#anyway i hope you liked this one too

[fandom-blackhole]

Snow

AN: Well it started storming here again and made me think Rain again and since the original thought had more to it I thought I might expand on the the world for those who are interested. I did make some decisions about the battle droids and Obi's home planet, Stewjon, that Im sure isn't canon but I don't really care, its my fic and I'll do with it as I want lol. Anyway if you like this let me know, and if you'd like me to do the rest of the story that I thought up let me know! Thanks for reading <3

Summary: Reader can't help but remember the first time they encountered snow.

WC: 3.1k

<<Rain

Night finally fell, and with it so did the sound of the blaster fire that had been ongoing all day. You'd always found yourself thankful that the Separatists were too stingy to give their battle droids infrared or night vision allowing you and your men to have reprieve if only for a few hours from the exhausting battles. On nights like this you thanked the force for it even more, the fighting had been near nonstop for the last few days and the marshy planet you were on was frozen near solid as it had entered its winter months, making the surface slick and hard to fight on. Your men were ready to drop from lack of good rest and you were tense and tired with headache pounding right between your eyes after what felt like a never ending day of fighting.

Dragging your feet back to your tent, you cursed the council for sending you to a place that was so cold, but immediately felt bad for the thought. The order was stretched thin with the war, more and more battles kept popping up and not enough of you to fight them. You were at war, you weren't meant to be comfortable, but you hated the cold, you always have. And you hated the fighting, not because you weren't good at it, you were a jedi you had to be, but because your heart was never in it. The disruption and chaos that rippled in the force from it felt like constant pin pricks all over your skin as so many things called out for your attention through it and always made you feel suffocated. As a padawan your training had been more focused on the gathering and protecting of information, studying and learning things about the galaxy not running around and fighting to keep the peace like the others. You found more reward in the archives than on distant planets or successful missions. But all of that was in the past, in a time of peace, now it was nothing but a distant dream in the midst of wartime for you.

Thoughts wandering into the nostalgia of past as you trudged along on the frozen muddy earth, you didn't quite register the feeling of a pin prick of iciness against the swell of your right cheek that faded nearly as quickly as it was felt as the cause melted against the heat of your cheek that burned against the cold. Subconsciously though, you felt a shiver at the feeling and pulled your hood closer to your face, just glad that the jedi order provided you with items that regulated your body heat nicely against the biting weather.

You paused in your path however, as that thought repeated in your mind, and your tired brain finally registered the frozen fluff falling around you, the ones meeting your face and melting, and the ones making their homes along the outside of your coat. You'd only experienced the snow a handful of times, and you never truly could figure out if you liked it. You disliked the cold, yes, but with snow- a bit like with the rain- the force quieted. Unlike the rain though with its full pause in quiet serenity akin to taking a deep breath after a long day, the snow seemed to cause the force to buzz just slightly, like the quiet static of a comm in between messages, nothing grating, but a soft background noise that swirled around you and made you take in the burning cold air and watching the plume of frozen breath disperse in the air as if to take your stress along with it. 

You stood still and watched the flurries fall around you, almost languidly, and couldn’t help but smile, their unhurried pace bringing forth a welcoming calm after so many stressful days. In the low light of the camp with the haze brought on by the falling snow you found the memory of the first time you truly experienced snow surfacing.

You had been assigned to a simple mission: transport provisions to an older temple in the Mid Rim that was home to only a handful of Jedi Masters and to collect a crate of ancient texts to be looked over and restored at the temple on Coruscant. At the time you were still younger, only having completed your trials and becoming a jedi knight a few years prior, and this was the first longer mission that you’d been assigned. You weren’t the only one going on the mission however, as the council had heard rumors of pirates having been circling that area of the Mid Rim they saw that it may be more beneficial to send along help just in case there was a conflict. The help had been in the form of your closest friend and also recently knighted jedi- a year after you which you still teased him endlessly about, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and his young padawan, Anakin Skywalker, which you had been immensely happy about as you never really got to see either of the two very much- the council seeming keen on keeping young Skywalker out of the temple often, leading to him and Obi-Wan to rarely even have time for a simple chat. 

The whole trip took the three of you roughly a week to complete, four of the days had been spent traveling to the planet and back to Coruscant after spending three days on the planet to unload the requested provisions, pack away the books and scrolls for the trip back, and to of course refuel. All in all the trip was easy, calm, and in Anakin’s words, “boring as kriff,” of which Obi-Wan chastised him for such foul language for a jedi learner, but you could only laugh at both Anakin’s antics and Obi-Wan’s resulting exasperation. You and Anakin did seem to be on the same page about one thing however, and that had been complaining over how cold the planet had been. The planet itself had been situated farthest from its system’s star, resulting in a freezing atmosphere and barren surface. The only hospitable places being those deep underground near natural hot springs from the depths of the planet’s core. You did find that you liked the planet in its quiet beauty, the nearly untouched blues and whites of frozen mountains were quite picturesque, as well as the surrounding silence through the force of few living creatures on the planet disrupted and created a studious calm, one you wished you could bottle up and take back to Coruscant for the days where the billions of life forms flowing so near each other in the force caused you to be distracted in your work and occasionally cause lasting migraines you still were working to control. But as nice as the silence and the landscape were, one thing overpowered any thoughts of staying, the constant feeling of never being warm enough, the tips of your fingers almost constantly being numb, the ever present need to wear thick clothes and a coat, the freezing cold that chilled you to your bones.

You found yourself jealous over Obi-Wan’s nonchalant state over the temperatures however. He walked around as if the cold didn’t bother him, even though the tips of his ears and nose were constantly a rosy pink color. You cursed him in your head and shot daggers at him anytime he teased you over your shivering state. Anakin however, your little hero, always stuck up for you and seemed to find ways to get back at Obi-Wan for all his teasing even if it meant harsher training sessions the for himself, of which truly wasn’t anything harsh, just longer periods of meditation typically, which little Anakin loathed. 

Most of your days on the mission had been spent watching the back and forth between Obi-Wan and Anakin, recognizing just how like brothers the two of them acted. Your heart warmed at the sight even if something in the back of your mind kept echoing the melancholy of loneliness and the wanting to have someone close to you, wishing to care for and be cared by another however against the jedi ways it was. Even with the creeping loneliness, you continued watching the two, through meals, lessons, and even nights. You couldn’t help it, something about seeing Obi-Wan’s everlasting patience and care for the young boy stirred warmth in your heart. It was his gentleness, how he stooped to Anakin’s level to speak with him, how he praised even the smallest accomplishment in his training, in seeing him comfort Anakin from nightmares in the dead of night when he himself was still half asleep after being awoken. Everything was bringing back the soft affections you had for Obi-Wan as children that you had thought you had long since let go. 

Those feelings came back quickly and so strongly that you had found yourself spending your nights sleeplessly wandering the ancient temple’s library, browsing the yellowing pages and letting the echoes of the past connected to the writing wrap around you in quiet mumbled and incomprehensible words through the force. But most nights as the quiet echoed around you louder than anything back on Coruscant, you couldn’t stop your mind from pushing its way back to thoughts of Obi-Wan. Since his knighting, he’d started to let his hair grow out, the ends curling against the tops of his ears and the back of his neck in soft waves, making your heart sing with want to rake your fingers through it, to hold it softly between your finger while those jewel colored eyes echoed back the affections you harbored for him. Your mind also wandered  to neatly grown out facial hair he was letting curve around his jaw and hide the youngness of his face, to make him appear more mature and worthy of his status as a jedi knight and worthy enough to be training a padawan of his own, something you knew he still struggled with in the absence of the man he looked up to most, his late master, Qui Gon Jinn. 

It was on the third and last night of your stay on the planet that found you wandering away from the scattered library and to the door of the temple, too lost in thought to really notice where your wanderings had led you until you found pause as the force started to light up in a soft static. Glancing out a carved window, for the first time you watched as snow lazily drifted towards the frozen ground, drifting in the slow wind and building up and layering on top of eachother blanketing the ice below. For the first time in several nights you found your thoughts blank, almost meditative in your paused state of just watching, observing the delicate dance of each falling flake. 

You weren’t sure how long you stood there frozen like the rest of the planet, frozen in the moment in time, but you were eventually broken from your revelry by a whispered voice to your right. 

“You know, if I didn’t know any better, I’d believe that this is the first time you’ve seen snow.”

Having not noticed his approach, too absorbed in the blank trance circling your mind and buzzing soft static of the force, you startled slightly turning to find amused blue depths watching you. Feeling a bit embarrassed you turned back to the window, replying in a similarly quiet tone that had an edge of wonder, “It is the first time I’ve seen snow.” Pausing you hummed before you continued as you could feel his gaze watching you questioningly, “Well, I guess not technically the first time I have seen snow, there was piles of the stuff on Ilum when I took the trip to retrieve a crystal for my saber, but…this….this I’ve never gotten the chance to witness.”

When you had turned back to glance at Obi-Wan his eyes had softened from amusement to an emotion you could not place as he studied your features for a moment before turning back to the window to watch the snow fall. You watched him watch the falling of the flakes  for a few seconds before turning to watch again yourself, the quiet swirling between you both before Obi-Wan broke it once more.

“There’s not much I remember of my home planet, I am not even really sure that the few things I think I may remember are true…..but one of the things I think I remember is that there was snow. I remember flashes of running around in it, playing games with young friends- maybe even siblings- and a warm joy whenever I glanced out the window and saw the ground littered in white.”

The quiet admission caught you slightly off guard, making you look back to Obi-Wan catching a few seconds of a reminiscing thoughtfulness written on his face. Obi-Wan had never talked about his home world, never shared stories about it when you and the others gathered in circles as younglings and spoke of what little you could remember. For much of your younger days you’d just assumed that he’d been born on Coruscant and home wasn’t as out of reach as everyone else’s, until one night as padawans you’d both snuck from your rooms to the temple gardens and under the starry sky he’d pointed at one and told you that was his home. 

Now though, your heart ached as he shared the memory he had obviously held so guarded for so long, opening himself to you in almost a deeper way than he ever had before. But before you could get too caught up in that thought he turned and smiled at you, saying, “Come on, you need the full first impression.”

Gently he led you out the door, pulling you along until you stood a hundred or so feet from the temple. Holding your hand out once you stopped, you huffed a quiet laugh as snow floated down and landed in your palm, melting on contact. Looking up, you see Obi-Wan’s fond gaze taking you in as you say, “It tickles almost when it lands on your skin and melts so quickly.”

Obi-Wan laughs at your almost childlike wonder and just watches as you continue to let the snowflakes wet your palm and as you lift your face to the sky watching them fall down towards you in twirling paths. You grinned as the snow dampened your face slowly, leaching heat from your chilling figure, taking joy in the fact that you could stand longer in this weather than rain without getting drenched.

When you finally turned back to Obi-Wan you found that he hadn’t moved his gaze from you, watching you with the same fond smile as if he didn’t want to miss a second of witnessing you experience something so simple for the first time and finding happiness in your own joy. From his own still watching, you could see unmelted fluffs of white decorating his honeyed hair and a few dotting his beard. He seemed to almost glow in the surrounding white and with the frozen drops decorating his appearance you think that you could easily mistaken him for deity, one who’s home was amongst the snow and ice as they fell and claimed him as theirs now. But what truly caught your attention however, was the few pieces of snow latched to his lashes, framing his bright, warm blue gaze in a contrasting ice. 

You found yourself being drawn closer to him, and the closer you got the more you felt a tell-tale brush of warmth within the force that you only ever have felt when you were around Obi-Wan. The warmth was always paired with the soft emotion filled look in his gaze, the one you could never place, or never let yourself place in fear of what you might find it to be, but now as you inched closer you couldn’t let yourself be afraid of it as your heart thudded in your chest, as you felt your own warmth reaching out in the force meeting his and swirling together until each were indiscernible from the other in a way you felt it never would be again. As your the toes of your boots bumped into his own, your eyes danced between his own, letting your walls down, allowing your emotions to fill you as you finally let yourself see the mystery emotion affection finally as it swirled Obi-Wan’s gaze as he met your own eyes, refusing to look away for a second as, to wrapped in the bubble of warmth dancing around the two of you, separating you both from the world outside.

Softly and ever so slowly he raised a hand and rested it on your cheek, his palm warming the iciness as he whispered, his face inching closer as your own followed suit, “You’re freezing, darling, you need to get inside.” A shaky breath left your lips as they brushed his own at the closeness as you replied, “Just a few more minutes ....please.”

It was as you remembering how your eyes fluttered shut and how Obi-Wan’s calloused hand smoothed against your cheek that you were pulled from your memory, the present flooding back into your awareness all at once as you felt a hand on your shoulder and a worried voice ask in a tone that seemed as if the question had been asked repeatedly already, “General, are you alright?”

Lowering your head from where it had been angled towards the sky, you forced a small smile to your face as you met your clone commander’s helmeted gaze. “I am fine, Pollux, just…just tired.”

“General you're shaking from the cold, how long have you been out here,” he asked as he started leading you towards your tent.

With a sigh and a shake of your head, as you trailed beside him, “Would you believe me if I said only for a few moments?”

“Not for a second, sir.” You let out a small laugh, interrupted by a larger shiver, before saying, “Join me for a cup of tea, Pollux? I have the feeling we both could use the warmth….and I would rather like the company.”

As the two of you reached your tent, Pollux pulled off his helmet and nodded, fatigue echoing on his face, “That sounds lovely, though you must promise to rest afterwards.”

Smiling, you laugh softly again replying teasingly, your smile coming easier now, “Always worried about me and my health, Commander.”

As he entered the tent he shot back a quick, “Someone has to be, sir.”

Before you entered though, you glanced skyward once more, letting another snowflake leave an icy kiss on your cheek as the lingering warmth from the memory finally leaves you and you enter your tent.

[satoumafuyuss]

old habits

[pokimoko]

Asexual bird? Please

How about two asexual birds?

[egophiliac]

crossing my fingers and wishing upon every star that chapter 10 finally brings us the tweel cards 🤞🤞

[xxplastic-cubexx]

[right to left]

finally finished This Wip from Ever ago and so now i ask you ever look into another dudes eyes and suddenly want to do whatever he wants

[theoldkyokodied]

One wedding and three funerals

Background paintings under the cut

[sygneth]

"The Fall of the Starmaker"

[edwinisms]

george rexstrew deserves awards for many things but i have to say. edwin’s bloodcurdling scream as niko gets killed deserves a whole award unto itself. like. that scream did not feel at all like a tv show scream. to a somewhat jarring degree. and i can’t express how much I respect that

[ricky-mortis]

“You’re a caveman. And I’ve invented fire.”

Close-ups under the cut :)

[mossy-aro]

ultimately i think my insistence on aro positivity honestly is as much a political stance as a personal one.

when i say aro positivity is crucial and that i dislike doomer-ist posts that express sentiments like 'I hate being aro so much I wish I was dead instead’ it's not because I don’t think there can and should be a space for negativity and acknowledging self-hate, or the many ways being aromantic can really suck sometimes. i find that to be very important!

that being said. there is smth here about how self-hate posts are sometimes just arophobia that we inflict on ourselves. and when we put that out into the ether it (intentionally or not) can become arophobia that we inflict on other members of the community. i think there absolutely needs to be a place for negativity and the expression of anger and frustration and self loathing even - these are all good things to talk about because these are things that we experience. that being said, it can also be genuinely upsetting and triggering to people to have what is essentially arophobia shown to them and then have that be validated by other aspec people. your personal thoughts can affect your wider community on a level you may not anticipate. and i understand it i truly do! it took me so long to be able to recover from accepting being aroace - it threw my entire world off kilter and made me question everything about my place in the world.

but my insistence on aro joy and positivity is because ultimately i do believe that building is at the core essence of it all. that ultimately discussions and the purpose of community should be about construction, not destruction. and this is both a personal and a political stance. talking about how much you hate yourself and cultivating online discussions/spaces where negativity about aspec identity is the main and only theme is destructive - if that’s where we let the conversation end. these thoughts can and should be used as a vehicle to look for a path forward!

joy and positivity create a space where the focus can become on forging a path forward, on construction, on community building instead of tearing ourselves and others down with negative thoughts. it’s not productive or healthy when it stops at a place of negativity - it becomes actively destructive to the essence of community.

and i do think that this is especially poignant considering the fact that being any kind of queer, but especially aromantic (and/or asexual) means forging a path for yourself and making your own happiness where there is no obvious way forward. our communities exist mostly online (right now, anyway), there is little recognition of our existence in the real world, the effects of amatonormativity are both pervasive and actively dehumanising, and there are legal, economic and social structures in place actively making our lives more difficult. yes that all sucks! it’s good to acknowledge that. we need to in order to change it. but more importantly, that’s not the end. we are still here and our happiness, our future is for us to determine. even if we can’t change the laws or society, loving yourself and understanding aromanticism as a political identity (as well as personal), as a radical worldview, and as a protest against amatonormativity is essential for both community and personal well being. the personal is political.

tldr. i guess my point is that as a community, we should focus on building, improving, and nurturing ourselves and each other (construction) as opposed to destruction. we should recognise aromanticism and asexuality as political identities as well as personal ones and rely on community and self-love in the absence of anything else as a form of protest and political power. destruction (the recognition of everything that is wrong) is essential as a starting point - but where do we go from there? we rebuild.

[bonicedemandarina]

Click for better quality

Shotout to Leona and Cheka for singlehandedly getting me out of the worst artblock I've had in months, love these guys

Tbh I just wanted to draw Cheka doing that one thing kids do when they treat you like a climbing tree, I have other drawing about that but it's a work in progress, it was supposed to be animation practice but Ibis got some crunchy quality on the canvas if you don't pay so. Yeah. Also Grim is here bc why not

[svtskneecaps]

i also just want to point out the qsmp members' commitment to like never letting the inactive members die. like dantdm logged on twice and is canonically dead and everyone continues to blame mysterious happenstance on him. spreen is canonically dead and yet people are still like namedropping him even tho the house façade he built has been demolished and also probably consumed by a mountain. they meme on kameto who's barely been on except that time he was a fed spy that was iconic as hell. they just immortalize their members and they're always so happy to see old faces come back and it lowkey makes me emotional lmfaoo like missa barely logged on for a while but goddamn nobody forgot his name bc philza can't go one day without mentioning him and mariana barely logs on but every time fit saw the homeless mariana in roier's city no matter what he'd stop dead and tell it "come home" and when slime came back to the server for elections after having logged off for the last like two months everyone was still excited to meet him bc the others had kept his memories on the server fresh and alive, maxo died canonically in the nuke and pierre pasted his face all over the server, luzu vanished for months and we never forgot him either thanks to the computers and foolish's wack ass family tree. like when purgatory teams were chosen and team red constantly joked about how it would be so over for the other teams once germán logged on despite the fact that germán had only ever logged on ONCE, the way they cheered when they snatched rubius in the split of green despite the fact that rubius hadn't logged on more than twice since march. they just keep the names alive all the time and it's like

it just makes me really happy to see. like it makes me really happy. like the admin team and the members alike are like 'no way in HELL are we letting your memory go' like damn once ur on isla quesadilla you really are stuck as an islander forever :D

[shkika]

if u call me beautiful you can have my attention for 5 more minutes

[otome-dissection]

Idk man I just think that mizu/ena5 and its progression was really beautiful actually. I just think that the release of the ena5 song was also really beautiful and kind of the nail in the coffin for me and I haven't been able to get the event(s) out of my head all week and that I kind of want to talk about it, actually.

It's about being hurt so deeply and continuously that any kindness that could be offered to you manages to feel like a sin, that it makes you crumble and shatter but for all the wrong reasons, not because of the newfound safety, not out of relief, but something worse and more deeply ingrained in you than kindness ever was. It's about carefully measuring the distance at which you keep others away from yourself, to ensure that it never happens again ("To save yourself the trouble", if that makes it easier).

It's about realizing that the people you've been spending all this time with are drifting closer, that they just might bump up against the unsightly parts of yourself that you've tried to keep locked away, it's about turning around and sprinting at full speed and slamming the door shut and holding onto the handle behind you to stop it from turning, because you're as frightened of the possibility of another wound being inflicted on you as you are of the possibility that kinder, gentler hands will reach out and smooth over the exposed scar. It's about hating eyes that judge and silently condemn you as much as you hate eyes that simply see you and take all of you in without scrutiny, because no matter what they're looking and they're looking at you and they know that your hand's on that door handle and they know that you're hiding something because, as much as you try to keep it shut, they've seen through the crack that you foolishly left open.

(The prominence of eyes in Bake no Hana, specifically eyes looking and searching, and finally landing on you, the viewer, Mizuki, is so fucking. Visceral in my opinion. Every character in the MV stares at the viewer in a deadpan, almost judging way. Even though Mizuki knows deep down that niigo won't really hate them, won't judge them, she just can't stand their kindness either; any gaze directed at her is a loss, another prick in their skin. It screams "don't look at me" while making sure that you know, with horrific certainty, that they're looking for you, that you're being watched. You can't go outside, can't leave your room, because they're searching for you, and while that should be reassuring, to you it's anything but).

It's about not wanting to be dissected, whether it's with hands that want to pull your organs apart or stitch them back together because no matter what they're there, and they're getting frighteningly close to your heart. It's about blinding yourself and covering your eyes to it all because seeing means exposure and exposure means they're taking something from you and you can't do anything about it, much less take it all back, much less have a say in the matter. Everyone's just taking and taking and taking and you wish you could just be alone. You wish everyone would just disappear and you could live in a world all to yourself, for only yourself (but is that really what you want?).

It's about the way that, near the beginning of the Yoka ni Mitoreta MV, Mizuki and her loneliness is represented as a dark, splotchy stain in the shadows. No colors, no patterns, no way to clean it or wash it all away, just raw ugliness marring a blank canvas. It's about the way that Ena reaches out to it anyway, the way she startles when the glass shatters just when she finally starts reaching forward, the way that the rest of the MV/song represents her searching for and reaching only further out to Mizuki, even if the broken shards of glass will only cut her fingers, potentially leaving scars.

It's about how, in every way, subtly, directly, consciously, and subconsciously, Ena shows that she fucking cares.

It's about the way that Ena lets Mizuki have autonomy, despite the situation being so horribly out of their control. And it's such a delicate thing: If she really wants to, Mizuki can take the opportunity to just run away, keep running forever, repeat the cycle over and over, and maybe she'll just destroy herself with it again, but it can't be denied that it's something important to them, something she can't quite live without just yet, their means of survival. Mizuki's autonomy is their identity, it's her tailoring her own clothes and choosing her own ribbons and styling her own hair the way she does. Ena letting them have that is as much about trust as it is about understanding that Mizuki of all people should have this right, when control was something stripped from her throughout so much of her life. She couldn't control how she was born, how people look at her or why, can't control what they think of her; lacking control has only left Mizuki vulnerable to the cruelties of others, has only caused them to suffer, which is why it's so important that it's given to them now.

She had the control to make the choice to see niigo's welcoming love and run away instead of staying, and she has the control to make the choice now whether she wants to keep things the way they are or take a step forward to be at their side again. She has every right to have it, and I think the fact that Ena realizes and respects that, even if it's subconsciously, is really beautiful (there is an entire fucking Verse about this in the new song and just. God Look at this. It's so caring, unconditional, and for fucking What. I think there is something to be said about how much Ena is willing to put aside for Mizuki, and maybe deep down it isn't healthy, but for now I'm just kind of in awe)

It's about how insanely patient Ena has been this whole time. Mizuki says that she basically lied to Ena's face about telling her their secret, even after Ena said with such conviction that she would wait for Mizuki as long as it takes, and Ena is just kept waiting and waiting and worrying like this seemingly indefinitely. It's about how Mizuki danced around it, avoided it, kept the distance, straight up ran when she was finally pushed, but Ena still chased anyway when she saw that she couldn't wait anymore, kept chasing just enough to intervene and get a straight answer out of Mizuki when she really needed to, but still leaving her enough space to leave if that was truly what she wanted. It's about how relieved Ena is the moment that Mizuki finally says outright how much they want to be with her and niigo, how much she wants to try, how much more light Ena's voice sounds when she grabs her hand, relieved, the way that the relief she feels can be felt through the music, throughout the entirety of Yoka ni Mitoreta, the way that warm colors always follow her when she chases after Mizuki, just to hold onto her and stop her from running away completely.

It's about how that careful combination of Ena's directness, Ena's persistence, Ena's warmth, her patience, her bluntness about her feelings, the way she chases and holds on but not too tight and her regard for how unsafe and exposed Mizuki feels actually works and breaks it all down. It's about how she really did reach through to Mizuki, despite the thorns and broken glass shards and nearly-unfulfilled promises, the way that Mizuki did finally let her turn the door handle and step through to see what she'd been hiding all this time, the way that Mizuki's hand, limp, when Ena first grabs onto it, shifts to hold hers back as they cry in the face of Ena's gentleness.

Despite how harsh Mizu/Ena5, and even Ena herself as a character can be (or at least was in the very beginning of pjsk), everything is somehow gentle and warm in the end, blindingly so. And you know what, I think that's beautiful. And what's even more beautiful than that is how Mizuki allows themself to crumble and shatter under that kindness, that warm light, but this time, finally, out of relief.

On a final note, I just want to say that I also appreciate how all that didn't have to solve everything. The scars haven't disappeared, haven't gone away, and Mizuki knows that their desire to run hasn't gone away forever, and maybe it never truly will. But for now they've calmed it, at least a little. She's learning to allow herself to be seen, learning that when someone's fingertips brush over their scars the way Ena's did that it's only out of care, and that maybe taking in that care and allowing herself to feel kindness and safety is okay. They're safe, for now, somehow. They're learning. They're trying. And I think that's cool :)

[egophiliac]

YOU MANIFESTED THE TWEEL CARDS CONGRATS

YOU'RE WELCOME EVERYBODY!

seriously though I was probably like. 60-80% thinking we'd get at least one tweel for chapter 10. but I was NOT expecting it so soon! both of 'em! in August! a shame we're not getting a Coral Sea event after all...but I guess I can be resigned to that and ALSO excited for getting shiny sparkly glowing(!!!!) mertwins along with Azul fighting his inner demons and going right for the eyes! AHHHH I CAN'T WAIT

(also heeeey I recognize that rowboat... 👀)

[madootles]

tma tma tma