#and considerably more moronic

[navree]

thank god cori bush lost cuz that means i no longer have to see her stupid antics in the news

[captivating-flavors]

mine | caleb

pairing: college au caleb x non mc reader

prompt: -

summary: you're going on a date. caleb wants to stop you.

words: 1,221

warning(s): possessiveness, obsessiveness, mc being referred to as caleb's adoptive sister

a/n: ok its like almost 3am and i got work tmr lol but i got so inspired whilst i was on my way home from work today so i kinda just finished this like half an hour ago and in one sitting and so yeah this is pretty much unedited andddd i sort of told @mayooness that i might make a part two of this into either a jealous caleb smut or fluff but i still dk (also putting into consideration the fact that i suck at writing smut, so the jury is still out) anywaysss enjoy? reblogs, comments and feedbacks are much appreciated <3

masterlist

Caleb is a Grade A pretender. Especially when it comes to you.

The first time was in ninth grade, when he had to pretend that he didn’t have a crush on his adoptive sister’s best friend, as she teased him for his attentiveness towards her best friend as he handed you his umbrella and had to walk through the rain home.

The second time was two days after the first incident, when he had to pretend that he was fine as one of his classmates asked you out.

The third time was later that day when he had to pretend that he had no feelings whatsoever towards you when his sister teased him for being jealous of the classmate who asked you out.

Of course, with them being tight as thieves, she knew he was lying. The three of you grew up together, so of course she also knew that he had a huge crush on you. She knew she wouldn’t mind you dating him, all she wanted was for the two most important people in her life to be happy and if that’s with each other then so be it.

From then on, Caleb has definitely lost count of the times he had to pretend that you were nothing more than his friend or his sister’s best friend.

That ends today, though.

Ah yes, he should probably start with a little bit of a life update and context first.

It was yours and Caleb’s second year of college and you had just been cheated on by your moron of an ex a few months ago. Caleb had been there for you, as he always was. He comforted you, kept you company, even warded off unwanted advances from the other guys on campus.

The pretty, heartbroken art major. That was what people were saying about you, unbeknownst to you of course (because Caleb made sure of it!). Your douchebag of an ex had cheated on you with a professor and it even made headlines for a local newspaper, so of course it was like an open secret.  

It had been a few months, but you still weren’t ready to date, obvious by how you kept rejecting advances here and there (fret not, the creeps and the ones who couldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer were all handled by Caleb!), or so Caleb thought. When he heard from his sister, who went to a different college, that you called her to tell her that you had a date with ’Devon’ from Art History, he knew he had to rush to your apartment.

The two of you lived in the same apartment building, but he lived on the floor above you. The two of you had each other’s keys so it was normal for the two of you to drop by unannounced at each other’s places.

“Y/N? You home?” Caleb called out as he closed and locked the door of your apartment behind him.

“In here!” You responded, your voice slightly muffled, coming from the direction of your bedroom.

Caleb walked past the entry way and the kitchen to get to your room. As he reached the open door of your room, he saw that you were wearing a bathrobe and that your hair and makeup was done. There were also several dresses laid out on your bed.

Oh, how it killed him to know that you had dolled yourself up so, so prettily for someone else.

“Perfect timing! I need your input.” You beamed.

“What for?” The pretender was back at it again.

“Which one looks better? This one?” You asked as you held out a yellow sundress in front of you before putting it on your bed and grabbing the other dress, “Or this one?” You asked again, this time holding a light blue midi dress.

“The blue one. Where are you off to?” Caleb tried his best to keep his tone to his usual light and cheery tone.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Did we have plans for tonight?” You said distractedly as you grabbed the yellow dress and turned to put it back on your closet. Caleb could only watch as you walked towards your bathroom with the blue dress in your hand.

“No… we don’t. But I was about to ask if you wanted to go to that new café that just opened a week ago. I knew you wanted to try their cheesecake.” He answered as he heard the shuffling sounds of you changing in your bathroom.

“Oh. I can’t… uh… I’m going on a date tonight.” You responded as you walked out of the bathroom, now wearing the light blue dress he had chosen. The sight of you looking so beautiful sent short circuited his brain and it was like no words could come out of him at the moment.

He blinked and tried to keep it together before saying, “Oh? Whom with?”

“This guy from my Art History class. His name’s Devon.”

“That… sounds nice.” No, no it doesn’t. He wanted to delete the guy from the face of the earth.

You gathered your phone and purse and walked towards the door as you said, “Yeah, I’m actually running late. He says that he’s picking me up at seven and its…” You put on a pair of heels before pausing to glance at your watch and pointed out, “Oh! Won’t you look at that. I’m already five minutes late. I gotta run. See you later, Caleb!”

No. No. No! There was no way he was going to let you go on that date. Especially when you’re dolled up that pretty! There was also no way that he’s letting you go to another jerk who didn’t know you as well as he did. He didn’t even know this ‘Devon’ guy, but Caleb was sure that the guy didn’t deserve you and won’t be able to treat you the way you deserve to be treated.

You reached out your hand and opened the door to your apartment. The door, unfortunately, didn’t manage to open all the way for you to go through. Caleb rushed towards you and planted his palm on the door, slamming it back shut.

“Caleb.” You said, trying to stay calm and not flip out at the fact that Caleb was going to make you extra late, “What the heck are you doing?”

Caleb had your back flushed against his chest, “Caleb. Let me go.” You still had your hand around the handle of your apartment door.

He took your hand and spun you around, so you’d face him, before planting both his hands right on the door, caging you.

“What are you doing?” You asked once more, looking up at his much taller frame.

Caleb looked down, let out a dark chuckle before looking right back at you, “I can’t let you go.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re mine. I’ll be damned if I let you go on a date with another man. Not again.” He leaned down and moved his face closer to yours.

You gulped. You had never been this close to him, so of course there was an unfamiliar nervousness that crept down your spine, “Caleb, what are you talking about?”

“I’ve been right here all along. When are you going to realize that?” He said darkly before slamming his lips onto yours.

-

taglist: @mayooness

[thebearer]

please please please need a part two of the fight blurb 😭 what happens next 😭😭😭

should i make it into a full fic omg?? maybe?? lol

but on the real, i think that he would have to take a leave from the restaurant, which truthfully, everyone needed. this is just what broke him. the one time he actually tries to deal with his shit and not just blow up, get embarrassed, try to make it up, and repeat the cycle with no real change. i mean, you took his babies? anchovy and teddy. you're not returning his calls. richie, fak, and sweeps are alternating wellness check watches because they're terrified he's going to hurt himself, especially after the way he spiraled when he found your wedding ring.

he knows where you're at. he managed to become technologically savvy all of a sudden and figured out how to see your location, that you shared with him when you first started dating. fak wouldn't let him take his car. richie had put him on a full blown "psych ward type shit" lockdown until he "got his shit together, cousin".

"richie said-"

"-richie's a fuckin' moron, give me my fucking keys, fak!"

"carmen," fak frowns. "i-i can't."

so carmen walked. he walked to sugar and pete's house. nearly an hour walk through chicago. smoking so much he felt sick.

pete answered the door, face falling as soon as he saw carmen.

"carm, h-hey, man-"

"-where is she?" carmen wasn't interested on any sort of small talk, tunnel visioned to get to you.

"uh, i-i don't-"

"-pete, i really don't want you to fuck with me right now, alright." carmen took a deep breath, throat burning with tears. "i need to see- i-i need to see her pete." he couldn't bring himself to even say your name.

a tiny meow came from behind pete, anchovy skippering towards carmen with bright eyes, tail raised. it made carmen's jaw clench, tears blurring his vision. he knew you had to be close by. looking at the time, you were probably feeding teddy, maybe putting her down for a nap. he should have been more considerate, came later in the day, carmen thought.

pete looked at the cat, down the hall, then back at carmen. "carm..." pete hesitated, gripping the door, letting it shut gently, shielding something behind him. "you know i can't."

"what the fuck? pete that's- just let me in." anger surged through carmen's chest, trying to swallow it down. all he'd been was angry. angry and sick and distraught, a never ending cycle for weeks, just amplified by your leaving.

"you want to get her back? quit actin' like a goddam baby." richie sneered one night, just days ago, when carmen was especially awful and mean. "quit actin' like this isn't your fuckin' fault. like you didn't do this to yourself. take some fuckin' accountability, grow the fuck up, and get your motherfuckin' shit together. and maybe-maybe you'll get your family back."

carmen turned, running a hand over his face, trying to calm himself. keep himself from crying, from screaming, from pushing pete down and running back there so he could see you himself- throw himself at your feet and beg for forgiveness.

"pete, please? please?" carmen's voice wobbled, breaking gently. "please l-let me talk to her. just let me- let me tell her i'm sorry. don't-"

"-carmen?" sugar's voice came from behind pete. her face dropped, different than pete's, her's was angry. "what the fuck are you doing here?"

"why do you think i'm here, natalie? huh?-"

"-oh, you've got a lot of fucking nerve showing up here." natalie sneered, pulling the door open and stepping out. "pete, go inside."

"nat-"

"-i got it." natalie hissed, eyes narrowing at carmen. she waited until pete left, shaking her head at him. "you should be fucking ashamed-"

"-i am-"

"-mortified." sugar continued. "do you know what i came home to the other night? i came home to pete taking care of your baby because your wife came here sobbing- sobbing, because you screamed at her? what the fuck is wrong with you? huh?"

"i don't know." carmen's voice was tight, fighting a tremble. "i-i don't fuckin' know. i didn't- i-i didn't mean-" a tear fell, the final crack in his demeanor. carmen wasn't sure how he had tears left, how he could sob anymore. yet here he was, on his sister's porch, tears flowing again.

sugar didn't comfort him, didn't move, just watched him through glaring eyes. "please let me s-see her. let me se-ee teddy, sugar, don't-don't keep my kid from me-"

"-i'm not keeping your kid from you." sugar snapped. "i didn't take teddy away. you know who did? you. you did carmen."

carmen flinched, he knew it was true but it still stung. "i know you don't remember dad very well, but you're acting just like him." sugar sneered.

"and before you try and come up with an excuse-"

"-i-i'm not-"

"-i want you to know, that every day. every single fucking day, there's days i want to drink myself to sleep. that mj or maggie make me want to pull my hair out and scream, or pete does something that infuriates me, but you know what i don't do?" sugar stepped towards carmen, arms still crosses. "i don't yell at them, i don't drink myself incoherent, i don't fucking act like mom or dad because i know how that felt." sugar jabbed a finger in her chest, eyes holding carmen's gaze intensely.

"i know how that fucked me up, i know how it fucked them up, how it fucked you and mikey up too- how it fucked everything in our fucking life up!" natalie laughed humorlessly. "and the last thing, the very last thing i would want, is to do that to pete, to my kids, to anyone."

carmen felt sick and yet eerily calm all at once. his chest was tight, he was sure he couldn't breathe, but he couldn't stop listening. a damning realization- a shameful one.

"you need to make up your mind, right here, right now, before you see anyone else." natalie stepped back towards the door. "you need to decide if you're going to continue to be a selfish piece of shit, or if you're going to change. and i can tell you, change is uncomfortable- it's not easy. you have to fight for it every single day. but i would rather do that than not have my family."

she looked down at carmen, twisting the knob. "you decide that, then maybe- maybe you can see them." carmen flinched at the door slamming behind her, not moving from his place on the porch, head in his hands.

fak showed up nearly an hour later, wide eyed and rambling about "how the fuck did you just leave? i was playing ball buster and-and then you're gone-"

carmen ignores him, sliding into the car slowly. "carmen?"

"you uh," carmen's voice is hoarse, staring straight ahead. "you said that, uh, that richie's got.... got someone for me to talk to?"

fak blinks, nodding slowly. "the therapist? yeah-"

"-take me there." carmen looks over at sugar's house. he isn't sure if it's his imagination or not, but for a moment he swears he can see you, peeking through the blinds.

"a-are you ok?" fak is worried, a little rattled at the sudden change. especially since carmen had been so adamant about not seeing "your stupid fuckin' therapist, richie, clearly she's no fuckin' good because look at you! you're still fucked up!" carmen's enraged words from days ago.

"no," carmen admits, throat swelling with a growing lump. "but, uh, i-i wanna be." he admits quietly, looking over at fak. "i gotta get my shit together, fak. i-i gotta be better for them."

fak doesn't deny it, doesn't console him. just goes quiet with a nod, driving away. carmen watches sugar's house disappear in the rearview, his heart aching, breaking, but he knows natalie is right. he knows he'll be back once he's better, that he has to be better. for teddy. for you. for your family.

[personasintro]

on God you don't understand nothing 🤦🏼‍♀️ first of all, you're acting like a victim when you're not. We're just asking you to update more often because it's literally absurd to update at most once a year. And then you defending yourself with "go read other stories" like tf that is literally the dumbest response I've ever heard, people expect YOUR story, not someone else's. So you should be more considerate and know that if you start writing a story people won't give you roses for updating once a year, but will expect more updates (which is normal)

Listen, you moron. There's nothing victimazing about being honest where you stand when it comes to writing. If you didn't have the option to send direct messages, you would just have to find someone else to harass and be mean to. People were mean to me even when I updated once a month, that wasn't enough for them. If you're so self-centered about your needs to read a freaking fanfic, you would never understand that there are many things that affect writers and their writing. Which just brings me back to what I said multiple times. You have NO IDEA what is someone going through. And y'all are just bunch of trolls constantly sending negative messages rather than showing support and having a little bit of heart. You are not welcomed here and you're not welcomed to read my stories.

You're the ones who keep coming back.

[clandestineivory]

Affogato Cookie x Healer Reader

Summary: The guy who keeps getting himself into the most weirdest situations (exiled) and the healer who followed him because they KNEW he wouldn't get far without someone else helping him. (aka; "help I'm hurt, I need a savior" x "you fucking moron why would you fall into freezing river water") Written with 2nd pov <3

TW: Wounds but not graphic, kinda angsty but not..? idk. Highkey self-indulgent tbh. He's like some kind of shunned creature I love him other: This ain't even headcanons that much, it's just weirdness uploaded into this thing. This doesn't even need to be seen as romantic now that I think about it. It could be really close buddies y'know..

Affogato Cookie used to come all the way to where you worked because of ANY minor scratches or splinters. Being the oh-so kind and considerate healer, you helped him (even when you knew damn well that he had a higher amount of medical knowledge needed for an advisor)

And this guy was highkey dramatic half of the time, and would treat you more like a friend or a gossip-companion than a doctor.

You helped him when he first appeared in the Black Citadel, which was quite a while ago, by the order of Dark Cacao Cookie when he found the stranger in the snow.

You were the one who often heard his complaints and rants about Dark Cacao Cookie in the first years he became an advisor.

- "Thank you for treating my wounds, y/n, now I'd really like to get back to talki-" - "I would rather watch you get hurt by a cream wolf and stitch you up again than hear you complain about the King. Just put matters into your own hands if you're so mad about his ideals and his thoughts on the kingdom." - "...that doesn't sound like a half-bad idea." THIS BITCH REALLY TOOK THAT SERIOUSLY, DIDN'T HE?

You were there when you watched his exile occur (more like his immediate retreat). When his disciples were in chaos because of the Great Wall breaking, you slipped away with him, watching when Caramel Arrow Cookie asked to hunt the advisor (or, ex-advisor?) down.

He seemed lost. Of course he was, he had just failed a scheme he had tried to devise and plan out meticulously. You two didn't speak for a while.

But you just had to ask: - "Royal Advisor, are you alright?" - "I got beat by a group of measly travelers. Like it was child's play. Do you think I'm alright after trying so hard to fight, trying to obtain enough power, only for it to crumble away?"- "I'm worse than 'alright', y/n. You wouldn't understand." - "...Affogato Cookie, help me understand."

And he did. Well, he tried to. He was pretty bad at explaining his emotions and past. It was messy, and he went quiet sometimes, like he was hiding the way his voice would tremble at certain moments and failing miserably when he tried to talk again.

But you tried to get it. And he seemed to like that, even if there was no fancy throne, or overly sweet food and banquets. Just the two of you, staying together in some old cave in the mountains while the chaos from the Kingdom subsided, far away with nothing but your first-aid kit and a spare blanket.

You two stayed in that cave for a while. Snowstorms were bad, and besides, it was too mentally taxing to go back out.

Affogato Cookie had huddled close to you. Seemed like his clothes, even with so many pretty layers, could not shield his body from the biting cold.

So, with the consideration you practiced from years past, you let him have the blanket...even with some back and forth. - "You take the blanket, y/n. Your clothes aren't suitable to the cold." - "Neither are yours, you moron." - "But you deserve it more. I'm ashamed that you want to care for me even after I've failed and got beat by children.." - "Affogato Cookie, I'm the healer, and I order you to keep that blanket and stay warm-"

Note: it went on for a full minute before you two came to a compromise to share the blanket instead. Yay for teamwork, i guess?

You noticed that he fell asleep pretty slowly. Sometimes his eyelids would droop, then he shifted a bit and tried to grab a bit more of the blanket, then not (because he says, "it's too hot now" oh, cool, call me Fortuna i guess because HOW are you hot in the middle of a snowstorm bud, pick a side)

But eventually, he drifted off into slumber, curled up like some kind of tall creature who simply needed a place to reside and be seen. Cared about. Understood.

And it was strange, seeing him in this light. A softer shade instead of the confident and self-assured dark indigo he portrayed himself as.

It was kind of nice, seeing him with this quiet tint of lavender.

[ashton-sano]

Too close to the stars, I Never knew somebody like you, somebody~

Now Playing🎼♬ ♪ ♫:

Blue lock boys in: Your Loving Boyfriend Husband who has a soft spot for you

Characters included: Itoshi Rin, Itoshi Sae, Shoei Barou

There’s less characters so more words, yey :3 (lowercase intentional)

Itoshi rin is a weird guy all things considered. he prides himself in his calm and cool demeanor and refusal to engage in his emotions for the most part, no bachira doesn’t count, he’s a moron. He says this and lives it to a T daily, so it’s always funny to see how fast he forgets to be calm and collected Itoshi rin when you get your hands in his hair. it’s weird to see in action. he hates everything and everyone when he’s practicing, brushing off his teammates and waving off hanging out with them if asked.

“as if id hang out with lukewarm trash.”

he plays mean and harsh and yet always melts into your touch when he gets home, he goes on about how “lukewarm” practice went, the idiocy of his teammates irritating him. he says it bitterly yet with how his face is pressed into your stomach, it sounds more like slow incoherent mumbling into your skin. he hardly notices how his fingers sink into the plush of your legs, kneading like second nature. you nod along but your focus is mainly on how docile he looks while grumbling, his eyelashes fluttering as he struggles to keep awake against your warmth.

some time between highschool and now must’ve given you enough time to soften him out, he doesn’t even know how you got him in the matching onesie. he swore he was still passed out on your bosom, how the hell did you have him posing for silly pictures. to be fair he looked more dazed than anything in the photo so it was hardly a pose. didn’t matter, you were smiling wide so he didn’t question how it looked or where it’d go. (the teasing at practice tomorrow made him slightly regret that)

Itoshi sae didn’t mind indulging your requests, silly as they were indeed. try as he might, no matter how much he steels himself over and swears not to, he caves under your gaze and sweet voice. before he knew it, he was doing everything he just said he wouldn’t because it’s like sacrilege to tell you no. from stupid amusement parks to clay making and running his blood sugar stupid high with sweets that he’ll definitely hear about from his dietitian. speaking of, he’s totally firing that moron; who does that guy think he is telling him not to consume more sweets under his wife’s request?

“unhealthy? try unemployed, you useless pain. my wife says it’s fine, so it is.”

it’s probably worse than he thought. there’s not a thing he does that doesn’t have your name in it. even when you’re nowhere to be seen, you’re his best excuse to leave interaction.

‘meeting be damned, i need my wife more so reschedule.’

‘tell that lady to wait, my wife is calling.’

‘im waiting for my WIFE, yes, im MARRIED.’

if you actually saw it, you’d still be awestruck. he never opens his mouth to tell you about this but everyone you meet knows you. the store workers, his manager, everyone who knows him will know you’re his wife. he’s the kindest person for you, everyone else can wait.

Barou shoei is peak househusband, argue with the wall. everyone sees him as the toxic and red flag type but he’s nothing if not considerate for you. don’t openly point it out, he will deny. he loves his family hard and plenty, so once you’re a part of that such extends to you. his sisters love you, truly and he’s grateful for that, his favorite girls getting along does make him content.

he never bothers just telling you he loves you, it’s easier to see when he interacts with you. actions are better in that regard so it makes sense. he gives you nothing but the best. he’s always cleaning up and such, you never have to worry about it when you come home. AND the laundry while cooking dinner? is there something he can’t do? he grumbles but never complains even when you forget to clean for the millionth time, or accidentally mess up dinner or stain the carpet with some harsh juice. you’re his wife, of course it’s okay to make mistakes. he actually insists on doing all the chores, he claims that it’s only because he does it better but he’s whipped. what man lets his wife do all that work while he lazes? Inadequate

“just worry about your work, don’t even think about a chore. hey! you’re thinking about it, aren’t you?”

a king is nothing if his queen is unhappy. that’s how he justifies it anyway. it almost makes you feel bad with how he works all day at practice then comes home and cleans tirelessly. when you asked his sisters, they assure you that it’s his love language and you’d argue with that but he seems content being so helpful so you leave it be. . a bit of help here and there doesn’t hurt though. don’t let him catch you though, he’ll chastise you back to bed like a mother hen. so maybe no chores, heh.

-> Property of ©ashton-sano; Don't post my content on any other platform without credit; much love^^

[yandere-daydreams]

tw - none. live dove: tender and sweet.

“I didn’t think I’d see you here, old friend.”

Xianyun startled, stiffened, but recovered quickly – keeping her expression schooled and impassive as the so-called ‘mortal’ man, Zhongli, took a seat beside her. “You must have the wrong person, stranger,” she responded, eventually, never so much as glancing in his direction. “I’m sure we’ve never met.”

Zhongli let out a breath of a laugh. “A chance encounter, then – of two souls who must’ve known each other in a past life.” He paused, following her gaze. It was trained with an almost violent intensity towards you, the young tailor comparison fabric samples dutifully on the opposite side of the small shop. He’d only come to retrieve a set of burial garments Wangsheng Funeral Parlor had employed you to modify, but her unexpected presence had been a welcome surprise. “Although, I can’t say it seems like you choose this destination on a whim.”

She straightened, crossing her arms over her chest with an indignant huff. “When one is preparing oneself for a reemergence into society, one cannot be caught unprepared. Clothes, although often seen as frivolous expenditures, can be the defining factor in the success of one’s reintroduction.”  

“And I suppose,” Zhongli started, with a thoughtful hum. “That your own skill as a seamstress has waned in the past century?”

“Don’t be moronic.” It was an instinctual rebuttal, cutting and concise, only slightly undercut by the way she pursed her lips. “In spite of one’s own considerable talent, it’s not unwise to seek a professional opinion when unsure of modern fashions.”

“A professional opinion, which could only be found in one of the smallest shops in Liyue Harbor run by perhaps the most inexperienced—”

Her elbow jutted out, spearing Zhongli’s side and cutting him off as you approached – cradling a rolled bolt of fabric the color of the sky as it approached midnight, two strips of teal satin and black lace thrown over your shoulder. “I’m sorry for the delay, miss. We just received the loveliest dendrobium-treated silk from Inazuma, and—” You seemed to notice Zhongli for the first time, greeting him with a quick nod and a bright smile. “Zhongli, sir! I have your order in my workshop – I can grab it for you now.” And then, to Xianyun, “Do you mind if we take your measurements when I get back, Miss Xianyun?”

“Of course, dear. Take all the time you need.” For the first time, her eyes fell away from you and to the fabric in your arms, her head lulling gently to the side. “Its beauty is truly wonderous to behold.”

You really were charming, in all your obliviousness. With an enthusiastic nod and a few more words of praise to your supplies, you were off to your workshop to retrieve Zhongli’s materials. As soon as you’d disappeared behind the curtained doorway, he turned to Xianyun. “Its beauty is truly wonderous to behold,” he repeated, melodically. “I didn’t know you were such a poet, dear friend.”

“One more word,” she took a sharp breath, glaring daggers at the furthest wall. “And I will turn ever statue of Rex Lapis in this archon-forsaken nation to dust.”

Zhongli only grinned, leaning back with a slight hum.

At least Ganyu would be happy to know her mentor was seeking more youthful companionship.

[demigod-shenanigans]

Piper and Jason burn down the kitchen

Summary: “What even goes in a cake?”

“Flour and sugar, probably!” Piper tried to remember the last time she’d baked muffins with her dad. She’d been maybe six at the time. Somehow, that still made her more experienced than Jason. She pulled a bag of flour from a cabinet she could barely reach. Since the bag wasn’t closed, half of it exploded down the front of her shirt and all over the counter. “…oops.”

“Are we sure we shouldn’t just ask one of the plates for a cake?” Jason asked, cringing at the mess.

“Jason. Buddy. Rule number one: when you mess up this badly, you do not apologize with the demigod equivalent of store-bought cake.”

“Even if you don’t know what you’re doing?”

Piper nodded solemnly. “Especially then. We owe Leo a cake that’s made with love.”

Or: After realizing they forgot Leo’s birthday, Piper and Jason decide to bake him a cake. Sure, they may not have a recipe or any baking experience to speak of, but really, what’s the worst that could happen?

Word Count: 8k exactly! Rating: Teen and Up

Written for Free Space as my final @lost-trio-week piece! This is. Uh. Three months late! Oops. Well, we did say you could finish these later and it’d still be fine, so…

This is also part of the Fate and Other Technicalities-series, but the only bit of context you really need to understand what’s going on is that Jason and Piper broke up post-Cupid and Leo did not end up on Calypso’s island.

No heavy warnings for this one (it does get a little sad but not for long), however, Jason and Piper have no clue what they’re doing baking-wise and the result is awful, so keep that in mind if you’re sensitive when it comes to food stuff. These two morons should not be let within a five foot distance of an oven <3

———

It didn’t occur to Piper until Jason almost stabbed her by accident that maybe she hadn’t thought this through properly.

Considering Jason had been trained to fight monsters since he’d been two years old, as well as everything that had gone wrong on this particular quest, the fact that knocking on his cabin door yelling “emergency!” in the middle of the night would result in him jumping out with his sword drawn maybe should have been obvious in retrospect. Well, hindsight was 20/20.

Piper yelped, staring at the tip of Jason’s gladius, which was barely a hair’s breadth away from her chest. She backed up a step, jokingly holding up her hands in surrender as she tried to get her racing heart to still.

“I know you’ve had a rough few days, but please don’t stab me,” she commented, trying to lighten the mood.

Jason immediately pulled the weapon back, looking horrified. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

Piper waved him off. 

“Nah.” She smiled teasingly at her friend. “Your aim needs work. You didn’t even graze me.”

“Sorry. I didn’t think- I wasn’t sure what we were dealing with, but a weapon felt like a good idea from the way you were yelling,” Jason muttered, shaking his head. He looked Piper over with obvious confusion on his face, probably taking in the fact that she was in casual clothes rather than dressed for battle, and that she wasn’t holding a weapon. “I’m… still not sure what we’re dealing with, actually. What happened? Are we in danger? Is anyone hurt?”

“It’s not that kind of emergency,” Piper said sheepishly, taking in her friend as he cautiously lowered his weapon. 

Jason’s whole body was tense. He looked as alert as she’d ever seen anyone look at three in the morning, but between the chest plate that had been hastily thrown over his pajamas, his sleep-mussed hair and the bags under his eyes, it was still obvious she’d woken him up.

Piper felt a little bad—she knew that between the disaster in Rome and his sexuality crisis, Jason hadn’t been getting a ton of sleep, and him unsuccessfully trying to sort out their problem with Notus wasn’t helping—but the current situation didn’t allow her to be as considerate of this as she would have been any other time.

“Waking you up like that maybe wasn’t my best idea. I was just on watch, so I’m admittedly not running on a whole lot of sleep right now,” she explained, yawning. “But this is important.”

“What’s going on?” Suddenly, his eyes went wide. Briefly, Piper wondered if he’d just realized the same thing that had occurred to her in cold sweat half an hour ago. “Wait, am I supposed to be on watch? Gods, I could have sworn that wasn’t until tomorrow.” He rubbed at his face like he had a headache.

“What? No. It’s technically sort of still my turn, but I asked Frank to take over for me.” She put a finger to her lips. “Don’t tell Hedge. He’s gonna freak if he finds out I left Hazel and Frank to their premarital hand-holding unsupervised.”

Jason laughed, some of the tension going out of his shoulders.

“So what is it?”

“We screwed up.” Piper bunched her hands in the hem of her shirt. “It’s the tenth of July as of three hours ago.”

“I- what?” Jason blinked at her. He was back to just looking confused. “Is there something happening on the tenth of July that I don’t know about?”

“No! Nothing’s happening on the tenth. That’s the problem!” Piper said, exasperated. She couldn’t believe the penny still hadn’t dropped. “Leo’s birthday was on the seventh.”

“Shit.” Jason’s expression cycled through the same series of emotions she’d gone through when she’d realized it earlier—surprise, then shock, then guilt. “He didn’t say anything.”

“Like you’re one to talk,” Piper commented, raising an eyebrow at him. If it hadn’t been for the cornucopia spitting out baked goods in Rome, she’d have missed Jason’s birthday, too. She wanted to curse at the stupid horn for not giving Leo the same treatment, but it wasn’t like that would fix much of anything now. “Besides, why should Leo have to say anything? After he told us when his birthday was, it was on us to remember. That’s how that works.”

“I didn’t know. I never even asked him about his birthday,” Jason mumbled, guilt clear in his voice. He stared at the floorboards. “Gods, I’m awful. He’s my best friend, and somehow I had no idea.”

“Of course you knew,” Piper immediately protested. “He told us all the way back in Wilderness School, remember?”

“Piper…” Jason said quietly, the guilt in his voice even stronger now.

“It was a few weeks after you two became roommates. Right after Isabel pulled that awful stunt in gym class-” Piper went on, then stopped. It felt like someone had dumped a bucket of ice water over her head when she realized her mistake. “You can’t remember because you weren’t there. That was the Mist version. It was just Leo and me,” she said, her voice quavering.

Jason hesitated—neither of them were entirely sure how these things worked now that they were broken up—but then he reached out to squeeze her shoulder, rubbing her arm comfortingly. “I’m sorry.”

Piper cursed. She should have known this. 

When she consciously thought about it, she did know her hazy Wilderness School memories weren’t real. 

But when they were just background noise, well… it was a little harder than she would have liked to make her brain comprehend that the things she remembered hadn’t actually happened that way.

It frustrated Piper to no end—how much trying to reach those early memories of her friendship with Leo was like navigating a room she only vaguely remembered in the dark. If she got close enough, she could touch the furniture around her—recall the feel of it—but she could rarely make out more than vague shapes, and sometimes she couldn’t even manage that. 

The few scenes she did remember semi-clearly came in flashes—moving boxes she hadn’t seen until she was already tripping over them, contents spilling all over the floor.

That was what had happened when Hazel, anxious about their upcoming world-ending deadline, had mentioned the date during their watch earlier. 

The memory had come unbidden, striking her like one of Jason’s lightning bolts. 

“I don’t do birthdays. Tragic orphan, remember?” Leo had said, smirking at her and Jason. “Besides, you know I ended up here for being a serial runaway, right? No way in hell  I’m sticking around until my next birthday.”

“Then there’s no harm in telling us.”

And he had. He’d told her.

Just her.

Because Jason hadn’t actually been around at the time. It had just been the two of them. 

Piper could feel the weight of the memory—could tell it was significant—but most of the details still escaped her. It made her want to scream. It also made her really long to fist-fight Jason’s godly stepmom.

Piper buried her face in her hands. She kind of wanted to cry. She wished she could reach three days into the past and shake herself for being too caught up in everything else that was going on to pay attention to the date.

“I’m pretty sure I was the first person Leo told about his birthday in years. I can’t believe I forgot. I’m a horrible friend.”

“It’s not really your fault Juno messed with your memories,” Jason said gently. He was right, technically, but that didn’t make Piper feel much better. “Besides, at least you asked. Leo’s been my best friend for the better part of a year. He’s my favorite person. And somehow I never even thought to ask.” Jason’s voice had grown very quiet. He was still staring intently at the floor.

Piper knew him well enough to be able to tell he was spiraling, even without any more words spoken between them. 

They’d both been struggling with their roles as heroes with how much had gone wrong lately, but failing as friends felt worse in some fundamental way Piper couldn’t quite put into words.

“In your defense, you didn’t know when your own birthday was until last month. Are birthdays even a thing at Camp Jupiter?”

Jason blinked at her. “…yes? What kind of question is that?”

“I don’t know.” Piper gestured vaguely. “You guys are weird.”

“No, I’m pretty sure that’s just me,” Jason told her, casually enough that she almost started laughing. For a brief moment, he smiled, but his expression dimmed again almost immediately. “I can’t believe mine and Leo’s birthdays are only a week apart and we didn’t get to celebrate either one of them together.” He sounded absolutely devastated. “If this is the only chance we had-”

That knocked Piper right back into business mode immediately. “Shut up. None of that. No doomsday talk,” she interrupted him, glaring at Jason. She hadn’t woken Jason up so they could stand around and feel miserable about being bad friends to Leo. She definitely hadn’t woken Jason up so she could think about the fact that she might be losing one of her best friends by the end of all this. They couldn’t solve the prophecy or fix the fact that they hadn’t celebrated Leo’s birthday when they should have. But there was still something they could do. “We’re going to fix this. Leo’s done so much for us. He deserves to have a birthday party, even if it’s a little late. Help me bake him a cake?”

“That’s a great idea,” Jason said, lighting up just a little. “You know how to bake?”

“I mean… not really,” Piper admitted. “But I thought it’d be nice. We can probably figure it out. Can’t be harder than fighting Giants, right? Besides, Leo did it for my birthday.”

Remembering her own birthday made Piper feel even worse. Leo had been in the middle of making sure the Argo II was ready to set sail, and he’d been stressed out of his mind, but he’d still gone out of his way to bake her a cake. Strawberry shortcake—her favorite—made using the camp’s vast quantities of fresh strawberries. He’d left it beside her bed with a note to have a nice birthday and maybe share it with Jason. Instead, the three of them had sat on the floor of Bunker Nine together, sharing cake and the sandwiches Jason had brought because Leo had missed lunch again. 

“I remember,” Jason said. He suddenly seemed a million miles away. “Leo had whipped cream stuck in the corner of his mouth all afternoon. He could have just wiped it off, but he insisted he could get it with his tongue when he really couldn’t. Not for lack of trying, though.”

“So glad your most vivid memory of my birthday is what Leo was doing with his tongue,” Piper teased him, raising an eyebrow. “I can’t believe you didn’t consider that you might be into guys until a week ago.”

“It’s not...” Jason looked away, but Piper could tell he was blushing. “He smiled so much that afternoon. Leo’s been really hard on himself lately, and I just… I miss how it felt before we left on this quest. I want to see him smile like that again. It isn’t the same when I can tell he doesn’t mean it.”

Jason was right. The quest had been hard on all of them, but Leo had been drawing back from everyone lately, and it worried her, too. She cursed herself for being too caught up in her own problems to pick up on it sooner.

“Well, a birthday cake is as good a point as any to start cheering him up,” Piper said, forcing herself to focus. She couldn’t fixate on all the things she hadn’t done. There wasn’t much she could do to change the past. She had to focus on what she could still do. “If you’re down to sneak out of your room after curfew, that is,” she teased Jason. 

Piper knew how he was about sticking to the rules. For all the Wilderness School memories she couldn’t immediately identify as fake, she didn’t have to think very hard to remember Jason sneaking up onto the roof with her had never happened. Both because she was becoming increasingly sure she wasn’t actually interested in making out with guys on roofs, and because the Jason she’d met seven months ago would have perished at the mere suggestion that he may have broken a rule. There had been times he’d balked at the concept of jaywalking, despite the fact that they’d been chased by a monster.

Jason wasn’t quite as bad now—Leo and Piper had eased him into the whole rule breaking thing as gently as they could—but he was still stupid about it sometimes.

To her surprise, Jason nodded, straightening a little.

“It’s for Leo,” he said decisively. “Of course I’m down. Let’s do this.”

Piper could have pushed the issue. Kept on teasing him about the way his eyes lit up when he talked about Leo, and how he laughed at all of Leo’s terrible jokes. 

But she figured Jason would get there eventually. Besides, they had a cake to bake. So instead, she just grinned at him and said “we’ll make you into a troublemaker yet.”

~~~

“What even goes in a cake?” Jason asked as they spread out baking utensils across the kitchen counters fifteen minutes later.

He’d gotten dressed and traded his armor for an apron, which Piper was not entirely sure had been smart. It was becoming increasingly obvious that neither of them had the slightest idea what they were doing. She figured the chances of them blowing something up were about 50/50.  

“Flour and sugar, probably!” she decided, trying to remember the last time she’d baked muffins with her dad. She’d been maybe six years old at the time. Definitely not tall enough to reach the counters without standing on a stool. Somehow, that still made her a more experienced baker than Jason, who’d apparently never done it in his life.

She searched the cupboards. The plates could conjure up food out of thin air, sure, but she knew Leo cooked with ingredients sometimes, and they had to be somewhere.

“Aha!” she said triumphantly as she pulled a bag of flour from one of the upper cabinets that she could just barely reach.

She couldn’t quite grip the bag right, and since it wasn’t closed, about half of it exploded down the front of her shirt and all over the counter before Jason managed to catch the rest with his powers. “…oops.”

“Are we sure we shouldn’t just ask one of the plates for a cake?” Jason asked, cringing at the mess they’d already made before they’d even properly started. 

“Jason. Buddy. Rule number one: when you mess up this badly, you do not apologize with the demigod equivalent of store-bought cake,” Piper tutted, looking at her baking partner disapprovingly.

“Even if you don’t know what you’re doing?”

Piper nodded solemnly. “Especially then. We owe Leo a cake that’s made with love.”

“Okay.” Jason opened up another one of the cupboards. That one just held dishware. “Flour, sugar, love. Anything else you can think of for ingredients? Because I don’t think that’s enough.”

“I’m not sure.” Piper eyed the mixing bowl. “Let’s just pour it in and see what happens?”

“I’m assuming we’ll end up with ingredients in a mixing bowl?” Jason guessed, looking increasingly unsure about this entire operation. “Are you sure this is a good idea? We don’t even know how much of each ingredient we need.”

“Relax, Super Chef.” She poked him in the chest, leaving behind flour prints with her fingers. “We’ll figure it out. Besides, Leo knows we’re not professional bakers or anything. He’ll probably forgive us if we don’t end up with a perfect cake.”

Jason didn’t look very pleased at that thought—apparently he was really concerned that he’d fail his cake exams, or something—but he complied with a sigh.

They poured the remaining bag of flour that wasn’t all over the counter into the mixing bowl, since there wasn’t that much left, anyway. 

“Do we use more flour or more sugar?” Jason asked, unsure. “I mean, I know sugar makes things sweeter, but what does flour even taste like?”

He’d found the sugar and was pulling it out of the cabinet, much more careful than Piper had been with the flour. He didn’t spill any of it, but it wasn’t really a fair comparison—both because the bag was full and therefore closed, and because Jason was taller than her.

“I’m not sure, but-” Piper started, then stopped when she saw Jason scoop a bit of the spilled flour up off the counter and put it in his mouth. “What are you doing?”

“Figuring out what flour tastes like.” He looked thoughtful for a moment, then grimaced. “Dry. Kind of like chalk. Are we sure this is supposed to go in food?”

“Yeah. That and sugar are the two ingredients I actually feel sure about.” She blinked. “Why do you know what chalk tastes like?”

“The rock climbing wall back at camp,” Jason said with a shrug, like that explained anything.

“I- are you saying you licked the rock climbing wall while I wasn’t looking?” Piper stared at him, horrified. “What the fuck?”

“What?” Jason burst out laughing. “No! You chalk your hands before climbing for a better grip. One time I apparently didn’t get the chalk off properly before dinner. Why was me licking the wall your first thought?”

“You just ate flour off the counter,” she commented, an eyebrow raised.

“For taste testing!” Jason protested. “Because apparently this goes in food. I don’t go around eating chalk!”

“Whatever you say, Wolf Boy,” Piper teased, grinning at him. They were still figuring out this whole post-breakup friendship, but so far, she thought they weren’t doing too badly. “So? What did your flour taste test reveal to you?”

“That if we’re sure this goes in the cake at all, we definitely need more sugar than flour,” Jason decided, still looking at the flour uncertainly.

Piper obediently dumped the entire bag of sugar into the bowl. 

“Alright!” She looked at the mixture—which, as Jason had predicted, was just flour and sugar in a bowl now. They were definitely missing something. “Oh, wait. I think there’s supposed to be eggs in this.”

“I don’t know if we even have eggs. I haven’t spotted any so far.” Jason hovered himself upwards so he could get a better look at the back of the upper cabinets. “There’s frosting in here. Considering it’s got a cake on the box, that’s probably for cakes, right?”

“Oh, yeah, we can use that later! Good job finding that!” Piper grinned. She was starting to wonder how Leo even reached half of these cabinets when he was cooking. The answer was probably him precariously balancing on chairs and/or climbing onto the counters. “Any luck finding eggs?”

“Nope.” Jason landed back on his feet, frosting in hand. “Now what?”

“Hmm. Maybe we could just ask the magic plates for some?” Piper suggested. “I don’t think it counts as cheating if we just ask for the ingredients instead of an actual cake.”

“Sure, that should work.” Jason took one of the plates out and placed it on the counter. “Can we have eggs, please?” 

A few seconds later, the plate provided them with a nice, warm serving of scrambled eggs.

Piper paused, thinking back to her very limited past baking experience. “I’m pretty sure they’re supposed to be raw?” She poked the plate. “Can you do raw eggs?”

The plate remained unmoved. Not a common breakfast food, then.

“Does that make a difference?”

“No idea.” Piper eyed the eggs, which smelled delicious, then shrugged. “I mean, eggs are eggs, right? It’s probably fine.”

“Alright.” Jason obediently dumped the eggs into the bowl. He still looked unsure. “How exactly is any of this supposed to mix? It looks really solid.”

Piper snapped her fingers. “Right! Liquid! We need some sort of liquid.” She was feeling way better about this whole thing now that she remembered more of the ingredients. “Water or milk should do.”

Jason’s face lit up. “Wait, would cocoa work? Leo loves hot cocoa.”

“That’s a great idea!” Piper patted his shoulder enthusiastically, leaving flour on his shirt in the process. “We should make it a chocolate cake! We can definitely ask the plates for chocolate.” 

The cocoa was a little more impractical to add than the other ingredients had been, but they just used one of the magic cups and had it fill up repeatedly until the liquidity of the batter looked vaguely right to Piper.

Then Jason chopped up two bars of chocolate to add it into the bowl. Miraculously, he kept all of his fingers.

Piper was the one in charge of properly mixing the ingredients—mostly because when Jason had tried, he’d held the mixer wrong and splattered a whole bunch of batter all over the counter, the walls and himself. At least they both looked like a mess now.

“Aw, look at us! We’re matching!” she joked, gesturing down at her own flour-covered clothes.

Jason snorted.

When Piper was done, she discovered that the mixture could pass as cake batter now. She stuck her finger in, trying a little of it. 

“Yeah, that definitely tastes like chocolate cake. It’s very sweet, but I don’t think Leo will mind that.” She grinned at Jason. “See? This wasn’t so bad!”

“Yeah, I guess not.” Jason smiled tentatively. He tried a bit of the batter himself, eyes widening in surprise. “You’re right, this actually tastes okay.”

“Told you so! Wasn’t this fun?” She bumped his shoulder with hers. “I think we’re finally getting the hang of this whole friendship thing. Only took us seven months and a whole failed relationship.”

That got a proper laugh out of Jason.

~~~

Leo was startled out of the nap he’d been taking in the engine room by the fire alarm going off.

He’d been dreaming about Nemesis and the stupid fortune cookie again, so it wasn’t a nap he’d usually have minded being interrupted, but considering all the memories the thought of uncontrolled fire brought back to him, he wasn’t sure this was an improvement.

He untangled himself from his blanket heap, nearly tripping over his own feet in his haste to get out of the engine room. 

“Festus, damage report?” he asked, ignoring the way his heart was hammering.

It wasn’t bad enough that there’d been any kind of ship-wide alarm—Festus had just woken him up, specifically—so the chances that they would fall out of the sky in a blaze of deadly fire didn’t seem that high, but he had to make sure.

‘Kitchen. Minor damage. No injuries,’ Festus replied immediately through the ship’s internal systems, though Leo thought his clicks sounded… almost amused?

Leo wasn’t sure what to make of that. It was a relief that no one was hurt, but he wasn’t thrilled at the thought of more damage to the ship that he might not be able to fix at the moment.

He glared down at his arm cast.

Stupid Khione and her stupid wind bomb. It had been a few days since the incident, but despite the ambrosia Leo had taken, his broken wrist still screamed and gave out every time he tried to lift anything heavy. Unfortunately, engine repairs required him to lift a bunch of heavy things. 

Leo hadn’t let that stop him at first, which was how he’d ended up with a re-fractured wrist and a very stern talking-to from Jason. 

So, for the past two days, Leo had just kind of been sitting around uselessly, doing minor repairs around the ship that wouldn't get them back up in the air as their deadline drew closer. 

‘Another grand performance by Leo Valdez,’ he thought, gritting his teeth. ‘You’ve got one jobaround here, and you can’t even do that right.’

He’d landed Percy and Annabeth in Tartarus, and now they wouldn’t even make it to Epirus to meet them because he couldn’t fix the fucking ship.

No wonder Jason and Piper would rather hang out with each other than with him.

Leo shook himself when he reached the kitchen door. That was enough feeling sorry for himself for one night. He had a fire to put out.

He pushed open the door and promptly froze.

The kitchen was a complete disaster zone. There wasn’t a fire anymore, but from the smell it was obvious that there had been one not too long ago. It looked like a flour tornado had moved through the kitchen, and dried batter was splattered over the counter, the wall and both of Leo’s best friends, who were standing in the middle of the mess.

Jason was directing smoke out of the kitchen window with his powers while Piper was busy dumping unholy amounts of frosting over… Leo actually couldn’t identify what it was she was putting them on. As best as he could tell from this distance, it might have been a large block of charcoal.

”Guys, what the fuck?”

“Leo? It’s four am. Why are you up?” Jason asked, startled.

He and Piper both looked up from their respective tasks. In Jason’s case, this wasn’t too bad. In Piper’s case, it meant she splattered frosting all over the already disastrous counter.

“Uh, Pipes, maybe put the bowl down?” Leo suggested, an eyebrow raised. She cursed, placing the bowl right in the middle of the mess she’d just made. That wasn’t what Leo had meant, but it was also the least of his worries right now. “Look. No shade to your couples’ night of… whatever the fuck it is you two are doing, but you set off Festus’ smoke detectors.”

”We weren’t…” Piper exchanged an unsure look with Jason. Then she took a deep breath and looked right at Leo. “Listen. I know we’re three days late, but… happy birthday. I’m really sorry I forgot.”

“I’m sorry, too.” Jason rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly. “We were trying to surprise you, but a fire alarm in the middle of the night wasn’t the surprise we were going for.”

Leo froze. The kitchen disaster in front of him rearranged itself into a completely different scene. He hadn’t picked up on it when he’d walked in—he’d admittedly been a little preoccupied with his friends trying to burn down the kitchen—but the small kitchen table that mainly existed for when Leo needed extra space to prep ingredients had been covered in a nice cloth and set with plates. There were what looked like hand-crafted streamers and tiny origami figurines sitting on top of it, like they’d started making decorations and not been able to put them up or arrange them nicely before they’d gotten into a fight with the oven.

Which meant the charcoal bits Piper had drowned in frosting... They’d been trying to bake him a cake.

Leo was trying so hard to keep it together. But then his friends started singing happy birthday—Piper’s incredible voice mixing disastrously with Jason’s best attempt at caterwauling—and he just started sobbing. 

Leo had been in an awful headspace lately. He’d barely even remembered his birthday himself. He hadn’t properly celebrated it in years—not since he’d been eight years old, getting chided by his laughing mom for sticking his hands in the frosting before he'd even bothered to blow out the candles.

A part of Leo had been relieved when the seventh had passed and no one had said a word about it. He’d fucked everything up. It was his fault they were stuck here, and his fault Percy and Annabeth were gone. He didn’t deserve to have a birthday party.

All of this… it was too much.

“Guys, I… I don’t even know what to say.”

Within a moment’s notice, the singing stopped, and then his friends were hugging him, getting him covered in all of their baking ingredients.

“I don’t think our singing was that bad,” Piper commented, and Leo laughed through his tears.

“No, it totally was,” he declared, enjoying the way he was tucked against his friends for a moment longer before he pulled back. “I’m also crying for the poor cake ingredients you guys used. What did you do to them?”

He took another look at the charcoal block drowned in frosting that was apparently supposed to be a cake. It was somehow even worse than it had seemed at first glance. It was burnt on the outside and drooping towards the middle, and the smell was absolutely horrendous.

“You haven’t even tried it yet,” Jason said, sounding seriously bummed out and giving Leo a look like a kicked puppy. “Sure, it’s a little burnt, but we tried our best.”

“It’s burnt enough to set off Festus’ smoke detectors,” Leo pointed out. “You guys know you could have saved yourselves the effort and just used the magic plates to make me a cake, right?”

“We didn’t want to save ourselves the effort!” Piper immediately protested. “We forgot your birthday! That called for something more meaningful than a summoned cake!” 

“Aw, so you decided to get me food poisoning instead? That’s so thoughtful!” Leo smiled at them. “No fucking thanks, though.”

“Can we at least cut it? I’ll try a piece if you won’t,” Jason told him, pouting a little.

“We can cut it, but you’re absolutely not eating any of that,” Leo told him immediately. 

He was genuinely both curious and terrified to find out how the cake looked on the inside, but nothing he could see right now suggested this thing was even slightly edible.

He got a sharp knife out of one of the drawers and cautiously cut off the end piece of the cake—which was difficult considering the outer layer had the consistency of a brick. Leo briefly wondered if he needed to get a saw (or maybe a hammer and chisel) out of his tool belt, but then the cake gave way with a gross squelching noise, and the knife slid through with worrying ease almost to the bottom, where it turned back into brick texture.

“What kind of monstrosity did you two create?”

Leo transferred the piece onto one of the plates with the care he would have handled a dangerous explosive with, poking at it cautiously. The outer layer was rock-solid, but the middle part was still visibly horrendously undercooked batter. He looked back at the rest of the cake, which looked much the same way. 

“Oh gods. How did we even manage that?” Piper asked, baffled. She didn’t look annoyed that Leo had teased them anymore. Honestly, she looked like she was struggling not to burst out laughing herself.

“I’m gonna try it,” Jason announced. “I think we should give it a fair shot.”

Leo and Piper exchanged an amused look, convinced Jason was kidding, which meant neither of them managed to stop him from biting off the edge of the piece that Leo had cut.

“Jason, what the hell?” Piper shrieked. “Don’t eat that!”

“Jase. Jase, spit that out this instant,” Leo said immediately. “I’m serious. You’re gonna make yourself so sick, and we can’t afford to have you out of commission for three weeks.”

“It actually tastes pretty decent,” Jason told them, still chewing. Something made an awful crunching noise. “Ow.”

“Spit it out,” Leo repeated, pointing towards the trash can. 

This time, Jason listened. 

“I think I chipped a tooth,” he said afterwards, wincing. “Maybe don’t try the cake.”

“Wasn’t going to. We may be fighting giants on a bi-weekly basis, but I don’t have that much of a death wish,” Leo told him. He gestured for Jason to sit down on one of the chairs and took his friend’s jaw into his good hand, gently tilting his head back and forth and inspecting his mouth. “Yeah, you chipped one of your molars pretty badly. Maybe avoid chewing on your right side until we can find you a dentist.” Leo winced in sympathy. “Also, I know you worry your lip a lot when you’re nervous, so try not to do that—unless you want to look like a vampire really likes drinking specifically from your lips. In which case, you know. You do you.”

“Thanks for checking.” Jason was blushing furiously. He looked mortified. “You can, uh. You can let go now.”

Leo nodded, dropping Jason’s jaw. He rummaged in his tool belt and took out a small vial of nectar. 

“Take a sip. It’s not gonna fix the tooth, but it should at least get the taste of cake and blood out, and if you did ingest any of the cake we should probably try to combat that early.”

Jason took the vial obediently, but he made a face when he drank from it. “It tastes weird.”

“Can’t taste any weirder than the cake,” Leo pointed out. 

“I genuinely thought it tasted okay,” Jason insisted. “Chipping my tooth was definitely bad, but I’m pretty sure I ate weirder things when I was living with Lupa as a toddler. It mostly tasted like very sweet, burnt chocolate with a bit of scrambled egg.”

“Even your description of that makes me want to throw up,” Piper told him. She looked a little green. 

Leo agreed with Piper’s sentiment, but he was also stuck on one specific part of what Jason had said. “What do you mean, it kind of tastes like scrambled egg? Why would it taste like scrambled egg?”

“Because we put scrambled egg in the cake,” Jason said casually, like this was a completely normal sentence and not one of the most cursed things Leo had ever heard in his life. “Wouldn’t it be weirder if it didn’t taste like it at all?”

Leo absolutely lost it.

“You put scrambled egg into the-” He was regretting his broken wrist again, mostly because this was the type of situation that, at minimum, required a two-handed face-palm. That did explain the weird yellow pieces Leo had seen in the undercooked batter, but he also desperately wished he could go back to not knowing that. He sighed, resigned. “Why do I even ask?”

“Why is that wrong?” Piper looked genuinely confused. “I know pretty much for sure that eggs are a common cake ingredient!”

“Yeah, but not scrambled eggs!” Leo burst out laughing and couldn’t get himself to stop. This was absolutely hysterical. “Forget celestial bronze and imperial gold. We should just weaponize this cake next time we fight a giant. Even if they do regenerate eventually, they’re never gonna dare to come near us again.”

He had to pause to wipe tears from the corners of his eyes—partially because he was genuinely really touched by the gesture, but mostly because the mental image of Jason and Piper dumping scrambled egg into a bowl of cake batter with completely straight faces was absolutely killing him. 

“The plates couldn’t do raw eggs. We tried,” Jason explained with a shrug. “We figured it wouldn’t make that much of a difference.”

“Yes, it does. What is wrong with you two?” Leo buried his face in his hand again, trying his hardest to catch his breath between bouts of laughter and failing miserably. “Also, we have raw eggs in the fridge. Why didn’t you just use those?”

Piper and Jason exchanged a look.

“Eggs go in the fridge?” Jason asked, dumbfounded.

“You people are hopeless.” 

“At this rate you’re not getting a cake at all next year,” Piper told him, crossing her arms.

“Thank the gods,” Leo said. He was shaking with laughter. “Do I even want to know the other ingredients if one of them was scrambled egg?”

“Sugar, flour, cocoa to add some liquid and two bars of chocolate,” Jason listed.

Huh. Unlike the scrambled egg, those seemed like pretty basic chocolate cake ingredients, and could actually have made for a decent cake, even though that sounded like way too much chocolate and Leo wouldn’t have put frosting on it. They’d probably gotten the ratios all wrong if they hadn’t had a recipe—and considering how the cake had turned out, they couldn’t have had one—but that didn’t explain why the outer layer of the cake had turned out hard enough to chip a tooth. Burnt cake didn’t usually do that.

Leo waited for Jason to continue listing ingredients. He didn’t. He just stood there, looking at him expectantly.

“…that’s it? No butter? No baking powder? No egg that wasn’t scrambled?” Leo was equal parts horrified and amused when his friends shook their heads. Ah. That would do it. “How did you guys manage to forget all of the ingredients that are supposed to make the cake less dense and somehow still end up with a liquid batter core? This whole thing should be a brick, not just the outer layer. I’m honestly almost impressed.”

“We didn’t know what temperature to put the oven on, but we figured just turning it all the way up and keeping an eye on it would work,” Piper explained. “Apparently it could have used a few more minutes.”

“Holy fuck. Yeah, that explains it. It also explains the fire.” Leo had been in the process of calming down at least a little, but now he doubled over laughing again. If being in the general proximity of this cake wasn’t going to kill him, his friends recounting their baking misadventures definitely would. “Whose idea was this?”

“I messed up the thing with the oven,” Jason admitted sheepishly. “The cake in general was Piper’s idea, though.”

“It was?”

Piper rubbed the back of her neck, looking somewhere between embarrassed and amused at just how badly this whole baking thing had turned out. “Evidently not my best call.”

Leo hugged her again.

“Thanks. You know, for remembering, even if it was a little late.”

Jason got pulled into the hug, too—for fairness’ sake, and because Leo knew it must have taken a lot out of him to break the rules and leave his room after curfew. 

As much fun as he made of the cake—which, in his defense, really did deserve it—Leo wanted his friends to know how much he appreciated that they’d tried. 

He felt warm all throughout his body.

“We’ll do it properly next time,” Piper promised when they broke apart. “Correct date and all. No cake, though,” she amended. “Not even cake mix. I will not stand for you laughing at our efforts.”

“And all the cake mixes in the world will thank you for it,” Leo teased.

It was hard to put into words what it meant to him to know that they were thinking of him, with how much he’d worried they would inevitably end up not caring anymore. That was the way it had always gone, even with the nicer foster families—inevitably, they’d all figured out he just wasn’t worth the effort. Eventually, he’d started running before it got to that point. 

It was a thought he’d been toying with a lot lately—ever since Nemesis had told him that he’d never belong with his friends. 

But something had shifted. 

Next year, Piper had said, and Leo believed her. 

He wanted a next year with her and Jason. And the year after, and the year after that one, until they were all old and gray. Until Gaia was nothing but a ridiculous story they told to their grandkids. 

‘Oh yeah, when we were teenagers the earth tried to kill us all. We kicked her ass. It was a whole thing. Now, have you seen my glasses?’

The thought of losing them scared Leo a whole lot more than the thought of staying did.

He didn’t put any of that into words, though. Instead, he decided he desperately needed to go back to teasing his friends, because all of these ridiculous emotions were too hard for him to deal with. 

“If nothing else, your ridiculous baking disaster did cheer me up a lot. I’m so gonna tell the others about this. They’re gonna lose it.” Leo smiled gleefully. “Also, please never set foot into my kitchen again. That goes for both of you. No more couples’ baking nights on the Argo, okay? The ship is wrecked enough as-is, and we can’t save the world if we’re all sleep deprived because you guys keep setting off the fire alarm.”

“You have nothing to worry about in that regard,” Piper told him. Leo didn’t really get why, but she was smiling.

“First baking experience was too traumatizing for you to ever try again?” he guessed, still struggling to keep a straight face.

“It’s not that. Despite the results, we actually had a pretty great time. It’s…” Piper gave Jason a questioning look. Whatever it was she’d asked, Jason nodded. “We’re just sort of done doing couples’ anything.”

“What does that even mean?” Leo looked from Piper to Jason in confusion. “Not sure if this is just me being sleep deprived, but is Pipes making any sense to you?”

“Yes,” Jason said, pausing for a moment before apparently figuring out that he should probably elaborate. “We broke up.”

That startled Leo so badly he almost caused a kitchen fire. “What? When? Guys, the cake may be awful, but it’s not bad enough to warrant a whole breakup.”

“A few days ago?” Piper shrugged. “It was mutual and we didn’t want to make a whole thing out of it. We’ve got more important problems right now.”

“Not the cake, then,” Leo concluded, too stunned to say anything else. 

His mind was whirring. What the hell had he missed? 

And why in the world was the main thing he felt relief? 

“Definitely not the cake,” Jason confirmed. “Don’t worry, we’re still friends. It’s a little weird, but we'll figure it out. You’re probably right that we should be banned from being baking buddies, though.”

He laughed.

They both seemed completely unbothered by the breakup. 

No, it was even weirder than that. Leo thought they genuinely looked happy about it. He had no idea what to make of that. 

Thankfully, Leo didn't have to know what to make of it. He could always just make jokes about it now and ask questions later.

“Oh, good. I’d hate to pick sides in the divorce. It’d suck if I only got to see Piper on the weekends.”

“Hang on, why am I the one who only gets weekends?” Piper whined, giving him an offended, deeply betrayed look. “You were my friend first!” 

”Jason genuinely thinks I’m funny, and he sat through all of the Transformers movies with me without complaining once. Sorry, Pipes,” Leo explained, grinning at her. “Besides, you admitted to this whole cake business being your idea, so that’s clearly child endangerment. You should be glad it’s not just supervised visitation.”

“You’re so lucky today is your make-up birthday, because otherwise I’d have some choice words for you, Mister,” Piper told him, pouting. “Anyway!” She clapped her hands. “Tonight is about you, not about our relationship status. I just wanted to make sure you don’t get the wrong idea. We were burning down the kitchen in a completely platonic manner.” 

“Right.” Leo snorted. “If today is my make-up birthday, does that mean I get to make a wish? And if so, can that wish be that we throw out your awful cake and eat magic plate cake instead?”

Piper and Jason were both pouting now, but Leo wouldn’t budge on this. They did not need to add food poisoning to their steadily growing list of problems.

Leo put the hazard of a cake into a box and stored it safely in his tool belt—getting rid of it at Notus’ palace might be considered a war declaration, which would not help their situation, but since they kept running into obstacles Leo was sure there’d be a monster they could kill with it in the future.

Then he made his friends clean up after themselves, because as much as his mom had been in favor of organized chaos in other spaces, she’d been very insistent when it came to tidying up after yourself in the kitchen.

Once that was done, Jason and Piper put up the decorations—streamers and tiny colorful origami dragons and all—and they all had a piece of unburnt cake without scrambled eggs, courtesy of the golden plates.

Afterwards, Leo voted they go hang out in Jason’s room, because Piper’s room was usually a disaster and his own was basically a workshop, neither of which was very cozy.

They collapsed onto Jason’s mattress, Leo tucked between his best friends, his injured arm resting on top of Jason so no one could roll onto it by accident. Jason didn't mind.

Leo picked out a movie—a new science fiction film neither of them had seen before, which turned out to be a mistake because the world-building was really complex and they were all sleepy as hell. None of them actually managed to follow the plot, and Piper barely made it half an hour into the movie before she dozed off.

“Last chance to throw us both out,” Leo said when realized Jason was starting to fall asleep, too. He didn’t have to bother with whispering. Piper slept like a log. 

“I won’t,” Jason told him, pulling Leo even closer for emphasis. “You’re so warm. This is nice.”

“You sure about this, Superman?” Leo teased, though he wasn’t complaining. “We’re gonna be in a lot of trouble if Hedge finds us like this. You really ready to deal with that?”

“It’s your birthday. Hedge can bite me,” Jason announced with a yawn. He pulled his blanket over all of them and wrapped an arm around Leo’s shoulder.

“Not how the wolf-goat food chain typically works, buddy,” Leo told him, letting his head drop onto Jason’s chest. He was halfway on top of his friend now, but Jason didn't seem to mind. Not like Leo had much of a choice, either—Piper kept moving closer to him, so moving to the other side was all Leo could do not to get squashed between them.

Jason laughed. The noise rumbled against Leo’s ear. It felt nice.

“How’s your tooth, by the way?”

“Would be a lot better if I could stop forgetting I’m not supposed to chew on that side,” Jason sighed, yawning again, “And before you ask, no, I’m not feeling sick. I told you, I’ve eaten weirder things than burnt cake before.”

“Somehow, this does not reassure me,” Leo commented. “We really need to talk to Lupa about appropriate toddler diets when we get back.”

Jason laughed again, but it was more subdued this time. This might have offended Leo—he was hilarious, thank you very much—but Jason was forgiven based on the fact that he was obviously completely beat.

A moment later, he was out like a light, snoring quietly.

There, tucked between his two best friends, Leo felt… happy. Despite his stupid broken wrist, the last few hours had been the best Leo had felt in weeks.

As much as he preferred sleeping in the engine room over the quiet of his own room, there was something to be said about the comfort of an actual bed. He could still hear the machinery of the Argo II whirring around him here if he really focused on it, but his friends’ breaths and the other noises they made in their sleep were more than enough to combat the quiet even when he didn’t.

When sleep found him, Leo was vision- and nightmare-free for the first time in ages.

———

Some notes:

I doubt that’s gonna seriously bother anyone except for me, but if anyone is keeping track of the book timeline, you’ll realize it being July 10th a few days into the Notus situation doesn’t quite work.

For the sake of this fic, I’m choosing to ignore that, because if I didn’t, I’d either have to deal with awkward comphet jiper still being together (which I’ve tried and did not enjoy writing), take the fic out of this universe and make it a standalone (which I’ve also tried and didn’t like) or have them miss Leo’s birthday by a week, which feels a million times worse.

After I finally decided to just say “fuck the timeline, I can do what I want”, I managed to finish this fic I was stuck on for months in four days. And it somehow also ended up my longest lost trio week fic, which… how?

Also, Leo having a broken wrist in this fic is mostly because part of the reason they’re stuck with Notus in canon is that the Argo is wrecked and Leo isn’t there to fix it, so I had to find an excuse why he couldn’t fix it even though he was there in this universe.

If anyone wants to call shenanigans on the batter not tasting terrible, please just assume they didn’t taste any bit that had scrambled egg in it, LOL

Anyway, hope you enjoyed! Comments super appreciated as always!

[nohaijiachi]

I got randomly recommended this video by YT and wrote a ginormous comment in response because I have no self control, apparently, so I thought I might as well also share my thoughts here in regard to whatever is going with THIS FUCKING SMILE

(under a cut to not clog y'alls dashboards)

(the first part of the comment here is a direct response to some of the ideas put forth in the video, it is very short so give it a quick watch for more context if you want)

Imo it's not necessary to look into overcomplicated theories that rely too much on off screen shenanigans to explain the smile, for how amusing the idea of them having swapped during the kiss is (like, the kind of stuff I won't want to be actually canon, but I'll be very happy to see explored in fan fics lol)

I think to fully explain that smile we have to take in consideration multiple factors:

This show is very purposeful in what it does and doesn't, well... show. That last shot is very long and I think the fact that Aziraphale's and Crowley's expressions in the aftermath of their disastrous break up is shown in such a manner tells us a LOT about the state of mind they might be at the start of S3, and the obstacles they'll have to face. Aziraphale doesn't immediately smile, rather he seems to look almost shell-shocked for most of the shot; it's clear (to me at least lol) that the quiet ride up the elevator is finally giving him some desperately needed time to fully digest everything that happened, because too much has happened in an extremely short amount of time, and we all know Aziraphale doesn't do well with speed lol.

But, for how much he can sometimes be a complete moron, he is smart, and all he needs are just those seconds of quiet to properly ponder on everything, on the choices made and the ramifications of said choices, and that's how we get to smile-- I'll delve into what I think Aziraphale is going through in his mind in more details later, because I also think it's necessary to focus a bit on Crowley's own expression, since the both of them are so intrinsically linked that the narrative cannot make sense without taking the both of them into account.

Crowley's expression is much more static and doesn't change the way Aziraphale's does; he looks profoundly tired in ways we've never seen him before. I don't think he's giving up on Aziraphale, and I fully believe the fact that he stood there and waited for Aziraphale to disappear in the elevator, the both of them sharing that last look, was a quiet message: He'll never give up on Aziraphale, he'll be there, waiting. But wait is all he can do for Aziraphale, now, because he can't follow where Aziraphale is going.

For how messy and full of heightened emotions the confession + kiss are, I think actually denying Aziraphale's request was a HUGE step forward for Crowley's character. He's never been able to deny Aziraphale, he always went back to him after every fight, and we all know how stupidly whipped for Aziraphale he is and how he'd empty the ocean with a spoon if Aziraphale asked him nicely-- But to actually put his foot down and say "no, I cannot do this for you" when asked to all but renounce the person he is now? Especially with how Aziraphale is all but begging him openly? That's a huge step, and something I think Crowley desperately needs to mature as a person (or, well, person-shaped being). We all love how Aziraphale has him wrapped around his little finger I'm sure, but we also all know that if they truly want to build a strong, healthy relationship they also both need to be able to keep their individuality and to put forth adequate boundaries about what they are willing to do for each other within reason.

Asking Crowley to come back to being an angel when he's made blatantly clear for six thousand bloody years how much he despises Heaven is not a 'within reason' request, innit?

So, yeah, for how heartbreaking the break-up was, in a sense Crowley needs it. They both do. They both need time apart to figure their own shit out, dismantle all those unhealthy habits they had to adopt in order to be with one another as safely as they possibly could while still 'employed', and then come back together with a clearer mind and a whole deal stronger than before, both as individuals and as a couple.

And I think how tired and downtrodden Crowley looks in that last shot is a precursor to this process, just as much as Aziraphale's smile is... So, let me get back to our favorite angel and what I personally think is going on with him.

I think to properly contextualize that smile we need to look at not just the happening of those infamous last fifteen minutes, but of S2 as a whole, and what Aziraphale does in it.

So, what is Aziraphale doing during S2?

At the start he seems to be more or less comfortably settled in his current life; he's as happy as ever doing what he's always done, enjoying humanity's creativity with his books and his music and his food and drinks, seemingly content to be puttering about in his bookshop (which is a stark contrast with Crowley's homelessness and his kinda adrift and depressed attitude). Of course then Jim!Gabriel throws a wrench right into that, but imo I think there was a lot more going on behind the facade of Aziraphale's well ingrained habits.

Sure, he still has all of his familiar comforts and his routine, but from the moment we see him interact with Crowley I saw a deep restlessness emerge in him: The panicked look he launches Crowley when Nina asks him about his 'naked man friend', the way he speaks with Crowley with all those 'our' he uses, the blatant way he keeps reaching over and touching Crowley-- To me that suggests that Aziraphale is clearly not as happy as he seems to be on a superficial glance. He clearly wants more with Crowley, wants to bring their relationship to the next step, but because the both of them are so deeply entrenched in their unhealthy coping mechanisms and habits and their inability to openly communicate it doesn't even occur to Aziraphale to just... You know. Take the first step, actually say something about it. So he just keeps throwing bait after bait in the water, hoping Crowley will bite and be the one taking the initiative as he's always done, finally allowing Aziraphale to accept said initiative, this time around.

Of course, we all see that Crowley doesn't take any first step, which is probably something deeply frustrating for Aziraphale at a subconscious level. That's how we get the ball; sure, on the face of it it was Aziraphale's way to make Nina and Maggie fall in love, but... Was it, really? Let's be real, for how entirely believable it is that Aziraphale makes up the lie about Nina and Maggie's love to cover for their miracle is, since we've seen him being anxious around other angels, I don't think for a second that had Aziraphale just stopped and spent three minutes thinking about it he wouldn't have found a way to convince Muriel that Nina and Maggie were, in fact, in love, especially with how 'green' Muriel is about humans.

I fully believe that Aziraphale is not properly thinking during S2, period. He's frustrated by his inability to bring his and Crowley's relationship to what he wants it to be, and that frustration and single-minded objective is utterly obfuscating his thought process. There are plenty of moments he seemed almost manic, imo, which I read as another sign about his 'impaired' (allow me the term) state of mind as of S2.

So, yes, the ball: On the face of it something to actually turn his lie to the Archangels into truth, but deeper down, perhaps almost unconsciously, I think Aziraphale sees the ball as a way to finally make him and Crowley happen. That fact that he's taking pointers about romance from human literature is blatant, and obviously he truly does believe the ball will be THE way to make love bloom.

If you stop and think about it, the ball scene is terrifying. These people are being manipulated to play the perfect background parts to make, what is in Aziraphale's mind, the height of romance atmosphere happen. The fact we get a juxtaposition with Nina's "what the F is going on, am I losing my mind???" rightful attitude underlines this. And I truly believe Aziraphale isn't exerting said manipulation with intent, but rather doing so subconsciously, because he's just so fixated on the idea of having finally the perfect set-up to have Crowley as he desires that he is influencing everything around him. After all, we all know they both have the tendency of making things happen the way they want simply by thinking that's how things are supposed to happen.

And again, he's so manic and giddy when he asks Crowley to dance, his ass is not LISTENING. He literally needed a brick thrown through a window to snap out of it.

So, in the present we have an Aziraphale who , in his own way, is trying to take the initiative, come out with plans. There is a moment that I think might have slipped under the radar of a lot of people but that's frightfully important about who Aziraphale is at this point in the story, and who he will need to become: "I have a plan," Aziraphale said to Crowley during the stare down with the demons outside of the bookshop after the ruined ball; Crowley didn't even seem to have registered that sentence at all, because his mind is already projected forward and going a mile a minute about what to do to keep both the humans and Aziraphale safe in this situation.

Crowley, who loves to swoop in and save Aziraphale, doing what he's always done to keep his angel safe, even to the detriment of their relationship with one another... And Aziraphale, who adores playing the part of the damsel in distress in turn, is actually telling Crowley that *he has a plan*.

That's not something to take lightly, methinks. That's very much just another sign that Aziraphale's individuality is struggling, trying to emerge through Aziraphale's anxiety and doubts and fears and deeply ingrained habits. Aziraphale's cognitive dissonance in regards to heaven, and his shaken faith in God are huge motivators of his actions, and in the grand scheme of things the scant few years he had away from under the oppressive thumb of heaven is nothing. It was barely any time at all in the face of the eternity of an immortal life spent under that oppression, and yet we are already seeing little glimpses of Aziraphale's rebellious side struggling to get fully free.

I think these little glimpses inform us at great lengths about the evolution Aziraphale's character will go through in S3, and greatly explains that strange smile right at the end; in my opinion that smile isn't the smile of someone who's trying to convince himself that he's ok, or realizing that Crowley loves him (he knew already, they both knew and have known for a long time, their inability to properly express those feelings was their downfall, but I don't think either of them has doubted even for a second when it comes to how much they love one another). In my opinion that smile is the smile of someone who is steeling himself for what he envisions in his future; equal parts old-sedated anxiety and yet determination to actually enact plans he's surely concocting in his brilliant little mind. That's the smile of someone who has just realized that not only they can, but that they need to do something, and you can damn well be sure they won't be sitting and twiddling their thumbs waiting to be saved, but they'll be the one saving themselves and everybody else along with 'em, this time.

Just as Crowley needs to actually spend some time define himself as himself, and not just in relation to Aziraphale, Aziraphale needs to spend some time shedding all those fears and doubts that are weighing him down, and emerge the other side someone much more self-assured and ready to do what he thinks is right without all the hesitations that have indirectly been strengthened by Crowley; in a way, by allowing Aziraphale an out with his 'temptations', Crowley had been feeding into those hesitations, and had been holding Aziraphale back from fully maturing, even if not done on purpose, obviously. Imo is very important for Aziraphale's character that he comes to realize that he doesn't need those excuses Crowley gifted him to keep doing what he thinks is right, that he actualizes his own morality properly, and enacts on it.

I don't have the faintest clue about what is going to happen in S3, but I do fully believe the above paragraph is what Aziraphale and Crowley's respective character arcs will focus on. And once they'll come back together they'll be the most power couple that has ever power coupl-ed, and the Metatron will have no clue about what is about to hit him >:)

[worldstarz]

shinjiro defends your honor against stupei

pairing: shinjiro aragaki x fem!reader (sees member)

summary: your leader wants to show you a video of the stone-cold shinjiro aragaki getting into a debate with junpei over ranking the girls. he gets very passionate over you.

tags: kinda shitpost ; feat. junpei + protag ; not proofread ; spoiler-free ; mutual pining

notes: just got to october 4th! wrote this to cope! i am not okay! also protag is called leader bc im not looking up his name to avoid spoilers. i’ll edit when i finish the game !!

———

“so if you press this button, the footage should start playing,” the leader points to the console, directing you on how to play the recordings. other than for meetings and before missions, you’ve never been in the command room before. hell, you didn’t even know there were cameras in the building until now.

the specific recording your leader wanted to show you is labeled ‘september 23 - lounge’. as you press the play button, the lights of the command room dim down as the video begins to play on the screen.

———

as expected, the recording shows the first floor lounge. shinjiro and junpei sit on the same couch, but at different ends.

“so, aragaki-senpai, what’s your ranking of all the girls in the building?” junpei leans back, hands behind his head. there is a considerable amount of distance between them, both physically and interpersonally, and junpei decided talking about the ladies is the best way to bridge that distance.

“why would i care?” shinjiro scoffs, his crossed arms not helping the already-tense air.

“oh, come on! with so many beautiful ladies here, you’ve gotta have a ranking by now! like, who’d you rather be alone in a room with? or see in a bikini?” junpei begins listing off the girls in an attempt to convince shinjiro to dig deep into his thoughts and desires. “there’s kirijo-senpai, with that air of elegance and maturity; yuka-tan, a pretty chick very popular among guys our age; fuuka, an all-around cutie; [name], who is… hm…” he didn’t even reach aigis before running out of adjectives. trying to think over his very limited dictionary, he briefly hesitates.

shinjiro visibly perks up upon hearing the last name listed. noticing this, junpei exaggerates his struggle to think.

“hm… what is there about [name]…” junpei rubs his chin, staring at his senpai as his face morphs from an expression of indifference to one of annoyance.

“you’re kidding me, right?” aragaki scowls, sitting up slightly. “you seriously can’t think of anything for [name]?”

“well, she’s just… eh…” junpei trails off. “i wouldn’t rank her very high.”

“i know you’re a moron, but i didn’t know you could be this much of a dumbass,” he leans forward. without even raising his voice, the simple action caused an air of intimidation around him that could be felt even through the screen. “the hell do you mean ‘you wouldn’t rank her very high’? are you fucking blind?”

“nonono, man, she’s attractive-“ junpei frantically tries to explain himself, backtracking on his original plan of getting a reaction out of shinjiro because finding out his senpai’s type was not worth getting his ass beat. but, aragaki continues.

“don’t tell me you’d rank her lower than a goddamn robot!” this was possibly the most passionate he’s ever been, and it was over a casual conversation of ranking the girls in their dormitory building. “she better be in at LEAST your top three or i’m mopping the floors with your ass.”

“no, dude, she’s in my top three, i swear!” junpei’s attempts at damage control were getting more desperate. “she’s probably number one!”

“…number one?” aragaki repeats, as the two sit in a heavy silence for a moment. “you don’t deserve to have her in your number one spot,” he mutters.

“…what?”

“i SAID you don’t DESERVE to have her in your number one spot!!”

“OKAY THEN SHE’S NUMBER TWO!!!” junpei raises his hands up in an act of surrender. “she’s second! [name] is second!”

———

“…”

unable to listen to anymore, you hurriedly hit the pause button. you feel hot, and as the lights turn back on, you make a futile attempt to cover your burning face with your hands.

your leader clears his throat. “so, should i set you two up on a date, or-“

“no!” you exclaim, cutting him off with a wide-eyed expression on your face. “no! no.” you calm yourself down with a deep breath, trying not to imitate junpei’s desperation shown in the video. trying to collect yourself, you add, “that won’t be necessary. shinjiro didn’t even say his own ranking, so all of that probably could have meant nothing. absolutely nothing. right.”

“i mean, if you finish watching-“

once again burying your face into your hands, you yell into your palms to cut him off. a typical response from a teenage girl finding out her crush laid his pride on the line to advocate for her attractiveness.

the leader, ignoring your wishes, presses the play button.

———

“where would you put [name] then?” junpei asks, his signature shit-eating grin on his face. the video seems to have skipped ahead, as evidenced by junpei being much more calm than earlier.

shinjiro hesitates.

the quality is a bit fuzzy, but you can see junpei having a perplexed expression as he leans in to get a better look at shinjiro’s face, who turns his head away.

“are you…” junpei squints, then his eyes widen in surprise. “are you blushing??”

“the hell? no way i am!” shinjiro turns his body away.

“oh man, you should’ve just said you like her!” junpei grins, trying to be a supportive bro!

“i-i don’t even think of her like that! just lay it off!”

“so, what about her, huh?” his excitement shows in his voice. “she’s pretty cute and all. oh, those eyes are gorgeous-“

“i said lay it off!” shinjiro exclaims, and junpei jumps.

“ok man, ok! that’s my bad!” junpei backs up, and the awkward silence returns once more. without saying a word, shinjiro gets up and leaves.

———

at this point, you’ve sat down. the leader turns around to look at you, your face buried into a pillow. your ears are practically glowing red.

“my offer earlier about setting you two up still stands-“ he begins, but as you did before, you cut him off.

“shut up!!!!” you scream into the pillow, kicking your feet. you lift your face from the pillow to meet his gaze.

he can’t help but laugh. “should i get yukari? she probably knows more.”

admitting defeat, you nod.

[kaiserposting]

Michael Kaiser — Voyeur to Belonging

PAIRING: Michael Kaiser/Reader WORD COUNT: 5.3k TYPE: Humor, Slice of life/domestic fluff (its technically a roommate setting) WARNING(S): None? NOTE(S): Reader character is an alien. Yes you read that right. A shapeshifting alien of some sort. The narrative is non-linear

Birthday

There was a coconut on the kitchen counter top.

Kaiser was confused. Most days he was disoriented on account of your incomprehensible behavior anyway, but this was new. You stood there, caressing it, and he wasn’t really sure what it was supposed to achieve while he watched you. Of course, there was other bullshit too, but the coconut was the most attention grabbing.

He didn’t bother asking. He also didn’t bother announcing himself to begin with when he first entered, since he had come home not long ago, and mainly because he was impolite. It was fine because you didn’t have any standard conventions about courtesy.

Instead of raising any valid questions, he went to shower.

Not like he cared to converse — when he wouldn’t immediately see you upon entering, he’d walk around looking for you because the thought you disappeared somewhere without notice kind of irritated him, and then he’d spot you and he’d be calm again. And then he wouldn’t explain what it was all about. Maybe you thought it was some funny human behavior he was exhibiting. The notion was appealing.

Though Kaiser was a bit over the top and didn’t have much consideration towards the water bill which made showering an entire event for him, it couldn’t have taken that long for him to emerge. He still had the towel on by the time he stepped back into the kitchen, curiosity eating at him. What was the coconut for? Surely it was something moronic and frivolous, but he was too impatient to keep pretending inquiring was beneath him.

Any intrigue he was feeling dropped to the floor and dissolved into the puddle he’d created by moving around while still wet when his brain processed the sight in front of him.

There was… a lot of powder(?) everywhere. Mostly on the kitchen counter and then some.

“What the hell,” said Kaiser, gesturing. “What the hell are you doing?”

He didn’t really like getting angry over stupid shit like this, the kind of problem which could easily be fixed. It reminded him of his dad, but then again how the fuck was he supposed to stay calm in this situation. In the face of his own ire, Kaiser was nauseous.

You turned around to respond and seemed rather joyous. His jaw clenched further, his forehead wrinkled more.

“My preparations,” you said.

“Your preparations,” he repeated. “For what?”

“The cake.”

Kaiser pinched the bridge of his nose.

“The recipe said it needs ‘coconut-pecan frosting,’” you continued even though he did not want an elaboration.

It occurred to him what had happened. Usually it would be more obvious, but the shock was so severe, he didn’t contemplate the situation as he was focusing his energy on not blowing a gasket. “You can buy the ingredients for that at the store-”

“Well, I didn’t.”

“-not grind it down. Would you hunt and skin a fucking chicken in cold blood if you wanted to make wings?!” He was raising his voice now.

The volume grated on your nerves and you raised your hands as if to placate him, backing off. Your reaction didn’t mollify him in the slightest. “It’s more convenient and it costs no money.”

“How is it more convenient?” There was a loaded silence. Kaiser didn’t understand where you got a whole coconut to begin with, but that was besides the point. “Why were you trying to make a cake anyway? ‘Cause if it’s some shitty new hobby you’re taking up again, do it away from my house.”

You blinked at him twice in this slow, deliberate manner, scrutinizing him as if he was stupid for not understanding what the purpose of this was. Then you said, “For Micha’s birthday.”

Even though you’d flinched away from him and he kept yelling without a care, that was what it took for him to immediately deflate and feel like shit. If anything, he was flustered and unsure, all that bravado for naught. You wanted to celebrate with him — wanted to do something for him. Remembered the date, even. His hand wrapped around his throat unconsciously, albeit without squeezing.

It wasn’t an extraordinary or special occasion. You technically celebrated with him last year too, but you didn’t know what that was all about. Wherever you came from, you claimed birthday parties weren’t a ‘practice’ there. The two of you were similar, in a way.

“Listen, so, I looked up ‘German cake’ because you claimed you were from Germany. The website said to use coconut-pecan frosting.”

“I don’t claim I was from Germany, I really am, and I still am, it’s not past tense,” he said, trying to distract from his regret by nitpicking.

“Well, anyway,” you beamed at him, and then you reached out towards him, and then you embraced him with the skills of a natural, even though that was something else you said wasn’t a ‘practice,’ “happy birthday, Micha!”

He let go of his neck to stiffly wrap his arms around your back. There was coconut powder on your fingers still, and it was sticking to his bare skin in clumps and copious amounts because you were touching him since he was still wet. It was a funny ploy, intentional, like you were checking how far you could go with an abused dog, trying to see if it’s comfortable with you yet. If giving him affection was enough for him to overlook anything in the world.

Kaiser was enjoying your hug, but he didn’t say anything about it beyond an ungrateful sounding thanks after the birthday wish. It was obvious, though, in the way he held onto you tighter the moment you tried to separate from him.

“But what about the cake? Should I scrap it…?”

“You can burn down the kitchen if you want to,” allowed Kaiser, both generous and unwise. Imprudent in that he was trying to flex on an alien in a roundabout way — look, I am rich, I do not care about superficial things like the kitchen, and coming from the guy who almost threw a tantrum over it.

The development pleased you, however, because you cheered and pecked him on the cheek. He flushed under the attention. You always found it fascinating, the way his skin could change colors, even if the shift wasn’t so dramatic. “Yay,” you said as an afterthought, “I love fire.”

The experiment was a success. You could get away with pretty much anything as long as you played your cards right.

To Kaiser’s surprise, the cake even ended up coming out delicious. Again he did not compliment you on it.

Dye

Kaiser was in the bathroom, which was a place he spent a lot of time in. But instead of admiring himself (that was what he called his creepy staring at his reflection), he was doing something to his hair. He was applying a mysterious liquid to it and he’d tied it up strangely. You hoped it wasn’t a new look he was trying.

“Do you need something?” he asked, not looking at you.

You stepped closer. Not knowing how to formulate a more specific question on the matter, you asked, “What is this behavior?” and then gestured vaguely at what he was doing.

For a second, Kaiser halted in surprise at the strange wording. “I’m refreshing my dye.”

“Ah,” you said with a smile, “I thought it was natural?”

“Sorry you had to find out this way.”

“You are deceiving.”

“Hopefully it wasn’t too big of a heartbreak.”

“Are you insecure your hair isn’t blue, Micha?” you asked. “The advice columns always say you should just be yourself.”

There was a good chance you were mocking him, but due to the possibility you were genuinely concerned about him, he wrinkled his nose to make a show of his disdain towards your ignorance and said, “No, it’s not a self esteem thing. Who the fuck is insecure their hair isn’t blue?”

“Are you trying to signal you’re poisonous?”

“I’m not some shitty animal,” he said in earnest, even though this confirmed you were messing with him.

“Do you cut it by yourself too?”

“Yes.”

“Why, can’t you afford a barber?”

Kaiser’s eye twitched in irritation. “I don’t like strangers touching my head.” It came out sounding stupid in relation to a hairstylist, but he hoped you wouldn’t question it.

“Ah, ok.” You smiled in an unsettling way. Kaiser tried to concentrate. There was a long bout of silence before you delivered the next ego killer of a question, “If you cut it by yourself, why would you willingly shape it like that?”

“There’s nothing wrong with it.” He crossed his arms and tilted up his chin, upturning his nose in a snobby gesture, before he ran his fingers through his hair. “In fact, I think it’s unique and charming, and one of my best features.”

You grimaced as you watched. “Micha, you’re totally messing it up! Don’t move like that! It’s dripping everywhere and you’re getting it all over your fingers.”

He, too, blinked like an owl, and let go of his strands at a dramatically slow pace, and then he stared at the tips of his fingers coated in blue like they were burned. “Fuck.” Then he glanced at his reflection in the mirror and realized he had smeared dye where he was supposed to still be blond. “Fuuuuck.”

You stood there, useless. As sympathetic as you were to his predicament, you didn’t want to contribute anything.

Kaiser narrowed his gaze at you anyway and said, “Maybe instead of standing there distracting me, you should help me fix it.”

“Ah. The mystic workings of the concoction evade me.”

“They clearly don’t!”

You inched away from him until you were out of the door. Kaiser bared his teeth and glared at the spot even after you’d long vacated it.

Massage

Your human was ill-tempered and prone to sulking.

Often he was unhappy or had an attitude for no discernible reason. Most days, on average, he could find an opportunity to turn at least three interactions into something painful.

The internet was an unintelligent place, which made it easy to parse through (as long as you didn’t take everything said at face value, which you learned after you warned him that his deodorant was going to give him breast cancer; apparently people do not fact check before publishing and lying is not a punishable offense). All you had to do was type, and there — information. You were used to the more reliable system back home, but those networks had nothing to offer on this culture, so…

Anyway, you searched for inspiration for what you could do. It was obvious Kaiser was susceptible to kindness and you thought maybe you could coax him into being more pleasant, at least occasionally. So, what you looked up was ‘nice gestures.’

A lot of the results seemed impractical: babysit for free — you could not find a baby; donate — all the items in the house were his so you did not see the point of donating them to him; listen — you listened to him daily; acknowledge his efforts — he looked at you as if you were a weirdo when you started calculating the trajectory of that magnus-impact-whatever thingy and then gave him a fake diploma for a physics degree.

But then you came upon a sensible suggestion, which was to give a massage. It seemed applicable, since he was an athlete and all. Kaiser even agreed to it without making a fuss.

He was on his stomach, lying on the bed with his face half-hidden in the pillow so you wouldn’t be able to see if he did anything embarrassing. You sat on top of him and tried being gentle even though you were tempted to dig your fingers in his scapula just to check if he would scream. 

Things were going well, he was even relaxed, until you asked, “Hey Micha, do you get massages?”

“Yeah, sometimes.” Though they were usually the painful sports ones and he wasn’t about to admit to feeling pain in front of you or anything else embarrassing.

“Is it like some kind of mating ritual?”

“What the hell?” he asked, bemused. “Of course the fuck not.”

“So you’re not into the massage therapist?”

“No! Why would you think that? Do you find it erotic, you strange creature?”

“No. I watched this video where a bird was trying to seduce another bird with a silly little dance. Thought it might be something like that.”

“What kind of conclusion is that?” he asked. You could tell even through the muffle that he was gritting his teeth. You decided to massage his face after you’re done with this, since he made those ugly expressions so often and probably had tension. Maybe the rigidity was making him easy to vex. “I swear, you assume such stupid shit, it appalls me.”

Kaiser drifted off to sleep mid complaining about your apparent cluelessness and woke up in a good mood a few hours later. However, the bad side effect was that he started demanding massages any time he perceived things weren’t going his way, so then you had to think of a way to trick him out of his giving orders addiction.

Clothes

“I like wearing yours, though,” you whined. It was unbefitting for someone at a luxury store, but then again what did you care.

Kaiser’s eyebrows pinched together. It was obvious the employees were judging you both considering the brain dead conversation you’d been having, but he had a different problem entirely. Like a toddler who didn’t want to share his toys at the playground, he hissed, “They’re my clothes, not yours! I’ll get you some.”

You pouted. The action was extremely ungrateful and petulant considering not everyone had a celebrity begging to let them buy them expensive new clothes, but as already established, you didn’t care that you were trifling. “Is there a robe or something, at least?”

“No, there aren’t any robes.” He was already exhausted, squeezing his eyes shut and massaging his temples.

You rolled your eyes and faked a loud yawn.

“At least try one out.” Kaiser pulled out some random miscellaneous item from the rack you were arguing in front of and shoved it into your hands with this expectant look on his face.

Deciding to humor him, you moved to strip. Thankfully it didn’t come to that since Kaiser stopped you, pulling your top back down before you’d even gotten to exposing your midriff.

“You’re uncivilized. Go to the changing rooms.”

“Such a pathetic, prudish society,” you said as if everyone else was wrong. From your perspective it was probably true.

“It’s not prudish, it’s called public indecency and I don’t want to associate with a reprobate.”

“That’s a new one, Micha! I haven’t heard it before.”

He rolled his eyes and ushered you in the direction of the changing rooms. His gaze followed after you while you meandered there, disinterest in the affair palpable. Ingrate.

Kaiser picked a few more clothes he wanted to see you try on. When he turned around, the assistant nearby was looking at him strangely. He remained stoic and went on standing tall and proud as if she was the weird one.

Origin

Kaiser liked to brood on the balcony because he thought that was a productive and angsty activity, fit for a troubled intellectual. You did not understand the point (or even what he was doing in particular), so sometimes you hung around him indifferently. Before growing better acquainted with each other he ignored you, although it was nice to have an audience for his mental movie anyway. He was the type of person who enjoyed things like that.

As time passed and he got more used to your presence, though, he’d sit down with you and talk to you instead. That day he asked you, “You never told me, how’d you end up here?” … With me?

“Micha is rich with a big house!” you said with a grin. His spirits dampened — the reasoning was practical, but he would’ve preferred something more poetic maybe. You went on, “I thought I could hide in the vents, but you found me after I snuck in. Whoops.”

He made a face. “You’re such a weird fucking… creepy crawly.” Then he cursed himself because he would’ve preferred to be more articulate.

“And you are a toddler.”

“Did you try anywhere else before my place, though?”

“Yeah. The guy found me before I could hide and called me a naked homeless bum! And then he tried to beat me with a shovel.”

“You must be bad at hiding,” said Kaiser in a tone as if you were beneath him, unconcerned by this information. Then an odd detail stood out to him. “I’m pretty sure you were dressed when I first saw you.”

You smiled at him, but did not elaborate on where you got those stained clothes from back then.

There was an implication.

Morning

You hung onto Kaiser while he brushed his teeth, hugging him from the back. Usually you slept in way after him, but there were rare occasions you’d barge in on him in the mornings, if he rustled too much and disturbed you. Again, for someone who preached that this was not a ‘practice,’ you sure did it a lot.

“Micha, why do you brush so hard? I don’t believe it’s any more effective.”

“Shut up,” he said, making an effort to go slower and less aggressive now that you’d pointed it out. “Don’t watch me. I don’t accept constructive criticism,” he added when you didn’t respond.

Though you changed your appearance to look human (albeit still a bit uncanny in a way he couldn’t quite place — maybe his knowledge that you were extraterrestrial hindered his view), the inherent differences between you and him were the most obvious when you were in contact skin to skin. He wasn’t warm to begin with, but your skin was so much cooler, it was enough to startle him if he didn’t see you coming. There was a contrast in texture, too.

Your hand rested over his chest while you began leaving feather light kisses over his nape and then down to his shoulder. Kaiser was annoyed because he was getting goosebumps. “You’re so clingy sometimes,” he complained.

“Your heart always starts beating faster when I kiss you,” you said. “It’s cute.”

“Stop observing me like a scientist.”

You hugged him tighter and kissed him a bit more firmly. “I wanna bite you real hard past the skin and suck your blood. You’d probably be one of the sweeter ones.”

What a creepy thing to say at seven in the morning. Kaiser had to respect your dedication to the craft at this point.

“Leech,” he said with disdain, though to be honest he was kind of flustered. “I thought you’re supposed to be an alien, not some lame vampire.”

“What? You have blood-sucking creatures here, don’t you, Micha? There is hematophagy in nature.”

“That’s not really the point.”

“I guess so,” you said.

Kaiser was partly annoyed because he was getting butterflies in his stomach, which was stupid and childish. It was clear you wanted to taste him more than you already had, and while usually that would have a more indecent connotation, in your case it was frightening. Like, so disconcerting, he was afraid of you. And it was confusing to be turned on and scared at the same time, but somehow the anxiety was pleasant.

Texting

You lounged around in the bathtub. There were lit candles and blue petals and some other stereotypical bullshit littered about, and you’d been wasting more time than necessary anyway. It wasn’t your fault the world was so dull whenever Kaiser was away from you. That was why when he wasn’t around the house, you did all sorts of extraneous things.

With a reach, you felt around for your phone until you could grab it, and then you turned it on and took a selfie. When you opened your chat with him, you saw he still hadn’t read or replied to anything else you sent him throughout the day, but you kinda forgot you did that anyway.

There were pictures of the sky and a few trees you liked and some old man you talked to when you went out hiking and of your meal at a restaurant which you didn’t even finish because it made you ill, all coupled with unimportant captions.

You sent him the selfie, where you were frowning.

You - 11:07 Micha I miss you soooooo much! I had some fun today but overall it’s boring I love you ♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

Michael Kaiser - 03:32 Don’t spam me Replied to “I had some…”: Whatever, suffer more without me I love you too

Label

“Micha,” you said with grave seriousness as you stared down at your phone, “you have a paraphilia.”

He flinched at the word, directed at him no less, and gritted his teeth. “What nonsense are you saying now? Always throwing around random shit in the air like you’re getting paid.”

You turned the screen towards him, pointing. It was some list on Wikipedia and your finger was hovering near the word ‘exophilia.’ “This is what you have,” you said matter-of-factly.

Kaiser had an unreadable expression, mostly because it was vacant and unimpressed.

“No need to use words you don’t understand the nuance of.” He smirked, getting over the initial… whatever reaction he was having, and then he reached out to wrap an arm to pull you into his lap while he sat like he was on a throne even though it was just a lounge chair. Kaiser gestured in the air with ostentation while he spoke, “It only makes sense an extraordinary person like myself would have a unique lover, to gaze upon otherworldly beauty, unlike all those other scoundrels who need to mingle among themselves.”

Now you were the one with a blank face. After some staring, you tapped his cheek. “Micha is so silly and pretentious sometimes…”

“When you talk about me like that, you make me feel really stupid. You’re supposed to feel flattered, not insult me.”

You ignored the complaint, but wrapped your arms around his neck and leaned in to kiss him on the cheek a few times as an appeasement. As usual, he melted into it, and he found himself embarrassed because it was such a small thing to get so affected by.

“Besides, you’ve got to have the same thing. Because I am to you what you are to me,” Kaiser said, still feeling a need to justify himself.

“Hmm. Yes. That’s true. Yay, we’re a freaky couple! Isn’t it nice?”

Kaiser didn’t understand what was so appealing to you with your enthusiasm about the word choice and all. At least if he was sick for his attraction, so were you. There was a unity in that.

Birthday II

You greeted Kaiser outside when he arrived and began dragging him back in, excited to show him something. Kaiser decided to be a pissy killjoy purely for the love of the game, “I don’t see what the point of buying me a present with my money is. I could do that on my own and probably pick something better too.”

“Don’t worry. I made it myself.”

Well, now he was vaguely scared about what it could be. But he was all cool and collected on the outside, so it didn’t count as real trepidation in his mind.

It was in the middle of the corridor on the second floor. Even though he already had a glimpse of it while approaching, you still presented it to him as if he hadn’t seen it at all, stretching out your arms and pursing your lips for the grand reveal.

There stood a statue of him posing with a ball and some kind of trophy. Kaiser didn’t bother asking how you ‘made it yourself.’ A lot of things about you, he was better off just not knowing. And even if he did, he might not get it. He didn’t want to be in a position where he misinterpreted you entirely, so it was better this way, like some kind of mystery.

But anyway this was very embarrassing. You had some kind of notion you had about him which was being communicated right now without words, that he was the kind of guy who sucked his own dick so much he’d enjoy this demented present. The most shameful part was that you were correct, he kind of liked it. It looked nice and all and it was life sized. His pose was grandiose. He didn’t know if he should be flattered or if he should dig a hole and bury his head in it, but either way he was made to feel exposed and attacked by your actions.

After the initial inner conflict, Kaiser decided to address you since it was becoming uncomfortable. “Thanks, you captured my likeliness rather well.”

You seemed pleased by the feedback. Often he noticed you cared about the more pragmatic things, in this case about whether your handiwork was accurate, if it was up to par.

He stood next to it and smirked at you before asking, “Who looks better?”

“Micha is the most beautiful man in the world,” you cheered. “He’s even more beautiful than himself!”

Hehehehe.

But he wouldn’t dare make such an undignified sound out loud.

Kaiser preened at the praise, even though he knew you were wording it in such an exaggerated way just to please him, going along with his fishing for compliments. While he preferred to think of himself as a complex and elusive person who no one understood, there were things about him that were rather simple.

Taxi

That day you had an interesting conversation with Kaiser over the phone. He instructed you to go to the airport and you argued with him about how planes were insufficient for transportation and then you found out they didn’t have teleportation pods and then both of you got too distracted over some made up, incoherent conflict. But anyway, in the end you asked him what you were supposed to do at the airport to begin with since it was such a boring place, and he said he wanted you to pick him up.

Once you climbed inside the passenger seat, you gave the driver the address Kaiser sent you. The driver didn’t seem particularly inclined to converse, but you talked to him. “My roommate is asking me to pick him up.”

“Cool,” he said, not giving a fuck.

“Between you and me, isn’t he handsome?”

You smiled and flashed him your lock screen, which was an unflattering picture of Kaiser (what the big stink was about, you didn’t remember). Those were surprisingly easy to capture considering how often he made all those ugly grimaces.

Though the driver wasn’t a football fanatic, he recognized the man — a celebrity. His exterior stood strong and he remained impassive on the outside, but he thought to himself, I’m stuck in a car with a delusional socially inept erotomaniac.

He replied in an even tone, “Sure.”

He also thought he was entering mass psychosis when fifteen minutes after he dropped you off, you brought back Michael Kaiser to the car, in the flesh (you were carrying around his luggage as if it weighted nothing before you loaded it in the trunk), and you were even talking to him about his away game, and he was bitching about some other players you didn’t seem to recognize beyond Kaiser’s hatred of them. Which implied you weren’t even a football fan.

Regardless, the driver acted natural.

Orbit

You’d been acting withdrawn all day this weekend, which worried Kaiser since it was uncharacteristic, and in turn he started being annoying and dramatic if not overbearing, as if he was seeking some sign in your responses that you weren’t mad at him through his antics.

The reason for this erratic behavior was rather pitiful. Within him there was an unease.

It wasn’t like you were locked in or anything. You were free to go out at any time, and you did. There were times he feared you’d figure out how to go back to your planet — selfish as it was, he hoped such good fortune would never befall you so you’d need to stay with him — and worse he thought maybe during one of your strolls you’d meet someone, get to know them. You had some acquaintances, but they weren’t really close to you, and he thought if there was someone you connected with and got to know better, you’d realize he was defective. Pathologically egocentric and incapable of… Well, he wasn’t sure what it was, but he knew sides of him were hollow, he was lacking. Since he was mishandled as a kid; even his parents couldn’t love him.

Of course, Kaiser did the mature thing any adult would do and didn’t speak his mind, letting it eat at him.

So his anxiety spiked when after all that avoiding him — on his day off no less — you asked, “Micha, don’t you think it’s time for you to go back to all the other humans?”

It didn’t even sound like a rejection, more like you were shooing him away. He just froze. There was an expression on his face as if he was spacing out, eyes widened slightly and mouth set in a thin line.

“Why do you say that?” he asked right back, trying to remain calm.

“Because you’d always rather spend your free time with me than anyone else. And you’re always doing all those things for me… Doesn’t it other you from your peers? What if I start rubbing off on you?”

Kaiser grabbed you by the shoulders. Though such desperate movements and measures and everything-s were below him in his opinion (or at least they were counterintuitive to the way he portrayed himself), he was already on edge and he didn’t want to mince his words. Like the window for winning you over was timed and he was sprinting to squeeze himself in. He supposed he was able to strip himself of his self-inflicted guidelines if necessary. It was just that he usually didn’t deem things outside of football important.

“I don’t care about that. I choose to spend all that time with you because I enjoy it. You make me feel human, so don’t leave. I want to love and care for someone and… I want to be loved and cared for in return, too.”

You seemed surprised by this. Kaiser thought such a thing would be obvious, but then again there were gaps between you that left room for misunderstandings which wouldn’t even be taken into account before they arose.

His love for you was self-involved to an extent. There was a certain light you saw him in — as a human — and he liked experiencing himself in that way through your perspective, but there was more to it than that, something he’d never felt before and couldn’t put into words. So it was real nonetheless, even if coming from someone deficient like him.

“Do you really mean that?” you asked.

“Yeah. Of course.”

He was really firm on it, too, and didn't hesitate before answering. You were a little nervous about what was about to happen.

“I want you to stay with me for as long as possible,” he said. There was an unspoken, Do you?

This seemed to cheer you up from whatever had caused your doubts because you smiled again. “Let’s mispronounce je t’aime together till the end of time.”

“What a disgustingly cute sentiment,” Kaiser said, letting go of your shoulders to embrace you properly, and then he started leaning in.

You shared a slow kiss with him. At first it was gentle and hesitant, but then you both relaxed into it, and he grew more confident in his advances. Kaiser caressed every part of you he touched with what you recognized as real desire, like it didn’t matter that you didn’t really look the way you presented yourself to him or how different you were from one another or even that there might be ways in which your bodies were incompatible.

___

This was just some stupid experimental half joke half allegorical bs that I wrote because I had the idea and I'm very normal and casual about the fact that kaiser sees himself as not inherently possessing humanity. Anyway if something is unclear u can ask me about it or share what you think!

[dreamsinmoonlight]

Angel Massages

(Welp as promised, the sequel to Angel Cocoon, as voted on by the public. Rejoice!

Definitely didn't write most of this with my Adam plush on my lap, don't know what you're talking about

Fandom: Hazbin Hotel

Characters: Adam, angel!reader

Pairing: Adam x reader

Genre: Comfort, fluff (this time with a tiny bit more spice)

Summary: You deserve a medal for loving this idiot as much as you do. Aka Adam gets a massage and care.)

“This is your own fault you big goof.” The grumble you got in response was expected.

Mornings in heaven, with a lover like Adam, were pretty routine: you woke up, you found yourself encased in a cocoon of feathers and slightly squishy flesh, you'd end up laying there until finally the man himself decided to wake up, and then this. Without fail he woke up, blinking in that lazy sleepy way of his, and took note of your presence; this then turned into him giving one of those smug grins of his and holding you closer, rubbing his face against yours. This as always caused you to whine and complain, playfully of course, because of his stubble and you pushed at him to no avail as he stretched out his wings and you finally were able to a) see your room and b) get up.

“What babe, don't like a little early morning affection?” he asked, as if he didn't know exactly why you were trying to get free; he snickered and one hand found it's way further down, trailing down your body with obvious intent, “Maybe you'd prefer it a different way?”

Adam snickered and stuck out that tongue of his and you did your best to resist him, pushing at his chest. He was considerably larger and stronger than you, meaning he could easily hold you in place if he so wished, but he decided to be kind enough to let you get free and you shook your head at him. “You're incorrigible I swear.”

This made him laugh, and to say the sound of it didn't do things to you would be a lie. But you knew what was coming and like clockwork it did; he laughed and his wings stretched and then his expression turned annoyed and grumpy when the effects of sleeping with his wings wrapped around you two inevitably hit him. The soreness caused him to start whining loudly and lower the appendages, practically dragging them on the bed.

You sighed softly and climbed out of his lap, watching and listening to your giant manchild of a boyfriend complain. “Lay down already, Adam.”

“My wings are so sore,” he groaned, with the kind of tone you'd expect of if he was dying; it had occurred to you a while ago that to him, any sort of inconvenience was no different than that, a fact you were not sure if it was him exaggerating or actually so. It was always hard to tell.

You did your best to try not to laugh or smile too much at how he was acting, it tended to make him act out more and honestly you just wanted to make him feel better quickly so he'd go back to being his usual smug, grinning self. Again you sighed and got up, stepping around the bed to gently try to push him forward. “Adam, come on, please lay down.”

He continued his complaining but eventually did as you instructed, laying down with his wings stretched out. The first time you did this you had been struck with the beauty of his wings, to the point of distraction honestly; it was hard to concentrate when you're faced with something so pretty as those golden feathers on those long thin wings. The bed, large as it was and it was fairly big, couldn't really handle the full length of them so while they were not folded persay, they weren't actually entirely stretched out. You though were used to that and so was the crybaby continuing to act like it was the end of the universe and his wings were going to fall off or something.

For the thousandth time you thought about how much you loved this stupid, reckless, egotistical moron but aloud told him how this was his own fault before taking one of the wings gently in your hands and starting to manipulate it. You'd done this enough times, you knew exactly where to press and where to knead, and you couldn't resist smiling as you felt those warm feathers under your fingertips, the muscles and tendons and bones that all made up those magnificent wings; you felt them twitch and move, responding to even the lightest touch from you. You started near the middle and went outwards towards the tips, easing the tension out little by little before going inward again, moving towards there they joined into his back. It was a seamless point, as it was on all angels you suspected, but you moved it nevertheless, the way the soft down of Adam's wings became the warmth of his flesh and back as you moved to the other wing. You took your time and you bit your lip as you heard his complaints and whines and moans turn from pained and irritated to far more pleased. Maybe a little too pleased.

“God babe, you know how to make me feel good,” he groaned and the slight rumble to his voice could be felt down below.

“I'm not done yet,” you warned, feeling him shift and move, knowing that Adam had only a few true virtues and patience was 100% not one of them.

“Then go faster.” Not a request, a demand, and one you were going to ignore no matter what he said or did or made you feel with that voice of his.

“And risk your wings still being sore later? Besides we both know you like it when I go slow with this.” You smiled, feeling a bit playful as you continued what had become your morning routine; currently working on his own wing, going slow and deliberate as usual, you pressed your fingers into one particular spot, reveling in the reaction you knew you'd get.

You'd found it entirely by accident the first time, a little after this whole thing started, and usually you did your best to avoid touching it too much for this exact reason. It seemed to send a shock of electricity through his whole body and the noise that came from him was best described as “fuck yes”; his wings shuddered and stretched to their full length, causing one side to end up over the side of the bed and brushing against the carpet and the other side to very nearly slam directly into the wall. You managed to keep that one folded enough to avoid that disaster, that would have been counterproductive. Adam buried his face in the sheets and you were certain you heard swearing, he hated that you knew about that spot and hated it even more that you weren't afraid to use it for your own amusement and delight. But probably, you were certain, he hated it the most that his ears turned bright red and were not so easy to hide. There was definitely some growling and you leaned down to place a kiss between his shoulder blades with an angelic smile. It was easy since you were indeed an angel.

The fact he behaved after that was a miracle you were certain but not one that was going to end well for you. You knew too well your boyfriend, and you knew that while patience wasn't his strong suit, vengeance was. You took your time with his wings, enjoying every second of peace you got from this, knowing full well of what would happen next and doing your best to mitigate the damage. You completed your ministrations upon his wings and were about to massage his back, usually a good idea considering, but your hands never got close to touching that space again.

Despite his size Adam was a dangerously quick creature. He was dangerous in many ways as you knew. And the glint in his golden eyes as he managed, with agility and speed one wouldn't easily expect from someone like him, to pin you under him, his hands holding your wrists to the bed, it was enough to send your heart rate racing.

“You're a naughty girl making me wait, sugartits,” he spoke, his teeth showing in the shark grin he had now, that he so often had, “Lets see how you like it.”

His teeth found your neck and you let out only the smallest of complaints. Maybe, just maybe, you shouldn't have teased him. Now it was going to be you who was sore.

Oh well.

[rapifessor]

Varesa and Genshin Impact's Identity Crisis

I'd heard things about Varesa's animations, but now that I've seen the leaks myself, it's even more ridiculous than I could have imagined.

Look, I have a pretty high tolerance for this kind of thing. My attitude towards sex and sexuality is more liberal than most. I think censorship is bullshit and I hate how much Puritanism is ingrained in our culture, especially American culture. But even I think HoYo might have gone too far with this one.

I say that somewhat jokingly, because I still like Varesa a lot in spite of what I've seen. It's just that I'm finally starting to feel the complete tonal whiplash of Genshin Impact over the past year. How did we go from characters like Navia, Furina, Arlecchino, and Chiori to... a girl in a crop top and miniskirt clumsily running about, smashing enemies with her ass?

I'd just like to point out as well that this is what Iansan meant when she said the situation at the Collective of Plenty was under control during the Abyss invasion... dear god.

The most charitable way you could interpret Varesa is as a "crouching moron, hidden badass" type of character; someone who deliberately acts stupid and clumsy but is actually really strong. That's not all bad. But previous characters were mostly cool and badass with silly/cute quirks here and there, or they had really interesting/compelling stories that got you to empathize with them and like them even more. Even Mualani is a really cool person in spite of how goofy she can be. She's a combat veteran and an "older sister" to a lot of people, with a bit of a mischievous streak.

Varesa on the other hand is 100% meme. There's always a chance that could change with the Tribal Chronicle or if she has a role in an upcoming Archon Quest. But in this case I'm not at all confident that will happen. She seems very much like a one-off gag character designed to sell exclusively on sex appeal. She's not just gooner bait, she's straight up coomer bait.

Natlan now very much seems like it's being used as an excuse for HoYoverse to try out a bunch of experimental character designs that didn't fit anywhere else, which I don't explicitly hate, but it's clear that they're pushing the boat out as far as they can with Varesa here. It kinda feels like they just wanted to design characters that don't fit in with Genshin's usual style, but still with Genshin gameplay.

As long as this kind of thing stays in Natlan, it's probably fine in the long run. Snezhnaya needs to be a return to form, though, because Genshin sometimes doesn't feel like Genshin anymore when it comes to Natlan. Especially since we've been building up to it for nearly five years. If the conclusion to the Fatui arc and the reveal of why the Tsaritsa needs the seven Gnoses is anything short of spectacular, this game is cooked.

I'm still probably going for Varesa, because honestly she looks fun as hell and like I said, I have a high tolerance for this kind of thing. I still think it's super funny how blatant they were with this character, it just feels like she belongs in a Senran Kagura game or some shit. And to HoYo's credit, they did make her considerably bigger than other characters of her model type, although her hip-to-waist ratio is still outrageous.

[slutdge]

life update ramble under the cut if yall gaf about that

making a bigger effort to limit my online time bc i recognize a lot of the time it really just makes me anxious and is rotting my brain and im starting to fall into terminally online loser behavior. i turned 26 last month and was just like "wtf am i doing man". its become an extremely unhealthy coping skill for me and i can FEEL the toll its taking on my braincells so. working on fixing that. i also have had my anons turned off for a while and just block people that annoy me extremely liberally bc like. its not that serious. its tumblr dot com. i wanna curate my space and have a good time on here not worry about dipshit morons that cant fucking read.

i reached a breaking point in being a doormat and receptacle for everyone else 24/7. with ptsd its really hard to set and hold even the smallest boundaries but im really... at a breaking point with how shitty it makes me feel all the time. small considerations are not too much to ask of people that supposedly care about me and if theyre going to be adverse to them i dont want it in my life. this has kind of just been a dynamic ive been cursed with my whole life, ive always felt, like i said, like a doormat for everyone else. i dont want to enable that anymore because too many people get acustom to being able to treat you like that and it just spirals out of control. *through gritted teeth, shaking uncontrollably like im about to combust" i am a person with value that deserves respect :)))))))))))))))))))))))))))). and yes i do recognize there is some responsibility on me to stand up for myself. im trying my best. but also holy fuck is it that hard for other people to just be mildly considerate of other people. im so worried about pleasing everyone else and what everyone else thinks im never pleasing myself or worrying about what i thnk of myself. its fuckin stupid and shitty.

as far as college goes, i got the highest scores out of my whole class on every final exam last semester and that was a really big win for me even if it seems a little silly. growing up being failed by the school system, being in the at risk youth program, not being accomodated for disability, and having a guidance counsellor in school tell me verbatim she wasnt expecting me to get very far in life and was just here until i wasnt going to be the schools problem anymore was really discouraging. hazard to say traumatizing even. getting back into school was really hard for me, it was scary and i wasnt sure id be able to do it but. im in my last semester now and looking at continuing studies after this. its still been scary and really stressful and i hate it 99% of the time and almost everyone i go to school with is insufferable and makes me wanna tear my hair out but. im still trucking.

ive reduced my drinking pretty significantly, its definitely still alcoholic levels and unhealthy and yeah i started smoking again but all im drinking is beer now, no more hard liquor, and thats been going alright. i feel less shitty than i did when i was blacking out every single night. im not ready to quit it yet, i know that i need this as a way to self medicate otherwise im gonna lose my fucking mind worse than usual. but im not doing heroin anymore so be grateful its just beer an cigarettes now.

yes the two abusive psychos that will not be named are still in my life yes i am still in physical danger 24/7 and one of them was responsible for giving me the concussion i got last month, yes it still makes me think about killing myself all the time yes it is soul crushing to do this all on my own with no support, im not gonna lie about that and do some fake positivity shit. that fucking sucks and these people have irreparably ruined my life. thats that. no silver lining there. i keep drinking because thats the only thing that will bring the anxiety down and make me functional in a lot of cases.

in the last 6 months or so ive felt a really big shift in my life, kind of like ive shed a large portion of who i used to be but im welcoming it, im trying to just see where im gonna end up, but it is a relief to be in a new place, with school to keep me busy, to be making an effort to get out more and do more things etc etc and self reflecting and all that dumb mental health shit, i feel like im finally closer to knowing and figuring out my actual self instead of the closet full of 100 personas i put on to please everyone else. im also doing my best to be mindful and try to leave small things in the past and do DBT & CBT and all that dumb fuckin therapy shit.

im still gonna be a hater i wanna make that clear. and i still hate my life. also wanna make that clear. i am still feeling shitty all the time i wanna make that clear. and im never going to turn into a toxic positivity person either wanna make that VERY FUCKING CLEAR, i am probably gonna be what ppl would call a pessimist until the day i die, im never gonna be a shiny happy person.

religious trauma is also on my mind a lot right now, more than usual, i realize how much it has stunted me mentally and day by day im trying to remove that shrapnel from my brain but holy fuck its hard dude. that shit sucks. if organized religion has zero haters im dead. and fuck the new pope. i wanna do tings for myself and make life as enjoyable as i can.

im also trying to deprogram all this dumb shit my parents have drilled into my head my whole life. my parents are fucking morons and huge assholes and i hate them, why retain what theyve taught me instead of branching out and educating myself and building myself, not being a clone of them? every time i do something that reminds me of them it makes me want to peel my skin off. not a good indicator. i dont want ideas from brainddead morons like them poising my mind anymore. its ok to do things you enjoy and be upset and be angry and be yourself and be "weird" (weird by their definition is anything that isnt rigid adherence to conservative catholicism)

i also stopped talking to my sister and dont intend to ever again honestly and i dont feel any way about it. shes been a nasty bully to me my whole life. were full grown now, shes 30, and still acting like were kids. all around a nasty unpleasant person to be around all the time. blood is not an obligation to me. weve never had a real relationship and im not gonna do it anymore. its a waste of my time and energy. not to mention shes an alt-right nutjob now which i double dont want to fucking be around. this whole family sucks and im not crazy for feeling that way, theyre crazy for acting like this and being held to this nuclear family mind cult where no matter what blood is blood and you have to suffer them forever. fuck. that.

this post is a mess and im overtired and i have an assignment due at midnight so im gonna check out. dare i say im looking forward to making more progress. do i dare. when you spend your whole life convinced you were gonna kill yourself its scary to start thinking and seeing that maybe that wont actually be how you end up. dont hold me to it though.

thanks for visiting my corner of the internet

im still gonna be a cunt about music and i still hate psychiatry as an institution and want to burn it to the ground.

good night.

[rei-ismyname]

Exceptional X-Men #9 review

"...You fight alone and I do not."

Ewing and Carnero are leading the pack by a considerable margin as Exceptional X-Men hits the climax of its second arc - face to face with Mister Sinister and his cloning ambitions. Kitty's attempt at normal is put on the shelf when Axo needs rescuing, so too is any conflict with Emma. THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP! Full spoilers ahoy.

Exceptional X-Men has been called slow by some and those people are welcome to think what they like. Personally, I think a better word for it is purposeful. Open a random page of a comic book and you have a really good chance of landing on a supervillain fight - there's really no shortage of action going around. It's mandatory - there must be physical violence each issue. What is actually rare is dedicated character development. All the characters in this book are new*. The kids we've been getting to know over the last 8 issues, and the adults who are in a transitory period of life. They're relatable enough to get invested in, with universal motivations. They feel like people and the interpersonal dynamics are established. Similarly, when protagonists are constantly fending off multiple supervillains, robots, demons etc it becomes rote - just something that happens every issue with muted stakes. The rising tension has been cleverly woven in with plot and character beats, so the anticipation is palpable.

BUMP!

Taking the time to show why we should care is respecting the reader's intelligence. Front loading the character work and dynamics establishes room to challenge them, to pick up the pace when it's dramatically satisfying, trusting the reader to follow along - a monthly ongoing is as long haul as modern comics gets, and Exceptional knows what it's about. We know more about any one of these kids than all the Outliers put together. Everyone has had their soul laid bare - except Emma. She's carrying a lot of grief and now she has to show up for the kids by facing everything she'd rather not. Krakoa had a devil and his name is Sinister. The more things change, the more he stays the same. It takes confidence in your craft to only properly fight the team's first supervillain in issue 9. These are children after all and they're fragile, inexperienced. Just getting along is a challenge. The danger is that you need to stick the landing, of course.

Bronze and Melee had already figured out that this wasn't their friend when he melted in a coffee shop. They were pretty damn suss before that too. Their voices feel maybe a little too light-hearted considering the situation they're in, but the book has done the work. I can believe the comfort in higher stakes is a result of training, guidance, and growth.

Kitty is me about R-LDS

Alas, Kitty and Emma are on the fence there and make the very un-X-men decision to keep them out of supervillain battles. A demonstration of Kitty's oft forgotten genius computer skills is a big thumbs up, ditto for putting the S.X = Essex connection together. Her anger is fierce and rendered cinematically, shaking with rage as she puts it together then shifting to the simmering fury of action as she uses it for fuel. Sinister is exactly the kind of asshole who thinks he's smart enough for his bad pun addiction to not matter.

R-LDS can go fuck itself as a concept but the mention of it here is interesting. It's obviously not the issue at hand, Bobby you moron, but seeding that he heard about it from Rogue does a lot of work in a single speech bubble. The Alaska team has passed along some amount of information about it to Rogue, who Bobby heard it from (not Scott or Hank, curiously.) Emma doesn't sound surprised to hear it, so she's probably heard about it too but not from Bobby. It's not spelled out but of course these folks share intel with each other, especially on something as allegedly serious as R-LDS. That connectivity between long term friends isn't allowed on page but at least we get confirmation of a vibe test degree of communication. That's excellent, and it's not something any other book has done. I'd prefer to ignore the concept altogether and just make Magneto have 90 year old man syndrome or something, but if you're going to do it then fucking do it. Take it seriously, you know?

I've seen other interpretations on the RLDS mention in this issue - mainly treating it as confirmation, at least more than I do. I can see it; Kate's speculation on the Axo clone being made from 'bad Krakoan DNA stuff' gives some credence to R-LDS itself being accepted as a real thing and not just a theory excitedly cooked up by a scientifically obsolete Hank McCoy. I figure none of the characters discussing it are geneticists so a Watsonian reading would make their behaviour frantic speculation. A Doylist analysis recognises the laws of narrative economy - that you use precious finite page space as effectively as possible. The author has chosen to include R-LDS discussion here and now, so we're meant to treat it with a degree of significance. I don't believe that this mention confirms it either way, merely that the characters are aware of it and are using logic and vibes to puzzle out what's going on. Emma mysteriously collapses at the end, but the solicits suggest it's some kind of psychic fuckery. Could be both, of course, maybe I'm just hoping it's not. Mashing the Legacy virus and AvX power incontinence while shitting on Krakoa is a boring concept for me. Moving on...

Uh, X-Men assemble!

There's no magic age where you become ready to fight Mister Sinister but Melee/Bronze are not ready. Kitty and Emma wisely order them to stay behind, perhaps forgetting that neither of them would obey that edict regardless of age. Kitty especially was precocious as hell, finding her way into all sorts of trouble. She was a master stowaway, for instance, ending up in all sorts of places. They just want the kids to be safe, to live to adulthood, and they already have one of their charges in mortal peril. Pointedly ignoring Nina, whose queries about normalcy Kate left hanging. It's not something she's comfortable in confronting, ironically juxtaposed with charging into battle vs an immortal Victorian eugenicist. If she can't have normal for herself she's going to bend over backwards to give these kids the best chance at it.

It IS something Kate will have to confront, and in doing so own up to lies of omission. 'Normal' people might not be able to understand what you've been through, but they definitely won't if you don't let them in. As normcore as Nina seems, we don't actually know much about her. Kate has compartmentalized her relationship from her 'mutant life' - it can be a healthy dynamic (especially for their safety) but without opening up the relationship is dead in the water. The tension in admitting her fears, or that she's been treating her girlfriend as normalcy totem of ignorance, underpins her actions. It's a problem for later, though. She does freeze later mid-fight, paralyzed by trauma response, and I think she needs to admit that to herself. It's a very human thing to put up your walls and seek comfort/avoid difficulty, but nobody can do it alone.

This fucking jerkoff

I unironically love the Star Trek-ish technobabble. Nonsense words formed by smashing intuitive concepts together are generally easy to follow. Telepathy is already an ill-defined magic system, and many of the existing are insufficient. Dividing them into classes is mostly silly - alpha, beta, omega etc - just handwave it and show the results visually. I also enjoy that Bronze and Melee don't get involved due to defying their teachers, instead being lured there by an Iceman clone. A lot of the tension with teenagers is in their relationship with authority vs safety. Sinister is a thematically perfect choice from existing antagonists due to how he can subvert authority (and represents Krakoan trauma.)

It does raise the question of how Sinister was able to clone Bobby pretty much perfectly yet couldn't get close to Axo, but he has watched Bobby for years and would have had access to his DNA. Also, he had the ice clone bring them here so I assume he wanted them to come. The kids are a tactical liability right now anyway, splitting Kate's attention in general and getting frozen. Emma is trying to neutralize Sinister while freeing Axo and she needs Kate on board for that. It's nice to see being frozen as a risk of suffocation - Rogue was just fine for hours.

Kitty flat out freezes, suggesting repressing her trauma and guilt is really getting to her. She's not helpful to anyone just staring though so Emma shakes her out of it. The two women have shit to work through as well as interpersonal tension. Using solidarity and support to lift her up temporarily really works for me as a baseline. The issues are still there but they can deal with it later. Right now they need to work together to protect the kids by defeating Sinister. Bobby has his own battle but it's a clone without his experience. He's got this. Melee can phase and they've trained these kids, so they need to trust in that. Also, Sinister kicking Emma is hilarious.

Boom! Bobby comes through and smashes his clone to bits. His presence has had a bit of a question mark over it since he first arrived. I hope he gets a bit more development; he's a familiar character with less issues than Emma and Kate but he could use a little more page time. He really came into his own on Krakoa and embraced everything about himself, and granted - nobody has talked at length about their grief. I wonder how he'll deal when the dam breaks. The Hellfire Vigil is coming soon, maybe it'll happen there and be followed up here. Bronze and Melee do handle themselves well, phasing out of the ice holding hands. They didn't contribute much to the fight but there's growth there.

The fourth wall breaking has been incredibly effective so far and having Emma cut into Kitty's for support is a wonderful swerve. It lets Ewing have her cake and eat it - Kate's tension externalised and pushed through with support. Axo is right there too so she could have said it to his face. It's a bold stylistic choice, almost a flex. I love it.

Only once the entire team is fully in sync do they manage to turn the tables and shut Sinister up. His baroque ranting is a delight and it makes the denouement all the more moving. 'The Power of Friendship' is incredibly cliché when done poorly; it requires complete sincerity to pay off effectively. Borrowing Axo's strength is the kicker that makes it truly special, allowing a savoured victory in a held breath.

You can feel the jubilant exhaustion turn to crisis when Emma's ice cream headache turns out to be something more. She collapses, setting up a one on one psychic confrontation with Sinister and looping plot back into character as a stinger. Everything she's been holding back is a barrier to overcome and a weapon in the arsenal of the face of Krakoa's corruption and fall. I really look forward to it - Exceptional just slays. Solicits show Sophie dropping by at some point too, which makes me feel giddy. First, Sinister, then they can heal/have awkward conversations with their normcore girlfriend.

[asunflowerana]

how to crash a study date

with: Bakugou Katsuki as your brother.

warnings: bakugou. that's all you need to know.

a/n: request of @the-hangry-otter for the How to Crash a Date blog event. Thank you for joining darlin', hope you enjoy it 😊💕

"Stay covered. Don't let them notice you, right?"

Bakugou wishes he didn't give ears to Kirishima’s stupid plan, and just bursted the whole thing up. Nonviolence it’s not something natural for him, especially with situations involving his family; but if he wants this to work, he needs to stay put, watching his baby sister being disgustingly ogled by a moron and not being able to do anything about it.

And wearing a fake mustache as coverage!

“tsc, freaking dork.” he scolds lowly, watching through the lens of his sunglasses at the way your classmate is passionately gazing at you, not even hiding his smile whenever you touch his shoulder to show something over your laptop, or share eye-contact for more than three seconds. That guy is so taken with you, that makes Bakugou want to puke in disgust, his expression hardening while watching the scene.

And what makes the blonde even madder, is that you’re not even noticing the way that punk is practically drooling over you. What the heck were you thinking of going out with him? He doesn’t look like he could throw a punch to a goose, let alone protect you should anything happen; he’s probably one of those fancy pants wonks with pathetic quirk and overly confidence. He might be enough for those other extras, but surely not good enough for his little sister.

He was fairly right to follow you over this “study date”. 

Bakugou’s temper was already boiling since he got into this stupid cafe trying not to lose you from sight; now imagine when he spots that moron suddenly taking a loose lock of your hair, fondling it between his fingers for a moment before tucking it behind your ear. 

He sees red.

Before the poor guy could make another move his hand is ripped away from your face, his wrist getting twisted backwards painfully by a brutal and unknown force. It takes one look above to see the enraged pair of red eyes staring down at him. “Get your filthy paws away from her!”

It takes a considerable amount of time to stop Bakugou from blasting the whole place up. 

a/n: one minute of silence for the poor date 😂

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