#anyway idk if this is gonna materialize into anything but its a fun au | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

axemetaphor · 3 years

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im definitely not ripping off my friend by making a list of au ideas i have no siree //gonna slap this under a readmore cause i. well i say a lot. all of the time. i tried so hard to format this Good but tumblr fucked me up i am so sorry

so first-off i know i already have one WIP AU (Auckland) on ao3 so i wont talk about That one cause like. spoilers. i actualyl have it like 80% created so its likely gonna truly get finished for once and i dont wanna ruin shit

the other one ive posted about is something me and ben (catgirlrepublic) have worked on together its not at all close to done or anything but it's. a fun little crossover. Between jdate and my fuckinuhm. Original characters story “Untitled Villains Project”. the sketches of the comic version ive started is actually my pinned post 👉👈 its like the first chunk of the story, i think half of part 1? yea.

Tldr john fucking Somehow is able t oget into contact with a certain curious scientist from another reality who’d just love to study the Soy Sauce, most certainly not for her own nefarious purposes

John and Dave meet up with the scientist, her name is Boss, and her lab assistant, Toxic, and after a bit of a preliminary Vibe Check where john determines her trustworthy (which Dave doesnt agree with,) the two agree to be taken to the world UVP is set in. from there they stay in Boss’s lab (big old fucking abandoned military lab). John and Toxic are fast friends due to mutual love-of-chaos. John n Dave get to fuckin, camp out on an air mattress.

The day after they arrive, the two get split up, not exactly intentionally; big plot points of UVP are liek. Fueled by Boss sending Toxic to go fetch her “research materials,” which are usually important artifacts

Fuckin side note i guess i have to explain my dumb bullshit: Boss’s, uh, field of expertise so to speak is actually fckin, basically the scientific study of magic and superpowers n shit like that. This shit’s all real in that world. Toxic’s got fuckin superpowers, so do 4 other main characters, whatever. It’s got a bit to do with spirituality, iss Boss’s hypothesis. So she has Toxic fetch important artifacts that might have “energies” to them. The thing is actually way more fuckin complictated than that, this is just Boss’s initial hypothesis.

Motherfucking anyways. So Boss gives Toxic a job to do, and John get excited about how Cool that sounds, and ends up going with Toxic, leaving Boss and Dave alone. Neither is thrilled about this. But Dave and Boss get to have a bit of conversation (while Toxic and John are off bonding and having a good time) and come to a… mutual grudging understanding of some kind. They still dont like each other though lmao

Theres gonna be deeper shit going on but we havent sorted it out yet/tbh havent like Written For It in a while but i still like thinking about it a lot lol

Also pretty sure our endgame is john and dave steal toxic and bring them back with em lmao boss is kind of not nice and toxic would most certainly be better off in Undisclosed. Actually theyd fucking love it. Theyd become a local cryptid im sure. Undisclosed’s mothman is a teleporting spike baby.

I have. Another crossover AU that i might. Post something about for halloween? Maybe? If i have it finished?

Crosses over into, you guessed it, another one of my original-character projects. God, am i vain or something?

I promise this is just because i think blue and dave should get to team up to beat up some monsters

Quick briefing on my fuckinuh. Original character story, this one doesnt have a name (yet? Idk lol my work never actually goes anywhere sso who gives a shit). It centers around two grim reapers, Red (26, bi woman) and Blue (22, aroace agender asshole). In this reality or whatever, grim reapers function kind of like low-level office workers. They get told who’s going to die + when by some middle-management types, and upper management only involve themselves when punishment needs to be doled out. These Higher-Ups can be seen as analogous to Korrok; they’re decidedly not human, never were, and fucking terrifyingly powerful. Additionally, grim reapers are sort of .. designed to be “background noise” people. In reality theyre supernatural beings and, uh, look Real Fuckin Weird (the whole deal has a neon aesthetic im terrible at drawing uwu) but most humans just perceive them like extras in a movie. A body’s there but the camera’s not focused on it.

To the narrative: the shit starts when Red n Blue get relocated to Undisclosed. Relocation is something that just happens every now and then to reapers; they usually work in teams, but they get split up into different cities to avoid any strong bonds forming (a counter-union strategy from the Higher-Ups).

Red, Blue, John and Dave end up running into each other for the first time in a McDonalds where John n Dave are getting some 4am “hey, we just survived another horrific monster fight” celebration burgers. John and Dave are the only two people who can see how… strange Red and Blue are. Nobody else notices.

John unintentionally pisses Blue off, leading to Blue whacking him upside the head with a dildo bat. They all four get kicked out of McDonald’s. Dave and Red both are less than thrilled

Blue and John end up resolving their differences, somehow. Red and Dave briefly bond over their dumbass best friends being, well, dumbasses. They all part ways amicably.

somehow-or-other (idk yet) they end up running into each other a few more times, and eventually john invites them over to his place, and the four (plus Amy now!) get to know each other a little better

while there, Blue gets a text about some guy who's gonna die and John offers to drive them to where that's gonna go down. they take him up on the offer and get to have a bit of one-on-one conversation

after that ordeal though Blue has had Enough of people and bails, leaving John to head home alone

theres a sort of mirror-development going on with the five of em. Red, John, and Amy would all like everyone to get along, though theyre a bit tentative about it (John moreso than the other two, actually, jsut cause. well Red n Blue could still be Sauce Monsters). Dave and Blue on the other hand do Not like people enough for this shit, and Dave's not unconvinced theyre Sauce Monsters. he will not trust them until proven he should

the story's kinda nebulous but i got an idea for some Shit going down that involves both Sauce Monsters and also the Higher-Ups to have some fuckin absolute chaos go down.

Oops! All Trans

Everybody is transgender. Everyone

Ive actually workshopped this one both with ben (catgirlrepublic) and ghost (ghost-wannabe) lmao its a fun lil concept ive had from the get-go cause i mean. What’s an internet tran gonna do other than hit all their favourite media with the Everyone’s Trans beam

Dave transitioned post-high school and faked his death for it. People go missing in Undisclosed all the damned time, after all. He moved to the next city over, transitioned fully, then came back as a completely new man. Yes i know this doesnt exactly fit with the “everyone knows David from high school” thing alright, hush.

Anytime anyone brings up John’s old best friend (pre-transition Dave) John throws an entire fit like an overdramatic grieving widow. Full-on sobbing “why would you bring her up?! I miss her so much—” to the point that people just stop bringing up because Jesus Christ That Sure Is Uncomfortable KJHGFDS.

This is a scheme he and Dave came up with prior to Dave leaving, though Dave hadnt exactly anticipated John putting on this much of a performance about it— but it’s stopped Dave from ever having tto hear his deadname again, so hey.

Amy transitioned sometime in middle school/early high school. Her family was super supportive and loved her a ton and most people just know her as Amy. she was super shy her whole life really so. Yeah. people just dont think to bring it up lmao also i Feel Like big jim would absolutely wallop anyone who gave her trouble of any kind

John’s nonbinary (genderfluid specifically) and not exactly Interested in transitioning ? like hes fine with how he is. mostly.

he came out to Dave in high school but hes not out to anyone else exactly. Maybe his bandmates. Probably any other trans person in Undisclosed knows, too, cause theyre safe to tell lmao. Johns mostly a “he/him out of convenience” kinda nb who’s cool with any pronouns but does prefer they/them most. Dave and Amy use they/them when the trio are alone

Also this is a totally self-indulgent caveat that i think would be great, Dave’s actually agender but because he's transmasc and transitioned when he thought there were really only two options, and being Boy at least felt less weird than being Girl, he just kind of assumed he was a dude. It’s only through a lot of (like fucking years and years hes probably in his 30s/40s when he puts 2 and 2 together on this one) talks about gender with John that he realizes he actually feels like No Gender. Masc aesthetic with none gender.

I Just Think It’d Be Neat Is All Okay

Also Amy came out to Dave about being trans early on in them seeing each other and his response was to get very nervous before blurting out “me too” and then just being too embarrassed to talk about it for the rest of the day. Hes got a lot of hangups on talking about it actually it takes years for him to get comfortable in that

by contrast when Amy comes out to John about it his response is to yell “EYYY ME TOO” and give her a big ol hug lmao

I think itd be neatt if Amy ran a like. Transfem help/advice blog on tumblr. Kind of helped-with by John who can give her transfem nb insight for certain asks. I also just think that would be neat.

Cowboy AU - i put this one last cause its got drawings to it actually. Theyll be at the bottom

Basically just. Hey you ever watched a western. I think they look neat

This is another one me n ben have come up with lol

The soy sauce and all that shit still exist, im not sure where korrok fits in yet but ill figure it out

Theres no real like solid narrative yet ? but heres the barebones of everybody’s arcs.

John

Johns an absolute troublemaker, Of Course. Hes wanted in several towns for absolutely stupid shit. Hes a loner who shows up, causes chaos, gets drunk, does some drugs, runs away if people get too mad at him

He definitely had the same kind of deal with the soy sauce as in canon— he was at some kind of party, somebody offered it, he took it cause why the fuck wouldnt he, now he can see monsters and shit

Hes kind of a mooch also. Like. dont let him stay in your barn man he’ll never fucking leave and drink all your booze.

He runs into Dave when they happen to just, cross paths in the same town. the bullshit John stirs up ends up involving Dave in a way that makes it seem like it's his fault too, and they both get run out of town

after that he just tags along after Dave. hes decided this guy's Cool he wants to stick around. Dave is pissed at first, but not enough to shoot him or anything, and eventually, John grows on him

Dave

Dave also is a loner but unlike John hes simply so fucking awkward and bad with people. He doesnt feel like he belongs anywhere so he just travels

He’s the stereotypical Lone Ranger tbh. He wanders from town to town, solving their problems, though hed deny its out of any moral obligation (it kinda is, a little bit, tbh. He does like feeling useful). He shows up, fixes things, leaves. He's kind of a legend but most people think he's hiding something dark. other people jsut know him as that guy who farted real loud in the middle of the saloon and promptly skipped town out of sheer embarrassment. you know how it goes with Dave

He ends up involved with the Soy Sauce when a snake (not Actually a snake,) bites him. The snake’s more like the wig-monsters, really. Anyway, it injects him with the soy sauce, he fucking trips balls in the middle of the desert, he can see monsters now

He runs into John and shit goes tits-up, as said, but they become traveling buddies after that. he'd never say so, but he's glad for the company, actually. it's nice. hes not used to companionship but he feels a strange kind of easiness hanging out with John....

not sure how the Monster Dave concept will like fit in to this reality but like. trust me i want it in here. I'll Figure It Out.

Amy

Amy’s been living in a town John and Dave end up passing through and she is very curious about these two new Handsome Strangers who claim to fight monsters and just kinda. Persistently tags along til they let her join for real

Her family’s all dead, unfortunately, just like in canon, and she’s been living alone for a few years before meeting John n Dave. she had nothing left in that town to stay for, she'd been fantasizing about escaping on wild adventures for a long time and this felt a little like a dream come true. (Dave still gives her a spiel about how Difficult it is, but really, her fantasies were pretty grounded-in-reality already. i jsut think thats how she is, yknow?)

Shes the first person to react to the whole “we see monsters” shit with a kind of “oh, okay. neat” kind of response lmao

John and Dave fix whatever the fuck is up with her town (maybe that’s where the Korrok shit can fit, who knows) and Amy ends up being integral to that. After, she insists they take her with them because “they need her now” and Dave just cant really say no. John too is very much "the more the merrier!" and hes actually glad to have another person along he loves people lmao

At the start she has long hair but after she joins them she chops it short with a knife for convenience

also she still is an amputee. justt. idk. it was a wagon/stagecoach accident rather than a car accident lmao. just to clarify since i hadnt mentioned it, i wouldnt rob her of her ghost hand or yknow. all of the significance to her character that Missing A Hand has. although also now im going to have to research what was used as painkillers way-back-when, but im betting shes still got, like, her pain pills, they probably had those, maybe i wouldnt have to try too hard there. old timey medicine could be WACK though,

Shitload

Yeah hes in tthis shit mostly cause i liked designing his cowboy self lmao

Hes a kid (like 16, 17, technically i think in those days that was more Young Man than Kid but whatever. Hes Young i mean.) who got possessed by the Worms out in the desert and, by his family’s perception, just went missing!

Hes also a wanderer, but he ended up at the same town john and dave met in, at that same time, and starts following them after, already aware of who/what they are.

He keeps his face covered 24/7. actually he covers a Majority of his self for reasons. kinda want him to be a slightly more horrifying Worm Entity rather than human idk,

I kinda dont have much for this boy yet sorry Shitload

images !

with some editing notes for me cause im doing a very specific aesthetic with this lmao. i might change some lil details/colours though ...... idk

im also kinda 🤔 about shitload's colour palette. i want things assoicated w the sauce to be black'n'red predominantly but i think his palette might mirror dave's too closely. also im working on a korrok design i jsut am too busy to draw it now

#jdate #john dies at the end #aus #erh. tthe hell do i tag this as #rambles.txt #long post #well let me know if youd wanna hear more or. or something #send an ask. or whatever #yaknow #:jazz hands:

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keichanz · 5 years

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Another Day in Hell

*in a horrible flirty voice* so...ya like zombies

I don’t know if there will be a part 2. i just got the sudden inspiration at work yesterday and i just had to write it. i blame @clearwillow and @bearpluscat for their horror red riding hood au that i am already hopelessly addicted to lol idk why but that one pic of woodcutter Inu inspired me and i was like “shit i wanna write him being all badass and killing monsters” and then suddenly this happened.

whoops. #sorrynotsorry

don’t worry, i’m still working on Move Your Body and the next part will be posted soon. YRM is still in the works as well. this was just something i had to get out of my brain because i really liked the idea. like i said idk if i’ll continue it but there’s definitely potential so. *shrug* we’ll see, i guess.

please note: the title is tentative; i’m not sure if i like it but i can’t think of anything else at the moment so please be aware that it might change in the future. feel free to give suggestions. also i wrote this entire thing in a single day and it’s unedited.

fun fact: i hate zombies. i loathe them. they freak me the fuck out and the nightmare i had about them once is entirely to blame.

anyway, enjoy. :).

Read on AO3

Ch. 1 || Ch. 2 || Ch. 3

You know that phrase, “Just another day in paradise?”

Well, the same thing could be said now for one Kagome Higurashi. There was just one small difference, however, because Kagome sure as shit wouldn’t call this paradise.

The undead and monsters both of the bestial and human variety wandered the streets looking for their next kill. To trust blindly could very well mean your death so it’s easier to not trust anybody at all even when they claim all they want to do is help. The smartest thing to do was to look out for number one, question everything, and always, always watch your back. Evil lurked around every corner, hid in every brush, and nowhere was safe anymore.

No, definitely not paradise. Because this was just another typical day in goddamn hell.

Careening through the desolated streets, dodging rotting trash, abandoned cars, half-eaten carcasses, and dead bodies, a lone figure bit back a desperate sob as she looked over her shoulder with wide, terrified eyes. Covered in blood, some of it hers, some of it not, pale, and shaking, Kagome looked for a place to hide, her exhausted body starting to slow down from all the sleepless nights and lack of proper nourishment. She was cold, hungry, in pain, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to go on for much further.

She could hear them behind her now, snarling, groaning, growling and the sounds forced her to keep moving as tears ran unchecked down her face. She was being tracked, hunted by more than just the rotting undead, remembering with a terrified whimper the manic, inhuman eyes glittering malevolently down at her and the flash of cold, bloody steel as the knife plunged for her neck. She’d narrowly escaped with her life, fleeing from the crazed man she’d been stupid enough to trust and now he was after her and she knew he wasn’t going to rest until she was dead. There had been a loud bang followed by searing, burning pain in her left shoulder but she’d forced herself to ignore it, gritting her teeth and not stopping.

It was while she was escaping that she’d grabbed the attention of the undead currently giving pursuit, relentless, driven mad with hunger, thoughtless and determined and unstoppable.

Desperate, knowing that screaming for help would be useless, Kagome dove for one of the abandoned shops lining the streets, hands yanking at the door but of course of course it was locked. She let loose a sob and sparing a quick look over her shoulder with wide, frightened brown eyes, Kagome darted into the dark alley beside the shop, hoping for another way in, another doorway, a broken window, anything.

What she found instead was a heap of scrap metal leaning against the wall and knowing she was out of time, without hesitation squirmed her way behind it, ignoring the cuts she got from the sharp edges as she crouched down low and held her breath, shaking, eyes squeezed tightly shut, praying the monsters would keep on going.

Mercifully they did and Kagome withheld a sob of relief, clamping her hands over her mouth as she took a moment to just breathe. She didn’t stay long though, because lingering in any place for too long was never a good idea. So not quite recovered but left without a choice, Kagome slipped from behind her cover and carefully peeked out from the alley—

Only to come face to face with another monster, amber eyes cold and piercing, the huge sword in his hand dripping with fresh blood, and Kagome didn’t give herself time to think.

Emitting a short shriek she ran, thinking that the undead must have drawn his attention and he’d come out of his bloody hidey-hole to investigate, no doubt looking for his next victim. She heard him curse, heard his hoarse shout for her to come back but of course she ignored him, pumping her legs, breathing hard, sobbing when she detected his heavy footsteps behind her.

And really she should have realized that with the racket they were making it would once more attract unwanted attention so when she spotted the same horde of rotting bodies stumbling their way toward her, snarling and falling over themselves in their haste, Kagome really shouldn’t have been surprised.

She stopped short, trapped, the undead before her, the murdering swordsman behind her, and with a desperate sound she dove to the right, toward a sedan that miraculously still had its windows intact. She locked herself inside even though she knew it was fruitless, it wasn’t going to do her a bit of good and cowering on the floor, curled into a ball with her arms wrapped around her head, she waited.

What she heard instead of the car door being ripped off its hinges was a loud curse, excited sounds of the undead as they targeted their next meal, and then vague sounds of a fight. Grunting, snarling, low growls and wet squelching sounds were all she could hear for the next few minutes and even when all went silent she didn’t dare move, shaking, eyes shut tight, jaw clenched, waiting.

Waiting. Waiting.

A knock on the car window had her jumping in alarm but she shook her head, hunching in on herself. “Go away!” she screamed, her breath hitching in her throat, heart hammering wildly in her chest.

She heard a growl and more insistent knocking--or more like banging, really. “Open up, you wanna fuckin’ die in there?”

“Fuck off!”

With a screech, Kagome moved, unlocking the door and then shoving it open so hard the killer on the other side grunted and stumbled back from the force. She didn’t revel in the brief victory and instead made another run for it, sobbing as she ran away as fast as she could, demanding her tired body to keep moving, dammit.

Please please please please plea—

She screamed when a familiar figure suddenly dropped in front of her and Kagome made the horrifying realization that the man wasn’t human. She looked at him now with wide eyes, spotting the dog ears on his head, the sharp talons tipping each finger, and the fangs that were clearly displayed in a dangerous and...annoyed? snarl.

“Dammit bitch, I’m trying to—”

“No!” Kagome shrieked and swung her fist, landing a blow to his stomach, but the guy hardly even flinched. Tears running down her face, Kagome did the only thing she could, punching him with all that she had, kicking his legs but when a large hand suddenly clamped down on her wrist in a vice like grip, Kagome wailed.

“Wench! Fucking listen to me, I’m not gonna—!”

“Please,” Kagome begged, yanking fruitlessly at her hand, shaking her head while her free hand banging uselessly against his chest. “Please, let me go, I don’t wanna die, I don’t—”

“Fuck’s sake, woman, you’re—”

He suddenly cut off and Kagome went limp, knowing this was it, she was going to die, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do. She slumped against him, waiting for the inevitable to happen, wondering if he’d use that huge sword or the claws stained with blood.

She heard a low, thundering growl, felt it in the hard chest she lay against, and she tensed. But then he cursed - again - and muttered, “Fuck it, we don’t have time for this,” and she frowned. What—?

A strong arm wrapped around her waist and Kagome was abruptly lifted off her feet and promptly thrown over a broad shoulder. She gasped, eyes going wide and instinctively she fisted the material of his shirt at his back.

“What are you doing?!” she screeched. “Let me—!”

“Shut up,” he bit out as he started stalking back toward the shop where she’d tried to take shelter earlier. “Do you wanna alert every fucking undead asshole—fuck, you already did. Dammit.”

Before Kagome could utter another word, she was hauled back down, her would-be executioner darted into a familiar alley and he was crushing her against him, pressing her face into his chest to prevent any sounds from escaping as his arm went around her waist, a steel band.

“Don’t. Fucking. Move,” he hissed in her ear and Kagome stiffened, eyes wide as another hoard of undead stumbled down the street, perilously close to their hiding spot. She couldn’t see them but she could hear them, groaning as they dragged themselves along the blood-stained pavement, searching for flesh, creepy clicking and grunting noises echoing as they communicated with each other.

A small eternity passed as they waited for the undead to pass them by, frozen against the wall, unwilling to move even after the noises had faded away to silence. Another five minutes passed before the man dared to move, his grip loosening slightly as he sniffed the air a few times and grunted.

“They’re gone,” he rumbled and without warning swept her up into his arms. Amber eyes collided with dark brown and Kagome gasped at the intensity in them, for some reason feeling her face heat in a blush. “Keep your mouth shut, wench. I fucking mean it.”

Before she could respond - like she had even been able to anyway - he scowled and then abruptly launched them into the air. She bit her lip to stifle her startled cry and instead clung to him, her thoughts a jumbled mess, wondering for the first time if this man meant to kill her or save her. What was happening?

The guy was fast, not taking any chances in being detected by undead or other as he darted across the rooftop he landed on and swiftly dropped into an opening in the roof–a door, she realized somewhat dazedly.

It was dark inside but the storefront windows provided a little light as he gruffly instructed her to close the door using a crude pulley system he’d no doubt manufactured himself. Wordlessly she did, a little impressed, and then afterward he was maneuvering through the darkness of the store, being cautious and ducking behind shelves nearly picked clean of all their merchandise.

Kagome was quiet, biting her lip as she foolishly allowed this stranger to carry her into the depths of the store, pushing through the doors marked “Employees Only” into the storage room. He bypassed pallets of shrink-wrapped food and other supplies and hunger gnawed at Kagome’s stomach, but she ignored it, fearing that if she spoke up the man would react negatively after he’d told her plainly to keep her mouth shut.

She had no idea if he was friend or foe but figured it was out of her hands now either way so she did as she was told, biting her lip to quell any questions as he made a sharp turn toward the back and headed for yet another trapdoor-looking opening in the floor.

Kagome blinked. Stores had basements?

Evidently this one did, she mused as the man dropped down and this time Kagome shut the door without prompting, spotting the simple chain drilled into the underside and tugging until it was sealed above them. Pitch black surrounded her and she could see nothing. It was cold and smelled a bit like mildew but still she said nothing as he moved forward, the darkness hardly a hindrance to him and Kagome secretly marveled at that fact.

He suddenly stopped and then Kagome was blinking against the harsh glare of bright florescent lights as he flipped them on. After her vision cleared, Kagome took in her surroundings, her eyebrows rising and her mouth parting slightly in wonder.

She hadn’t really known what to expect, but it certainly hadn’t been an efficient and clean looking hideaway. Amidst the hot water tank, the plumbing system snaking across the ceiling, and a large metal box that looked to be some sort of electrical system, he had made himself a little home, complete with a bed compiled of stacked wooden pallets and a thick mattress with clean blankets and pillows.

She spotted a two-way radio on a sturdy looking table with three chairs surrounding it, a bookshelf filled with non-perishable food, and a freezer chest beside it that she suspected was filled with frozen meats and meals. There was an old television but she doubted it worked, a beat-up washing machine that acted as a cooler from what she could see, and a very old, puke-green armchair that had seen better days. A mini fridge sat against the wall with a timeworn microwave on top and beside that what appeared to be one of those old fashioned water pumps protruded from the wall, situated over a drain in the cement floor.

Kagome was impressed, and okay, yeah, a little envious. It was safe, secret, and protected, hidden from the outside world. It was a slice of paradise in a world gone to hell, a safe haven from death and disease with enough food and supplies to last for a very along time.

The man grunted, disrupting her thoughts, and crossed the floor to set her carefully down on the bed.

“Don’t move,” he rumbled her eyes followed him as he wandered over to a large chest she hadn’t noticed before, opened it up to retrieve a small bin, and came back over. He set the translucent green container beside her and Kagome received her second surprise to find it filled with various medical supplies.

Was he...going to treat her injuries? What kind of serial killer was this guy?

Or maybe...maybe he wasn’t one?

Biting her lip, Kagome refused to get her hopes up, still too frightened and wary to say anything and watched as he walked back with a cooking pot filled with water before dragging a chair in front of her, sitting down and carefully setting the water on the floor at his feet.

Wordlessly he reached for her arm and Kagome instinctively flinched back, a sound of fright echoing in her throat as her wide eyes stared at his blood covered hands. He paused, stared hard at her face for a moment with a deep frown, before taking the rag he’d gotten from somewhere, dipping it in the water and wiping off the dried blood on his claws and hands.

Kagome blinked, not expecting that.

He continued to silently clean his hands the best he could, the rag becoming a ruddy brown color and the water turning a light pink.

“You got a name?” he asked out of the blue and frowned when she jumped. He paused and studied her quietly, eyes searching the dark, terrified depths that gazed back at him.

“Relax,” he murmured. “I ain’t gonna hurt ya.”

Kagome’s lips pressed into a thin line and she ducked her head.

He rolled his eyes. “If I wanted you dead, wench, don’t you think I woulda already done it? Clearly you know what I am, and yet I still saved your ass from becoming zombie food twice now. You can trust me.”

She still looked uncertain, worrying her bottom lip and avoiding his gaze and he sighed. He could understand her hesitance; it was foolish to trust so blindly during these trying times, and he suspected she might have already made that mistake once which explained her wariness now. Still, he needed to treat those cuts and that nasty looking gash on her temple. Poor girl looked like she’d been through hell, and he was worried she might either pass out from sheer exhaustion or fever if any of her injuries were infected.

How the hell did he get her to trust him, though?

Racking a hand through his short hair, Inuyasha blew out his cheeks in another sigh and studied her, eyebrows dipped into a deep frown. His ear flicked, and then with slow movements, making sure she saw what he was doing, he dropped his hand to the Glock holstered at his hip and pulled it out. He’d gotten it from the dead body of a cop a week or so before and it was more for backup than anything since Tessaiga was his favored method of destruction.

Predictably she tensed, the color leeching from her face at an alarming rate but before she could bolt, Inuyasha flipped it around and held it out to her, the butt facing her.

She froze and stared wide-eyed at the firearm being offered to her for a long minute before lifting her dark eyes up to his, her shock evident. Inuyasha said nothing, silently waiting, his gaze steady and expression carefully blank.

Her eyes kept darting between him and the gun but Inuyasha remained patient, waiting for her to take the offered protection he knew would provide at least a little reassurance. Sure enough a moment later she slowly wrapped her fingers around the butt and drew the weapon into her lap, finger poised on the trigger while still avoiding his gaze, her face turning a light shade of red.

He fought a grin. It wasn’t loaded; he’d used up the last bullet just earlier that day when Tessaiga had been knocked out of his hand, but she didn’t need to know that. Then as an extra precaution, still keeping his movements slow, he jerked Tessaiga from the belt loop of his opposite hip and lowered it to the floor before lightly kicking it away, out of his reach. She relaxed visibly after that, the tension leaving her shoulders and she released a shaky breath.

Gratified, Inuyasha steeled himself and carefully reached for her arm again. She tensed, he paused, and waited a few seconds before trying again. She let him grab her arm this time and with measured movements, after wetting the rag again, he carefully began washing her skin of blood, both dried and flesh. He was glad to see that it looked worse than it really was, most of the cuts superficial and already clotting.

“My name’s Inuyasha Taisho,” he told her as he worked, voice low. “I’m thirty-one and I own the dojo across town, Sword and Shield.”

Surprise flickered across Kagome’s face. She recognized that name; she passed it every day on her morning commute to work. Or at least she used to.

Her eyes met his and Inuyasha’s lips twitched, his expression softening. “I’m a half-demon,” he said and her lack of surprise suggested she’d already guessed that. “But I’ve never killed another human before.”

Inuyasha paused, and then grimaced before amending, ”Uh, that hasn’t tried to kill me first.”

Her lips twitched slightly and she nodded. She understood that.

Relieved, Inuyasha worked on cleaning up her cuts and then treating them with antiseptic and bandages, muttering a soft apology when she winced as he doused the deeper ones. He did the same with her other arm, carefully cleaned and treated the gash at her temple – being sure to keep his claws away from her soft skin – and sat back.

“…Kagome.”

Inuyasha paused in studying his handiwork to flick his gaze to hers, giving her his undivided attention.

She blushed, gave him a trembling smile, and repeated softly, “Kagome Higurashi. Twenty-nine. Office worker.”

Inuyasha gave her an easy grin and he nodded once, eyes locked on hers, the vulnerability and lingering fright still clear as day. “Kagome,” he echoed, sliding his hand down her arm to grasp her hand and squeeze. “Thanks for trusting me.”

“Don’t make me regret it, please,” she whispered and relinquished the Glock back into his grasp.

“You’re safe here,” he rumbled and swiftly holstered the firearm. “I promise.”

Then she gave him her first genuine smile and something in his chest tightened as his breath caught in his throat.

Well. Fuck.

Clearing his throat and shaking his head, Inuyasha stood and went to the washer-turned-cooler filled with melting ice to get a cold bottle of water.

“When’s the last time you’ve eaten anything? Or slept?” he asked, frowning down into the well of the washer. He’d have to get more ice soon.

When he didn’t receive an answer, he looked over to find Kagome sheepishly avoiding his gaze, blushing and biting down on her lip. That didn’t exactly look encouraging.

“Um…like, three days?” she admitted with a shrug, and then immediately gasped and winced as hot pain flared in her shoulder.

Inuyasha’s frown deepened. “What’s wrong?”

“Shoulder,” she murmured, hissing through her teeth as she attempted to raise her left arm, but couldn’t move it without stabbing pain shooting down to the very tips of her fingers. She bit her lip to stifle her cry of pain.

Instantly Inuyasha was there, sitting beside her and gently nudging her to twist around so he could take a look. What he found had him sucking in a sharp breath and his eyes to go very wide.

“What?” Kagome pressed, trying to crane her neck around to see without jarring her shoulder too much. She failed. “What is it?”

“What the fuck,” Inuyasha growled, ears pinning into his hair. “Kagome, you’ve been shot.”

Kagome blanched. “W-what?” she squeaked, the disbelief clear in her voice.

“That’s a fucking bullet hole,” he went on and started lifting her shirt to get a better look at it. “Christ, wench, who the hell did you piss off to get them to shoot at you?”

Kagome was barely aware of him tugging her shirt up and over her shoulder as she suddenly recalled with vivid clarity a loud bang followed shortly by burning agony exploding in her left shoulder as she’d sought to escape the murderer she’d foolishly trusted.

“Oh,” she breathed, feeling lightheaded and slightly nauseous. “That’s what that was.”

“What do you mean that’s what—dammit, wench! Why didn’t you fucking tell me about this?!”

Growling, Inuyasha ended up slicing her shirt to get it off without moving her shoulder; it was already torn and bloody anyway so he didn’t think she’d mind. With hard amber eyes, Inuyasha took in the neat little dime-size hole on the back of her left shoulder. Oozing fresh blood in a steady trickle, the edges were red and inflamed and Inuyasha knew the bullet was still lodged inside. There wasn’t an exit wound on the other side of her shoulder and he could already smell the beginnings of infection from the foreign material embedded in the tissue. Shit.

He needed to get it out, quickly, before the infection set in and caused damage that he did not have the required medication for. He did, however, have the tools for it; he’d been shot at more than once, which was how he recognized the wound for what it was, so at least she’d have the comfort of knowing that he had experience with this sort of thing. Unfortunately he did not have any numbing agents so this was not going to be fun for her. Since he’d only ever done it to himself, figuring he’d never have to perform the “procedure” on a human, he’d never bothered to look for some since he could handle the pain.

Kagome, though? God, this was going to be a bitch for her and he hated himself for what he was about to put her through.

Swearing under his breath, Inuyasha left Kagome’s side to get clean water, a fresh roll of gauze, a mini stitches tool kit, and even though infection had already started to set in, he still grabbed the antibiotic ointment to prevent it from getting any worse. She seemed to be in a bit of shock, sitting there staring dazedly at the air in front of her and either unaware that she was topless with her white cotton bra revealed to him, or she didn’t even care. He suspected it was the former and he muttered another curse, grabbing a handful of rags he’d made from random articles of clothing before returning to where she sat.

Inuyasha set what he needed on the chair and hesitated briefly before crouching before her, hands resting lightly on her knees. Her face was pale and tightened from pain, however her eyes were surprisingly clear as she stared down at him. She worried her bottom lip, sighed, and the fleeting look that crossed her face suggested she knew what he was going to say next.

“I wish I didn’t have to say this,” he began, the regret on his face and in his voice genuine. “But I need to get it out. And I’m sure you already know, but it’s not gonna be fun. I don’t have any numbing solution, Kagome. I ain’t gonna lie to you, it’s gonna hurt like a bitch and I’m gonna need you to stay as still as possible for me so I don’t slip and accidentally cause more damage. Alright?”

If possible Kagome paled even more and she grimaced, but gave a curt nod, setting her jaw in determination and sucking in a steadying breath. She could do this.

He had to smile at her bravery. “If it makes you feel any better, I’ve done this before so I know what I’m doing. I’ll try to be quick.”

Kagome nodded again and that time offered a trembling but genuine smile. It made his heart hurt so swallowing the lump in his throat, Inuyasha stood and sank on the bed, kicking up a leg to stretch out beside her and urging her to turn so her back faced his chest and nestled comfortably between his legs. She kept her arm to her chest while doing as she was bade, shifting until both of her legs were stretching out before her and unable to hide the wince of pain when her pain flared briefly in her shoulder.

His ears flattened and clenching his jaw, Inuyasha got to work cleaning the surrounding area of dried blood and disinfecting it with some rubbing alcohol. Predictably she hissed and arched her back at the sting, instinctively trying to escape it as her hand reached down and fisted in his jeans.

“Okay?” he murmured, setting aside the antiseptic before wrapping an arm around her waist and brushing his fingers over her shoulder, readying to dig out the bullet.

Breathing deep, Kagome closed her eyes and jerked her head. “Yes,” she breathed and couldn’t stop the way her body tensed, preparing for the pain she knew was coming. “I’ll be fine. Just—get it over with. Please.”

Fuck, but he wished he didn’t have to.

“On the count of three,” he rumbled, swallowing thickly as he poised his claws above the wound. “One, two...”

Stifling the whine that welled in his throat, Inuyasha plunged his fingers into the open wound and Kagome screamed.

Burning, searing, agonizing pain exploded in her shoulder and ricocheted down her arm, sending every single nerve on fire and compressing the air in her lungs until she was gasping for breath. Tears pricked her eyes and Kagome tried very hard not to withe in agony, sobs catching in her throat as she girt her teeth and dug her fingers into his legs beside her, her body shaking, her stomach rolling, and her chest feeling impossibly tight.

Behind her Inuyasha wasn’t fairing much better, jaw clenched hard as he rooted around for the bullet and tried to pinch it between his claws, but the blood made that difficult. Switching tactics he tried to scoop it out instead, tightening his arm around her waist as she started to jerk and twist against him and he knew it was an unconscious bid to escape the pain.

“I know, baby, I know,” he soothed her as she cried, wanting nothing more than to heed her pleas for him to stop but knowing he couldn’t until the damned bullet was out. “You’re doing great, Kagome, just a little more, hold on for me, alright? You’re doing great, just a little more—”

He kept repeating the same things over and over again in her ear as he dug around for the blasted bullet, being careful not to dig his claws even more into the tissue of her shoulder but it was difficult. Kagome keened and sobbed, legs moving restlessly but the arm around her waist prevented her from jerking away from him.

Her entire arm was on fire, her shoulder felt like it was being stabbed over and over again and Kagome idly wondered if she’d ever been in as much pain before as she was right now. It was excruciating, blinding, and she almost wished she could just pass out so she wouldn’t have to endure it even a second longer—

“Got it.”

Inuyasha crooked his fingers, jerked his hand and the bullet popped out of her shoulder, glistening with blood and landing on the floor with a soft clink.

With a sob of relief Kagome went limp against him, curling her knees up as she turned her head and buried her face into his chest as she cried.

Though he wanted nothing more than to hold her, the tiny tremors that rocked her frame and the muffled whimpers against his chest tugging at his heart, Inuyasha forced himself to stay focused on the task at hand. Hurriedly he reached over and wet a rag before cleaning the wound. Though he felt like he was going to be sick, Inuyasha prepared the needle, making sure it was thoroughly disinfected and then giving a soft word of warning, he speared the flesh around it and stitched the wound closed.

Kagome jerked and issued another low moan of pain, her body stiffening but she offered no other protests, knowing it was necessary. At least he seemed to know what he was doing, his movements sure and swift. Kagome was surprised, but grateful when only seven minutes later he announced he was finished and then he was spreading the antibacterial ointment over it, staunching some of the blood flow. He wasted no time in pressing a thick gauze pad to it and keeping it secured with medical tape.

He remained quiet as he dressed the wound, and though he wanted to ask if she was okay, he had a feeling she would scoff in the face of his concern since she clearly was not. Still, the need to distract her even a little bit from the pain was urgent and so he repeated his earlier question.

“So,” he rumbled and reached over to grab the roll of gauze. “How’d you get it?”

More or less composed by now, her sobs having died down to sniffles and quiet sighs, Kagome sucked in a shaky breath and sat up straight to make it a little easier for him. Her newly bandaged shoulder protested and she winced, but the pain was tolerable.

“I made a stupid mistake,” she answered, her voice hoarse. Inuyasha started wrapping the gauze over and around her shoulder and she lifted her arm the tiniest bit so he could pass it under. “I trusted the wrong person and he ended up being...not very nice.”

“Let me guess.” Inuyasha frowned and added another layer of gauze, passing the roll over, under, and around again, passing just beneath her breasts. “One of those psycho axe murderers from a bad Halloween film?”

She gave a watery laugh and nodded. “Basically. I ran when I realized what he was and narrowly missed having my head cut off. I didn’t know he had a gun too, and as I was running away I heard a loud bang and then sharp, burning pain in my shoulder. I think I was too scared to really understand what it meant, and the adrenaline probably temporarily numbed the pain, so that’s why I didn’t tell you about it. I didn’t even know I had it until just now.”

His frown deepened. It made sense, but he didn’t like that she’d been so frightened the pain from the bullet hadn’t even registered, hadn’t even penetrated the terror she was feeling then.

Why did that make his gut twist and make him physically ill?

“That’s why I ran from you at first, you know,” Kagome said softly, drawing him out of his thoughts. “When I saw you standing there, your sword dripping blood and looking...well, terrifying, to be honest, I thought you were another crazy and didn’t think before I ran.”

Inuyasha grimaced and shook his head, recalling what he’d done right before he discovered her in the alley. “Yeah, I can imagine how bad that must have looked. I’d just finished tussling with a few of the undead fuckers myself. Damn things had been hanging around the shop for days before I finally managed to catch ‘em off guard and slaughter the lot of ‘em. I hadn’t even gone back inside when I heard someone yankin’ at the doors, trying to get inside, and that’s when I saw another group of them pass by with that single minded focus that could only mean they found their next meal. I was about to give chase, hoping I could get to whoever it was before they did, but then I heard something, ended up finding this tiny thing looking and smelling absolutely terrified, and she ran from me before I could ask if she was alright.”

Kagome blushed and smiled sheepishly even though he couldn’t see it and ducked her head. “Then what happened?” she asked and he easily detected the teasing lilt to her voice.

Inuyasha’s lips twitched. “Then I chased after her, killed some zombies, and tried to coax this terrified creature out from a car she’d locked herself in. She nearly knocked me on my ass with the door, told me to fuck off, ran away again and I had to stop her before she went and got her fool ass killed.”

“What an idiot.”

He chuckled that time. “Then I carried her back to my poor excuse of a shelter, treated her wounds, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

Kagome hummed but said nothing more and Inuyasha took that cue to reluctantly remove himself from behind her and put away the supplies. She slowly swung her legs back over the edge of the bed, releasing a yawn and Inuyasha suspected she was minutes away from passing out but first he wanted to get something in her stomach. It was obvious she hadn’t had a decent meal in a while so he’d start her off with something small first lest she get sick.

Kagome was seriously considering laying down and crashing for the next day or so when Inuyasha suddenly appeared before her, holding a bottle of water and some crackers, and her stomach loudly told of its emptiness at the sight of food. She flushed but gratefully took them, choosing to ignore his knowing smirk as she uncapped the bottle and took her first drink of fresh water in three days.

“Slowly,” he murmured and she forced herself to do as much. “You’ll get sick if it’s too fast.”

While Kagome slowly but surely drained the water and nibbled on saltines, Inuyasha made himself a PB&J and pretended it was a big juicy steak as he chomped down, finishing it in four bites. He rifled around in a box of clothes and found one of his clean t-shirts for to wear since her last one was nothing but rags now.

Wordlessly he walked over and held it up. Predictably Kagome flushed, setting down her small meal so he could help her put it on. Though she was gritting her teeth the entire time, Inuyasha managed to get her arm through the sleeve with minimal difficulty and she breathed a sigh of relief when she was covered once more.

“Thank you,” Kagome whispered softly, sincerely, and Inuyasha’s expression softened.

Because the urge was too great, he reached out and tucked a strand of raven hair behind her ear, prompting her to lift her gaze to his.

“Don’t mention it,” he rumbled, quirking a grin, and dropped his hand. Before he could step away, however, a small hand darted out and grasped his shirt, keeping him there, and he frowned down at her in concern.

“S’matter?” he asked, kneeing down and brushing his fingers against her arm. “Do you need—”

Shaking her head, Kagome tugged on his shirt, cutting him off and she finally lifted her head, deep pools of chocolate brown locking with burnished amber.

“Not just for that,” she murmured and the smile she graced him with was shy, but stunning. “For...everything. For chasing after me, feeding me, for...saving me. Thank you, Inuyasha. You didn’t have to, but you did, and...”

Her throat closed up and she could say no more, but she didn’t need to. Her eyes told plainly of her gratitude and a peculiar warmth spread throughout Inuyasha’s chest as a knot developed in his throat, suddenly making it a little harder to breathe and goddamn, but she was pretty when she smiled like that.

Composing himself, Inuyasha cleared his throat and tossed her an easy grin, though his eyes were soft and his words genuine when he rumbled, “You’re welcome, Kagome. I’m glad I did.”

Her smile widened and her blush deepened. “Me, too.”

He stared into her eyes and had the insane urge to...well, he didn’t know what, but then Kagome abruptly yawned and the spell was broken.

Shaking his head, not without an amused chuckle, Inuyasha sighed and stood up going back over to the chest of medical supplies and digging around for some painkillers. The second she spotted them Kagome made a little noise of demand and made grabby motions toward them with a little pout. He grinned and shook out two for her.

“Get some sleep,” he rumbled and waited for her to knock back the Ibuprofen with the rest of the water before taking it the empty bottle and tossing it in the cracked recycling bin that served as the trash. “Honestly I’m surprised you’ve lasted this long. Three days is a long time to go without sleep for a human.”

Kagome shrugged and then immediately regretted it when her shoulder twinged in protest. She winced and mumbled, “Kinda hard to sleep when you’re trying not to get to eaten or killed.”

Inuyasha snorted. He could agree to that.

Sighing, she carefully lowered herself down onto her right side and it was like her exhaustion hit her all at once, suddenly struggling to keep her eyes open as her body melted into the mattress and her mind became hazy. Her shoulder was stiff and still hurt like a bitch, her arm didn’t feel much better, but she was easily able to ignore all of that because she was finally able to get some sleep on an actual bed, in a safe place without worry about being discovered, without the fear that she might never wake up.

She was covered with a light blanket and she sighed, losing the battle to keep her eyes open as she murmured, “N’yasha.”

“Hm?”

“Stay.” It was barely above a whisper, her voice nothing but a breathy wisp of air, but Inuyasha heard it anyway and he felt that weird tugging sensation on his heart again.

“I’ll stay,” he replied roughly and gently brushed her bangs back, his touch lingering, a feather-light caress. “Sleep, Kagome. I’ll protect you.”

Kagome smiled, sighed, and slept.

Ch. 2

#another day in hell #inuyasha #kagome #inukag #keizfanfiction #fanfiction

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purplesurveys · 4 years

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722

How many walls are in your bedroom? It’s your typical four-wall bedroom. What do you think about Fall Out Boy? I like their older stuff and my favorite album of theirs is Folie à Deux by a mile. Haven’t been able to keep up much with their new material, but I definitely don’t hate the stuff they’ve been putting out. Do you know where Guatemala is? I wouldn’t know where to find it on a map but I know it’s somewhere in the middle of North and South America? At least I’m pretty sure? Do you find musicians attractive? I mean being a musician isn’t necessarily a criterion for me to be attracted to someone, but sure I’ve come across good-looking musicians in the past. Do you like hard boiled eggs? They’re okay but I like soft-boiled more.

Do you know anyone named Hector? Nope. Would you move to another country for the one you love? We’ve had this conversation before and she has vehemently scolded me when I said that I honestly would, but idk that’s me. Then again, we’ve never been in that situation so I don’t really know how I’d actually act when it came to that. Do you own an instrument? We have a keyboard, but it’s for everyone’s use. I don’t own any of my own. What do you usually have for lunch? Ever since the quarantine started my family has only been having very late breakfast and dinner, so I’ve technically been skipping lunch for over a month now. But before this whole thing started my lunch would typically be whatever my mom can cook, which is pretty limited – fried chicken, sisig, and giniling with varied soups are her usuals, if I remember right. Ever had a pregnancy scare? I would have absolutely no reason to have one. What do you think about the Purple People Eater? I’ve never heard of this before. What the hell is that looool Are you pale or tan? Tan. What's the weather like right now? It’s windy, just a tad chilly, and comfortable enough during the night which I’m thankful for, but the days are excruciatingly hot. Sometimes it’ll be very humid and the air becomes too heavy and difficult to breathe in, and it usually means it will rain that night, but that’s seldom. I get headaches almost everyday now because of the rapid temperature changes, and it suuuucks because we’ve run out of Biogesic in the house. Do you like cats? No. We have such different personalities and I can tell all of the ones I’ve encountered don’t like me. But for the next few days I’ll probably have a brief soft spot for cats because my sister’s cat, Arlee, passed away last Sunday. We were never close and her tail always got bushy whenever she saw me, but it was the first time I had to deal with a pet cat dying and I was still pretty shattered by it. What's the best part about Wal*Mart? I dunno, I can’t relate. Do you think Akon is amazing or annoying? I think neither of him. I mostly don’t mind him. Do you like the buzz cigarettes give you? I’ve... never gotten a ~buzz from them before? Am I smoking wrong? Lmao. But uh idk it’s weirdly pleasurable overall, and now I’m ever so slightly disgusted with myself for even being able to say that now. Are you a practical joker? Nope, I hate pranks. Do you like pop? This is slang for soda right? No I don’t. I feel like my tongue is being cut off every time I try it out and that always ruins the whole experience for me. What are you looking forward to? Eating the box of sushi sitting beside me. Angela surprised me for my birthday and had the sushi delivered to my house :) Have you ever laughed so hard you couldn't breathe? I’m sure most of us have. What's your favorite band? This question has been everywhere recently. I like Paramore the most but just so I give a different answer for once, I also enjoy alt-J. Do you feel stupid when you spill things on yourself? My mom has conditioned me to think this way, so yes. I feel pretty stupid when I drop or spill anything. Are you excited for summer? In the current global situation? It’s hard to feel excited for anything, especially when experts have recommended closing everything down until at least August. Have you ever snuck out? No. My mom would’ve found out easily. It’s always easier to ask for permission cause she’s never said no anyway. When's the last time you were kissed? :( A month and two weeks. Would you ever eat popcorn & salsa? I’ve never tried them together; I think it’d be a weird combination plus salsa already isn’t my dip of choice anyway. Do you sleep with the television on? Nah but close. I’ll sometimes sleep with Netflx or YouTube playing on my phone, depending on what I feel like listening to before falling asleep. Would you ever want to be able to be invisible? I’ll fantasize about it sometimes, sure. What does your favorite shirt look like? Don’t have a current favorite shirt since I can’t go out anyway. What's your favorite scent? Gabie’s perfume or any freshly cooked food. Skype, Msn, Aim, or Yahoo? All of these are pretty much ancient now. What's your favorite time of the day? These days I’m really loving these hours in particular – midnight onwards. It’s nice to finally be alone considering I’m cooped up in a house with family literally all day, and it’s nice to use the alone time listening to lo-fi and answering a survey or two. Do you hate the phrase ''love ya'' when coming from a boyfriend/girlfriend? Yeah it wouldn’t sit well with me if it came from Gabie. But I say this regularly to my friends. What do you do when someone in the room has b.o.? Look away if I’m forced to be with them, or just move away altogether if I’m not talking to them directly. What movie would you like to see right now? Not really in a movie watching mood rn. I just watched Two for the Road a couple of nights ago and that’s enough for me, hahaha. How many times a day do you shower? Just once. What do you think of the name Chloe? It’s cute! It’s already common where I live so it’s not one of my top baby name choices, but I really love the name and I think this spelling in particular is cute. Do you like Hollister? When I was 14, sure. I was mostly invested in them because Louis Tomlinson of 1D’s girlfriend used to be a Hollister model HAHAHAHA. These days I largely don’t care for the brand. What's your favorite alcoholic drink? I always go for a Long Island Iced Tea whenever they have it on a menu. Do you like 80's music? Like, 0.0003% of it. Just not my decade for music. Do you have to wear glasses or have contacts? I wear glasses. I choose not to wear contacts. Do you play Halo or Gears of War? No for both. How do you feel about cleaning? I think it’s...necessary lol? I don’t really actively feel anything for it, other than it has to be done every now and then. What do you think of emo kids? I think we should leave ‘em be. Do you like the movie Grease? I don’t like musicals. Do you like singing? Only by myself or if I’m absolutely shitfaced drunk.

What's your favorite Jim Carrey movie? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, WITHOUT A DOUBT. There's a knock at your door at 4 in the morning; what do you do? Welp, given that there’s been a recent disturbance in our village where a construction worker broke into a neighbor’s home, I’ll probably be more wary this time around and just ignore it. I’ll stay alert for a few minutes to see whether they start breaking in after being ignored or simply walk away so that I’m ready to wake up my parents and start screaming if they do the former. Do you like peaches? I hate all fruits. Ever lost a best friend? Not to death, but I’ve drifted apart from a best friend.

Ever heard of a town called Wadena? No. Only Wakanda, heh. Have you ever been to a funeral? I’ve never been to a funeral; I’ve only visited wakes. We were pretty sheltered when it came to death and I would dread the day I’d have to go to my first funeral because I don’t know if I’d be capable of processing the events. What's your favorite sport? Pro wrestling if it counts. If it doesn’t, tennis is my favorite to watch while table tennis is my favorite to play. What do you think about homeschooling? Egh the homeschooled kids where I live always turn out to be a bit weird or not very sociable, so I’m kinda biased against it. I don’t know if homeschooling in other countries can say the same, though. What do you think about French people? I don’t think anything of them. Thankful for their pain au chocolat though. Do you like your parents? Yes. They’ve worked harder than anyone I know to get to where they are now and to be able to provide as much as they have for their three kids. I respect them tremendously for that. I just wish we were more open and expressive and affectionate as a family in general; that would literally solve like 9732 of my problems. And I also wish that my mom wasn’t verbally abusive at times. What do you think about Minnesota? OMG nothing, stop. Do/did you like high school? It had its ups and downs. I’m mostly in the middle about it, like I can’t say I enjoyed it cause then that would betray the things I hated about it, and I can’t say I mostly hated it cause that would invalidate the good times. I did learn a lot though, that I can say for sure. Do you have any Asian friends? All of my friends are Asian. Is it cold where you live? Not even barely. Do you find accents attractive? No. I find most of them difficult to follow which is why I always need subtitles when I view anything foreign haha. Do you hate it when people make spelling mistakes? No, unless they act like a know-it-all but still fuck up their spelling. Would you ever let your boyfriend/girlfriend do your makeup? I would DEFINITELY let them do my makeup – she’d be the first person I would run to hahaha because I don’t know the first thing about applying makeup. Do you like to shop? Not like every week, but it is fun to fall down the rabbit hole and start grabbing clothes heh. How long are you on the computer during a 24 hour period? These days I’m not on it for long, which I’m really happy about! When the lockdown started I was really worried that I was gonna be too dependent on my laptop and never close it for the entire quarantine period, but the opposite has been happening. I really just open it in the evening when I take surveys, so that’s around 3-4 hours. Is money really that important? It is for me, and for everyone else in this third world Southeast Asian country. Have you ever broken a bone? Nope. Who is your favorite family member? My dog. What size bed do you have? Just a twin size, nothing special. Can’t wait to earn on my own and buy me a much bigger mattress. What age do you want to be married? Late 20s, if possible. I want to be ready for kids by the time I hit my 30s. What's the last thing your wrote? A Facebook message for Gabie. What do you think of your town? It’s mostly uneventful here, but I think I prefer living in a calm city cause I suppose it would be exhausting living in a city that’s so hectic all the time. My situation also gives me a healthy balance of busy and quiet which I think has helped my wellbeing. When's the last time you played hide & go seek? Years and years and years ago. I think it was when we first moved into the house and it was still mostly empty.

#survey #surveys

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aimmyarrowshigh · 5 years

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Please tell me you’re gonna write a fix it damerey fanfic.

I mean, I feel like In Screaming Color sort of ends up being one simply because I uh, started it before there were any Road to VIII materials, let alone the fuckery of TLJ or anything weird with Road to IX or TROS. It’s still basically going to be what it was when I started writing it in 2015, which is “this is what I hope Episode VIII will explore with Poe and Rey’s characters (and Force-sensitive Finn) but I know won’t happen because it’s all quiet internal character-work. Also, Kylo sux.”

As far as like, a specific fix-it for TROS... I personally liked TROS, because it’s fun to watch and there was hardly any Kyle in it and there was no reylo endgame and Kyle is dead, which, those were pretty much the only things left to hope for after TLJ, which was one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen and I unironically enjoy Olsen Twins movies. I’m not a huge fan of bicker-y ships, so if I were to explicitly fix-it anything about Poe/Rey, and their interactions, in TROS, it would just be not to make them bicker-y. But they literally bickered one time, at the beginning, while under incredible stress, so I don’t even feel like it’s fair to say that They Bicker, it’s just like... they were stressed. IDK.

Nothing in In Screaming Color is going to change from my original TFA-inspired outline, so if I... finish writing... that story, then it can effectively be a fix-it. Otherwise, I’m not really sure that I have any ideas that are like, necessary to put into a separate fanwork, at this point, per se? Like, “Rey is on Tatooine with Finn and Poe and BB-8″ is not the worst ending IMO, so unless/until proven otherwise, I’m not, idk. And I don’t think I have anything DIFFERENT from what the other fix-its by writers I trust are going to say yet? I’m more likely to do some kind of “Poe never ran away from home to join a drug gang because what the fuck” fix-it than I am TROS-in-general fix-it, tbh. But even that, I have no current plan for. IDK.

The lack of response for the update of In Screaming Color -- which IS TOTALLY FAIR, IF A WRITER MAKES YOU WAIT TWO YEARS BETWEEN UPDATES, IT IS TOTALLY FAIR TO HAVE FLOUNCED THE STORY -- kind of made me not, like, super feel invested in posting Poe/Rey stuff even if I headcanon it or AU it with @nichestars or @bebeocho or @dracosollicitus like, every day, too. Which, again, I do not blame anyone for having stopped reading ISC since I absolutely failed at writing it with any kind of reliability, I just also am #oversensitive and #neurotic (and don’t feel like I am like, Part Of Damerey Fandom anyway?) so /shrug, /ramble, etc. If I have a good idea that I feel like adds to the fannish conversation in a way that is worth writing and worth posting, I will. :)

That said, I know that @dracosollicitus has already posted a few fix-it one-shots and is currently writing a multi-chapter fix-it that is good!

#damerey #asks

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starlightshore · 5 years

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I was wondering do you have any good fanfics to recommend ive been in a fanfic mood but can't find any, most of them stopped updating :(

god i’m honestly not the best person to ask for fics or fandom content in general. i literally don’t interact with the fandom much at all, like, sometimes i’ll go into the main tag and follow someone, but even then it’s very rare for me to follow someone. i like my dashboard small so i can catch up.

also, i only really read fic now once in a blue moon for emotional catharsis. sometimes i just want to feel bad and that’s ok. this also means most fics i read were years ago and i can barely remember anything, and don’t feel safe recommending in case i forget something bad about it. also, my old bookmarks were on a different computer, rip.

so honestly, i’m terrible for recommending fics. i’m only going to recommend one that i’ve reread some-what recently and some art based content. i actually recommend other people to reblog this post with their own recommendations! i just ask that non of them misgender the kids or are gross. just, putting that as a caution, i’m not assuming anyone is going to do that.

long rec under the cut, sorry mobile users ;-;

1) feeling bonely

the only fic on this list. a human au where sans is suicidal and meets toriel online anonymously through omgle. through the power of friendship and 38 chapters, sans learns how to put in the effort in having friends and making his life better.

this fic is such a comfort to me. it’s got My Brand of sadness that i crave in fics but it’s also so funny, lighthearted, thoughtful and inspiring. i love sans’ friendship with alphys, i love sans being a total dork baby over time travel, i love papyrus learning about depression and helping sans fight it, the salads and rubber bands for coping, i just,, akfjalsjdf its my favorite fic.

its soriel but i believe sans is ace so while romance is a element, sex isn’t which i greatly appericate lmao. since the fic does go into suicide and depression, parental abuse and ableism, ect., i do recommend keeping an eye on the content warnings. it’s also a really long fic but it’s finished.

—-the rest are wips but almost all of them are still updating!

2) Unexpected Guests

Papyrus summons a full bodied gaster blaster, chaos ensues. It’s a post pacfist comic that is beautifully drawn, is light on angst and has a lot of fun character interaction.

still a wip, but has a substantial amount of reading material you can go through. the story is getting really juicy by having sans finally fess wtf is UP with him. i’m dying to know what happens next!

3) Insomnia

a literal classic that hasn’t been updated in over a year, and it’s been that long since i read it but it’s a fandom classic! the art and it’s vibrant colors still stick to me even now. the story fits lore and real science together, it so detailed and beautiful.

i can’t recall if the author said this will be continued someday or not, i don’t want to spark rumors esp with my shoddy memory so idk! it’s such a fandom classic though, it’s defs worth reading!

4) We’re not in kansas anymore.png

ok i don’t THINK thats the title and i could just be oblivious and be misunderstanding here lmao. kan makes really, really good undertale content in general, like, their art is my favorite anything ever. kan covers heavy topics but does so with genuine care and thought. i luv their poncho and chara stuff. i could gush forever.

this comic in particular just started but it is ongoing! they also write fics!

5) EVERYTHING BY MEL

mel has a few askblogs, all of which are fantastic! i haven’t gotten the time to read all of their blogs but like, mel’s characterizations are so good and complex. mel handles the topic of trauma with nuance and it’s all vry good.

everything is on hiatus rn but there’s a big backlog.

6) Askgasterfamily (ok this is me outright cheating here. it’s my askblog)

i have a 4 year old askblog and while i have a lot feelings about it and its not aged the super best in my eyes cause a good chunk of it was written when my mental health utter crap. these last few years have been hard as hell on me and i will not go into why rn cause.. obviously its personal and this ain’t a vent post lmao. i used agf to cope a lot with the shit i was going through, so a lot of is messy.

anyway, summary: the aster family runs a vlog, where people ask them questions about their private life. starts off as a fun slice of life comedy but descends into a sci-fi horror story about depression, morality, and family abuse.

i honestly would recommend just waiting for me to make the animatic film. it’s going to be the definitive version where the story is streamlined and more coherent. i storyboared over a hour of footage but it’s currently undergoing major rewrites as i was unhappy with it, so it’s still going to be a while for it to come out.

aaaaand that’s it for now! that’s all my recs that i can think of. i know the second i post this i’ll think up like, 5 things i could recommend but i’m just gonna leave it as is for now. pls don’t take it personal if i forgot or didn’t put ur fanwork on here.

#also i'm gonna list content warnings both in the post itself for the fics and at the end of these tags #just so those who don't want to see cws even mentioned on their dash #(i hope u don't mind i make this public!)#(I try to answer privately for non anon asks but i did say i wanted to chat which brought this up so i'm gonna post)#personal stuff #sams replies #also my ex has some good fanfic but i feel that'd be awkward to recommend so if they see this:#i'm sorry and i didn't forget u i just don't want this to be weird lol #tanaysmith11 #cws mentioned are the following #depression #sucicide #absuse #parental abuse #agf has some torture and body horror spooky shit #self harm #uhhhh i'm sure theres other serious topics and cws that i'm forgetting #i love angst and comfort sorry thats what end up reading and therefore all i can recommend

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gaydinobots · 5 years

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swooplock!!!

THANK U im gonna just. do every category because i havent talked abt them in a hot minute so obviously! its time to go ham

under a read more because wow. wow this is so long. im so sorry

their first impressions 👁swoop thinks grim is pretty hot but to be fair. thats a fact. i think he respects grim just because grimlock is like. strong. he would want to know him more he feels like theyd vibe. grimlock thinks swoop seems fun, no special feeling or anything. hes drawn to him a lil but not because of looks (if anything hed find swoop more cute in a weird, ‘this persons objectively not attractive but i cant stop noticing them’ kind of way) . basically they like each others vibes

their first date 🕯i think i made a joke tweet a long time ago that theyd probably have a date in a junkyard or something as their first date BUT tbh. i think they probably did go to like…a bar for their first date!! swoop drinks more than he can handle to impress grimlock and even tho grim tells him to lay off he thinks its cute hes trying so hard (grimlock pays for Everything)

their first kiss 💋THINKING ABT THIS MAKES ME EMBARRASSED OH MY GOD………..ok swoop initiates the kiss impulsively, it probably happened on one of their first dates, and he didnt think much of it. grimlock thought abt it a lot longer than he expected to (it all worked out in the end)

an inside joke they share 🃏they make fun of slug getting mistaken for a heterosexual by every lesbian he knows…………i think swoop would probably bring up anything dumb grimlock has said too but u see grimlock loves him so he just laughs it off

a recurring fight they get into ⛈they dont rly fight fight because max dinos 3 proves swoop can only stay mad at grimlock for all of 5 whole minutes. i think they fight over grimlock getting too overprotective when they were starting out but theyve been together long enough to like. be more mature abt handling it!!

their love languages 💞i think grimlocks highest one would be touch!! idk why im attached to affectionate touchy grim but i feel like he just likes to hold his partners….whether its straight up cuddling or just a casual hand slung over a shoulder. swoop is more of a quality time kind of guy!! i dont think they rly do gift giving often BUT theyre do a lot of nice stuff for each other instead. grimlock also rly isnt into like. verbal affection as much as swoop is. swoop is verbal abt his affection but isnt big on being complimented himself.

how they feel about pda 🌹swoop LOVES pda because hes dramatic and likes to show off sometimes. he needs everyone to know he loves his wonderful bf and show him off!! grimlock isnt so big on the public part but he indulges swoop anyway + he likes being affectionate - its a win/win for him either way

their favorite things about one another ⭐️grimlock clearly has a type for airheads hgkdsf but for real i think he does love how cheerful and upbeat swoop is!! he likes how impulsive swoop can be too because it means he cant predict what he’ll do next….so he’ll find something new to love when he doesnt expect it 😳 (maybe im being a bit mushy here. whos going to stop me? no one thats what) i dont think swoop ever rly put thought into his favourite trait of grimlock or hed just give a superficial answer about it. but his favourite part about grimlock is his more compassionate side + i think he also likes how grim doesnt. particularly care what other people think of him! he thinks grimlock can be rly sweet and is maybe a little proud of the fact hes one of the few ppl that actually get the Whole Grim Experience

how they would adapt for one another 🍂swoop has to slow down a lil bit for grimlock! he’s naturally high energy which can be overwhelming for grim, so when swoop realises this he starts to make sure that grim can keep up w/ him. he also does try to take things more seriously cause i feel like hed view his whole thing w/ grim as being casual up until a certain point. grimlock on the other hand definitely tries to be more attentive to swoop. grim is naturally just. not rly receptive to people but when he decides someone is worth the effort he goes ALL IN. hes not the best listener or anything but he does try his best to be interested! even if its for little things.

their favorite celebrations 🎃dinobots collective anniversary because they all decided to just lump up their anniversaries into one nice day + slash’s birthday !!!!!!! i think swoop would also like. get jokingly into knowing different species celebration days but he doesnt rly care much for the meanings

their domestic rituals 💆what intricate rituals do they do………………………i mean they WERE separated for most of post war so they dont rly have much material to go off of. i guess fighting is a good bonding activity w/ ur partner so you end up resting together at night………they definitely cuddle Quite A Bit, swoop and grim also allocate a specific amt of time to swoop gossiping abt something or laughing at other people…im bad at this part OOP

their family and friends’ opinion ⚖️in an ideal world the dinobots (minus lesbian icon strafe and their daughter slash) r all dating each other in one big polyamorous marriage anyway….the scavengers are very happy that grim’s happy even if krok keeps asking them to stop making out on top of his fridge when he wants engex. misfire keeps planning really weird elaborate date plans which both appreciate even if grim isnt rly sold on shoot shoot bang bang as a date night concept. i keep thinking of a dumb au where the other dynos live and slug is kind mmm because he and swoop are dating and he thinks therell be drama but the spoiler here is that they all have 2 hands so swoopsluglock ends up being the REAL endgame

their shared living space 🏡the dynos barely have a house half the time in idw oop. i like the idea of them all somehow finding…dinobot island. gay dino paradise if u will. perfect honeymoon destination complete with very nicely heated mud pits

#Anonymous #GOD i hope ur ok w/ this essay length shit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!#asks #swooplock #this is so long i genuinely feel so embarrassed ghlsdjf #edit: i forgot. the firstt impressions

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multsicorn · 5 years

Note

What are your top three favorite ships (relationships or friendships) at the moment?

At the moment! That’s a good question (thank you)....

Number one has definitely gotta be Jack/Parse, from Check Please. I can’t believe I’ve been obsessed with this ship for almost three years now! ... and I’ve got a discord where I talk about it more days than not. As to why, ugh, there’s an essay that I keep writing in my head about that... maybe tomorrow I’ll take a break from being almost done (any day) finishing my writing tools and actually write it instead. That’d be fun. Cause the thing about Failing At Life, you see....

Number two as of this week is Flint/Silver (though I believe the usual order is SilverFlint? but anyway) from Black Sails. Friendship? Relationship? Neither really applies to these two, exactly, but I’m very much a fan of something that in many ways resembles a relationship while keeping the shifting balance of power struggle and uncertainty of trust that they have in canon. Which is after all, what I find appealing. Everything from ‘in my head, you are not welcome’ to Flint shooting his own protection... jesus, it’s a lot. I love ships dancing on that thin line between enemies and everything else. (This is the other ship, btw, that I’ve been reading on ao3).

Third!... I don’t have a single good answer, so I’m going to cheat. (Don’t I always tend to do that? Ask me for three things, you’ll get seven. Or none. Cause I got overwhelmed by the seven. But, um, anyway.)

A couple of ships from things I’ve watched now/recently.

Third, cause I do spend more time thinking about it, cause I watched the series over a longer period of time (I do not like the current trend for binge tv... but that’s another post), and cause it has SONGS to listen to/watch forever, is Pearl/Rose from Steven Universe. (Rose/Pearl? idk.) “do it for her! that’s how you know you can win -“... I could quote every line of that song and write an essay just on it too but I will Not. (uh. maybe later. if anyone wants). Anyway - yeah - sure - the Pink Diamond reveal changed a lot of stuff - I really was into the original knight-and-lady dynamic, along with all the added great queerness/weirdness of how gems do things, and the complications of ‘I’ve got to be there for her son’ (also a wonderful! song!!! lol I love musicals). But I’m never gonna say no to adding fucked-up power dynamics in an angsty backstory. Who do you think I am.

And, fourth... Allison & Vanya (or possibly Allison/Vanya? I’m not definitively opposed) from The Umbrella Academy. ... The thing with the ordering here is that while I spend more time, I am sure, thinking about Rose/Pearl, I am more likely to read, and to read about, Vanya and Allison. So. ~shrug emoji~? And - the thing there - this is exactly what I said when liveblogging the show, I’m not sure I can be more specific - is “he made me his accomplice,” is “you left” - “I didn’t want to leave *you*”. I. just. okay. I did not grow up in an academy for superheroes, obviously, because those don’t real, but the way this show depicted a group of people dealing with their shared fucked-up childhood and family, was very extremely excessively #relateable to me, and Vanya and Allison most of all. That book! All those deliberate (and sometimes overly much) attempts at friendship! The near final confrontation and the actually final confrontation!!! I am making so much sense!!! ... but, anyway. When I first dug through the ao3 tags they were dire; I hope there may be something better now. And I want to do Something... I don’t know what... but Allison is not, I’d imagine, going to be sanguine about having her throat cut! for fucking ever. And Vanya’s not going to be quite as apologetic as she probably should. And I’m okay with incest - if someone else goes there - it’s not a hard no for me, generally, but since my feelings about this show are so very much, personally, about family... I don’t know if I’ll want to go there myself. Then again, the actresses are *damn* pretty, so maybe, lol.

(Honestly, I just? Don’t have the same ‘as long as it’s porn or angst or ideally both give it to me’ um, lack of standards at least at the start for f/f ships I love as for m/m. And I need material to fan the flames of fannishness. Hence, 1, 2, 3, 4... but I love these things, so I’d like to figure out how it can work for me.)

Anyway! I promised you seven, didn’t I? I can’t count. I meant six. Because, after, I love my old ships just as much, I think about them just as much, as newer ones. (No, not Glee. That’s just on my blog cause it’s still on my dash after all this time).

Fifth... I still think about my John Laurens (not anyone else’s, really, but mine), just about every fucking day. I left Hamilton fandom quite decisively, several years ago, for several reasons.. (oh, the ship is Hamilton/Laurens of course), but I can never shake that story I was gonna write and will never write. Apparently. - It goes like this.

John Laurens was trying to die in the war. For good reasons - his apparent utter inability to change anything in the world - (I know that’s not a good reason! don’t talk to me!) - and for worse ones (being gay, his lover married, feeling so guilty about the former that he wanted the latter, oh, John). He almost succeeded, at the very last minute - in history he did succeed. But in my AU, he wakes up - the war’s over - and he’s gotta figure out What To Do Next. “Dying is easy, living is harder,” yeah? One of the (many many many) things I loved about Hamilton is how it went in on that, only not for Laurens, of course, cause he died... and that’s the story that keeps singing in my brain; there are, fractally, lots of details, of course, but that’s the outline, the story of this ship.

Six! I need to finish this post. It is 1:24 am. So the fact that Roy/Ed from Fullmetal Alchemist (it is really a very great show - ships aside, when I rewatch, I just love it) is still enough of a favorite that I wanna count it will. Lol. Stand mostly on its own. I have been rereading rainjoys’ corpus of fic for them continually for a dozen years now. And just a few days ago I was talking irl about this great idea I had for a roleswap AU... even though it was inspired by shippynes, the AU itself isn’t shippy. It’ll, also, be a different post! And I love magic science and geniuses who disobey their commanders and it is 1:30 am goodnight <3.

#forever fave #no i’m not tagging all the ships and characters right now #i love... things #eta also i would love any more questions ;)#to answer tomorrow morning!

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franeridart · 6 years

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Oh man, I'm just imagining that there's so many close brushes with kiribaku almost realizing or almost being in positions to find out that the other is a vigilante-- an injury and no way to get into contact with Jack or Mina-- a rainstorm washing Kiri's dye away on the job. I think it'd be especially funny if he thought for a minute that Kiri was bleeding but then Kiri is like "UH GOTTA GO ITS NOT BLOOD" and he realizes it's red hair dye

Oh Kirishima sort of already suspects it’s Bakugou - more or less? He’s in the process of starting to suspect it, at least lol for being someone who really doesn’t want to be found out Bakugou’s more carefree in his disguise than Kirishima is (his hair is a pretty obvious giveaway, for example, thought Bakugou relies a lot on the ‘attacking and running’ strategy, so in his mind all he gotta do is just not be seen by anyone at all lol) compared to Kiri he gets bruised and beaten up way more too (Kiri’s hardening makes it easy for him to avoid that in general) - Kiri’s noticing Bakugou’s bruises and his vigilante friend’s bruises match up a whole damn lot, so he’s starting to figure that one out

Bakugou’s a dumbass tho (read: he doesn’t really look at people he isn’t particularly interested in) so for him it’s gonna take a while haha

Anon said: If in vigilantes au Bakugou and jirou are just friends why do they live together and hug like a couple?

They’re best friends, and sometimes when your best friend is going through a real rough heartbreak and he’s in literal tears over it, you might be nice enough to offer your back for him to hide his face in and let him pretend he isn’t currently breaking down on you. Sometimes, you like a person in a platonic way enough to emotionally support them as best as you can when they’re at their lowest. It. Sort of happens between best friends, now and again. You don’t really need to want in someone’s pants to care about them.

They live together cause they started working together as vigilantes when they were in high school, and once they moved up to college they found it a good idea to have someone back home who knew about what they were doing to treat eventual wounds, since they can’t go to the hospital! Also the rent is cheaper this way

Anon said:Can you draw more comics of childhood kiribaku? You’re art is sooo cute 💓

It’s something I’ve regularly kept on going back on for years by now, so sure, it’ll probably happen! And thank you!

Anon said:OH MY GOD. Please tell me you will make an official webcomic of your Vigilante AU. It’s so beautiful, cute and I definitely need more of this. It’s like a drug that I did not know I needed until I read your concept(????). BTW, your art is soooo pretty. Thank you so much for drawing KiriBaku ❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

Ahhh I’m really happy to hear you like it! For personal reasons I’ve decided that making a cohesive, coherent succession of comics isn’t something I want to do, but I think I’ll draw more of that AU soon enough, snapshots and things like that! I hope that’s good enogh for you~

Anon said:May I request a pissed kiri??

Didn’t I draw that less than 10 posts ago

Anon said:Hey, I rlly admire you! I wish we were friends, you seem rlly nice!!

Thank you!!! The few close friends I have might tell you I’m actually not that great at the whole friends thing, but I appreciate the feeling a lot! :D

Anon said:Were Kirishima’s eyes red in the last panel of the last comic??

Yep :( he really does like Bakugou, after all

Anon said:I saw you answering the other anon and if I may ask, why posting the gem au was a big mistake? Were pol rude with you? If it’s so, I’m sorry abt it

Anon said:You said that posting your SU AU stuff was the biggest mistake you ever made… is it because of something that we, as viewers and worshippers of your KiriBaku (damn, I’ll never stop telling you it’s cute and adorable and it hurts but it’s also sweet), can help NOT doing? Or is there anything we can do?

It’s okay, it just got in the hands of people who don’t particularly like Bakugou, and these people started talking about the AU in less than nice terms, which was honestly pretty ridiculous and made me wonder how people can survive being alive on this earth when they consider Steven Universe sensitive material but either way it brought around in my activities a bunch of people I would have preferred not to interact with ever, and that sort of took the fun out of the AU? Now every time I think about drawing for it those people come back up in my head and I get annoyed all over again, it’s no fun

Anon said:are you still doing the fusion au? id love to see kaminari and shinsou

I’m not, sorry! Though someone did ask about baku and mineta and I’ve been thinking about drawing that horrible monster since then, and I’ve also been wanting to redesign the krbk fusion, so maybe I might get back to it ??? I’ll add shin*kami to the list haha

Anon said:I really like the relationship Jack and Bakugou have, and the angst is nice too! I really like the vigilatne AU! I hope we can see more of it, only if you feel like it of course!

Thank you so much ;;;

Anon said:Silly question. If Kirishima activated his quirk being in water. Would he float like wood, or he’d drown like a rock? >//w//

Oh, I’m pretty sure he’d go down since his quirk makes him into a rock haha

Anon said:I think this is around the eighth anonymous ask I send you, but being a porn-making Tumblr user, it’s better if I don’t go public. I just wanted to say, once again, that I love your KiriBaku, it makes me both ache and feel so warm and fuzzy inside; but right now, the focus is that Bakugou’s crying face against Jack’s back is just so good, expressive and painful. I often hate his guts, but yours I can never hate. And the sheer intensity of that expression, and the environment too… so many feels

Aw, thank you!!! I’m glad I can make you enjoy my fav character, anon :D !!

Anon said:I have a question about the vigilante AU. What’s the relationship between jirou and bakugou? Because they don’t look like just friends

Why don’t they look like just friends tho

Anon said:Hypothetically. How would Bakugou react (or what would he do) if Kirishima stopped showing interest in him?

Are we talking about a specific AU or is this meant for the canon universe? Well, either way I’d say he’d be pretty hurt, but it’s not like he can force Kirishima to like him can he. Ah, in the vigilantes AU he’d probably think it’s for the best even if he’d hurt a lot over it, but in canon and most other AUs I like to think he’d try to fix it somehow? Unless he has other reasons to not act on his feelings for Kirishima… gosh this is a vague question, there are so many possibilities really!

Anon said:🧡Hi Fran! I’m pretty sure you’re the one who introduced this concept to me so I wanted to say thanks! Touch starved Bakugou and super cuddly Bakugou are totally my fave, especially when you have him all curled up with Jirou! Having them be Mina and Kiri level besties makes so much sense and I love you for introducing that thought to me!!!🧡

I’m!!!!!!!!!!! so happy to hear that!!!!!!!!!!!!! ;O;

Anon said:in your vigilante au, Kiri has a scar, does Bakugo ever notice the scar?(curious if it reminds him of Red or nah, love yur art btw~~

When he’s not doing vigilantes work it’s actually hidden by the hair, so Bakugou never noticed! But if he were to notice he’d probably mark it down as a Kiri thing and leave it at that, as I said he’s not the most observant when he’s not particularly interested in someone so he hasn’t really registered it on Red’s face anyway haha

Anon said:I RLLY LOVE YOUR AU!! I haven’t found an AU in this fandom I’m rlly into but THIS IS SOCUTE??? will there be more?

Heck I sure hope so!! Thank you for liking it!!!

Anon said:hey for the anon you were looking for an outrageous ship to draw to test out their theory, try Tokoyami and Link (legend of Zelda link) cuz I just saw cosplayers of them hardcore dancing at dragoncon and I die every time I think about it. You can find a video of it on quirk-registration-office

…………………..I’m probably never gonna draw that ngl LMAO BUT this ask made me wanna draw Tokoyami as a Rito so I guess that’s ???? something that might happen instead heck that’s a good concept I should have thought about earlier

Anon said:I absolutely love your art its soon amazing and I really like the vigilantly au but take care of yourself okay

I dunno what I did to make you worry about me but thank you so much for it? I’ll try my best !!!! And thank you for liking my doodles too!!! ;^;

Anon said:Do you know about any fanfics based in your art?? (Idk if that’s grammatically correct sorry 😅)

Hmmmmmmmmmm there are a few but the only one that comes to mind right now is such a funny pair !!! boy ellen’s fics are always so damn amazing, I still can’t believe she wrote for me ;^;

#fran answers #inbox will stay closed still for a while #sorry! ;;;;#anonymous

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elsaclack · 5 years

Note

Hi :) This might sound weird haha but I adore reading you talk about your writing, it's really inspiring and I feel like I learn a lot of things every time I read you talk about it (you know I'm a fan of your style haha). And anyways while I was reading your answer to your last anon, this struck me: "when i was outlining that chapter i think the only line i dedicated to the actual fight itself was “and then they have a crazy knife fight (good luck future me)”" and I wanted to ask you (1/2?)

(2/3?) do you have like any tips for writing a multichapters fic? I guess from what you wrote here you outline the whole thing before you start with it? Or it depends or the story and sometimes you just go with the flow and see where it goes haha? Do you mind sharing some of your writing process of multichapter fics? :3 Bc I tend to get "bored" really easily and if I don't finish something in one sitting I usually never ever finish it. But also I'd like to learn how to take my time sometimes

(3/3) and idk maybe learning how to properly "get ready" to write something long would help haha. I'm sorry if this doesn't make sense at all but yeah in any case just thank you for blessing my nights with your fics and killing me over and over with feels, I'm sure I said it before but you (and all of the amazing writers this fandom is blessed with) are a true inspiration!!!

you are SO sweet to me i die fhflkdsjf

i’m gonna go ahead and throw 100% of my answer under the cut because i haven’t even started yet and i know this is about to be. So Long. i am sorry in advance lmao

there are a couple of different aspects to this ask that i want to touch on so i will be as brief as possible but as i have proven twice over tonight alone, i am really not capable of that lmfao

i’d say first and foremost, the biggest thing you can do to help yourself in this arena is figure out how to best discipline yourself. which SUCKS it’s like the worst most mom answer ever but in all honesty, developing discipline in writing is what separates the “i could write a book” people from the people who actually do write books. everyone is capable of writing, but not everyone has the discipline or patience to do so. long-form narrative requires even MORE discipline than a one-shot (or even a long one-shot) because it’s like you said, it requires the author to come back over and over and over again to write new material and edit existing material and figure out a way to cohesively connect everything they’ve written into one consistent narrative, and some people have a much harder time with that than others do. there’s nothing wrong with that either way!! the world needs short stories just as much as it needs longer stories. but if you’re wanting to work on writing longer-form narratives, working out a way to best discipline yourself should probably be your number-one goal.

that kind of brings me to my next point (and also ties in part of what i was talking about in that other ask) - comparing your writing style, your progress, your everything to other writers will only lead to heartache for you. when i first started reading and writing for b99 i came across a specific author (who is now one of my dear friends) whose fics were just. next-level works of art. and while i read through just about everything she’d written for b99 and LOVED every single one of them, i found myself getting more and more down on my own writing, because i knew i’d never be able to write like her. but the more comfortable and confident i got in my own writing, the more i realized that it’s less about writing more like That Person and more about developing my own style (my favorite comparison to make between my writing and hers now is that hers are like beautiful and intricate fairy tales, and mine are more of a smokey back room at a bar where a guy is sitting alone at a table and he says “come here and listen to this story.” they’re both Very Different, and perhaps have varying audiences, but one is not inherently Better Or Worse than the other). all of this to say, if you’re working as hard as you can and being really disciplined but still find yourself struggling with writing a multichap, THAT’S OKAY!!! there’s NOTHING wrong with that!!! your writing, however short or long, serves an INCREDIBLY important purpose within the fandom as a whole and no matter what, there will ALWAYS be an audience for your writing.

so okay as for the actual Advice!!! i actually have a couple of steps that i usually follow prior to actually Writing the first chapter of any long fic i’ve written (or am in the process of writing...@king and lionheart yikes). i have yet to really find any consistency in how i think of ideas for multichaps - so far the idea every multichap i’ve written has come from a different source (which is actually kind of Frustrating for reasons i won’t get into). but basically once i actually have An Idea, i’ll take a day or two to kind of think it over and flesh it out as much as possible. if it really starts expanding in detail and an actual Story constructs itself around the idea, i’ll move on to the next step, which is to find a few trusted mutuals here on tungle.corn and say “heyyYYY CAN I YELL ABOUT AN IDEA I HAVE FOR A SECOND” and then spill everything i’ve thought of so far. usually i can tell if an idea will live or die based on these conversations - if the other person is Into It and we start sort of developing the world within the chat, i know it’s time to really sit down and make an effort to pursue the fic. in that case, i will go and copy&paste that part of our chat into a google doc and i’ll build an outline in a separate doc. i used to despise outlines and i would refuse to do them in high school, but once i got into writing as a hobby and i started pursuing longer narrative forms, i tried once or twice to write a multichap without an outline and i just forgot a lot of the details i originally wanted to include, which left me feeling really frustrated with myself and with my writing. i came to realize that outlines kind of a necessary evil, so in writing them i made them as fun for me as possible (i.e. the “good luck future me” line from the king and lionheart outline i mentioned lmao). now i love them and i have them open at all times while i’m working on writing a new chapter.

so i know that i started this off by saying that writing multichaps requires a special kind of discipline, and i stand by that, but also...writer’s block and real life responsibility and just plain exhaustion are all Very Real Things, and they take precedent over keeping up with a publishing schedule (if you’re so inclined to make one of those for yourself). when i started writing king and lionheart, i didn’t know at that point that i would be headed back to school in the spring, and thought that i would have all the time in the world to write. right around november, i realized that i would be going back to school - that’s about the time i took an unofficial hiatus from writing king and lionheart, because i knew trying to keep up with writing that fic the way that i want it to be written and all of the intensive and demanding coursework was going to kill me. taking a step back from posting and coming back to it later is okay. i know i talk a lot about feeling guilty for not having an update for king and lionheart (and the cancer au before it) but in all honesty i know that it’s okay for me to take some time and deal with my real life. and, you know, it’s also okay to lose inspiration for a while and to take a step back until that inspiration comes back. i think it’s that fear of not being able to take longer breaks between updates that scares a lot of people off from even trying to write a multichap - as the queen of procrastination, i am here to tell you that it is 100% okay to start a multichap and to take a break and come back to it when necessary!

writing a multichap is very much like running a marathon - it requires a different kind of energy than a 400 meter sprint or a 1k fluffy oneshot. it’s gonna hurt and it’s gonna suck and there are gonna be times when you’re ready to just quit writing altogether. but there will be parts that are really fun and really easy and you’re gonna get some really great views along the way - and at the end when you cross that finish line and you’re able to check that “complete” box on ao3 before you post the last chapter, you won’t remember the parts that sucked. trust me!! i wouldn’t write as many as i do if the actual shitty parts of the writing process negated the good things that come from writing it and sharing it with other people!

it’s also worth noting that just because you get bored with an idea doesn’t mean that you can’t pick it up again later!!! honestly the first 2 or 3 paragraphs of on your heart like a tattoo sat in my google docs for MONTHS before i randomly decided one day to open it and take a crack at finishing it, and to this DAY i’m still getting people regularly commenting on it. every idea has its purpose and its place, even if it doesn’t always immediately seem like it.

i really hope this helps and i’m sorry if it doesn’t!!! you are such a kind and wonderful person and i absolutely adore you

#em answers #nice people #guys i adore adele #seriously #writing advice #b99peraltiago

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dreammutual-remade · 6 years

Text

high school!donghyuck

request: idk if you’re taking reqs but i really like ur highscool aus so if u want to write one abt hyuck ill be :^))))))) - anonymous

word count: 5.1k

a/n: oof its been awhile unnies!!!! ive had exams for the past two weeks and I still have exams now so im sorry for not posting anything but reblogs with headassery in the tags!!! we are continuing the high school series n renjun is next!! since I got like 3 requests for him !!!!! hhehhehehheheh its gonna b cute <3 anyways hope u enjoy this I love my lil duckie baby

masterlist

mark, renjun, jeno, donghyuck, jaemin, chenle, jisung

big oof i’m gonna cry while writing this

i’m running out of creative ways to say let’s dive in

let us take the plunge

okay!!!!!!!!!! so you’ve been an editor/writer for the school paper for pretty much all of your high school career

you’re not super well known though because you don’t try to take any credit for anything and always sign your pieces like “- the daily newspaper team” or smth

anywhom you’ve always loved writing about the stuff around you or making up little short stories

one of your hobbies is just going people watching and trying to write down a brief description of people you see and what you think they’re on the way to do

you’ve befriended the baristas at your favorite spot, lucas and mark, and they always beg to read them but you never let them because mark is too nice to tell you it’s shit and lucas is too dumb to at least say it nicely

you’ve got at least 6 notebooks FULL of these little stories but you’ve never really ? showed anyone because wow showing others your work is Scary

criticism ???/$&/&:&:&:

it’s midway through the first semester of the school year and you’ve been super busy since it’s football season and you gotta write about all the games

and you haven’t had much time to write your cute little stories for yourself and you miss it a lot :/

this weekend though the chance of rain is SUPER high so the football game is cancelled and you have plenty of time to yourself !! :D

there is, a setback tho

THUNDER!!!!! IS SO SCARY !!!!!!

u fckin softie

you decide to tough it out though and get suited up in some polka dot rain boots and a rain jacket and set off to find somewhere to chill

as you’re walking to the nearest lil greenhouse/cafe thing it starts raining ,, ,,, hARDER

when you started it wasn’t rlly raining it was just like that weird tension in the air right before the air pressure drops and it starts to rain and you were already on edge OOF

but then it’s raining so you clutch your notebook to your chest and dash

usain bolt had nothing on you girly you were ZOOM ZOOM

broom broom- doyoung

unfortunately you don’t make it though because with you head down to keep the rain out of your eyes you run RIGHT into someone’s CHEST !!!!!!

hehe u know i’m a sucker for these god damn TROPES

your notebook goes flying and and the arms attached to the Chest That Caused Your Grief come up to catch you by the arms

“oh gOD sorry are you okay ??? i wasn’t looking and i was trying to keep my journal dr- MY JOURNALSDJDDD”

you fling yourself out of this boys arms and pick up your soaking wet journal sadly

:((((((( you had so many stories in there wtf

“oh shit i’m sorry do you uh want me to buy you another one ???”

“no that’s okay it wasn’t your fault :( and it’s just a journal i’m only sad because all my stories are gone :(((((“

you finally look up from your Ruined journal to see , the prettiest boy

you can’t tell for sure cause his hair is soaking wet but it’s a bright red that looks a bit faded and his skin is tanned and golden like HONEY OOF

he meets your eyes and awkwardly smiles and he looks so GUILTY AW

“no really it’s fine don’t feel bad!!”

“okay but i feel bad what can i do to make it up to you?”

“hMMM you could come help me think of wacky stories about people who walk past”

“well if you INSIST m’lady”

“aw, never mind”

“IM JUST KIDDING SJDJJD”

so in the pouring rain you both walk to cafe and find a little corner to people-watch in

on the way there he tells you his name is donghyuck but his friends call him hyuck

“dude that’s the sound goofy makes when he laughs your friends are terrible”

“oh my god i don’t even think they know what they’re saying HsjdjHEHHS”

after a couple minutes of bad goofy impressions you decide to call him duckie instead because ,,,, GARSH MICKEY 🤠🤠🤠

also because it’s cute

you didn’t hear this from me but he uwued so hard rip his street cred with the Boys

anyways right before you settle in you’re like hey uh did you have somewhere to be like weren’t you heading places

and he was like nah i like the rain it’s nice to just walk around feels GOOD

your eyes widen so big and he snorts because what’s so ridiculous about that

and you’re like uh UH NO NOPE NO SIR I DONT FUCK WITH DEMONS

your dramatic ass tries to get up and LEAVE but he grabs your wrist and is like noooo we haven’t even written any stories yet why do you hate rain so much ??

you explain how thunder is the work of the devil and that lightning could strike you down where you stand at any moment and storms are EVIL

he chuckles and side eyes you

“aW you big wimp you’re afraid of thunderstorms aren’t you”

“yES. like any sane person would be”

“you know a lot of people actually like storms”

“like i said, SANE people do not”

and then you change the subject right quick because your face is getting RED with embarrassment

you n donghyuck spend like 2 hours just sitting in the corner and writing little scenarios on napkins

“oh shit that girl over there with the french braids is TOTALLY gonna marry hipster beanie guy in two years. mark my words”

“idk y/n she lowkey has the hots for the barista”

“ ew you mean mark??”

“yeah. now THAT man is a work of art”

MARKHYUCK RISE

“god what is wrong with you maybe you should buy me another book”

“too late now we’re FRIENDS and i don’t owe you ANYTHING”

“being friends doesn’t work like that at all but, okay”

at the end of the day you’ve got a stack of napkins with scribbled notes on them

(one of them has donghyuck’s number on it skdkkfjd)

he leaves you with a bright smile and you’re in awe this boy is so golden and lovely

oof and when you were still in the cafe his hair had dried to the unnatural red color that he ? somehow made look good ugh not fAIR

and it was a lil curly and fluffy and looked very soft :(((((

as you walk home you drift along the sidewalk with a stupid smile on your face wow please get a little less obvious hunty

when you get home the sun is setting and the rain has cleared and you are so Happy that was the best day !!!

you weren’t even scared of the thunder because whenever the sky would fckin CRACK OPEN hyuck would subtly try to keep your attention and distract you with questions

the sky: AAAAAAAAAAA

duckie: oH Hey uhhh so hOW do you even come up these stories ?):$:$ theyre so good

such a sweet boy uwu

when you get home your mom eyes you suspiciously as you drift down the hall towards your room but doesn’t comment

she didn’t need to though because you immediately return and tell her everything !!!

she encourages you to befriend him at school and see where it goes from there ;))) or just TEXT HIM

so you do

both of those things !!!

you: hey!! it’s y/n btw

duckie: hey! u make it home alive without the sky cracking open and killing u

you: stOP MAKING FUN OF ME

you send him memes and he sends , even better ones back this boy is Husband Material

the next couple weeks you realize that hyuck is actually in like a lot of your classes

and he’s like yeah i don’t blame you for not noticing since your nose is always in one of those Damn Journals

can’t believe u smh

anywhom

you start actually interacting with people in class

and by people i mean donghyuck and any of his friends who happen to be there

you literally get thrown into their friendgroup like one day you know donghyuck and have vaguely heard of jeno since he’s on the soccer team

and then the next you’re a part of the group message and jaemin begs for your math homework during lunch ????

“jaemin just dO YOUR OWN HOMEWORK FOR ONCE ???”

“ugh but i don’t know how”

“hey you know what maybe if you didn’t sleep in class you WOULD”

“IM TIRED GOD DAMN IT”

this is usually when duckie interjects with

“hey now girls, you’re both smart <3”

“i know im smart but , jaemin , i don’t know about him 😔😔”

poor jaemin leave him alone :(

jisung is , extREMELY awkward around you because he’s a Baby Freshman and you’re a Female Senior hsjdjf it’s so cute

and chenle is the complete opposite he IMMEDIATELY latches onto you and is always like

“y/n !!!! wanna watch this video of me singing and playing the piano when i was thirteen on live national television !!!!”

“y/N !!!!!!! can you drive me n jisung to get ice cream plEASE !!! we won’t even play PSY this time”

“okay,,,,, pinky promise?”

his pinky hooks around yours at an incredible speed as he jumps up and down with excitement

“pinky promise !!!!!!!!!!”

hyuck overhears and insists upon coming with for , unknown reasons

renjun and jeno keep snickering to each other across the lunch table too uGH

sneaky bastards !

after school you wait in the parking lot for the Babies with hyuck who looks rather flushed considering his skin is pretty tan and it takes a lot for him to visibly blush ??

“hey duckie boy you good?”

“haha yEAH uh just wondering where the boys are hhhh”

“oh yeah ! they should’ve been here like 10 mins ago”

your phone buzzes in your pocket and you go to check it to see a text in the group message

lele: hey y/n~ me n jisung can’t come we totally forgot we joined a frisbee team and there’s practice today !!!

blueberry: yeah ! have fun w/ hyuckie tho

moominluvr96: sjdjd i’m so proud of them

jenomunomunomu: absolute legends have fun at ur frisbee practice my sons

you: 🅱️ro i wanted to go home and SLEEP

blueberry: sorry ! xoxo :*

duckie: chenle my son ? how could you 🅱️etray me this way???

you: ur dead to me

you: literally what’s a chenle ?? sounds like a poisonous fruit

lele: NO IM SORRY

but tbh you’re just being Silly you don’t mind just going with Sunshine Boy

hyuck has only gotten redder as the texting went on though what’s his deal 0.0

you agree to take his car !

actually you insist because you don’t wanna drive but, let’s say you agreed

you find out that hyuck exclusively listens to hipster bands and the occasional troye sivan song because we love a gay legend

actually his music taste is ALL OVER THE PLACE but we r still boppin ladies

you roll the windows down even tho it’s Chilly and let your hand float in the breeze until your fingers start getting numb and you pull your hand back in and roll up the window

okay maybe that was a Bad Idea your fingers almost hurt they’re so cold and you’re rubbing the feeling back into them when hyuck clears his throat

you look up at him and he tilts his chin toward the hand he stretched toward you

you’re confused bc like ? i don’t have anything to give u duckie

he sighs anxiously

“just. give me your hand. mine are warm because i didn’t try to be cool and stick my hand out the window like this is a teen coming of age movie”

“have you ever just been nice and not followed it up with a weirdly specific insult”

“nope. now gimme”

you cautiously placed your hand in his and felt heat bloom all over your cheeks and trail up to your ears and down your neck

he gulps and interlocks your fingers and tucks them in the pocket of his hoodie

you have to lean against the console in between you a little so that your arm isn’t strained but it’s,,,,, Warm and Nice

you’re quick to continue the conversation like normal but your voice sometimes goes in and out since he is subconsciously rubbing his thumb over the back of your hand or tapping his fingers against yours

when you arrive you awkwardly pull your hand from his grip to get out of the car and he cringes a lil :(

you decide to be bold for once in your life and run around the car to catch up with him and shove your other hand into his

“this one’s cold too”

he ducks his head and smiles but gives your hand a lil squeeze :3 uwu

eventually though you do have to let go and enjoy your ice cream

you just make small talk with him about the newspaper and whatever homework is due the next day when a man walks in wearing BRIGHT RED CLOWN SHOES

the weirdest part though is the fact that other than the clown shoes the man is dressed like a body builder and has the hulking mass of one

and also there is a PARROT ON HIS SHOULDER ???

you and hyuck whip to face each other and then look back at the man

without looking away you slide your notebook to the middle of the table and flip open to where you’ve bookmarked the next available page

needless to say you both have a field day making up storylines for this man

“hey hyuckie i missed this it’s been forever since it’s been just the two of us and my journal”

“me too, sunshine”

“heY now you’re the sunshine in this relationship”

both of you choke at your use of the term “relationship” but continue with the conversation JSKSK

“alright but then you have to be the rain”

“aw you know i don’t like the rain”

“yes i know that’s why YOU are sunshine”

“kay but you are so much more like sunshine than i, an Emo”

“how bout i be sunshine since you like sunshine and me, and you be rain since i like rain and you”

OOF ????????

you blush for the Millionth Time and nod shyly and duckie is about to turn purple YIKES

you leave the ice cream shop and climb back in the car and the whole atmosphere is very Tense

you sigh because you miss holding his hand and then turn up the song on the radio which just happens to be, Walkin On Sunshine

THE !!! IRONY !!!

you giggle into your hand and he snorts and you both break into laughter

you plug your phone into the aux

“alright time for some Real Tunes”

“i swear to GOD if you play Bad Boy one more time i’m gonna LOSE IT”

“fuck you red velvet are LEGENDS”

“the only reason you know who they are is because mark tells everyone with a pulse that one of them is from canada just like him”

“okay and ??? i can still appreciate that they produce iconic songs only”

“LISTEN I LOVE RED VELVET TOO BUT ENOUGH IS ENOUGH”

you playfully bicker the whole way back and when you get back to the school to pick up your car you realize you never even got to play your song

“for your information, i was in fact NOT going to play bad boy i was going to play the bop of the century, what is love by twice”

and then, with heavy sarcasm

“well gee why didn’t you just sAY SO”

“IM SICK OF YOUR GIRL GROUP SLANDER LEE DONGHYUCK”

then he giggles and grabs your hand to keep you from getting more than halfway out of the car

“okay okay you know i’m just messing with you”

“yes but leave my gorls out of it”

he releases your hand with fake disgust and wipes it on the passenger seat headrest

“ugh go home, gru”

“it’s a good meme and you can’t even deny it duckie boy”

you blow him a half serious half playful kiss as you bounce over to your car and climb in

you play bad boy and roll the windows down as you drive by his car just to spite him and he laughs good naturedly

it’s only when you get home that you’re like heyyyy nOW

WAS THAT A DATE ??????

you tell your mom about it and she’s like uHHH sounds like a DATE to me ???

but you’re Unsure so you don’t say anything to the others or hyuck just the usual goodnight texts and whatnot

although it could be argued ,, that goodnight texts are a little, relationship-y

it could also be argued , that you do have his contact name as , duckie☼♥

but those can be discussed another time

you continue to hang out with the boys although you refuse to allow them to sit with you at football games because they’re so DISTRACTING

jeno and jisung just fckin yell the whole time while you try to jot notes down to turn it into a story later for the paper

but you can’t concentrate or even figure out wtf is goin on because they’re scREAMING and jumping and messing you uP !

so you sent them elsewhere although,,, hyuck stayed with you

he always does “just in case you get cold or smth”

ur not fooling anyone hyuckie baby

and would you look at that time has FLOWN and it’s time for homecoming !!!!

you plan on going in a big group with hyuck and all The Boys and jaemin has even scored a date !!!

it was highkey through trickery but that’s okay

chenle and jisung are gonna wear matching shirts because they’re headass like that

you’ve already bought a dress and you haven’t ….. shown hyuckie……. just in case……… he asks you

since he…… hasn’t …… YET

renjun keeps assuring you that you don’t need to find a date and that everything is covered but ???? inch resting how duckie has done nOT ONE THING

alright the day of the dance you wake up feeling a little off but go through your normal saturday routine of eating a waffle and absentmindedly watching old gossip girl reruns

but later in the day you feel SHITTY

you’re flushed and your head hurts and it takes so much EFFORT just to get up and get a glass of water

you , comrade, are sick :-(

you text in the gm to let your boys know you can’t come

chenle thinks you’re faking until he calls and hears you sniffling and how rough your voice sounds

“hEY THOT I KNOW UR FAKING BC U DONT HAVE A DATE”

“chenle if it didn’t hurt to speak i would yell at u but my eyes are watering please just text me”

“oh,,,,sorry love u”

and then he hangs up real fast lmao

so you decide to just wallow in despair in your bed and rent overpriced movies on demand

there’s a half drank mug of tea that has long gone cold that contains the medicine you’re supposed to be taking but,, you can’t be bothered tbh lifting your hand is so hard

after a few movies and the sun setting there’s knock at the door ???

you barely hear it since you’re in your room with the door closed but /sigh/ you gotta go answer

you drag yourself out of bed and stumble to the front door and open it, immediately slumping against the frame

this whole time you have still not opened your eyes because light hurts a lil and you know your house well enough

in hindsight that was probably dumb considering you don’t know who’s at the door

you try to open your eyes but they only turn half lidded and droopy so you can just barely make out donghyuck looking Concerned on your front porch

“duckie? what are u doing here?”

“uhhh i uh came to take you to homecoming ??”

he then holds up some flowers and smiles awkwardly

“duckie. baby. sunshine. did u not read the texts i sent ? also it is VERY late to be asking me to homecoming. also, i am a little high on cold medication”

“srry princess, can i come in? you look like you need company and soup and possibly some Sarcastic Banter”

“sounds good duck”

“okay duckie was already incorrect please don’t shorten it to duck”

“you know i didn’t have to let you in”

“so what kind of soup do you want? :-)”

he busies himself attempting to make soup while you have melted into a chair at the dining table with one eye cracked open to watch him

he is very obviously Struggling so you wobble to your feet to stand behind him at the stove and maybe lean a little too much into his back to prop your chin up on his shoulder and reach a hand around him to turn the heat down on the stove

you’ve reached the point of I Don’t Give A Shit and have given up on trying not to be affectionate with him you’re too tired and sickly to restrain yourself and his heart is just steadily beating faster and faster

after your soup you drag him into your bedroom to force him to provide you warmth while watching another movie

but he digs his heels into the floor and tugs on your hand to turn you around

“since you’re missing homecoming….. wanna dance?”

“in my bedroom. while i’m dying. with no music.”

“i’ll take care of the music. cmon don’t be difficult”

“i’m not being difficult i’m just-

you’re cut off by him pressing a finger to your lips and going shhhhhh

you open your mouth to curse him out bc hOW DARE HE

but then he gently pulls you by the waist into his chest and does his best to tuck you under his chin

you’re too comfortable like this so you don’t bother admonishing him for earlier and just settle into his embrace

you loop your arms around his neck as he starts to sway you back and forth

after a couple seconds he starts humming, quietly at first and then louder

and then he starts singing and it’s so sO SWEET AND SOFT

you can feel each breath he takes under your hands and the vibrating of his vocal chords against your forehead and you just close your eyes and press closer to him

you’ve literally never been this content in your whole life binch

he is so warm and ever so often smooths a hand up and down your spine whenever you shiver a little or shift in his arms

when the song finishes you keep swaying with him a little while longer

you’re leaning against him so hard that like the majority of your weight is on him yikes

“babe are you asleep”

“mm”

“no?”

“mmm”

“pretty close though?”

“hm”

“alright”

he chuckles and presses a barely there kiss to the top of your head and sort of waddles the two of you over to the bed

you don’t even have to ask him to climb in with you that was The Plan, Stan

(that’s a saying and also i’m calling u a stan wow queen of puns)

as soon as he settles in you tuck yourself under his arm and throw an arm over him to play with the fingers of his other hand

you’ve got the breakfast club on and it’s Real Nap Hours

hyuck’s arm falls asleep pretty soon tho so instead you switch to laying on your sides facing each other with your face pressed into his neck and your arms draped over each other

right before you fade into unconciousness, he tilts his chin down and nudges his nose against yours to get your attention

your eyes flutter open and you look up at him while he smiles gently down at your sleepy expression aWE ???

“hey wanna be my date when you’re not on your death bed?”

“god, what a romantic. is that a shakespeare quote?”

“shut up and say yes”

“alright fine”

“with more enthusiasm!”

“YES!! GOD DAMN IT”

he shakes his head but then leans down to press a lingering kiss against your cheek before tucking you back against him and evening out his breathing

you fall asleep and dream of boys with beautiful voices who love to dance in the rain

a couple hours later you wake up to a forehead smooch and your Boy whispering bye angel

you sit up and whine and he’s like bby i have to go it’s like midnight n my momma wants me home :(((

you pout and he giggles and taps your lips with his index finger

“go back to sleep and i’ll text you something nice to wake up to yeah?”

you nod and grab his hand to kiss it before flopping back down and passing The Fuck Out

the next morning you wake up still feeling a bit shitty but smiling anyways bc you’ve scored the cutest boy in the universe uwu

he even kept his promise and left you a cute message to wake up to ;((((

duckie☼♥: good morning bbg i hope ur feeling better today and that the sun shines all day for u !!!

you: JEKDKDJ DUCKIE IM STILL SICK BUT TAKE ME ON A DATE RN

you: 💗💗💗💕💌💞💞💗😤💖🤧😔💗😔🤧😔🌺💐🌺🌺🌸💐😔💛😔💛💐🤧💐💐💖💖

duckie☼♥: noooo ur gross

you: you ruined it :(((

duckie☼♥: i mean noooo u gotta get better

you: okay :)))

you finally get over your cold like 4 days later and insist you’re fine to be Taken Out And Treated Like A Princess

he tells you to dress warm except gloves bc he wants to hold youR HAND CAN YOU BELIEVE

you’re weirdly not nervous ? like you thought you would be but you’re just excited and very happy !!!! uwu

he picks you up about an hour after school and reveals that he’s gonna take you to all the cafes in town to people watch and write stories which is !!! your favorite activity !!!!!!

“is it lame??? oh god you think it’s lame i’m so sORRY”

“nO!!! no i love it you did good”

“are you sure?”

“yes duckie”

“okay good i mean i knew you’d like it”

“but you just-“

“hm?”

“,,,,, nevermind”

you both hike around town until it gets late and you’re tired and you end up on a bench in the local park with his head in your lap and your fingers in his hair

you lightly scratch his scalp and hum and he practically PURRS like a cat

(furry ????? it’s more likely than you think)

his eyes are closed and you trace your fingers over his features lightly until it tickles and he scrunches up his nose aw bABY !!!!!

then, without opening his eyes

“so when are you gonna man up and kiss me?”

“first of all, i will never man up i prefer being female thanks. sECOND WHY DO I GOTTA DO IT”

“i asked you on the date !!! you gotta do something!!!”

“i held your hand first!!”

“after i literally offered my hand to you”

“uGH fine come here”

“no i’m not gonna ‘come here’ you literally just made a disgusted noise at the thought of kissing me”

“it wasn’t at the thought of kissing you it was just at you”

“this isn’t helping at all”

you roll your eyes playfully and then yank him up by the collar of his shirt to press your forehead against his

“does this help?”

aND THEN YOU LAY ONE ON HIM ??????:$&:&;&;

QUEEN OF CONFIDENCE

he sighs against your lips and sits up a little more so he can reach you better, smoothing a hand up to cup the side of your jaw and neck

you pull away and his eyes are still closed

“hmmm,,, yeah”

you scoff and drop him back to half laying on your lap

“you’re such a dork”

“yeah but i’m your dork now so it’s embarrassing for both of us”

“aw i wouldn’t have it any other way <333”

“is it just me or was that sarcasm”

“just you <3333”

renjun, who has been rOOTING FOR YOU GUYS THIS ENTIRE TIME

screams when you call him that night lol

literally SCREECHES

chenle happens to be with him and screeches eVEN LOUDER

basically the whole group screams simultaneously they’ve been shipping it since day one

hyuck is a bit prideful so when you guys are out in public he’s not super affectionate but ,, when you’re not out

he’s wrapped around you like a koala and will never let go

you have to go pee? hold it

you’re dehydrated and dying? you can live off of his Love

your favorite activity to do together is BAKING because it never goes well no matter how hard you try

and although it usually ends in DISASTER it’s also a good time and afterwards duckie lets you curl up between his legs on the couch and nap uwu !

dating really didn’t change the dynamic between you two other than affection you still read each other to DUST on the regular lmao

no one gets too harsh tho bc you love each other and whatnot

ugh love ruins all the FUN doesnt it :/

donghyuck makes it his business to know exactly when it will rain and makes sure to be with you when it does

at the first sight of clouds he is in your house with board games and movies and snuggles to distract you !!! what a sweetheart

on days when it’s really bad you just climb into bed and bury your face in his chest while he talks about whatever comes to mind and distracts you

he also takes to slumping down and falling asleep on your shoulder whenever you have movie nights together and it’s so CUTE

his little heart shaped lips and his cheeks always end up smushed and he just looks adorable wow rip you

he’s obsessed with your cheeks he loves to cup your face while he talks to you and press gentle kisses to them during Sleepy Time or when you part ways in the school hallways

if he’s excited he’ll bound up behind you and wrap his arms around you and kiss your cheek real hard and then start babbling about whatever’s got him so worked up

basically, hyuckie is a boy full of sunshine and passion and sarcasm and he’s the best boyfriend you could ever ask for :’-)

503 notes · View notes

minijenn · 6 years

Text

Water Pines: Dead in the Water (Part 1)

AHAHAHAH OH FUCK THE ANGST TRAIN IS HERE And yeah lemme just warn ya’ll that this one? Is fucking ANGSTY and SAD as fuck. So... if ya aint into that you probably won’t like this one cause there’s like, no fluff to be found here whatsoever. But yeah anyway, for those of you who don’t remember what Water Pines AU is all about cause we never talk about it around here anymore, its basically the AU where Dipper makes an ill-informed deal with Bill that results in him literally switching places with Lapis, so he gets turned into a gem and stuck with Jasper while Lapis is freed and turned into a human. Imo if you need more info on it (and wanna see some art I drew up for it way back when) feel free to check this out. And finally, I should inform you that this is a two parter and idk when I’ll actually get around to writing part 2 but I got burnt out trying to make it one part so yah, basically what ya see is what ya get until I eventually write the second part. And so with that stupidly long explaination outta the way, let’s get onto the PAIN!

Dead in the Water (Part 1)

“Ya know, Pine Tree,” Bill casually continued his appeal, an appeal that Dipper had no intentions of taking seriously, though out of morbid curiosity, he halfheartedly listened nonetheless as he watched the laptop continue to steadily tick down. “What happened to Water Wings is just plain tragic, it really is. I mean, just think about it: she’s locked down there at the bottom of that grimy lake, having just a grand old time duking it out with Stripes and spending every waking moment in an endless sea of misery and torment and its all—your—fault!”

“Don’t remind me…” Dipper muttered despondently, guiltily glancing over at the pile of photos of him and Lapis. Reminders of peaceful, happy times that only existed in the distant past now, times that certainly would never come to be ever again. Unless…

“But as ‘sad’ as it all is, kid, I could fix it all up for you, nice and easy!” Bill quipped, his tone as bright and deceptively cheery as ever. “And luckily for you, I’m willing to let you off by only asking for something small in return; in fact, you won’t even notice the difference!”

“You still haven’t bothered to tell me what that ‘something’ is, by the way,” Dipper remarked, sending the dream demon a distrustful glare.

“Huh, guess you do have a point there,” Bill shrugged. “Alrighty then, what I want from you, Pine Tree, is something sooooo easy that I’m sure you won’t even have time to think twice about it once the deal is sealed! And that something is… drumroll please!” At this, the demon snapped his fingers, materializing a self-rolling snare drum out of thin air before making his supposedly daunting proclamation, which ended up being not so apparently daunting at all. “I want you to stay out of my way!”

“Wait… what?” Dipper asked, largely caught off guard by this confusing request.

“You heard me, kid!” Bill said succinctly. “All your ‘mystery hunting’ this summer has gotten you way to close to some answers that you shouldn’t be finding, cause if you did, it’d just about ruin everything I’ve been planning for centuries now. But instead of coming up with some sort of cockamamie scheme to, oh, I don’t know, hijack your body and use it to destroy that journal of yours before flinging your empty skin off the water tower or some hypothetical screwball plan like that, I decided I’d save a whole lot of time and effort by cutting this problem off at the source! So all I’m really asking here is for you to put the breaks on all your little investigations and let me have my fun. See? I told you it was something simple!”

“Hold it so… you… just want me to stop looking into the mysteries of Gravity Falls?” Dipper frowned, still bewildered by how straightforward this all seemed. “And that’s… it?”

“Well, that’s mostly it,” Bill shrugged nonchalantly. “There’s… another small little tidbit in this contract too, something that’ll make sure you keep up your end of the bargain.”

“And… that something is…?”

“Aw, come on, Pine Tree, you don’t want me ruining all my surprises, do you?” Bill asked coyly. “Let’s just say you can expect a bit of a… change, but I’m sure you’ll get used to it eventually! Plus… at this point its just about your only sure-fire way to dredge poor Water Wings up out of both that fusion and that lake. After all, you don’t even know if that dusty old laptop over there could even help anything at all, so why not go with the safer route? I’m sure if she were in your place, Water Wings would do the same thing for you—oh wait! She basically already did by trapping herself down there with Stripes. Don’t you think its about time you returned the favor, kid?”

It was, it really was, and this was something Dipper had felt from the very moment he realized that Lapis would be trapped in that lake possibly forever if nothing was done to rescue her. And up until now, that was an effort he hadn’t found too much hope in, his spirits dropping every time he so much as thought of the blue Gem, struggling and suffering all because of her clear, devoted dedication to him. Dedication that Dipper largely felt undeserving of, for he knew he hadn’t really demonstrated it towards her in return. And yet… now he could, in such a simple, easy way too. True, he loved investigating the boundless, incredible wonders to be found in Gravity Falls, and he knew with every one he uncovered, he drew closer to unraveling the entire mystery that was the town and its baffling strangeness. But at the same time, Lapis had become one of the best and closest friends he had ever come to know in the short time that they had together. Her sacrifice for him alone was proof enough of that. And it was a sacrifice that Dipper felt more than ready to honor by making one of his own, if only it meant that they could finally be together in safety, happiness, and freedom once more.

And so, that’s exactly what he did.

Dipper saw no point in exchanging any more deliberation on the matter as he watched Bill extend a hand out in offering, unnatural blue flames sparking around it. He hesitated, only briefly, upon remembering the dream demon’s warning that there was another element to this purposed deal, but from how he had made it sound, it didn’t seem like it was anything too drastic or important. And even if it was, then certainly liberating Lapis from her longtime prison would make whatever that unknown addendum was worth it.

Right?

“So, Pine Tree? Do we have a deal?” Bill asked almost goadingly, calm in the assurance that he had his young, unwitting pawn right where he wanted him.

Keeping his manner steady and resolved, Dipper only nodded, taking in a deep breath before he carefully met the demon’s hand and shook it, solidifying their bargain once and for all. “Alright, fine,” Dipper said sternly as he looked to Bill rather coldly. “No more mystery hunting. Now fulfill your end of the deal and save Lapis.”

“Oh, don’t worry, Pine Tree, I already got that one covered!” Bill exclaimed with a mischievous chuckle as the flame encompassing both their hands suddenly grew brighter. “But in the meantime, there’s still the matter of the other half of your end of things…”

“M-my… wha-” Dipper barely had any time to get anything out before his voice caught in a startled gasp, his eyes growing wide and his body still and rigid as he felt a sharp pain course through it. In fact, so great was this pain that it ended up completely incapacitating him, to the point that he couldn’t even cry out for help or for a release from it. In a way, it almost felt like all of his cells were violently tearing apart, or better yet, that they were burning, glowing even, but in the worst way possible. Amidst this torrent of unstoppable agony, he hadn’t even registered the dream demon’s incredibly amused and sadistic laughter ringing in his deafening ears, nor did he notice the pale white light ripping away at every part of him, effectively disintegrating him until there was nothing left at all. His consciousness was the last thing to fade away, but before it did, the last thing he heard was the triumphant teasing of the demon who had so easily tricked him with a promise that had ended up resulting in what must have been his own complete and utter destruction.

“See ya, Pine Tree! Hope you enjoy your new digs! Oh, and be sure to send Stripes my best! I’m sure she’s just gonna love to see you!”

The very first thing Lapis felt before awakening was a stark, sudden beating inside her own chest. In fact, the sensation was so strange and alarming that it only seemed to quicken, to the point that it ultimately ended up tearing her right back into consciousness. She let out a gasp, her eyes opening wide as she felt the air fill in another part of her chest, the beating continuing rapidly as she found herself in need of even more air, which she took in heavily as she tried to make sense of what was happening to her.

Despite her effective hyperventilating, Lapis was able to focus enough to notice that whatever surface she was lying on wasn’t anything remotely similar to the darkened, drenched, despair of Malachite’s mindscape that she had grown so accustomed to over the past several weeks. Instead, the surface below her was hard yet warm, crisp, red light pouring in from an unseen source and illuminating a wooden ceiling above her. Disconcerted, Lapis slowly began to pick herself up to get a better look around, though she stopped short upon catching a glance of her arm. Her pale, fleshy, not blue arm.

“Augh!” Lapis cried, grasping her wrist as she glanced over the rest of her form. The usual blue coloration of her dress was apparently no more, replaced by a mix of navy, orange, and grey, and upon pulling a lock forward, she found that her hair had somehow turned a shade of chestnut brown. “W-what… what is this?” she muttered to herself, her brow furrowing as her breathing and the beating in her chest gradually slowed to a normal, natural tempo.

She didn’t have too much of a chance to wonder what had happened or where she was, however, before she noticed something lying on the ground right beside her: a blue and white hat with a tell-tale print of a pine tree on it. An article Lapis immediately recognized, to the point that even picking it up and holding it close made her ache with both regret and with a curious sense of hope as she took another look around.

“D-Dipper?” she ventured, her voice small at first, especially as she failed to find the boy anywhere in the immediate vicinity. “Dipper, a-are you here?” she asked again, feebly rising to stand only to find herself strangely unsteady. All the same, she clung onto the hat, a spark of terror and dread filling her as she realized this place, whatever it was, was surprisingly bereft of Jasper. Regardless to the bizarre alteration of her form, certainly she had to still be part of Malachite, which meant that her orange adversary couldn’t be too far, right?

Lapis shook her head, steadying herself as her expression filled with resolve. If she was indeed still Malachite, and if Dipper, of all people, had managed to find his way into their incredibly toxic mindscape, then she knew her mission, above all else, had to be to protect him from Jasper’s wrath and bring him back to safety. Which meant that her starting step in doing so had to be finding him first.

And so Lapis picked herself up off the ground, her footing initially unsteady as she had to get used to being solely in control of her own form once more. Even so, she wasted no time in checking just about every single nook and cranny the room had to offer for any further sign of Dipper’s presence there, only to find none at all. As a result, an even deeper sense of worry filled her, one that was more than enough to prompt her to set out beyond the boundaries of the room to check elsewhere in the hopes of finally reuniting with him if nothing else. However, as she tentatively opened the door, she ended up reuniting with someone else entirely.

“S-Steven?!” Lapis gasped, her eyes wide as she caught sight of the young Gem standing right outside the door.

Startled, Steven gaped back up at her, his hand held up ready to knock on the now-opened door as he tried to make sense of exactly who was standing before him. “Uh… do I know you?”

“Of course you do!” Lapis exclaimed as though it was obvious, despite her new appearance. “It’s me: Lapis!”

“L-Lapis?!” Steven’s jaw practically hit the floor as everything connected for him, but sure enough, it did make sense. Save for her oddly familiar but markedly different coloration, the woman before him looked exactly like the blue Gem who had trapped herself at the bottom of the lake several weeks ago. “Wha—I don’t understand; how did you even get here?! When did you and Jasper unfuse? And… and why do you look so different?”

“Wait, wait, hold on, what?” Lapis shook her head, her eyes wide with surprise. “I… I’m not fused with Jasper anymore? But… but I thought…”

“Well… I’m pretty sure you’re not since you’re here,” Steven pointed out. “But what I wanna know is why you look like that. If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were a human!”

“A human?” Lapis scoffed, crossing her arms. “Don’t be silly, Steven. I may not know how I got separated from Jasper or why I look like this, but if there’s one thing I do know, its that I’m still a Gem. See?”

At this, she turned around to show the young Gem the stone on her back, only for Steven to let out a stunned gasp at what he actually saw there. “L-Lapis…” he muttered, clearly shocked. “Your Gem… it… it’s gone!”

“What?!” Lapis frantically reached both of her hands to her back, feeling around desperately for her familiar teardrop-shaped gemstone, only to feel nothing but smooth, warm skin where it should have been. “H-how… what happened to it?! Where did it go, I-” She stopped short with a gasp, her eyes widening even more in a dawning, almost sickening form of realization. “N-no way…” she whispered, absolutely shaken by this revelation as she pressed her hand against her chest, only to feel what could only be a heart hammering away underneath it. “I-it can’t be… I… S-Steven… I think I really am a human…”

“B-but… how did you just turn into a human like this?!” Steven asked, just as frantic as Lapis was over this alarming news.

“I don’t know!” she exclaimed, running a hand through her now brown hair. “One minute, I was keeping Malachite chained to the bottom of the lake, and then the next I woke up here and found-” Lapis interupted herself once more, remembering that she had much more important things to worry about aside from her shift in species as she glanced down at the hat still tightly trapped in her grip. “Dipper…” she whispered before hastily placing a firm hand on the young Gem’s shoulder. “Steven, where’s Dipper?”

“Wait, you mean he’s not in there?” Steven frowned, glancing past Lapis and into the otherwise empty attic. “That’s weird… Mabel sent me up here to find him, so… maybe he’s in another part of the shack? He’s been working really hard lately to try and find a way to save you, so I’m sure he’ll be really happy to see you!”

“H-he’s been trying to…” Lapis trailed off, letting out a sad sigh as she held the hat close to her chest. “Oh, Dipper…”

��H-hey, I’m sure once we find him, he’ll be able to help us figure out exactly what happened to you,” Steven reassured upon noticing Lapis’ obvious melancholy.

“R-right…” Lapis nodded in absent agreement, following after the young Gem as he led her through the rest of the shack. The two searched diligently for Dipper, with Steven claiming that it only made sense that he’d be somewhere in the building since that was the last place he had been seen heading to. And yet, despite their best efforts, neither of them managed to find him inside the shack whatsoever, leaving Lapis in a rather distraught state as she was filled with both dread over her new form as well as over Dipper’s whereabouts, which by all accounts, seemed to be completely unknown.

With their search of the shack completely exhausted, Steven and Lapis agreed to check outside for Dipper, just in case he had ended up slipping out of the house without anyone noticing somehow. And yet, instead of finding him, they managed to run smack dab into his twin instead as she was heading into the house carry a high-piled basket of sock puppet supplies, which was easily knocked out of her hands the moment her and Lapis accidentally collided.

“Hey!” Mabel huffed, disgruntled as sock and craft supplies spilled all over the floor. “Steven! What’s the big… idea…?” She trailed off, her jaw dropping as she watched the familiar figure beside the young Gem start to pick herself up off the ground to stand once more. At first, Mabel thought she was seeing things, because certainly there was no logical way she could be here like this; but sure enough, it seemed to be true, as completely unbelievable as it seemed.

“No way…” she muttered in amazement as she stared at the former Gem, her mouth gaped in awe. “Lapis?!”

“H-hey, Mabel,” Lapis greeted, offering the girl as much of a smile as she could, though it was clear her primary concern was still with finding Dipper. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

“It sure as heck has!” Mabel exclaimed, still completely awestruck. “How are you even here? And how are you all humany? And most importantly, does Dipper know? Cause if when he sees you he’s gonna freak out. I’m not even kidding, he’s been driving himself crazy looking for a way to save you and-”

“I-I know,” Lapis interjected, glancing down somewhat remorsefully upon hearing this. “Steven already filled me in. But we are looking for Dipper, if you’ve seen him anywhere.”

“Not since we-” Mabel quickly cut herself off, a worried look crossing her expressions as she looked down to the scattered sock puppets on the ground below and remembered the rather harsh words her and her brother had just exchanged only just a few moments prior. Words that, in light of Lapis’ sudden, unexpected, but still miraculous reappearance, seemed incredibly petty now, especially on her end of things. “Uh… never mind,” she said quickly, pushing several of the sock puppets away with her foot as she dropped her basket. “W-why don’t I help you guys look for him? Three heads are always better than two after all.”

“Are you sure, Mabel?” Steven asked with a frown. “I mean, your puppet show’s coming up really soon and you still have a lot to do to get ready for-”

“Eh, the show can wait for a sec,” Mabel interupted with a somewhat forced wave of her hand. “After all, I… I…” she trailed off, not particularly wanting to bring her bitter argument with Dipper up in front of Lapis, especially since said argument had largely centered around the former Gem in the first place. “I really wanna see the look on Dipper’s face when he sees you again, Lapis!” she intercepted, being both truthful and dodgy all at the same time. “Now come on, let’s go find him!”

“Right,” Lapis nodded firmly, crouching down a bit, almost as if she was anticipating something. Steven and Mabel looked to her in confusion when nothing did end up happening, something that confused the former Gem even more, until she stole a glance behind her and let out a startled gasp. “M-my wings!” she cried, distraught as she stood properly. “W-why can’t I summon my wings!?”

“Uh… probably because you don’t have a Gem anymore,” Steven informed gently. “Humans can’t fly, Lapis. Well, at least not using water, that is.”

Lapis shook her head in disbelief at this, grief filling her expression over the loss of something she had always treasured so much. Her wings provided her with freedom, with a chance to escape to safety in an instant if the need arose. But now, they were gone and she was tethered to the ground, anchored almost just as much as she had been with Jasper at the bottom of the lake. The only difference now was that she was at the very least, no longer trapped within a prison of her own design with a cellmate she would have just as rather shattered than let survive. All the same, her lack of wings only added onto the several disconcerting discoveries she had made since awakening in her new human body. A worrisome change that she hoped could at the very least be eased upon finding the one she had given almost everything up for until now.

Since searching by air was out of the question, the trio split up, investigating the immediate woods around the shack on foot. Though Lapis was unfamiliar with the area, Steven and Mabel made an effort to venture out a bit further, their own respective concern for Dipper starting to rise upon catching not a single sign of him anywhere. From there, they decided to check in up at the temple, Lapis keeping her distance outside as the kids asked if any of the Gems had seen Dipper around, only for all three of them to offer sympathetic no’s. It was only after they decided to join in on the search themselves that they discovered Lapis and her now human condition, something that aptly shocked all three of them, though the former Gem had no interest in garnishing any help from them, except for when it came to looking for Dipper. As minutes turned into hours, Mabel decided to make a tough call and postpone her puppet show, knowing that, for the first time all week Gabe Bensen could wait; her brother was, by all accounts, apparently missing. And after putting him on hold all week for her own selfish pursuits, she wasn’t about to rest until she made things right, found him, and apologized for the lack of support she should have been providing him with all along.

As the sun began to sink across the forest, the Gems insisted that the kids finally check in with Stan, all of them hoping that he at the very least had some sort of clue as to where Dipper had run off to. The conman however, was simply quite surprised to hear that his nephew was missing alone, making it quite obvious that he was just as clueless as everyone else. After calling up Soos and Wendy, a rather sizable search party had been formed, one that forged on late into the night and stretched as far as the town boarders itself. And yet, despite their collective, valiant efforts, Dipper never seemed to show up anywhere, much to everyone’s immensely growing concern. It truth, it seemed as though he had disappeared completely out of nowhere, leaving only his hat behind, which Lapis hadn’t let go of since the moment she found it in the shack’s attic. Speaking of the former Gem, what struck most of the others as odd was that her sudden appearance seemed to perfectly coincide with Dipper’s abrupt disappearance. There was no question the two events were connected, but as to how and why, no one had the slightest clue. Even Garnet, with her future vision and all, was unable to foresee them locating the missing boy anytime soon. Still, that didn’t mean they were going to give up hope so easily; Lapis and Mabel in particular were both insistent on continuing the search until Dipper was found and brought home, safe and sound.

And yet in the midst of foraging through the darkened forest in the very late hours of the night, Lapis soon discovered another aspect of humanity that she had previously never experienced before: exhaustion. With each passing moment, it seemed as though her pace grew slower, her eyes grew heavier and her focus drifted away altogether, to the point that at one point she almost tripped over Steven, who was every bit as tired as she was. Upon realizing this and detecting the same sort of fatigue from Stan, Mabel, Soos, and Wendy, the Gems concluded that they would continue looking for Dipper while all of the humans headed home to bed so that they could be better rested up to help in the search tomorrow. Of course, there were protests all around concerning this as all of them did indeed want to find Dipper as soon as possible, but once Garnet put her foot down on the matter, there was no arguing with her about it.

And so everyone save for the Gems headed home for the night, their hearts equally heavy with worry and dread. After a healthy round of convincing and bribing Stan on Mabel’s part, Lapis was allotted to stay at the shack, with Steven sleeping over as well since the Gems would be out for the rest of the night. Together, the pair fashioned a makeshift air mattress bed for the former Gem to sleep on, though all the same she still really wasn’t quite familiar with the process of “sleeping” to begin with. Being a human was, at least from her perspective, a rather odd experience as a whole. Only just a few hours ago did she “eat” for the first time, with her first meal consisting of something Steven called “the bits” that he got from Gravity Fries downtown while they were searching around there. To Lapis’ surprise, she actually enjoyed the snack quite a bit, though she was somewhat anxious when Steven and Mabel informed her that eating was something she’d have to do regularly now that she was a human.

In fact, the reality that she was no longer a Gem but rather a human on its own was enough to keep her lying awake in bed even after Steven and Mabel had already fallen asleep. In the full moonlight streaming into the attic room, Lapis stared at her hand—her now flesh-covered, pale, human hand—as she let her thoughts wander. How did something like this even happen? How had she been torn away from Jasper and put here, of all places? How long was she going to stay like this? Was it ever possible for her to return to her original form? And most importantly, the question that had been largely plaguing her all day, even about her own concerns about herself: where could Dipper have gone to? The former Gem couldn’t deny that her now human heart ached whenever she thought of the mysteriously missing boy, the boy who, even during her own self imposed imprisonment in the lake, she had missed so very much each and every day. Lapis couldn’t deny that she wanted to see him, probably even more than she wanted to be a Gem once again. As far as she was concerned, thoughts of anything else other than finding him and bringing him home could wait. To know that he was safe and sound and where he belonged would be more than enough to set her worried mind at ease. Which was why, as she slowly drifted off into her first fitful, fretful slumber, the last thing on the former Gem’s mind was the warm reassurance Steven had offered both her and Mabel just a few hours prior. A reassurance she hoped more than anything would come true:

“Don’t worry! I’m sure we’ll end up finding Dipper tomorrow!”

Except they didn’t. They didn’t find him then, or the next day, or even anytime in the days or weeks after that.

And when they finally did find him, he was in the last place any of them had ever thought to look.

Earlier…

A flash of blinding light sparked from the depths of Lake Gravity Falls, completely filling its empty surface, though no one was around to see it. Likewise, no one was around to see the tiny, squarish blue stone drop into its murky waters from seemingly out of nowhere, sinking lower and lower, down towards the bottom of the deep lake on its own accord. For a moment or two, fish occasionally flocked to it, investigating the odd, dully shimmering gem until, out of nowhere, light began to explode from it, scaring the sealife away as a small humanoid shape began to form around it. The light took on a bright blue pigment as it began to define its previously amorphous form, with clothes and features taking shape as the gemstone found its place upon its forehead. And, with another flash of solidifying light, the radiant glow disappeared, once again sending the lake depths in obscuring darkness and leaving a small, singular figure floating in its place.

Upon regaining some sense of cognizance and feeling, the very first thing Dipper did was abruptly open his eyes, taking in a sharp gasp the moment he did, only to inhale a large mouthful of water instead of air. As panicked and disoriented as he already was, his first instinct was to panic at the thought of drowning, flailing about as he floated just above the lakebed, neither rising towards the top nor sinking to the bottom all the while. It was only as he unintentionally ended up taking in more water that he noticed something both relieving and alarming; he wasn’t drowning. In fact, it seemed as though he was somehow able to breathe within the water just as easily as he could breathe air.

“W-what the…?” Dipper trailed off, whispering to himself as he began to curiously touch his throat only to stop short upon stealing a glance at his hand. For a brief moment, he thought it was simply a trick of the incredibly low light surrounding him on all sides, but upon a second glance, he realized that his hand was indeed somehow strangely blue as opposed to its normal pale pigmentation. He was quick to discover that everything else about him was some varying shade of deep blue too: from his skin, to his clothes, to his shoes, to even his hair as it covered what he found to be the most disconcerting of all: his birthmark. While it was usually mostly unnoticeable considering he kept it concealed so well, Dipper couldn’t hold back a soft gasp of surprise as he realized he could actually feel the copy of the constellation on his forehead, smooth and solid and almost… stone-like to the touch.

For a moment, Dipper took pause, his hand floating away from his birthmark as he tried to make sense of exactly where he was and what was going on. Surrounding him all around seemed to be a vast aquatic void, with only the occasional deepwater fish, plant, or sunken canoe to be spotted anywhere nearby. With nothing visual to go off of, the most Dipper could do was think back to how he might have ended up in a place like this when, as far as he knew, he had just been in the shack’s attic just a few minutes prior. The last thing he remembered was his own exhaustion amidst his endless attempts at trying to decode the laptop’s password, but that was it. He couldn’t recall falling sleep, which meant that there really wasn’t any chance of this being some sort of dream. Even so, he couldn’t help but feel as though he was missing an important piece here, a piece that, if he ended up actually remembering it somehow, could quite possibly explain both his unknown location and his bewildering condition at the same exact time.

However, instead of finding that missing piece, he soon found something, or rather someone else entirely. Or rather, they found him.

“YOU!” The outraged shout boomed across the lakebed, scaring off any fish that was even remotely in the vicinity. Dipper, on the other hand, froze up completely, his eyes going wide as the massive shadow of a Gem he had hoped to never encounter again fell upon him. Yet before he could fearfully spin around to face the vicious warrior, she did the job for him, unexpectedly grabbing him by the arm and wrenching him around roughly. Dipper had only a moment to register the thought that such a maneuver could have easy broken his arm entirely as he glanced up and shuddered with unconcealed alarm at the fact that he was now somehow face to face with none other than Jasper herself. “I know you,” the orange Gem growled, scowling fiercely at him all the while. “You’re her favorite little human pet, the one she wouldn’t stop thinking about while she kept me chained down here! So why are you here? And where is she?!”

“W-who?” Dipper dared to venture, his voice much smaller and more frightened than he had hoped it to be. “Lapis?”

“Who else?!” Jasper snapped hotly, her already inescapable grip on his wrist tightening. “Up until a few minutes ago the two of us were fused, just like we’ve been for weeks now. And then all of the sudden you show up and she disappears! What’s going on here?!”

“I-I don’t know!” Dipper answered truthfully, confused just as much as he was terrified. In fact he was so disoriented that he barely even registered an essential part of what Jasper had just said, namely that her and Lapis had been fused. Which meant that, even though it was really beyond all sense of logic, they weren’t fused anymore. “I was just-”

“Quiet!” the orange Gem barked harshly, giving the unfortunate boy in her grip a violent shake. “I don’t know where she thinks she gets off, just running off after everything she did and leaving you behind to-” Jasper cut herself off, her confusion with the unfolding situation seeming to grow as she noticed something that only seemed to anger and disgust her even more. “What is that?”

“W-what?” Dipper tried to glance up at whatever it was Jasper was pointing at, only to find that she was oddly referring to him. Or rather, to his forehead.

For a moment, Jasper didn’t answer, opting to finally relinquish her tight hold on Dipper’s arm only to suddenly grasp his chin instead, still effectively holding him in place as she swept a bit of his hair up to find something that made her gasp in clear shock as she finally let go of him altogether. “You’re not a human!” she exclaimed, obviously baffled as she continued sending him the same bitter glare as before. “You’re a Gem!”

“Wha—no, I’m not!” Dipper countered, though he still lifted a curious hand up to his now tangible birthmark, wondering if Jasper might have somehow confused that for a gemstone somehow. But then again, his now oddly blue coloration, his strange, newfound ability to breathe underwater… both of these things seemed to speak to the contrary. Which in and of itself was an alarming possibility he didn’t even have time to think about as Jasper continued, apparently growing even more incensed by the second.

“I get it now…” the orange Gem growled coldly. “The little game you and her have been playing… the reason why she wanted to protect you so badly that she decided to trap me… You’re a Lapis Lazuli, just like her!”

“N-no!” Dipper tried to protest, knowing that such a claim was completely preposterous. “I’m-”

“Let me guess…” Jasper continued, her feet firmly planted on the lakebed as she marched closer towards him. While Dipper had the wits about him to wisely float backwards out of her immediate range, he was still largely too engulfed by fear to make a real escape attempt. “You two came out of the same Kindergarten, didn’t you? I know you Lazulis like to travel in flocks. So when she got stuck on this backwards planet, you were the only one of her kind still left around to take care of that mirror she was trapped in. Then, when she flew back here to warn you that we were coming, you tried to hide yourself by shapeshifting into that weak, pathetic form you’re in now, just like Rose did! But it didn’t work, because I’ve got it all figured out now...”

“No, y-you really don’t, trust me,” Dipper tried to clarify, though of course, in her ongoing anger and thirst for vengeance, she was hardly listening to him.

“And… since she took so much from me… and now that I know just how much you really mean to her…” A sly, almost sinister smile crossed the orange Gem’s face as she stood essentially towering over him menacingly. “I think its only fair that I return the favor and take something from her…”

Dipper didn’t even have a chance to ask what she could have meant by this before she suddenly latched onto his arm yet again, wrenching him upward before, surprisingly, spinning him around with almost a flare of what could have been mistaken for grace. She relinquished her hold on him for just the slightest second and in that second, he did all he could to try to swim away, only for her to pull him back down by his ankle before he could really make any progress at all. Once she had him back down, she began swiftly spinning them both around in something that almost seemed like a dance. And it was as Dipper realized this, that he realized with a burst of apt panic exactly what Jasper was trying to do.

“W-wait!” he cried as Jasper’s smug smirk only deepened at his obvious fear. “Don’t-”

“Go ahead and beg all you want, Lazuli,” the orange Gem hissed with a hateful sneer as she suddenly dipped him low, just as she had done with Lapis on the lake shore weeks ago. “I begged too, for weeks on end, in a futile attempt to escape her,” Jasper’s grin only deepened as the gemstone that was in the place of her nose began to take on a bright white glow. “But it never worked; if she had her way, she was going to keep me trapped down here forever. All because of you!” Dipper gasped in growing alarm as the same sort of glow began to pour from his birthmark, or, as he now realized with a sense of sickening shock, his gem. “Well now its your turn to see what that’s like. I hope you enjoy it, because just like she said, I’m never letting you go!”

With this final, fierce proclamation, she roughly pulled him towards her, a blinding light enveloping them both. While Dipper’s past experience with fusion was extremely limited, he knew that both times he had formed Stepper with Steven had felt absolutely nothing like this. With Steven, the act of fusion had felt warm, calming, even welcoming, even if the initial aftermath had been largely tremulous and uneasy. But with Jasper, fusion was anything but those things. It was like she was throwing him into a tight cage and throwing away the key. It was like she was anchoring him, weighing him down to the bottom of an ocean that, even with the ability to breathe underwater, he would surely drown in. It was like—no, it wasn’t like, it was her trapping him, locking him into something he wanted no parts of and desperately wanted to escape.

Which was why, even as the eventual fusion gained its form, it was screaming, half of it crying out for release while the other half simply laughed vindictively. As a result, their sharp-toothed maw split cleanly down the middle as their form solidified, resulting in two mouths, two sets of eyes, and six sets of arms, two of which acted as legs. Most everything about this fusion was monstrous, yet familiar, their coloration a mix of mangled, sickly greens and their build bulky, awkward, and uneven. Their white hair was a wild, untamed mess, their skin markings garish and garbled, and their newly-shared mind a complete and utter disaster as they both were forcibly plunged into its darkened depths.

As for the fusion themselves, they hardly faired much better as they were still caught in a chaotic flux of sadistic satisfaction and horrified anguish over the realization of the awful monster they had become. “Augh! L-let me go!” they screamed through one of their two mouths, their voices mangled together and uneven yet nightmarishly unified all the same. “Not a chance! Not until you see just how much she made me suffer because of you!”

At this unhinged declaration, the fusion, out of sheer desperation alone, reached up to the far off surface of the water far above them, hoping they could somehow breach it and alert someone, anyone to their horrific plight. Unfortunately, before they could even get anywhere close, a sudden chain, composed entirely of water, rushed up from the lakebed, latching onto both of their wrists and keeping them anchored heavily down to the ground itself.

“N-no! Stop! Please!” they begged, not even bothering to hide how outright terrified they were by this seemingly possible, absolutely miserable turn of events. “I-I already told you! I’m not a Gem! Hmph! You really are stupid if you think you can fool me again!” they sneered, yanking the chains back to force them down even more. “If you’re ‘not a Gem’ then how did we just fuse? I-I don’t know! I don’t even know what’s going on! P-please, I just want to—Ha! You really think I care about what you want?! The only thing I care about is making both you and her pay for what you both did to me! B-but I didn’t—QUIET!”

The fusion gasped as an entirely new set of watery manacles suddenly latched around both sets of their feet, pulling them down until they were basically tethered to the lakebed itself with no hope of escape whatsoever. “I’m done listening to what you have to say!” they barked harshly, so caught up in their lust for revenge that they didn’t even place any second thoughts or concerns with the other, absolutely panicking half of their ruinously shared mind as they essentially drowned him in the darkness of their fusion’s hatred altogether. “She might have tried to protect you, but she failed. You both failed! Because from here on out, you’re not a Lapis Lazuli or a human in disguise or anything else anymore.” At this, one of the fusion’s mouths leered into a sickening smirk while the other one quivered in pained whimpers, heartbroken tears starting to well up in two out of their four eyes as they began to sink, quite literally, into their unimaginable fate. “The only thing we are now is Malachite. So get used to it; because as long as I’m around to keep us together, that’s something that’s never going to change.”

The first few days and nights were, simply put, completely unbearable. True to her word, Jasper kept Dipper, and by extension, the newly-recreated Malachite tightly chained to both bottom of the lakebed as well as to the murky, inescapable depths of their now forcibly shared mind. And from the very moment his unexpected, nightmarish imprisonment began, Dipper wanted nothing more than some form of release from it. A release that seemed like it would never end up coming.

In fact, if there was any one word Dipper knew he could use to sum up his still relatively newfound existence as Malachite, then that word would be drowning. Largely because a majority of his time seemed to be spent doing exactly that in just about every sense of the word. He seemed to always in a state of constant drowning; drowning literally in the toxic waters of Malachite’s dark and desolate mindscape, drowning in the mire of hatred of the Gem who had cruelly trapped him in the name of her own vengeance, and drowning most of all in his own crippling, crushing fear that he’d never be able to escape, a fear that only steadily grew the longer it went on for.

In fact, the only times Dipper didn’t feel like he was drowning were the rare occasions when Jasper, for whatever reason, decided to dredge him up to the surface level of their forcibly shared mindscape. The orange Gem only ever did this for the sake of antagonizing her unfortunate hostage, by giving him a glimpse of the sparse rays of light that shined through the surface of the lake far above them, light that offered the elusive promise of hope and freedom. Promises that, Jasper would all to quickly remind him, he would never achieve again as she always ended up dragging him back down to their cripplingly cold subconscious, never even allotting him a single moment or inkling of any sort of control over their twistedly fused form whatsoever. In fact, he was lucky if she ever even let him have a word in edgewise against him, always callously brushing off all of his fierce, sometimes downright desperate attempts to fight back or resist against her. And yet, for as much as Jasper’s vengeful cruelty was starting to wear him down more and more, the worst part for Dipper by far, was that he essentially had no idea how he had even ended up in this seemingly unending waking nightmare to begin with.

In the agonizingly long stints of lonely drowning he had to endure, the question of why he was there at all was really the one Dipper was really able to grapple with. As chained as his hands were, he wasn’t really able to reach up to his forehead, but as far as he knew, there was a gemstone there, a gemstone that, by all accounts, apparently made him a Gem. The fact that he had been able to fuse with Jasper at all was proof enough of that, as disconcerting and alarming as the very thought. And yet how exactly he had somehow changed from human to Gem and wound up in the lake in Lapis’ place was a complete and utter mystery to him, one that, he believed if he could figure out the answer to, then perhaps he could begin to puzzle out how free himself from his current, miserable plight. The only problem was, he had no idea where to even start.

That is, until the day the normally lonely, dark corner of Malachite’s mindscape he now called home received the very last visitor he could have ever expected.

And what a surprise it certainly was for Dipper when, amidst floating miserably and silently in the dreary, empty darkness, a sudden sadistic, familiar cackle echoed through the water, sending heavy ripples throughout both it and the newly-turned Gem trapped within it. Ripples that turned into outright shock as a certain triangular demon suddenly materialized quite out of nowhere before him.

“Well, well, well, look at you, Pine Tree!” Bill exclaimed in bright greeting, startling Dipper quite a bit by his abrupt appearance. “Turns out you don’t make that shabby of a space rock after all, if I do say so myself. You’re still pretty shabby overall though; guess some things never change, even if your species does!”

It took Dipper a brief moment to break out of his relative alarm, but when he did, he was still rather baffled by his new, rather unwelcome ‘guest’ all the same. “B-Bill?! What… what are you doing here?”

“Aw, come on, kid, isn’t it obvious?” Bill asked, only for Dipper to shake his head in continued confusion. “Seriously? You don’t remember?” the demon pressed, almost surprised by this fact before letting out an exasperated groan. “Hmph. Guess I should’ve figured that suddenly having your entire human DNA rewritten into nothing a bunch of solid light molecules would scramble your brain up a little bit. Well, it would if you still technically HAD a brain anymore! But if you’re still in the dark (which you definitely seem to be right now) then let me refresh your memory for ya, Pine Tree!”

Surprisingly, true to his word, Bill did just that with a simple snap of his fingers, one that sparked a brief, bright glow in Dipper’s gemstone and instantly filled him in with flashes of everything he needed to know. He saw himself, human and free from the fused oppression he now knew; he saw Bill, cheerfully rattling on about some kind of ‘deal’ that would help free Lapis from her own dire straits; and finally, he saw himself accepting that deal, desperate to finally rescue the blue Gem who had done so much to rescue him, he saw himself shaking the demon’s flaming hand, he saw himself disintegrating into nothing but pure, formless light, he saw Bill somehow compress that light into a deep blue stone, one in the very same shape as his own birthmark. And finally, he saw the demon carelessly drop that stone into Lake Gravity Falls, into the very spot where it would be easy, almost inevitable for Jasper to find him and force him to fuse with her.

And just like that, he finally had it all figured out.

“Y-you!” Dipper gasped, pulling back away from Bill as much as he could with his arms and legs still changed as they were. “You did this! You’re the reason why I-I’m… I’m a Gem, and why I’m here, and trapped with her and-”

“Yeah, yeah, kid, no need to waste any of our time reiterating what we both already know,” Bill remarked, clearly not taking the new Gem’s apt anger seriously.

“Why?” Dipper interjected before the demon could get any of his callous remarks out, largely since he was seething with so much raw fury over how Bill had effectively turned his entire life upside down altogether. “Why would you even do something like this?!”

“Because its hilarious, Pine Tree!” Bill laughed unapologetically. “Or wait, guess I can’t really call you that anymore, seeing as how you’re the new Water Wings and all! See what I mean?” With another snap of the demon’s fingers, Dipper’s gem glistened briefly once again, though this time, a wide pair of rather elegant aquatic wings, almost identical to Lapis’, unfurled from its spot on his forehead, catching him off guard quite a bit, though the somewhat embarrassing sight only elicited even more twisted amusement from the sadistic demon. “Ha! And just when I thought this couldn’t get any more priceless! I don’t know why you look so cross, ‘Water Wings’! After all, I’m sure you’ll catch some great headwinds with those beauties, huh?!”

Dipper only offered the demon a hateful glare before glancing fretfully up at his new wings, ones that he tried to force back into his gem, though despite all of his mental straining, he had no such luck, much to his ever growing frustration with his situation as a whole. “T-this wasn’t our deal, Bill!” he shouted furiously, a part of him realizing he probably looked quite ridiculous with his watery wings coming out of his forehead, though he hardly cared.

“Oh, see, that’s where you’re wrong, kid,” Bill said. “See, I seem to remember you promising to stay outta my way in exchange for freeing your friend. But that means that somebody had to take her place, and since you wanted to save her sooooo badly, I figured you’d be the perfect fit!”

“But you never mentioned anything about turning me into a Gem or about Jasper forcing me to fuse with her!” Dipper countered hotly. “In fact, you hardly mentioned anything at all! I didn’t know anything about what I was getting myself into because you lied about it all! This isn’t fair which is why I’m calling our deal off. Change me back and get me out of here, Bill, now!”

“Aw, sure, I’d be more than happy to do that for ya, ‘Water Wings’,” Bill remarked, though his tone darkened somewhat as he pressed a bit closer to the new Gem. “Giving you back your boring old human meatskin would be a piece of cake! Of course… you do know that means that everything will go back to the way it was before. Which means… Water Wings—or I guess I should call her Pine Tree now—has to come back here to Stripes too, right?”

“W-what…?” Dipper took pause at this, his eyes widening at the alarming implication. “What… what do you mean? Where is Lapis anyway? What did you to do her?!”

“Well, I put her in your place, duh!” the demon quipped, pointing down to his flat form as it depicted an image of Lapis herself, surprisingly completely human, sitting sandwiched in between Steven and Mabel. While there were hints of worry in all three of their expressions, they still smiled to one another, their happiness only growing as the former Gem hugged both of the kids close to her, clearly relieved to be free and with them instead of trapped and alone. The very sight of finally seeing a genuine smile on Lapis’ face after so long stirred something warm up inside of Dipper, and even despite his own horrific circumstances and the fact that he couldn’t be happy there with her, he still couldn’t deny just how glad he was to finally see her released from the nightmarish prison he now found himself trapped within.

“Y-you… you turned her into a… a human…” he mused, his voice almost a whisper as he continued staring at the depiction of Lapis with a ghost of a smile on his face.

“Ya got that right, kid,” Bill remarked evenly. “I gotta say, the shift from Gem to human was probably a bit of a downgrade for her, but hey, at least she’s finally outta this unending hellhole of pain and misery, huh? Then again, I guess she won’t be for too much longer since you’re so deadest on getting outta here yourself and forcing her back in, right, Water Wings?”

Dipper practically froze as Bill once again extended his hand out to him, blue fire licking at it as he offered him the promise of freedom, safety, and normality yet again. A promise that, by all accounts, as much as he wanted it, he knew he couldn’t take. Not when Lapis had already suffered languishing imprisonment for so long. Not when she had sacrificed almost everything she had just to protect him. Not when she was finally free and happy and living a life she never really got to enjoy before. True, Dipper did miss his own freedom; he missed Mabel and Steven and Stan and the Gems and being a human and even Lapis herself. But as much as he wanted all of that back, as much as he wanted his very life back, he knew that taking it back while taking it all away from Lapis would be nothing more than selfish, especially in light of how much she had given up for him before. And though the thought of being locked away in agonizing solitude with no one but the carelessly cruel Jasper to keep him company was nigh unbearable to him, Dipper knew that he had no choice but to endure it. After all, if Lapis was willing to go that far for him, then it was only fair that he return the favor and do the same for her.

“N-no…” he finally sighed, looking away sadly as he thought of all he was giving up. His family, his friends, his future… all of them would now only be a distant dream he’d never be able to have anymore. And even despite his righteous resolve, that alone was more than enough to bring a tear to his eye. “I… I can’t… As long as she’s safe and happy out there, then… then I’ll stay down here, like this…”

“Forever?” Bill pressed with almost twisted curiosity, clearly reveling in getting his way in the matter.

“F-forever…” Dipper muttered in defeat as that tear finally fell, knowing that, just like that, he had sealed his now hopeless fate, once and for all.

“Well, if you say so, kid!” the demon quickly pulled his hand back, taking Dipper’s seemingly only chance for freedom along with it. “But just so ya know, from here on out, there are no more take-backsies! Which means you’re pretty much stuck in here with Stripes for the long run!”

“Yeah, I… I know…” Dipper acknowledged quietly, looked down at the chains that would now keep him bound and trapped for the rest of his existence, however long that might be.

“Then I guess that’s that!” Bill concluded brightly. “Ya know, it really is a shame, Water Wings, that Pine Tree will never get to know just how much you’re giving up for her here. But oh well, with that new short human lifespan of hers, its not like she’ll have way too much longer to feel guilty about it. Unlike you, kid; you get to spend the next several millennia hanging out down here with Stripes. Who knows? Maybe by the time she decides to let you out, some of the people you love and care about will still be around… Nah, I’m just kidding, they’ll all be long dead and gone by then! Ha! This can’t get any better, can it!? But, I guess if you don’t have any further need for my ‘services’, then I’ll just be taking off here. See ya, Water Wings! Oh, and have fun spending the next few thousand years as a lonely little prisoner inside of a grotesque, hulking monster of a Gem fusion! Like always, I’ll be watching you!”

And, without sparing another word to the hapless new Gem he had so cruelly deceived, Bill disappeared, leaving Dipper alone in the dark depths of Malachite’s mindset once again, a prison that only seemed even more suffocating as he realized he had just condemned himself to being confined to it forever. And as that realization sunk in more and more, his aquatic wings finally dissipated in his growing despair, his eyes welling up with more and more tears that he was powerless to contain as they came out in heartbroken sobs.

Though Bill had told him he’d exist practically forever, Dipper felt as though his life might has well have ended right then and there. Because now, as a result of his own haste and foolishness alone, he’d never again get to experience anything but the empty darkness currently surrounding him, he’d never know anything but Jasper’s senseless burning hatred and cruel punishments and torture. He’d never again get to feel the warmth of the sun or breathe in the fresh morning air or even exist as his own being, his own person outside of the monstrous fusion he now was. He’d never get to hang out with Steven or Connie or Stan or even any of the Gems again, never tell any of them just how much they all meant to him. He’d never get to see Mabel again, to make amends for their final argument or take back the heated words he regretted so much now more than ever. And perhaps worst of all, he’d never get to thank Lapis for her sacrifice, for taking on the immeasurable burden he had now accepted in her stead. He’d never get to keep up his end of the promise he had made to her, that they would be safe and happy and together once again. He’d never get to do any of that, and he only had himself to blame for selling it all away in a moment of pain and desperation, two things that would now only accompany him forevermore.

Because now, he was just as Jasper herself had said; nothing more than a prisoner, a piece of the monstrous Malachite and all that they entailed.

And, from then on out, that’s all he ever would be, for the rest of time itself.

Or at least, that’s what he thought.

It took almost a month for any of them to finally discover where Dipper had been for so long. And when they did, it was in the least expected, and most alarming way possible.

Because when, after another long night of combing the surrounding area near Gravity Falls for any hopes of finding him, Dipper began to suddenly and inexplicably appear in Steven’s dreams, Lapis, Mabel, and the Gems all pressed him to keep going, to look further for the longtime missing boy who had seemingly vanished without a trace. And it was only as Steven found himself dropped into a vast, shadowy teal ocean, one that’s bitter cold water seemed to carry a feeling of mournful agony and hopeless suffering to it, that he finally, finally found Dipper. Though the state in which he found him was anything but relieving.

He floated amidst the seemingly fathomless ocean only a few feet away, his head hung and his eyes closed in an expression of complete and utter beaten exhaustion. Though what concerned Steven the most upon a first glance wasn’t just the fact that his entire coloration was now inexplicable shades of dark, deep blue; rather it was the thick, watery chains locked tightly around his wrists, ankles, and even his neck, all keeping him secured tightly in place, for whatever reason. Something that wasn’t going to continue for too much longer if Steven had anything to do about it.

“D-Dipper!” the young Gem cried, launching himself forward amidst the water he could somehow breathe in. This call was surprisingly enough to rouse Dipper from whatever stupor he was in as he weakly glanced up at Steven, letting out a gasp of shock to see anyone other than Jasper for the first time in what felt like years.

“S-Steven?” he asked, immediately perking up with both surprise and with oncoming fear as he glanced up anxiously. After all, in light of his self-imposed isolation here, he could have never expected Steven of all people to show up, though seeing such a friendly face hardly relieved him now. “W-what are you doing here? No, wait, how did you even get in here in the first place?! D-don’t tell me she-”

“W-wait, hold on, where is here, Dipper?” Steven asked, not hesitating to get the most important details first. “Is this where you’ve been for the past month? If it is, then you have to tell me where we are so we can finally come find you!”

“…I-it… its been a month?” Dipper asked, eyes wide with disbelief upon hearing this disconcerting news, one that almost brought tears to his eyes as he realized just how long he had been a prisoner for. “I-I’ve really been trapped here all that time?”

“Trapped where?!” the young Gem insisted almost desperately, placing his hands on Dipper’s shoulders in an attempt to shake him out of his rattled revere. “Dipper, please, you-”

“S-Steven!” he suddenly interrupted, fear filling his expression even more as he looked back up to his friend. “I don’t know how you got here, but you have to leave, now, before she realizes you’re here! Please, you can’t be-”

“Before who realizes I’m here?” Steven asked, confused. “Dipper, you’re not making any sense. I-I just want to help you, which means you have to tell me what’s going on. A-are you hurt? Who’s trapping you here? Why do you seem so scared?”

Dipper hesitated, flinching away out of genuine anxiety as he stole yet another glance upward, as if he was expecting something to emerge from above. Yet all the same, he forced his very apparent dread aside to finally try and offer some concrete information as he met Steven’s fretful gaze once again. “S-Steven, I’ve been-”

Before he even had a chance to finish, however, Dipper was suddenly lurched upward by the chains binding him, and despite a brief bout of resistance against this force, he was ultimately powerless to keep himself from being pulled up sharply by whatever was above him. “D-Dipper!” Steven cried, acting on instinct as he lunged forward to grab onto his friend’s ankle and keep him weighed down, though that hardly did anything except pull him upwards as well.

“S-Steven, what are you doing?!” Dipper exclaimed in immense panic as the young Gem continued to hold on. “You need to let go! If she sees you, then she’ll-”

“N-no! I’m not letting go!” Steven insisted, tears starting to well up in his eyes that were reserved solely for the friend he had been morosely missing for so long now. “I have to save you!”

“Ugh, you don’t understand!” Dipper shot back, somewhat frustrated with his persistence. “You can’t save me! I’m not-”

Once again, he was cut off as they both finally surfaced above the water, essentially landing on top of each other as they collapsed together upon its somewhat solid, dark surface. As breathless and worn as both of them were, however, neither of them had much of a chance to recover as they were joined by a new figure altogether.

“Alright, what’s with all the noise down there?” Jasper growled to her unfortunate captive as she marched over to him, her expression set in an unsavory scowl as she practically towered over both Dipper and Steven. “I thought I told you to…” The orange Gem suddenly trailed off, her eyes widening with shock as she noticed the young Gem in particular as he slowly began to pick himself up off the ground. “It can’t be… Rose?!”

“J-Jasper!” Steven sucked in a sharp, frightened gasp as he quickly stood, unquestionably afraid of the fierce Gem warrior who had nearly killed him in their first encounter. However, before Jasper could take another step closer to him, her approach was suddenly halted as none other than her own young hostage who had rushed to stand in between her and Steven.

“Leave him alone!” Dipper shouted defiantly, refusing to let Steven endure anything remotely close to the same kind of abuse and torment he had been going through for the past month. Unfortunately though, despite his selfless resolve to protect the young Gem, Jasper was, as always, much stronger and much more in control than he could ever hope to be. A fact that she easily proved as, with just a simple nod of her head, another burst of water shot up from the ground, one that formed something of an aquatic gag meant to silence Dipper as it latched onto him and covered his mouth. At the same time his other chains all tightened oppressively, keeping him essentially locked in place and helpless to do anything but watch in horror as Jasper sulked ever closer to the aptly frightened Steven.

“You stay out of this, Lazuli!” the orange Gem shouted back at him quite threateningly as the young Gem backed away from her apprehensively, especially as she turned to him with a triumphant grin. “And as for you, Rose… I don’t know how you got in here, but am I ever glad you’re here to see this. You thought you could take my Diamond away from me all those years ago? Well, look! I’ve taken one of your ‘Crystal Gems’ away from you!” Her twisted smile deepened as she motioned to Dipper, who was still trying his best to pull against his restraining chains, though of course, it was to no avail at all.

“Y-your… what?” Steven asked, completely confused amidst his ongoing fear. “I-I don’t understand! What are you doing to him?!”

“I’ll tell you what I’m doing,” Jasper sneered haughtily. “I’m getting even with both you and with her,” she nodded back to Dipper once more, who was only able to shake his head in worried warning to Steven, trying to beg him to get away while he still could. Something that, unfortunately, the young Gem didn’t understand as the orange Gem continued. “When Lapis disappeared and this one showed up in her place, I figured it was only fair that I make her suffer every ounce of suffering she put me through because of her! So I figured the best way to do that was to give her a taste of Malachite first hand…”

Steven couldn’t help but gasp in disbelief, his eyes wide with worry as he looked back to Dipper once more, who only looked away from him in shame out of the deal he had made, one that he wasn’t even able to properly explain for himself thanks to Jasper. “Y-you… you fused with him?” the young Gem asked with dawning horror. “But… but how? He’s not even a Gem! You can’t-”

“Ha! You really think I’m gonna fall for that tired old trick again?” Jasper scoffed, stepping over to Dipper and wrenching his chains even tighter as he pulled him towards her. “If she’s not a Gem, then what’s this?” Once again, the orange Gem roughly brushed her captive’s hair aside to reveal the stone fixated to his forehead, a sight that left Steven completely floored from the very moment he saw it.

“D-Dipper…” Steven said, his voice soft and sad as he looked to the new Gem, finally piecing everything about his ongoing mysterious absence together; and the picture he got once he had, was anything but comforting. “Y-you and Lapis… you guys… you’ve been-”

“Enough talking,” Jasper huffed impatiently as she roughly shoved Dipper aside to focus her attention back on Steven. “You know, Rose, I wanted to finish you off in front of what’s left of your pathetic army. But since you’re already here, I might as well make the most of a perfect opportunity. At least you’ll have one member of a captive audience around to see you in your shattering moments…”

It was clear that Jasper was taking quite a bit of sadistic pleasure in the obvious fear as was causing Steven, especially as she towered over him, her heavy helmet summoned and ready to land a brutal blow upon the defenseless young Gem before her. And yet… before she could throw her helmet down, something completely unexpected happened instead.

In an instant almost too quick to notice, a sudden burst of water lashed out at the orange Gem, latching itself around her neck in a thick, bulky chained manacle. Jasper lurched back, startled as more chains began to wrap around her wrists and even her legs until they managed to pull her down to the watery ground altogether. “W-what?!” she gasped, shocked as both her and Steven glanced back to none other than Dipper. His own chains and even the gag were completely gone, replaced by orbs of water that seemed to control Jasper’s chains entirely as they surrounded his tightly clenched hands. But what was by far the most surprising was his expression: fierce, outraged, and absolutely hostile as he struggled to pull the orange Gem back away from Steven and towards himself instead.

“I-I said… leave him alone!” he shouted as he threw his hands down, brutally shoving Jasper back down into the depths that were usually his prison. It was easily the first time he had ever had any semblance of actual control of Malachite’s mindscape, which was why he was left in slight shock as the orange Gem disappeared, leaving him and Steven alone and relatively safe, if only for a moment.

“D-Dipper…” Steven began rather breathlessly as he slowly began to approach the new Gem. “T-that… that was… are… are you really a Gem now?”

The most Dipper could do as the young Gem posed such a question was let out a small sigh, averting his concerned gaze once again as he instead looked to the water now surrounding his hands. “Steven, I-I-” Suddenly, he was cut off as his hands were pulled sharply downward, clearly by Jasper trying to work her way back up to the surface once more. Which of course, meant that there wasn’t much time before Dipper knew he’d be pulled back down in her place, with not a single soul to relay what could very well be the last message he might ever be able to get out. And so, he wasted not a single moment in telling the young Gem everything he could in what little time he had left. “S-Steven, listen to me!” he said, his tone serious and intent even as Jasper continued trying to pull him back under and herself back up. “I made a huge mistake b-but there’s no way to undo that now. Right now, I need you to get out of here a-and tell both Mabel and Lapis that I’m so sorry for all of this! I didn’t know things would turn out this way, but like I said, I can’t change that anymore, so… so I’m just going to have to stay here… l-like this…”

“What? No!” Steven cried, horrified by the very thought of Dipper keeping himself trapped in such an awful state. “Dipper, you don’t have to stay here! We can—no, we will help you! T-the Gems, I’m sure they can figure out a way to split you and Jasper up and then we can-”

“No, Steven!” Dipper insisted somewhat harshly. “I can’t leave. Because if I do, t-then Lapis has to come back here and be trapped with her all over again a-and I can’t do that to her, Steven, I can’t! She’s already been trapped enough!”

“But what about you, Dipper?!” the young Gem pressed almost desperately. “You don’t deserve to be trapped like this either! Lapis wouldn’t want this; I know she doesn’t! She wants you to safe and at home and with her! T-that’s why you have to let us help you. We just want you back already; everyone misses you, Lapis misses you, I miss you! S-so just tell me where you—or I guess where Malachite’s at and we can come and-”

“Just stop already, Steven!” Dipper shouted fiercely, clearly struggling to focus on keeping Jasper anchored down at this point. “Like I said, you don’t get it! I made this mess, which means I have to deal with it, alone! I don’t want anyone else getting hurt because of me!”

“But-”

“Just let me do this for you, Lapis!” Dipper suddenly snapped, yanking Jasper’s chains tightly in anger before he realized how he had misspoke. His eyes were wide and pained and filling up with oncoming tears as he looked to Steven once more, reaching the agonizing realization that this was perhaps the last time he’d ever get to see him. A fact that barely seemed to barely matter and matter more than anything at all, all at the same exact time. “I-I mean… I didn’t…”

“Dipper…” Steven said sadly, reaching a shaking hand out to his suffering friend. A hand that he made no attempts to take as he pulled away in both grief and shame.

Dipper still wasn’t exactly sure how his new water wings worked, but even so, he somehow managed to summon them from his gem, awkwardly maneuvering them around himself to block himself off from Steven more than anything else, despite the young Gem’s persistent attempts to reach out to him. “I’m sorry, Steven, but… I’m not Dipper anymore…” he said coldly, his tears lost amidst the water he was trapping himself within as he felt Jasper inch ever closer to the surface, ready to overtake him at seemingly any moment. Even so, he did let out a sigh of both sadness and relief as he saw Steven begin to inexplicably vanish from their mindscape altogether just as Jasper brutally emerged back into it. Surprisingly enough, however, she didn’t immediately shove him back down as she realized exactly what his intent was. An intent that she only smiled cruelly over as she stood behind him, a hand gripped tightly on his shoulder as they proclaimed her vicious triumph, his broken defeat, and their twisted fusion, all at the same exact time in perfect, empty unison:

“We’re Malachite now…”

To be continued…

#universe falls #jen writes #water pines au #uf 3 year anniversary extravaganza #oneshot #angst #dipper #steven #lapis #jasper #bill cipher #gravity falls #steven universe #crossover #au #au week

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