#and like... things are far more complicated than that?

[fairestwriting]

Can i request for ruggie, jamil, kalim, and idia a gn reader who gifts them homemade food and desserts when they have a crush? :3 i just think its cute

𐙚 Ruggie Bucchi

Honestly. It's probably not the best strategy to take if you want to drop hints that you like him— Not because he doesn't care about it, of course! He'll accept any gift you give him with a big, bright smile.

It's just that he's done similar things for friends back home, so if you're already somewhat close, it doesn't strike him as anything that's too unusual. "You gotta tell me what kinda food you like best, so I can repay you later." He says, happily digging in.

If you do tell him, as soon as he gets time inbetween his part time work, he'll show up at your doorstep with the dish. Because he just had to properly show his gratitude, you know!

He also insists to wash the utensils the food you give him come with. Tupperwares, bowls, whatever it is. He'll have them returned to your dorm in a timely manner, probably cleaner than they've ever been.

𐙚 Kalim Al-Asim

Kalim's history with food gifts is, to say the least, complicated. But when he sees the look on your face as you hand over the food you make, he can't help but smile himself. "Aw, that’s sweet of you! Thank you so much! I just gotta take it to Jamil first…”

Things get just a little awkward then, with Jamil right between the two of you for a moment, because Kalim will drag you along when he takes the food to him — He wants you to see his reaction when he tries it, after all! And the Jamil thing is just a formality, you’re his friend, he trusts that you wouldn’t want to hurt him.

…The whole process might feel a little discouraging to you. It happens every time you give him anything, and Jamil is never thrilled over Kalim being so trusting of you. Or anyone else, really. Kalim feels a little bad for you, deep down, having to witness all of that. Though if you do have the patience to get through that ordeal every time you want to give him some food, it definitely won’t go unnoticed.

Because while he does love your food, pretty much regardless of what you’re gifting him, what makes Kalim feel the most appreciated is how willing you are to still make him food despite that whole situation... And while he might remain oblivious to your crush on him for quite some time, you might notice how, one day, the way he looks at you suddenly becomes even warmer…

𐙚 Jamil Viper

Goes quiet for a second. It takes a moment for his brain to process what's going on. "Thanks, I didn't know you were into cooking." Jamil says after the pause, just to keep the conversation going. He feels a little flustered while he goes for the first bite, hesitating a little on instinct.

He takes another brief moment to think when you ask him how it tastes... he does already like it, just because it's a gift— But he does also have a lot of opinions about food, so if he thinks it could use more spice, he will let you know.

Of course, he's nice about it. Even if he doesn't love the food itself, Jamil still finds himself enjoying it. He might even ask if you want to cook with him sometime, if it sounds like something you'd like to do.

Maybe he'll make you something in return, or maybe you could make something together? He quickly realizes that his proposal might sound a little sudden, but you don't seem to mind it, so...

𐙚 Idia Shroud

It's for him? Really? Are you sure? He stutters out a thank you before he even knows what it is. All his brain has registered so far is that it's a gift. "Uhm, I'll take it to my dorm... a-and eat it later. Thank you." He mumbles, saying he's not hungry, but it's really just because he's too flustered to eat in front of you.

...Unless you prompt him to do it. Like asking him to try some of your food instead of just handing it over. He might just internally explode on the spot, but in a good way.

Idia is honestly a really picky eater, he doesn't really feel like eating anything other than candy unless he's really hungry... but if you're making the food for him, it's different.

He does start kind of wondering if it's a romantic thing, because some characters do that in romance anime. But he's probably just overthinking it, right...? You're just a really nice person. Of course.

if you like my work you can support me by commissioning me or tipping me on ko-fi ── ᵎᵎ ✦

[kingedbishop]

"That's still no excuse to start emulating their behavior."

Granted, there were times he would have liked bashing Markus' head in with his own hands, but Nines' attitude didn't help making him like the plan any more than that.

Bishop watched as his mechanical double stood his ground on the matter. If only he still had the empathy to side with him.

"You shouldn't have developed a conscience. It will only get in your way."

The hostile glare he got was worth the risk of getting his own head bashed in. As for the androids who wished to going back to being mindless machines, he had no sympathy to spare for those hindered by their own emotions.

Rook was far more humane.

"Serves him right! And no amount of yelling could make him look less of an idiot after getting a tire to the face. Should have respected the king of tires."

It didn't change the negative effects that incident might have had, but it was still good to dunk on that man and joke about it now. Ellis seemed to prefer it that way anyway.

"I'll come back to hang out some other time." she promised.

They were getting along so well, it'd be a waste not to. Willow was of similar intentions, though it wasn't surprising after she received a sweet snack for the trip back. It was nice but not unexpected after promising Dan to respect his preferences in communication. Making things convenient really costed her nothing, especially after all the work they had done to help them in their quest.

"My original duties weren’t that different from yours. Adjusting the way I'm to hold a conversation is really no trouble at all." Willow reassured, "I appreciate you telling me, as I do everything else you have done so far. Now, I shall collect those stuffed toys while the others handle the rest."

Although there was another matter she had to tend to before doing that. Willow decided to go up to Nines then, staring him up and down while Bishop wrestled with his copycat as he attempted to throw him out like a trash bag.

"It would be best if you were to ignore the exchange you just witnessed." the cyborg said calmly, "Such matters would only get in the way of your current investigation."

She wished to remain on good terms with the android population. Having to discourage the one of a kind detective the way Carthage usually did would have needlessly complicated things.

Rook shrugged, being well used to Willow's way of asking things to people. "Whatever. Let's go help Strasky's friends."

A portal was opened and duly positioned so they could leave that place behind to go back to sorting out the pocket dimension.

Bishop didn't acknowledge the smile, seeing no reason to waste his energies on appearances. His counterpart was doing enough of it with the way he was glaring at both.

"You aren't any better than those humans who brutalize androids."

Of course, that didn't mean he had anything resembling empathy. But it was a sign that perhaps the matter hit close to home for his copycat.

The agent didn't appreciate the irony of it.

"It wasn't right." Rook repeated, "I'm glad he couldn’t bend you in the end. You're a fighter and a survivor, but I guess we already knew that. I bet you have some stories to tell."

They weren't the happiest stories, she was sure, but she knew what it felt like to deal with a person bent on tearing her apart without any chance to get away. Rook definitely saw a bit of herself in Ellis, much like the reason why Willow likely felt so inclined to help Kelvin out.

The same sentiment didn't fully extend to Dan for the cyborg, however, though it was nothing personal.

"I see." Willow tucked her hand behind her back. "While I don't mind chatting as my current form allows, I don't think I could ever accept fully giving up this form of communication. It comes natural to me, even more if multiple subjects are involved."

Either way, she was happy to take the brownies with her. Willow carefully collected as many as she could fit in the container. They would last her for a good while.

"I will however stick to verbal communication in the future, if that's what you're comfortable with."

"Sure, we can help out with that." Rook replied, "But first, let me get one annoying twat out of your hair."

Bishop looked over as Rook marched over from the kitchen.

"Come on, Bishop, say goodbye to your new weird friend so we can go home." Rook briefly looked at the copycat. "You know, we killed the guy who made you."

Bishop almost looked happy to hear that, the android not as much.

"That isn't going to last."

"I know, but it felt nice." She gave a shrug, "Hurry up, bitch."

"How frightful. You're letting a little girl boss you around?"

"Don't think I can't twist your bolts too, tin can!"

Bishop smirked as he stood up. "Well, I better be on my way now. This was an interesting experiment for certain."

[iminyourwallsbabe]

Okay I figured someone should explain this about Momo and her friends because I feel like there's a lot of confusion but yes, ALL THREE OF THEM are gyarus.

Now you're probably thinking "well obviously Muko is, look at her, but the other two just look normal"

That's because Muko is what we would call a manba/yamanba gyaru. She tans really dark or she is just naturally dark, idk yet you can never tell with these characters. Besides the tan, their makeup tends to be more extreme, which is why hers stands out so much more compared to Momo or Miko.

Her accessories are also very colorful, which gives us some hints about her style outside of school. In keeping with manba fashion and just gyaru fashion in general, it's probably loud and super patterned.

The second thing we have to understand here is that they're all kogals.

"But wait, I thought you just said she was a manba?"

Kogal is technically not a style. I say technically because it's a little complicated. Kogal, generally speaking, is a term meant to encompass gals currently in school. The reason you may look this up and see a lot of uniforms isn't because that's what the "style" requires, but because these are often school-aged girls who don't have the choice to wear anything else on a regular basis. However, that in itself kind of became a style? In the sense that they would change the way they wore their uniforms and what they wore them with to align with gyaru styles outside of school. So while kogal is not a style by definition, there is a style by nature of that definition. Ykwim? If that doesn't make sense, I'm sorry. Just know for our intents and purposes we're gonna talk about kogal as a label and not a sub style.

Anyway, back to this. So all of them are kogals, which means a few things. One, their fashion in school is somewhat limited, and so are their hair and makeup choices. Some schools are stricter about this than others, some parents contribute to that strictness or add some that wasn't already there. As far as the school in Dandadan goes, it seems like they don't care too much about that kind of thing.

Not to mention, school is a lot of work! It gets busy, and gyaru makeup takes a long time. (I would know, I'm a gyaru). And if you're also fighting aliens who wanna steal your uterus and demons who just... do demon shit, chances are you aren't going to have the energy to be doing that every morning. Not even Muko, the most extreme of the two, does her makeup all the time

So the lack of makeup, even though it's usually a good identifier doesn't mean Miko and Momo aren't gyarus still.

Also, look at their clothes compared to real life kogals.

This is no coincidence. This is undeniably kogal.

Also notice that in these pictures, these gals are wearing gyaru makeup, but it's not as in your face as what I showed earlier. That could also be the case with Momo and Miko.

From my understanding I don't think they're wearing makeup but if they are, it's probably a lot more subtle, which is a real and totally acceptable thing for gals to do, especially in school. I can imagine this would be hard to animate properly, especially in a battle shonen. This is also why sometimes, you might not even know a character is gyaru until the creator confirms it later. (Think Camie and Mina from MHA). Like they were probably wearing the makeup the whole time, but because of the art style and the fact that it's animation, we couldn't tell straight away.

They could be doing something like this

It still has the pillars of gyaru makeup, like the nose stripe and the bright under eye, but if you don't look hard enough or you just pass by it in the street, you may miss it. What really gives away their subculture to the untrained eye is their accessories, the way they do their hair, their nails, and little things of that nature. It's why Momo has those big ass earrings, why she wears her choker, stuff like that. It all screams "gal" even without the makeup.

Now you may be saying "what about when she's not in school"

Well, like I said, she might still be wearing makeup but we cannot tell because of the medium this show is in. And two, do you see what she has to do damn near everyday? I wouldn't bother with makeup either. Imagine dodging fucking hair follicles in that kind of makeup, it'd be ruined within an hour. I'm sure she would do it if her life wasn't so hectic though, if she isn't already cuz like I said, we kinda can't tell.

But despite all of this, she does make a point to be dripped tf out at all times. I think that's also where some of the confusion comes from as well, because her style doesn't look like what we imagine as gyaru, especially in the west. But I'll get into that in part 2, because I can't add any more pictures lol.

I'm out.

[creatingblackcharacters]

Hi there! I hope this doesn't sound too rambly but I'm writing a Black trans character and having a bit of trouble. The story starts off with them as an infant and my original plan was that the reader gets to see her grow and eventually transition from male to female when she's older. Where I'm struggling a bit is the implications with her personality. She's always been more kind and "soft" compared to the rest of the men in their life (It's portrayed as a positive thing and that her joy and optimism motivate the rest of the men to not give in to despair) but I'm worried that once she transitions it will seem like I'm playing into the stereotype that all girls are soft and delicate or unintentionally saying she was soft and kind because she identifies as a girl. On the other hand, her race complicates the issue of misogyny since a lot of bad representations of black characters portray them as aggressive so softness could be interpreted differently with this in mind. What should I do?

Well, on the Black end of things, it sounds fine. I can understand how you're worried that it may sound like gender essentialism and misogyny, though. There are people who are smarter than me on this, so they will put it far better! However I would think a similar mindset applies where the effort you put into writing her coming into her own is what makes the difference. I can only imagine that Black trans women would like to be treated gently and kindly in this life, considering!

Plus- and I'm not misgendering her here, I just want to make a separate point- even when she identified as a male, there's nothing wrong with being soft and delicate still. These descriptions are not like... Things that should be thought of as set in stone because of gender. She's soft and delicate because that's who she is as a person! And that's okay! Just make sure the writing reflects that, and that you don't slip into something like "my kindness and gentility always suggested that I should be my true self- a Woman!" That's when it'd be like ehhhhhhhhh mmmmmm 'kay author.

[kyoshithewriter]

Pomum. (Part six).

Wc: 4.3k

Warnings: violence, mentions of mental health issues, angst, mature themes (18+)

A/n: I couldn’t do too much of his pov because I felt like that would give too much away😭. Also, did you guys know that his mom is blasian???? I had to do something with that information. I also apologize in advance for this loool. Enjoy?

The mug of half-drunk coffee somehow manages to steal his attention despite the important presentation, Mr. McLeod, the COO, is currently giving at the front of the conference room. The tendrils from the cup now rise in sparser intervals and are a lot less prominent. They probably wouldn’t be noticeable if you weren’t paying keen attention like he is. But it’s not the black liquid that’s cooling in the cup that has his attention— no, it’s the mug itself. White porcelain and plain, just as he requested. He likes things simple and pristine; it brings a sort of peace that cuts through the constant buzzing in his brain, like thousands of bees are always in his vicinity. Simplicity, order, cleanliness and recently, Sofía. But the more Virgil stares at the mug, the louder the buzzing seems to grow. There’s a chip on it. It’s minuscule, but it’s there: a light grey patch that sullies the glistening white.

“Mr. Van Dijk?"

On instinct, his fist folds into a harsh clench at the use of his surname. A reminder of the man who has made him everything he is today. A man he is torn between despising and admiring.

“Yes?”

Mr. McLeod quivers under his stare, so he hurries to relax his features: empty—blank, rather than the harsh furrowed brows and piercing glare he knows he first pinned him with.

“Oh I was saying um…” the Caucasian man clears his throat, adjusting his tie out of nerves. But it only manages to tick Virgil off more because he now makes it crooked. It leans a little too far to his left.

“In summary, operations are good and profits are even better since we started importing goods from China.”

“Good. If that’s all?”

Relief ripples throughout the room and it annoys him further. He hates the way his employees in office cower in his presence because they dub him as intimidating. Sure he’s not looking to attend after work socials, but he treats them all with respect, listens to their opinions or concerns and pays them all handsomely. ‘Maybe if you’d try showing an ounce of emotion around them rather than annoyance?’ He ignores the rational side of his brain to focus on his surroundings.

“That’s all.”

“Then the meeting is concluded. Who seconds?”

The CFO raises his hand to second the motion. Virgil stands and everyone else follows suit. Before exiting the conference room, he turns to address his assistant; “I need a new mug. White, plain and porcelain. Please.”

**********

“Have you decided if you want to move forward with the plan yet?”

Scratching at his goatee four times, Virgil reclines in the plush chair in Mr. Zhào’s humble space. The smell of burning Chinese herbs in his small ‘doctor’s office’ helps bring a level of calm the rational side of his mind chooses to combat; he’s not one to believe in the use of plants and weeds to regulate emotions or stall one’s mind from collapsing in on itself. He had witnessed his father trying and failing for years. Mr. Zhào’s face is textured with wrinkles, crows feet and dark brown moles. His black hair is thinning in the middle and he now has a characteristic hunch to his shoulders and bend to his knees. But Virgil is no fool, he knows weaponized helplessness when he sees it. It’s easy to underestimate a man like him— a fool’s first mistake. This man not only has a high rank in the Chinese Triad, but he’s also a master of martial arts. He helped mold Virgil into the parts of himself that he despises a little less than the others and is still a valuable ally.

“A certain… complication-”

Mr. Zhào cuts him off with a wheezing laugh. It’s scratchy from years of tobacco abuse. It also shows in the yellowing of his teeth.

“Complication, huh? What’s her name?”

Virgil stiffens in his seat; his fingers tap against his thigh: once, twice a third time. He pauses and tries to physically fight against the buzzing in his brain but concedes after only two painful seconds to bring his finger down a fourth time.

‘You waited too long; the rhythm is lost. Go again.’

His brain is almost screaming at him despite his calm demeanor. He hurries to tap four times then clenches his fist.

“Why are you so sure it’s a woman?” He eyes the man whose wisdom is always something he has been envious of. Mr. Zhào is patient, strategic and wise; always armed with old Chinese sayings and information from leisurely strolls throughout the streets of California.

“Or a lover. I’ve been in our world a long time, Virgil. ‘Complications’ usually mean only one thing, especially for levelheaded, smart men like yourself.” He states in a matter of fact tone. He reaches over to hand Virgil a cup of ginseng tea he had been steeping since he stepped into his office.

He takes the offered white mug. Porcelain and pristine. Mr. Zhào has known him since he was a child, after all.

“Not exactly a lover but…”

“Ah, you want her to be. It’s that daughter of his, isn’t it? Don’t look so alarmed. I’m old and I know things, you know this, nephew.” He says with a small laugh at the slight widening of Virgil’s eyes.

“What have you heard?” The mug is starting to burn his palm that he has clasped tightly around it.

“Don’t worry, no rumors about the two of you. Just that she’s supposed to marry the Ferrante heir and that she’s all bright eyed and beautiful. The Chen’s wanted to make a move when word started going around that her father was looking for a suitor to strengthen his position. And many others in fact— a beautiful bride that comes with the Hernandez last name. A name that has been respected in these parts since the 1970s.”

Virgil exhales a relieved breath, placing the cup on the dark wooden desk between them.

“A name that is also slowly starting to lose the respect it once had. Barka is slowly amping up his reputation because he keeps getting away with blatant disrespect. The Ferrante’s are slowly starting to earn more respect because their shipments of drugs are now more reliable. I have been here for almost a decade and you have been meeting me here for the better part of two years and he still has no idea.” He shakes his head in disbelief. “Mr. Hernandez, xū zhāng shēng shì.”

Virgil’s mandarin is a little rusty but he knows that saying well; ‘all bark no bite.’

“It took you going to the club to scare Barka in his shell a little. But since Mr. Hernandez told you not to… handle him properly, he’s out and about again. Virgil, Mr. Hernandez needs to be dealt with. He still thinks this is 2011 when people were scared of his name; as distance tests a horse’s strength, time reveals a person’s character. Mr. Hernandez was not only respected because of his last name but because he was loved. His actions these past few years have turned people against him.” He pauses his rant to take a tentative sip of his tea. And Virgil knows all too well. He understands the world they’re in but even they have certain moral codes. Mr. Hernandez has been despicable, and he worries how Sofía will react when she learns just how cruel her father can be.

“Do you understand what I’m saying, Virgil? The longer he’s allowed to keep believing the illusion that he’s still top dog, the worse it gets for everyone around him. Your reputation is being muddied and the surrounding families will start going to war for territories that’s slipping from his fingers. I understand your instinct to remain loyal for the sake of the young woman, but remember, bīng bù yàn zhà.”

“Soldiers don’t hate deceit.”

Zhào nods solemnly at his contemplative translation. All is fair in war. The war might not have started yet, but they’re on the brink of it. Everyone, except the clueless man he chose to partner with, can feel it.

“We have to be smart about it, though. We cannot go for the head first. Something small to… hinder certain things.” Zhào looks up at him and quiet understanding passes between their gazes. Virgil tries to contain the quiet relief that passes through him. He can now justify his plan as strategic rather than done out of rash emotion.

“Is everything in place in case I make a decision soon?”

Zhào offers a solemn nod.

“Good.” Virgil downs the lukewarm tea in one swallow. The liquid warms his throat and chest as it glides through his body.

“How is your mother?”

Virgil’s nostrils flare. “Uncle…”

“You need to speak to her… she misses you. You have this idea that she wouldn’t be proud of the man you’ve beco-”

“And I’m right.” He clenches his fists four times rhythmically in his lap.

Zhào scoffs. “Are you forgetting she’s my sister? Despite what I do? Despite who I am? Did she keep me estranged from the family? She willingly dated your father as well. Sure, she would’ve preferred a doctor or a damn engineer but you’re a product of your environment. She knows that, we all know that. Wiring hundreds of thousands to her from secure accounts every month is not enough. She wants to see you. Bǎi shàn xiào wéi xiān.” He chastises sternly. (Among hundreds of virtues, filial piety comes first).

For the first time in a long time, Virgil feels a hunch to his shoulders. He’s ashamed.

“You’re right, Uncle. I’ll… I’ll speak to her, I just need to…”

“Yes. I know. Just promise me you will.”

Virgil gives a firm nod.

“Good. And stop by one of these days for a sparring session. Or do you think you’re better than me now?” Zhào asks with a smirk.

“Only a fool would underestimate you, uncle.”

Zhào barks a sharp laugh. “And don’t ever forget it.”

Flipping his wrist in his line of sight, Virgil eyes his Patek. “I need to get going. Hernandez wants me with him to escort them to the Ferrante’s for dinner in a few hours.” His heart thumps in a way that’s embarrassing at the thought of seeing Sofía again.

Zhào stands with him to escort him to the door of his little cramped office. The building is so unassuming and only labeled in mandarin that translates to “Zhào’s alternative medicine shop.”

They eye each other in quiet understanding. “Okay, nephew. And remember to please take care of your mind. Stop by one of these days so I can take care of you.”

“Uncle, burning herbs and acupressure to unblock chi won’t help. It didn’t help my father.”

“Because your father was already broken beyond repair when we found him. Your mother helped for a while but it wasn’t enough. He was too… damaged.” There’s a hint of melancholy in his voice.

“I might be too.”

*************

His feet take him around back before he even alerts Donavon of his presence. He doesn’t question it or think too deeply; he just allows himself to go where the air smells earthy with an underlying scent of bitter citrus. There he finds her, humming softly to herself while she fills a little basket with lemons. Her curly hair is secured on top of her head with a colourful scarf— it makes her cheekbones more prominent. Her brown skin seems to always glow along with her pretty brown eyes and moisturized pink, plump lips. Lips that he has already missed. She’s wearing a little flowy, shorts set— perfect for the summer but terrible for his self restraint. It shows too much skin and the ample curve of her hips and ass. Rational thoughts flee his mind for a moment as he marches in her direction with laser-like focus. She startles when she finally notices his presence when he’s a few feet away.

“Virgil! You scared me.”

Her pretty eyes blink up at him in wide eyed stupor as he grasps her hips, moving them in the shadow of the lemon tree. It’s reckless doing this in broad daylight, but he feels starved. Her little moan is sweet when he captures her lips in a kiss. Lemons clatter by their feet and her hands, sullied with soil reach up to grip at the lapel of his jacket. And Virgil realizes that his brain remains quiet. There’s no buzzing or the need to wipe at it until his muscles burn. Because all that matters is Sofía’s pliant little mouth and her soft skin beneath his palms as he cups her behind. She eagerly sucks his tongue into her mouth, drawing a groan from the pit of his stomach. He can feel himself harden beneath his slacks and boxers, his control is slipping fast. The way Sofía moans almost helplessly while she grinds against him doesn’t help. She’s such an eager little thing; that night she cried as she came all over his fingers while thanking him might’ve costed him a little bit of his already fragile sanity. He needs to have her fully at his mercy; he’d make her forget everything but his own name. The whisper of her touch against his growing bulge forces a heavy exhale from his flared nostrils. He allows her another two seconds to tentatively feel at him before breaking the kiss and grabbing at her wrist. Sofía looks up at him in awe.

“It’s so big.” The words seem to be blurted from her mouth in a breathless whisper.

Virgil quickly moves away from her body. Wiping at the sticky essence she left behind on his lips, he eyes the entrance of the greenhouse to ensure they’re still alone.

“Oh, I’m so sorry! Let me-”

He watches as Sofía, clearly panicked over something, leaves a dirty trail behind on her clothes as she wipes her hands on them in haste. Then she hurries over to brush her hands against his abdomen. It takes him a second to realize that she’s trying to get rid of the dirt she accidentally left on his clothes. His brows furrow in confusion at her frantic movements and the apologies that fall from her mouth almost desperately.

Gripping at her wrist, he speaks; “It’s fine, Sofía. Relax.”

“No it’s not! I know how you are with things like this. I’m so sor-”

“What do you mean?”

Sofía blinks up at him in confusion. “Um, being clean and um… immaculate is important to you? I figured you might have ocd or something closely related.”

“What?” He can’t mask the disbelief in his tone. Ocd? He figured something was wrong with him but he never gave much thought as to what exactly.

“Uh… your suits are always clean without a single wrinkle. If your jacket is off, your shirts are folded four times up each arm neatly— if they aren’t folded, you adjust the cuffs on each arm four times; you brush your hand over your hair to make sure it’s slick often and always four times; you scratch at your goatee four times; you clench your fists four times… Virgil, you’re a man working in organized crime with hand sanitizer in your cars.” She whispers the words cautiously.

“I…” Virgil eyes her unsurely. He’s not exactly sure how to reply and he’s torn between being impressed by her observation and wary of it. He doesn’t enjoy being… read.

“I could be wrong. I just googled after I noticed and…Where did the obsession with the number four come from?”

“My father. He was somewhat of a bodyguard to very important people. Someone he was assigned to protect died in his service because he shot the assassin three times but he somehow survived; tricked them all into thinking he died then killed the target anyway. I was very young but he came home almost crazed and he kept repeating to always…” He trails off, jaw clenching almost painfully.

Sofía nods; without him having to finish, she easily pieces the rest of the puzzle together.

“Why are you always wearing a suit anyway? Is it to conform to the apparent rule of this… kind of business?”

His shoulders start to relax at the change of subject. “I have a job.”

Virgil smirks a little at the way she gapes at him.

“As in… a legitimate job outside of all this?”

“Of course, Sofía. I’m not an idiot.”

“What kind of job?” Curiosity lights up her already pretty eyes.

“I own a business; it deals with…import.” He says cautiously. Sofía rolls her eyes, cocking her hips to glare at him. Fuck, the things he wants do to her for that attitude.

“Importing what?”

“Produce.” He answers truthfully.

“As in… fruits and vegetables?”

Virgil nods easily, watching as her skepticism changes to something contemplative.

“A legitimate business that explains your finances; one that also requires regular shipments coming in for you so that your goods are under less scrutiny. Perfect cover for you to smuggle your apparently ‘very special’weapons from The Netherlands with a lot less hassle.”

Virgil is not sure how many times this woman is going to surprise him but it’s now a bit concerning.

“Don’t look at me like that, the men around here don’t respect me, remember? I heard them speaking…” Virgil's eyes narrow as she licks at her lip and avoids his eyes.

“You have something else to say.” Not a question, a statement.

“They put off my dinner with Romano for three days but we’re going later. That means the arrangement isn’t off; I thought you were going to fix it.” She pouts her pretty mouth while glaring at him.

“I’m working on it, little rose. I promise.”

Virgil’s phone buzzes in his pocket and he knows without looking it’s Mr. Hernandez wondering why he’s not in his office yet.

“I need to head inside. You should too, to start getting ready for dinner later.”

****************

Sofía eyes her reflection in the mirror of her bedroom. She’s adorned with pearls and a creme coloured Chanel dress that hugs her figure all the way to the middle of her calves. Her heels are closed toe and pointed with a thin delicate strap. Modest. Ever since Sofía found out about the horrors her mother has been suffering in silence under her father’s cruel hands, she has made a point of reigning in her subtle acts of rebellion. Her fear for her mother’s safety has now taken priority over whatever else she’s feeling. Everyone is already gathered in the living room by the time she ambles down the stairs. Virgil’s eyes do a quick sweep of her from head to foot before he turns his attention back to whatever her father is saying. Sofía notes through the warmth that floods her face the way Virgil stands within the small semicircle formed. He angles his body slightly away from her father completely; he’s not showing outright disrespect by standing outside the circle and not giving his attention. But the little gesture isn’t lost on her. Raúl, Enrique, Joaquin and Galo complete the small group and she wonders if this means that Galo’s rank has changed recently. He has been more… involved lately.

“It’s decided. Celeste, you and I are riding with Raúl and Enrique. Sofía, you’re with Virgil and Galo. Joaquin will stay just behind with Juan, Sal and Mendes for extra security.” Her father says with finality before leading everyone out the house.

And if the tension between the two wasn’t obvious before, it is now. Her father always rode with Virgil. Celeste mirrors her shock but they both know better than to say anything. So quietly, they move to obey.

Sofía makes her way to the passenger side of the vehicle but she’s stopped abruptly by a gentle hold on her bare forearm.

“No. Galo rides up front.” Virgil says sternly.

Sofïa glares at him but moves to enter the backseat as he holds the door open for her. He fixes her with a look that screams ‘behave.’ The door is slammed shut with a muted thud that makes her even more annoyed as her ears start ringing. Raúl pulls out of the driveway first with Virgil right on his tail and Joaquin just behind. The ride is tense and quiet; Galo is not someone she has spent a lot of time with, so she isn’t sure what the man is like. Folding her hands in her lap, she glares at Virgil’s side profile. There’s a certain tension that’s visible on his frame even more so than usual and she wonders if it has to do with Galo being in the car.

“Can we turn the radio on?” She asks with faux sweetness dripping like honey from her voice.

“Sur-”

“No.”

Galo clears his throat as his approval is cut off by the Dutch man in the driver’s seat. Sofía hopes her stare actually scorches his skin. She watches the way he squeezes at the steering four times before turning onto the main road. Red lights from the stop sign at the intersection illuminates the inside of the vehicle; and as Sofía sits in the backseat eyeing both men up front, a sudden feeling of unease washes over her. Her heart suddenly starts beating a little too fast; she wills herself to breathe, watching the lights turn green. Just as the vehicle lurches forward, a pair of bright head lights descend upon them from the right.

“Virgil!”

Sofía’s body is flung against the door as Virgil swerves sharply to avoid being bulldozed by the matte black suv. A flurry of loud, black motorbikes suddenly appear from both sides and another black suv breaks the red light to pull in front of Raúl’s vehicle up front.

“Little rose, down.”

It takes a while for her brain to properly process Virgil’s words. Time seems to slow watching as Galo fumbles with his gun in the front seat; but Virgil; Virgil moves with calm efficiency to examine the bullets in the cartridge before chambering and locking it in place.

“Sofía!”

Sofía ducks just as the first round of shots ring out. The car starts moving again as bullets thud against the bulletproof exterior. Cupping her hands over her ears, Sofía stays cramped on the floor of the backseat as chaos unfolds around her. The vehicle swerves again, this time with a hideous sound as the tires skid across asphalt. Her chest tightens painfully; she was already on the verge of hyperventilating before and now she’s sure she might pass out from the lack of oxygen. A shrill scream is torn from the pit of her belly by the sound of a gun going off. This one sounds so much closer than the others. There’s a choked off groan and the sound of something splattering in the vehicle; something warm and wet drips onto the back of her neck causing Sofía to start clawing at the skin of her chest.

“Virgil?” She calls out in a timid whisper.

“Shit. I’m okay, little rose. Keep your head down, okay, baby?”

The car swerves again before she hears the front door open and close just as quickly. Police sirens wail in the distance while the car pulls a dangerous u-turn and starts speeding. Sofía is not sure how long she stays down while he drives but she’s too scared to move. Low vibrations hum from his direction before he starts speaking.

“Yes, she’s fine. Galo was not so lucky.”

Galo… Sofía feels like heaving.

“No, I’m taking her somewhere safe. Don’t go home, go to the safe house and call more reinforcements; we need to regroup. I’ll call in 30 minutes.”

Silence stretches on for another minute after his phone call.

“Little rose, you can get up now.” He says softly.

Sofía limbs shake violently as she gingerly hauls herself off the floor and onto the leather seats. Virgil eyes are brimming with concern when they make eye contact in the overhead mirror. Keeping one hand on the steering, he reaches the other around for her to hold onto for dear life. She’s so desperate for an anchor, anything to stop the tremors that wrack her body and to slow the erratic pace of her heart.

“Don’t cry, you’re safe now.” He promises. Sofía wants to believe him but her eyes keep scanning the roads in every direction. Wherever he’s taking her, looks to be away from the city as the amount of cars on the road lessen significantly.

“My mom… is she alright?” Her voice is barely above a whisper.

“Yes. Raúl and Enrique kept them safe. I’m not sure about Joaquin and the others.”

“Galo…” she eyes the now empty front seat with something cold pitting in her chest. Galo was just there— he was alive and breathing. Hair with copious amounts of gel like he always liked to wear it. Liked. Past tense— because now he’s gone.

“I’m sorry, Sofía.”

Virgil words sound like they are coming from underwater. She can’t look away from the front seat. More specifically, the window by the front seat. There’s blood and what she’s sure is marrow splattered all over it. But that’s not what really has her attention. It’s the glass itself; still intact with only a little dent with small splinters surrounding it. The glass on all her father’s suvs are bulletproof after all. The realization makes Sofía break out in immediate cold sweat. The glass wasn’t penetrated, so Galo couldn’t have been shot from outside. He wasn’t. Swallowing thickly, Sofía slowly turns her gaze back to the overhead mirror to find Virgil already watching her. His gaze is piercing, knowing. He watched her put the pieces of the puzzle together. Sofía drops his hand like it burns, scooting away to the corner behind the passenger’s seat. His jaw clenches, now empty fist squeezing four times before he brings it back to the steering.

Sofía sobs softly before asking; “Virgil… what did you do?”

[shanastoryteller]

okay,but for realsies if I do end up watching Roswell New Mexico, what's the recommended place to stop watching before being filled with rage about writing choices, but still get the maximum time with the characters?

oh geez

ok so keep in mind this is a bad cw show!! that's the standard we're at

season 1 is legitimately good. solid writing and plot for what it is and AMAZING characters. the characters and relationships are 100% what make this show. i ended season one being absolutely in love with liz and michael. they were easily my favorite characters out of all of them, even though i really did like the others

i didn't start shipping alex and michael until season 2

in season 1 they're all, as michael puts it, "tortured lust" and now looking back i love all their scenes but at the time i just didn't find them all that compelling. it's all so high stakes that it just all feels like drama. they never get a moment to just be before they're fighting or something again

in season 2 you actually see them acting like friends. it was actually the episode where they break into the long farm that really got me, where they're laughing and conspiring together and watching wyatt make an ass of himself that they really clicked for me. i was fully invested from that moment on. the relationships and characters continue to be great into season 2 and the science and plot is sort of stupid, by which i mean very, but despite being stupid there is an internal logic being carried through the season, so that's something

season 2 is also, unfortunately, the season where maria becomes intolerable. spoilers below.

i was actually fine with it up until the last episode of season 2. maria betrays her best friend, the only one who's shown to know all her internal struggles and who goes to an effort to support her, by getting together with the man he's in love with behind his back after explicitly telling her best friend that she won't pursue him. i didn't like this choice, but

maria doesn't have to be perfect. so far in season 1 she's shown hints of impulsiveness and selfishness and thoughtless cruelty, but she's also shown the huge effort she goes to to be more than that, to be the fun friend and the good friend, to legitimately care about people and try and help them. maria of season 1 was interesting and multi faceted and a good character doesn't always have to make the right choices or do the right thing and can of course be capable or doing good things and bad things simultaneously

the thing that makes maria's (and to a lesser extent, michael's) actions in season 2 intolerable is that she's never held accountable for them

alex isn't allowed to get mad at her and michael ever. neither of them ever apologize to him for getting with his best friend/love of his life. he's never allowed to be upset with them about it - including after the infamous 2x06 threesome. alex is visibly, noticeably upset about what happened the morning after. michael doesn't get it and never gets it. maria uses it as a way to force michael to make a choice once and for all - her or alex

again, this isn't really a problem. it's conflict which stories need to progress

except it's not allowed to be

no one ever acknowledges how shitty this was of maria. michael never comes to understand alex's feelings about having sex that involves a woman (and his supposed best friend) as a gay man and with the man he loves and wants to be with who then chooses his best friend over him again. this is a really interesting, complicated thing for the show to navigate

except they don't

we don't see alex for an episode and then when we do he's actively trying to move on from michael with someone else in a way he hasn't been the rest of that season. maria's plan of using this to push alex away clearly worked and yet it's never really addressed. the next time we see michael and alex interact, michael says, surprised, "you came." and alex replies, "you asked." which is among one of my favorite interactions between them, but doesn't tell us anything. it implies that michael knows that alex was upset after the threesome and that he might not come, when alex has spent the whole season so far being at his beck and call, and alex affirming he's still here for michael, but that's as an explicit acknowledgement about everything that happened that we get

maria is fairly disparaging of michael even when she's with him, both before and after finding out he's an alien, and refuses to give him any say in her life and changes the subject to sex or something else when he tries to discuss anything serious with her. michael is stagnant with her, unable to grow because that's not what she wants from him. by contrast, all of his scenes with alex are about his emotions and what he wants and who he wants to be and who alex believes he could be. the contrast is really startling, and again could have been super compelling, except it's another thing that's never acknowledged. all the characters talk about how great michael and maria are together and there's no reckoning. michael even says he loves her and she has to break up with him. which is another thing that could have made sense, michael making a desperate bid to keep this thing he's hurt alex over worthwhile, for this relationship to be anything but another fuck up in a long line of fuck ups, while maria has finally figured out that what she wanted from michael wasn't michael, but an idea of him, an idea of someone that could love her exactly as she is without ever challenging her, which isn't really love. we could have salvaged it!

it's not salvaged. they play it straight. maria never has any reckoning for her actions and choices, no come to jesus moment, nothing. the narrative treats everything she does as good and fair and beyond reproach, which is why i didn't mind s2 on the first watch and hate her parts of it in retrospect. what i thought was a character arc and set up for growth was just bad writing

michael and alex never have a conversation about maria or her michael's relationship. they just move on as if it wasn't a big deal. it's crazy

season 3 is very bad, but malex gets together and liz is delicious and we get some great kyle scenes. season 4 is nearly unwatchable. if you watch either, i'd just skip around to scenes involving characters you like and ignore the rest as much as you can

[hd-wireless]

📻🎶 H/D WIRELESS 2025 - WEEKLY WRAP-UP #2

Welcome to our second wrap up of 2025!

Two weeks of posting have passed, and we have already revealed 19 absolute bangers for you, and there are plenty more hits still to come! Today we're not only thanking our creators but the readers as well!   🎉  Thank you all for being amazing! As always you can listen to the prompted songs for the works we post on a playlists:

Click here for the YouTube playlist.

And here for spotify! (big thanks to @evaeleanor for helping here!)

🎶 H/D Wireless Fic 🎶

📻 Signs of a Lifetime [T, 1,758]

🎵 Song Prompt: Don’t Delete the Kisses - Wolf Alice  🎵 Summary: Draco keeps giving Harry the slip, but it ends tonight.

📻 Draco Malfoy and the Multiverse of What the Fuck [ E, 12,259 ]

🎵 Song Prompt: Talk too Much By Coin  🎵 Summary: Draco can jump timelines. Potter is in all of them.

📻 Socratic Methods [E, 79,103 ]

🎵 Song Prompt: 'Bed Chem' by Sabrina Carpenter  🎵 Summary: Against his better judgement, Harry agrees to appear on WENIS – a charity gameshow designed to lead contestants to the deepest desires of their hearts, while also showcasing Wheezes’ new line of adult products.  The aphrodisiac tea quickly gets the better of him.  So does Malfoy.

📻 Bathed in Starlight, Shrouded in Truth [T, 5,574]

🎵 Song Prompt: Stargazing by Myles Smith  🎵 Summary: After the war, both Harry and Draco are willing to shed their old prejudices and grow as individuals, forming a tentative friendship. They remain friendly after Hogwarts, though no more in each other's lives than when they were in the castle together, until several independent decisions bring them back into each other's orbit. Once Harry gets out of his own way, he realizes how deep his feelings for Draco actually run, but it takes far longer for Draco to do the same.

📻 wonders bright [M, 7,160]

🎵 Song Prompt: The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us! by Sufjan Stevens 🎵 Summary: When Harry stumbles upon Malfoy walking the streets of Muggle London, what else is he to do besides follow?

📻 in the wells of silence [E, 35,788]

🎵 Song Prompt: The Sound of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel (cover by Disturbed)  🎵 Summary: In a challenge to see who can shut up the longest, Harry and Draco stop speaking. Shame that’s not enough to stop them falling in love.

📻 First In Line [M, 14,420]

🎵 Song Prompt: 'Take A Chance On Me' by 'ABBA'  🎵 Summary: Auror Harry is newly divorced and deals with the aftermath while trying to solve a difficult case. Robards is being annoyingly over-protective. And, naturally, confirmed bachelor Draco Malfoy is in the middle of it all.

📻 shake the disease [E, 70,012]

🎵 Song Prompt: shake the disease by depeche mode  🎵 Summary: After Draco gets one too many complaints at work, Harry gets assigned to the job of preventing any more. Only, he discovers things are far more complicated than they seem, with corrupt Aurors, a society on the brink of collapse and a magical disease slowly draining the life from Draco.

🎶 H/D Wireless Podfic 🎶

📻 Take You Home [E, 2:53:31 ]

🎵 Song Prompt: Take you home - Dido 🎵 Summary: Everybody’s a little fucked up after the war, Draco especially. What starts as hate sex after a night out, eventually turns into something else, something more like comfort. And even though his friends all tell Harry he’s just being used, all Harry’s doing is making sure Draco gets home in one piece. He’s not falling helplessly in love.

[gammaraydeath]

Date idea

Nerd out about history in ur room

Shepard tells Garrus about the ice age and he's like "oh wow, you your species survived that?" "Yeah"

Then Garrus tells Shepard about the Scorch, similar to the ice age but instead of a frozen hell, a scorching hell, now its her turn to go "wow your species survived that?" "Yeah"

Don't get me started on dinosaurs

I wonder if turians had like, dinosaur equivalent, or if other species had a dinosaur equivalent that predated their own species or is that just an earth thing

HMMMM well yes i would imagine nearly every species has organisms that predate them represented in the fossil record!! not even the asari or the krogan with their very long lifespan just appeared out of thin air. they originated from simple, single celled life just like every other organism. but would all of their planets have had a "dinosaur" stage? it's hard to say. i went on a whole biology and evolution rant i apologize in advance

i think the trick is to not look at "dinosaur" as a required evolutionary step. they're just animals, very cool animals, but animals nonetheless, that lived and died just like so many animals before us and so many animals that are yet to exist. even just like us, as no species can exist forever. i think there's a lot of freedom in imagining any alien planet's prehistory if you don't try to make it analogous to our own - dinosaurs existed here because their ancestors did, and their ancestors did, and their ancestors did, and also because the conditions were right and evolutionary pressures shaped them along the way. so when you take those specific circumstances away, what are you left with?

we don't know very much about the life on palaven, aside from the fact that much of it has some sort of natural shielding from radiation - everything is silver except the turians, paraphrasing from jon grissom. a planet with a weak magnetic field, how would life evolve there? obviously you don't have to follow science exactly, as some research suggests that complex life would not have evolved if our planet's core did not solidify, creating our protective magnetic field. but you can gain inspiration from the real world. some insects (most famously cockroaches but i gave you a different example there) are more resistant to ionizing radiation (the kind that would bombard palaven). now here's the interesting thing - it actually has very little to do with size. radioresistance is all about dna repair, and organisms with simpler genomes or copies of their genome will make more accurate repairs. us humans, we have very complicated genomes and our repair pathways are prone to error. (and again, it's not related to size. the organism with the largest genome we've discovered so far is a plant)

and there's another thing too - smaller particles are very penetrative. a metallic carapace may be enough to block alpha and beta particles, but life on palaven must still be getting heavy doses of gamma and x-rays all the time. so you can infer their dna repair pathways are extremely efficient. one of my favorite headcanons is that as a result, turians very rarely get cancer. did you know this is true of sharks? not the radioresistance part, but they don't accumulate dna damage as much as other organisms, and as a result, get cancer less frequently than other animals. this ability to repair damage can also lend itself to longevity (hi, greenland sharks!). turians have a lifespan comparable to humans, but they may have animals that live for centuries on their planet. their rate of evolution may also be slower - if your dna is repairing all the damage, then mutations aren't accumulating either, and mutation is what drives evolution. going back to the shark example, animals with slower rates of evolution also have trouble adapting to a changing environment. in particular, a genetic bottleneck, perhaps caused by some horrible war that killed off much of the population, could present significant problems to the species' future.

so has the climate on palaven mostly remained the same? past ecological disasters could spell the end for a lot of life on the planet. just food for thought. i think something like a scorch could happen, but you have to keep in mind that humans are extremely adaptable. we survived plenty of ecological disasters because we're us - how would a less adaptable species have survived a period of intense heating? even if they themselves are smart, and tenacious, they still depend on the resources their world provides. if their ecosystem dies, so do they.

as for what their prehistoric animals looked like? well, that's anyone's game. i have no idea, and if you read all this and still want to give them their own version of dinosaurs then go for it! i think as long as you put thought into it, you can really do whatever you want. although i like to think a lot of their megafauna are found in their oceans because:

1) water is actually a pretty decent radiation shield, so you can get wackier with it. like if much of palaven's life has some kind of shielding, that must limit size somewhat. the more surface area you have to cover, the heavier this plating gets. there are always evolutionary exceptions that seem to break the laws of life as we know them, like we had sauropods for crying out loud, but as a general rule of thumb i think that land animals trend toward the small to medium side.

2) turians can't swim but what if there were Other reasons why garrus doesn't like the ocean? big scary things in the depths of the sea is a really fun idea. and maybe if the environment on palaven is stable, and animals typically have low rates of evolution, a lot of the prehistoric monsters still exist down there...

also, just as a footnote, i do actually have a palaveni animal i made up. it's small and potato sized, lives underground in desert environments, has no eyes and tiny ears and relies on sensitive whiskers to pick up on vibrations in the ground, and modified front claws that act like shovels. its back legs are small and vestigial, and it's the closest thing the planet has to a mammal, secreting fluid from glands in its skin for its pups (that hatch from eggs). it has no name, but i love it

[burning-academia-if]

Okay, I feel like this could be difficult to answer, but I have finally worked up the courage to ask this so here we go:

How would the ROs act if they were in MC's shoes and MC was a student warden in place of Lars? Like a complete role reversal (mostly focusing on the Lars x MC dynamic because the scene where Lars is forced to come to the MC's rescue is stuck in my head, and the ask where the ROs give their POV on having the scars has opened this can of worms in the first place)

Ooooh man I love this question and it has been rotating in my head since I got it. This is going to be more a complete role reversal (ie the RO is both human who's not privy to the magic world + got violently thrown into this world in the same manner MC did) Under a cut because I kept ranting lol

Rook: He has spent his whole life keeping his distance, terrified of the ramifications he could cause if he kept you close, only for things to turn into this. How could you have kept such a major secret from him (as if he hasn't been doing the same to you)? How could you have a completely different life than the one you led him to believe (just like he does)? For the initial wave of emotions, he thought it all a deserving punishment. The violence, the scars, the sudden upheaval of everything he knew. It was what he'd been hoping for. A complete and utter destruction.

But then there was you. You, who he wanted to keep safe, and was the one who landed him in danger (And isn't this fine? Isn't this what he'd been waiting for?). Yet. Yet. There is something congealing in his organs, writhing and bitter, clamoring for a way out. A sudden, white hot rage asking, snarling 'Do you really deserve this?' A child of abuse, free falling into this new, strange world that does not want him and has judged him for being guilty without a moment's hesitation. The more the situation solidifies in his mind, the more he understands what has occurred, his whole life is thrown into a different life.

He never fucking deserved any of this. He doesn't care, truly, that you hid this from him, but by God, the two of you going to figure this out together and you are helping him through this nightmare. Maybe somewhere along the way, the two of you can finally apologize and work out the mess your friendship has become.

Beck: There is something complacent in his soul when the situation overtakes him. Yes, of course, this is how things would work out, isn't it? A dull sort of sense in the back of his mind, pulling out memories of his youth, or all the strange things he's noticed throughout his life. Him and death have always been very close. For this to happen, for the dead to finally reach out and brand him in a way he's long expected for most of his life (even if it was not in the way in which it happened), feels closer to an exhale than a life shattering event.

He, by the way of his morals, does not care for the way of the Student Wardens. But you're there, and at least something about you as some sort of care in there. A glint of understanding. He holds onto that. Hopes that as things keep creeping in, as he keeps finding himself changing (because he leans too far into death, gives in too easily to the dead, as is the way of things. Who would he be, if he didn't?), that at least you'll be someone who he can at least speak to him about this things that is as alive as he is.

Beck doesn't know what he wants, at the end of this. Peace, maybe. Some kind of conclusion to the tragedy he's preformed in his head his whole life. Maybe he just wants someone who he can finally confide in about all his complicated thoughts about death (could that be...you?). Or maybe he'll just let himself be dragged along, living through this dark fairy tale however it was intended to be lived.

Rhea: The perfect daughter suddenly is perfect no longer. She sits, quiet and shell shocked, in the Headmaster's office, staring at a father who left her and her mother long ago (because of course he would have left her, she realizes later, when the politics of magicians settles over her skin like a thin film. How could he have ever been able to stand having a human daughter, instead of a magician? She was never perfect. The moment of her birth was the moment which marked her flawed). Her father's eyes are a damnation, filled up with endless disappointment, without a hint of surprise.

There are so many things to think about after. The scars on her hands she keeps staring at, her mother. God her mother, who lied to her for her whole life. Her mother, who knew her father was a magician because she was one, too. What the hell is this? Why the hell did she do everything she was told, to build up this version of herself, if none of it ever fucking mattered in the end? She would never be anything they wanted her to be.

She isn't surprised when her father makes sure she is personally tailed by a Student Warden at all times. But on the days that it's you? She at least feels less like a prisoner held captive by her own father. You seem reluctant to do this and just as annoyed by this whole situation as she is. She can at least find a moment of solace in that.

Zoe: No. No. No no no nonononono. Oh god, of course Zoe finds themselves instantly labeled as guilty the moment eyes are laid upon them. They can't do this. Their whole life, they were always the weird one. The Other. The one who kept changing names, who never talked. Who looked different, who felt different. They didn't need this man before them to declare them guilty to know the verdict. All they needed for the confirmation was the swarm of people around them.

They can't drag their family into this, is their first thought. The rip of their heart at the only safe place they had being taken away from this breaks them into pieces. They hate this university, the people here. They don't even care about the fact that magic is real. Clearly the fact they have the ability to create miracles, but they've chosen to only continue the very human issue of power struggles and bullshit politics makes them think they're not worth shit.

They don't like you either. A warden, and one of the people they know is keeping an eye on them. But you're the one always around, and they can't keep everything bottled up inside. Even if you're not someone who can sympathize, at least you're someone they can talk to about the way their life has gone sideways and be able to at least understand what they're talking about. They're so starved for comfort, they'll take whatever they can get.

Lars: He's burning down this school and everything in it. He makes it to this conclusion before he even makes it through the door the Headmaster's office. After meeting the Headmaster, he figures he'll also burn down everyone in it as well.

He doesn't think, not for a second, not with these newfound scars that scratch at an itch in his brain that he just can't remember no matter how much he attempts to scratch at it. He dives into research, he doesn't take no for an answer. He's not about to sit down and twiddle his thumbs while his whole life has been turned upside down and not while they think he's the perpetrator. They can try to stop him all they want, but he's getting every dirty secret he can dig up.

And you? He's using you to source answers. If you're compliant? Perfect, you're now his partner in crime. If not? Oh the two of you are fighting and butting heads, and he'll always make a point to remind you whenever he's doing some other questionable thing to get info that you're here to keep tabs on him, so you're in the for the ride either way. He'd almost find having you around fun (in either scenario), if he wasn't too focused on trying to figure out what the fuck is going on at this school.

???: You already know the answer to this. I know you do. I am you and you are me. We are mirrors, aren't we? You don't need this version of this story. You're already living it. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.

And I'm sorry I'm not sorry enough to stop it.

[kyroptera-more-like-chiroptera]

Evolution of Nostraman Eyesight

Okay, so, to start off with, I wanted to make this into a proper reply because I always love yapping to a fellow biologist about stuff like this. So, here goes some of the thoughts I had on this whole thing since *checks notes* yesterday lol. So, from my (admittedly limited) understanding, Nostramo is a hive world that was perpetually dark due to its pollution-clogged atmosphere and the fact that it circled a slowly dying star whose light was unable to penetrate this toxic haze to reach the surface. I think I read somewhere that it’s like a shroud of perpetual darkness produced by the massive amounts of toxic smog kept the planet swathed in dull greys and deep blacks. I also seem to remember reading somewhere that only the rich could afford the Nostraman idea of illumination, which was little more than (and I’ll come back on this later) dim blue illuminalion-strips that were placed in the ceilings of the ruling hierarchy's luxurious dwellings in the spires of the dark world's hive cities.

In order to make sense of this properly there’s a couple of sciency things about visual physiology and evolutionary adaptations to dark vision that I’d like to go into (just a little bit). This includes the visual spectrum, both ultraviolet (UV) and infrared (IR), and some of the basic mechanics of the eye.

Text under the cut because I am a science nerd and wanted to write it all out properly.

(also thanks to @nereidof40k for indulging me in all the geek talk, and @ladyalisette wanted to tag you in this since it's inspired by one of your responses on yesterday's post 😋)

When we’re talking about light, we’re talking about the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. It’s the full range of EM radiation, and organised by either frequency (in hertz/Hz) or wavelength (in nanometers/nm). The spectrum itself is then divided into bands, with dif names for the waves in each band, and from low to high (frequency) these are radio waves, microwaves, infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, x-rays and gamma rays. We’ll only talk about a couple of these, don’t worry, and I won’t complicate things too much.

So light/visible light/visible radiation is basically what we (humans) can see, and spans the wavelength range of 400-700 nm. As you can see from the image below, it’s flanked on the left by the UV band (high side of the freq spectrum and lower wavelength) , and on the right side by the IR band of the EM spectrum (on the lower frequency but higher wavelength).

When it comes to IR, the only important thing to remember here is that red is on the right side of that spectrum (at the far end of the human visible light spectrum) and that IR begins with waves that are just longer than those of red light. This means that red is at the long wavelength end of the visible light spectrum and has a dominant wavelength of approximately 625–750 nanometres. Also important is that IR be sensed as heat, even though it is invisible to the human eye.

Now as for ultraviolet light, usually simply known as UV, is electromagnetic radiation of wavelengths of 10–400 nm, is present in sunlight and constitutes about 10% of the total electromagnetic radiation output from our Sun. We usually put the lower end of the visual spectrum at 400nm, but that’s not a hard limit, and shorter wavelengths just become less and less visible in that range, and a lot of animal species can see near-UV than humans can’t.

An interesting tidbit here is that your eye is basically just a giant receiver, it captures this optical radiation across the visual spectrum, which causes the electrons inside a molecule to go bonkers, which then leads to a change in the bonding chemistry of that molecule, and that change is interpreted and sent off to our brain as a signal (aka what we see -very very broadly, apologies for any inconsistencies, it’s been ages since I’ve actually had any of this in college). At the lower end of the EM spectrum (at the IR band), we stop seeing things when the longer wavelengths no longer have the ability to excite those photons and trigger a reaction. Same thing goes for the other side of the spectrum (UV), where the internal architecture of the eye steps in, and UV light is absorbed by the cornea below 360 nm and the internal lens below 400 nm. Furthermore, the rods and cones located in the retina of the human eye cannot detect the very short (below 360 nm) ultraviolet wavelengths and are in fact damaged by ultraviolet. Fun fact, this is why some people who are born without a lens in the eye (who can still see since the lens is only responsible for about 30% of the eyes' focusing power) say they can ‘see’ UV light, as do patients who’ve recently had cataract surgery). Birds have a fourth color receptor for ultraviolet rays; this, coupled with eye structures that transmit more UV, gives smaller birds "true" UV vision – remember that, I’ll circle back to it later.

Many animals with eyes that do not require lenses are able to detect ultraviolet (such as insects and shrimp -who here hasn’t heard or seen the shrimp color post come across their dash? They’re not wrong, because shrimp are tetrachromatic, meaning they have more chromatophores than we do and thus see a larger spectrum of shades and colors). And they do this by quantum photon-absorption mechanisms, in much the same chemical way that humans detect visible light. The human eye only uses three types of cones to sense light in three bands of color (meaning we’re trichromatic). The biological pigments of the cones have maximum absorption values at wavelengths of about 420 nm (blue), 534 nm (bluish-green), and 564 nm (yellowish-green).

Though there are quite a few animals that are sensitive to various types of infrared, not all of them do it by means of this so called quantum-absorption where molecules get excited and we capture that change and interpret it. Infrared sensing in snakes, for example, depends on a kind of natural thermal imaging, in which tiny packets of cellular water are raised in temperature by the infrared radiation. EMR in this range causes molecular vibration and heating effects, which is how these animals detect it. I hadn’t encountered prey sight yet in my Warhammer readings, but I’d be interested in knowing what exactly it entails and what type of IR and/or thermal imaging it’s employing. @ladyalisette mentioned this in her response to @nereidof40k's post, which inspired me to dig a little deeper into the topic since I'm always down to geek out with a fellow biologist.

Now, let’s talk about the adaptations that’d happen in case of a perpetually low-light environment such as Nostramo. Adaptation itself is already a term in visual physiology, and very apt in this case since it refers to the ability of the retine to adjust to light levels. In humans, rods (not cones) are responsible for night vision, since cones only function at higher light levels, and our night vision tends to be limited mostly because there’s less resolution and color differentiation is almost impossible, instead being limited to shades of gray (can we say that without thinking of 50 shades? No? just me? *sigh*). But, we *can* see in the dark, even though we don’t do it super well. So when we transition from light to dark, our eyes undergo what’s called natural dark adaptation, and it’s a slow process which can take from 45 min to two hours. During that adaptation, the eye adjusts from high to low luminescence ‘settings’, meaning that they increase their sensitivity (by several orders of magnitude, it’s actually quite impressive). This adaptation period is different between rod and cone cells and results from the regeneration of photopigments to increase retinal sensitivity. I believe @nereidof40k already mentioned rhodopsin in her post, and that comes into play here. Rods (and cones) don't work on their own; they are inert, and that particular type of nerve cell needs a chemical to enable their function -Rhodopsin. The body does not produce this chemical in daytime, and it takes a very low light level sensed by the eyes to produce this chemical. When the light is detected at a low level for 20 minutes or so, the body starts producing rhodopsin and night vision starts setting in. A key trait of this feature is that rhodopsin is photoreactive, meaning it reacts to light, and it only takes a few seconds of bright light to cause the rhodopsin to decay into two parts with a photosensitive reaction, and the rods stop working. Then the cycle starts again, meaning your eye has to start the process of adjusting to the dark all over again. It is an interesting trait that deep red lights do not trigger the neutralization of the rhodopsin, so astronomers and safety officials use red lights for night lighting to allow night vision to continue and work in low-lighting conditions. However, unless the light is monochromatic like a laser, even red light has elements from other colors, which means that even a bright red light can reduce the rhodopsin, and so a dim red light is best for maximizing after-dark eye behavior. It has also been suggested that that since stars typically emit light with shorter wavelengths, the light from stars will be in the blue-green color spectrum. Therefore, using red light to navigate would not desensitize the receptors used to detect star light. This ties in nicely with @ladyalisette ‘s statement that the red end of the spectrum tends to travel further in space.

It also works nicely with what we know of Nostramo, seeing as it’s sun is ‘dying’ and orbited a distant red giant. As objects grow hotter, they radiate energy dominated by shorter wavelengths, changing color before our eyes. Now our own Sun produces more yellow light than any other color because its surface temperature is high at 5,500°C. If the Sun's surface were cooler —say 3,000°C—it would look reddish, like the star Betelgeuse. If the Sun were hotter—say, 12,000°C—it would look blue, like the star Rigel. If the star is dying, the temp would be lower, and the light it gives off would be redder, meaning that if any sun were to reach Nostramo at all through the toxic smog layering the hive city, it would be on the red side of the EMR spectrum anyway. It's atmosphere blocked out the visible spectrum of light, leaving the planet in almost complete darkness. However, the planet isn't noted as an ice world or volcanic, meaning that enough sunlight still reached it, though it might not be visible to the human eye, and it would be safe to assume that Nostramans have adapted to that reality, and their physiology would have evolved measures to survive in that kind of environment over time.

With regards to vision, there’s three main kinds, namely scotopic, photopic and mesopic. Photopic vision is the vision of the eye under well-lit conditions. Scotopic vision is the vision of the eye under low-light conditions. Mesopic vision is also called twilight vision, and it’s a combination of photopic and scotopic vision under low-light (but not necessarily dark) conditions. Now, evolutionarily speaking, there’s advantages and disadvantages to maxing out all your stats in one area, but trying to do both is usually quite ‘expensive’ in the terms of resources it takes to develop a sense. So as per usual it’s about finding the balance in order to give yourself the edge when it comes to passing on your genes. In the human eye, cone cells are nonfunctional in low visible light. Scotopic vision is produced exclusively through rod cells, which are most sensitive to wavelengths of around 498 nm (blue-green), and are insensitive to wavelengths longer than about 640 nm. Under scotopic conditions, light incident on the retina is not encoded in terms of the spectral power distribution. Higher visual perception occurs under scotopic vision as it does under photopic vision. Now, cone photoreceptors are -haha, you guessed it- conical in shape, and there are three types of cone photoreceptors, each being sensitive to a specific wavelength of. The various cone cells are sensitive to either short wavelengths (blue light), medium wavelengths (green light), or long wavelengths (red light). Only relevant thing to keep in mind here is that in the language of optics, red is the color evoked by light that stimulates neither the S or the M (short and medium wavelength) cone cells of the retina, combined with a fading stimulation of the L (long-wavelength) cone cells.

Seeing as our night vision is largely dependent on rod cells, which are more sensitive towards the lower part of the wavelength spectrum, not the higher end (where red and IR are), I’d say that it would be ‘easier’ evolutionarily speaking to just make Nostramans sensitive to UV light, perhaps by adding that fourth color receptor other animals already have, and maybe some other physiological changes like the lens being less susceptible to UV damage.  The main physiological adaptations to such an environment would be (1) having a larger eyeball, (2) a larger lens, (3) a larger optical aperture (the pupils could expand to the physical limit of the eyelids, hence leading to the near-black eye look), (4) a higher density of rods rather than cones (or rods exclusively) in the retina, and (5) a tapetum lucidum (which is a reflective structure that is responsible for this superior night vision as it mirrors light back through the retina exposing the photoreceptor cells to an increased amount of light). I’d definitely say there’d be advantages too when it comes to heightening their ability to see parts of the IR spectrum based on the planetary conditions on Nostramo, so it could definitely be a case of having both adaptations. If we want the human eye to perceive the wavelengths above/below the visible EM spectrum, there would be the need to reassign (or add a new type of) cones to generate a response stimulus at those wavelengths, and we’d have to define how broad we would want the response to be. It would be important to define how sensitive it is (the smaller the wavelength range it detects, the more sensitive it is, but the less it sees overall). Another interesting change could rhodopsin becoming less photoreactive, or it's metabolism being quicker so as to allow quicker adjustment in low-lighting conditions.

*all the images are from Wikipedia, just FYI, couldn't be arsed to find my textbook and take a picture, and they're solid.

[etoilecyber]

Synchronized Breathing

Ash and Leo have been friends for so long that people often wondered if they were always on the same wave length. Ash decided to try and make that reality.

“Are you sure about this, Ash?” Leo asked as Ash packed a package.

“Look, if my buddy says it works, I trust him. He said him and his boyfriend personally tested it out and it works.” He takes out two circular nodes. It looked so simple, no one would assume it was anything complicated.

“Vance has always been one to get results. Though I always thought it was Kyle who was more into science”.

“So what? We just keep one of each nodes stuck to the back of our necks?”

Ash nodded

“Yeah. Vance says its a new wireless model based off an earlier experiment. It’s supposed to synchronize our brains, emotions, and experience so we can bounce off of each others skills.”

Leo was still skeptical as he inspected the node.

“Okay. But how far does it actually sync us up though. Is it like, letting us read each others brains?”

“I dont doubt that, but most likely more. Probably like a more streamlined version of what that show Sense8 does.”

“Look, as long as it doesn’t kill me. But are you sure you want to do this? I mean, If this works, are you really okay with me poking around your head.”

Ash smiled, planting his node to the back of his neck.

“Totally man. You’re my best friend. Its not like you dont know how I think. Why, are you hiding some deep dark secret, Leo?”

Leo scoffed, planting his own node onto his neck.

“Please. The only secret I had was that I’m gay. And you were the first one I’ve ever told.”

“See? It’ll be fine.” Ash grinned as he pressed a small button that activated the nodes.

“Fine. But if we die, I’ll kill you.”

The nodes began beeping before shocking the two unconscious.

Leo was the first to wake up. In front of him, Ash was stirring and began to regain consciousness as well.

“Ash?”

Ash remained silent, staring into his eyes. Suddenly, he felt a voice in his head

Leo, can you hear me?

Leo gasped. It had worked. Actually worked.

Holy shit. You’re in my head.

Hell yeah I am. Ash grinned.

What the hell, this is unreal. How the hell did your friend manage to do this?

Beats me but this is way more awesome than i realize. Come on, let’s see what we can do with this?

“Okay, but can we talk normally it’s kinda freaking me out.” Leo said.

“You’re such a buzzkill sometimes but fine- Woah.”

Ash got up in surprise.

“I felt that!” He jumped in satisfaction. “You got annoyed!”

“And I feel like I just discovered Mars. You really do get hyper excited!”

The two spent no time trying to figure out the lengths their synchronization could go.

Thought sharing and telepathy aside, they found themselves learning each others skills and building each other up through no contact at all. Leo began feeling stronger and learning how to exercise while Ash felt his brain processing faster than he ever did before.

Man, how much longer are you going to work out? Im feeling the burn and I’m just at home. Leo asked once during the first time Ash went to the gym with the nodes.

Yeah. I know. I can feel you reading up on Roman History for fun. But dont worry, I’m just about done. Ash never used to be vain but he found himself taking more photos of himself recently. He chalked it up to getting traits from Leo.

Things took a turn when Leo felt his groin harden out of nowhere. It wasnt anything new, but he was in the middle of work and he couldn’t ignore it.

Suddenly, his head was filled with grunting and moaning and then he knew.

Ash was getting some. And by extension, he was getting some.

He could not be more grateful that he worked from home because he had ran into his room to try and sort it out.

He laid in bed, spasming slightly as he tried to take the Sync Node off his neck.

To his horror, he found that it had already been off. He remembered that the two of them decided to take a break from it yesterday and took them off.

Leo unbuckled his pants and felt his dick spring free. He barely even had to touch it.

It was if he felt Ash’s own penis penetrating whichever woman he decided to hook up with.

In some strange cosmic sort of way, he felt as if he was having sex with a woman for the first time.

Ash’s stamina was something wild because Leo was practically begging Ash to finish.

He was panting, his breath in complete sync with Ash.

I’m coming. They both thought in sync.

And it happened.

Both cried out as they came.

Leo felt shame as his cum covered his shirt.

Ash must have felt that shame too because he suddenly called out to Leo in their heads.

Leo?

We… we need to talk… When you get home.

~~~

“I’ll look into it.” was all Vance said when Ash asked for help.

“I’m sorry man. I dont know why that happened. But I guess we’re synced up for a while.”

“Shared exercise is nice and all, but I’m not sure how to feel about having to share Sex.”

“Look, I’m sure it was just a glitch.”

Ash grinned and gave Leo’s shoulder a friendly punch.

“But hey, wasnt that mind blowing for you? Does that mean you’re straight now?”

“No. I don’t know. I feel like I’m definitely still attracted to men. But that caught me off guard.”

Ash grabbed Leo’s hand and moved it over to his crotch.

Leo’s cock hardened and Ash felt his shock.

“Bro!” Ash laughed, patting his own member in amusement as it hardened in sync with Leo’s and thought nothing of it.

“Yep, definitely still gay.”

“You’re weird you know that?”

Though Ash played it off, he felt himself more changed than he’d realized.

Finding interest in his friends hobbies and processing things faster aside, he felt a shift in the way he viewed people. More specifically, men in particular.

He figured the way he was lingering his gaze over attractive men he’d walk past was just from Leo’s side indirectly influencing him. But the longer it went, the more he realized he was doing it on his own now. And he was starting to find them attractive. If Leo noticed, he did not mention. Though Ash figured Leo would think those were just his own thoughts.

Things came to a head the day before Ash’s friend was supposed to finish a fix for their dillema.

That night, Leo was feeling really frisky from the past few days. The two agreed not to engage in sexual activities without letting each other know so they were prepared. But Leo could not handle any more and waited out Ash to go to sleep.

When he was sure Ash was deep in slumber, Leo laid in bed and started slow. Lubed up and pumping, Leo started panting. He did not feel anything from Ash and thought he was in the clear. He was wrong. So very wrong.

Within 2 minutes or masturbating and edging, he felt Ash stir. He was slowly coming out to as his body trembled from Leo’s ecstasy.

A moan escaped Ash’s mouth before he realized what was happening.

L-Leo?

Why are you awake?

I don’t- fuck…

I dont know. What happened to… no funny business… until we were better?

Leo’s pumping grew faster and desperate.

I cant take it anymore. I need to come. Please just ignore me. Just one night.

But Ash couldn’t ignore it. Not when his cock was demanding a party.

The heat radiated from both of them as Ash began pumping his own cock alongside Leo.

Ash! What are you-

Two can play it that game.

The intensity of their mutual, synchronized jerk off session was nothing they’d ever felt before. So much so that their breating was one for one.

Their hard cocks enduring differences in speed and stamina as both men started to form a solid link that would change their chemistry forever.

Ash… Leo… They moaned together.

“FUCK!” They finally shouted, their cocks simultaneously erupted more cum onto their bare bodies than they had ever done in their lifetime and passed out.

When they woke up 20 minutes later, something had gone beyond horribly wrong.

Leo felt heavier when he got up. His body sticky from the jizz he had shot up just earlier. Yet his hands… they werent his. This bulk, this room, this body. He’s seen it before.

But it wasn’t his.

He pat himself down, trying to figure out what was going on. And when he finally looked in the mirror, panic settled in.

He was in Ash’s body.

The sync had been so strong that their minds had passed through the link to each other.

“Ash?” He called out, weirded out by the new deep voice that came out of his mouth.

He closed his eyes to try and feel out where his friend is. He felt a wet sensation and realixed Ash had gotten up in his body and showered.

Instead of waiting, Leo found himself walking to their shower

He found his Ash under the shower, somewhat confused, and inspecting his new body.

When he turned around and found his own body staring at him, he felt his… their hearts beat in rythm.

“Leo?”

“Yeah… it’s me.”

“What are we going to do?”

There should have been a more logical answer to this for Leo, but the two felt their connection intensify their feelings. Their breathing.

Leo dropped his underwear and walked in.

No more words, just feelings.

Leo grabbed hold of his old face and drove his and Ash’s new mouth into a deep kiss.

The shock that Ash felt lasted all but 3 seconds before he reciprocated.

He felt their bodies close in, their wet skins leaving no gap. Their rigid cocks rubbed against each other as the two continued to make out in the shower.

They moved to the bedroom to consumate this strange exchange in bodily form.

The synchronization still doubling the orgasmic feelings they felt.

Ash moaned as Leo maneuvered his okd body to dominate Ash’s new body in the bed. A feeling Leo was not always familiar with. He assumed it was Ash’s experience as a top that’s fueling this aggression.

Though Leo was familiar with the feeling of a cock up his ass, Ash was not. Still, in his friend’s experienced body and the sync letting them call each others experience, losing his ass virginity was not a terrible experience.

He felt his old 8 inch rod slowly enter and pace through his growing hole. He could not help but grunt in surprise and caress his old body’s smooth pecs.

“Guess… you’re not so straight anymore…” Leo panted before planting his lips against Ash’s. Their tongues interwined and playing as their bodies continued to girate from the overwhelming sex.

The sync allowed both their cocks to stimulate each others feelings and maximized the orgasm they felt would come in no time. The two were careful and deliberate, slowly inching in and out to draw out pleasure they both craved before both managed to cum a storm of white once more that night and finally fell asleep.

The morning after, they found themselves still trapped in each others bodies. But an eerie calm washed over them.

“Morning.” Ash was looking over Leo at bed. He was still speechless that he had used his best friends own body like that. He didnt even feel like he got to enjoy how big he felt.

“So… what do you want to do?” Leo asks, though he already knew what Ash wanted.

“I dont know. But whatever that was last night… i kind of want to feel it again. Maybe we… stay like this a little longer… Ash?”

This softness. It was foreign coming from Ash. The confidence he felt, that was foreign to him,

Their breathing was one. Their brain chemistey permanently altered. How could he even consider just going back without seeing where this goes?

“Okay… Leo.”

~

Thanks for reading!

Hope you enjoyed!

[demigod-shenanigans]

The choiceless hope in grief (chapter 9)

The first thing that changed was the background noise. Mostly because there’d barely been any background noise for most of Leo’s walk down this stupid staircase. There’d been the sound of his own steps and the crackling of the fire in his hand and the sound of his breathing, and that had been it. Suddenly, he could hear rushing water. The noise was faint, but it was definitely there, growing louder with each step.  Fucking finally. Leo had been seriously starting to wonder if these stairs were bottomless. His legs were starting to hurt. He was a decent enough runner, considering how much of his life he’d spent bolting from people and places and all the painful memories he’d never quite be ready to face. The last year and a half of running from monsters trying to kill him had made him even faster. But running and walking down the stairs forever were two completely different things. Running for his life meant he had adrenaline pumping through his body, his mind pushing out everything but the stuff he needed to know for his immediate survival.  Right now, he was a little short on adrenaline. It wasn’t that he wasn’t terrified—he was walking into the Underworld, of course he was terrified—but stairs weren’t usually the sort of enemy that chased you around corners and tried to tear you to bits with sharp claws, hence why the adrenaline wasn’t kicking in. Between this and Mount Olympus, Leo was getting real sick of giant staircases.

Rating: Teen and Up

Chapter Word Count: 6.4k

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Chapter 9: Underworld PSA: Do not stick your hand in the Styx

So far, the Underworld was a little underwhelming. This was to say: Leo had spent the past half an hour walking down some stairs and there was no end in sight. Up until this point, nothing had attacked him or growled at him from the shadows or anything. He couldn’t see any eyes in the blackness. The biggest threat he currently faced was the fact that the staircase was steeper and more slippery than he’d expected, which made falling down the remaining ten bazillion stairs a very real possibility. Out of all the stupid ways he could have died in his almost seventeen year long career as a demigod, that had to at least make the top three. 

On a general threat level, the endless staircase of eternal boredom wasn’t ranked nearly as high, though. He had to take slow, careful steps, which was annoying, but he’d expected much worse.

Leo wasn’t… disappointed about the lack of other threats, necessarily, but they did make him anxious, in a calm before the storm-kind of way.

Even with the research he’d done, he still felt like he barely had a clue what to expect once he reached the Underworld. Sure, he knew the basics—about having to cross the Styx and Cerberus and not eating fruits from Persephone’s garden. But it wasn’t like a lot of the literature on the topic was written by people who’d actually come back from the Underworld. Demigod quests to the Underworld were rare. Successful resurrections were basically unheard of. The only one Leo knew of aside from his own—which unfortunately hadn’t come with any convenient knowledge of the afterlife—was Hazel’s, and he obviously hadn’t been able to ask her for advice.

He couldn’t have asked her to keep that kind of secret for him. Not again. Not when it had already weighed on her and Frank so heavily the first time.

Hazel… that was another person he’d failed pretty solidly in the friendship department. He hadn’t reached out to her even once after getting back the the Waystation. 

Leo hadn’t been doing a very good job keeping up with any of the Seven after he’d gotten back, but Hazel was the one he’d probably been the closest with aside from Jason and Piper. He’d gone on a lot of quests with her and Frank on their Gaia Tries To End The World-Tour. Part of that had been selfish—despite the weirdness of the whole Sammy situation, hanging out with them had felt less complicated than third-wheeling Jason and Piper (which probably should have told him something, but Leo was nothing if not a professional at being in denial). But he’d grown to genuinely like her and Frank. They weren’t the foundations of a home the way Jason and Piper had been, but they’d still been his friends, and now he’d gone and fucked that up, too. Grand fucking job, Valdez.

He wondered if Nico and Hazel had felt him enter the Underworld. He hadn’t gotten in by croaking, so he hoped not.

He pushed the thought away. There was no use lingering on hypotheticals. He was doing this. No one could stop him now. Whether his friends found out, whether anyone worried about him or tried to come after him… that was out of his hands now. There was nothing he could do about it.

All he could do was keep walking.

The first thing that changed was the background noise. Mostly because there’d barely been any background noise for most of his walk down this stupid staircase. There’d been the sound of his own steps and the crackling of the fire in his hand and the sound of his breathing, and that had been it.

Suddenly, he could hear rushing water. The noise was faint, but it was definitely there, growing louder with each step. 

Fucking finally. Leo had been seriously starting to wonder if these stairs were bottomless.

His legs were starting to hurt. He was a decent enough runner, considering how much of his life he’d spent bolting from people and places and all the painful memories he’d never quite be ready to face. The last year and a half of running from monsters trying to kill him had made him even faster.

But running and walking down the stairs forever were two completely different things. Running for his life meant he had adrenaline pumping through his body, his mind pushing out everything but the stuff he needed to know for his immediate survival. 

Right now, he was a little short on adrenaline. It wasn’t that he wasn’t terrified—he was walking into the Underworld, of course he was terrified—but stairs weren’t usually the sort of enemy that chased you around corners and tried to tear you to bits with sharp claws, hence why the adrenaline wasn’t kicking in.

Between this and Mount Olympus, Leo was getting real sick of giant staircases.

When dim grey light began to fill the tunnel, he breathed a sigh of relief, extinguishing the fire in his palm.

His arm was tired from holding it up for so long (he’d tried to let it drop a few times, but that made it harder to see the staircase and had nearly resulted in him lighting up his pants twice), and although it took a lot for him to completely exhaust his powers, he couldn’t be sure if the rules were the same in the land of the dead. Better not to push his luck if he could see alright without his flames.

Besides, walking around as a live candlestick seemed like a great way to inform any ghost and monster in the vicinity that there was something different and exciting going on with him, and he didn’t really care to ring the dinner bell on them any more than he was already bound to by walking down here while he was still alive. 

The sound of the Styx had grown louder and louder, and it was roaring in his ears now. 

‘Almost there.’ 

Leo figured this was probably the most stoked anyone had ever been to reach the river of hatred.

He was grateful to have his feet on semi-even ground again.

The cavern he’d stepped out into was huge. Leo had been through a variety of caves in his lifetime—he had slept in some (usually much nicer than sewers, but also much more likely to have other, larger inhabitants, and therefore enter at your own risk) and fought monsters in others. None of them compared to this one in size. No wonder getting down here had taken him forever.

The view was breathtaking—heh, there was a pun in there that all the newly deceased that came through here probably wouldn’t have appreciated. The wide, domed ceiling was covered in stalactites. Colorful veins ran across the stones—gold and silver and copper. 

Right. In Roman mythology, Pluto was also the god of riches. Even knowing Hazel, that was easy to forget sometimes—it was kind of outweighed by his whole eerie death theme. 

The air glowed strangely and smelled kind of weird and Leo had absolutely no clue where the light was coming from, but he figured there was no real point in overthinking the land of the dead. He didn’t like not having explanations for things—he’d always preferred the comfort of complex machinery that he could explain with logic over magic and things created through godly powers that were just kind of there with no rhyme or reason—but he’d reluctantly had to accept them as a fact of life.

Leo let his eyes wander. He stood on the dark, sandy shore of the Styx, which rushed past him, down a section of rapids and then winded along the gloomy landscape.

His eyes immediately landed on his destination. As far away as they were, the giant dark walls of Erebos were hard to miss. Hades’ palace lay beyond these walls. Jason was somewhere beyond these walls. 

They were illuminated by some sort of light—fires, maybe? It was hard to tell from so far away. Giant gates were surrounded by a strange, shifting mass that glowed faintly. 

It would have almost been beautiful if it hadn’t been so fucking creepy.

Leo checked the watch Jo had given him to see if he was just being dramatic about the amount of time he’d spent coming down here, and nope. He’d just spent a fucking hour and a half walking down some stairs.

A distant part of him also registered that if he survived, he’d have to walk back up these same idiotic stairs, and that would be significantly more annoying than walking down. 

Well, that was a problem for future Leo, he supposed.

Current Leo’s most pressing issue was figuring out a way to cross the Styx with Charon nowhere in sight.

After a moment of hesitation, he committed to walking upstream, figuring he was better off not taking his chances with the rapids—from everything Leo had been able to find on the topic, a dip in the Styx was generally inadvisable unless you really wanted to dissolve your soul and your entire sense of self. As useful as the Curse of Achilles sounded, Leo was good, thanks.

He wasn’t sure what he was hoping for. There probably wouldn’t be a convenient path somewhere in the middle of the river—that would be a huge security risk in terms of souls breaking out of the Underworld, and would also put Charon out of a job. But hey, maybe he’d get lucky and find a narrower section where the water didn’t move quite this fast. 

Leo thought it was annoyingly possible that he would have to build another stupid boat. At least he had plenty of practice with that. The thought still didn’t exactly thrill him, though.

The water was a mess. It was dark and oily and filled with so much random garbage that it made the Hudson River look pristine in comparison.

All the unfulfilled dreams the living left behind when they crossed drifted along in the current. Leo watched a novel drift by. Had that person dreamed of writing one? Had they just really wanted to finish the book they’d been reading before biting it? A pair of baby shoes bobbed along the surface. There were plenty of pictures, a few trophies, a few half-finished paintings and a lot of paper that might have been diplomas or legal documents—Leo could not be bothered to wrestle his dyslexia long enough to find out. 

He really wished someone here had dreamed of whitewater rafting, but no such luck.

A little further upstream, a whole damn motorcycle floated in the current.

That was odd. Leo was pretty sure that motorcycles didn’t usually swim, especially not for extended periods of time. By the time he had the presence of mind to decide to investigate, it had almost drifted past him.

Because Leo had excellent impulse control and was great at thinking things through, he decided the next logical step was to stick his hand into the current to retrieve the motorcycle. He wasn’t even sure why thought the stupid thing was important. He just did. 

Leo had made an impressive amount of stupid decisions throughout his life, but this one had to be one of the absolute dumbest. By the time his brain caught up to be like “hey buddy, maybe don’t stick your hand into the river that’s said to burn away your soul”, his fingers were already on the handle. Styx water splashed all over his arm when he pulled the motorcycle towards him.

Leo was familiar with pain.

Back when he’d been a little kid, he’d “upgraded” the swing at the local playground because he’d wanted to know what flying felt like, earning himself a hospital trip and a very stern talking-to from his mom. There’d been the two bruised ribs that had finally made CPS remove him from Teresa’s care, and the time at the beginning of his glorious demigod career when he’d gotten severely concussed on a wrecked skywalk, to name a few highlights.

None of those experiences were even slightly comparable to this.

Hell, the pain was so intense that it almost made Leo feel nostalgic for the time he’d exploded himself.

His knees buckled, and he nearly face-planted into the river. It was mostly dumb luck that he fell backwards into the volcanic sand instead, half-blind with agony. It felt like someone had poured acid down the length of his arm, and now it was dissolving slowly, being sandpapered off layer by layer. 

For some reason, his numb fingers were still clutching the handle of the stupid motorcycle. It took forever to get his hand to unclench. Once he managed, he clutched his arm to his chest, sobbing quietly. 

He was so delirious with pain that he almost thought he could feel a hand on his shoulder.

“You’re okay.” A slightly blurry version of Piper was smiling down at him warmly. “Look at me and try to breathe. You’re going to be just fine.”

Breathing. Right. He could do that. He could totally do that. 

Rationally, Leo knew Piper wasn’t there. But he hadn’t completely made up the image either. It was a memory. 

He’d forgotten—lost it somewhere in the Mist—but he saw the scene in his mind’s eye with an absurd clarity now. 

He’d been roommates with Piper. He had no idea how that had happened, since co-ed definitely hadn’t been common practice at Wilderness School, but they had been. 

A few days into them sharing a room, he’d had a really bad nightmare about his mom. 

Usually, after a dream like that, he tried his best to make himself small, hoping whatever foster siblings he was rooming with hadn’t heard him cry or noticed how tightly he was clinging to his pillow. 

But this nightmare had been particularly bad. Maybe Gaia had figured he needed a reminder of what happened when he stepped out of line, since she’d known it was almost time for him to learn the truth.

Whatever the case, Leo had apparently been thrashing so violently that he’d woken Piper, because he’d been ripped out of the burning machine shop by someone gently shaking him. 

Piper had been sitting on his bunk, her hand on his shoulder, her smile kind. There had been absolutely zero judgement in her expression. She hadn’t poked fun at him. She hadn’t even asked what he’d dreamed about. She had just stayed with him until he’d calmed down a little, and then offered him an MP3-player she’d apparently kept hidden well enough that it hadn’t been confiscated yet.

“In case you don’t want to go back to sleep.”

The following night, Leo had tried to dip through the window.

~~~~

The feeling of Piper’s hand on his arm lingered for a moment longer, even as the rest of the scene faded along with the majority of the pain. 

Leo was staring up at the strange Underworld sky again. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been lying on that beach, half-conscious, trying to remember how breathing worked.

“Alright, note to self: sticking your hand into the Styx is a terrible idea. Don’t do it again,” he said breathlessly, quickly making sure all his limbs were still attached. Thankfully, the answer was yes.

His right arm was an angry red where the water had splashed across it, like he had a really nasty sunburn. He reluctantly took one of his ambrosia pieces out of his tool belt, breaking off half and popping it into his mouth. The marks on his skin melted away, and the remaining pain faded to a dull throb.

“Wow, that was really stupid,” he mumbled to himself, looking at the idiotic motorcycle he’d almost killed himself to retrieve.

Why had he wanted that again? Something about its weight?

His thoughts were still a little hazy.

Well, he had it now, and after everything he’d just done to get it, not investigating would have been stupid. 

Leo took a moment to collect himself. Then he asked the tool belt for a pair of disposable gloves so he wouldn’t get any more Styx water on his hands—it seemed likely that the bike was still wet, and after the experience he’d just made, he wasn’t taking any chances—and started his inspection. 

As far as he could tell with his eyes and the machine-senses he’d inherited from his dad, it was a perfectly normal motorcycle. The ridiculously expensive kind, sure, but Leo was pretty certain the prize tag wasn’t related to the fact that it could double as a raft. If that had been a thing, he’d have known about it. Marketing loved to brag about that sort of nonsense.

The only thing that set this motorcycle apart from other vehicles of its kind was the fact that it weighed absolutely nothing. Leo wasn’t strong in the way most of his siblings were. He had a pretty terminal case of noodle arms, if he was being honest. But somehow, despite how heavy this thing looked, he could lift it no problem.

“Okay, that’s super weird.” 

Was it a property of the river that things within it became weightless? Leo didn’t think he’d float if he stepped in it—not that he was particularly eager to test that theory—but he did drop a screwdriver into the current to see what would happen. It behaved like any regular old screwdriver would have, sinking immediately.

It wasn’t the water, then. Was it the bike itself? Did it float because it was someone’s dreamed-up bike instead of a real one? 

And if that was the case—if all the dreams floated because they were weightless—did that mean Leo could use them to get across?

He let his eyes wander further upstream, to a place where a rock jutted out partially over the Styx, mind whirring so hard that his hair started smoking. 

Right. Okay. He could work with this.

~~~~

Leo would freely admit that this plan was probably completely insane. Then again, so was this entire operation. Insane plans were kind of his brand, if he was being honest.

Using some materials from his tool belt, he’d made two improvised grappling hooks that he managed to toss and fasten on the outcropping of rock across the river after a few attempts. He tied the other ends to two large stalagmites close to the cavern wall. The end result were two parallel-ish ropes that ran diagonally across the river and would make okay handrails for the truly crazy part of this plan: a makeshift bridge made up of random dreams that drifted by, which Leo would have to construct on the fly.

He’d fastened the weightless motorcycle to a large stalagmite with wire rope that was typically utilized in lifting equipment so he could be sure it would hold once his body weight was added—and it had better hold, seeing as it had sent his tool belt into timeout for half an hour. Everything else he built the bridge out of he’d have to collect as he went across, judging spontaneously if he considered it sturdy enough to hold his weight and praying he didn’t fuck it up.

He had to wait for his tool belt to come out of cooldown before he started, but that wasn’t too bad. That gave him a little extra time to recover from his first encounter with the Styx, plus time to carefully test the ropes. 

Then he pulled out the lunch box Percy had given him.

Leo hadn’t had much of an appetite all day because he’d been so anxious, but tinkering always brought his anxiety levels down, and coming out of blueprint hyperfocus mode had made him realize just how hungry he was.

He also kept an eye on the Styx, just in case he spotted something he could use. Just as he was about to pack up and see if his tool belt was feeling generous again, he spotted it: tennis equipment, still packaged, including a plastic cylinder filled with exactly three tennis balls.

Jackpot.

Leo ditched the racket because it wouldn’t fit, but the tennis balls he dropped into his tool belt for later. He grinned. Things were going surprisingly well for a change.

He fastened a carabiner to one of the handrails, connecting it to his tool belt with a second carabiner and even more rope. He wasn’t sure how much it would realistically help if he misstepped or misjudged the ability of an object to hold his weight, but it made him feel a little better about his chances to avoid going for the world’s worst swim.

“Well, here goes nothing,” he said to nobody in particular, gripping the handrails tightly and stepping out onto the motorcycle.

It held his weight. Leo hadn’t even realized he’d been holding his breath, but now he released it with a happy whoop. That was one point for Leo, zero points for the Underworld trying to kill him.

…well, okay, maybe one point for Leo and the Underworld each, if he were to count properly. But hey, at least he wasn’t losing!

For a while, all he could do was stand there and watch the river. Most of the things that drifted past were too small and light to be of any real use. Blueprints, college degrees, deeds for houses… he could understand why they were floating around in here, but they didn’t exactly make for a great bridge. Besides, he already felt a little weird about literally walking all over people’s dreams to get across. Stepping on someone’s marriage certificate felt a bit too far.

Finally, Leo spotted a large wooden sign. He kneeled, one hand on his carabiner and his heart in his throat as the motorcycle swayed in the current, water sloshing over his boots. He was grateful that he’d had the presence of mind to wear water-proof safety boots for this trip.

He grabbed for the sign, barely reaching the edge with the tips of his fingers. Carefully, he drilled two eye bolts into it (one on each side) and fastened it to the motorcycle with more iron wire. Upon closer inspection, it was a nerdy bakery sign that read “Do or Donut” in large yellow letters, framed by two cinnamon rolls on one side and a breadstick lightsaber on the other. He’d have appreciated the pun a lot more if he hadn’t been trying not to die.

He pulled himself back into a standing position via his carabiner.

He carefully tested the stability of the sign with one foot. When it didn’t give, he pulled the other one across, holding onto his rope handrails as hard as he could in case the bridge wouldn’t hold.

It held.

Leo exhaled and started looking around for his next piece. 

A part of him had always been a little jealous of his siblings’ strength—of the way they could easily lug around heavy equipment all day without their arms getting tired—but being scrawny came in undeniably handy for this task. If he’d been taller and more muscular, finding objects that held his weight would have been much harder than it was already bound to be.

Slowly but surely, he made his way across, utilizing a variety of strange objects that had most definitely not been intended to ever be used in bridge construction. A Hollywood star with a name he’d never heard of before. A large TV that Leo felt a little sorry to ruin, even though obviously no one down here would be using it. A window frame that looked like it might have been intended for a treehouse. 

Every time he shifted his weight from one object to the next, he could feel his heart rate spiking. But the objects he’d picked didn’t give. His iron wire didn’t break. 

Before he knew it, he’d made it most of the way across.

He was just starting to think that hey, maybe he’d actually make it to the other side without fucking everything up.

That, of course, jinxed it.

He was kneeling on top of a large, unfinished painting now—a weird type of abstract art that made Leo feel grateful he’d been too busy preventing the apocalypse to attend art class, because he definitely would have failed that analysis.

He figured if he got lucky, he could make it all the way across with one, maybe two more bridge pieces. 

Unfortunately, he’d have to either abandon the safety of one of his handrails or scale the rock outcropping for the last part of this trip. The outcropping had been his best option for fastening the grappling hooks for height and sturdiness, but the downside was that if Leo didn’t want to go for a climb, he had to go past it on one side, out of reach of his second rope.

He was still weighing his options when the river made the call for him. He wasn’t sure what caused the calamity, but something large slammed into the bridge at great speed behind him. It wasn’t heavy enough to break the bridge—nothing in this river was heavy, that was the entire point—but the force of it still shook the whole bridge, pushing the front of it further downstream than Leo had planned for it to go. He scrambled to hang onto his handrail ropes, struggling to keep his balance on the floating bridge. Then the rope to his right snapped.

Leo screamed.

He only had a split-second to make a decision now. Thankfully, his brain worked fast. He only had one rope now, and it wasn’t even the one he’d secured himself on. It was a shit option. But if the bridge got pulled any further downstream, the second rope might rip too, or the metal wire might, and then he’d definitely be Leo soup. 

He held tightly onto the rope with one hand, pulled a hammer from his tool belt to create a handhold and lunged for the stone outcropping.

His feet found purchase, but barely. 

His heart was thundering in his chest. 

Leo hadn’t exactly felt nostalgic for that time he’d fallen into the Grand Canyon, but that was exactly what this felt like—except this time, coach Hedge wasn’t around to rescue him.

If someone had asked Leo later on how he made it up that outcropping of rock, he genuinely wouldn’t have been able to explain it. It was like his brain had just pushed out all thoughts that weren’t up, mapping out the best hand- and footholds to get him to the top and pumping every bit of adrenaline it could spare into his bloodstream to make sure he followed through.

By the time he made it up, he was dazed, his gloves were ripped to shreds and his hands were scraped bloody, but he was alive , and that was the only thing that mattered.

For a while, he just lay there, staring at the ceiling and processing. 

He’d made it across the Styx without dying. Barely, but still. 

“Holy shit,” he breathed. “I need to think of something else for the way back. I’m definitely not doing that again.”

Leo removed the mangled remains of his gloves and got up slowly, still trembling with adrenaline. He made his way down to the shore of the Styx. 

He wondered if whatever had disturbed the bridge was still there. Out of morbid curiosity, he took another look at the river to see if he could spot it. 

The answer was yes. 

His makeshift bridge had been pulled even further downstream, moving further and further away from the shore Leo was sitting on now. And right there, in the middle of the bridge, bobbed a fucking canoe.  

The Fates probably thought they were hilarious. 

Leo was about to turn away from the Styx and figure out his way forward when he spotted something else—much closer, and much, much worse than a stupid canoe. 

There was a picture stuck on a jagged piece of rock just slightly off shore. That part wasn’t surprising. Leo had seen a lot of pictures drift past him in the last few hours.

But he knew the people in that picture. 

Distantly, Leo registered that this was going to hurt—possibly worse than the first time had, considering his hands were covered in scrapes and getting Styx water in his bloodstream was probably a really shitty idea.

It didn’t matter. He was already moving. Nothing mattered except for that picture. If it ripped through the force of water against rock or he let the current drag it away, he would never forgive himself.

Leo clearly hadn’t learnt his lesson about keeping his hands out of the Styx the first time. When the pain hit, it was so intense he almost dropped the picture. 

Belatedly, he remembered how he’d bested water the first time, conjuring up Piper’s image in his head. The pain turned from blinding agony to a throbbing ache—still awful, but not unbearable. Enough for him to pull his hand back without face-planting into the river. He stumbled away from the shore, the picture clutched in his hand.

He desperately wanted to be wrong about what the photograph was. 

Unfortunately, he hadn’t been wrong. 

Whatever agony the Styx had subjected him to earlier, it was nothing compared to what this image was doing to him now. The unforgiving ache in his hand suddenly seemed like a minor issue.

He sunk to the ground, all the air knocked out of his body.

The photograph looked like it had been taken with a Polaroid camera. The white bit at the bottom had been pierced and ripped where it had gotten stuck on the rock, and there was some water damage, but the picture itself was mostly intact, if a little faded. It showed three people, laughing, wearing identical purple hoodies. There would have been no mistaking the logo on their chests, even if Leo hadn’t been to Camp Jupiter recently. The words “New Rome University” were printed in bold, golden letters around the university’s logo: a stylized temple framed by laurels. 

A slightly older version of Leo stared back at him from the center of the picture. His hair was a little shorter than in reality—he’d had things other than his haircut to worry about lately. His hoodie was rumpled and had a burn mark right below the neck, despite the fact that it was clearly brand-new. He was pulling a face at the camera—both of his eyes looked inwards and he’d stuck his tongue out, the small gap between his front teeth clearly visible.

Piper stood to his right, eyes crinkled with laughter. Her hair was much longer than it had been since her spontaneous grief haircut. She had her tongue out just like Leo, but she was biting hers, which made her look infinitely more cheeky than him. One of her hands was in a rocker pose in front of her chest, the other loosely wrapped around Leo’s shoulders, for some reason not even retaliating for the bunny ears he was giving her. Maybe she hadn’t realized what he was doing until after someone had already snapped the picture.

And to Leo’s left…

Jason’s mouth was wide open like he was mid laugh. His hair looked tousled, sticking up in several different directions, and his hoodie was apparently a size too large—a gray shirt was slightly visible beneath. Like Piper, he had an arm around picture-Leo, despite the fact that he, too, had been graced with a pair of bunny ears.

@fedzzzart

Reality-Leo felt like someone was surgically excising his lungs from his body. He couldn’t breathe, and no amount of hallucinated breathing exercises were going to fix it this time.

It would have been bad enough if it had been his own dream drifting along the currents—if the river goddess of the Styx had decided he was already as good as dead and she might as well get paid upfront.

But school had been hell for as long as Leo could remember, and even before this whole demigod nonsense, college had never been a part of his plan—not that it had been a real option due to how far out of his budget it was and the fact that troublemaker kids didn’t generally get picked for scholarships, but even if he could, why would he want to put himself through more of that when his brain just wasn’t wired for it? No fucking thank you. 

Leo wanted to open a machine shop, like the one his mom had had. That dream had grown to involve more demigod tools and celestial bronze dragons since the original draft from when he’d been little, but the gist of it hadn’t changed. The exact way he’d get there had always been fuzzy at best, but the thing he’d dreamed of had always been that end result, not whatever academic endeavours he’d have to put up with to reach it.

Which meant this wasn’t his dream.

Which meant…

Leo curled around the picture and started sobbing uncontrollably.

“Jason made a choice,” Nico’s voice echoed in his head. “We should respect that. Anything else wouldn’t be fair to him.” 

”Jason was a hero,” Apollo’s voice added. “He’s done so much for all of us. He’ll always be remembered for that.” 

Leo wanted to yell at them to look at this picture, look him in the eye and say that again. 

Jason was so much more than the paragon of the perfect hero. He was a Roman history nerd who liked to sketch and build models in his free time. He got way too competitive about video games and ate porridge every morning and he loved Leo’s cooking, even though he couldn’t handle spice for shit. The scar on his lip twitched when he was anxious. Sometimes he slept in the woods for no discernible reason instead of using the bed Leo and Piper had put up in the Zeus cabin. He refused to cross the street at a red light, even when there were no cars anywhere in sight. He was thoughtful and kind and picked up on things no one else paid attention to. When Leo had asked how he’d even known he needed comforting after coming back from Ogygia, Jason had just shrugged and said “you weren’t fidgeting, and you don’t even like coffee, so I figured something was wrong”. He was terrible at making jokes and had a soft spot for old romcoms and he was so useless with boats that he basically couldn’t even look at a canoe without capsizing it.

All of that—all of those stupid traits and quirks—had made up Jason Grace. 

He hadn’t dreamed of being remembered as a hero. Jason had never even wanted to be a hero. He’d carried out that duty because he felt like he had to—because he’d never been allowed to be anything else—but it had made him completely miserable. Anyone who’d paid even a little bit of attention to him could see that.

This was the biggest Jason had ever allowed himself to dream. Fucking college orientation. Living for one more year and having Leo and Piper by his side. Getting to be Just Jason for a little while, and figuring out what exactly that meant.

Compared to the kinds of dreams other people had that had drifted past Leo—endless riches or fame or scientific discoveries that would fundamentally alter the way the world worked—that one was depressingly doable. 

And the Fates had still refused him.

Leo gently stroked the face of the Jason in the image, sniffling.

“I’m trying to make this happen for you, okay? ” he said quietly to the empty riverbank. Gods, how desperately he wanted to see Jason laugh like that again. “I think your biggest dream being college is really lame, for the record. We should probably work on that.” He rubbed at his eyes with his sleeve. “But I’m trying, I swear. You deserve to be nothing but a lame college kid for a change.”

It wasn’t a Styx oath—he’d already tempted fate way too much today—but it was a promise nonetheless.

~~~~

Leo wasn’t sure how long he remained frozen on the river bank. He couldn’t remember how to move his limbs. He distantly registered that staying in one place for so long wasn’t smart—there were monsters down here that could kill him, and he was much easier to track if he wasn’t moving—but his soul was so heavy with grief that moving seemed like an impossible endeavor. 

You could just stay here, a malicious voice at the back of his head whispered. Let the river dissolve you and spare yourself the pain of your inevitable failure. To the people you left behind, you’ll be just another memory—a bad dream fading away in the water. The seventh wheel. The escaped spirit. You’ve always been destined for loneliness. Destined to wander. Why bother to resist? 

The sound of rushing water startled Leo awake. He was completely disoriented. He had no memories of falling asleep. 

Had he cried himself unconscious? The thought was so pathetic that he almost hoped he’d passed out from Styx-related pain or exhaustion instead.

He sat up slowly. He was still clutching the photograph in one hand. Leo pressed it to his chest one last time, then carefully placed it in his tool belt, praying desperately to anything that would listen that it wouldn’t get even more crinkled than it already had.

He had to keep Jason’s dream safe for him. He wasn’t sure what would happen to a soul that left the Underworld if their dreams had been damaged or lost in the current of the Styx, but he had absolutely zero desire to find out. 

Speaking of the Styx—why did the roaring seem louder than before?

Leo turned his head, realizing with horror that he was barely an arm’s length away from the river. 

He scrambled to his feet, backing away from the Styx as fast as his jelly legs allowed. 

“What the hell?”

Despite how dazed he’d been at the time, Leo remembered walking further away from the river bank in fear of losing or further damaging the picture very clearly. How had he gotten so close to the water again?

Had something tried to pull him in? 

But he couldn’t see any signs of that. Aside from the strange mist that had settled over his surroundings, everything looked exactly the same as it had before he’d passed out. 

The only footprints he could see were his own.

———

Notes:

We are not curse of Achilles-ing Leo in this fic, but I did want to make it obvious that if we were, Piper would be his lifeline. We clear on that? Good.

Also, fun fact: originally, I was just going to have Leo use the walking path that Nico and Will use in tsats, but a) that felt lazy and b) I want Leo to actually get to use his smarts to get out of situations in this, and so, this chapter was born. It feels, in many ways, ridiculous, but I hope it’s a kind of pjo-flavor ridiculousness that I can get away with.

For anyone wondering about the scene with the rocks: maybe that was dumb luck/adrenaline/Leo’s planning abilities. Maybe he has some minor geokinesis due to his dad’s association with volcanic rock. Maybe it’s a combination of all of the above. The universe can cut the poor boy at least a little bit of slack occasionally.

The lovely art included in this chapter is a commission I got from @fedzzzart wayyy back when I first came up with the idea for this fic, please go and leave them a like/follow :)

I have so many thoughts on why the dream I picked for Jason to leave behind in the Styx is specifically NRU with Piper and Leo. Obviously Leo clocked some of it correctly, but there’s more :) Would love to hear if any of you have additional thoughts on why it’s that specifically. I’ll probably put some elaborate rambles about it in next week’s chapter notes :D

Also, I want to be clear that I think Leo could do great at college if he wanted to (that kid is brilliant), but as someone who’s currently miserable at uni and keeps zoning out ten minutes into the lectures at the latest, I’m… not sure how great of a time he’d have. I definitely think lectures specifically would bore him to death. I highly doubt he’d dream of higher education, out of everything he could pick, considering his less than stellar experiences with the education system so far.

Thank you so much for reading! As always, I’d love to hear thoughts/theories/rambles/whatever else you may want to share! I apologize for the slightly later than usual update but it’s been a long day and I completely forgot about having to figure out how to include the image in this chapter so it got even later.

Tag List: @poppitron360 @lilyfrey @lady-silkwing @intenebrisobscurat @manygeese @ann-rex @jvneseries

[gravitysheep]

It was strange how the pair were actually tolerating each other at the moment. Normally they were at each other's throats in public, putting up the front for everyone that they hated each other. Though thinking about it it was far more complicated than that. They really weren't a good combo outside of their abilities and fighting capabilities but here they were now, tolerating each other. It was hard for him to wrap his head around right then given how full of fuzz it was.

So instead of focusing on that he focused on the now and watching as Dazai takes off his coat and shoes before getting his portion of food. He chuckles a bit, "even if I did poison it you'd probably live through it somehow. Why waste perfectly good food like that." Though he did know that Dazai was a bad chef so he guessed that was also a waste of food too. It was a good thing that Chuuya was actually a very good chef at the very least so the pair hadn't starved when they were partners in the mafia. Seeing how Dazai had also fiddled with the bandages on his arm made Chuuya tilt his head a bit in thought.

"Do you need them redone Dazai...? I think I still have a few rolls left over."

Not that he made it a point to keep extra on hand, he just had a bunch from when he used to host Dazai frequently when they were partnered together. It wasn't like it was a strange thing for him to offer all things considered. For now though he focused upon his meal and thought about that answer from the other man. As long as he was needed huh...? That made him feel a bit better since he really didn't want o be alone after the hellacious day he'd had.

"Eh, suppose I can host you as long as you want to be here then."

In all honesty, it was a relief Chuuya had decided to text him out of nowhere, and didn't outright want him to leave now. Dazai knew when the other wasn't faring well, and despite the particularly rough relationship they had, he would still come to the rescue. He could only imagine how absurd the Agency would find it, but they didn't need to know about this. No one did.

Once they stepped inside the apartment, Dazai actually lets himself relax. He shouldn't, one would think. He's in an enclosed space with the Port Mafia's most dangerous weapon, who had threatened to kill him some time ago at that. And yet, he felt safe enough to let his guard down. It hasn't changed. Chuuya might beat the shit out of him, but Dazai would still trust him with his life. He's at least polite enough that he does remove his shoes and shrugs off his coat as his gaze follows the shorter.

"That's no problem. Believe me, I'll eat anything you make. Even if it's poisoned."

With how he was, that probably wasn't even a joke. But that aside, food was always better when it was other people's. Especially in Dazai's case. He gave Ango and Oda food poisoning once. By accident, of course. So instead, microwave meals tended to be his friend, or stealing someone else's food. You know, when he actually remembered he needs to eat like a human being. Anyway, he followed Chuuya to the kitchen to hover near him and watch him. It was odd, how this almost felt normal. It definitely wasn't, it's not like they were friends. Not even allies. He didn't think he could call them enemies either though, much as they hated each other. It was...complicated.

Dazai looks up from the momentary distraction of fiddling with the bandages around one of his arms, they were starting to get loose, when he's handed a plate and takes it with a bright smile. His gaze lingers on Chuuya, before he's shifting his attention to get a portion of food for himself. Only when the other speaks again does he look over with a tilt of his head and a look as if he was actually thinking about it.

"Hmmm... As long as you need me to, I suppose."

[icewindandboringhorror]

(also feel free in the tags to clarify Why you made the choice you made!! :0c)

[laniidae-passerine]

don’t get how you can watch iwtv and be a sincere diehard lestat hater. like the world’s biggest lestat hater is louis and that man can’t even commit to it for more than five minutes before literally hallucinating lestat wearing a wedding ring and talking pretty to him. this show is about louis and every road leads back to lestat for that man

[sashavasilieva]

⸻ A soft chuckle slipped past Sasha’s lips when Bastian “granted permission” for her to laugh at his water fiasco. She didn’t even try to hold back this time, humor was rare currency in her life lately, and she took it where she could. Once the waiter returned, she ordered a New York steak with mashed potatoes and a glass of red wine, her tone casual but clear. Beside her on the table, Yelena was still enthusiastically drumming her tiny hands on the wood. Sasha, without missing a beat, placed her own palm flat on the table, letting her daughter smack that instead, redirecting the chaos without dimming it. Yelena blew a raspberry in response, giggling at her own brilliance. Her wide, stormy grey-blue eyes sparkled, a perfect echo of her mother’s. Meanwhile, Ilya was busy gnawing on his teething ring, drool glistening on his chin. Sasha reached for the cloth diaper draped over the back of her chair and gently wiped his mouth, her movements efficient and tender, without drawing attention to them.

It wasn’t often people saw this version of her, the soft one. The Sasha most people knew was guarded, flinty, difficult to read. Even her family rarely got past the surface. But since the twins, some of those sharp edges had worn down, at least in moments like these. Letting people in, especially strangers, wasn’t easy. Still, tonight, she wasn’t bracing herself so much. She wasn’t sure what that meant yet. She gave a polite nod when the waiter returned with her wine, murmuring a quiet ❛ Thank you ❜ Before taking a sip. Her eyes returned to Bastian as he echoed her casual ❛ So... ❜ With one of his own, and the corner of her mouth twitched.

❛ Well... I haven’t worked at Grudge Box for very long. A couple weekends, tops. ❜ Her gaze dropped to her glass as she idly ran her fingertip along the rim. ❛ I spend more time at the casino, the one owned by the Kang family. I’m a hostess there. ❜ She glanced back up briefly, her tone even, but not impersonal. ❛ The crowd at Grudge Box was fine, honestly. Tamer than I expected. Or maybe I just haven’t worked a wild night yet. ❜ A pause. ❛ But the casino? That’s where it gets complicated. ❜ Her voice tightened just slightly, still polite, but clipped at the edges. ❛ Some patrons mistake me for a waitress, no offense meant to waitstaff, of course. But then they try to order things from me, or worse, talk to me like I’m part of the scenery. ❜ Her gaze sharpened faintly, but the heat in it was controlled. ❛ Let’s just say... if I weren’t on the clock, a few bones would’ve needed realigning. ❜ She gave a wry smirk and took another sip of wine. ❛ So far, I’ve resisted. Miracles do exist. ❜ Yelena let out a little shout at that exact moment, as if in agreement, and Sasha chuckled softly under her breath before reaching over to hand her her cloth diaper. Her eyes flicked back to Bastian. ❛ Anyway. You still want a story? Stick around. I’m sure the chaos will find me eventually. It always does. ❜ Like everything in life in general.

Bastian finally managed to swallow, setting his glass down with deliberate care. "Okay, yeah, go ahead and laugh. It’s not every day you get to witness a man nearly defeated by a simple glass of water. It’s a rare and humbling spectacle, I’m sure." He leaned back, a faint, self-deprecating smile playing on his lips. "And you 'got it'? That's a relief. I feel infinitely safer already, knowing the crowd is being monitored by such a seasoned professional. I promise to keep my heckling to an absolute minimum so you don't have to put me in a time-out." The sarcasm was thick, but her playful wink had practically demanded it. This entire dinner felt like walking a tightrope he hadn't even known existed an hour ago. He was her boss - her secret, accidental boss - and she was sitting here talking about her weekend job like he was just some random guy she'd met. The irony was so dense he could probably cut it with a knife. He watched her with the kids, the gentle coaxing for 'ma-ma', the easy way she soothed Ilya's sneeze.

This wasn't the guarded, sharp-edged Sasha he remembered from her college days, constantly bracing for a fight with Alexei. This version was softer, definitely tired, but also more present. More real, somehow. The thought of telling her the truth right now felt fundamentally wrong, like pulling a fire alarm just to see what would happen. That conversation with Cedric on Monday was going to be deeply unpleasant - for Cedric. The chaotic twin percussion started up, and she handled it with an ease that was almost mesmerizing, sliding the teething ring back to her son without breaking eye contact. She was holding it all together effortlessly. He picked up her conversational cue, mirroring her relaxed posture. "So …" he repeated, letting the word hang for a second before continuing. "Since you're the expert on all things Grudge Box, you have to have some good stories. And I don't mean the fights. I mean the audience. That place attracts a special kind of creative chaos. What's the weirdest non-fight-related thing you've seen? Someone trying to trade a half-eaten hot dog for a better seat? A drunk fan trying to officiate from the sidelines? There has to be something that made you just stand there and think ... this is why I can't have nice things."