#and i am almost constantly sleep-deprived for no fucking reason

[rat-prophetess]

pathologic 2 + text posts because I can't face my actual responsibilities and my brain is broken (part 2 / part 3 / part 4 / part 5 / part 6 jfc because my brain is still broken) [patho classic version, part 1/part 2/part 3/part 4/part 5]

[class-1b-bull]

Ayo you're back!! Awesome!! Could I perhaps ask for how each of them are when they're chronically sleep deprived? Like "I've lived off of caffeine for the past two weeks and I am currently communing with the microwave via love bites" kind of sleep deprived (and maybe what the others do to get them to fucking bed)?

Not proofread we die like men

Awase - he already casually drinks energy drinks so no one really noticed he was as tired as he was until they tried talking to him. Bro can not understand a word being said to him at any given moment. Not to mention he sounds like the dyslexic scene from the ghost stories dub. Rin or someone probably throws him onto his bed only for him to almost instantly pass out lmao.

Sen - everyone knew he was lacking sleep when the saw him poor an energy drink into black coffee and say sorry to a wall for walking into it. He eventually falls asleep on the common areas couch and his classmates just leave him there undisturbed. (Monoma did draw on his face with a sharpie thought)

Kamakiri - it takes so long for people to find out hes lacking sleep. Him cussing at objects and drinking 12 black coffees in five minutes or less is considered normal for some reason. They only realize hes desperately needs rest when he doesn't immediately try to fight tetsu when he asks to train his quirk. He probably just ends up falling asleep on his own since he dosent let his classmates in his room anyways.

Kuroiro - bro is always sleep deprived so nothings new. He goes on average 2-3 days without sleep. So him walking into class with a bag full of energy drinks and a large black coffee extra espresso in hand no ones really surprised.

Kendo - shes pretty good at keeping a good sleep schedule but because of that kendo losing only a few hours of sleep can really mess with her head. So a full all nighter has her seeing stars and stuff. Everyone can instantly tell shes exhausted and all it takes is for someone to ask her to go take a nap and she does just that no problem.

Kodai - when shes sleep deprived she actually becomes more talkative but shes yawning in the middle of every sentence and constantly losing her train of thought (not to mention she poured an entire pot of coffee onto the floor before realizing she missed her cup completely.) Komori or kendo probably takes her to bed lmao

Komori - shes a very loving person so when shes sleep deprived its probably because she struggles sleeping without someone near her. Shes probably used to sleepovers with the other girls (mostly pony and setsuna) so once the girls see komori bite into a piece of tree bark she found on the ground they decided to hold a small sleepover to help her out.

Shiozaki - its really hard for her to become tired much less sleep deprived since she can absorb a little energy from the sun with her vine hair (at least thats what the wiki said) but since shes used to the sun giving her a little boost she quickly becomes tired during long periods of clouds and rain with little sunlight. She starts to doze off while standing and kendo has had to carry her to her room more than once during this.

Shishida - once he starts getting tired he takes less care of his hair(fur?) And it quickly starts getting tangled and matted. He unintentionally starts sounding like an old man thats fought both world wars. Idk its just his tired tone of voice lmao. He probably doesn't drink energy drinks so when hes sleep deprived there isnt a moment where there isnt a black coffee in his hand. He probably ends up falling asleep sitting up in a chair.

Shoda - if hes lacking too much sleep and the coffee and energy drinks arnt helping anymore he will simply fall asleep at his desk for a few minutes at a time or in the common area. If hes that sleep deprived he will catch up on sleep through little naps throughout the day instead of just going to bed normally. (Which arguably makes his sleep deprivation worse)

Pony - when shes sleep deprived she dosent bother with brushing her hair in the mornings or things like that so as she gets less and less sleep she looks more and more like a zombie. She probably is a lot like komori and needs one of the girls to help her sleep a bit.

Tsubaraba - hes always sleep deprived. It gives charachter. He'll go for days without sleep and not even notice until one of his classmates point out how hes taking to his own shadow. Rin and awase got him to go to bed. (It took welding him down but if it works it works)

Tetsutetsu - not getting proper sleep isnt manly in his opinion, so he tries his best to take good care of his sleep schedule. So on the rare times where he is lacking sleep hes not sure what to do. He ends up falling asleep in class and staying asleep until schools over pretty much. Other than being really tired and barely being able to form a coherent sentence hes not as bad sleep deprived as ya think.

Tokage - she will say absolutely anything and everything she thinks of when shes tired and she will be immediately forget what she said. Its not anything mean or remotely understandable for that matter, but she will say it. She seems the type to get more tired from things like coffee and energy drinks so those dont help. The only way she gets any sleep is either from the girls sleepover or by actually collapsing

Manga - pulling 4 all nighters in a row just to draw was not his smartest moment. Doing that during exam season was an even dumber move. He pulled up to class without a pencil or book of any kind but he had a black coffee with triple espresso. He dosent like coffee but he forgot until he was already half way done with his coffee and the bitter taste hit him like a truck. After that he slept for like 2 and a half days straight.

Honenuki - he can go 4 or 5 days without sleep but in those final few hours on the last day he loses all grip on sanity lmaoo. He'll be fine and then suddenly he'll be drinking 12 energy drinks in one sitting and forgetting his own name. Hes pretty good at getting himself to sleep at that point tho.

Bondo - no one can tell hes sleep deprived until he falls asleep standing up. He starts moving all sluggish like and is constantly yawning but other than that not much of a difference despite how tired he is. He probably ends up falling asleep in the common area.

Monoma - he loses an hour of sleep and he'll look like he hasn't slept in months. So even one all nighter causes him to get the biggest eye bags youve ever seen. He can only stay awake thanks to the multiple energy drinks he has. He finally gets some sleep after kendo knocked him out.

Reiko - she usually stays up later than the rest of the class so shes used to having a bit less sleep than some of her classmates but the second she starts walking into walls because she can barely keep her eyes open she knows its time for bed. When she gets like this she can sleep for almost a full day and a half and still be tired when she wakes up. Becoming sleep deprived is how she knows its bed time.

Rin - the only reason he would ever lose sleep is if he stayed up all night studying or some nerdy thing like that lmao. Day of the test he walks in with the biggest eye bags and 12 energy drinks in his bag only to pass out the second it starts and not wake up all day. He refuses to pull all nighters after his final grade dropped 20% from that.

Gifs anime - dungeon meshi

[spectrum-core]

hi if you don’t mind me asking I’d love to hear more about serrated duo parallels?

Alright, just to make sure we are on the same page because I'm not sure if many people know who am I even talking about when I say serrated duo, I mean this pair of goofballs who I love very much.

Fuckass essay about them and how this thing even came to be (which is not what you asked for but it's still important I think) under the cut, as a warning though this is EXTREMELY long, i'm also writing it assuming the readers have played ruina to completion, have at least glanced at the ruina artbook once and are decently familiarized with the pjm universe and its terminology.

"But Spec", you may (and reasonably so) say, "these guys show up in different story tiers, one is a glorified ranged attack tutorial with a minor lore exposition attached to him and the other doesn't even have anything going on due to being a general reception, what the hell".

So let's get into this, more meticulously organized than some essays I've submitted for my uni classes because I care that much about these guys (don't be like me and do your uni projects, please).

Table of contents:

How the fuck did this even come to be 1.1. Me yapping about character dessign

Liwei as a character 2.1. The surface 2.2. Emotional internal nature 2.3. Resentment

Dong Hwan as a character (sorry can't separate him into many categories bc there's NOTHING THERE man i'm absolutely grasping for straws here i KNOW it, but please bear with me)

Summarizing parallels

If you don't feel like sitting through my attempts to contextualize how this ship came to be and me desperately grasping for straws, feel free to skip all the way down to part 4

1.- How the fuck did this even come to be

Honestly the whole thing started as a sleep deprivation shitpost I rolled with because yeah i like these two guys a lot (if you read that one post talking among other things about why I like liwei so much in the first place, the short reply also applies to dong hwan and... Yeag, the only thing that's better than one hot guy is two hot guys and so on).

There was also an interesting aspect about this because maybe it's just me but based of liwei's dialogue lines and keypage text he suggests not trusting, or even liking/admiring/looking up to, high graded fixers (despite feeling that he's supposed to). With an emphasis put into colors because, I mean, he fucking died because he met one at the wrong moment, but I feel it's a general thing he feels for grade 2s and above.

With this in mind, putting him to interact with a grade 1 is... at the very least it has the potential to put them into a funny mutual vitriol kind of dynamic with lw constantly thinking "what's the deal with this guy? does he expect me to praise him just for having a high grade? well, tough luck, i'm no bootlicker" and dh constantly thinking "what's wrong with this man? is he unable to recognize greatness even if it punched him in the face...? should i punch him in the face?", but it becomes far more interesting when you try to imagine (and, with dong hwan being an absolute background character we can only assume things of from extremely vague hints, pretty much all we can do about him is imagining) what made them both special enough for each of them to think "wait, hold on, i actually like this guy" of the other.

After the initial shitpost stage was over, we (the guy who came up with serrated duo while sleep deprived and me) started talking about why we liked both characters and we essentially concluded that, at least dessign wise, they are the same type of guy (ofc I also added a couple of characters I like and who fit the criteria to my post but this post isn't about them).

1.1.- Me yapping about character dessign

On top of that, if you pay attention specifically to liwei and dong hwan in there, you can notice that there's a pretty neat balance of common and contrasting themes in their dessigns, almost in a two sides of the same coin way, so here's a non exhaustive list:

both characters have a primarily monochrome/dark aesthetic going on, with their eyes being the primary colored element that stands out in their dessigns (yeah, you could say that dh has brown hair too but it's a dark shade of brown that doesn't catch the eye nearly as much as the bright-yet-deep shade of red of his eyes)

on top of that, liwei's eyes are blue while dong hwan's are red (i thought they were reddish brown at first but that's just an effect of the transparency, if you separate the sprite in it's different parts, you'll notice his eyes are actually red), which happens to link with a certain trope about two-sides-of-the-same-coin pairs... (will elaborate on this later trust me).

despite the previously mentioned similar monochrome aesthetic, there's a clear contrast between their styles and how they wear their clothes, with liwei having a much more "only informal if it's more practical that way" type of look, with a focus on practicality over trying to stand out too much (for the most part at least, he was dessigned with the idea of a cool guy in mind after all), while dong hwan is essentially wearing a business suit in the most fucked up way possible (really, what the fuck dong hwan), which of course makes his dessign incredibly memorable. To further elaborate on this (and to add details that don't really follow this formal until unpractical/informal AND unpractical pattern): -Liwei's clothes stay in similar shades of grey and black giving him a more uniform look, while dong hwan uses more contrasting shades in his clothing (despite wearing primarily black clothes, that light grey shirt absolutely stands out, and by extension he does) -Liwei wears long boots, while dong hwan wears regular shoes -Liwei wears a long coat, while dong hwan wears a short jacket -Liwei has a fully buttoned dress shirt with a tie, dong hwan wears his shirt unbuttoned, in an universe where clothes are basically like armor this is essentially him saying that he's confident that his opponents won't be able to hit him in the chest, or that even if they did he wouldn't get too hurt from it, and it's a dessign detail that absolutely stands out in an universe where most characters only show skin in their head, neck and hands at most, as we know since its stated in multiple keypages and cutscenes, if a character shows more skin than the absolutely bare minimum, then that means that A. they are inmensely strong, and B. they are even more confident in their capacities, with this being a tactic to intimidate potential enemies for many factions -Liwei wears fingerless gloves while dong hwan wears regular gloves, while at first glance this detail seems to subvert the pattern, let's be real here... have you tried to hold any object and using it properly with gloves? unless you're wearing latex gloves or something made of very thin fabric that shit's absurdly hard, of course i assume there's weird city tech involved in dh's gloves but at least that's my own personal impression of that particular contrast)

and going back to common but not really details: both characters have something noteworthy in their ears (this is most likely just a result of the characters being visible as chibis in game so the best way to give them memorable dessigns is by slapping somewhat unique stuff in their faces and heads BUT IM GRASPING FOR STRAWS HERE OK) with liwei's earpiece (which serves a practical function) and dong hwan's earrings (which look cool as hell, going in line with both characters' general priorities)

similarly, both have something in their opposite eyes, with liwei partially covering his right eye with his hair and dong hwan having the scar going through his left eye.

the right-left motif is actually very relevant in their dessigns. You see, most character sprites in ruina switch the hand in which they're holding their weapons for certain frames (or at least, this is not uncommon to see), either for rule of cool, clearer silhouettes or whatever reasons. However, in every frame in which liwei is visibly holding his knife, he holds it with his left hand (and when he uses his pistol he holds it with both hands), suggesting that he may be left handed. On the other hand (see what I did there?), dong hwan consistently holds his knife with his right hand, in every. single. frame. of his sprite, suggesting that he's right handed instead.

And of course, both of them have elements in their opposite legs too, with liwei having these two stupid fucking belts (affectionate) in his right leg while dong hwan has... whatever the fuck that thing is, in his left leg.

Of course I'm not here saying that they were given contrasting dessigns on purpose, but all these details end up making both of them looking really cool when put together, specially with how their dessigns emphatize their personal preferences and priorities, something I will elaborate upon in each character's section later.

2.- Liwei as a character

Liwei is one of my favorite pjm characters as a whole, yes i like him more than ayin, yes i like him more than angela, yes i like him more than carmen, yes i like him more than dante, yes i like him more than your favorite sephirah/patron librarian/sinner, no im not saying i think any of these characters is bad or poorly written and in fact i think pjm has made an amazing job with protagonists so far catching my interest even with characters i thought i wouldn't vibe with at all, but i have a thing for unremarkable background guys.

As you may have guessed, this means that i have a lot, and i mean A LOT to say about him.

This also means that I have a very specific interpretation of him, this interpretation, while clearly taking bases from what we can see of him in game, is entirely fanmade and i'm not trying to claim this is what anyone intended to convey with him, but it's what makes sense for me.

This interpretation also strays away from some other fan characterizations I've seen of him. So if you think he's actually, at his core, a serious, formal, emotionally detached and unbearably professional, even outside work hours, guy who's deeply dedicated to the honorable task of murder and who is in good terms with the shi association or holds them in high regard? sorry, but for me he's nothing like that.

2.1- The surface

"But Spec", you may say again, "he does act emotionally detached during his cutscene, he even says that people die all the time! are you sure you are actually reading this character right?"

Of course I'm not, I'm just saying that I'm reading him in a way that makes enough sense to me, but I do have reasons to believe that the serious and emotionally detached attitude is an akward mixture of a facade he puts up to be taken seriously by others and an incredibly unhealthy coping mechanism, so let's start by analyzing his artbook profile...

Wait a minute, is that..?

Ok, I'll see myself out and continue writing the actual character analysis this is what people are here for.

Anyway, going back to the character profile, you may be inclined to see it and assume "well, that actually just proves that he's a serious and formal dude" at first, until you realize that artbook profiles, due to their in-universe explaination being that they were compilled by roland and angela from the information they could take out of the guests' books, are most likely to be about what the guests perceive themselves as/would say to describe themselves rather than what they actually are when looked at from an outsider's perspective. Further proof of the artbook profiles being subjective comes from how the profiles change almost erratically for distortions and ego users, with people in the middle of both states simply not knowing how to describe themselves, the fact that we lack any information about the agents of the head as they were never booked, or how characters such as tomerry have...

This, which I mean, it's very clear that's just tomerry talking about themselves.

Now, liwei's personality traits, or at least what he'd use to describe himself, are "Meticulous, Efficient, and Sharp". We know that he has to be efficient at the very least, considering the nature of his job and guns in universe, the same thing goes for meticulous, we can assume he wants to do things the right away so that he gets paid, sharp as a personality descriptor can take multiple meanings and frankly i don't know which was the original korean word used to describe him so i can't tell which is the right one but most of them seem pretty accurate, at least when looking at him from a surface perspective.

To be honest, I don't think any of the traits mentioned there is precisely wrong, I simply don't think that they are the main or core ones, but they are the traits liwei tries to show, at least.

Another interesting detail is that all full stop fixer artbook profiles have food related items for the likes and and dislikes sections, except for stephan disliking dangerous jobs.

Not particularly noteworthy for this category in particular but still tangentially linked to a point that I believe is also a core characteristic of all three full stop fixers and that is key to understand all three of them, their dynamics and the choices they make during their reception: they are Poor As Shit, because guns and bullets are expensive of course, we also get to see this in stephan's obssesive fixation in money (come on nobody actually checks their bank account as a hobby... right, guys?), and of course this ties in with wanting to be seen as someone serious and professional people will trust with their money AND with the idea of them having the need to maximize efficiency to... well... you... you know... not end up even worse than they actually are.

2.2- Emotional internal nature

Alright, and here we dwell into the actually spicy part of the essay, at least for liwei's character: the moments in which the mask of a professional and emotionally detached guy cracks and he shows his more emotional, and mostly caring, side. This is focused in the way in which he treats stephan and tamaki (compared with how several other faction leaders treat their underlings).

While I should probably need to read all the dialogue in the game to make sure this is a particularly notorious detail, something that inmediately caught my attention is... the fact that liwei never uses a single honorific when refering to other people, neither he's bothered by stephan's more informal speech and the fact that he doesn't refer to him by any honorific or title either (sure, you could say this is because they were in a life or death situation but also y'know, it says something about you that the people below you don't feel the need to use formalities when talking to you), the only person he calls by title instead of first name is... well, the blue reverb, whose real name we can assume he didn't know, with also him being someone perfectly capable of killing not only him but the guys standing beside him as well, you'd want to be as respectful as possible when talking to a guy like that and trying to negotiate.

(even then he doesnt use any sort of honorific towards him, at least in the english translation of the text, he simply refers to him by title)

He neither uses any title or honorific when talking to angela, despite keeping a formal/respectful attitude, i honestly believe that he is genuinely formal and respectful but... you know, that's not the beginning and end of who he is.

Of course, this isn't a major point, but I think it's worth mentioning considering how important honorifics can be to establish the speaker's relationship with the people a message is directed to, they can be used to distance oneself from others. So in a way it could be seen as him putting himself at an "equal" position relative to stephan and tamaki, as opposed to trying to assert that he's their superior (at least in the context of the mission they were working in, since his title is merely fixer, not operator, president, director or anything implying some form of leadership on his end).

Another extremely important detail is his inmediate first reaction once argalia shows up and ruins their plan is... not coming up with a plan b, not trying to fight him in any way, not doing anything about trying to save what little money they can, he quite literally tells stephan "forget about money, we need to survive now".

His initial reaction is directly just yelling at his team to run away, and this stays consistent once he:

Notices that stephan and tamaki are beginning to argue over the future of their mission and how much money they lost.

Realizes that they can't outrun argalia as long as they're wielding their heavy (and again, extremely expensive) equipment. This says a lot as it shows that he cares enough for the people under his care to let the office go bankrupt if it means they can live.

Needless to say, stephan and tamaki refuse to do so and while he clearly isn't precisely happy about the inevitable confrontation with argalia, he doesn't argue about this, he does understand their concern about money, he's not like the other authority figures who will ignore their underlings' concerns at best and ditch them once they outlive their usefulness at worst (at least, that's what i imagine he thinks as he makes these choices).

Not to mention, once they are in a, if only slightly, safer situation in the library, his inmediate response is trying to comfort stephan and tamaki, things dont look good but theyre at least alive, for now.

And there's this line which... doesn't seem to fit at first glance with the idea of him wanting his office to survive at all costs... right?

That is until you realize that he says that line during yet another argument between stephan and tamaki, as an attempt to get them both to calm down, this could also fit in with him trying to keep or restore the cynical, stoic and serious act, but then again we get to see his more emotional and sincere side once he:

Gets killed, quite literally saying that he didn't want to die yet, at least to me this line alone is enough to pretty much confirm that he didn't really mean it when saying that trying to delay their deaths was pointless, but if you need more, he also acts against that same line when he...

Sees his allies die, and inmediately starts freaking out.

Wins the reception, in which case his inmediate first concern is, again, not money, lost ammunition or anything, but rather if stephan and tamaki are okay and if they will be safe once they return.

I don't think that line was him fully lying though, it does say something about him that makes enough sense to me and fits with the rest of the characterization: that his cynism runs much, much deeper than stephan's.

Tl;dr he is extremely caring and emotional deep inside, and even though he tries to suppress that side of himself it always finds a way to show itself, I feel like in other contexts this makes him prone to emotional outbursts and generally make him an unpleasant person to be around... save for people who are already familiar with his personality quirks and the fact that he is Like That.

2.3- Resentment

Of course, this dissonance between the person he tries to pretend to be to fit in/keep his job and the person he actually is made him grow a pretty strong disliking of... well, everything he considers related to the fact that he has to act like that to get enough money to feed the people in his office.

I also feel like he feels genuine guilt over the fact that his job is essentially just glorified murder, I have no base for this other than the more detached way in which he refers to the church of gears, it almost feels like hes forcing himself to not care because its them or him and his office, and that he has genuine self-hating tendencies because of it (which he also uses his stoic act to hide, he doesn't want to worry his office and become a burden to them, after all), in a way he may be trying to overcompensate by being nice to his office to feel like there's people he can help/protect.

But this hatred towards himself also manifests in the form of hatred towards anything he can blame over him being the way he is and working the job he has.

As I said before, I don't think liwei likes colors, or most high grade fixers for that matter, you may also extend this to figures of authority, influential organizations or even the city's society as a whole (and honestly? i do personally, i don't think he's actually capable of forming any particularly healthy bond with people outside his office because of this, and even then saying that the relationships he has with his office are healthy is... generous to put it softly, this is not to say that he secretly hates the other people in the office, but rather that he fears that they may secretly hate him, because he's the highest graded member of the office, he hates people sitting above him so it only makes sense that people below him hate him for being above them, right?), and of course I'm not saying this because I'm projecting or because I think it's cool and edgy and sad but I actually have bases for this from what I can see in the game.

The first example of him not trusting high grade fixers AND influential organizations being one of the very first things he says when being introduced: that having an important person, from an important organization, belonging to an important section of said organization, approach him and give him a request was shady as fuck.

And he turned out to be right, as Yujin was planning for him and his office to get sent to the library and die there so she could read their books and find some passage saying shit like "well we were found by the blue fucking reverb and our only choice was to come here and die even though we were royally fucked either way life sucks see you all in hell my final message 🖕🖕🖕🖕🖕" so she could use that on her favor.

In this topic too, I'm personally firmly opposed to the idea of full-stop office being affiliated to the shi association and this is the hill i'm willing to die on, but I digress.

We see this same resentment on an even deeper level in his keypage where he talks about colors (and we can assume this view extends to other high graded fixers, and to a lesser extent to the hana association), he doesn't sound like he wants to become a color, he doesn't sound like he even likes the concept of colors being a thing that exists in the first place.

The most important lines from these fragments to me being the following:

"A color is the dream [...] of all fixers who wish for freedom.", freedom is a VERY relevant concept in project moon and ruina makes a very clear point about how nobody is free in the city, roland says it, most plot relevant guests say it, some patron librarians say it too... a huge part of the story is how angela comes to terms to the fact that turning human wont grant her freedom and how she ultimately becomes free by embracing her nature as a machine (so free indeed that the head decides to kick her and the entire library out of the city, not only shes a machine that acts like a human, which is already a major city wide taboo, she made a choice that no human in the city should ever make). Essentially, liwei seems to see colors (and im assuming that by extension high graded fixers) as the ultimate example of an impossible aspirational class (think of these "self made" enterpreurs who received extremely generous financial support from their rich parents to start massive companies as the closest irl equivalent, except that obviously not the same, i will elaborate more on this later).

"They put forward the colors as great and successful people that other fixers will look up to. They dream of earning wealth and fame, and to be free like them one day." Why would he be talking in third person here if he too admired colors, or wanted to be like them, or thought that were free in any way? Also that separation between money and fame (something that colors objectively do have since they can afford exclusive high tech weapons and armor) with freedom (something that is debatable, but liwei seems to assume colors don't have) feels too much like a deliberate choice to further push towards that point of him seeing colors as not only an impossible goal to achieve for the average fixer but also that the ideal of a color as someone who is free is something impossible to achieve even if one were to become a color.

"Colors are assigned by the 'Hana Association'. [...] The title of a color is forcibly given to fixers who qualify essentially. Can a fixer be truly happy with freedom that was forcefully handed to them?" This particular fragment, specially the last sentence, is absolutely key for Liwei's characterization, and the final and most important part of him saying "wait, no, colors aren't free, because nobody is" to me. It is also worth noting that this fragment can be read in multiple ways, all of them are important and accurate for his characterization.

He thinks that the responsability and risks that come with being handed the title of a color are far greater than the prestige that comes with the title, can you really say that someone who cant afford to decline requests due to being contacted by the most important organizations in the city, whose closest friends or family WILL be regularly targetted by rivals either to extort them for money or just try to attack them to the point in which most high graded fixers abandon any personal attachment to others, who will have to see the horrible things that happen in the city in an almost day-to-day basis and will likely have to do even worse things in the name of corporate interests is free? Can you really call it freedom if you can't refuse it? Essentially he is saying "actually every single aspect of being a color is terrible and to make matters worse that life is forced on them after they go through extreme miseries in the hopes for a better life but all they get is more of the same if not even worse, they aren't free and shouldn't be refered to as such."

He thinks that in order to become a color (or any highly graded fixer, really), you must essentially lose yourself, which is to say abandoning all friendships or familiar bonds, only keeping shallow interactions with people, desensitizing themselves to whatever horrifying shit they may have to see, abandon all sense of morality as they never know what their next request will be and "im sorry but i dont do xyz, it does against my personal morals" isnt an argument that will work in a place like the city, this also fits into the whole "actually having a much more chaotic emotional side he's trying his absolute hardest to supress but failing" theme mentioned in point 2.2., someone who is so deeply emotional and whose actions are ultimately defined by what is the most likely to keep the people around him alive is obviously not going to like the idea of keeping his distance to them, or to dispose of people with lower grades than him because they were supposed to be expendables anyway.

I don't remember the exact quote and i dont feel like looking for it but in one of gebura's cutscene she claims that all power in the city only serves to strike those below but never up. You have to climb to get stronger and then you'll only be able to assert dominance (through violence) over people weaker than you are, and she grew to dislike this, as she wanted to protect others but was never able to do so because of how the city was dessigned.

Of course, liwei reached the same conclusion but he took the much simpler but much more unhealthy approach of assuming "well, if things are like that, then that must mean that everyone in a position of power (over me) must be responsible for this".

Of course this also comes with the side effect of him being as caring for the rest of the office as he can because he doesn't want to be like other figures of authority as i mentioned in point 2.2, but thats not to mean that things are all fine in the office, i feel like there are several moments in which he internally curses his position of authority but not quite (bc i don't think he's actually The Big Guy In Charge of the office, really), most obviously the aforementioned moment in which he yells at tamaki and stephan to drop their guns so they can run away and live when they clearly dont want to, i feel like at moments like that he feels like they only do things because he tells them to and they "can't argue" (except that they do, fortunately for him the enviroment in the office is healthy enough for the rest of full stops to not abuse this fact, but the "what if"s are absolutely eating him from the inside). As ironic as it sounds his earnest desire to not be Like The Others is the same thing stopping him from being the perfect and efficient leader he wishes to be, and he probably isn't sure of which thing he values more than the other (it's staying true to his own morals and keeping the people under him safe).

However, there's a key detail here that's worth noting: liwei has a tendency to treat everyone else as equals, sure he is formal and respectful when doing so (pressumably even when talking to people he'd rather never interact with if we assume his conversation with argalia was actually how he is and not him just walking on eggshells to not get killed) but he doesn't bother trying to make a clear distinction of who is above and below him, no matter what their title and rank may be, and for people who are used to being looked up to by everyone else this will be seen this as him insulting them in some way, it may come from a sincere desire of him to come off as insulting while not breaking any (major) social convention in an act of malicious compliance or just the type of person he is, that's up to you to determine.

"But how the hell does any of this relate to dong hwan?" we'll get there right now.

3.- Dong Hwan as a character

This is kinda... the hardest point to talk about, because sure I can yap all I want about him but... it's hard to without going "Source: I made it up" too much.

So, looking at his combat sprites you may notice one thing: he is unbelievably hot for real what the hell he has an incredibly smug aura, most people who care about him to some extent i've seen tend to depict him as a very prideful person, and honestly i dont think differently either.

HOWEVER, i feel like despite this he's still a levelheaded guy who can aknowledge his own flaws. On top of that, i think he's a pretty charismatic guy and he's capable of noticing other people's strenghts, and he'll let people know about their own strenghts too.

Also, to contrast with his smug and cheerful exterior, his combat lines depict him as someone very serious when at work, he doesn't even react emotionally to getting killed.

His first "on kill" line is also particularly interesting, as it shows that he prefers to work on his own (unlike everyone's favorite monochrome moody boy), which makes sense considering that he comes alone to the library when you fight him, he may belong to a one-man office (which is the closest a fixer can do to be fully independent, as far as we are aware).

His keypage story also fits this more serious and analytical personality but not much of it is particularly noteworthy from a character analysis perspective, it doesn't say much that you couldn't notice from his combat lines anyway.

Another important factor to me and to contrast him to liwei is... okay, this may be the fact that he's a solo fight and he is, pressumably, an independent fixer, so he's not titled as a member of a particular organization, instead his title (for him, his reception, his keypage and his book) is "dong hwan, the grade 1 fixer", which i mean, again, is most likely just so we dont fight this guy with zero context on who he is and what hes even doing in the library in his own is he stupid? but i like to imagine that the in universe explaination is that he has tied his perception of himself and his own self worth to his grade, to the point in which using both his name and grade is what comes naturally to him when introducing himself, since books are essentially physical manifestations of the soul, then it just makes sense then that his book will give both his name and grade the same importance. This may come from a need to compensate for something else and i actually like to imagine that's the case because it adds yet another layer of parallels with liwei (source: trust me).

Another point is... remember that I mentioned how food was a very consistent thing in the full stops' likes and dislikes sections in the artbook? this point is also not relevant but dong hwan is frequently assumed to be the owner of that pub that shows up at that short side story about roland and angelica which i never watched because i Literally Can Not Care about angelica sorry, but, hey, it's a cute detail, i think he should cook for the full stops.

I feel like there's something to be said about dh's red eyes because in pjm when a character has red eyes you know that means one thing: they will be a big deal, but dong hwan, other than looking incredibly fucking cool and carrying me through the snow queen suppression (FUCK THE SNOW QUEEN ALL MY HOMIES HATE SNOW QUEEN) and star of the city tier 1 (thank you dong hwan i love you dong hwan)… he is rather unremarkable on the grand scheme of things, he's a general reception so you don't even need to defeat him to beat the game, and he only serves to give us some insight on who the fuck was the vermillion cross, and even then he does a terrible job at explaining who he was other than "well, he was a guy i guess" and honestly, the relevance of both liwei and dong hwan is ALSO an important factor in these parallels, as with one being the guy who introduces the concept of colors and the other being the guy who introduces one particular color fixer by casually mentioning being friends with him, both feel like characters who would be much more narratively important in any other story, but here they... aren't.

4.- Summarizing Parallels

Aka the part you may want to skip to if you don't care about me analyzing characters with little background info about them.

So, basically a list of personality (and background, i guess) traits they have in common and how they're different:

Both characters are putting some sort of facade, with liwei trying to act serious and stoic so he's taken seriously while dong hwan... i dont think he even knows what the facade he's putting even is, he's been putting an act for so long that his mask became his true self

In both characters' cases, the first impression they give isn't really the kind of person they truly are (in lw's case this is a deliberate choice and in dh's case i assume that's just the type of person he is), HOWEVER, while liwei acts serious and analytical (and to some extent he is), his true self is far more emotional and prone to form deep bonds with people, while dong hwan has a more passionate, smug and cheerful external attitude but he's much more serious and levelheaded deep down

Both characters have different, conflicting views about their grades, however these differences ultimately lead to both of them being able to treat each other as equals, or as close to that as possible in the city, i feel like liwei can see dong hwan as someone of worth so to speak for reasons unrelated to his grade, while dong hwan does see liwei as a good person (well, good is a subjective term specially in a place like the city) and far better at teamwork than most people in the city, in a way both value something in the other that the other never stopped to consider "hey this is actually a good thing i have"

Both characters are (pressumably?) trying to compensate over something, with liwei putting his professional and formal act to compensate for his sentimental self while dong hwan puts a strong emphasis on his high grade for... who knows, really, i just like this parallel being there because i think it adds a lot

Both have problems forming relationships, with liwei being a generally unpleasant person but being capable of forming deep, meaningful relationships with the people capable of seeing through it, while dong hwan is a charismatic guy liked by almost everyone he's met, but whose relationships tend to be shallow

Not really a personality thing but both characters have a thing for being remarkably unremarkable guys, dong hwan is obviously forgotten by most ruina playes because he's a general reception and the biggest impression liwei leaves in most players is "OH SHIT HE HAS A GUN", even though both are pretty intentionally dessigned with the intention of making them look cool however ive very rarely come across full stop or liwei fans (by which i mean people who like them particularly instead of "actually the entire pjm cast is cool and that includes them) and dong hwan fans are.... yeah, i think ive met like, 4 of them at most (thanks guys i owe you my life)

Something about their combat styles including their passives, liwei's only visible passive is called Concentration and gives him extra strenght for the first turn of a fight, after which he relies in the fact that his attacks weaken the enemy, so he comes off as the sort of guy who prefers to keep his distance and figure out the opponent's weak spot(s) (something he canonically is good at doing) to keep an upper hand at combat, however despite this he's still lacking in both strenght and technique, being only a grade 4 (which i mean let's be real the grades go from 9 to 1 and i feel like a majority of fixers are in the lower grades so he's still pretty much above average but he isnt doing all the cool shit you see the stronger characters do, because that's not the kind of character he is). On the other hand dong hwan's passives have much more cooler sounding names (Fervor, Carver of Scars, Toughness...), all of them focused on either inflicting bleed (status ailment that gradually makes the opponent lose hp)/buffing him against enemies with bleed or buffing him as he gains emotion levels, and his focus is just inflicting bleed like crazy, as well as delivering harder blows against people with bleed, prioritizing raw damage over strategy (but likely being able to figure out an opponent's weaknesses as well, brute strenght alone are most likely not enough to get you far in a world where the powerful people are INSANELY strong bc physical enhancements are commonplace)

I feel like in a way both admire each other, liwei admires dong hwan's capacity to keep a cool head at all times when at work and not letting his feelings have too much weight over his desicions, but dong hwan admires how honest liwei is about himself as well as his capacity to work in a team taking in consideration what will be best for the team as a whole even if it's perjudicial for him in particular.

In Conclusion

Your honor, two of them

[that-gay-guy-from-hell]

Welcome to the "What the fuck is that theory?!"

Today I want to talk about DMC 2. What about it, you might ask; well my friend, I want to tell you of a theory that I have been thinking about constantly for the past week/week and a half.

What if, in DMC2, Dante isn't Dante; what if it's actually Vergil? Just--

Hear me out--

According to the actual DMC writers; DMC2 takes place after 4 (and I think 5 as well, for this we are going to say after any game in the series).

So maybe the reason Dante sounds so... off is because that's not Dante. It's Vergil masquerading as his brother.

This is rough but just--

What if Dante died when the twins were in hell?

Vergil in his grief and probable fucking mental breakdown would come back mimicking his brother; keeping the Devil May Cry going in his brother's name.

Maybe Dante even asked Vergil to take over the shop for him and bestowed his gear to him--including Rebellion.

Or (and here comes the crackhead and main theory) what if Argosax is Dante.

Vergil and Dante's story lines up almost perfectly with Mundus and Argosax, respectively. Mundus ate a Qliphoth fruit to become stronger than Argo; Vergil ate a Qliphoth fruit to become stronger than Dante.

So let's roll with Argosax somehow being Dante in DMC2;

⋗It would be really ironic that Argosax wouldn't talk when "normal" Dante won't stop talking.

⋗Argo's horns are similar to Dante's Sin DT and his body is similar.

⋗"Dante" is able to disappear during the last fight which is kind of more Vergil's thing--to be able to teleport.

⋗Although I know this is old and Dante's colors weren't all red; Ivory's charge color is blue.

⋗"Dante" doesn't look Argosax in the eye or say anything--not even "Jackpot". Argosax, on the other hand, looks at him; staring him down. Perhaps to try and plead with his older brother (who knows that there is nothing that can be done).

⋗Plus the symbolism of Ivory being used NOT Ebony; Ivory is the gun that Dante used in DMC3 where as Vergil used Ebony. It would have made a LOT more sense for "Dante" to use Ebony for that shot, but he didn't, he used Ivory--he used Dante's gun. Given, Dante does kind of smile buT perhaps it is because he is happy to free his brother of this curse (and that he won a fight against him lmfao)

⋗Rebellion hitting the ground at the end of the fight might be a metaphor for Dante being put to rest; the legend of the Sparda twins being put to bed. (It's also just a cool view by I digress)

All this comes to a head when "Dante" (or in this case, Vergil) decides to go to the underworld; seemingly unphased by the idea--which, again, would play into it being Vergil who spent most of his adult life in Hell. Perhaps to go and continue the fight? or maybe see if his brother is, in part, still alive like he was after being killed in DMC1.

I don't know, it would be an interesting way for them to retcon DMC2 into the time period they say it's from...

Instead of taking place between 1 and 4 like literally, everyone else thinks it does--including myself--and that Dante's just really fuckin' depressed lmao Please keep in mind, as I said, I do not personally think that this is how it should work-- I just thought it would be interesting to talk about. I'm sure that this has been talked about before and probs been beaten into the ground but I thought it was interesting lol.

I'm curious to know what anyone else thinks about this; does anyone else see what I'm getting at? Like I know I am kinda grasping at straws, but isn't that the whole basis of DMC lore to begin with lmfaooo Please let me know through the tags or comments what you think--I'd love to read other's thoughts on this!!

Thanks for coming to my sleep-deprived theory time and I'll see y'all next time.

MASTER LIST FOR TUMBLR

[vizthedatum]

One of the college admission essays I wrote in 2007... or "how I downplayed the amount of trauma I was going through and masked so fucking hard to get into college"

The inhabitants of this Earth revolve themselves around certain procedures, schedules, and mannerisms that are unique to them, but are they so unique? Perhaps, we simply mimic or take inspiration from other lives, add our own personal touch, and call them our own, but a certain consistency is apparent in everyone's routine. In my case, I'm not so fortunate.

On an average day, I wake up at 5:50 AM, bang my head on the wall adjacent to the closet, and get ready for the long day in front of me. During the school year, I diligently attend school with a few minor complaints and learn how and what to study for the betterment of my education. While I involve myself in school and the work that pertains to it, I look for outlets that will help distract me from my schoolwork. These outlets are my extracurricular activities. I've been involved in orchestral work, which concerns my violin playing, academic teams (such as math team, future problem solving, and quiz bowl to name a few), and volunteering. This is simply an overview of my daily schedule, while quite frankly, this average day is not quite accurate.

As I began my freshman year of high school, I found that my "average day" was slowly changing. Though I kept up with my schoolwork and activities, I constantly felt deprived of energy. At least once a week, I would get an almost unbearable migraine and would have to lie down until it got better. The only reason why I survived my first term of high school was because I only had 2 academic subjects, Math and French. That term I was involved in the Pitt orchestra for our fall school musical, Oklahoma. Practices would run up to 6:00 each day, and after my mom picked me up and dropped me off home, I'd collapse on our living room couch for 2-3 hours.

Freshman year wasn't so bad though, because I'd try and keep my headaches under control as well as trying to keep myself healthy so that I could function. When sophomore year began, I had a fail-proof plan to succeed in school as well as taking the necessary rest I needed to keep focused. Everything drastically changed when on September 19th, 2005, my father suffered an almost fatal stroke. For a week, he was in a coma. I also remember that the Friday of that particular week, I had an AP European History test. I didn't study. North Memorial Hospital became my second home. I would go there after school every day and sometimes, stay overnight. For months and even today, I couldn't sleep at night. I did my homework during class and in passing time. Not only had everything gone out of control but my mind had as well. My grades got worse than usual, and I didn't care what happened around me. Nevertheless, I tried to make it to school every day even though my work output was of low quality. My father stayed in stroke rehabilitation for the rest of the 2005 year before finally being discharged from the hospital. Even though, he was discharged, he was half paralyzed, and his speech was severely impaired. Three times a week, he would go to the hospital for therapy, and most times, I would come too. During that year, I felt really empty and alone. I felt that my dad was going to drop dead and I would never see him again. I felt like I would collapse into tears every few minutes, and I did so a few times in the school stairwell. Then again, I felt guilty for feeling alone and helpless. My friends surrounded me with a protective coat of support, and my aunt and uncle helped us resettle into our new lives. Furthermore, my mother and my brother needed me. While I managed to go to school every day, my brother couldn't as my mother took him with her to take care of my father.

As if it weren't hard enough, when my father became sick, he lost his job. We were a family of four who depended on a sole financial provider, my father. We also lived in an apartment for which we had to pay a monthly rent. We then had to live off of Social Security, which was not so sufficient for the room and board of our whole family plus gas bills. It was very difficult especially since I tried to continue all of the activities I was involved in at school.

My father resumed going to work in the summer of 2006, but he mostly worked from home. When I started 11th grade, things were somewhat better. Whatever happened in the past was horrific to think about, and every day I would be reminded of it. My headaches also started getting worse. Second term of 11th grade was especially hard for me, because it seemed like I acquired every flu/cold in existence. Third term was even harder because I began experiencing sharp pains in my lower left abdomen. It turned out I had an enlarged ovarian cyst. For months after that, I experienced the same pain for unknown reasons. My headaches became migraines, and I found my body limiting my actions such as going to school. I was determined to not let that bring me down. My grades did suffer a little bit, but I took the responsibility to teach myself the subjects I signed up to take.

The summer before my senior year was a happy time for me. My migraines were getting worse, but I was getting treated for it. Though I wasn't getting any relief and felt guilty because of the waste of money all this was turning out to be, I spent my summer making myself happy with who I was. I hung out with my friends, happily taught swimming, and volunteered as much as I could.

Senior year started, and quite frankly, I was really excited. I was signed up for really great classes with teachers that I knew and trusted. The not so exciting part was that I didn't even get to fully enjoy it; I missed more than half of the first term. Every week, my mom rushes me to doctor after doctor to find an absolute cure so I can go back to my life. I recently got put on two new medications, and I hope they'll help. Meanwhile, I'm going to keep on keeping my commitments to school (even if I don't always attend), learning, and the activities that make me happy and build my character.

--

So many things I didn't say:

my ongoing suicidality and depression

the physical and mental abuse from my parents

the physical and mental abuse from my high school boyfriend

everyone disbelieving my pain

the abuse from my doctors

my PCOS, undiagnosed endometriosis, undiagnosed bladder pain

the absolute brutality of what it takes to get into college when you're poor

my undiagnosed anxiety disorder and PTSD

[yourgamemasterthewhiterabbit]

The great sleep experiment of 2024, 3.5 days -ish past "fuck it"

Well... 10 until 2 right?

Best sleep I ever got. Neighbours weren't blasting anything. Nothing was exploding, cat was quiet, didn't have any night terrors, paralysis or 'seizure like' symptoms.

I feel rested.

My night sleep shift is fucked though.

And I assure you I am approaching them both the exact same way.

The difference is my brain cooperates with getting sleepy at a consistent -ish time if I am sleeping during the day, but not at night.

I have slightly more caffeine in the mornings, so I tried having a bit more caffeine at night... no deal.

I have stuff I am supposed to be doing during the day, so in case this tied in to demand avoidance, I assigned myself a list of quiet tasks to do at nights... No dice.

I'm not taking melatonin during the day but I did try taking it at night. No bueno.

But I want to invite everyone here to imagine what it is like having a body/brain that does this while trying to maintain gainful employment, go to school, or even do light shift work.

Step one. Your first week of sleep after a massive non-sleeping crisis is great. Work is going fine.

Then you start to get insomnia at night or wake up constantly due to various kinds of sleep distress. You start getting really convincing nightmares and the feeling of being paralyzed or lifted with what should be distressing imagery often when you are about to wake up or when you are trying to sleep. But you still have to get up in the morning and go to work. Your lack of emotional reaction to the sleep imagery doesn't really change that it's nightmarish.

All day you get sleepiness spells that are nearly impossible to force yourself awake through, but you do and you get horrible splitting migraines from it. Employers don't like workers who are asleep on their feet -literally- or are in too much blinding pain to function. They tell you to "get some sleep" tonight.

You get home and you are exhausted, angry, but too exhausted to care, so you lay down and... Your brain won't sleep. Won't do it. You spend another week sleeping 2 hours a night at most and trying your hardest to fake being awake and not in pain during the day. You are already up to 8 extra strength advil daily, and the air quality in their building is giving you low-key asthma attacks, but never mind that.

They say shit to you like "HoPe YoU gOt GoOd SlEeP lAsT nIgHt :DDD XD"

And to your credit, you do not immediately choke them to death with your hands. This is hard for a human this sleep deprived.

You become progressively more sleep deprived and pretending not to be possibly actually insane from sleep deprivation through the week until the weekend when you can spend all your spare time sleeping all day. You curse your continued lack of ability to sleep at night unless it is sandwiched by sleeping all day on at least the front side. You do not have time to do chores or hobbies.

This carries on for long enough that you go to a doctor about it, because no sleeping pill you could buy in a store did anything and melatonin does almost nothing and makes your dreams really vivid. Abusing allergy meds or alcohol to any reasonable degree to sleep also doesn't work.

Anything to do with sleep or mood stabilizing your doctor can prescribe, your body seems to metabolize so quickly it mimics the symptoms of having crushed and snorted it, and you stop being able to sleep more than 2 hours a day no matter when you sleep. You have to stop taking the meds when you start to fear actual breaks with reality from a lack of sleep.

The more you bring this up to your doctor and the more the meds don't work, the more they treat you like you are irrational, drug seeking, etc, start telling you it must be stress related, or depression, and the more they start focusing on how you might be insane in some way, instead of addressing your escalating physical health problems [which existed before and after this, and are besides the point right now, but are numerous and distressing].

Between this, chronic bladder infections, and having to pee too much you are constantly being threatened with being fired by your manager and by HR. Your manager is trying to pressure you into working extra hours so the 'team' can have pizza day at the end of the week. You refuse overtime and no one likes you. You go home and your boyfriend still doesn't have his own job, still won't even do the dishes, hasn't cooked anything or done laundry, etc... is playing videogames where you left him. He's very convincingly depressed so you don't want to nag him about it, but even polite reminders to pitch in make him look despondent. He also won't go to a doctor. Your savings are slowly vanishing to feed both of you. You have 7+ other undiagnosed disabilities and work at a call center all day. If you bring this up in front of your friends they call you a nag and say he looks 'hen pecked'. You need better friends. You cannot argue reasonably to a doctor you aren't stressed, depressed, or anxious, but like... None of their meds or suggestions DO anything.

This keeps up for 2.5 years until they give you your 1 year pin, because for 2 years they just didn't bother fighting about the back-order and you didn't seem to care.

You get onto 4X10 shifts so that you have 3 days a week to sleep. You make it work. You have no savings left from before your 'husband/boyfriend' moved in, but your rent is paid and you have food. Your house is a mess and if anyone sees it or you bring it up, they ask you if your 'legs are broken' and refuse to hear that you work 10 hours a day and your boyfriend does nothing. You need better friends, but you are too sleep deprived to think or care.

Your 'boyfriend' finally gets into a school program to make up work and get his highschool diploma. It seems good for him. He makes friends. His friends either avoid you or are really rude to your face and later apologize that they were just jealous of your relationship???? He graduates and starts looking for work... He's looking for work... He's...

You start having very vivid half waking dreams about demons trying to possess and attack you and your 'boyfriend'. You do a few things that are half-way between a spell and some kind of meditation to get the dreams to stop. It works so you keep doing it. [I often forget this happened at all but forgive me I was very sleep deprived at the time] Everyone is side-eyeing you for being a "crazy nag" or whatever, despite that you never even raise your tone, but you can sleep a little bit here and there so you don't care much. You haven't had the energy to care about anything in years.

He gets a job for a hot minute before he's fired for being "too competent to work here"... And you learn you can get him to pitch in just a little with dishes if you remind him regularly that a clean kitchen means you can make apple pies.

You get a migraine that lasts literally over a month solid. The call center is still harassing you about how fired you are going to be. They never accepted any of the doctors notes you got about needing to pee so your bladder didn't tear or to keep you from having chronic bladder infections that were starting to impact your kidneys. You are still ignoring your 7+ other disabilities that are each on their own a reason you shouldn't be working, because you are too sleep deprived to realize there's a real problem here and everyone else in your life is happy to just act like all of this is your fault and on you to fix. You are angry and know they are wrong, but what the fuck are you going to do about it, you need to be at work in 10 minutes and you are the one paying rent.

After the first week of the solid migraine, and multiple threats that they will sue you if you don't either quit or come in for work, you quit. You quit because you know if you don't you will go to prison for murder. You know it -in your bones- that the next manager to get in your face is getting blitz attacked by the most mild mannered and quiet person they ever met in their lives, especially if it's that one who's a horrid cunt to you ever since finding out you were born in November because she hates 'Scorpios'. You are, by the way, no longer that mild-mannered person. This migraine that will keep you on the floor in tears for another 3 weeks is -in fact- them dying. You don't know that yet.

The hospital treats you like you are drug seeking and won't scan anything or do any tests. At least you don't have to work.

You are finally able to sleep. You sleep whenever you can and it is so so so fucking good. Sleep. sweet fuckign my love sleep. yes.

You have bills to pay and an unemployed 'boyfriend' but the reason he lives with you is so he doesn't have to live with his abusive uncle and grandmother. He won't stand up and be independent, so you don't have the heart to kick him out. He is by all accounts a sweet guy. You aren't sure he remembers your name, but as anyone around you will remind you, he's really depressed :( and looks really put-upon >:( . He gets annoyed with you for being loud in public or any time you seem a bit manic, and won't say shit when his family members or your friends start saying how all this is your responsibility to fix. He doesn't have conversations with you where he doesn't shut down and just keep saying "yeah babe"... You try to tell him he might be gay or asexual or just not like you personally because he doesn't seem romantically or sexually interested in you at all, but he's insistent on being in this relationship anyway. At least he isn't ever pressuring you for attention or sex, so you let it lay.

You have bills to pay and no savings. You had thousands in savings from your first food service job, but they are gone now.

You go to welfare and you explain all the problems and how they won't let you have the EI you paid into because technically they forced you into quitting. You look really pathetic and earnest and are only 22 -ish, so the nice lady there lets you on while you 'wait to be approved for disability' which will take over 10 years, but at least doesn't make you job search in that time due to your sun allergy. Now your rent and bills are *mostly* covered and you get about 200/mo for food. :)

Your 'husbands' father gets clean, he was always the nice parent, his mom is on appropriate pain management now too, he won't have to live with his abusive shitty uncle and raving asshole grandmother. You kick him out because living with you only makes him miserable about the world and himself 24/7 and he won't leave or talk to you about it. All he does is nod and quietly go. All your mutual friends now see you as the bad guy except the ones who are -very actively- trying to convince you to fuck them.

Without him there you are no longer getting enough from welfare to afford rent and have to move in with the first of a long chain of abusive ex's kicking off your adult life of cycles of abuse and having to move again and lose all your friends on repeat.

Being unemployed and able to sleep, you start to figure out that missing sleep was only ONE of MANY reasons you are exhausted all day long and you will spend the next 10+ years peeling back the curtain of each one to find that the brick wall behind it all is CFS. I mean it's 50 other things but also under it all is still the CFS.

Now the only pressure to sleep at night is being able to make doctors appointments, do groceries and have a 'social life' [?]. It continues to be equally impossible and equally untreatable. You lose friends sometimes just over the fact that you can't predict when you are going to be awake or fall asleep. The only people who maintain social relationships with you are the guys trying to convince you to fuck them.

You get relatively good at manipulating your sleep problems to let you sleep between 4 and 16 hours around being as productive as anyone could ever expect you to be, while you are left to take care of any household you move into. Because everyone else refuses to clean or handle repairs or calls to the landlord more timely than you can as a VERY disabled person. You are hyper-competent as they come though so you handle it and that's why people keep you around.

Then Corona sweeps over the world.

Now there are certain times of day where virus levels are going to be at their lowest and thus most safe-adjacent. Your life might depend on only going to businesses right at opening before the viral load in the air reaches in infectious threshold. You are in your 30's now, btw.

You have been sleeping so 'good' if irregularly for so many years you keep forgetting the HELL that opens up and swallows you when you try to force yourself onto a regular schedule.

You are 36. You have forgotten what -school- was like, or how by the end of it you were sleeping less than 2 hours a night and punching plaster walls in the basement where you could only hurt your own fist because a doctor -you snuck out of school to go see- tried to put you on the WRONG medication [you had to sneak out because your step mother wouldn't let you see a doctor, and once you had prescriptions you new nickname was 'pill popper' to her]. You have never even genuinely threatened violence to another person in your entire life.... BTW.

You have forgotten about the night terrors, and the worst of the 'seizure-like' symptoms that you are sure is actually seizures but your doctor won't concede to because it doesn't respond to the pills they get paid to prescribe for that, and the 'narcolepsy-like' symptoms that your doctor won't diagnose you about for the same reasons... "if it was that it would respond to this treatment at least a little :)"... You have forgotten about the 'spiders' that swim in the corner of your vision when you are awake too long, and mostly about how when you are kept awake too long you start hearing people calling your name like your parents used to from the floor above your head... You mostly forget all of that.

And you see and read study after study about how good and important and NECESSARY regular sleep is to your very survival... And you think "maybe it wasn't that bad or that hard to be on a regular schedule"...

And then you make some stupid decision, stupid the likes of "I haven't been depressed/had dandruff in YEARS why am I still on this stupid medication for it ha ha :)"...

And you try to force yourself onto a regular sleep schedule, at night and everything. Like an idiot.

You act surprised when the insomnia, night terrors, waking and falling asleep hallucinations all come back, and when the narcolepsy and seizure "like" symptoms start escalating again.

"But regular sleep is so good for you and 'necessary for your sanity and survival' no one is a sPeCiAl ExCePtIoN sWeAtY XD you must not be trying hard enough"

... And then you fumble the love of your life in what could have been a sex dream, when you could have made love to him, and had it feel real, when he 'rescued' you from a night terror/sleep paralysis thing... because you were too tired and scared to think straight.

T~T [come back I am so sorry]

And then your neighbours who make complaints to the landlord about the sounds of you cleaning your apartment, and run the hot water whenever you try to shower, start blasting dance music from 7 till midnight on random nights and setting off small explosives beside the one window you have that you can open for fresh air that happens to be next to your bed, up until fucking 12 midnight.

The fuck

And you have -for the record- still not murdered anyone about it.

You haven't even done a violence or a threat.

Last you checked you are 'the bad guy' and also 'failing on purpose' but you haven't actually physically hurt or threatened anyone yet...

But yeah, I like slept great from 10-2 today and Pumpkin was so good and polite the whole time.

I started blending up the gravy food he likes because he just kept licking off all the gravy and leaving the meat chunks and wouldn't touch the pate, and then screaming at me all hours because he was hungry but didn't want his kibble... So spoiled.

But like, ask me how I feel, tonight when I can't sleep, about the sentiment "It should be legal to feed people who set off illegal fireworks next to your bed at night when you are sleep deprived to your cat to keep him quiet." [This is a joke, my willingness to maim people is reserved for anyone trying to put their dick in me against my will]

Maybe if I complain about it enough the universe will want to make me look like a lair and hand me regular sleep like I was capable of it all along.

Idk, but for science reasons I will keep trying, keep documenting the problems, and keep complaining, in hopes that maybe medical professionals might see this, take it seriously and understand yet another way in which afab patients are commonly horridly neglected, under diagnosed, and under served. I genuinely have been told by doctors that the sleeping pills don't work on me because I am not "trying hard enough"... sir?

I literally have tried every meditation and way of drugging myself to sleep that I can legally get a hold of and literally have to fight demons to stay on a sleep schedule... Like have you MET the desperation of a sleep deprived person just trying to get a night of sleep!?!?!?!?!?!? but okay.

This has to be a diagnosable condition that they just haven't fully grasped yet, mostly due to not believing their patients. I cannot be the only one. I am not -in fact- under the impression I am a special snowflake.

But if you have ever wondered why i seem to be on here at completely random times that are constantly shifting... This is why.

I say "ooh I am going to stay up" and then I vanish, this is why.

I say "T~T it is my beddy-by timey" and then I am on here for 12 hours straight, this is why.

The problem is that you cannot physically force yourself unconscious without repeated head injury, and there's only so much you can force yourself awake when your body really wants to be asleep, so there's really only so much I can do.

Sleep is something most people just -do- automatically at regular intervals without having to interrogate it, so it's really alienating to them to try to imagine their brain simply not working that way. To them it is akin to breathing, so they have no empathy, no ability to imagine a life, for a person who doesn't have the neurological hard-wiring to breathe automatically. To most people it is just such an automatic function that they imagine you have to be doing something to fight it in order to have it not work right. They imagine you must bee staying up late to do hobbies semi intentionally, or be having caffeine irresponsibly, or or or...

"sOmEbOdY wOlD hAvE nOtIcEd By NoW iF tHiS wAs NaTuRaL tO yOu!!11" say my doctors... Because my mother's observations that she couldn't keep me awake to eat properly or get me to sleep at night mean nothing to them.

I'm fine. I slept fine today and I am in a good mood and I am well rested.

I just... even if you ignore the 7-10 other disabilities that I have managed to get diagnosed by now, this ALONE would have kept me from staying employed and makes societal expectations antithetical to my existence, and my doctors can't or won't even diagnose it or give it a name. My official diagnosis for disability had to focus on the migraines I get by forcing myself awake.

I am pretty sure this is actually a complicated sleep disorder overlapping with my chemical sensitivity and autoimmune shit and not simple "chronic migraine" but whatever

I just want the general public to understand that some people have to live with shit like this, and how maybe it stacks with other problems -like sexism- to make your life a living hell with literal demons and everything.

But I can't help but feel I am one of the lucky ones who doesn't have full on hallucinations when I am awake and out of bed, and doesn't hear voices until hour 20 of no sleep [which is pretty normal actually].

I can solve most of these problems entirely by just sleeping on a random schedule, and sleeping a bit extra, and I can't help but wonder if the reason I am not diagnosed is that other people with this condition, whatever it actually is, are on drugs to keep them awake/asleep, and then more drugs to combat the resulting hallucinations and pain, and then have their autonomy taken away to try to force them onto a regular sleeping schedule under the assumption that regular sleep will help them instead of being what is causing all their problems in the first place.

Is this yet another instance of "Well turns out you have another semi-common disorder but your symptoms are so unique for that condition that we can't treat it and you actually aren't suffering badly enough for us to think any treatment or intervention is necessary." like so many of my existing diagnosed conditions.

Zero professional curiosity about what underlying condition or mutation is causing all of this or all of it to be so "uniquely expressed" btw...

The bottom line is that if I don't have to work and can sleep when I need to all these symptoms either disappear or are mild enough I can ignore them.

I just wonder how many people are being denied that autonomy and self-management under the societal drive to force them into living like 'normal' people. If I was forced by doctors into drugging myself into both sleeping and being awake and that resulted in actively hallucinating, would they just diagnose me with a psychotic disorder, take away my autonomy and call it a day? Is doctors not taking me seriously when I describe my symptoms the only thing that saved me from that? How many other people would benefit from less pressure to conform to 'normal' and thus be able to live 80% more 'normal' lives?

How much research have we put into sleeping and waking disorders? or disorders that come with seizures or hallucinations or disruptions in sleeping and waking states? How much of it wasn't plagued with denying the patient their autonomy, the ability to seek outside help, their basic rights and their humanity?

I know they all have a higher comorbidity with autism. I know that, but how well do we understand the relationship between neurology, sleep cycles and abnormal sleep/wake events? I am convinced it is not very well.

Also like... When I try to tell people that even though I don't regularly experience hallucinations, or night terrors or sleep paralysis etc... I still have plenty good occasion to understand what they are talking about on some level, because it has happened to me before... or when I compare hallucinating to a waking dream-like state in my own experiences... THIS is why. Every time I talk to someone else who gets sleep paralysis or hallucinates mildly, or has narcolepsy... They take one look at the fact they haven't seen me experience a symptom in the time they have known me, and the fact that I am unmedicated, and don't seem distressed about it, and they decide I am making it up. Every time. Right before they decide I must be a horrible person who would make up being able to relate to what they are saying just for social approval or some shit they should know I don't care about. Like the reason why I experience these things but am not distressed by them is because I manage my symptoms well and at no point have ever thought any of it was 'real', not because these things don't happen to me sometimes. And yes, the only thing between me and experiencing these things to a point of absolute distress, is the fact that I don't work and can sleep when I need to. I'm not out here trying to tell them how to manage themselves I am out here just nodding and saying 'yeah I know that can suck, this is my experience of it, it sucks.'

That is also why I am letting half my sleep schedule shift to a daytime slot. The point of this is to test the water and see where it goes, yes, but not to have a sleep deprivation induced episode that ruins my life or gets me on the news. Everyone in the world slowly goes insane if they don't get enough sleep. We know that. I am not about to do that to myself in the name of only sleeping at "appropriate hours U.U" and that's kind of the whole point of contention I have always had with the world.

Everyone is under the impression that if I'd -just- force myself awake during the day, I'd be tired enough to sleep at "appropriate times XD" and won't believe me when I tell them just how much it doesn't work like that.

I am going to keep trying to sleep at night, and keep documenting how that goes for me, but like... I can tell you from my lived experiences that the chances of my body ever "getting used" to sleeping at night for 8 hours is uh... Pretty much zero. hasn't happened in 36 years under any circumstances, so...

I think some people are just genetically programmed to be the "night watch" I think this is healthy human variance, and I think we do everyone with that hard-wiring a systemic abuse by acting like it's an aberration that needs to be fixed.

[gwydionmisha]

Mystery Solved and Jesus Fuck is it stupid and pointless.

We solved the sling. It is all to stupid for words. The first two weeks post op are crucial for correct recovery. We wasted them on needless pointless torture because I am fat. We'll find out the extent of the catastrophe tomorrow afternoon.

She did this terrible, nightmarish dangerous thing to me without examination or measuring me based entirely on her first glance at me from the hallway. I could have lost some fingers or the whole hand. I could have had nerve damage. I have no idea if the bones healed right.

I suspect they were treating me at the surgeon's office on Friday like I was crazy and hysterical because the things I was telling them made no sense. It was likely inconceivable to them that a PT would over ride a surgeon like that to do something so pointlessly damaging to a patient, so clearly I must be saying it wrong.

We were planning for Squirrel to come into the appointments as a third party to explain things since I am not in great shape from two weeks of extreme sleep deprivation necessary for holding my arm as still as possible and keeping the arm from falling out of the sling and the constant battle to keep massaging blood into my hand.

We are still doing the Squirrel talks to the doctor thing because "PT knew the surgeon had messed up when she saw I was fat from the hallway" can't sound anything other than insanity. I'm keeping the sling fitting appointment because I have now directions for things like proper strap and arm position for the normal people sling only the special fat people torture device one which I don't trust for obvious reasons.

How did we solve it you may ask? I was taking things out of the bag from the hospital to put away, retrieving the papers with things like sleep directions, when I looked down and saw my entire arm had slithered out of the sling for the second time. I must have been holding the Forbidden Sling at the time. In my alarm, I put what I was holding down and went to get Squirrel to fix the arm issue.

It's black. I set it on the canvass back pack next to wear the bags go. Camouflage. The arm thing was so dramatic since I wasn't used to having to manhandle it back in constantly yet. I thought I was doing something wrong because they hadn't mentioned how easy it was for the arm to fall out of an immobility sling. I had intended to put the forbidden sling next to the sink to use when I showered. When we couldn't find it anywhere I thought I must have misremembered things given I'd had my bones stolen earlier that day and anesthesia recovery.

When the forearm began to deteriorate precipitously I searched again in hopes because I thought that having a sling that would hold my wrist at a natural angle and not restrict blood to the hand might help, and my normal sling had likely slid between the desk and the filing cabinet and I was struggling to cope with the pain the jostling from breathing was causing, so crawling around on the floor trying to keep the arm from falling out of the sling while the arm felt like it was being stabbed, flayed, and set on fire all at once. I couldn't do a thorough search because of my condition.

By Sunday, my neck, back, shoulder, and arm muscles were exhausted from almost two weeks of having to constantly try to hold the arm still without help from the sling. Keep in mind I wasn't meant to be using the shoulder at all if I could help it because you are supposed to give it as close to complete rest as humanly possible, but because of the special fat person torture sling that wasn't physically possible. Even the trick of sitting at my desk using a pillow in my lap to take some of the weight off my shoulder and trapping the arm between my stomach and the desk couldn't help any more because the shoulder muscles were just done.

I could think a little better with the Millennial altered sling because my hand was better and if I kept my wrist still enough it didn't hurt that much more than the surgery. I hadn't seen the bags during the Friday search, but the little table where things going to the car like bags go is cluttered, and had a lot of extra stuff I'd forgotten to stow in the hectic couple of days before surgery. I decided to see if I'd left the sling in a bag by accident and found it on the back pack.

Squirrel put me in it and built the stabilization nest before leaving for game. Millennial altered sling went into the wash as I wanted to run that after Goth Millennial bathed me so I could produce it in evidence for the doctor and explain why we had to alter it and why everything had gone to shit and why we went against medical orders and had me wear the Forbidden Sling.

So I'm lying there using meditation to try to unclench the muscles I'd spent all that time training never to relax, and I notice what feels like darted fabric against my forearm skin similar to the Millennial alterations to the other sling. O.o. So I felt the parts of the sling I'd never seen because I was looking from above. I'd had a neural block so there had been no chance of me feeling the dart in the couple hours before it had been confiscated because I was "too big." (She kept talking about how big I was and how that that was a problem to me and the nurses. I'm short. There is no ambiguity here.)

The sling had been carefully hand altered.

If it had really been the wrong sling it would have been generic.

They'd measured me for the sling at a pre-op appointment. It had been carefully altered to match my arm which was why it was so small. It had been a size large because you need more fabric to do alterations, so she replaced a custom fitted sling that had been cut down from a large so as to do essential work in the crucial first two weeks with a generic extra large I could have fit both arms plus random cargo into that compressed my hand and held my wrist at an angle it can't go without a lot of force and immobilizing hand and wrist and providing almost no support for a shoulder that had literally just been replaced.

Every other sling any of us had ever seen had let the thumb and fingers poke out, but the hole for that was in my armpit in the Special Fat Person Torture Sling. She either didn't notice or didn't care.

She kept looking at me like she'd never seen a fat person before and acting like there had never been one in short term post surgical. This was certainly not the case. I've had surgery there a lot. I've seen plenty of people a lot bigger than me. Squirrel works there and is like yeah they have plenty of bariatric supplies and there are other fat patients in the hospital all the time so them not having any experience with fat people at the hospital is exactly as weird as it seemed to recovering from anesthesia at the time. (To be clear there is nothing wrong with being fat. I'm not ashamed. I'm mentioning the range of fat people they help regularly to try to convey how weird it was that no one seemed to have any kind of training to deal with not skinny people and that I was not remotely unusual. If I had required bariatric equipment, I still would have deserved to be treated like a person. Everyone deserves to be treated like a person. I'm visibly queer and other staff were using pronouns. I can't remember if she got mine right or not. I can't rule it out, but she never mentioned it, whereas she made clear repeatedly that she was doing this because I'm big).

She could have examined the sling, but she would have had to see me as a person instead of assuming all fat people automatically needed an XL sling for all medical situations regardless of size. She could have measured me to see what size sling would be normal for a person my actual size, but she'd have had to look at and touch me to do that and she could barely force herself to do that during the confiscation. She could have called someone more experienced who'd seen a shoulder replacement sling and/or a fat person before to ask if the sling looked wrong to her. She could have checked my chart. She could have called upstairs to ask if they were sure they had the right sling. She could have called the surgeon or surgeon's office. She could have looked at the custom sling properly while cannibalizing it for a belly strap. She could have actually looked at the fit after hastily and squeamishly putting it on me and thought, "Shouldn't I see fingers?" and stopped to think for a minute.

It took me about a minute to think of all these options that would have been simple and common sense. She couldn't take even a minute to think of one of them.

She did this dangerous horrifically damaging and painful thing without a single thought. Not a one.

I'm sure nothing will happen to her. She'll likely never even be told what she did so she would know not to do it again.

I spent two weeks in hell just because she glanced at me from the hall, saw I wasn't thin, and never noticed or thought through anything after.

None of it was necessary.

I wish I could find out right now how fucked I am on arm recovery. Afternoon feels a long time away.

I thought long and hard about whether I wanted to post something this personal about my health, but I think people need to know because shoulder replacement is a pretty common surgery once you pass a certain age.

Did I mention I had to talk her into letting me keep the forbidden sling. She was really reluctant. She almost threw it out.

[globodamorte]

I'm kinda pissed off.

(lmao had to put it under a cut bc it got LONG)

didne sleep well like usual woke up with my neck hurting and my mom screaming calling for me like and when I asked what she wanted she just said "come.downstairs and help me call your sibling" and like.ok IG God fucking damn I'm in pain ok call the sibling let's go downstairs idk what she wants and she was like "just help me. clean your room. clean the cats litter. just Do something..." and she started fuckin. telling my cousin how much she hates that we don't do things the exact moment she asks us. and how "wrongly" she raised us..while I'm fucking sleep deprived and in pain and generally exhausted. constantly.

and I'm trying my best but I can't say that bc I don't "DO" anything and therefore I basically "DON'T HAVE THE RIGHT" to be exhausted and if I'm in pain that's MY fault for being a sedentary fat bitch bc again I don't "DO" anything. and I KNOW she's upset about my weight bc she's said so before one time she got pissed and yelled at me and just HAD to mention how I'm just getting fatter at home without doing anything with my life. it doesn't even matter to her that I lost 5kg in a month all of a sudden if her old jeans can't fit me then I'm still too fat IG.

I'm in so much pain and every little thing is so fucking difficult for me and I'm so exhausted all the time and I can't mention it bc to her (or anyone for that matter) bc I'm "lazy". she decided I'm "not as depressed anymore so why am I being like this?". like I'm already stopped doing the thing my ent doctor asked bc it's just. too many things and I keep forgetting at the end of the day. I WANT to do it. but it's HARD. EVERYTHING IS SO HARD. but things CAN'T be hard for me bc I'm "intelligent and smart (<- had good grades in fucking. grade and middle school I guess)" I'm TRYING. but it doesn't matter to them. bc to them I'm not. to them I'm being lazy.

like idk i feel like it's so dishonest to compare me to a non (or let's be real, less) traumatized version of myself. like bitch yeah sure I was 10 and got good grades. I still dealt with bullying from my own "friends" and self image issues I couldn't tell my parents about. I had to hear sexist comments about my body when I was , FUCKING 10, and not being able to do anything about it bc the solution was just to exist differently I guess.

like ofc I understand that they can't see inside my head to fully understand but they don't even partially understand and I'm terrified of trying to explain. I'm trying my best. I really am. some days my best will be making food for everyone. some days my best will be showering and doing my skincare. some days it will be brushing my teeth at least once. and yeah some days it'll be nothing. but when I think about the way they see me I start feeling crazy "am I really trying? did I manage to trick myself? am I actually fine and just pretended so hard that now I think I'm actually ill"

i don't even know anymore. I'm exhausted.

it literally does not matter to them. if I stay out all day and come back and say I'm tired they be like "but you don't do anything" I realized it's almost an automated response from them (at least from my younger sibling it is) there was one time I did do a lot of things at home. in front of this sibling. and when I just sat down and went "oof I'm tired" they were like "but you didn't do anything" and I realized. it literally doesn't matter if I do or don't do anything they WILL say the same thing.

no matter what I do it really will never be enough for them. they just want me to magically not be mentally ill anymore. they will never say this, but what they want from me is basically that. I just need to stop "moping around", lose weight, get a job (which I do NOT feel capable of doing it maintaining), and be happy. easy right? it's not like I have a good reason to be like this (,they're the reason,) they dont want ME. they want the version of me inside their heads that honestly I don't. think ever existed. bc if I try going back to pinpoint the moment 'everything went wrong' I'll just keep going back forever bc there's no moment like that. I guess I just took longer to break but the thing is. now I'm broken.

[flyingjosephine-blog]

Right, so this is for the #alexbreaks100 celebration.

The amazing @cillmequick 's Lockdown Series has been my little obsession, lately, since discovering it by chance while on holiday. Alex, you deserve each and every follower you have, because your writing it's just so good!

I decided to go with: 👨🏻‍🍳 Banana Bread.

This little scenario has been playing on loop on my mind for a while and I just had to get it out. I have no idea of the result, but it was just soooo much fun writing it, whatever the outcome may be…!

Warnings: 🔞 smut, with a little bit of plot; use of sex toys; unprotected sex; mention of insomnia.

Author's note: I used to write when I was younger, but it's been a long while since then, so please bear with me. Plus, this is the first time ever I attempted to write smut, I just tried to do my best but I still feel very insecure about it (even more since there are so many incredibily good writers out there...!).

Disclaimer: English is not my first language, hope this is not completely unreadable. I proofread it at least ten times, but I'm sure there are still some grammatical and/or spelling mistakes somewhere in there...I'll find out just after I posted it, right? Because that's how these kind of things work!

❗️This is a completely fantasy work. No disrespect intended to the real Cillian or his family ❗️

Soundtrack: I have been obsessed with Coconut Skins by Damien Rice in the last period and I have been listening to it on repeat while writing this story.

Ok, enough rambling. Took me almost a week to find the gut and I am still nervous beyond words 😅, but here it comes...

Insomnia

Once again you couldn't fall asleep. Scrolling lazily through your phone, laying wide awake in bed, you were barely focusing on anything that popped up on your screen. Your eyes were watering, stinging slightly, but even though you could sense your body and mind being exhausted, still sleep wouldn't come. One of the many gifts lockdown was spoiling you with: insomnia. Huffing and restless, you changed slightly position under the duvet; your legs started hitching, your skin crawling like all the muscles in your body weren't able to stay still one more minute. You knew you had to get up, either you wanted or not, otherwise you'd be tossing and turning the very next moment, eventually waking up Cillian.

Right, Cillian. He, on the other hand, was sleeping like a baby, you noticed, feeling a sting of annoyance. The pale light of the streetlamp just across the road casted deep shadows all across his body, his bare shoulders scattered with freckles and his broad chest, evenly rising and falling. Seeing him so quiet, you felt like bitching and throwing a fit, even though you knew you were being completely unreasonable and irrational and it was none of his fault. But sleep deprivation can surely play horrible tricks on your mind and mood, you argued with yourself. You just wanted to get some rest, that was all you were asking for, honestly. To stop and feeling constantly on the edge, tensed and anxious and so fucking tired and sleepy, your mind clouded. Lockdown was a pain in the ass enough as it was, no need to add in the madness.

At least, after all Cillian and you got through in the last year, you had the chance to be with one another. And that was more than you would have hoped for.

Trying not to make too much noise, you threw your legs out of the duvet, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking out for your slippers, nowhere to be seen. Scout, you snorted internally.

“Love?” came a sleepy voice behind your back and the table lamp on Cillian's side flicked on.

Shit.

“Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you up”, you whispered, while he sat up, settling against the headboard. The complete silence you were experiencing those nights – no cars or people on the street, no teenager getting drunk below your windows or lovers laughing passing by – was unreal.

“Again?” he asked, keeping his voice low as well, though there was no real reason for it. He had been witnessing your insomnia for the past week and he was starting to get worried, seeing how bad it was affecting you, not only in the night, but during the day as well. Making you unsettled and cranky. Jesus, Cillian really must loved you to put up with you lately. You barely could stand yourself.

“Yeah. I'm sorry, babe. Really, go back to sleep. Don't worry, I'll be downstairs with a good book” you gently stroke his fingers, splayed on the sheets between you. He gripped your wrist, moving under the sheets to scoot over to where you were sat.

“Ei, don't be sorry. It's not your fault, but I think you really need to relax, love, and get some proper rest” he sighed, his eyes soft, looking at you behind those ridiculously long eyelashes of his. He kissed softly your bare shoulder. A small smile was playing at the corner of his lips and you caught a spark in his gaze, suddenly not sleepy anymore.

You tilted your head: “What are you thinking of, Cillian?”.

You wanted to sound annoyed, but actually it came out more amused than you intended for it to be. Lately, he was suggesting some quite funny shit to try and set you asleep. Some ethnic infusion he found online, that tasted like piss; a bubbly hot bath, smelling of cinnamon and vanilla, that resulted in Scout trying his best to get in the tub with you, making a mess of the bathroom; an ASMR playlist that made him nod off immediately, but, on the other hand, drove you almost crazy. How can people find some random noises relaxing? Impossible to deny, he really tried his best and you loved him for it, but still you were a bit wary to hear what was coming next.

The smile broke wide on his mouth, then, and he let go of your hand, reaching for his bedside table's drawer from where he retrieve a small white box. Although the box was completely plain, no sign or label, you immediately recognised what it was.

Oh, so that was what he had in mind. You felt yourself smiling as well.

“Well, maybe the time has come for you to try your new little toy...” he teased, raising an eyebrow, and you giggled. But the playfulness was immediately cut off by Cillian quickly gripping your arms and pulling you flat onto the bed with him again.

The main reason - almost the only one - you bought it was the feral look in Cillian’s eyes the second he saw it on your laptop screen. A friend of yours passed you the website's link, half as a joke, during an afternoon Skype Call you arranged just to kill time, and curiosity got the best of you. You hadn’t ever possessed or even used a toy, not by yourself or with any other partner. Not with Cillian either. And, truth be told, you never felt the need to. You probably would have not even thought about actually purchasing one that day, hadn’t been for the way he clenched his jaw and swallow a little too hard, asking you what you were doing, gaze fixated on the vibrator showing on the web page. And it was then and there you decided that maybe you could use a bit of a distraction during the tensed and excruciatingly slow lockdown days ahead of you.

Actually, you almost forgot about it, after it was delivered, having put the box away inside your walk-in wardrobe; and he had never suggested using it, either. But he must have been thinking about it, you now realised, seeing he had taken it and placed it in his drawer, within reach.

The vibrator was lean, not very thick, surely not as Cillian’s cock, and it had quite a peculiar shape, bulging on one side at the very tip. It was soft, silky almost, and a very bright pink in colour, with two little buttons on the white handle and a faint silicone smell. Cillian looked at it almost mesmerized and you could tell by the frown on his forehead he hadn’t ever used one too. But he seemed determined to make it good to you, so you just laid back and relaxed, slipping out of your nightgown in one swift movement, spreading your legs wide and feeling yourself getting wet at the mere thought of what was coming.

Cillian’s breath itched at the sight, spurring you on incredibly; you gripped at the headboard above you with one hand, letting the other slowly brush over your stomach. You felt so fucking powerful being on display like that and seeing what it was doing to him, his eyes darkening while he kneeled between your legs and gripped your thighs hard. Your fingers inched down.

“Don’t” he growled. This little game really was turning him on, you thought, a smile pulling at the corner of your lips, but you complied nonetheless, even though you were already aching for some sort of friction. It was always like that with him and it never ceased to amaze you: one look and you were ready to go. That craving for him never satiated, it seemed.

“Then get down to work, Murphy” you encouraged.

That was all it took. He turned on the vibrator, while hovering over you and gently nuzzling your lips, his soft hair tickling your face, before placing a soft kiss and licking your mouth slowly. He wouldn’t let you deepen the kiss, though, teasing you almost wickedly while at the same time running the small device inside your thigh.

Oh, that was fucking good. The low vibrations spreading through your skin and setting your flesh on fire, the sweet smell of him filling you senses and his warm weight engulfing you. You couldn’t imagine what it would be like feeling those vibrations, at last, on your cunt, hot and ready. But it seemed like Cillian wanted to take his time, savouring your small whimpers and gasps of anticipation, your mouth falling open under his lips and he quickly pushed his tongue inside, groaning, and devouring you with a sudden force and impatience, while all the same his hand moved still frustratingly slowly toward your centre. How he can be so focused and controlled was beyond your comprehension, as you already felt yourself coming undone, drifting towards the promised pleasure that was making your head dizzy and light.

You breathed deep through your nose, trying to slow down your racing heart, pushing your hands through his hair and kissing him back with the same unashamed need. A mess of ragged breaths, hot saliva and swollen lips. You opened your eyes to drown yourself into his blue ones, just at the same time he finally drove the vibrator on your core, sliding it between your wet folds and you could not stopped your hips from jolting suddenly and a deep moan escaping your mouth.

“Fuck”

“Feels good?”, his voice was so low, darkened by deep arousing, you heard yourself groaning again at the sheer sound of it.

“Fuck”, seemed the only word you could remember or utter in breathy whines and he smiled before tilting his head and latching his mouth to your neck, pressing open-mouthed kisses on your throat, drawing his tongue along the soft and sensitive skin there, where your pulse was running erratically.

His right hand continued to work the small tool through your folds, sliding it easily, coating it with your wetness and teasing your opening, while neglecting purposely your clit. You arched your back, bolts of pleasure exploding under your skin, running up your spine, coiling and boiling in you stomach. The new sensation so powerful you barely could get a grip of it, sparking so suddenly and so forcefully you could only try and go with the flow, not letting it drown you. Not yet, you thought.

He pinned your hips on the mattress with his other hand, his fingers digging into your soft flesh enough to leave a mark, stilling as much as possible your movements. You couldn’t push up, but you still could rotate your pelvis, grinding against Cillian's hand as much as you could, desperate for more. Your walls clenching around nothing, your swollen clit begging for some touch, some pressure, some...anything. The frustration was building fast. Was this his idea of helping you relax? Christ, he was driving you crazy.

“More, please”, you meant to sound convincing, instead it came out more like a pleading whine. You sensed his lips, kissing tenderly on your breasts, curl up a little. The little bastard. He may had not used a toy before, but he was certainly a quick learner and enjoying every bit of it. He bit down on your nipple, eliciting a small cry from you, and he stilled his hand.

“What?”, he asked in a growl.

Right, you thought, he had set his mind on killing you. So much was clear.

“Cillian”, you pleaded again. He wanted you to beg? God, you would beg. You were far past giving a fuck about decency or pride. His breath was ragged against your skin and he exhaled slowly, before returning to your mouth, kissing you hard and wet and getting back to where he had left, rubbing the vibrator's rounded head on your clit.

“Oh, Jesus”, you cried, your legs going tensed and closing around his hand, your back arching even more. There was no way you could keep this quiet, the sensation so foreign, so different and so damn intense you had to clench your teeth not to come on the spot.

He slowly, but steadily, slid the vibrator inside you, the stretch making you gasp and suddenly you realized why the unusual shape of its head. God, it was perfectly stroking your walls, hitting your g-spot on each and every thrust, drawing moans from your lips. Then he pushed one of the buttons on the handle, twice in a row quickly, and you felt the pulsations rising in intensity. Jesus, you could feel them anywhere, through your inner walls, spreading in your ass, in your stomach and your spine, all the way up to your nipples. It was so different from having a man inside you, but it was nonetheless so fucking good.

You gripped his shoulders to try and ground yourself, your head falling back and your mouth hanging open, gasping out of breath, your chest tightening.

Cillian stopped his ministrations on your neck to raise his head, casting his gaze down between your bodies where his hand was moving the device inside you, now faster and harder, the skin of your face and breast flushed, the muscles in your belly and thighs trembling. Your eyes following his, you saw his strong wrist between your legs, twirling gently, and his hard cock straining against his night pants. Even though you didn't think it was possible, the pleasure inside you grew even more. Each wave higher than the previous, stronger and deeper. It was consuming your body from the inside, like a hot fire spreading in your bowels and trying to find a way to surface.

Cillian's deep groan caught you off guard and you almost let go of your impending orgasm, rising so high in your stomach. He was drinking in every move you made, every sound you let out: the way you were lightly quivering, the way your skin was glowing in the pale amber light of the room, hot and sticky, the way your brows furrowed. He was so lost in savouring how your body reacted to the different pace he was setting, slower now, every thrust dragged out almost painfully, every soft inch of the vibrator stroking inside you, he barely realised he had shifted on his knees and was palming his throbbing cock through his cotton pants, trying to ease some of the tension. Fuck, he was out of breath himself. He could have got off simply looking at you, needy and lost in the pleasure he was giving you. You looked and felt so his, that he was enthralled.

You slid your hands from his shoulders, gripping his arms and then moving on, dragging your fingers on his chest, his ribs and lower on his stomach, scratching lightly your nails around his navel and the soft skin just below. You had to touch him. He quickly got the hint and abruptly stopped stroking himself, grabbing your wrists instead, forcefully. It would never cease to amaze you how his hands were big enough to take both of yours in one.

“No”, he protested, through uneven breaths “This is about you, babe”.

He flicked your clit with his thumb, his hand gone from your wrists, drawing small circles and increasing the pressure on each touch.

“Then...” you tried to say around a moan “I want to come around you”.

His eyes on yours, you saw his pupils blowing off, making them almost black and his jaw clenching. He had a hell of a self-control when it came to sex, you had to give him credit for that, but even Cillian fucking Murphy had his limitations. And you knew he was on the verge of the breaking point by the way he froze and took a deep, though shaky, breath through his open mouth.

“Please, I need you inside me. Now”, you pushed.

He, finally, succumbed to his own need, crashing his mouth on yours while sliding the vibrator out of your cunt. The sudden emptiness made you shiver, but was immediately replaced by the warm wetness of his cock's head pushing inside. Cillian's balanced himself, one hand each side of your head, before entering you completely with a swift movement of his hips. Buried entirely in you, he lowered himself even more, almost crushing you and trapping your body between his and the sheets. So fucking deep and not nearly enough. It was never enough with him, you were always craving for more: deeper, harder, faster, as you were constantly wishing one day he could just disappear inside you and you inside him.

You clenched your walls, as he waited for you to adjust, appreciating the small break himself. Fuck, he was so worked up already, he would have to take it slow if he wished to last more than a minute. You took the chance to run your fingers through his hair, longer than usual at the nape, and to pry his eyes on yours. He really was something else: flush spreading all over his chest, up his neck and on his cheeks, lips slightly open, swollen from all the kissing and nibbling, eyes dark and slightly hazed. You licked his bottom lips and he started moving, trying to go slow at first, wanting to savour the sensation.

But you had had more than your share of waiting, so you grabbed his ass, sinking your nails in his strained muscles and encouraging him to pick up his pace. He gladly obliged, while bowing his head to kiss and suck and lick your nipples.

Then it was like a fog descending on you and you weren't able to focus on anything anymore. You could barely distinguish whose hand was on your clit, or whose voice was the loud moan reverberating through the room. All you knew were the sweetness of the obscene sound your bodies made colliding and the spiral of delight running through you.

“Cill, I'm gonna...”, words strained in your throats, struggling to get out.

“Let it go, love. I got you.” he panted, sighing at the impossible tightness of you, fluttering around his throbbing cock.

He grabbed the back of your thighs, raising them and changing the angle of his thrusts, fucking you even harder, each stroke pushing him so deep you swore you could feel him in your stomach.

That was it: you came hard and fast, waves of pleasure and shivers coursing through you, moaning loudly something you yourself wouldn't know what it was – his name, God's name, who would have known? - and eliciting a seemingly endless stream of curses from Cillian's lips. Still he kept on thrusting hard, not relenting a bit, all through you orgasm and you were just coming down from it when you felt him tense, all of his muscles straining, and come inside you. Warm, so warm.

He stayed inside you a while longer, regaining his breath and waiting till your body stopped trembling.

Then he spooned behind you, engulfing you in his arms and resting his head in the crook of your neck, placing casual little kisses there from time to time. You laced your fingers with his, stroking lazily the back of his hand with your thumb and sighing contently; your eyes were drifting close, your whole body so relaxed you had a feeling that you were melting away.

“Better?” he asked, smugly and you knew, even without looking at him, he was smiling.

“Mmmh”, you mumbled, your capacity to form words long gone now, while he slipped one of his legs between yours.

“Well, now at least we know how to fight off your insomnia” he scoffed, nuzzling the soft spot just behind your ear.

And with that your world shut down, dark descending on you, but not before one last thought had the strength to cross your mind. You were one lucky bitch to have Cillian in your life; and you knew, deep down, he was there to stay for good.

[anxious2dsimp]

General Dating Headcanons | Sero, Todoroki & Bakugou

‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾｡･:*:･ﾟ★｡*✧･ﾟ:˚۰˚☽˚｡･:

‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾｡･:*:･ﾟ★｡*✧･ﾟ:˚۰˚☽˚｡･:

Pairings: Sero x Reader, Todoroki x Reader, Bakugou x Reader

Reader: Gender Neutral!

Format: Headcanons​

Warnings: Cursing bc Bakugou 🙄 (as if I wasn’t the one who picked him lmao)

Request: :))) hellooooo :D hmmmm may i get general dating headcanons for sero, todoroki, and [insert your favorite character]? 💖💖💖💖💖💖💖 @smexy-goose

‧͙⁺˚*･༓☾｡･:*:･ﾟ★｡*✧･ﾟ:˚۰˚☽˚｡･:

Hi again!! Omg yes, I’ll gladly write some hcs for the best bois! I had a hard time picking a fave, but since I have written for Kami and Kiri in the last request I decided to go with blasty boy❤️ (Also, I’m trying a new way to post requests, I hope it works!)

Sero Hanta

I feel like Sero is genuinely so fun to date, just like he said in that one dorm episode, he’s always the wild card.

He’s a goofball, so he adores making you laugh and smile as much as he can. I love him omg😭

Will definitely take advantage of his height (he’s among the taller ones in the class) and give you surprise hugs from behind and rest his head on yours.

He’ll also use his quirk on you for everything from pranks to just randomly pulling you to him to give you a quick peck or a hug :’)

He’s pretty standard with PDA, so he won’t go around making out with you in public but he will do little gestures like those <3

In private I feel like he’s definitely cuddly, he’s just so happy to be with you!

He loves having you over at his room to just chill or be in each other’s presence, even if you’re doing stuff individually.

Speaking of, the bakusquad definitely complains about you having privilege in using the hammock in Hanta’s room. 

Denki will whine like; “why does y/n always get to use the hammock? You said it was out of bounds!”

“That’s on pretty privilege, sorry! And you’re just jealous you don’t have a cool s/o like mine,” Sero will say and poke his tongue out from the hammock where you’re swinging togehter :’) 

I’m warning you now, if you had a healthy sleep schedule before going out with him, you can kiss it goodbye.

Sero will absolutely be up till like 3 am sending you memes and tiktoks that remind him of you.

And with him blowing up your phone you’ll most likely end up talking into ungodly hours of the night, the *sleep deprivation* only causing funnier conversations.

Those will end up becoming inside jokes that he’ll bring up to make you laugh while the rest of the class is like ???

That also results in some weird ass nicknames sorry not sorry

So he’ll sometimes call you regular stuff like babe and other times... he’ll call you things like “Bert” (FOR NO REASON??) or “Candied Blood Pumping Organ” instead of sweetheart lmao

Overall you two are just THE chaotic couple (and if you’re not generally that way he will bring out that side of you)

Pranking your classmates? Pranking each other? Random ass adventures? Trying weird food together? Dancing in the kitchen at midnight while sharing late night snacks? By going out with him you said yes to all of the above.

From sneaking out of the dorms for late night food runs to occasionally skipping class to go to the arcade or the beach, you usually can’t go a week without doing something fun togehter.

This one time you two were out with the Bakusquad and y’all stopped by a supermarket to get food. 

So you had to ask Bakugou to buy you something bc you and Sero had to stay outside and just hand him the money.

He was like “tf?? why? Just buy your shit yourselves!” You had to explain you two were banned from the store because Hanta had accidentally crashed a cart he was driving you around in into a display of cereal boxes.

Ah yes, good times.

Todoroki Shoto

I feel like he’ll definitely need a small push when it comes to relationships bc of his past, but once you’re with him he’ll care deeply about you and will try to make you as happy as you make him :’)

I’m begging you, please give this boy some luv and affection!! For the most part you’d probably initiate PDA because he’s too nervous to do it himself

At the beginning he wouldn’t even be comfy cuddling, solely because he’d be afraid of hurting you somehow :(

But once you’ve reassured him he complies, and from then on out you just have to open your arms and he’ll instantly know it’s *cuddle time*

It’a one of his favorite pastimes bc he just feels so safe and loved <3 he also just loves the feeling of you playing with his hair

Luckily you get to do it year round since you cuddle his hot side in the winter and cold side during the summer

I feel like he’s secretly insecure, so the fact that you trust him and love him for who he is makes him feel like he could melt <3

Because of that you’re the only one he truly opens up to and shows his real feelings to, not to mention the only one who can touch his scar

And though he isn’t great with words, one look at him during one of these personal moments when its just you two, and you can just see it in his eyes.

Especially if you kiss his scar, his eyes might even get teary this sweet boy I 😭

That’s also probably why he shares his precious cold soba with you

Since you’ve been together, Shoto has just been so much happier, so his siblings and mother LOVE you.

They’re constantly inviting you over for dinner when Endevour is working (bc he’s a huge buzzkill to say the least), and his mom adores when you come with Shoto to visit her :)

Todoroki really enjoys seeing you get along with the people he cares the most about...

 BUT what he hates is THE EMBARRASING STORIES HIS FAMILY TELLS YOU OMG (you live for them, but I wouldn’t tell him that if I were you)

“Fuyumi remember when Shoto-” “Natsuo, no💙“ your bf will say as he unconsciously squeezes your hand, both of the siblings laughing at Shoto’s glare.

You had to hold in your laughter so hard omg

Though he isn’t that talkative, you guys definitely have that kind of relationship where you two could be silent and still feel completely comfortable (oh I’m so jealous of that but nvm)

He’s definitely observant, so expect the most considerate gifts and the most assertive observations, he’ll always know what you need.

The type of observant that gives you a water bottle before you even notice you’re thristy during training, or switches sides while walking so you loop your arm with his on his warm side when you’re cold.

Also the type to gift you that one thing you really wanted but mentioned once like months ago along with your favorite snacks/drink (you best believe he has them all memorized bc he’s just that attentive)

Over all, just a really soothing relationship were you can be comfortable with each other and feel at home when you’re together.

Bakugou Katsuki

Ok so, I feel like you’d be a competitive couple, turning anything into a competition in an endearingly annoying way.

You’re definitely the type of couple to go to laser tag, an escape room, an arcade, etc, as dates >:) but the competitions don’t end there:

Who can plan the best date? Who can make the other blush first? Who can get the other the better gift? Who’s the better kisser? Who gets the higher score in class? Or wins at sparring?

Especially when it comes to productive stuff like training or academics, although he won’t admit it, he’s just pushing you to be your best because he knows how amazing you are :’)

All the bakusquad knows about your shenanigans and at this point they’ve learnt to stay out of it & go get the Advil just in case bless their souls lmao

I’m sorry but he definitely calls you nicknames that purposely piss you off (with no ill intentions ofc), like “gremlin”, “dumbass” or “booger”

I suggest you also call him stuff like that back, like “angry pom” or “blasty” to get on his nerves >:)

You guys also definitely friendly bicker all the time, knowing that you take it lightly (though strangers won’t, resulting in some hilariously awkward situations)

“You’re such a fucking idiot,” he’ll say rolling his eyes as he messes up your hair.

Just watch his smirk dissapears when you reply, “no, u❤️″ It gets on his nerves, I just know it.

So he’ll chase you around as you call each other random stuff. While the other people at the convenience store are just like  👁👄👁

He never means it tho, keep in mind if you’re dating the self proclaimed future no. 1 hero he thinks highly of you :)

So he’d definitely be protective while simultaneously showing you off <3

Will always greet you with a kiss and keep his hand on your back or waist so ppl know you’re with him

RIP anyone who tries to hurt or flirt with you, I say try bc Bakugou will be exploding them even before they get the chance😅

Denki’s definitely almost gotten his brows blown off his face bc of that lol

Speaking of, the bakusquad still can’t get over the fact that THE lord explosion murder has a soft spot for you,

You mean you take care of his injuries, scold him when he burns himself out, touch his hair, and hug him when his moody... and you DON’T get cussed out and blown up? Shooketh

However they don’t see what happens behind closed doors, & how you’ve helped him with all the trauma he has experienced

You’re the only one who he is vulnerable with, you’ve seen him cry and he tells you about his nightmares and fears

You do the same with him, and you promise each other to get through anything together, which you’ve done so far :’)

Bc of that his parents love you, and his mom’s always going on about how she’s so glad you “stand” his son😂

Why can’t he be real ughhh

[stellocchia]

This is part 3 of the Comprehensive Analysis of c!Tommy and c!Dream’s relationship during the Exile Arc

Part 1 -  Part 2

Here we go again! When I started this I did NOT think it would be this long or take this much time, that said the Exile Arc is very nice to rewatch. There are a lot of little moments I didn’t notice on first watch. 

Anyway, as always from here on out it’ll all be about the characters and we will be discussing some heavy topics so do keep that in mind!

We are now onte the 4th proper Exile stream: Tommy Is Holding It Together in Exile with Dream

This one peculiarly enough does not start with Tommy drowning. Also I want to mention that this is the second time during exile where Tommy mentions that he thinks he is allucinating. The first time it was in regard to seeing a group of mobs, this time it was in regard to Tubbo being on-line. Also at the beginning of the stream he finds a present left from HBomb consisting of 1 fire resistance potion 1 strenght II potion, Wait and a photo of the Queen, Tubbo and Vikkstar.

“We need to do something and quick today. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but every single day at the start of my stream Dream logs on uh... and I’m starting... *sigh* he said that Technoblade was over there” (moment when he decides to go scout out Techno’s cabin)

“Okay, what if- just- just to investigate it because I know- I know that big man Dream wouldn’t be too happy if he knew so...” (the manipulation is turning out to be quite effective)

By the way, the reason Tommy states for wanting to see Techno at this point is literally just too feel again like there was someone near (he did say “to smell” someone near, which does tie in with him saying he could “almost smell” Dream when he was searching Techno’s cabin when only Ghostbur and Tommy were there, which I’m sure we could analize further, but I won’t), not to team with him. Once again, :t no point was it Tommy’s intention for them to team up. 

“I’m very lonely out here heh, I’m very lonely back home” (casual use of “home” to referr to Logstedshire)

“I wanna go back, I wanna go back. I don’t like this no I don’t like this now we’ve been away for too long” (panicked speach patterns get worse the longer he is away)

“Friend??? No, horse” (Lmao)

“Dream wouldn’t want me going in here...” “Dream wouldn’t like it if I was here! Dream wouldn’t like it if I stole! He’d loose his shit, he’d loose his shit. Surely not...” *Dream joins the game* “oh Oh OH NO! I’m in deep fried shit!”

I want to point out that I personally think a bit of time has passed since last stream, mainly because of this progression. At this point it’s not only fear of physical pain prompting him to act a certain way, it’s also Dream’s conditioning: suddenly what Dream wants it’s extremely important and the same goes with what he would and wouldn’t approve of. And, if I remember correctly, this particular scene was quite the eye opener for a lot of the audience at the time. 

“Okay we run back we run back we run back we run back *screams* okay which way’s back? which way’s back? which way’s back? He [Dream] can’t know he can’t know” (panicked speach patterns once again, getting worse)

“I knew I shouldn’t have gone there, that was stupid that was stupid that was stupid” (self-loathing)

“Now how do I get home?” “No no, chat, we should just get home!” “We should probably get home quick” “Is anyone at home? Maybe Wilbur came home” (Logsteshire has now the title of “home”, but it’s definitely not safe)

“No!” *creeper blows up* “*sigh* I deserve that” (self-loathing)

“You know let’s clean up our land. What we need to do before... before He arrives. Maybe we should make a little safe spot, nah, there isn’t enough time today. You know I reckon after last night He is gonna be okay with us, He is gonna be much more...” (hard time speaking or thinking about Dream)

Tommy proceeds to seat down with the compass listening to Far and looking towards L’Manburg for a while. Then Tubbo (hallucination, which is quite worrying) comes out of the portal with the compass in hand and they stare at each other for a bit, after that he keeps seeing Tubbo (always hallucination) throughout the stream. 

“I actually just woke up Tommy and I came straight here, to visit you” “Why would you go stra- straight here?” “Because I wanted to see you~” “Why?” “Uh, because we’re friends” “Oh yeah... hi Dream!” “Hello”

Dream arrives and blows up Tommy’s armour and weapons (I actually did not remember about Dream taking the weapons every time as well, but it does make sense in Dream’s f*cked up way considering that his intent was leaving Tommy entirely defenceless so that he would be more dependent on him). This time though, Dream makes Tommy light up the tnt, with minimal resistance from Tommy at this point (he just says: “I don’t really want to”, but he can’t bring himself to resist more then that). 

I do find quite interesting that every time they seem to have the blowing up and insecurities part of the conversation at first and then basically re-start all over. It happened last stream as well. Also, Dream keeps accentuating 2 points to Tommy: how everything back in L’Manburg is better without him there and how, while it is basically effortless to come visit Tommy, he is the only one making the effort (even going as far as going to visit first thing in the morning). 

“I’ve had a little idea by the way, I want to know what you think” “Okay” “And also if I’m allowed” “Okay” “*sigh* Basically, I’ve been thinking, you know how we made our Big Path to get home?” “Yes, it’s been a little while” “Yeah yeah, I’m thinking: I throw a party!”

So, couple of things to talk about here: Tommy feels the need to constantly ask Dream for permission (because Dream just puts so many rules to this supposed “exile”), another indication of some time having passed since the last stream for them, considering that the last stream was literally the day before irl (I’m talking about the “it’s been a little while” part) and also this is when we are introduced to the idea of the party.

“I’m allowed? I’m allowed?” “Yeah, can I come?” “Of co- uh- yeah” “Okay, they’re allowed to come” (talking about the party)

“Well Dream, is it me or is it you that’s been left by themselves for about 13 days now?” (irl it’s been 4-5 days, though at least now we have a bit of a timeframe for them as well)

Ghostbur arrives with Phil (who gifts Tommy the Tommy Slippers, which are a pair of diamond boots, a stack of black wool, 8 iron blocks and a Friendship Emerald) 

“Guys are you- are you real?” “Am I real?” “Because I keep fucking seeing... I keep seeing Tubbo” (Tommy finally mentioning the hallucination to others, also Ghostbur pretends to see him, though it was confirmed later on that he wasn’t there)

“Dream’s here by the way, Dream’s always here” (now that’s kinda ominous)

“Dream, Dream I swear to Christ I think I just kept seeing Tubbo” “I didn’t see him, I never saw him once. Phil didn’t see him either, it was only you and Wilbur. Pretty sure he wasn’t here~” “My eyes are not the most reliable, I see lots of things” 

I’d say from here on out is when Tommy starts trusting Dream over his and Ghostbur’s perceptions of reality. After all, as I said at the start, this is not the first, nor the last time where he questions his own perception of reality and, as we talked about in the last analysis, it’s not the first time that Dream tries to assert himself as his main source of information (callback to him negating having ever destroyed any of Tommy’s belongings). Also Fundy came to visit giving Tommy an efficiency II fortune I diamond axe (may I point out now how Fundy is literally the one person, aside from Dream and Ghostbur, visiting the most and how he is the only one aside from Ghostbur always saying “hi” whenever Tommy logs on? Their friendship is so underrated). 

“I’m going- I’m going crackers...” “Hi Tommy! I think- I think I saw Tubbo as well” “Dream was Tubbo here?” “I did not ever see Tubbo, but I don’t know, I haven’t seen him” (confirmation of what I said before)

“Dream, now that you showed up everyone started to visit me again!” “Well I think it’s just because the- well, to be fair, are they here with you right now? They’re just running around, like, I don’t think they are here visiting you, they’re just visiting Logstedshire” “Oh” (Dream enhancing Tommy’s feeling of loneliness)

“He [Tubbo] told me he missed you” “Really?” “Well-” “Yeah! I gave him a compass that pointed towards you at all times and he siad ‘I really miss him'“ “Really?” “Yeah” (...) “I thought I saw the compass in a chest, like he threw it in a chest in the Community House, but I’m not- maybe it was a different compass, I’m not sure”

Ghostbur was actually a great support during Tommy’s exile. From pointing out the holes in Dream’s rules, to trying and reassure and support Tommy when he is feeling down, often going directly against Dream’s narrative, even going as far as creating a physical connection between Tommy and Tubbo through the compasses. It’s no surprise then that Dream tried to get rid of him right after this stream. Tommy builds his first girlfrend, “hot girl”.

“Hey Tommy, don’t you worry, I’ll be at the beach party!” (Ghostbur said, like a liar...)

“Wilbur did you burn my hit novel?” “No!” “I heard you did” “No!” “Did you know that that was the only book in history that sold better then the Bible?” “No! No! No! Didn’t do it!” (Ghostbur said again, like a liar...)

“Wilbur we need a chest room” “No I don’t really need one, I just go to L’manburg” “Low blow ghost” (Ghost [derogatory])

“I’m sleep deprived” (we’re back into character after the 20 minutes of them bullying Brand)

“I have a gift for you Tommy” *gives Tommy iron helmet, chestplate and pants* “Armour? For me?” “Yeah” “Oh thank you, thank you!” “You’re welcome”

Remember this part because Dream will use this as a point against Tommy when destroying Logstedshire, just like Techno does later on. In case anyone was wondering: if you give something freely to someone as a gift you have literally no right to then hold it over their head at a later date. That’s just manipulative as shit. 

This neds with Phil, Dream and Tommy making a cake for the beach party and deciding on the last few details, and:

“We’re getting better everyone. We’re getting- are we- we’re getting better. I guess- I guess we’re bonding... *sigh* I guess...”

I’ll leave this off by reminding everyone that Dream and Tommy called Dream blowing up Tommy’s armour and weapons “bonding”. 

[purpletaecup]

10 ☾ he said that’s how he still remembers me

warnings: explicit language (cursing), mentions of miscarriage, mentions of infidelity (not rlly but on thin ice)

notes: you guys... this is a long one and it’s kind of fast paced, but we are finally getting some answers and the drama really begins! next chapter will be emotional, that’s all I know. I’m sorry for putting you through all this angst!! also, I wanted to bring some attention to the crisis in the Philippines right now with all of the dangerous typhoons. A lot of people need donations and rescuing, so HERE is a link to a twitter thread of donation drives! Please make sure to check it out, share and help spread awareness!

as always, come talk to me in my ask box! and if you want to be added to the taglist, please send an ask, or reply to this post or the masterlist!

not edited!! sorry if there are any mistakes lmfao i usually am sleep deprived when i write so yeah, there are probably some errors.

word count: 5,614

☾

The days following Jungkook’s visit were dull, if anything. You’ve received texts from Yoongi saying that he couldn’t come visit until that weekend because he had to finish wrapping things up in advance at the company so that he could spend some time with you. You had argued over the phone like teenagers when you insisted that he didn’t need to do that and you could take care of yourself until Jin came back. Of course, that led to him ranting about what the doctor said about monitoring you and your symptoms for concussion and to get him to just shut up about the medical stuff (it made your brain hurt more than it did usually), you reluctantly agreed to his ‘visits’, as you’d rather call them.

[nov. 20, 2020]

It was Friday now and you still haven’t gotten any glimpse of actual memories back, although you have been having these strange dreams that you couldn’t really remember when you woke up. You could only describe the feeling it gave you as ‘sinking’, like you were drowning and you couldn’t escape. As much as possible, you tried not to think about these feelings, and focused more on trying to get to know the version of you who lived in this amazing apartment.

The past couple of days that you spent at this apartment put you in awe. It really was the apartment of your dreams, from the color of the furniture down to the little plants stuck in the corner of that tiny shelf in the kitchen. It was beautiful and so you. The only problem was that you couldn’t find anything to help with your current situation. You scoured every nook and cranny and couldn’t find anything dated after your wedding reception. No pictures, no post-its, notes or anything past that date. What you had found in your apartment, you already knew of (aside from the wedding photos). Past photoshoots, high school photos, a notebook full of movie ticket stubs. There was absolutely nothing in this apartment that gave you a clue to the life you lived during the four year gap in your memory.

You even tried to get into your twitter and instagram from when you were nineteen but you couldn’t log in. Wrong password every single time. When you tried to change your password for social media, the email you used had a different password too. You couldn’t figure out what you could have changed your password to. Every password combination you could think of, you tried, but none worked, so you decided to just skip that and maybe go over it later on. Or make a new one. That could work, too.

You couldn’t even look at your twitter account because for some reason, it was private and that seemed strange for someone with almost 130,000 followers. You could see your instagram account from your browser, but it wouldn’t let you see the pictures and posts in full size with the captions and comments, so you were really stuck.

A quick internet search of your name yielded things you already knew. Former model, current writer (that fact was still surprising to you). Old news articles of dating scandals that weren’t true, except for the one with Yoongi. More news articles about your divorce with no further information than what Yoongi had told you already.

It’s as if any clue about your life during your memory loss is unaccounted for. It seemed like at this point, you could only rely on other people telling you about your life and pray to whatever higher power there was to give you your memories back.

This futile search was beginning to make your stomach churn. You almost couldn’t suppress the bile rising up in your throat. Hopefully Jin would return soon. Maybe he could put all of the pieces back together for you.

☾

Jungkook sat in on the uncomfortable leather couch in Yoongi’s office as he waited for the man to finish up whatever he was typing. He looked through his instagram feed and saw one of your posts from July. For a while, he was confused as to why this picture from July would end up on his feed, but he remembered the new instagram algorithm. Curious, he clicked on your profile and looked through it slowly. He couldn’t remember the last time he actually paid attention to your posts.

“I forgot to ask but what did you and Yn do at her apartment? She said you stayed over for a couple of hours.” Yoongi asked though his eyes never strayed from his paperwork.

Jungkook looked up at him and pondered on what to say.

“Hm, yeah. I got roped into staying. She asked a bunch of questions and we looked through her apartment and her photo albums. Her apartment’s cute, by the way. Way different from what your house looked like.” He comments.

“Really?”

“Yeah. It was bright. Lots of green. Nothing I’ve ever seen in the house you guys shared.”

“How was she when you picked her up? She told me a couple of things but I haven’t seen her yet so I can’t know if what she’s telling is the truth or not.”

It was quiet for a moment, with only the sound of turning pages filling the room, as Jungkook wondered what to say to this. He didn’t really know when to start with you, especially with how different you were acting.

“Well, she’s fine. The personality is definitely different. She seems a lot more outgoing, and she had a lot of questions but she didn’t push. I think she wants to try and figure things out on her own.” Jungkook replies as he continued to slowly look through your previous instagram posts.

“She’s been like that. She hates being a burden and gets really defensive about it sometimes.” Yoongi comments.

Jungkook pauses at your most recent post. He checks the date. September 22.

“When did you guys divorce again?” He asked.

At this, Yoongi looked up.

“The divorce was finalized on September 29, I think.” He answered, but looked questioningly at Jungkook as if to ask why.

“Did you know she was going to therapy?” Jungkook asked again.

Hearing this, Yoongi stood up abruptly and hurried over to where Jungkook was sitting.

“What? Where did you see that?” Yoongi asked as he looked over Jungkook’s shoulder.

Jungkook showed him the post. Yoongi took the phone from him and examined the post carefully.

It was a picture of clouds with text on it. Is this the life we really want? The caption read “as per the advice of my therapist, i’m just here to pop in and say that I’ll be going on a hiatus for a little bit”.

“What the fuck? I didn’t know this!” Yoongi yelled, evidently angry.

Jungkook looked at him confused. They were together for four years, how could he not know that you were at least going to therapy?

The same question was running through Yoongi’s head. He took a seat next to Jungkook to process this new information.

“Hyung, can I ask you a couple of questions?” Jungkook requested.

Yoongi could only nod.

“What was Yn like when you were together? Why did you marry her?” Those were the first questions that came out of Jungkook’s mouth.

He was truly, genuinely curious. Though he’s heard some things that Yoongi had said about you, he never knew the full story.

“We married each other because we loved each other. Wasn’t that obvious?” Yoongi retorted.

Jungkook pursed his lips at this. “Well that's what you tell everybody and yeah we get it, but considering the fact that I’ve barely seen you two together more than two handful of times in the past two years, I had to ask.”

“That’s because we were both busy, but that didn’t mean we didn’t spend time together. Of course you never saw it because you weren’t there and I’m not one to actively talk about my love life. Yn and I both liked our privacy.”

“Okay, then what was she like when you were together?”

Yoongi was quiet for a while. There were a lot of things he could say about you when you were together. He just didn’t know how to articulate it to Jungkook.

“When we were together… she was charismatic, beautiful and intelligent. Something about the way she communicated made you feel like you could forget about all of your worries and live life to its extent with her. She constantly dragged me out to picnics and made me forget about the business and my career. She made me feel young again. And she had so much love and care for people around her. For a long time, I felt like I would never be deserving of her. She was kind of like a sunflower. Or sunshine, you know what I mean?” Yoongi poured out.

Jungkook nodded. He realized that this was the time to try to figure out what happened to you in your marriage. From his conversation with you at your apartment, to the description of you that Yoongi had just given, he surmised that the version of you that he knew was someone different and he could only wonder if Yoongi saw it too.

“Did you ever feel like she changed? In the time you guys were together?” He probed.

Yoongi thought about it for a while.

“Yeah, I think so. I always found it strange that she decided to quit modelling.  When I met her, she said it was all she ever wanted. I never asked because it seemed like a sensitive topic to her, but I supported her regardless. Writing seemed so out of nowhere for her. I don’t know where it came from. Then she stopped wanting to go to business dinners and events with me and after that we just drifted. And in between that, you introduced me to Yura.”

When Yoongi mentioned Yura, Jungkook winced. He had thought about it some nights ago, but he realized that he might have had a hand in your divorce by introducing Yura to Yoongi. Though he knows Yoongi would have never physically cheated on you, he could see how Yoongi and Yura gravitated towards each other. Jungkook had to admit that Yura was a sweet girl. She was beautiful, and when she smiled it was like sunshine.

Yoongi interrupted his train of thought. “Yura is kind of a complicated subject to our marriage. I would never, ever cheat on someone I loved. And I loved Yn, so much. When you introduced Yura to me, I was happy to meet a new friend and that’s all I saw, but the more you made me hang out with you guys, the more I started to see something in her that I stopped seeing in Yn. I never meant to have any sort of romantic feelings for Yura, but it happened and I feel so fucking shitty for doing that to Yn when I’m the one who promised her a lifetime together.”

Jungkook straightened his posture as Yoongi’s confession.

“Wait, what do you mean by that?” He asked.

“By what?” Yoongi looked at him confused.

“What happened to Yn that pushed you to Yura?”

At this, Yoongi scratched his head.

“I wouldn’t say that it pushed me to Yura, but remember when I said Yn and I started getting distant? As time went on, I felt like she changed and I didn’t know who she was. She used to be so bubbly and happy and always wanting to go look at flowers, but towards the end of our marriage, she stayed holed up in our room no matter how much I asked her to spend time with me. Yura, she was happy to spend time with me. She made me feel like I could forget about everything just by talking to me.”

“Yura made you feel like how Yn used to make you feel?” Jungkook cut him off.

“Well… I guess so.”

Jungkook thought about this for a while but narrowed his eyes at his hyung.

“Hyung, answer this truthfully; do you love Yura?”

The tips of Yoongi’s ears turned red after hearing this.

“Love? I don’t know. I like her? I like the way she makes me feel. She’s beautiful and smart and she makes me happy.”

“Hyung, I don’t know if you realize this, but the way you described Yura is exactly the same way you described Yn.”

“What do you mean?”

“It sounds like you started liking Yura because she reminded you of Yn when you met her. So, do you really, truly like Yura? Or do you just like her because she reminds you of what you don’t have anymore?”

Yoongi lowered his head.

“I-I don’t know. I never thought of it like that.”

Jungkook put his hand on Yoongi’s back to comfort him. Obviously, the man was confused.

“I don’t know if this helps, but I just wanted to let you know that whenever I saw Yn, during those dinners or events, she never gave off the vibe that you described her to be. To me, she was quiet, reserved and never bothered trying to get to know us, your friends, or your business. That’s what she came off as. When you told us that you loved each other and that you eloped, I thought you were joking. When I saw her, she just seemed like the typical trophy wife. Just for show. I never liked her and wondered what you saw in her all the fucking time, but now after hearing this, and after being with her for a couple of hours, it’s obvious that something happened that fucked her up and then fucked your marriage up.” Jungkook ranted.

“I think you might need to reevaluate the relationship you had with Yn so we could help her recover from this whole amnesia thing and hopefully figure out what happened. Something definitely happened, but since I don’t know your marriage like you do, I don't know what it is. I feel guilty now after realizing that I might have had a hand in whatever the fuck she was going through. And maybe figure out what you’re going to do about Yura. Can you keep dating her when your feelings for her are based off of your feelings for your ex-wife, who is currently pregnant with your wife and doesn’t know about it?” He continued.

Yoongi took a deep breath, taking all of this conversation in.

“Yeah, you’re right. I’m almost done with the shit here at the company. When I go home, I’ll sort everything out and talk to Yn and Yura tomorrow. I don’t think I can keep seeing Yura with the current situation. I have to tell Yn about the pregnancy as soon as possible, but I’m scared because the doctor told me to monitor for residual symptoms for her concussion. I don’t even know where to begin with the situation.”

“It’s okay, hyung. I’m here for you. You have to tell her about the pregnancy before she finds out herself. In the meantime, I’ll help you out when you can’t take care of her. I already feel shitty enough for how I acted with her when you two were married. I feel like I had the wrong impression this whole time.” Jungkook offered.

Yoongi remembered the moment earlier when Jungkook confessed that he never liked you and that baffled him because he thought that you two, of all people, would get along well together. More often than not, he would feel jealous of Jungkook, who had your admiration when you first started dating. He remembered you always asking him to introduce you to Jungkook and it took a year for him to budge and actually make it happen.

“I’m sure you’ll get along now. I always thought you did get along. Did you know she liked you before?” Yoongi asked.

Jungkook shook his head. “I didn’t know until the other day when you had me take her home. It probably would have helped if you told me she knew who I was before you introduced us after you got together. She never acted like she was a fan of my music and admittedly, I was a dick to her.”

Yoongi glared at him. It was a first for him to hear about how Jungkook treated his ex-wife.

“Well, you should feel shitty because she really liked you and your music. For a while, I thought she liked you more than me. If I had known you were an asshole to her, I probably would have ripped you a new one. Hearing you admit you treated her like shit makes me feel like shit because I never knew and just assumed you guys were good with each other. You didn’t do or say anything bad to her, right? You’re not that type of person.”

Jungkook could only pretend to smile at Yoongi as he asked this.

He shook his head and lied. “No, never.”

Lying through his teeth to his best friend about how he treated you made his heart fall to his stomach. Well, Yoongi didn’t have to know because it was in the past. You couldn’t remember any of the mean things he’d said to you, so now was the perfect time to make a new, much better impression of himself to you. He decided days ago that he would be better, because deep down, he knew that you didn’t deserve to be treated like how he treated you.

[nov. 21, 2020]

Yoongi had taken the day off after his somewhat enlightening conversation with Jungkook last night. He decided that he needed to go see you and spend some time with you today, but before that, he needed to settle things with Yura.

They decided to meet up at his apartment for maximum privacy, just in case anything happened. He wanted to account for the worst case scenario of Yura probably getting angry and throwing things around, but he doesn’t think she’s the type of person to do dramatic things like that.

Turns out, she’s not. When he reluctantly tells her that he can’t continue on with what they had because of residual feelings for you, in addition to the fact that there were complications in that relationship that he can’t speak about carelessly, she had reacted calmly and amicably. Though Yoongi hadn’t expected her to throw a tantrum, he was expecting some kind of anger, but all he got was a sad look passing on her face followed by comforting words.

He apologized profusely for having dragged her around when he still had apparent feelings for his ex-wife and not figuring out his feelings for her, or lack thereof, sooner. She reassured him that it was okay and she’ll be fine.

“I’ll be fine Yoongi. I liked you, but it’s pretty obvious that you used me as some kind of rebound or replacement for your ex-wife, and I was okay with it. Truthfully, I was waiting for you to just come clean and break it off with me. I hope you and Yn figure things out this time, and I hope you can talk to her. Communication is important.” She reminds him before she leaves, but not before letting him know that she would always be there for him as a friend.

He had texted her after she left, and after a couple of minutes to himself, that he was thankful for her being so nice about the situation and all in all, he didn’t regret whatever short-lived affection they had for each other.

Yoongi still couldn’t believe how smoothly everything with Yura went. He hoped that the rest of the day would be the same.

☾

You woke up to a message from Jungkook asking if you were free, so you had to tidy up the apartment and yourself because you didn’t want to look messy in front of someone you had idolized for a long time.

Luckily enough, you didn’t have to cook since Jungkook offered to bring food. You thank your lucky stars for that because for some reason, you’ve been feeling incredibly sluggish and nauseous. It was probably some symptoms of the concussion you suffered. You remembered your doctor saying something about that the last time you were at the hospital.

About 20 minutes later, you heard your doorbell ring so practically skip to the door, excited to see Jungkook and steal the food that he brought.

You opened the door to see Jungkook standing there with a big back of food in his hands. He was wearing all black, with a leather jacket that looked a tad too big on him.

“You look warm.” You comment.

He rolled his eyes. “Are you gonna invite me in or not? I even brought you food.”

You laugh a little and move to the side to give him room to step inside the apartment.

“So, what have you been doing?” He asks as he makes his way to your dining room to put the food down.

You make your way to the kitchen to get some plates for the both of you.

“Nothing. I’ve been trying to look for some stuff but I don’t know where to start so I just gave up until you or Yoongi could come help.” You reply as you move to the dining room to set the plates down.

Jungkook takes the food out and puts some on the plates. Kimbap, like you asked, and some seaweed soup.

“How have you been feeling? Okay?” He questioned.

You nodded, though hesitantly.

“Eh, I’ve been feeling kind of tired. I think I might be sick because I keep wanting to vomit. Is that my wintermelon tea, by the way?” You pointed to the drink in his hand.

Jungkook poked the straw through the lid and handed it to you.

“Sick? Did you take any medicine? Are you feeling better now?”

You took a sip of your tea and sighed, missing the sweet taste of the drink. It felt nostalgic.

“Mhm, took some earlier and I'm feeling much better thanks to the food you brought!” You smiled.

Jungkook rolled his eyes jokingly once again. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

He didn’t think about your illness any further. It was probably a cold and nothing else.

For about 20 minutes, the two of you ate and spoke about little things, mostly about Jungkook and his career. It helped you get to know him a little bit better since he’s the only person besides Yoongi who could help you in your situation until Jin comes back.

After you finished eating, you told him that you needed his help going through your room in case there was anything that could jog your memory.

“I would ask Yoongi but he’s been busy lately.”

“So I’m just your last resort?”

“You’re literally the only other person in my contact list besides Yoongi and Jin.”

“Right, anyways, lead the way!” He exclaimed.

You laughed as you led him to the room at the end of the hallway.

“Sorry if it’s a little messy, I didn’t have that much time to clean up before you got here!” You explained.

Jungkook shook his head, telling you it didn’t really matter since it was gonna be a mess anyways while you two went through your things.

☾

When Jungkook walked into your room, he was once again hit with the feeling that he had no fucking clue who you were in the past years he’d known you. If he could describe your room in one word, it would be enchanting. White walls, white sheets adorn with a baby blue blanket, wooden floors, giant plants and a mirror much bigger than himself. Your desk was filled with different kinds of pens, different notebooks that look to have been trifled through, and an unnatural amount of books and crystals.

From the looks of the rest of your house, he probably shouldn’t be surprised at your bedroom, but it’s still a bit difficult for him to wrap his mind around the fact that you were this type of person. Bright, intelligent, and incredibly neat.

He walked up to your desk and picked up the different notebooks laid out messily on the table. When he opened each of them, he noticed that they were mostly blank, with the exception of a few doodles. There were some things he’d recognized as lyrics from songs he knew, but nothing truly relevant to the memories you lost.

You stood next to Jungkook and looked at the notebooks in his hands.

“I went through those already. Nothing but a few sad lyrics here and there. None of them triggered any memories.” You mentioned.

Jungkook put them down and started walking around the room with you as you talked about what you did find during the days that you were left alone. What he got from that conversation was that you had no luck with anything and that’s why you waited until either he or Yoongi could come over and help you. Jungkook knew that Yoongi was coming over later, so if he couldn’t help you find anything or answer any of your questions today, then maybe Yoongi could.

“Oh! I forgot to mention that I can’t even access any of my social media, so do you think I can look through my instagram through your phone? I mean, if that’s okay with you. I know some people feel uncomfortable giving their phone to someone else to play around with.” You asked.

Jungkook shook his head and stuck his hand in his pant pocket, reaching for his phone.

“It’s fine, you can look at your profile, I think I follow you. The password is 061313.” He stated as he handed his phone over to you.

You grabbed it excitedly, finally getting the chance to see what your life was like during the four years that were missing from your memory. You fell back onto your bed as you unlocked Jungkook’s phone and clicked on his instagram app quickly.

You took a look at his profile first, staring in awe at the pictures he’s posted. Most of his pictures are very dark and he had quite a few selfies. You smiled a little bit as you admitted in your head that he was indeed handsome.

Okay, Yn, onto the more important things! You thought to yourself as you quickly searched your username ‘faeyn’ on the search bar. At first you were excited, but it deflated when you saw just how many posts you had. 13 posts. And almost all of them were just landscapes. Some had pictures of you by yourself, or with Jin, but that was it. How the fuck were you supposed to try to figure out your life through 13 pictures?

Scrolling through each picture and their captions from the oldest to newest, you quickly realized that you must have decided that privacy was something that should be valued. There was nothing of substance to your situation in the captions you’d written. Just casual mentions of how your day was, or what you did that day. The only thing that caught your eye was the latest post you had, dated September 22. It was a picture of clouds and the caption said something about your therapist advising you to take a break, so you were going to be on a social media cleanse for a while.

Well, at least you learned one thing. Apparently, you started going to therapy again. For what? You don’t know. You only remembered going to therapy a couple of times after the whole incident with your bastard ex-boyfriend.

You filed this little detail into your brain and hoped that maybe it would make more sense later on. Swiping up on Jungkook’s phone took you to his home screen, but you paused for a little. Maybe you could snoop through some more apps and see if there was anything else you can find.

No, that would be an invasion of Jungkook’s privacy, you thought. Another part of you argued that he wasn’t going to know and he’s here to help you. If there was anything worth hiding, he wouldn’t have given you his phone and his password so easily. And if there was anything, it wouldn’t be incriminating since he mentioned that you two didn’t really know each other that well, so you shrugged and clicked on his messages.

I’ll just see if there are any messages to me. I won’t look at anything else, you justified, as if it made it any better.

After scrolling for a little while, you finally saw something worthwhile. A text convo between you and Jungkook and from the preview of the message, it looks like it was from the middle of September. You opened it, excited to see the contents, but what you saw made you furrow your brows.

What is this?

☾

After Jungkook gave you his phone, he continued walking around your room until he got to the side of your bed that was next to the window. He looked around for a bit and saw something in the corner of his eyes. Crouching down lower, he saw something on the floor behind your headboard. He couldn’t tell what it was at first, but as soon as he moved closer, he realized it was a thick notebook. Jungkook surmises that you probably hadn’t seen it despite telling him that you looked ‘everywhere’. He took the notebook and sat down on the floor, completely hiding his figure, but not before he could look at you. He wanted to see what was in the notebook before he showed it to you, and luckily enough, you had been facing away from him.

So he sat down and opened the notebook. From just the first page, he could tell it was some kind of diary or journal. There were lots of drawings and stickers and a picture of you in a field of flowers right in the middle of the first page. He flipped through the whole notebook really quickly and found that half of it was already filled.

A part of him wanted to read through the whole thing and see what kind of things you wrote, but another part told him that it wasn’t appropriate. Despite that, he convinced himself that he should read maybe just one entry, just to see if this notebook was something substantial to your current situation.

Jungkook took a peek at you again and noticed you still had your back turned to him so he took that as a sign that he could probably get away with reading an entry. He flipped to a page randomly and focused his eyes on the writing.

The entry was dated August 4, 2020. Fairly recent. He noticed that there were some dark blotches on the paper that made the ink bleed.

He began to read the entry, not knowing what he was going to find out.

It still seems weird to be writing about my problems in a journal. I’m still not used to it, but it’s been helpful since I don’t really have anyone to talk to about this.

That made him frown.

I went to my OBGYN today because I’ve been having severe cramps and bleeding, but I already had my period so I was worried. And the cramps were starting to really hurt, so I had to go get it checked out just in case. Well, apparently I was pregnant and lost the baby.

Jungkook’s eyes widened and he gasped audibly. Luckily enough, it wasn’t loud enough for you to notice. He clasped his hand over his mouth at the disbelief in reading this information. A miscarriage? And so recent, too. He didn’t know how to feel. Yoongi had never said anything about this.

Jin actually just left my house a couple of hours ago. I don’t think the news hit me until now. I texted Yoongi earlier to tell him but he was busy so I think that was a sign that I should probably not tell him. It’s not like it matters right? Since the baby was gone anyways.

I know my therapist told me to stop with the negative self-talk, but it’s moments like this that really push me to just keep thinking I’ll never be good enough for the men that I love. Thanks to my bastard ex for fucking my mind up like this. No matter how hard I try, I always just circle back to the fact that I wasn’t good enough for him, and that I’m not good enough for Yoongi. Even fate is telling me that I’m not good enough to carry a child with the man I love. How fucked up is that?

Jungkook’s heart dropped to his stomach. He felt sick. There were so many things going through his head right now. He felt like he was violating something that was so private. Yoongi didn’t even know that you went through this. You didn’t even know you went through this. He shut the journal quickly, wiping the tears that formed in his eyes.

At that exact moment, he heard your heavy breathing and quickly got up to check on you. He walked around to your side of the bed and found you trembling with his phone in your hands. He noticed that his messages were open and he began to panic.

“What the fuck is this?” was the last thing he heard you say before your eyes rolled to the back of your head and you fell limp into your bed.

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[krispytidalwavesheep]

Hi! I saw that you were interested in requests for Zelda x f!Reader, among others, so I decided to send something and I hope you don’t mind :) An idea based on „We all shipped them together before they made it official because she kept scoffing that she did not like her and yet she always looked at her first whenever someone told a joke just to see if she was laughing too” post I saw some time ago. Basically a reader who is much younger, more optimistic and affectionate than Zelda. Zelda initially maintains her facade, of course, and constantly denies being interested in her. However, everyone, and I mean really everyone, can see what it is really like and they are both just made for each other, despite their apparent opposites. Thanks in advance, have a nice day!

I was/am really nervous about this, but thanks for the prompt! I hope you like it, I wrote this in the middle of the night, while being absolutely sleep deprived. Hope you enjoy! ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Zelda disliked you from the very beginning, even though she wasn't quite sure why. Maybe it was your happy-go-lucky attitude or the fact that you were so damn affectionate with everyone, that it almost made her sick. Well, everyone except herself, but she made sure that you understood that you wouldn't stand for such foolish actions. It was kind of pathetic, you hanging of Hilda as you did, and the way you always cuddled up to Ambrose and Sabrina. Who did you think you were, anyway? Nothing more but a nuisance, that's for sure. Zelda couldn't believe that she caved when Sabrina practically begged her to take you in.

Where exactly you came from was still shrouded in mystery. One day you just appeared in the woods, wounded and with amnesia. Of course, Sabrina had to take you in and now everyone was all over you and it annoyed Zelda to no ends. As soon as you got better and more comfortable around everyone, you were practically all over everyone, like a bitch in heat. You even tried to hug Zelda himself a few times, but she made sure that those notions wouldn't occur again. Still, you were so unbelievably nice and cheery, even to her. Disgusting.

You stared at Zelda, who seemed deep in thought and annoyed about something. You were pretty sure that that something was the fact that you were cuddled up to Hilda for some comfort since your night was plagued by nightmares again. Hilda took care of you when Brina brought you to the mortuary and you felt very much thankful for that. You didn't remember a lot of your life before you appeared out of nowhere and with no memories. All that you knew was that you were deadly afraid and hurting all over. Your body was covered in smaller wounds and half of your face was swollen, but the moment you laid your eyes on Sabrina you knew that you would be okay. She had a chaotic but albeit calming aura so you went with her willingly when she took you to her aunts.

At first, you met Hilda and her aura told you all you needed to know about her. She was a protector and she took you in without questioning, taking care of you as if you were one of her own. You trusted her immediately and especially after she helped you through your first nightmare. You met Ambrose next and even though he was cautious of you, he took to you rather fast. You were simply fascinated by everything he told you about magic and mysteries and he liked the audience. Brina and you became fast friends too, even though you didn't agree with everything she did. But she was sixteen and some teenage drama was expected. Especially after what she went through in the past months.

Brina was rather direct and you quite liked that about her. She was like a little sister to you, and she was the first one to muse that you weren't used to affection, which was why she gave it to you willingly. It was kind of cute to see your reactions to physical affection. She knew that it was unusual to trust someone so fast after everything that happened, but you were practically a cinnamon roll and no one ever sensed any weird vibes from you. Except for Zelda of course. But Sabrina had her theory about that...

When you and Zelda first met, the morning after Hilda took you in, you were captivated. You couldn't remember ever seeing a creature more beautiful than her. Her behavior and her aura were completely at odds around you and you wondered why. Especially since her familiar loved you to bits and pieces from the very beginning. Wherever you went, Vinegar Tom was sure to follow and you couldn't sit down without him jumping in your lap and curling up, demanding to be pet. Of course, that was just one more thing Zelda disliked about you. Everything was just affectionate with you, as you were with them, and Vinny's betrayal didn't make it any better.

But still, every time Ambrose told one of his stupid puns her gaze wandered over to you to see you laughing. Although it made her feel weird, she couldn't stop watching you. Just to make sure that you weren't up to something, of course. But everyone, really EVERYONE, had the audacity to imply that she, in fact, liked you very much. Which wasn't true at all. Not in a thousand years.

Her gaze was drawn to you again, as you made cooing noises at Vinny and played with him in front of the hearth, smiling affectionately.

“You're smiling, Zelds,” Hilda smirked and Zelda gave her the patented death glare.

“Whatever you are implying Hilda, I can assure you that it is all in your head,” Zelda huffed and hid behind her paper. Hilda had the audacity to giggle and Zelda gripped the paper just a bit tighter. She tried to ignore you for the rest of the morning, although she wasn't very successful.

“You want some more coffee?” you suddenly asked and leaned over her shoulder, placing your hand between her shoulder blades.

“Remove your hand or I'll cut it off of you,” Zelda just said haughtily, not liking the tingling feeling your hand evoked.

“Sorry, sorry, won't happen again,” you said and held your hands up in a nonthreatening gesture. Which somehow ticked Zelda off even more.

“Remove yourself from the kitchen right now,” she said for good measure and glared you down. Why the heavens did you get so under her skin with just existing? But what happened next shocked everyone deep down to their core. You started yelling.

“What is your fucking problem? Is the fact that I exist that bothersome to you? Why do you hate me so much, what did I ever do to you?! I go out of my way to stay out of your hair and you still so fucking everything you can to make me feel unwelcome! You agreed to me living here, so what. Is. Your. Problem?!” you yelled and to the mortification of everyone, including yourself, you started crying. You stormed out of the house and into the woods, frantically rubbing at your eyes, and before you realized what was happening, you were lost and the sun was disappearing behind the trees...

“Zelda Phiona Spellman! Was that necessary?!” Hilda yelled and glared at Zelda.

“I-I wasn't-”

“That was cruel, even for you Aunt Z,” Sabrina said and grabbed her coat.

“Oh no darling, you stay here. Zelda can go after her and set this right again!” Hilda growled and ripped the paper from Zelda's hands. She was so shocked that she complied and grabbed two coats before she went outside. It was early spring, but it still got cold at night. And Night it would soon be.

Zelda was shaken to her core. You were right, what was wrong with her? Why was she behaving like this, even though you never gave her any reason to? You have been nothing but nice to everyone, helping out where you could, and yet... Zelda felt not like herself around you and that made her angry. Irrationally so. But why? Why did she feel this way around you, the last time she felt like this was when she first met Mambo...oh. Oh no. It couldn't be... her problem wasn't that she disliked you... The problem was that she liked you a bit too much.

Her sub-consciousness must have been so scared of the fact, that it made her dislike you so much. She walked a bit faster after that realization, she had to find you and set things right with you. Apologize.

Zelda was almost frantically running through the forest, using a spell to trace your footprints, but you were faster than her and she cursed her heels. It was getting darker and harder to see, but Zelda knew the forest almost better than her own house. You didn't though, and Zelda found herself sick with worry. She was such a horrible person...

You were shivering in the cold evening, curling yourself into a ball to conserve body heat. You should have taken your coat with you, but you were so angry when you left the house. What exactly was Zelda's problem with you? What did you ever do to deserve such behavior?

You always noticed Zelda looking at you when she thought no one was looking. You even caught the odd smile, unconsciously thrown in your direction when you laughed or played with Vinegar Tom. You always thought that she was shy or something like that, that she liked you but wouldn't be caught dead admitting to it. You heard Hilda and Ambrose talking about how head over heels Zelda must be over you, with all that secret glances and small smiles and you hoped. Hoped, that when enough time passes and you proved that you could be trusted, Zelda would come to like you. Not necessarily as you liked her, but one could hope, after hearing Ambrose and Hilda talk about it, right?

But all your hopes were dashed earlier, when the situation escalated. You were probably no longer welcome at the Spellman house, but you didn't care. No one ever wanted you. You still hadn't got back all your memories, but enough to realize that you were never loved by anyone. Maybe you were too much. Hilda, Sabrina, and Ambrose would come to that realization too. So you should leave now, as long as it is still kind of your choice, but it was so cold, that you couldn't move a muscle.

“Maybe it is better this way...” you mumbled to yourself and closed your eyes.

“Don't you dare to go to sleep, not when I just found you!” an all familiar voice growled and you opened your eyes in shock, looking at Zelda Spellman herself. You just huffed and closed your eyes again. It was just so much easier.

To your utter shock, you felt warm arms wrap around you and the shock was enough for you to open your eyes again. Zelda lied down next to you, pulling you flush against her and somehow you managed to blush.

“We need to get you warmer so that I can bring you back to the house...” Zelda whispered and put the extra coat around both of you. 'Fuck it' you thought and buried your face in Zelda's shoulder. She smelled so good, and you were so tired.

“Don't fall asleep y/n” Zelda urged you and you huffed in surprise.

“You never called me by my name” you whisper and smile. It sounded good coming from her lips.

“Listen y/n I am... I am sorry for how I treated you. It wasn't fair and I regret deeply that it had to escalate like this before I saw reason.”

“'s okay,” you mumble and snuggled a little bit closer. Zelda's hand started rubbing your back gently and she couldn't get over the fact of how right it felt to hold you like this. She was a horrible person for treating you with such resentment when you deserved so much more.

“What I will tell you now, I will tell you just one time, so you better listen, okay?” Zelda mumbled, still rubbing your back.

“Aaaahh there is the Zelda I know and lo-like,” you smile, almost slipping.

“We'll see how deserving of your affections I am when I told you what I need you to tell,” Zelda said, ignoring what you just said for now, even though her heart started to beat faster.

“I am no easy woman. I lash out when I feel vulnerable and my temper is the worst. I treated you like vermin, and you didn't deserve this. I lash out when I feel vulnerable, and I feel that around you, a lot. Even though I didn't realize that until now. I am not as happy-go-lucky as you are, and I am not an affectionate person. At least out in the open. I was told that I am a stone-cold bitch on more than one occasion and I can't help but to agree. I have been hurt y/n, and it pains me to admit, I am afraid that I will get hurt again.”

“Hilda told me what happened. With Blackwood and Mambo Marie. Don't be mad at her, she just wanted to help,” you whisper and Zelda scoffed. You had to smile at that. You two lay like this for a while longer, until you felt how the numb feeling left your extremities.

“I think I'm better now,” you say reluctantly but Zelda didn't let you go just yet, asking for just a little while longer. You wiggled your arms free and wrapped them around Zelda too, slowly and carefully, not to scare her away. Zelda melted instantly into your arms and you smiled. Seems like you weren't the only one starved of affection. Stone cold bitch my ass, you thought and nuzzled a little closer.

“I'm gonna be brave now, okay? I like you very much Zelda, and somehow I think you like me too, don't think I didn't notice the way you look at me when you feel like no one is looking. The point I am trying to make is, that I wouldn't dream of hurting you, at least not willingly. I can be a massive idiot sometimes, but I want to get to know the real you. The one that hides behind all those walls of fear and hurt and I want to... just be there,” you mumble and to your utter shock you heard small sobs coming from Zelda.

“Hey, it's gonna be okay... Sorry if that was too much, I just told you what felt right!” you say and leaned back to look at Zelda. You were panicking. Did you say something wrong? But Zelda just took your face into her hands and bestowed the softest kiss to your forehead. It felt like an absolution.

“No one ever told me that they wanted to get to know the real me. I can't promise you that I will be able to show you my true self, but I will try,” she whispered and buried her face in your neck.

“That's good enough for me.” You said and cuddled closer... ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Still taking prompts, and since schools are closed due to Covid I have a lot of time to write and imrpove!

[alovesongshewrote]

If you’re taking requests, maybe something about Doux finding the reader absolutely delirious from lack of sleep? I may or may not have gotten literally any sleep last night and although I managed to get through my morning routine pretty efficiently I FEEL my body just wiping out. I will be comatose within the hour.

Sleep, Darling | Hisirdoux Casperan x Reader

Plot:  you’ve been awake for too long and it is not doing you any favours.  Thank god for punk wizards who care about your wellbeing, amirite lads?  (Also, the pure Irony that this is getting posted at like, 2:40 am where i am, rip me i guess)

Word Count: 2,292

Warnings:  A bit of blood is mentioned in passing, the reader isn’t human and probably has adhd or smthn.  Also, Friends is mentioned, like, the tv show, so that’s a thing!

A/N:   if you look closely, you can actually see me projecting onto this one.  I hope you got some sleep anon.

Tags:   @furblrwurblr @einahpetsyarcip @sorrels-scribbling @anxious-stitcher @alive-and-afraid @animedweeb333 @douxiesdamsel @saroski05

Time isn’t real.  It’s a social construct made to bring order to the general chaos that is human existence.  That was why you were up at 5 a.m for the second, maybe third, night in a row.  Was it healthy?  Probably not, but you didn’t need sleep, you needed answers.  Answers to what?  Who knows at this point, honestly.

You couldn’t say you were surprised when you finally noticed the late, or early hour.  You just shrugged it off and went “fuck it, all-nighter,” which was fine for the moment.  But time’s a bitch, and that moment was over pretty fast.  By noon, you were ready to collapse.  The three cups of coffee did not help.  Instead, they made you vibrate at a frequency that could quite possibly break glass.  As much as this sucked for you, it was worse for your lovely friend and co-worker, Hisirdoux Casperan.

Now, our boi Douxie was and is madly in love with you, but shhh, it’s a secret.  You also love him, and that’s a secret too.  Neither of these secrets are well kept, and the only reason you aren’t together is general stupidity.  Literally, anyone else who watches the two of you interacting can tell that you're in love.  Hell, half the town assumes you’re together already.  The other half keeps trying to get you together.  It is not working very well.  But that’s all a digression.  What you really need to know is that Douxie loves you and watching you suffer from a lack of sleep was Not A Pleasant Experience.  You were delirious, shaky, and constantly off-balance.  You could work well enough, but it was clear that your health was not in the same zone.

The final straw came when you cut your hand on broken glass.  You’d dropped a cup, and instead of using magic, you’d tried to fix the mess by hand.  That plan did not work, and you received a bloody slash across your palm for your troubles.

“Ah.  Fuck,” you said, thinking you were whispering but instead speaking at a normal volume.

“What’s wrong, love?”

“‘S nothing, I’ve got it,” you did not got it, especially not in this state, and Douxie had the good sense to figure that out.  The blood was a pretty good hint though.

“Oh, fuzzbuckets.”

“I told you, I’m toooootally fine, there is nothing to worry about.”

“Here, (Y/N), let me help you-”

“No, no, this is, this is-” it was then that your sleep-deprived brain decided to cut off your train of thought and replace it with another, more chaotic train.  You stopped talking and just stared at Douxie for a solid minute.  Or at least it felt like a solid minute.  Time isn’t real, remember that.

“(Y-Y/N)?  You alright there, darling?”

“You’re really cute, did you know that?  Like… really cute.  Steve was right, you could be a model.”

“I-”

“Also, just gonna put it out there, I freakin’ love it when you call me darling.  Like, I know you call most people darling, but it makes me feel special.  Don’t ask why, it just does.”

Douxie wasn’t planning on asking why.  He wasn’t really planning on anything.  Your sleep-deprived half-confession had turned him from a capable individual into a blushing mess in less than a second.  You always had that effect on him, but it looked like your exhausted state was giving you a bit of an edge.

“Oh, sorry, I made it weird.  Anyway, do you think if I brewed my next coffee with Monster instead of water it would wake me up?   Because I’m still tired, and it isn’t fun.”

“I- you- I’m-”

“I think I might try it, honestly.”

“Ok, how about you don’t do that,”  Archie said, swooping in, literally and figuratively, to save the day, “Douxie, can you please get (Y/N)’s hand patched up?  It looks quite painful and they’re dripping blood onto the carpet.”

You were, in fact, dripping blood onto the carpet.  That wasn’t good, “Oh, that’s- I’m sorry.”

“Don’t fret, just go do something about that hand,” with that, Archie smacked Douxie upside the head in an attempt to snap him out of his flustered state.  It was super effective!

“Ahh, yeah.   C’mon, (Y/N), let’s,,, go,,, fix,,, that.”

“Ok,”  you stood, too tired to protest, and followed Douxie into the back of the bookstore, which was literally just his apartment.  

It was a nice place.  Very cozy, very him.  It made you want to curl up and take a nap, but to be fair, literally everything made you want to curl up and take a nap at the moment.  Regardless, his home made you feel warm and fuzzy on the inside and you never wanted to leave it.  Maybe it was the interior decorating, but you knew it was because your favourite person lived there.  What you didn’t know, or didn’t realize, was that you’d just spoken your entire thought process out loud and Douxie heard every word of it.  Once again, the boy was a blushing mess.  If you were awake enough to process things, you would have found it cute.  Or you’d be dead from embarrassment, that one is a bit of a toss-up.

Fighting through his flustered state, Douxie pulled you into the bathroom and collected a first aid kit from under the counter.  While he focused on getting things done, you curled into a ball in his bathtub.  For some reason, your exhausted brain decided that sitting on the edge of the bathtub simply did not Vibe™ but sitting inside the tub was better than nothing, and so you just,,, curled up there.  Douxie was only a little surprised to see you there.

“(Y/N)?”

“D’you remember that time on Friends when Winona Ryder played a closeted lesbian?  That was a fuckin’ trip, man.”

“(Y/N), darling-”

“That whole episode is just- it’s just strange.”

“(Y/N)-”

“Hehe, Stranger Things.”

“(Y/N), love, I need to see your hand.”

“Oh, fuck, yeah, I forgot.  Here,” you sat up, extending your hand out to the wizard.  He took it, sitting on the edge of the bathtub which was fine for him to do, I guess.  Not you though, you were stuck in bathtub jail for sleep deprivation crimes.

You squinted up at his face as he tended to the nasty scratch you’d given yourself.  You didn’t have the capacity to focus on what he was doing, so instead you focused on him.  He was pretty, as you’d said before, but that was always true.  At that exact moment, his brows were furrowed in concentration, his eyes concerned and his jaw set.  His hands were steadier than yours could ever hope to be, especially since you hadn’t been sleeping.  Overall, he looked kind of mad, so you sunk down into your bath-prison, silent and waiting for him to finish so you could get back to work.

Douxie was not mad at you.  He was upset that you hadn’t been sleeping, but he wasn’t mad.  He was just worried for your health.  Your wizard did not appreciate seeing you shaking and sleep-deprived.  He didn’t appreciate it when your current state led you to injure yourself, either.

He wrapped up your hand and gave it a small pat, “Done.  Now, come on, you’re taking a nap.”

His voice surprised you.  It was gentle, calm, not at all angry like you’d suspected.  You found yourself so lost in it that you didn’t realize what he’d said until he said your name, trying to snap you out of whatever haze you were in.

“Oh, wait, what?  No, shit, I have to get back to work-”

“No, you need sleep.”

“Sleep is for the weak, I need to go-” you stood and almost fell over.  You probably would have broken something if Douxie didn’t catch you.  You hadn’t exactly expected to end up in his arms today, and despite the heat rising in your face and neck, you were not complaining.

“(Y/N)-”

“I’m sorry, Douxie, I-”

“You need to sleep.  Please, (Y/N), don’t make me use a spell on you.”

You froze for a second before a smirk crept onto your face, “You wouldn’t.”

“I-”

“You wouldn’t use a spell on meeeeee-” the smirk grew into a full smile as you let yourself go limp, forcing him to move his hands to support you better and pull you closer to him.  Was that your plan?  Maybe.  Was it part of a second, bigger plan?  Also yes.

“You wanna bet?”

“Sure.”

“I-” and then he went silent.  There was a moment of tension where you just stared into each other’s eyes, holding your breath to see what the other person would do.  Your gaze fell to his lips as his fell to yours.  For that moment, your thoughts began to wander far out of your control.  Douxie’s mind was also running rampant but in a different direction.  You were right, he thought.  He couldn't use magic on you.  As far as he knew, you were a human.  Just a mortal being who crawled their way into his life and stayed there, improving the quality of it greatly.  If there was even the slightest chance that a spell may have negative side effects, which most sleep spells did, he wouldn’t dare risk it, especially not on you.  He sighed, tightening his grip on your waist, “You’re right.”

“What?”  Oop, plan going sideways, PLAN GOING SIDEWAYS!

“I’m- not going to use magic on you,” he helped you to stand, and moved to take a step back before you grabbed his hoodie and pulled him back to you, ignoring the sharp sting in your hand.

“Ok, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, hang on there wizard boy-” you took a moment to pull yourself out of the bathtub entirely, “You can’t give up that easily.”

“Wha-”

“Come onnnnnn, make it fun, make it exciting.  Put a spell on me or whatever, just-” you went quiet for a second, but for once you weren’t distracted.  Just quiet.  You had to face facts.  Your plan had failed, and now you had nothing but the truth.

“(Y/N)?”

“Just make my brain stop.  For just two seconds.”

“What?”

“Please.  I’m running on a motor and I can’t stop myself.  I haven’t slept and I have no choice in the matter.”

“(Y/N)-”

“Look, just, take away my free-will if you have to.  Knock me out, magic or otherwise, I just want five seconds where I’m not on hyperdrive,” you were standing on your own now, though Douxie’s arms were still wrapped around you and you hadn’t let go of his hoodie, “Please.”

The bathroom was silent for a minute.  It took that long for Douxie to process what you’d just said.  You feared, for that moment, that you’d said too much.  You hadn't.  Not to him, anyway.

“Come on.”

“What?”

“Come on,” he said, picking you up, effortlessly sweeping you off your feet.

“Wait, what!?” your voice was slightly more frantic, surprise lacing through your words.

“There’s more than one way to get a person to sleep.”

“Oh-?”

He didn’t respond to your question, instead, he carried you out the door and into what you could only assume was his room.  You had no choice but to wrap your arms around his neck and cling to him for dear life until he set you down on the bed.

“Stay here, okay?  I’m going to make you some tea-”

“Wait!” you stopped him, grabbing his wrist as he turned to leave, “I’m… I’m sorry.”

“You don’t need to be sorry, my darling,” he sat in front of you on the bed, “You just need to get some sleep, okay?”

“But what about-”

“I’ll cover your shift, you don’t need to worry.”

“I-”

“Just rest, for now, love.  Please.”

“Ok,” your words were a whisper, something that Douxie could only just hear.  The next thing though, he didn’t have to strain to hear at all, “Yeah.  I meant what I said earlier, by the way.  You’re so pretty, it isn’t fair.”

He laughed at this, at you, finally seeing some humour in your shenanigans.  He relaxed now knowing that you may actually get some much-needed rest.  He stood, kissing your forehead and tracing the side of your face with a hand, rough from guitar strings and 900 years of sweeping.

“Worry not, love, you’re pretty too.”

“Hey, wait-”

“Don’t ‘hey, wait,’ me.  You are.  Now lie down, I’ll be back in a second.”

A smile crept onto your face as you followed orders.  Your emo wizard man thought you were pretty.  And he cared enough about you to let you sleep during work hours, in his home, no less.  You let yourself relax into the bed, grinning once again.  It smelled like him, like thyme and peppermint, lemongrass and sleep.  It was nice, comforting.  You could only vaguely think of Douxie as your brain finally took a fuckin breather.  It was everything you needed, honestly.

By the time Douxie came back, you were long gone, lost to your dreams and finally asleep.  He sighed a smile that matched yours on his face.  He placed the cup of tea on the bedside table before grabbing a blanket out of his closet and draping it over you.  You looked so peaceful.  Good.  You deserved some peace every now and then.

He took the cup and left you, brushing a strand of hair out of your eyes as he did.  After making his exit, he placed the still-hot tea on the counter, disregarding it for now before returning to the bookshop.

“How are they?”  his familiar asked, tail twisting in concern.

He gave a final fond look at the door before returning to business, “They’re just resting.”  And for once, you were.

[luminousalicorn]

I apologize if this is intrusive, please feel free to ignore if so. (I am asking mostly because I would like more information on this topic for myself, not to stalk you.) How do you feel about having had children? Is there anything about parenthood that isn't as you expected? Do you feel that you still have a full life yourself?

I love having kids and am delighted to have them and plan to have some more.  It’s incredibly cool that something can be that valuable and I can just manufacture ‘em at home with ingredients I already possess.  (Hi, spouse.)

They are a lot, though.  I recommend to anyone on the fence about having kids who can feasibly arrange it to live with - not babysit, not even necessarily do a ton of caretaking for, but just live in the same house as - young children.  There’s not a great way to convey the merciless relentlessness of having a child who insists on continuing to exist and want and need regardless of how much sleep you got, how sick you are, how many times you have already read that book, how tired your arms or how aching your feet, how hungry or sweaty or needy-for-cognition you’ve gotten, how much or little support happens to be available that day.  It’s a lot.  I have a ton of support, and I also have more support now than I did when my first was new.  Not coincidentally, I barely remember my first baby’s infancy and am enjoying the second one lots more.  I was not getting enough sleep to form many long-term memories, first time.  Lots of people tolerate sleep deprivation better than I do, to be clear, but you need to be aware that it’s a whole fuck of a lot.

But man, they’re so cool?  If you spend that much time around a little person you get to be able to read them pretty well and they’re doing such cognitively fascinating things constantly, you get to watch all kinds of atomic human concepts be broken down into pieces by the force of a tiny mind trying to grow.  Probably not everyone gets a kid as cool as mine, who is four and can read and do her own D&D arithmetic and play a competent game of chess and rack up hundreds of XP on Duolingo a day, but my understanding is that people whose kids are less objectively cool also find things to appreciate about them.  Also did you know babies in addition to being adorably incompetent are soft, and smell good, and if you have your own baby nobody will think it’s very weird if you put your entire face on your baby for these reasons even well past the point it would be super weird with somebody else’s baby, and also if you are fortunate your baby might laugh about it?

Diapers are nothing and sleep is everything.  Parents aren’t better at parenting tasks because of magic or even because they responsibly read the entire parenting manual, they’re better at them because they are forced to practice way way way more than anyone would naturally choose to practice any such tasks (and accordingly your skills will be uneven depending on how you divide those tasks).  Like many things, parenting is subject to the novel intervention effect where if you try something that seems like it might help, it will probably help, but only for a little while, so your creativity is very much a limiting factor on your effectiveness.  Your house will not be clean for several years unless you throw really quite a lot of money or time at it.  The constantly asking “why” thing is not an imaginary stereotype, they actually do that.  Teething is bad.  Sleep training is bad and the only thing worse than sleep training is not sleep training (some people can get by with co-sleeping or whatever, we can’t.)  You will spend a truly unreasonable amount of time thinking about and discussing human waste.

I do not feel that I have given up anything I was in fact doing to have kids.  However, this has something do to with the stuff I was in fact doing.  My hobbies are writing and reading and faffing about on the Internet and cooking.  You will notice I did not include, say, exciting travel, or actually anything that takes me out of my house or renders me unavailable for more than a couple hours in a row.  Do some people have kids and also hobbies that involve leaving their house for more than a couple hours in a row?  Sure!  How do they do that?  I have no earthly clue, I had to negotiate with my coparents to arrange those couple hours twice weekly in which I can go sit in the yard and read half a novel without being festooned with children.  (I’m the primary caretaker; my coparents would have less necessary negotiation to do that sort of thing.  I on the other hand have been asking permission to take showers for the last four years because the buck stops with me unless I make really sure someone else is aware that they have taken possession of the buck and can’t drop it in my lap until I re-emerge.)  Maybe they hire more babysitters (we’ve managed to almost totally avoid leaving the kids with strangers), maybe they embark on logistics projects in order to have their kids come with them whitewater rafting or whatever, I don’t know.  Ask one of them.  My life is basically like it was before except now it is 85% kids by volume.  It turned out the rest of it compressed pretty well, with some adjustments.

Look at my preternaturally photogenic baby.

[thebmatt]

FFXIV Write 2021 Prompt #22: Fluster

Fluster – make someone agitated or confused.

Aetherytes were constantly busy. You learned pretty quick to move away from one as soon as you manifested next to one, lest someone suddenly appear next to you and knock you both down.

Old Man Franks, tired as he was, almost forgot this, and only barely missed being clipped by an arriving Roegadyn armed with an enormous spear on his back.

He quickly moved out of the plaza and cast a quick glance about, and then raised his hand to his ear, activating his linkpearl

Rheika’s voice answered him. “Heya Franks. You get to the Toll already?”

“Yeah, I’m here. I take it you’re not?”

“Not yet. Fearless isn’t answering her ‘pearl, so Dahk and I went to her place. Ranaa said she and Makoto went to the Sekiseigumi HQ, so we’re headed there. Turns out she left it at home. Again. Anyway, go on in and figure out what’s going on, we’ll be there as soon as we find her. “

“Copy that. Hopefully whatever this is can be resolved fast. I need to catch up on some sleep.”

“Did you stay up all night working on cross-world portals again?”

“I admit nothing, see you soon.” He disconnected the link before she could chastise him further and headed into the Seventh Heaven bar. A few of the regular patrons tossed greetings his way, which he returned as best he could in his sleep-deprived state,

The bouncer who guarded the door to the Rising Stones nodded at him and stepped aside. Franks strode in, turning to shut the door behind him quietly. Darn thing tended to slam, he’d been meaning to install something to slow it down. Maybe after some rest today.

“All right, Tataru, what is this emergency…about…” Midway through his sentence, he’d turned to face the room. Sitting at one of the table were Tataru, Y’shtola, and someone who shouldn’t be there. Someone who couldn’t possibly be there. Because she was dead.

Standing up at the table, hand over her mouth and tears streaming from beautiful sea-green eyes that he hadn’t witnessed in years, was a viera woman that happened to be the spitting living image of the woman he’d married so long ago.

She dropped her hand, looking for all the world as happy as the day they’d wed. “Hello, my love.”

Twelve forfend, it sounded like her too. “What the hells is this? No…you’re dead, this is some kind of trick!” He pointed a shaking finger. “You’re a godsdamned Ascian, you HAVE to be! How the hells did you make someone look like her??”

She ran to him. “Darling, no, it’s me, I swear it!” She moved in close, trying to embrace him, but he backed away, shock and anger on his face.

“Fandaniel, that you? Because you just crossed a fucking line, you piece of filth, and I’m going to make you regret it!”

The woman looks over to Y’shtola, panicking. “He…what’s happening, who does he think I am?”

Y’shtola has already moved next to her, wrapping an arm around her shoulder and holding the other with her hand. “Aleister, I swear to you on my life, this is not a trick. Do you remember how Rheika unmasked Elidibus, by tricking him about the Amaro? It proved that an Ascian can’t access memories of their hosts, do you recall that?”

He had stopped backing away, but his eyes didn’t waver from the woman who looked like his wife. He nodded.

Y’shtola looked to her. “Tell him something that only you would know. Something you’d never reveal under even the gravest duress.”

Her eyes danced back and forth, considering, thinking. Finally, they widened and she smiled again. Closer and closer, she approached him, but now he didn’t move. Could….could it be?

She whispered in his ear and he cried out in joy. His world faded, and there was nothing more than the woman in front of him. He pulled her in, crushing against her. Her arms wrapped around his back and pulled in just as strong. So many sensations, so many memories flooded him, and he took all of them in. The scent of her, the feel of her living body preseed to him, the sound of her voice as she whispers her love between sobs. He could not reply, too overwhelmed to cry and breathe.

Tataru moved next to Y’shtola, unable to take her eyes off of the embracing pair. “It…it really is her.”

Y’shtola nods.

“But…how?”

“I think that story is best told to us from them. Once everyone has joined us. I think our resident Old Man may finally be ready to open up, since the loss that caused him so much pain is no longer lost at all.”

Finally, Franks was able to catch his breath and he pulled back to look at her. He kept her close, arms wrapped around her waist, as though he feared she might vanish into mist if he let go. For her part, she likewise kept her arms solidly behind his neck. “Gwen….I…I don’t understand. They…multiple people told me they saw you get taken by Sylvanas’ death squads. We…” He hiccuped. Taking a deep breath to calm himself, he kept going. “We scattered when we heard you got taken…that’s, that’s how I ended up here.”

She smiled. “They were right. I was put in with dozens of others, taken to a camp somewhere in Hillsbrad, couldn’t tell you where exactly. We were lined up. Living prisoners had their names taken, checked off a list, then executed right then and there. Some were….were fed to the soldiers. Others to plaguehounds. But for whatever reason, they didn’t kill the Forsaken. Maybe she had sentimentality about us, or maybe she planned to do it later, but we were just shoved into a makeshift prison and left there. We got food occasionally, but no interaction otherwise. Just neverending boredom. Zenjulin and Beskar finally found the place and killed off the few remaining loyalists that still manned it, freeing us.”

She shuddered. “By that point, the Banshee had fucked off to…wherever it was she went. I don’t know. Zenjulin explained it, but I wasn’t listening very well. Or he was missing details, I don’t know. Anyway, he said that our allies were being brought back together to stop her and whatever else she’d brought with her, but that you were still missing. I told them I refused to do anything until I found you. They understood, and I started tracking your movement. Which was hard, because you’d concealed them well, but eventually I made it to Stranglethorn and discovered the cave, the one Y’shtola tells me you came to that same one and it brought you here.”

Franks looked over to Y’shtola, who smiled. “I went there to take some readings, and found her emerging out of the cave. Once I realized who she was, I brought her straight here and had Tataru contact you.”

“Thank you.”

She shook her head. “There is nothing to thank.”

Franks looked back to Gwen. “I… gods, Gwen, you look like the day I asked you to marry me. Even despite all the years, both living and dead, I recognized you right away. I…I actually hallucinated last night…I saw you. Worked for too long without sleeping again. You looked…almost exactly as you do now.” He chuckles. “You uh…you didn’t have these, though”.

He reached up to stroke the fur of her ears. She made a very happy noise at the touch. “Okay, those are definitely a little sensitive, good to know.” She cuddled up against his shoulder, enjoying the sensation.

Eventually he stopped and pulled back again, looking her over. Everything was the same, her long graying hair, two green eyes, one slightly darker than the other, on a heart-shaped face. Everything save the ears. He vaguely recalled the shape of her human ears, but they were no longer there.

She giggled. “I…I don’t know what changed me or why it gave me my youthful body with these ears, honestly. You, though, you look a little bit older than the day you asked me to marry you. Maybe…around our 10th anniversary, I’d guess? Bit more white though, not that I mind. That haircut’s definitely a lot better, someone’s been taking care of you on that front, I see.

She placed her hands on his arms, rubbing them appreciatively. She moves them to his chest and down to his abs, sculpted like they’d been in his younger days from long hard hours of farmwork. “And I see you’ve definitely been taking care of the rest of you. Been way too long since I’ve seen these muscles.” she purred.

Franks laughed nervously. “Well, um….you get a second chance like this, you tend to appreciate and take care of things you took for granted…before.” His hands slipped down to her hips.

Their eyes met, growing lidded. Slowly, he ran his hands up her sides, appreciating every ilm of her curves, ghosting the sides of her breasts. He pulled her close, and their lips met in a kiss they’d not been able to share in decades.

Memories of all of their favorite intimate moments with the other flooded their minds, and both had a realization that those moments could now not only be remembered, but now relived. The rest of the world had long been forgotten and their kisses and touches became more heated when the world suddenly reminded them that it was still there.

“Ahem”

The pair broke, looking in the direction of the voice. The other Warriors of Light and the senior members of the Scions of the Seventh Dawn had all entered and were staring at the pair in varying levels of confusio

Rheika spoke up. It had been her voice that broke into their moment, Franks realized. “I hate to interrupt your moment, I swear I do, but uh…didn’t we have some kind of emergency? Also, um, who is this? Not that you don’t deserve to kiss someone that gorgeous, but I feel like I’m missing part of the story here.”

Franks laughs. Both he and Gwenefyr have turned beet red having realized just how much of a crowd their reunion had attracted. “Ah, yes. Um, well, everyone…allow me to introduce you all to Gwenefyr Franks. My…not quite late wife, as it turns out”

She giggled at that. “Hi, everyone. Y’shtola’s told me a little about you all. I…think I recognize at least some of you from her stories.”

Franks looked over everyone. Thancred, Estinien, and Alisaie weren’t even masking their suspicion. Dahkar, Alphinaud, and Rheika wore expressions of shock. Fearless looked like she was going to explode with joy. Urianger just looed perplexed.

It was Thancred who stepped forward. “Franks….are you sure? I mean, we’ve seen the Asicans puppet dead bodies before..

He immediately shook his head. “No, no, I thought the same thing. But remember, Elidibus didn’t have access to Ardbert’s memories so Y’shtola asked her to tell me something only she would know. It…it’s definitely her.”

Gwen took his hand and looked to the gunbreaker. “Thancred, right?”

Thancred nodded.

“Y’shtola told me you’d probably be the hardest to convince. I don’t know what to say or do to prove to you that I’m not a…..Asican, was it? But I’ll do whatever it takes to prove it to you. To all of you. Because I’m not going anywhere.” She looked up to her husband. “Right?”

He looked right back to her, his eyes sad. “I…don’t think I can go back there again. Not if it means…going back to the way our forms were.Are you…okay with that? With leaving it all behind? I promise, this place is…it’s worth it.”

She nodded. “I don’t think I can either. Azeroth has taken enough from us. And the others…they told me they won’t be surprised if we don’t return to the fight. They’re prepared to keep working towards the dream, but they’ll have to do it without us. I’m not going anywhere without you, love. We have a second chance at actual life and I’m not going back to a world without it or without you.”

Alphinaud speaks up. “Apologies, but did you say Azeroth? I’ve not heard of such a place.”

Franks nods. “Yeah. That’s….that’s the other reason I’m pretty confident she’s not an Ascian. And it’s a story most of y’all long overdue for hearing. And now that I have…gods I can’t believe I have you back…ahem. Well, there’s just no point in hiding it anymore. Gather round…time I told the full story of where I….where we are actually from.”