#but by the time they reach canon that has manifested into something quite horrible

[the-casbah-way]

FINALLY finished my outline for prodigal son it’s going to end up way longer than i planned </3

[luwupercal]

i figured out some thoughts recently on vulkan, specifically how i personally would write him, and since i’ve been telling people i thought i’d post it on here and just put it up for public record. this isn’t really based on anything from canon, just Thoughts, so... it might contradict canon, if it does don’t sue me, i’m a dumbass by trade. anyways

i’ve already talked about how i think vulkan isn’t as blindly optimistic as people portray him as, but i wanted to sort of clarify and reiterate. i think vulkan isn’t a diehard optimist as much as he’s horribly scared of losing hope. back in nocturne, many people Lost Their Hope Completely during vulkan’s childhood, as the drukhari raids took their toll. many others were heavily traumatized, including vulkan’s foster father, who’d lost his spouse just before vulkan arrived. so vulkan isn’t, actually, as much cheerful and optimistic as he is trying really hard to keep a flame of hope burning within him-- something that’s hard to do sometimes, in this galaxy.

he’s also very interested, more than any of his brothers, in one specific subject: how people tick. not necessarily in a psychological way, but moreso in an... i can’t describe it other than an almost pratchettian way? he’s interested in how people’s brains swing in their pendulums back and forth on a daily life, finds comfort in the mundane parts of existance, like having an old man who thinks he’s smarter than he actually is have his ego popped like a balloon by a well-placed question, or understanding that despite grumbling the entire way through it, people will come to help each other. he does believe very hardly in the inherent goodness of humankind, so sometimes the conclusions he comes to are biased or skewed, but yanno. he’s human too

(he also has a problem with nuance in terms of morality? he’s willing to accept people who aren’t perfect obviously, but he does divide people in Good People and Bad People (and Eldar, as a subcathegory of Bad People). it’s not... out of anything bad, this is just kind of a natural consequence of trying to believe people are inherently good against evidence)

my headcanon is that primarchs didn’t grow to 10 feet tall in 3 years and that they didn’t reach, like, middle-adulthood in three years but instead they were more like... 16-17? old enough to be independent in a pinch but young enough that they shouldn’t. and at 15ish they were some 7 feet tall or so, and they just kept swelling bigger and bigger afterwards. with that said: anecdotically, a young vulkan took that extra growth especially hard, combined with his regenerative powers (which imhc had first manifested during his childhood). he kept having logicless anxieties and weird nightmares about being some kind of gray goo

(as an addon: he finds horror about immortality sucking particularly tough to digest. it’s a good thing harlan ellison’s been long, long forgotten by the 30th millennium, isn’t it)

he intuited something not just good but almost akin in konrad, before everything went down, and it really genuinely did freak him out. he couldn’t quite name it, since he didn’t have the full context of what rules konrad lived by and why he did what he did, but he could sense that they both, in completely opposite ways, had struggled extremely hard to believe in the inherent goodness of humanity while allowing for “bad” people to not lose said faith (at least before konrad’s legendary freakout / blowing up nostramo). but where vulkan had seeked to reward the good, konrad had instead punished the bad. and vulkan could intuit that, even without all the information, and it made his skin positively crawl

(another parallel is that vulkan’s too afraid of the darkness to stop being optimistic and konrad’s too afraid of the light to stop being cynical. there’s material here and it’s going underused!! it’s really cool material!! come on)

also, vulkan has a really hard time even thinking about his own mental struggles? he thinks a lot of how he thinks that’s due to trauma is just an obvious conclusion everyone’s ought to eventually reach, and so he only realizes too late, sometimes, when he’s doing something unhealthy or irrational

(like torching a planet)

anyways i think about vulkan a lot. i hope these thoughts make you think about him a bit because i think he deserves more people who actually have smarter thoughts than me to think about him. i think that’s all on my thoughts for now

one last thought: it’s really fucking cute that he was friends with ferrus. they played xbox together. vulkan has the oldest xbox knownnnnn to mannnnnnnn

[elyvorg]

It’s Shadow Maki’s berserk form, in the same vein as the Shadow Kaito design I once did!

In short, this is a concept from Persona 4 in which a person’s suppressed thoughts and feelings manifest into an abstract, symbolic representation of their issues. I’ve made a couple of posts mentioning vague, general ideas about Maki’s Shadow before, but now that I’ve finally managed to piece together enough ideas for her berserk form in my head, I couldn’t not draw it.

Since I’m not going to be writing a fic about this like I did with Shadow Kaito (there’s no need; Maki effectively already faces her shadow in canon thanks to Kaito’s encouragement and support), I’m instead going to just talk about all of the symbolism involved right here.

The Shadow initially manifests as just a giant box without any holes, upright and closed, thudding and rattling like something inside is trying to get out. As it tips over and falls open, the Maki doll clambers out from under a huge pile of weapons. The hands appear before she can leave the box itself, their strings piercing through it to take hold of the weapons and stab them into Shadow Maki, keeping her trapped in there under their control.

A significant part of this design was based around the fact that I’d already decided that Maki’s Persona would be Pandora. Pandora got associated with all the bad things that escaped when she opened her box, but that shouldn’t be considered her fault – it’s the fault of the asshole gods who filled the box with those things and gave it to her in the first place, knowing she’d open it.

So that’s why there’s a box filled with weapons, and why one pair of shadowy hands is holding it. The hands represent the members of Maki’s cult who trained her, or perhaps also the rich assholes who hire her to kill people, so the box with all those horrible things inside really originated from them.

The imagery of the box also fits very well with Maki’s tendency to cope through compartmentalisation – she’s become very good at just shutting away the things she doesn’t want to think about so that she can do what she needs to do. In fact, Pandora’s myth also works really well here, because after letting out all the bad things, Pandora shut the box in such a hurry that she left Hope, the one good thing, trapped inside. That’s basically exactly what Maki did with her own hope – her wishes that one day she could escape this hell and have a normal life – in order to cope. Shadow Maki starts out trapped inside a box because she’s been firmly sealed away inside a metaphorical box by the surface part of Maki for a long, long time.

(This compartmentalisation idea also works for the weapons being sealed inside the box to start with, since Maki also tries to shut away and avoid thinking about all the horrible things she’s been through and done whenever it’s possible for her to do so.)

I am aware that actually in the original myths, Pandora had a jar, and it’s a modern(ish) mistranslation that made it a box. However, while the original correct version of Atlas worked way better for Kaito (he carried all of space, not just the Earth!), this time the misinterpreted version happens to fit a lot better for Maki – because toy boxes are a thing. Except oh god those aren’t toys those should not be anywhere near children.

That was the other main idea I had in mind for this, before I’d even figured out Pandora and knew a box ought to be involved: this sort of imagery that’d disturbingly juxtapose Maki’s child caregiver and assassin talents, because it is horrifying and heartbreaking that she was put through all this and turned into a killing machine as a child.

So it was a pretty neat bonus that Pandora’s box could also be presented as Pandora’s toy box. There’s some more symbolism in the idea of the Maki doll having been alone and forgotten at the bottom of the toy box, because Maki on the surface hasn’t allowed herself to think about her normal, happy life as a child in a long time. Meanwhile, the weapons piled on top of her get taken out of that box and “played with” by surface-Maki a lot more often.

Even if anyone did pick up the doll and try to play with it again, it’s broken and mutilated and can never be the same any more. Maki’s traumatic experiences have messed her up enough that she can never have that normal life back now in quite the same way.

And even if she did try to be free anyway and live her own life despite being broken, she still can’t actually escape that box that she’s shut herself in, because she’s being controlled like a puppet by evil outside forces beyond her reach. That puppet imagery was another thing I knew I had to do with this – fitting neatly with the child-caregiving image of the doll – because a lot of the tragedy of Maki’s story is the fact that she never had a choice. Everything she’s been through has all been her being controlled and manipulated by people who don’t give a damn about her.

The box also helps here in that she can’t even see the hands puppeteering her, because Maki doesn’t actually see her situation as herself being controlled and feels like she deserves to bear every single bit of the blame and responsibility for her actions herself. (And the owners of the hands can’t see her in there suffering either, because like hell any of those assholes care about that.)

I had the strings be attached to the Maki doll via weapons impaling her partly just as an efficient way to combine the toy mutilation and puppeteering motifs into one, but also because that control and manipulation is precisely one of the main things that’s been hurting her and messing her up so much. She’s technically holding those knives in her hands and could use them to kill someone like this, but doing so is hurting her just as much. And trying to break free of it would only hurt her more – so it’s easier for her to just stop struggling and give up.

[number5theboy]

Wow. Your ask queue has gotten pretty serious today. So I thought about asking you some fun questions as a positive distraction (hopefully). 1) If the UA sibs were throwing a party what would their duties be? 2) 3x5 childhood head canon (since nobody talks abt them) 3) If the UA sibs went to college what majors would they choose?

Dearest Anon, you cannot believe how nice I think this gesture is, I really appreciate and cherish this ask so much, thank you, thank you, thank you.

1) If the UA sibs were throwing a party what would their duties be? 

Allison and Five are in charge of the booze. Both of them know their cocktails and how to mix, and Allison also pulled off enough birthday parties for Claire to know well-tasting, colourful non-alcoholic drinks. They go wild o the decorations, definitely having too much fun with the little paper umbrellas, and Five enjoys playing bartender on the evening (I’m imagining a party in the mansion here) while Allison entertains. Vanya and Luther share the responsibility for both music and food. Luther has absolutely incredible taste in party bangers, but is hopeless with putting together a playlist that doesn’t horribly clash with itself, so he picks songs, Vanya adds some and puts them in the most entertaining order possible. They also put together bite-sized appetizers in the kitchen the entire day leading up to the party, grooving to the playlist made from songs they rejected from the party playlist. Diego helped them out for half the day, but Vanya and Luther have the tendency to make dad jokes, and after a while, Diego couldn’t take it anymore. In the evening, Vanya and Luther put together the sound system, Luther easily carrying the heavy equipment around and Vanya knowing what to do with it. At one point, Luther was carrying a speaker with Vanya perched on top of it, giving commands on where to put what. If you then turn around, you find Team Decorations, Diego, Ben and Klaus. Klaus clearly put his entire heart and soul into the aesthetic of this party, and definitely picked an extravagant and accidentally genius theme, like ‘80s Gothic’. Diego will not admit it, but he did scour the entire house for objects to add to the decoration, and Ben just resigned himself to make sure they had things like cups and plates, but also definitely got a disco ball. So Klaus, Diego and Ben are busy the entire afternoon to put up neon Victorian-style decorations which clash both more and less than expected with the inside of the mansion. Ben uses the tentacles to put garlands up high, just as Klaus manifests ghosts to hoist him up to places where he can’t reach. Diego’s powers help him put up a tower of glasses perfectly. The decoration is wild and fun and everyone’s really happy with it. Ben, Luther and Vanya share the role of photographer for the evening, and they catch a lot of fun family snapshots of the evening. Allison and Five grinning widely behind the bar, little paper umbrellas tucked into their hair. Klaus and Luther on the dancefloor, trying and failing to gracefully remember their Paso Doble lessons from childhood, in the background Five is looking on in horror from behind the bar. Diego and Ben, absolutely mastering the Paso Doble. Vanya, with fluorescent fake cobwebs on her head and Allison in the background, holding up two fingers at the back of Vanya’s head. Luther bear-hugging Diego and Ben. Klaus, his cheeks round with appetizers, making him look like a chipmunk in a very cool skirt. A selfie that Vanya took sitting at the bar, with Five grimacing behind her. Okay I got very much carried away with that idea, I really love it!!

2) 3x5 childhood head canon (since nobody talks abt them) 

Allison and Five, my darlings. I don’t think they were that close growing up, but I think Five must’ve been extremely fascinated by Allison’s powers, as they bent reality. Reginald noticed this interest, and thus used Five the most as a guinea pig to push the limits of Allison’s powers, also because Five had the strongest own will as a kid, always talking back, so cutting him down was in Reginald’s interest. At first, Five was quite intrigued, but Reginald really drove Allison and thus him to the brink, and afterwards, the two of them would sneak up to Allison’s window, just escaping for a bit. They would softly talk about anything but training, sometimes trailing to the future. The last time they did that, before Five got lost in the future, they were thirteen, and they talked about having kids of their own one day. Five, seeing how Reginald treated them, could never imagine having children, but Allison sometimes talked about wanting to have kids one day. It was a conversation replaying in Five’s head when he read Vanya’s book for the first time, and found out that he had a niece he never got to meet, a niece that died along with everyone else, a niece that Allison just have love more than anything in the world. This got sad. Whoops.

3) If the UA sibs went to college what  majors would they choose? 

Oof, that’s always difficult. Luther might do astrophysics, but I can totally see him do botany or English literature as well. Actually, it’d be cute if Ben and him both did English literature, but maybe Luther switched majors at some point, getting Ben to dramatically call him a traitor every time they meet in the university corridors. Diego might do criminology, or social work, but I also see him not go to college at all and rather learn manual work. I have a soft spot for smith Diego, ngl, I think it’d be cool if he could make his own weapons. Also I know he went to police academy in show canon, but just no. Klaus definitely went to college, both for the experience and to test out how much he can push the American education system. He probably did courses like gender studies and might have annoyed Diego in criminology, but totally took some straight white boy classes just to rile people in there up, like economics, business or western philosophy. He genuinely makes friends with at least three frat boys. I know Vanya would go for a violin degree, but after Season 2, I really love the idea of her studying to become a special needs teacher, with a focus on teaching autistic children. Allison definitely did drama, but I love the idea of her also doing media management to get to know the behind the scenes of the entertainment industry, so she can manage herself. And Five honestly could have gone for anything. Clearly, quantum physics is something that fits him well, but I think Five could find interest in almost anything. He could also do languages, in my opinion, or anything with engineering.

[ofgreyskull]

“ sometimes in the morning i am petrified & can't move awake, but cannot open my eyes & the weight is crushing down on my lungs, i know i can't breathe & hope someone will save me this time. “

adora she-ra | 23 | lesbian | bartender | just wants to be loved

  ─  the mirrors surrounding you did as they were meant to, reflecting back a spitting image of FLORENCE PUGH  -  but it’s clear something is wrong from the moment that a vision of PLANNING A BEST FRIENDS ROADTRIP TO RESTORE MAGIC TO THE UNIVERSE strikes you.  perhaps it was a passing daydream in the frenzy of the funhouse. you reassure yourself  -  you’re ADORA,  a TWENTY THREE YEAR OLD BARTENDER whose virtue lies in your + STRENGTH & + FEARLESSNESS, although you’ve been told that you tend to be quite - BLUNT & - SELF SACRFICING,  and you’re associated with THE SOUND OF A SWORD BEING DRAWN, THE SUN REFLECTING OFF WATER, AN ENDLESS STAR FILLED SKY by those around you.  suddenly,  however,  you’ve found THE SWORD OF PROTECTION on your person - was that always there? from the moment you leave the funhouse,  memories from your life in SHE-RA & THE PRINCESSES OF POWER have begun to return - leaving whoever you had been before in the mirror’s reflection behind you.  you can almost hear BETTER SON/DAUGHTER by RILO KILEY following in your wake.

canon ( full of spoilers so if you’d like to watch the show i wouldn’t read this part. i’m sorry it’s long, this is mostly for me to go back to if i forget something so really i won’t be offended if no one reads this part lmao )

grew up in the horde since an infant with catra, the two of them were raised by shadow weaver and were best friends.

it wasn’t a great childhood

was told how horrible the princesses were and they were the bad guys, they were always told they were a dangerous threat to etheria.

when she is older adora got promoted to force captain which she was extremely happy about.

the two of them sneak out and adora gets lost in the whispering woods. there she comes across the sword of protection and starts having visions when she touches it and it knocks her out.

her and catra return back to the fright zone but adora leaves again that night to go back to the sword.

there she meets bow and glimmer and they fight for the sword. neither of them trust her bc she’s a horde solider and adora ends up getting captured by them.

she learns from bow and glimmer how truly awful the horde is and how they destroy cities, lands, and hurt innocent people.

with the sword she transforms into she-ra ( and is v much horrified about it and the fact she’s a princess) that night when trying to fight off some robot bug.

she also discovers light hope that night too

bow and glimmer take adora to a village that later gets destroyed by the horde and catra appears driving one of the tanks that wrecked the village

adora tries explaining how horrible the horde actually is to catra, how they’ve been manipulated by shadow weaver and hordak their whole lives and tries convincing her to go with her and leave the horde together. catra says no and that begins the first heartbreak adora ever experienced. ( rip that really broke her heart )

the two of them then become enemies ( cue the ‘hey adora’ )

adora as she-ra also accidentally transformed a horse into a unicorn, he’s able to talk, fly, and they’re now linked and he is her steed. his name is swift wind.

adora is now part of the rebellion, lives in bright moon, and the best friend squad gets the princess alliance back together

for a while whenever her and catra would go against each other she would try to convince her to come with her

the fighting between the horde and the rebellion goes on for like two years i believe

still v upset and hurt about catra not being with her but tries not to show it

shadow weaver ends up joining the rebellion 

catra captures adora and wants to use her sword as the key to open the portal and she almost destroys etheria completely.

adora wakes up back at the horde with catra and with her memory completely wiped 

something doesn’t feel right to her and she’s losing track of time and her memories start coming back to her.

reality starts falling apart and adora is trying to reach the portal to close it and save everyone and etheria ( also she has to fight corrupted catra rip )

once she finds the portal she learns she has to sacrifice herself in order to close it and save everyone, but glimmer’s mom does it instead because the world needs she-ra. the portal closes, but adora blames herself for angella’s death

because of what catra did adora completely cuts off catra and stops trying to convince her to join her, not believing things can be the way they used to.

adora learns about the heart of etheria project.

adora tries to stop the heart of etheria activation but glimmer want to activate it thinking it will help them defeat the horde she helps scorpia activate her runsestone. adora goes to light hope to confront her about it around the same time and light hope uses she-ra to begin activating it.

adora learns she’s not from etheria, but instead from eternia, she’s a first one and was sent through a portal as a baby by light hope to become she-ra and complete the heart of etheria project

once the planet is balanced light hope portals etheria out of despondos and back into the wider universe. this also means horde prime and his army can arrive.

adora as she-ra is able to fight the activation process and deactivates it, but in the process breaks the sword of power and believes she isn’t able to transform into she-ra anymore.

adora now has to relearn how to fight without she-ra like back when she was in the horde but it’s extremely difficult and she didn’t realize jsut how much she has come to rely on her power.

horde prime’s army begins attacking etheria, they also have captured glimmer and catra.

adora, bow, and entrapta go in the ship to rescue glimmer from horde prime’s ship.

while in space they receive a message from catra telling them she’s going to send glimmer to them and warns her not to come to horde prime’s ship that it’s a trap for her. catra apologizes to adora before sending glimmer her way.

adora becomes intensely worried for catra and doesn’t want to lose her and realizes just how deeply she’s in love with her.

their ship runs out of fuel and they stop at a planet that has the crystals they need for fuel. once there adora uses her inhuman strength as she used to when she was able to turn into she-ra to stop a rock from crashing down and realizes she still has power within her.

they go to horde prime to save catra.

once in horde prime’s ship that’s when she discovers her under horde prime’s mind control. 

after being surrounded by horde prime’s clones adora is desperate to save catra and get them both out of there. she ends up being able to transform into she-ra and manifest a new sword.

she fights off the clones with catra unconscious in her arms and they return back to the ship.  

once she instructs the ship to go home she goes over to catra and lifts her in her arms and heals her and she can’t stop worrying and checking up on catra the whole way home.

the two of them are back to being close and flirting with each other and it’s so obvious to the ppl around them how much they love each other.

once home they realize just how long they’ve been gone bc most of etheria is under horde prime’s mind control ( including some of the princesses ) and is being taken over with his clones.

shadow weaver comes up with a plan for adora to save the planet, despite it being incredibly dangerous and having to sacrifice herself adora agrees to it much to catra’s dislike. but adora will do anything to save people even if it means getting hurt or dying.

adora accepts the heart’s fail safe and bonds it to her soul to carry it to the heart to etheria

catra ends up leaving in the middle of the night not wanting to watch adora sacrifice herself, but adora catches her and begs her to stay that she needs her. catra leaves and adora cries out for her ( my girl is heartbroken again )

adora heads to the heart of etheria to use the fail safe once there she’s bombarded with visions of her past self  along with horde prime getting into her head and sending a monster for her to fight.

adora is wounded by the monster and cannot fight and can barely walk. catra appears and helps adora by trying to take out the monster. shadow weaver appears as well to help adora get to the heart.

they make it to the heart but adora hears catra scream and goes back to try to save her.

shadow weaver steps in to fight the monster herself and seals the opening for catra and adora to not come through. they have to stand back and watch as she sacrifices herself for them.  

they go to the heart together

she is unable to transform into she-ra bc of horde prime’s virus and tries to convince catra to leave so she can do this on her own, not wanting catra to watch her die. catra ends up staying with her while she uses the fail safe.

adora become unconscious and is on the verge of dying. during this she has a vision of her wish it’s her’s and catra’s future where they’re married. the vision is then interrupted by horde prime.  

she’s dying and while unconscious she hears and sees catra and tries fighting to stay alive, it isn’t until catra tells her she loves her that she’s able to succeed in staying alive.

she wakes up in catra’s arms and tells her she loves her too AND THEY KISS

the failsafe works and saves the planet right before her friends and etheria is about to be destroyed

adora as she-ra appears where horde prime is and destroys his ship and heals the planet, as well as gets rid of horde prime for good.

the best friend squad ( which now includes catra ) agree on going on another mission to bring back magic to the universe

in alucard

   growing up in alucard wasn’t easy for adora, she was in the foster care system since she was a baby and knows nothing about her parents or why they gave her up. she remained in a group home with other kids in the system, watching as some of the kids she became friends with got adopted into families while she remained in the home. the home was strict and adora is a stickler for rules so she always did what was told of her, she became a ‘favorite’ to the house parents. because of that she never got in trouble/punished when she occasionally broke a rule or two with the other kids. instead she would get numerous lectures about how much better she was than the others, how she shouldn’t follow them, and what great things she could do if she keeps listening to the house parents. adora didn’t understand it at them time, what they meant or why she was the favorite, but she did like attention and the feeling of a ‘parent’ looking out for her. she didn’t realize until she was older that the house parents were grooming her to be exactly who they wanted her to be. adora herself never knew what she wanted to be or who she truly was because she always followed what the house parents told her to be, always did what was told of her. all she wanted was to be loved.

   after her eighteenth birthday she was out of the system, her house parents urged her to join the military. they told her it would be perfect for her because of how strong and how immaculate of a fighter she is. the more adora thought about it the more she realized she didn’t want that for herself, she didn’t want to hurt people. that was when adora made her first choice for herself, she decided to leave the home and begin her life without the influence of her house parents. she jumped from job to job for a few years, trying to make any money she could to be able to afford a place to live. she finally settled on being a bartender, even though it’s not the job she had dreamed for herself she gets paid well and it’s enough until she figures out what she’s good for. 

powers/abilites

transformation - is able to transform into she-ra and is able to transform the sword into various objects

superhuman strength

superhuman agility

healing powers

animal transformation

energy blast

aura generation

animal magic

sword summoning

space survival

expert at hand to hand combat

weaknesses

the data disk - a first one’s tech that is able to corrupt and control any other first ones tech that comes into contact with it or whatever it controls. when the sword is infected with it  while adora is she-ra she enters a violent, berserk rage. she incapable to telling who is a friend or an enemy and goes after anyone/anything in sight. take the sword away from her and destroying the disk is the only way to stop the corruption. once the sword is taken adora falls into an inebriated state and she doesn’t remember what happened.

unclear mind - when her mind is unfocused or full of doubt she can’t transform into she-ra

traits/personality

brave

loyal

indomitable will

a leader

stubborn

competitive

rule follower

needs a plan for everything

connections

catra: ex-girlfriend, ended on bad terms, but still loves her 

hmu on discord if you wanna plot !! 

[komahinasecretexchange]

Title: hiraeth

Author: @slickandsolangelic

For: @usernamefieldhere

Rating/Warnings: T (warning for existentialism and disassociation)

Prompt: Hinata dealing with the consequences of having Kamukura as a past self, au or canon

Author’s notes: I hope this is to your liking, and I hope it’s okay that the au I picked is dnd-esque fantasy! I had lots of fun with this, and I can only hope that you do, too ^^

The Isles of Jabberwock are oft a pleasant place to be in, their sand a fine gold that lets itself be swept away by the lapping currents from the crystalline blue ocean that surrounds them. Better yet is the sun there, bearing down on them with its golden rays, easing flowerings into bloom and saplings into growth. Hinata is very, very glad that they managed to rescue it from being leveled down by those ambitious bandits from the east.

An adventuring life was unpredictable at its core, but unusually gratifying after a job well done.

Which is to say, it feels really fucking good to beat up some bad guys and get money for it, but such a thought is embarrassingly self indulgent and thus will remain at the very back of Hinata’s mind, where it belongs.

Nanami looks up from the weapon she’s examining. It’s a medium sized spear with a silver tip. She seems to weigh it in her hands for a bit, before letting out a satisfied hum.

“Komaeda-kun, would this be good to use if you ever wear yourself out using your magic?”

“Oh, Nanami-san, that’s really kind of you to think of me,” Komaeda starts to say, looking up from the item he was examining, a small flute embroidered with bronze trimmings. “But I’ve never really been good with sharp things. And as I’m already worn out, I’m afraid I might just point it the wrong way and, as per chance’s design. Being impaled sounds like it’d be inconvenient for our party!”

“Yeah,” Hinata says solemnly, because he’s traveled with Komaeda long enough to know that this is entirely possible.

“Yeah,” Nanami says, and she puts the spear back.

“I like this,” Hinata says. He raises both his hands to show them them silk pouch nestled in his palms. “It’s magical, so you can put up to three hundred pounds of stuff in there.”

Komaeda is at his side then, gliding past the tables laden with strings and wooden instruments. His arm brushes Hinata’s when he reaches from the small card attached to the golden thread around the pouch’s hem.

“It’s also worth five hundred gold pieces,” Komaeda says.

“Oh,” Hinata says.

“Oh,” Nanami agrees.

“If Hinata-kun really wants it, I can-” but Hinata is already putting it back.

They wind up circling the aisles of items for a few more hours, the other two interjecting with commentary when one makes a suggestion. It’s more comfortable than anything, Hinata muses, surfing through their options with one another together like this. Battles where their competence and trust in one another made the difference between loss and success, between life and death; that’s something that’s undeniably special. Something that matters, in a way, and Hinata knows that, and he is grateful- but he much prefers the quieter moments like these, when all that matters in the moment is their group effort at bargaining with the shopkeepers, the sunset’s rays framing their silhouettes as they journeyed through the winding paths of towns they’d saved or served.

There’s something he’s come to appreciate about their regular time spent together as friends rather than adventuring companions. It’s more bothersome than jarring (in a way that makes Hinata feel equal measures irritated and fond) when Komaeda answers a yes or no question with a tangent which existentially questions the universe and when Nanami turns out to have been asleep with her eyes open for the past hour they were going over plans.

It’s nice, Hinata thinks. It’s just… nice, to have moments of quiet in between. Away from threats to their life during the day, and away from his night terrors when it grows darker.

The Isles don’t really have much to offer aside from scenery and impressive craftsmanship when it comes down to it. They have a good time crossing the bridges that lead up to the separate islands, though (it doesn’t take them that long to haul Komaeda out from the water when he falls off one), and the locals aren’t unpleasant folk to converse with.

The third island has a slightly less relaxing ambiance than the others. Of the six, it’s certainly the loudest and most vibrant of the bunch– Komaeda almost immediately identifies it as the art venue when they pass by a Bard-run tavern by the name of “Titty Typhoon”. It sounds like hell in there, but hell in fifty different types of musical instruments and also wildly out of tune.

“Well,” Komaeda says, looking cheerful. “They’re having fun.” His hands are clasped together, and his eyes are widened in something that’s either wonder or contemplation. Hinata’s learnt to recognize when Komaeda begins to form overly complex thoughts over things that really aren’t that deep, but he chooses not to intervene.

“Very loudly,” Hinata says.

“And out of tune,” Nanami adds, but she’s smiling.

“Everyone’s Bardic inspiration manifests in different forms.”

“Yeah, well, it also helps when it manages to inspire without being a Bardic pain in the ass.”

“Hinata-kun speaks very boldly! Well, I guess I can’t really blame you for not finding that kind of music to your fancy, not when your own bardic prowess is unique in a way that’s unrecognizable to most regular people such as myself.”

“That was months ago, holy shit-”

“The sweet melody still haunts my dreams.”

“You’re horrible.”

“You’re the most inspiring artist a commoner like me has ever had the pleasure of hearing.”

Hinata’s shoving him now, trying to stifle a smile behind the sleeves of his leather armour plating, and failing quite spectacularly.

“Asshole,” Hinata says, but there’s no bite to it. Komaeda gives him a smile that’s a different kind of unsettling, only because it makes his insides turn funny. It’s wide, but soft around the edges, and it makes his eyes crease ever so slightly. Then he looks away, and that’s that.

.

Hinata hasn’t slept in what feels like three fucking days.

In reality, it’s only been about two and a half- the other half he spent goofing around with Komaeda and Nanami in the Isles of Jabberwock, hooking up their party with new shit for the next challenge.

This is bad. With the map of the nearby continent spread out before him on the scratched and damaged inn table, he should be getting in the mood to mark their next exploit. It’s a pretty good map, even if the dim yellow glow emanating from their lamps doesn’t do its details much justice.The sharp strokes that form the peaks of mountains are unmistakable nearby the expertly woven lines of rivers and streams, cutting through grassy landscapes and flat wastelands. There are circles and lines which mark territories and label them, categorizing them as either off limits or safe to explore.

But with how tired he is, Hinata’s beginning to circle around the same thought over and over. In fact, is that a fucking city, or a firefly? Is that a firefly on his map? Hinata isn’t sure if what’s on his map is a firefly or a city. That circular dot of yellow– is it a firefly, or is it a city?

“You don’t look well,” says a familiar voice. The dot of yellow buzzes and leaps into the air and onto Hinata’s nose. He swings back suddenly in an effort to swat it with both his arms. The momentum drives his chair backwards.

The quiet tavern folk don’t care to stop their chatter when Hinata crashes to the ground with a sound thud, and so the warlock is left to stare at the ceiling with unblinking eyes and his palms cupped around his nose as the minuscule sphere rises and floats away. Nanami’s concerned face hovers above him.

Ah, so it was a firefly.

Their next quest is for a blond wizard hailing from an important family. Hinata thinks he’s kind of an asshole, but Hinata also thinks that five thousand gold is maybe a sufficient price to get a job done for an asshole. He wants them to retrieve this artifact called the “Eye of Fate”, something that apparently reflects a person’s psyche and innermost desires. This is worrisome considering the Asshole Status of the person they’re retrieving it for, but according to the client, the Eye of Fate is trapped within the body of a topaz crystal gollum, a probably slightly more dickish creature to bestow such a relic upon.

Nanami helps pick him up off the ground, but he needs to take a handful of moments to gather his bearings.

“You need to take care of yourself. We won’t be able to get anything done if you neglect your health.”

Hinata thinks this is rich coming from Nanami, who never seems to sleep and yet spends half of the time she’s awake in a state of trance that’s impossible to break her out of. He means to tell her this, but instead the words that come out are “Lord Togami is an asshole.”

“He’s not easy to work with,” Nanami agrees.

“He’s a big fucking asshole.”

“Okay,” Nanami says patiently, sitting him down on the chair.

“I hate rich people who offer lots of money for ridiculous quests.”

“Mhm.”

“Nanami, there was a firefly on my map.”

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, there was.”

“It flew.”

“I think fireflies tend to do that.”

Hinata presses his face against the scratchy surface of the map. He traces a finger along the Mountain Range of the Dead, across the Red River, and straight through the continental tunnel into the cavernous entrance of the Cave of Wonders.

“Yeah,” Hinata mutters. “’S cause of their wings.”

“Sure is.” Nanami puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Yeah,”

“Yeah,” she says, and pets his hair gently. “Go to sleep.”

.

The journey is harsh, but not unbearable.

Through the rocky mountain range they pass, tearing down groups of chimaeras, hopping between camping sights near the valleys. Komaeda picks flowers by one of the crevices, and Hinata feels bad when they wither under his bare hands.

They stop just a clearing away from the bank of Red River for the night. The sun kisses the horizon and turns it a warm shade of purple that lulls Hinata to slumber.

He dreams.

.

Hinata’s by the Red River.

His pants are rolled up to his knees, and the sky above him is as dark as the waters he’s lowered his feet into.They lap at his skin, icy and unforgiving. He pushes closer to the river side, sinks his legs further in until his calves feel numb.

Below the surface of the water, something is stirring. Moving like a shadow through the already dark film that covers the waters, closer than he wants it to be.

A voice says, “Haven’t they told you that this river is red with the blood of the fallen?”

Hinata doesn’t respond. He watches the figure grow closer and closer, a monster baited to the surface. His legs form ripples in the water when he moves them to and fro. He watches the spray of droplets disrupt the dark surface, and tries to hum away the panic in his chest.

“…You’re not listening anymore.”

The darkness is coming. Hinata is not afraid. He’s not afraid. He’s not.

(He’s terrified. He can’t move anymore, can barely breathe. He is helpless in a way that makes him angry at himself, useless in a way that makes him regret its existence.)

“You’re going to have to. It’s irrational to think you can run away forever.” The voice is calm as it says this.

It is nowhere. It is everywhere. It’s the full moon that lights up the stars above his head, the ripples his legs have stopped making in the river, the all encompassing darkness that wants to eat him whole, devour him until nothing is left of his existence.

.

Hinata wakes up with a start. His hands aren’t quite steady. That is to say, he’s shaking bad.

Hinata steps outside for a moment. It’s dark out still, so he snaps his fingers and watches a small flame flicker to life in his lantern. Their tent’s still steady against the breezes coming from the north. (Nanami had done a good job hammering it in right, after all. She’s always been good with practical skills like these, even if her proficiency was healing). The leaves sway high above his head on their host of towering trees, though, and the wind’s whistle is unmistakable and sharp, cutting through the night.

Hinata shudders.The bite of the air is akin to the sting of frost at his knees in the dream.

A hand lands on his shoulder, and he nearly jumps a foot into the air.

“Hinata-kun?”

Oh. It’s Komaeda. Hinata tries to be subtle about the breath of relief that leaves him, but he’s sure he failed. Whatever. God, whatever.

Komaeda retracts his hand. “I’m sorry,” he says with the kind of sincerity only he seems to be capable of. “I called for you before, but you seemed preoccupied.”

“…Ah, yeah.” Hinata tries to go for a smile, but it slips off his face at astronomical velocity. He’s exhausted, tired in a way that makes his bones ache and his heart stutter at every step. “It’s just that…” For a few long moments, he contemplates his next words, painfully aware of the tentative silence between them. Komaeda doesn’t break it, and even though Hinata’s looking away, he can feel the weight of Komaeda’s gaze pressing into the back of his head, sharper than the wind that pierces through the thicket of trees surrounding their campgrounds.

Hinata says, “You’re a bard, right?” Of course Komaeda is, that’s out of the question. When Hinata whips around, he sees the look of tempered confusion Komaeda is giving him. His head is tipped sideways, and his gray eyes blink at Hinata questioningly.

“By the standard definition, I am,” Komaeda says. “Perhaps not entirely deserving of the title, but that is the most conventional term to reference what I do.”

“…Right,” Hinata says. He tries to swallow back the lump that forms in his throat, and finds he can’t do it, just as he can’t quite bring himself to dispel the anxiety eating away at the pit of his stomach. “Yeah, I know. You’re a good bard, Komaeda, we’ve had this talk.”

“And you’re changing the subject, Hinata-kun,” Komaeda responds quietly. He’s still looking at him with those intent eyes. Fuck. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

Silence. And then a howl from the wind hollow and loud all at the same time.

“Have you heard of the Ender of The World?”

More silence. And then, a laugh.

“Kamukura Izuru… who hasn’t?”

“So he has a name?”

Komaeda sets his own lantern on the ground, then lowers himself and takes a cross-legged position. Hesitant, Hinata follows suit.

“You didn’t know? They named him after the original Wizard, the one whose discoveries helped incorporate the plane of magic with our own.”

“Ah,” Hinata says. His throat is dry. “I, uh, never looked into it too much. I tried to, well- avoid. That sort of stuff.”

“…I see,” Komaeda says, and there’s an obvious question in his tone. To his credit, he doesn’t ask it.

“Well, Kamukura Izuru… Well, to start, he’s beautiful. I saw him, once.”

Hinata’s heart stops. “You did?”

“I did,” Komaeda says, and smiles. There are no creases under his eyes this time, no softness to the edge of his mouth. Only a wide curve that increases Hinata’s unease. Komaeda’s eyes watch the purple flame in his lantern flicker and sway.

“When I was still travelling alone, I took shelter in a sea-side town. I was still young then, maybe in my mid teen years, and so I was still learning how to get around alone, and still learning how to cope with my abilities. Naturally, no one wanted someone whose magical energy was as unstable and harmful as mine.” Komaeda makes animated hand gestures as he speaks, his voice remaining light and unbothered.

“So I tried not to use any, even when it got cold and I needed a fire, even if I had to defend myself. As soon as they realised their flowers wither around me and the grass their cattle eat from is poisoned by my magic, they’d throw me out. I couldn’t afford to let that happen yet, not when I was in such desperate need of a sustainable place to stay.”

“Komaeda…” Hinata starts to say, a crease forming in his brow. But Komaeda just continues.

“This is why I ended up staying by the port, where there was less organic matter for me to visibly hurt. And then he was there, and the stories? They were true,” Komaeda says. “He was- ah, I’m afraid I’m not nearly eloquent enough, but he was something else. He didn’t hurt anyone then, didn’t turn any cities to dust or erase landscapes with the swipe of his hand, but his existence was like…” He holds up a hand over the lantern, and his eyes are wide enough to hold the entire sky within then. Komaeda clenches his fist over the lantern’s glow.

He whispers, “Like fire. It was burning with the demand to be attended to. It was like being charmed, but worse, but better. And where he floated, Hinata-kun? It was over the sea, which had begun to turn inky below him. It was like void. Like nothingness was just overcoming the blue, erasing it.” Komaeda’s still smiling. How is he still smiling?

Hinata tries to regulate his breathing, but he feels sick. His head spins with a thousand visions, of tarlike darkness invading crystal blue, of lonely teenagers by ports, of magical essences strong enough to burn themselves into the hearts of spectators.

Hinata’s voice sounds hoarse to his ears when he speaks. “…And? Was he- was he evil?”

Komaeda laughs again. “Evil… Well, I suppose it depends on the standards of one’s morality. I just think he was hideous.”

“Huh?! Didn’t you just say-”

“I meant what I said.” Komaeda says. “He was the wrongest thing in the world, in that moment. Something that wasn’t destined to be. He was beautiful, too, and it had made me feel something. Now, I can identify that feeling as what it is.”

“And what is it?”

Komaeda turns to look at him then, eyes wide still. He closes them for a moment, but the smile doesn’t fade. Komaeda says, “Disgust,” and Hinata feels like he’s been kicked in the ribs.

“Oh. Um, I suppose that makes se-”

“I think he was just empty. I don’t understand how someone can have such power over destiny and be such a shell.” His smile takes a dip, then twitches back into place. It looks wrong, not that it ever really looked right to begin with. It looks… sour.

“People will call Kamukura Izuru beautiful, or they will call him horrible,” Komaeda says. “I just think that he’s like me.”

“Like you?” Hinata’s heart is pounding.

“I don’t mean to sound egoistical,” Komaeda says quickly, holding his hands up, His smile returns to its default vacancy again, “Of course, I could never hope to be as powerful. But Izuru-san and I have something in common.”

There is quiet now, and even the well timed howling of the wind fails to shake Hinata out of his semi-trance state of contemplation. He recognises that Komaeda’s given him an opening to ask. The tension in his gut notwithstanding, he does.

“What is it, then?”

Komaeda hums. His gloved fingers close around the handle of the lantern and pull it up to his face. Illuminated so closely by the glow, Komaeda looks like a flame himself. It’s a haunting kind of beauty that Hinata can’t fully wrap his head around. (His heart aches). He blows his flame out, and just like that, the world grows dimmer. Komaeda stands up, and Hinata wants to reach out and grab at his sleeve, but he’s too tired, and Komaeda’s too swift, and it’s too cold out here, so cold and dark and god, Hinata’s so tired.

“Well, when I looked in his eyes, I could tell. I could tell that he had nowhere to go either.” Through the mist of darkness, Hinata can’t see his features, he can sense it when Komaeda’s gaze leaves him.

He whispers, “Good night, Hinata-kun.”

Then he returns to their tent, and Hinata’s left alone.

.

There is a flash of light.

Pillars of light come together to form a gollum, at least 12 feet tall, its arms made of diamond shards which reflect the yellow light pouring out of the empty holes in its head that make its sockets. The gollum is a beautiful, monstrous thing, its voice caught somewhere between roar and song. It’s a compound of light shards taking the form of rocky limbs and sharp shoulders. Like tears, the light that runs down its head burns into the cavern’s ground, acidic.

They get in order. Hinata raises his wand, and Nanami prepares her wooden staff. The amethysts that stick out of the ground by Komaeda’s feet begin to lose their vibrancy as he puts his flute to his lips.

Hinata casts.

Nanami points.

Komaeda plays.

And the gollum unclasps a dark mouth trapped between jaws of silvery-gold crystals, and showers their attacking silhouettes in stunning light.

.

I.

You are born.

You are a creature! And how alive you are, how real- your hands are small and pale, your hair back length and a light shade of a pretty colour. And you are not clothed, not yet, but you are so alive.

Besides you a person with shaking arms and a trembling form. They say, “O-oh, it worked, it worked,” and they sound like they’re going to cry.

You reach out to them, and you feel concerned.

.

Disorientation. Fear. Hinata’s head is spinning, and he can’t tell his head from his feet, not anymore. The world is nothing but a dull blur of colour, and all he hears is a the quiet hum of the gollum’s voice, a guttural, chilling sound.

And then the next flash of light comes.

.

II.

You are alone. Ash falls between the spaces of your fingers, the remnants of the home you once had. The sky cries for you, but you do not cry. You cannot cry anymore, not when you know they were right all along. Right to abandon you, right to throw a creature of destruction and havoc.

You are disgusted with yourself, with the pulse of energy that crackles like lightning beneath your skin.

Your hands dig into the ashes that were once meadows and gardens and homes, homes you grew up in, homes you weren’t hated for existing in.

You let out a scream that tears your throat in two, and you are heartbroken.

.

He can’t tell if he’s breathing.

He can’t tell if he’s seeing. He can only hear the roar approaching.

But he feels it, too, the third flash of light slamming into him.

.

III.

Magic is difficult.

Magic is unnatural- it’s strange, because for your family, it seems to come as easy as breathing. Generations of wizards have thrived from their line, after all, each with magical energy in the very air they breathe, clear in the way they carry themselves, evident in the gleam in their eyes.

Except for you, that is. You have grown up looking at your hands and hating them. You have grown up with the words of the divination mistress inscribed in your head from when you were but a youth, her raspy voice calm and factual as she tells your parents, This one’s a branch that’s been severed. He’s dry, he is.

And you are. You attempt to cast spells. Nothing happens. You try your hand at passive magic, tries to see if you can work out divination, or magical forgery, or bardic inspiration.

Nothing happens within. Your hands remain plain, pitiable things, empty of even the telltale scorch marks and scar of a beginner magician. There is disappointment in the looks they give you. There’s judgement. There’s torment in their stares, a searing fire that burns away at you in the expectations you know you’ll never be able to fulfill. A tiresome, constant hum of unease.

So plain.

What a shame, that one- think of the potential!

Maybe he’s just a late bloomer?

But you aren’t.

You press your palms to your face and try to feel for a hum of something more that isn’t there, was never there, will never be there.

Until one day, not many days from now, at the hands of a circle of wizards who promise your family prowess, progress, and most importantly magic- it is.

And you feel… nothing.

You don’t feel at all.

.

A flash of light.

.

I.

Your hair is trimmed to your shoulders. You are dressed in a cloak of silver with a green hood, given a staff crafted of rosewood and embroidered with your initials. You are given a name. You are given a purpose.

The person who made you is loving. They are kind. They don’t make you feel like the tool that you are, but you know, and you think it’s okay.

.

And another.

.

II.

You learn that the leaves of plants wither first when you play. And then gradually, so do the stems. The petals are last to go, turning a sorry shade of gray that disintegrates to ashen black the more you continue.

You feel sorry.

.

And yet another.

.

III.

There is more magic in the air than has even been. More horror in your heart than you ever thought possible. They are chanting incantations, murmuring things in languages you can’t recognise, humming in tones you don’t understand, and you are scared, but your want to stop disappointing overwhelms this fear. Your want to be something that surpasses ordinary, something that beats worthless.

So you stay still.

And you drift, further and further away, into a space where you can’t feel your heart and can’t contain your soul.

And for a while, you don’t return. Not really.

Another.

.

I.

You learn that you are a cleric. You learn that your name is Nanami Chiaki, and that you can wield light and speak seven languages and be very, very useful.

You find your place among an adventuring party, and you set off to do your job as a cleanser of despair.

.

When will it stop?

.

II.

You feel smaller than you should, a quiet mass of stark white hair and shaky hands that suck the life out of every unsuspecting thing. But you learn- you learn to sleep in the hollows of large trees.You learn to survive days without fire and food. You learn what you have to do to live, what you have to do to continue, but often you wonder if there’s a purpose at all.

And then you see Kamukura Izuru turn the ocean’s blue into void, and immediately realise what you have to do.

.

Hinata hears what sounds like a thump, but maybe it’s just the dull beat of his heart. Does he still have a heart?

.

III.

It is

So

Dark.

It is so dark , and so quiet, and you are not there, but you are, but the world isn’t, but you are, but you’re dead, but you’re not, but you’re in pain, but he’s not.

And he’s you.

Or you’re him.

Maybe you’re both and he’s neither. She finds you somewhere between existence and death, surrounded by the skeletal remains of the seven wizards that made you what you are.

She examines the circle of black glass and scorch marks that used to be their mountain, and the grin on her face can cut through the fabric of the universe and weave it into something new. She holds out her hand, and says, “Confused, aren’tcha? I think I have something that’ll work for you.”

And before you know it, the world is ending at your hands.

.

There is the sound of something falling multiple times all at once.

.

I.

You love them so much.

You love them so, so much. But you do not, because you weren’t made for this. You don’t know what love is.

Do you?

.

It’s getting closer.

.

II.

You are a being of misdeeds, a creature of filth and ugliness.You are a pawn in the hands of luck and a facilitator of fate. And it’s fine.

It’s fine. You don’t deserve to feel this companionship. You don’t deserve the moments when his eyes meet yours and you feel something akin to hope. It’s selfish. It’s foolish.

It’s fine.

(It’s not.)

.

They are footsteps, Hinata realises distantly at the back of his head, and they fall like hail.

.

III.

You wake up in another circle of black glass. Your head is full of memories that aren’t your own, your back breaking under the weight of sins you earnt. You hands are pale and unscarred and yours, yours, yours, but you don’t know what’s yours anymore, so you dig them into the hard ground until your nails chip and bleed and you’re screaming because the pain is the only thing that makes you feel real.

You don’t know how long you lay there, but when you come to, you can cast flame, you can create light.

And it takes you so, so long, to pick yourself up, to tear away your memories and the bards’ songs of Him, of You.

You are sick of your own existence, but most of all, you’re not sure when you’ll be him again. You’re not sure how long you have as you.

(You’re not sure when you started to think of this in terms of you and him.)

When you find yourself a party, you worry.

When you sleep at night, you worry.

When your companion’s piercing gray greens look at you and tell you, “Good night, Hinata-kun,” you worry.

What’s a sense of self for someone without one at all?

.

Crash!

Splinters of diamond scatter across the cave’s floor, yellow and white and shades of off-orange, shattered, sharp and everywhere.

Komaeda is panting by the now screaming, headless gollum, its guttural screeches now reduced to weak yelps that sound more like windchimes. The splinters that caught him in the face send blood streaking down it, and he’s breathing heavy.

In his right hand Komaeda holds Nanami’s abandoned spear of light, semi-tangible and fading in his grasp. Nanami rises to her feet besides Hinata, only a distance away. Cuts and scrapes line her arms and legs where the crystals caught her, but she is healing faster than any of them can process, and she points her staff at the gollum, lips drawn in a thin line.

When Hinata gets into position besides his companions, his heart thrums with something that’s maybe determination, and that’s definitely the desire to beat this fucking thing to the ground.

Their eyes meet. When Hinata catches Komaeda’s, Komaeda gives him a tired, bloodied smile which he tries to return.

They attack.

.

LEGEND.

There is a legend in the land about a sorcerer. Or at least that’s what they think he is. He’s certainly not human- it’s not clear if he’s much of anything the people of this world can recognize.

He’s like something out of a night terror, spectral and haunting, ethereally beautiful in ways that are hard to encapture. Bards fail to find music befitting of him, and the storytellers, their hands bleed of their efforts to weave tales and tapestries worthy enough. An artist’s maddening, he is, a being of darkness, or maybe light, or maybe divinity.

He razes lands in his wake.

It only takes a flick of his wrist for the grandeur of towering spires, raised peaks and settlements, so many settlements built with caring craftsmanship and loving ambition, to become ash.

There are no scorch marks to tell of despairing fires, no bloodstained marble and cobblestone to tell the tragedy of battles lost. Only the memory of what used to be and the dust that remains of its existence.

Some call him the Destructor. Some call him a God. Most merely call him The Ender of The World.

And he is as beautiful as he is terrifying, the story tellers swear. He doesn’t function on malice, they say. It’s impossible to tell what his motives really are, but he doesn’t thrive off of evil nor off of death. He does not need to thrive, really, not when his very existence is that of raw energy and power, not when he can make himself a living deity on command of his presence.

Others have different stories to tell of him, all with the staples; the beauty, the divinity, the grace. But they speak of different powers- armies of the dead animated for seemingly no reason. Stormy clouds of gray that encircle him, a crown of booming thunder and imminent destruction.

Eyes the colour of rubies, painfully empty despite the ocean’s worth of magical energy they surely have.

The World is ending.

And then it isn’t.

The cities of ash remain as they are, as do the hearts of endless storms continue to beat with the booms of thunder. Every tapestry and abandoned sheet of song remain, but the Ender of the World does not.

.

At the gollum’s husk, Hinata brings down a spectral axe he summons; once her spear of light is back in her hands, Nanami maneuvers close enough to leave a gaping gash of oozing yellow where its abdomen was; Komaeda’s flute plays notes that manifest into spectral hammers which descend upon it, blown after blow. The amethysts around them are now a darkened gray.

With each hit that lands, crystals shatter across the floor.

Soon, all that remains is a gradient of gold in pieces at their feet.

And their prize reward, the gollum’s heart: an ornate circle of the very same gold, its surface clear and reflective like a mirror. The Eye of Fate.

Komaeda collapses on his knees.

He’s making a noise that sounds like giggling, red faced and dizzy, and then he collapses to the side, spent. Hinata isn’t fast enough to catch him, but he tries anyway. Chest still heaving from the effort of battle, he takes the time to brush away the red that bleeds from the wound on Komaeda’s forehead. The amethysts are more like coal now, a tell-tale sign of the energy he’s expended.

Nanami kneels beside him, and she’s not out of breath at all. But she looks just as tired as he feels. All her wounds have closed up. Hinata almost finds it funny- he always thought the reason her wounds were so quick to heal was because she was an extraordinarily healer. While that was true, he now more or less knows that there’s more to it. And she… they both…

Well, they both know now, don’t they? But the panic hasn’t really settled in just yet.

“I’ll get him,” Nanami says, and she nods towards Komaeda. Already her hand is on his chest. “You have to go retrieve the mirror. Hinata-kun, you know what to do with it.”

Hinata nods. Rises to his feet.

He heads towards the Eye of Fate, back turned to Nanami. It feels smooth and light in his hands. The surface reflects his face, bloodied and plain, and it all feels deceptively simple.

Nanami says, “Hinata-kun? I know you’ll make the right decision. I know you’re a good person, and you can make your own path.”

He feels the smile in her voice as strongly as he feels the sting in his eyes.

“Right,” Hinata says softly, and examines the glassy surface.

He throws it to the ground experimentally. It lands quietly without a sound.

And then he crushes it under his fucking feet. Over and over until it breaks apart for good.

Nanami laughs softly from behind him.

Hinata says, “All right, then. Now that that’s over with, let’s go home.”

.

Home isn’t anywhere but the three of them.

The journey back isn’t as tiring as Hinata thought it would be, but it’s every bit as emotionally taxing. He wallows in his anxiety on their trip back, just as he wallows in his thoughts.

He and Nanami don’t speak of it.

And he understand that she needs time, and she understands that he needs courage, or perhaps strength of will. But she smiles at him like he means something still, like he’s more than lost identities and failure and magic that isn’t really his, and he’s grateful. He smiles at her too, a bit less patient, a bit more jaded, but he hopes it lets her know that she means something to him like he does to her.

And then there’s Komaeda.

They’re back at their camp grounds when he finally wakes. The sun’s beginning to rise above the horizon, painting its line a faint white and streaking the blank sky with shades of pale blue and orange.

Nanami’s gone to bring them firewood for later on since they’re all too tired for conjuration. Hinata’s fingers clench and unclench into a fist. He counts the fading stars that are eaten by the sunrise, and wonders if he can still see the faint outline of the moon provided he tries hard enough.

Komaeda sits opposite from him. Neither of them says a word.

The silence is quiet and tangible, and when Hinata looks at Komaeda, really looks at him, he pauses. Komaeda’s fully healed and unscarred but for a nick that the gash on his forehead left, and even that is hardly notable. His hair is even messier than usual, dirtied and gray with dust and dirt from their encounter. His pallor is still prominent, but thankfully, it doesn’t look like he’s about to fall seriously ill.

"Hey,” Hinata says.

Komaeda raises his head to look at him. He’s giving him that look again, a look of uncomfortable  intensity that Hinata feels in his bones.

Komaeda say, “Hinata-kun,” by way of greeting, and they fall quiet again.

Hinata looks at his thumbs.They’re shredded from the shrapnel of crystal, scarred in little crisscrosses.

He says to Komaeda, “Well. I mean, god. Let’s- let’s cut right to it. Talk to me.”

And so they start to, the rising sun a backdrop to their conversation.

“You know now,” Hinata says.

“I do.”

“You wanted to find me. Or him. Whatever.”

“I do.”

“You still do?”

He tips his head sideways, and light curls frame his curious expression. Very sincerely, he says, “I do.”

Hinata feels a tightness in his chest.

“You’re weird.”

“You’re a god.”

Hinata gives him an annoyed, incredulous look. Now he knows Komaeda’s messing with him.

He says, “You know I’m not,” and can’t help the edge in his voice.

“Of course I do,” Komaeda says, voice hushed in a way Hinata’s never heard it before. “I felt your thoughts, Hinata-kun. We both did.”

He knows this. And it’s frustrating, infuriating even, to have something like that taken away from you and broadcasted so intimately. Looking at the mess he made of his own fingers, Hinata wishes he hit harder, attacked harsher.

And then he looks at Komaeda, and oh. He sees it now, the tightness around his shoulders, the tension in his frame. The sharpness of his present smile, guarded and ingenuine.

He’s hurting, too.

And god, Hinata’s so selfish. This entire time, his own anxieties have been overwhelming him, and he wasn’t able to realise sooner that his companions have their own plates full to the brim.

Of course. Of course he’d hurt. He’s felt it vividly, Komaeda’s loneliness, his pain, just as he had Nanami’s doubt in her existence, just as tangibly as they felt his own aches.

Hinata reaches towards Komaeda, who tenses like he’s about to flinch away, but… doesn’t. He places a hand on his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

And Komaeda says, “I was wrong.”

“Wrong?”

His gaze bores into Hinata. “Wrong to call you beautiful and hideous.”

Hinata puts away his hand. He says, “Then what would you call me?” and feels bold for it. The way Komaeda says ‘you’ instead of 'Kamukura Izuru’ or 'The Ender of the World’ or some other superficial title makes him shiver.

“I would call you hopeful,”

“Uh, what?”

Komaeda puts a hand over his heart. And there it is again, that terrifying earnestness in his eyes.

“Hopeful. You’re not like me, Hinata-kun. Despite everything, you’re still here. You’re still doing good after what she made you do.”

What she made you do. The illusion of guilt, the vision of the perfect monster, it’s gone. It’s all gone.

Hinata is shaking just the slightest bit. His hands aren’t as steady as he thought they’d be in his lap. This is hard.

“But– so are you.”

“So am I what, Hinata-kun?”

“You’re here too, aren’t you?”

Komaeda falls silent.

Hinata can’t quite read his expression right, was never quite able to, but the stunned look of bewilderment that twists his features isn’t hard to note.  

“But I- that’s not… That isn’t how it works.” Komaeda argues, a confused frown twisting his mouth.

“Isn’t it?” Hinata is smiling, and as he does, he feels the tremors start to calm.

“It isn’t! Hinata-kun, if you’re as good at drawing conclusions as you are at playing instruments-”

“Stop trying to backhand compliment me, I probably can play if I really try.”

“Backhanded compliments? How rash of Hinata-kun to jump to such a conclusion, I was only trying to speak my mind.”

He flicks Komaeda’s forehead. Komaeda doesn’t make a move to flinch this time.

Hinata dares to push back the hair that falls in front of his eyes, heart beat mingling with the songbirds’ melody. He waits for Komaeda to stop him, but he does not. He rubs his thumb over the small scar on his forehead.

“…You were good out there with Nanami’s spear,” Hinata murmurs. “Maybe you should actually consider buying one.”

“Oh,” Komaeda breathes in response.

Sunlight makes him look even prettier.

It’s quiet here in these woods, and it’s not “home” forever. Nothing will be for a while. But the permanence of home and the worries of tomorrow mean nothing when Hinata sees that smile again. A smile soft around the edges that make his eyes crease, a smile that makes Hinata not want to let go.

“Is this okay?” Komaeda says, and his voice is quiet. His eyes begin to flutter. His gloved hands reach tentative towards the back of Hinata’s neck as he moves to lean into Hinata’s touch. Komaeda’s hands are light, their pressure barely there, like he’s afraid to hurt him.

Hinata says, “It’s okay.”

And when he kisses Komaeda, it feels like the relief of something long awaited. It feels like comfort. It feels like something right. Hinata’s hands reach to cup his face, and oh.

He kisses him again, and again, and again, and everytime Hinata pulls away, he sees that smile and just can’t stop.

They’re going to be okay.

[dotthings]

Okay, about this “g*ncest” thing that just cropped up which makes me feel like I splintered back to the year 2006 and aren’t we over this by now...what that is is a bona fide example of toxic masculinity attitudes at work and being valorized by a small number of fans, mostly female.

First off, as far as I’m concerned, you are free to enjoy or write any type of fic you want, I don’t care. I’m not judging your fic tastes. I won’t insult you as a human being, attack you, send anon hate, or put this post on your tags or even any shared tags. Which is more than antis have done to respect my shipping but whatever. 

However I disagree with the idea that there can be no discussion when fandom reinforces certain biases or ideas and tries to normalize them, without realizing how they’re reinforcing some real world level stuff that needs to be questioned. The discussion itself is valuable if you aren’t being a dick about it. 

So you know how D*stiel fans get accused all the freakin’ time, endlessly, ad nauseam “you don’t respect male friendships! male friendships are rare and precious commodities in the media! why do you have to ruin it by making it gay!” (Sorry I need a moment to stop laughing). When the fact is D*stiel fans openly own their slash and own the gay and fling glitter, they don’t tend to apologize for it, instead of trying to mask the fact that it’s slash. Nobody is denying that close platonic male friendships can exist, either. But guess what, it is outright not toxic masculinity to see past heteronormative defaults to see how shipping two male friends together and seeing the potential for romance instead of by default ruling it out just because people are the same gender. It’s just not. It gets concerned trolled into the freakin’ ground as reinforcing toxic masculinity. It isn’t.

Which brings us to this g*ncest thing which, I stfg I thought we’d left behind in 2006. It’s an old fandom term that has outlived its need and outlived the context of the mores in fandom and society at the time that created it, like its related fic label concept, “smarm.”

“Smarm” isn’t the same definition as “smarmy.” The fandom definition of smarm is fic that depicts two people of the same gender being emotionally and physically close who are not in love and the intent is not romantic and not slash.

In other words, gen fic.

It depicts a platonic friendship or sibling bond.

It’s..gen fic. But for some reason, some felt they had to call it “smarm” because either it’s difficult to grasp that two men can be physically or emotionally close without it being slashy, or, fans who wanted to slash but self-shamed for it. They wouldn’t just call it a slash fic. Just like, it’s not w*ncest it’s g*ncest!!! Which somehow seems to assume itself a fest safe for anyone who isn’t into incest and just wants to celebrate the platonic sibling bond and...no, really, no. Probably be smarter to just host a Sam and Dean Gen Fic fest, which I’m sure exists, and hey, something for everyone, I’m not saying the g*ncest fest shouldn’t be allowed to continue, just pointing out why some people are bothered by it for reasons other than “you are ship shaming meanies!!”

There’s a big aspect of shame in smarm, and I’m arguing, to g*ncest. 

The recent uptick of intensity in SPN fandom where w*incest fandom stans determinedly turn every single canon Sam and Dean moment into incest, and insist every story, every fic, every image, every concept about Sam & Dean’s bond is emotional w*incest is part of this toxic masculinity thing, the g*ncest issue, the smarm issue. A Sam and Dean image, boom, incest! The brothers are so in love! D*stiel fans are considered horrible for, y’know, reading romance into a shit-ton of usage of romantic tropes, canon pining, plot and dialogue and long arcs that map to romantic tropes, even overt shout-outs from other characters to the idea that Dean and Cas are a thing, but if Sam and Dean so much as stand next to each other it’s incest ftw.

There is such a thing as pre-slash and I find it a whole lot less squicky than smarm or g*ncest. I kind of like pre-slash because it owns the fact that romantic relationships don’t always have to manifest as sexy times, but why did we even call it pre-slash, why not just slash at a G or PG rating? I think this is becoming more of the norm, with slash shippers unapologetically posting slash fic at a G or PG rating. Readers are free to read into whatever they want into a gen fic, but if the author ships it and intends to put romance into it, but it isn’t about how the characters have sex or even kiss, they’re still romantically in love and they’re going to label it slash or pre-slash. I don’t see the need for the “pre” in that any more. No they aren’t kissing yet, no they aren’t having sex yet, but they are in love nonetheless. 

Let go of the idea that a kiss or having sex is the only way to verify characters being in love. 

Toxic masculinity isn’t the removal of heteronormative goggles that were probably fused to our faces from birth because that’s how our society is and being capable of imagining that two male friends in a story can fall in love the same way we imagine a man and woman can. 

Toxic masculinity is when you are so determined that men--be it friends or siblings--cannot be close and it be, in fact, friendship or sibling love. It’s the equating of all male intimacy with a sexual and/or romantic bond. And I feel that a false narrative’s been allowed to prevail in SPN fandom that D*stiel fandom is deeply guilty of this when it’s not, while other groups that are doing this chronically, get a free pass.

I’d say it’s a pretty major example of toxic masculinity to insist that platonic w*incest is a thing, instead of just, y’know, Sam & Dean loving each other as siblings without hints of a romantic or sexual element. It’s toxic masculinity to slap the -cest slapping on every-freakin’-thing and then claim you’re being ship-shamed because you actually gate-keeped against fans who really just appreciate the sibling bond and don’t need any -cest to appreciate how close Sam and Dean are and appreciate that bond, and it’s pretty toxic to keep flinging a trigger in people’s faces every five minutes, openly, as if you own the entire fandom, and insist canon backs you up when in fact it’s gently shut you down on multiple occasions, and then expect absolutely nobody to be upset at you ever, and if anyone gets upset they’re ship-shaming you. That’s quite a big amount of entitlement, to assume that people aren’t allowed to be uncomfortable with something like incest.

Especially when you try to force LGBT ships that are non-trigger into the same mode, force a false equivalency, thus fetishizing the LGBT ships, and get offended if someone points out why a differentiation is sensible and necessary.

If you’re into Dean and Cas’s friendship and don’t see any romantic element, that’s gen. No really. It’s friendship fic. That’s not pre-slash. That’s not platonic D*stiel. You see a friendship. There is no such thing as platonic Destiel. Now, this gets tricky, because while that is 100% valid to feel that way, D*stiel is reaching a stage where not-shipping it is cool and all that, but if you vehemently deny there is any reason for other people to see more to it, you’re kind of having to ignore a hella lot of canon to keep those heteronormative goggles fused to your face, and no I am not accusing people who don’t ship it of being homophobic. Or of unconscious biases of being homophobic. We all have them. Talk about it, don’t insult people or shame them, sometimes it just takes a little bit to get people to understand. Others will never get there no matter what. Depends on the person. 

There’s any number of het ships where I have eyes, I can see canon intent, I see they’re into each other, but I don’t care and I don’t ship it and I might enjoy genfic about that relationship or have them wind up as friends, I don’t ship it. There’s non-canon popular slash fics I don’t feel it or see it. I don’t yell down its shippers though. Its that simple. My advice is just don’t go screaming down D*stiel shippers with why must you ruin their friendship or claiming it’s toxic masculinity and going on about the sanctity of platonic male friendship which is just such a rare and precious flower in the media (sorry. pausing to lmfao again). 

I also literally do not care how you see Sam and Dean’s relationship or if you ship that. I honestly do not care and I don’t make assumptions about you as a person (your fandom behavior over your ship might make me decide things about you). But...it’s still incest. I’m not ship-shaming. It’s incest. Why does this have to be explained over and over. You can ship whatever you want and should be allowed to have safe spaces for it but this assumption that everyone has to be 100% cool with such an obvious trigger and societal taboo or they’re hypocrites who don’t really believe in the “ship and let ship” they believe in...come on. “Ship and let ship” doesn’t mean be inconsiderate and it doesn’t mean you have to be comfortable with every ship in the fleet.

But SPN fandom has this lingering thing it can’t seem to let go of where systemically, it thinks incest and an LGBT ship should be treated exactly alike, and it has this thing where incest is being intrusively slapped onto every-freakin’-thing about Sam & Dean in spaces where fans can’t avoid it and it’s not behind a cut tag it’s not labeled, and if you aren’t into it you get mocked, and if you don’t watch only for the brother bond you get mocked, and this is coming from many of the same people who think an LGBT ship is identical to incest and from many of the same people who get offended if you point out why an LGBT ship isn’t like incest, and who get offended people ship that LGBT ship as well as from generalized anti-shippers who treat being a non-shipper like a superior badge of honor and who reinforce the gatekeeping that virulent incest shippers aim at D*stiel shippers while valorizing an incest ship, but this breed of anti-shippers are in total denial about doing it. (Note the distinction between anti-shipper and non-shipper).

But taking what is actually just gen fic about Sam & Dean being emotionally intimate or showing physical affection and insisting it needs a -cest on the end instead of just, y’know, being about a sibling bond...that’s where toxic masculinity comes in. Isn’t one of the whole major points of SPN’s narrative to deconstruct these perceptions of masculinity? To debunk the idea that men can’t be emotionally intimate? And please miss me with the idea that shipping D*stiel is somehow contrary to this. D*stiel is a part of that debunking because neither Dean nor Cas act like the media stereotypes of what bi (or ace or pan or whatever Dean and Cas might be) looks like. They started as friends, and became emotionally close before SPN canon got into the zone where it seems a lot more serious about possibly openly vocalizing or consummating the subtextual pining. Friends-to-lovers isn’t insisting all friends must be lovers. It’s fans identifying something in this particular pair of friends and in the narrative, in the canon, and don’t discard it just because of a heteronormative default that buys a slow burn will-they-won’t-they for m/f but sneers that same-gender potential romance is delusional.

Likewise if it’s Dean and Cas and someone slaps some form of slash label on it while refusing to own that they ship it and refusing to own there could be sexual attraction, instead of simply saying “it’s a gen fic I love their friendship” would also an example of toxic masculinity ideas and probably a lot of self-shaming about seeing and enjoying the slash in the first place. Dean and Cas friendship enthusiasts and Dean and Cas shippers actually get along pretty well (assuming no one is acting like a dick) and that, I think, is because there is such a powerful emotional component to the ship, and Dean and Cas friendship enthusiasts tend to be non-virulent and tend to be open-minded about why the shippers see more in it even if they don’t.

This should be also true of w*ncest fans and enthusiasts of the sibling bond because again, massive emotional component as common ground, but I feel like what’s happening is the more intense and virulent w*ncest fans are trying to draw such a hard line that if you aren’t into incest, there’s no space for you. This goes hand in hand with the virulently pro-codependency fans, who romanticize mental illness and then can’t seem to figure out why anyone is upset with them, and who think that anyone who isn’t into romanticizing mental illness hates the bro bond so they’ve swept out plenty fans who adore the sibling bond with their virulence.

Personally I find uncomfortable when fans insist that gen fic about two dudes being close needs to be some kind of pick-your-fighter-label form of slash instead of just owning it’s a celebration of close male friendship. Bromance is a stupid term and IMO part of toxic masculinity too. 

There’s also the erasure of the fact that D*estiel is one of the least smut-driven ships. A recent study of ships with the highest smut content found w*ncest at the top and D*stiel barely even rated, and here’s the ironic part: virulently anti-destiel w*ncest fans and ship shamey non-shippers slapped D*stiel with a default assumption that it’s all about fapping material and two dudes getting it on and you just want to make spn into a porno and accuses D*stiel fandom of fetishizing m/m relationships when w*ncest is at the top of the smut pile. No I am not shaming you for enjoying smut. No I am not saying that a ship is superior for being less smutty. I’m very clearly objecting to the shaming and misconceptions of D*stiel fandom, which are often willfully perpetuated. 

This misconception has stubbornly stuck in spn fandom and it’s incredibly annoying. Please join us in the year 2018. When so much of D*stiel is Dean and Cas not having sex but just being ridiculous and making heart-eyes and in denial and trying to figure this out and maybe they brush hands and blush, it’s almost Victorian. (Y’know, like the canon ha ha. Oh wait that’s not funny I’m serious). A lot of D*stiel fans write slash fic so they can get them to talk honestly with each other. 

So sure, have your ficfests how you like, but I think it’s worth at least pointing out that this fixation with slapping the -cest label on everything is an example of toxic masculinity concepts at work, is normalizing incest to a ridiculous degree, is de-normalizing fans who really just appreciate a sibling bond, what with the stans insisting that w*ncest is just another term for their close emotional bond, *splutter* I don’t watch SPN for ships how dare you instead of, y’know, having the balls to own the fact that they’re intrigued by the incest ship. They shove it everywhere and disown it all in the same breath.

[rhysand-vs-fenrys]

Nesta in ACOFAS: My Overall Opinion

Below the cut is my stance and interpretation of everything Nesta and surrounding Nesta in ACOFAS. I’ve been as exhaustive as possible in my answer because I’m only making this one post to go through it all.

It is broken up into 5 sections (with subcategories):

How the trauma built

How it manifests

Rhys & Feyre’s responses (with some overall references to the IC here)

Cassian’s role

Nesta overall

The TL;DR of what follows is that I support the direction SJM is taking these characters and it is completely logical as they have been presented to us.

How the Trauma Built

This is to the people saying Nesta was OOC because of her PTSD (though again, Maas is these character’s God and Creator, it’s impossible for her to write OOC).

Nesta was isolating herself quite a bit in the beginning of ACOWAR. She wanted nothing to do with anybody, and also isolated Elain with her. She had a sort of ally in that regard.

Over the course of ACOWAR, Nesta started reaching out more and engaging more with Prythian and the other members of the Inner Circle. She even came close to reconciling with Feyre (more on that with “Rhys and Feyre’s Responses”). 

For Nesta at that point, being alone to process her thoughts and then becoming more immersed in Velaris and Prythian was the right path. It helped her find the ground again after her trauma in the Cauldron, which is very much described in WAR as a violation with similar descriptors to being raped (feeling that their body did not belong to them anymore). 

And then Nesta killed Hybern.

She was built as being incredibly resistant to even the idea of war, and never wanted to fight (More on that later in “Cassian’s Role”). The IC were the fighters, she wanted to maintain the sort of innocence that came from not surrounding herself in blood.

Not only did Nesta kill Hybern, but she killed a dying man. Elain struck the fatal blow- the knife through his neck. He was done for. Because of what he’d done to their father and to Cassian, Nesta snapped and literally sawed off his head while he was still alive.

ACOFAS builds around Nesta’s thoughts of that moment, the last words Cassian thought he would ever say to her, and her own fears during that time. 

I think Nesta would have been alright if “just” the Cauldron happened (not that that was a weak blow). She was finding her way and her strength, she’d accepted that at her core nothing was different. She was still the same Nesta she’d always been- imperious and not someone to fight a war. 

But then she was the one who ended it, and that shattered her sense of self and with it any progress Nesta had made against the trauma of the Cauldron. After 1 traumatic event, it is hard enough to find your footing. After two, spaced far enough apart that some semblance of recovery had been made? Utterly devastating. 

How it Manifests

The Drinking

The IC has always processed things with the assistance of alcohol. Rhys’ answer to Feyre’s marriage to Tamlin was a plan to get blackout drunk. Cassian having a bad meeting with Nesta in MAF meant he went for the liquor when he came home. Feyre fighting with Nesta in WAR earned advice from Mor that it was fine to drink directly from the bottle.

Giving Nesta space to drink all she wanted might not have seemed entirely wrong (at least, at first). Fae healing probably means over-drinking isn’t as much of a threat to their health, and it took them a while to realize and accept that Nesta wasn’t just drinking off stress, she was well on her way to becoming an alcoholic.

I hesitated there to say that she is an alcoholic mainly because she wasn’t showing signs (in her PoVs) of an addiction mindset. She never seems to crave alcohol, and I think overall rather than an addiction it’s an expression of her trauma and attempt at self-medication of sorts (not to say it hasn’t morphed into full alcoholism). 

Again, that isn’t a denial that it’s alcoholism, just a hesitation in assigning the term in this circumstance without more data.

The Sex

If you haven’t read the ACOMAF excerpt “A Court of Wings and Embers” about Cassian and Nesta’s meeting, it revealed something about her back story that she (and Cassian) never mentioned in the core trilogy or FAS: When Nesta broke up with Thomas Mandry, he attacked her and nearly raped her. He got as far as tearing her dress before she managed to escape.

In “Wings and Embers”, Nesta is even sensitive to Cassian’s normal taunts and demeanor because of that experience, she has a bit of a flashback of sorts while they’re talking and he realizes what must have happened. Nesta refuses to give him the name of the man who tried to hurt her (because he promises very sincerely that he will kill him).

For Nesta to go from that to unchecked anonymous sex ties directly into her references in ACOFAS to feeling completely numb inside. I think in forcing herself to bed some random stranger- which “Wings and Embers” makes clear is unacceptable to her- she was trying to trigger some kind of shame or horror response in herself. 

She was trying to feel anything. Even if that feeling was fear.

The IC has always been sex-positive, and they didn’t have that critical piece of knowledge Cassian alone holds about Nesta’s past. So they had no hope of catching Nesta’s behavior early on as the cry for help it is.

In that vein, some people do use sex as a coping mechanism after stress or a traumatic experience (This one being killing Hybern). Nesta was lost and needed to figure out who she was after her self-image was shattered. The sex alone might not be the best way to handle it, but it didn’t raise flags for Feyre and the IC because they didn’t know the piece of Nesta’s story Cassian was pledged to secrecy over.

I did not see slut-shaming anywhere in ACOFAS. If anything, Feyre dwells on it because it’s the piece that really doesn’t fit for her. Nesta used Feyre’s sexual relationship with Isaac as fodder to make her miserable. Nesta is the one who slut-shames in TAR and even leans towards it in MAF when she’s snapping at Rhys (More on that in “Rhys and Feyre’s Responses” next).

Feyre isn’t sitting there going “Wow Nesta is a slut”, she’s trying to connect the dots, again while missing the piece of information that would reveal exactly how Nesta was using that sex in her PTSD. 

From an outside standpoint, Maas was using it to show another way PTSD manifests. Feyre and Aelin both manifest as being hollow inside and completely shutting down. Some people affected by PTSD don’t have that “quiet” route, and so Maas is opening up and exploring another form. 

The sexual aspect of Nesta’s PTSD is specifically to show that fundamental difference in how her trauma needs to be treated (more on that in “Nesta overall”).

Rhys and Feyre’s Responses

This section alone could be a novel, so I’m going to try and keep it fairly linear timeline-wise, but still separate Rhys and Feyre later on.

History

Think about how we’ve seen Nesta in ACOTAR and ACOMAF:

In ACOTAR, she’s a frigid, cruel bitch to her baby sister. She slut shames her, insults her, finds insults that literally make Feyre flinch and digs in harder, and does everything in her power to sabotage Feyre because Nesta is mad at their father. For years she makes Feyre’s life a living hell and even contributes to Feyre’s own psychological issues that Tamlin actually heals in TAR (props where props go).

Feyre has zero hope for life in the beginning of TAR, she even tells her father hope doesn’t exist because she genuinely believes that. It is tied almost exclusively to Nesta’s abuse or things that result from her abuse (if Nesta had helped Feyre instead, they might have been able to find a better footing in their poverty, or at least had a home Feyre didn’t dread returning to).

When she returns to the mortal lands, before venturing out to save Tamlin(’s ungrateful ass), Feyre finds a sort of peace with Nesta and starts to realize why Nesta was so horrible to her for so long. The key here is that there is no reconciliation, just a beginning step towards one.

In ACOMAF, Feyre returns from Prythian almost expecting that same quasi-peace she and Nesta found, only to find Nesta as viciously mean and cruel as she was in TAR (probably because of Cassian, but also her own prejudice against Fae and all that their presence might represent (war)). 

Again, a bit of understanding is reached by the end of the book-

then Nesta and Elain are thrown into the Cauldron.

And guess how Nesta treats Feyre in WAR when she returns? Like shit. Again.

Each time the slide back to cruelty makes sense- TAR --> MAF it is the introduction of the fae element and knowing Feyre’s involvement makes the war inevitably an Archeron problem. MAF --> WAR it is the incredibly traumatic event Nesta and Elain went through, Feyre not being there to help them on the other side, and Nesta feeling as if she and Elain were abandoned to the care of near strangers after such a horrifying event (that again is always described along the same vein psychologically as being raped).

Still, even though it makes sense where she is coming from, Nesta does always return to the evil bitch role and never apologizes to Feyre (though she does come close).

Rhysand

He’s first because he’s easy.

People are harping on Rhysand for how he treats Nesta in FAS but it’s totally in line with canon. Feyre snaps at him in WAR for little offhand comments he makes against Nesta. He’s never had a particularly warm image of her.

Rhys brings out receipts for Nesta’s treatment of Feyre pre-ACOTAR, specifically sending her out to hunt in the forest. Remember what happened to Rhys’ little sister when the older sibling didn’t protect them? And she was meeting him somewhere that should have been perfectly safe, she wasn’t entering a dangerous area armed.

On top of that, he’s seen Nesta slut-shame her sister, and even from a non-Feyre side of things, Nesta has a habit of landing hard blows on his entire IC. His best friends who have helped him through horrible trauma, and she attacks them and repeatedly belittles them. 

From his PoV, even if he wasn’t in love with Feyre, Nesta is just downright evil.

Feyre

Nesta is always going back-and-forth. Even Feyre cannot predict when Nesta will strike a blow (metaphorically) or when she’ll be somewhere in the vicinity of pleasant. She defends Nesta to Rhysand (in MAF, WAR, and FAS), but even so whenever Nesta opens her mouth to say something Feyre flinches or anticipates something horrible.

She doesn’t want Rhys to speak ill of her family because they are all she has left of her mortal life, and she had to literally risk her life to keep them fed for years. She couldn’t let grudges grow, because if she did she might just walk into the woods and leave them to starve. They are her family, and so she feels an obligation to protect both Nesta and Elain (more on Elain in a moment).

That doesn’t mean she isn’t affected by how she was treated, or that old wounds aren’t there. She just doesn’t want to get into it. It makes Feyre more dismissive of Nesta, but she is still trying. She’s just lost the strength to try as hard as she would for Mor or Cassian or even Elain- people who actually show her kindness and love.

Elain and the IC

Mor sees Nesta as a nasty thorn in Feyre’s side, but she knows what it is to deal with horrible family (to a much harsher degree). She supports Feyre and her stance, and that’s it. She tried making friends with Nesta and had her head bit off, so she’s not reaching out.

Amren and Azriel you all know.

Elain is where Nesta isolated herself wholly and completely.

In WAR, Nesta had Elain with her as they processed their trauma. Elain was worse off than she was, completely shut down, and so the isolation seemed like a good idea (you may remember in WAR it was not a good idea when it came to Elain, she needed to be around others regularly to open up).

After WAR though... Elain accepted Prythian. She doesn’t fully accept that things are over with Grayson, and doesn’t entirely acknowledge that she is fae, but she accepts Prythian and Velaris and Night. She accepts the world, even while ignoring her circumstance... and Nesta resents her for it.

Elain was always side-by-side with her, but as Elain settled and Nesta raged, she couldn’t count on her younger sister anymore to just be there and understand. Elain started having her own life and hobbies. She found a way to start processing her pain and deal with it. She wasn’t set back by the death of Hybern because Elain accepted that it had to happen and she was protecting her family and avenging their father. 

Elain is very much the one to let go of grudges, while Nesta holds them in a vice-grip. Nesta resented Elain’s peace, and so she distances herself from even Elain, while still leaving a door open for the sister she always favored (at least for a while in FAS Elain is the one who can get Nesta to do stuff).

Cassian’s Role

From the very beginning of WAR, Cassian has known Nesta isn’t like her sisters.

He wanted Nesta to train, he taunted her over it repeatedly, trying to goad her into it. Cassian’s approach to Nesta has always been the closest to how Nesta needed to be approached. He has a fundamental understanding of her and her personality.

Cassian was once someone without a place in the world, and so he carved it out himself. He wants that for Nesta, but he also knows she has to be the one to take it. He tries to help Nesta while giving her her space, and he also seems to accept that while Vealris treats Nesta as if she’s his (brought up by Nesta herself in FAS), she is still her own person and free to be with whoever she wishes or live as she chooses.

Cassian is trapped between wanting to help Nesta as much as she will allow, and minding that line so she knows he isn’t trying to force his presence or himself on her. He is dismissed and ignored by Illyrians as a bastard and is touchy about that, but he endures dismissal when it comes from Nesta so that she knows he is always there for her.

Still, as much as he clearly loves her and cares about her, he can only take so many hits at a time before old wounds become too raw. That is why he will push more forcefully, but in the end he always leaves it to Nesta to take the final step herself.

Cassian is watching her more closely than the others, and he knows that missing piece about her sexual history. He is trying to help her as much as he is capable, but he also knows she needs something different. She needs real help, and Cassian doesn’t have any right to be the one to drag her bodily off to get the treatment she needs. He also knows she wont open up to some doctor.

I’m not doing a lot on Cassian’s stance because that’s what the next novel is going to be. Cassian honestly sees the same pain on Nesta that he had, and he knows her personality very well. She needs the fight, and she needs to feel like she’s earned and carved her own spot in the world.

She needs training as an Illyrian, a position he has always held when it comes to Nesta.

Nesta Overall

Contrary to how some tumbrs have been spinning it, the IC and Feyre never outright abandoned Nesta.

Even Nesta acknowledges at one point that the IC tried giving her jobs or pulling her along in their group to get her to engage. They tried to help her through her PTSD the same way they did for Feyre, Rhys, Mor, even Elain (given a job early on of designing the Townhouse garden). Rhys has offered her duties or positions, Feyre’s tried to help find hobbies for her, and yet Nesta is resistant to all.

As I said before, Maas is showing another form of PTSD, one that requires a completely different path of treatment. The IC try to heal Nesta the way they healed others, but she was never going to be able to walk that same path, not after what happened with the King of Hybern at least (remember, Nesta accepted the role as Ambassador to the Human Lands in WAR as she recovered from what the Cauldron did to her, then wanted nothing to do with it in FAS).

The IC didn’t abandon her, they just couldn’t understand her, and Nesta cannot express herself to show them how best to help her. 

She’s always been barbed and defensive, and in this case when she needed people to gather around her all the more and see through it, they were pushed back because of her own past actions. The IC cannot help her, because she burned bridges with them time and again and they’re just done taking her punches.

Cassian sees what is happening, and he tries to reach for her- but Nesta doesn’t need him alone to make that leap. Even if she loves Cassian desperately and they are endgame mates (that’s not an ‘if’ that’s a fact), she needs to know the others care.

She needs to know that she is genuinely wanted, that her presence is appreciated and accepted with no other thought than “Nesta’s here, I’m so happy” (why Cassian reacted so strongly when Feyre made mention of the almost buyer’s bargain with Nesta coming to Solstice).

Feyre’s exhausted when it comes to her sister. Rhys and  most of the IC have no reason to reach out for her very much because of her own personality and how it hides deep rooted insecurities. Rhys in particular has dealt with horrible people his entire life and he’s not willing to keep them around that much, not if he believes there is nothing redeeming inside them. 

Nesta is screaming for help in her own way, but unfortunately it’s a case where no one else speaks the language, save Cassian. And knowing Cassian understands makes Nesta feel ashamed and weak, open and judged, so she uses every weapon at her disposal to push him back.

She needs both isolation and acceptance. Nesta cannot open up enough for that, and the rest of the IC doesn’t speak that language. They aren’t wilfully ignoring it, they honestly have no idea how to process it and are frustrated by that lack of understanding.

The minute she got up and went to the dying King of Hybern, this became completely inevitable. Nesta isn’t someone who can be strengthened and forged like Feyre or even Elain- surrounded by gentle love and kindness. She needed to be shattered and re-forged, and when she is she will be stronger, more confident, and happier for it.

The next book is going to be incredible.

[yourladyocs]

All for Lumley!

1. What’s the maximum amount of time your character can sit still with nothing to do?

Very little! Lumley has to be doing something, especially with her hands.

2. How easy is it for your character to laugh?

I feel like its a little hard for her to laugh, but if you can get her laughing then it is true laughter. 

3. How do they put themselves to bed at night (reading, singing, thinking?)

Lumley writes in her journal and then checks in with her brother Tenzin. 

4. How easy is it to earn their trust?

Not easy at all, but once you have it then you have it for life. 

5. How easy is it to earn their mistrust?

A simple slip. Lumley gets paranoid easily. 

6. Do they consider laws flexible, or immovable?

Her line of work doesn’t allow her to see them as immovable. 

7. What triggers nostalgia for them, most often? Do they enjoy that feeling?

The feeling of sand beneath her feet. The silent night looking up at the stars and the moon. It fluctuates; sometimes it is good and reminds her of home, but other times it reminds her that she isn’t home and might not come back.  

8. What were they told to stop/start doing most often as a child

Sentil had to tell her so many times to stop picking up objects and messing with them. Sentil also had to tell her to start believing her happiness and stop believing that she was meant to have a purpose; to live life as it is. 

9. Do they swear? Do they remember their first swear word?

Yes. I think it was calling Emil/Rowan a dumb ass. 

10. What lie do they most frequently remember telling? Does it haunt them?

She really isn’t the type of person to lie. 

11. How do they cope with confusion (seek clarification, pretend they understand, etc)?

She writes it down and then tries again later to remember some details about it. 

12. How do they deal with an itch found in a place they can’t quite reach?

Ask for help (from her friends). 

13. What color do they think they look best in? Do they actually look best in that color?

I love to dress her in yellows. I would like to believe she does look good in yellow! 

14. What animal do they fear most?

Animals should fear her! She doesn’t fear any animals since she is a hunter. 

15. How do they speak? Is what they say usually thought of on the spot, or do they rehearse it in their mind first?

She speaks as soon as a thought comes to mind. She has one of the most genuine interactions with others, even though she is a spy. 

16. What makes their stomach turn?

The moon. 

17. Are they easily embarrassed?

I would say no! 

18. What embarrasses them?

Talking about love and romance with people who are close to her. 

19. What is their favorite number?

17

20. If they were asked to explain the difference between romantic and platonic or familial love, how would they do so?

I had this discussion in cannon, but its slowly changing over time.“Romantic love contains a certain duty to the person. You will do anything for them. I mean anything, even if it is against a moral code. Platonic and family love you don’t have that same type of duty. You will do anything for them, but you know not to cross your moral line.”She will do whatever it takes to protect both types of love, but she values herself a lot more in platonic and familial relations. She knows that if they try to break her moral code, that they aren’t really family or friends at all. Romance is hard. Romance is a place where your heart takes over and your moral code is easily broken to appease another. She is really hoping she doesn’t lose that in pursuing a crush. 

21. Why do they get up in the morning? 

She gets up in order to keep in touch with all her friends and family. She has things to do and she is going to do them! 

22. How does jealousy manifest itself in them (they become possessive, they become aloof, etc)? 

Possessive and attached a lot. Its not to the person they are jealous of, but like if someone is trying to attach themselves to her crush, then she is going to circle around her crush. 

23. How does envy manifest itself in them (they take what they want, they become resentful, etc)? 

She is envious of people who live in a life of bliss, but she doesn’t do anything about it. She truly doesn’t care about them enough. Whats the point of being resentful? It won’t help now or in her life in general (except with the moon). 

24. Is sex something that they’re comfortable speaking about? To whom? 

Lumley is uncomfortable talking about sex. She understands it scientifically, but like she isn’t going to talk about it like Peitho talks about it. 

25. What are their thoughts on marriage? 

It is a nice idea. 

26. What is their preferred mode of transportation? 

Walking with bare feet. 

27. What causes them to feel dread? 

Getting caught doing something she shouldn’t. Breaking an object that she messed with. Facing enemies she knows are tougher than her, but fighting through her emotions to stand up to that enemy. 

28. Would they prefer a lie over an unpleasant truth? 

Unpleasant truth. 

29. Do they usually live up to their own ideals? 

Lumley doesn’t have any ideals yet. She is building them. 

30. Who do they most regret meeting? 

She doesn’t regret meeting them, but she regrets not killing them when she met them: Aengus. 

31. Who are they the most glad to have met? 

Hoth (her mother) and Rowan (her best friend) and Nasuada. 

32. Do they have a go-to story in conversation? Or a joke? 

She does not. Lumley doesn’t socialize. 

33. Could they be considered lazy? 

I don’t think they could! 

34. How hard is it for them to shake a sense of guilt? 

Yes, very. She feels horrible about many things she did. She writes them down so she never forgets and so she can learn from her mistakes. Lumley has a hard time letting go of things she did. 

35. How do they treat the things their friends come to them excited about? Are they supportive? 

Depends on what it is about. She is usually very supportive about it, but she doesn’t have to be excited about it if it something bad or something she doesn’t super like. 

36. Do they actively seek romance, or do they wait for it to fall into their lap? 

Lumley likes to take it slow. She will not actively seek romance but she doesn’t want it to fall in her lap. She wants to take her time and slowly build the opportunity.  

37. Do they have a system for remembering names, long lists of numbers, things that need to go in a certain order (like anagrams, putting things to melodies, etc)? 

She keeps a journal! 

38. What memory do they revisit the most often? 

Moments with Sentil and dances with Water Weaver. 

39. How easy is it for them to ignore flaws in other people? 

She has so many flaws herself, that she chooses not to speak about other people’s flaws. 

40. How sensitive are they to their own flaws?

She knows she has a lot of flaws. 

41. How do they feel about children? 

Children are good, however she doesn’t want to give birth to any of them. She prefer not to, but if her bloodline must continue then she might. 

42. How badly do they want to reach their end goal? 

End goal is to kill Aengus and she wants to do that now. 

43. If someone asked them to explain their sexuality, how would they do so?

She would say that her romance would take a long time. It takes her a long time to get anywhere with anyone. Its hard enough to platonically love Rowan and its been three years. She is very ace. 

QUESTIONS FOR CREATORS

A) Why are you excited about this character?

I love her! She is my child! I am excited about her because it seems like she is evolving as the time rolls on. 

B) What inspired you to create them?

When I created Lumley, I had only created Elves in D&D. So I wanted to play a new race and I was lent Princes of the Apocalypse earlier that year. I wanted to play something in that book, so I picked a water genasi. I decided on her backstory as sort of a pun. Like “haha, what if a water genasi is living in the desert”. Then her backstory started evolving from there. 

C) Did you have trouble figuring out where they fit in their own story?

The DM did a super good job at making sure our characters fit into the world perfectly. 

D) Have they always had the same physical appearance, or have you had to edit how they look?

I had to edit her, specifically her hair. She used to have really long crimpy hair and now she has a short boy cut(?). That is all she usually has. 

E) Are they someone you would get along with? Would they get along with you?

I don’t really know. We share a lot of characteristics, but I don’t know if we would get along with each other. 

F) What do you feel when you think of your OC (pride, excitement, frustration, etc)?

A mix of frustration and adoration. 

G) What trait of theirs bothers you the most?

She is so genuine and not very charismatic. That doesn’t help when you are literally on a spy mission! She is average on many traits.

H) What trait do you admire most?

I admire her ability to evolve and adapt. She is figuring herself out still and I love all the new ways she adapts to things. 

I) Do you prefer to keep them in their canon universe?

I don’t think I could play her anywhere else and keep her adaptability. 

J) Did you have to manipulate or exclude canon factors to allow them to create their character?

I don’t think so. I would have to double check. But I didn’t break the game! 

[frozensnares]

Hello.

I recently listened to an excellent podcast called HumanizeMe, and it left me with a lot of thoughts and feelings about my involvement with different communities, particularly my interaction with this one. So I’m going to be spilling a lot of those out below. It may not make much sense, but I will try to edit and keep things organized.

And an apology for not listening to the advice given in that podcast and have someone review this before posting it. I just need to clear my head.

I find myself in a really odd relationship with this community and my involvement in it. The whole story behind it is long and complicated, and I am my own person with lots of thoughts and opinions about everything, which only further complicates things. 

Generally speaking, I try to keep my presence kind and welcoming. The shipping communities are the harder ones because there are stronger emotions attached there, and I understand this because I am also a part of it. I tend to stick with my ship. I don’t venture out much. I like things the way I have rationalized them out to be. And I know that I am an anomaly.

This is why I like to engage in “Ship And Let Ship” mentality. You ship what you want. I ship what I want. Everything is fine. Everyone is happy. I won’t board your ship if I don’t want to. You don’t need to board mine either. That’s fine.

The reason why writing for my ship has become difficult for me is because of something that happened about a year ago. 

A few of you may remember a post I made in which I openly and honestly expressed my feelings about how I felt I was treated by others. I deleted that post. Even though I posted it solely for myself--so I could remember what happened and get my feelings out of my head because I needed clarity--it was taken as a personal attack by the people involved in the incident. They confronted me about it, thought I was slandering them (even though I didn’t use any names), and treated me like it was a wretched thing I had done to them. They made me feel like I didn’t deserve an outlet to vent, like this safe space that I created for myself wasn’t safe. So I deleted it.

Not too long later, the people involved did everything they could to ostracize me. They pushed me to the far reaches of the group, snapped at me whenever I expressed any opinion, and treated me poorly before deciding that I wasn’t worth their time. There were several compounding factors about why these things escalated, but one of them had to do with shipping. 

Apparently, expressing that I wouldn’t engage in material that separated my OTP and put them in other situation was a bad thing. There were further comments in response to my extremely honest statement that was approximately “You can write what you want, but don’t expect me to read it.” That seemed fair to me, given that most of those people didn’t read or comment on things I posted. I just thought the justification had to be made because I had specifically gone through to read and comment on everything they posted.

Either way, it led to them deciding that I wasn’t open or accepting enough for them. So they removed me from the situation.

This led to an overwhelming desire in me to separate myself from everything they did. Not that it probably would have mattered. After all, they probably aren’t insane and would just bypass my screen name if it ever popped up. (I do wonder if they have blocked me. It’s interesting to think about. Sorry I’m enough of a problem that that was a necessity.) But the part of my brain that fixates on these ideas is astounding. I can’t let my name pop up where they might see it. What if it negatively affects them? I had to unfollow a ton of people that I was mutuals with simply because seeing screen names gave me panic attacks. I couldn’t do that to someone else. I can’t safely write in my fictional universes if it damages another person. Knowing what I know, it makes some of my things really hard to go back to. I know what they peruse. I knew what they sought out. I couldn’t let myself have the freedom to explore anymore.

Eventually, I’ll get to how this affected my anxiety order, but now is not the time. Maybe keep it in mind, if you’re still reading.

At that time, I very busy. I was working, I was traveling for the first time in my life, I was rushed to the emergency room, I was dealing with mental health issues... And I tried not to let those things known. It wasn’t relevant, or so I told myself. However, the lack of knowledge just made my mistreatment worse, and led to drastic thought spirals that directly affected my ability to produce.

I continued trying to write and trying to stay active, but at the same time, activity within the corner of fandom I was involved in dwindled. It happens, really. I know I ship a non-canon rarepair, and that I shouldn’t have expected much. With everything happening at the same time, though, it didn’t help my mental state.

With everything happening how and when it did, I became even more bitter and resentful about activity and response in the fandom. With this, I became much more vocal about how works receive recognition. After all, it makes sense to me that after spending hours and days and weeks working on something, it would garner at least a little more response than a three word comment or a kudos.

This seems like even less because I have a big problem with anxiety.

Each user only gets one press of the kudos button, so that makes it more valuable, right? Not according to my brain. No, my brain thinks that it’s much more likely that the kudos button was an accidental tap on a phone screen, and it’s not possible to revoke kudos once it’s given, so it’s likely all a mistake.

And a short comment? Well, it makes sense that time may be limited and people may not know what to say. But if someone just spent a good amount of time reading something that took days to write, certainly they could spend a few more minutes to let an author know? And the comment would sound like they’d actually read the thing, right?

Surely, it’s not just me. Everyone is probably responding to everything in the same way. My brain doesn’t see that, though. It sees the few works that are only just similar to mine getting some weird standard of “better” responses. As if responses can even be better? Probably just my brain putting me down and making me feel even more worthless. Stupid brain. It’s clear in hindsight, but at the time? I can’t separate those thoughts.

This is how my brain thinks. And it’s not just in fandom. This is every single thought that my brain has. Driving is a pain. So much that I had an anxiety attack while I was driving in a dream. Can’t escape even when I’m unconscious. But that’s my issue, and it doesn’t and shouldn’t have to concern you, if you’re still reading this. (Are you? Hi. Sorry this is so long.)

So what’s the point of all this?

I’m not entirely sure.

Maybe it’s my long-winded explanation of excusing how horrible I’ve been in response to being slighted by people I thought were my friends.

Maybe it’s my apology for letting it manifest so extremely in what I do. 

Maybe it’s just thoughts I need to exist somewhere outside of my head.

I likely do owe you an apology. You, whoever is reading this, deserve my utmost sincerity in apologizing to you. Because I have thought poorly of you, and given so much power to all these other doubts that plagued me. And you never deserve that. You are wonderful and joyful and a delight to be around.

I tried to make that my default and to keep myself in that mindset. And along the way, I allowed myself to be so thoroughly destroyed that I couldn’t quite get back there. I can’t start again. That isn’t possible. But I can make the effort to try and get back to where I was. I won’t be the same. But who can say that they ever are, really?

[crit1rael]

Uncommon Questions for OCs and their creators

QUESTIONS FOR YOUR OCs What’s the maximum amount of time your character can sit still with nothing to do? -About 10 minutes if they really really have to, usually they're always moving unless they're "sleeping". If it's a sit-still-and-wait situation there will be fidgeting, if it's a don't-move-or-you'll-die an-agonizing-death situation then there will be straining noises and sweating at the 2 minute mark. How easy is it for your character to laugh? -with strangers or acquaintances they're pretty straight-faced, with friends they're prone to cracking a smirk, generally it's just a small upwards quirk of the mouth tho. A smile is pretty rare, and outright bursts of laughter only really ever happen when drunk. How do they put themselves to bed at night (reading, singing, thinking?) -Petting Sai is their go-to method, but generally they prefer to stay on watch, or they'll scout ahead. They'll let someone take first watch, then stay up the rest of the night and let everyone else do whatever it is they do in their resting time. How easy is it to earn their trust? -Not very easy at all, they keep things close to their chest and only open up slowly, if at all. If their trust is earned though, then you've got an ally for life. How easy is it to earn their mistrust? -they're generally wary of people at first meeting, trust is reserved for those few who earn it. If you had their trust and betrayed it then, depending on the severity, it's either a wary second chance or it's broken for good. Do they consider laws flexible, or immovable? -Flexible as hell, as long as others aren't being harmed. What triggers nostalgia for them, most often? Do they enjoy that feeling? -The smell of maple syrup, the color of golden sunlight filtering thru trees. They don't like it very much no. What were they told to stop/start doing most often as a child -Stop wandering off was the most frequent. Do they swear? Do they remember their first swear word? -They'll curse under their breath, but they do most things under their breath tho so. As for first it was probably something crass they repeated from their father after he hurt himself. What lie do they most frequently remember telling? Does it haunt them? -"I'll be back soon." Said frequently and with heartfelt meaning, but never really fulfilled. The last time they said it was when they returned to find their home village completely gone. They never say it anymore. So yes, it haunts them. How do they cope with confusion (seek clarification, pretend they understand, etc)? -A weird mix of both of those, they'll pretend for a second out of habit and then just go wait what? How do they deal with an itch found in a place they can’t quite reach? -Find a good ol tree to scratch against, of find a stick to scratch with, or use an arrow to reach it if push comes to shove. What color do they think they look best in? Do they actually look best in that color? -They -think- they look best in blues but they don't. They look best in dark greens. Luckily they always wear reddish earth tones and shit so it's a moot point. What animal do they fear most? -Dragons of course. How do they speak? Is what they say usually thought of on the spot, or do they rehearse it in their mind first? -Quietly and under their breath in the thick of things, clear and confident when they actually know what's going on and what they're talking about. Either way they don't usually rehearse their words. What makes their stomach turn? -Not a whole lot tbh, at least not physical things like smells or blood/death. Or at least, not normal amounts of blood and death. Wanton and vast destruction would hit them badly though. Are they easily embarrassed? -Not in most situations no. What embarrasses them? -They think pretty highly of their skills, being that they spent their entire life honing and surviving off of them, so when they fail at something around others that they're normally very adept at, they get a bit embarrassed. What I'm saying is that they're nervous doing things in front of people so they suck at their skill checks. What is their favorite number? -14 If they were asked to explain the difference between romantic and platonic or familial love, how would they do so? -They wouldn't really have any clue what you're going on about, emotions tend to confuse them. Like, of course they know that their parents loved them, and Ed'Hel loved them but in a different way, and they loved Ed'hel in an even more different way and specific way. But they couldn't tell you what those differences were. Why do they get up in the morning? -To...survive? How does jealousy manifest itself in them (they become possessive, they become aloof, etc)? -As with most emotions they'll just kinda...walk away. How does envy manifest itself in them (they take what they want, they become resentful, etc)? -If it's something they can attain for themselves with a bit of effort then they'll go for it, they're not the type to be envious of material things tho. Is sex something that they’re comfortable speaking about? To whom? -No What are their thoughts on marriage? -No What is their preferred mode of transportation? -On foot, out of convenience. Ideally it would be on the back of a giant bear though of course. What causes them to feel dread? -Having to rely on others to survive. Like say they're tied up and have to wait for someone to rescue them. They'd have a really shitty subconscious moment of 'there's no way that person is capable enough' and deep down feel really bad about that but still feel dread that they're right. Would they prefer a lie over an unpleasant truth? -Pretty much always prefer the truth. Do they usually live up to their own ideals? -No of course not, does anyone ever? Who do they most regret meeting? -horribly, Ed'hel. Second place goes, equally horribly, to Kjelle. Who are they the most glad to have met? -They're pretty positive about the group they've found themselves with at the moment, Naveen is their favorite by a good margin tho. Do they have a go-to story in conversation? Or a joke? -Not really no, socializing is by far their weakest point. They'll gladly listen and nod, but story time isn't something they do. Could they be considered lazy? -it's a knife edge of having no set goals but to survive every day as it comes. So physically they're far from lazy, they hunt and fight and travel every day, but motivationally? Very lazy. How hard is it for them to shake a sense of guilt? -If it's an abstract sense of guilt then they can quell it fairly easily. If they're truly guilty of something then they don't handle it well at all, they'll apologize and try to amend as soon as they realize how and why they fucked up. How do they treat the things their friends come to them excited about? Are they supportive? -Yes very, nod in all the right places, do the whole mhm go on thing, tell me to go for it. Yeah. Do they actively seek romance, or do they wait for it to fall into their lap? -they're not actively looking at all, as with most things if it falls in their path they'll deal with it as it comes. Do they have a system for remembering names, long lists of numbers, things that need to go in a certain order (like anagrams, putting things to melodies, etc)? -long years of practice in the art of if-you-forget-to-do-this-you'll-starve/die. But other than that they're shit at remembering names and there's nothing I can do to help them. What memory do they revisit the most often? -painfully, the time they saw Ed'hel before they left that final time. How easy is it for them to ignore flaws in other people? -depends on the flaw really, if it's not something that is actively endangering their life or making it unpleasant then it's not their problem and they don't care. How sensitive are they to their own flaws? -they know what they're good at and they know what they're not good at and so they stick to things they can do and leave the other shit to other people to handle. How do they feel about children? -they're people, don't hurt them. Just like all other people. How badly do they want to reach their end goal? -at this moment of their life they're taking every day as it comes, one day at a time. The trail to finding out what happened to their home and loved ones has long since dried up and they live a quasi-life of just getting up every day and not dying, rinse and repeat. This adventure is the first time in a long long time they've been curious about anything other than immediate survival, they find themselves going into their rest periods thinking of what else could possibly happen tomorrow. If someone asked them to explain their sexuality, how would they do so? -very vague confused shrug QUESTIONS FOR CREATORS A) Why are you excited about this character?
-pretty excited, they're my first new child in a long time. B) What inspired you to create them? -they're a dnd character so I kinda had to make them. I had no choice. C) Did you have trouble figuring out where they fit in their own story? -I still don't know where the hell they fit in all this 
D) Have they always had the same physical appearance, or have you had to edit how they look? -I've edited them recently based on details others have drawn them with that I like and feel fit them better 
E) Are they someone you would get along with? Would they get along with you? -nah they'd very much dislike me, we have similar negative attributes that don't mesh well F) What do you feel when you think of your OC (pride, excitement, frustration, etc)? -frustration mostly, character creating has been getting harder and harder for me in recent years 
G) What trait of theirs bothers you the most?
-no end goal, I relate too much H) What trait do you admire most? -tenacity 
I) Do you prefer to keep them in their canon universe?
-nowhere else to put em really, AUs are always great tho J) Did you have to manipulate or exclude canon factors to allow them to create their character? -I have no idea what that means...

[thekisforkeats]

Where You Go, I Go (Let All the Broken Pieces Shine, Chapter Five)

Info: The Magnus Archives, D&D AU. JonMartin, more ships to be added. Rated T. Post-Canon. Jon is amab nb and uses they/them, Martin is a trans guy.

CWs: Apocalypse (mentioned), paranoia (mentioned), depression (mentioned), child abuse (mention of Martin's mother), slavery (mentioned), alternate realities.

Summary: Martin has some long, deep thoughts about roleplaying games and his new role as "the one who knows things."

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First Chapter Previous Chapter

The Raven Queen brings Jon and Martin to a room deep in the fortress, where they are to be outfitted with new clothing and gear for their journey. Martin broods as they go, trying to get some hold on what’s going on while he lets Jon lead him by the hand.

Jon’s been leading Martin by the hand for months now, if his reckoning of time is any indication. Longer, really--it was always Jon choosing the statements they’d record, who’d research which part of which statement. And that was when they were even including Martin; so much of the time they’d known each other, Jon had been keeping things from him, hiding things, leaving him out of the loop. That Jon had started to trust Martin and talk to him still felt like a major development in their relationship.

Martin’s getting tired of being led around by the hand. By Jon, by Peter, by… anyone, really. And it’s not even so much that he wants to do the leading as that he wants to feel like he’s contributing to the decision-making. Back in Scotland, there’d been a blessed few weeks where the decisions had been joint when it hadn’t just been entirely left to Martin: what to have for dinner? What to do for the evening? Do they make long-term plans to settle in the village, or make plans to head back to London? Something as simple as Jon letting him decide the menu for the week had felt… thrilling. Empowering.

And then the world had ended, and he’d gone back to following Jon around like a lost puppy.

No, that isn’t fair. Martin grimaces, glad Jon’s not looking at him. Jon’s certainly never looked at him like that, like someone they’re only putting up with and letting tag along out of pity. They’ve made it very clear that for a very long time, even when they were paranoid and thought Martin capable of murder, they’ve depended on Martin. That he’s been their rock, that seeing him has long been a balm that’s kept them clinging to hope even when they felt at their lowest. So far as Jon’s told him, in Jon’s mind they’re not leading Martin by the hand; to Jon, it’s more like Martin’s been carrying them on his shoulders.

It occurs to Martin that very shortly they will be in a world that Jon knows nothing about. Martin is the one with all the information now, not Jon. He’s glad Jon hasn’t yet asked how Martin knows so much about a roleplaying game; the truth is embarrassing, and he doesn’t want to admit it outright.

When Martin was a kid, roleplaying was an outlet that he clung to rather desperately. Most of his roleplaying was done online, through the various text-based mediums he found, but there was a bright spot in his early teens when he had actual friends who he joined for regular games of Dungeons and Dragons. Those teenage campaigns had been full of drama and hijinks and plenty of arguments between people who wanted to stick to the rules and people who cared more about the story. Martin was, naturally, in the latter category although he didn’t mind a bit of rules lawyering from time to time.

Roleplaying had also been a place for him to try out new roles. When he’d briefly taken on Dungeon Master duties he’d tried out pitching his voice lower with the male characters he played, the enemies and allies of the main characters. When he’d gone back to being “just” a player, he’d made the bold move of deciding to up and play a male character, a half-elf bard who had a penchant for reciting Martin’s own horrible poetry to pretty girls and boys alike.

That half-elf bard’s name had, of course, been Martin. It was no coincidence that when he’d come out as trans half a decade later he’d settled on “Martin” as the name he claimed for himself.

Sometimes he wondered if he’d have kept up with the hobby if his mother hadn’t gotten sick. If he’d been able to go to uni, would he have found a group on campus? Or even started one? It was one on a long list of “might-have-been” regrets that he’d nursed in quiet moments of resentment and frustration.

After his mother had died and he’d agreed to work for Peter, he’d suddenly found himself with extra income he didn’t quite know what to do with. In a fit of self-indulgence, he’d gone and bought every single book for the 5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons, and kept on buying all the new ones right up until Peter had led him down into the tunnels beneath the Institute. He’d had no one to play with, but he’d sat in his flat on those solitary evenings and weekends and read each book cover-to-cover.

He’d daydreamed about what it might’ve been like, if he’d suggested running a game as a team bonding exercise. What would everyone have played? He’d have been Dungeon Master, of course, but he did love a bard, so there could have been a helpful bard the party would run into from time to time, dispensing plot tidbits alongside his tavern songs. Tim probably would have played a fighter, to be able to swing a sword at things, and Sasha a wizard so she’d have as many options as possible. Jon would be a spellcaster, but he wouldn’t want the religious aspect of a cleric and he’d refuse to play high charisma, so… druid, maybe?

And then Martin would shake his head and call himself a fool. He barely remembered the real Sasha, and even if he remembered Tim being combative and argumentative that didn’t mean he’d want to be a fighter. No, Tim would want to be something high charisma. A sorcerer, or a bard, or maybe a paladin. Sasha… he didn’t remember at all. Jon would refuse to play.

At least it had been a good exercise in feeling Lonely.

He’d told himself the whole thing was a self-indulgent waste of time, but now he wonders. He remembers Lolth claiming that she sent him to their world, and he reaches up a hand to feel at his vaguely pointed ears, and he wonders. Was he drawn to this because it was always real? Or has he somehow manifested it into being?

Well, regardless of how they got here, it’s certainly real enough now. And he’s grateful to his past self, for having bought and read all those books, because he feels like it’s going to be useful, where they’re going.

So he comes back to the fact that Jon is going to be out of their depth in this new world, and Jon’s not good at being out of their depth. It’s sort of endearing, sometimes, watching Jon fluster, but Martin doesn’t really want Jon to be flustering in the middle of, say, running into a pack of kobolds.

It’s going to fall to Martin, then, to tell Jon what’s going on. It’ll be the last few months reversed--instead of Jon leading him through a strange landscape filled with potential danger, Martin will be leading Jon through a strange landscape filled with potential danger.

At least there’ll be inns to stay at.

The Raven Queen bids them goodbye once they reach the room where they’re to be outfitted, leaving them with a pair of shadar-kai, elves with the same withered look Jon has. These two are going to help them with their gear and then lead them to whatever portal they’re taking to Toril.

Martin looks over the two tables that have been laid out with their gear. Fairly standard stuff--basic traveling gear, armor and weapons, the like. His own table has a couple sets of clothing, one looking more a costume than the other, various pieces of armor made of leather, a shortbow and quiver, a dagger, a backpack already filled with gear.

Martin ignores all of this, however, between two things catch his attention and hold it fast: a choice of several musical instruments, and a silver pin engraved with a symbol of moon and harp.

His breath hitches a little bit. A bard. He’s going to be a bard. And not just a bard--they’re giving him a Harper pin. There’s a lump in his throat and his eyes are watering. He’s not sure what to make of the well of emotions, except to note that they are, at least, happy emotions.

The Harpers are the reason Martin was always drawn to the Forgotten Realms above all other D&D settings. Those Who Harp are a secretive organization--people know they exist, but Harpers often don’t announce their allegiance. They are dedicated to promoting good, preserving art and music and history, maintaining a balance between civilization and nature. They’ve disbanded and reformed several times, but they are known far and wide as a shorthand for traveling do-gooders.

They are absolutely egalitarian about who they let into their ranks--so long as you are dedicated to the cause, it doesn't matter your background or race. Many Harpers are bards, though hardly all of them, but it’s common enough that many people assume any random bard was a Harper.

A teenaged Martin had dreamed of being such a hero--traveling the world, using music and poetry to bring joy to the hearts of others, vanquishing evil with stalwart companions. It was the sort of thing he’d held onto when he’d faced the horrors of the Magnus Institute, that tiny seed of hope that maybe, maybe, just trying hard enough to live up to those ideals would let them vanquish the things they were struggling with. It hadn’t worked, in the end, but it had gotten him through more than one terrible encounter.

And the Raven Queen intends him to be one of them. To be a Harper.

Martin catches Jon peering at him, and flashes them a grin. “C’mon,” he says. “Let’s get changed.”

Jon’s clothing is less ornate than Martin’s, and there’s no choices to be made. A backpack filled with gear, a spear and shield, leather armor. Martin thinks that Jon’s meant to be some sort of fighter until Jon asks one of the Raven Queen’s servants about a pouch set on the table and is told it’s for spell components.

Jon blinks at the other shadar-kai. “Spell…?” He shakes himself. “Well. I’ll figure that out.”

The other elf merely nods and goes about helping Jon get his gear on.

Martin frowns at this. Spell component pouch, so Jon’s a caster… but not a wizard or a sorcerer, with the leather armor. A cleric would have a holy symbol, a druid would have a druidic focus…

There’s only one option left, and Martin’s surprised it hasn’t already occurred to him. Jon is a warlock.

It makes sense, really. Jon had indeed made bargains with dark beings for power and knowledge, even if he hadn’t done it entirely consciously or willingly. And this, too, explains the sword--Jon must be a Hexblade. The Raven Queen is the patron of Hexblades, warlocks who used special swords and magic to enhance their prowess at fighting. It fits together so neatly that Martin’s mentally kicking himself for not seeing it before.

It bothers him a little, though. Martin’s a bard, with a shortbow, which means range and spellcasting. Jon might be fighting with a sword, but he’s not sturdy. They’re going to need someone who can take a hit, and he doubts the Raven Queen would send them out into the world without some idea that they’ll run into someone that can help with that.

After a few minutes of fretting, Martin decides to put it out of his mind. Thus far everything has gone along as if they’ve literally stepped into the 5th Edition D&D manual, so he’s just going to trust that they’ll find fellow adventurers along the way. The Harper pin should help with that, at least--Harpers are trusted by most people in Faerun, and anyone who doesn’t trust a Harper isn’t someone Martin really wants to associate with anyway.

Once they’re outfitted and grab their gear--Martin chooses the lute, the stereotypical bard instrument--they’re led out of the Raven Queen’s fortress and into the bleak landscape of the Shadowfell. It’s still entirely devoid of color, a place of craggy peaks and deep gorges. The Raven Queen’s shadar-kai know the way, however, and lead them confidently.

They finally reach a city with a river of lava flowing through its center, a place full of undead and necromancers and dismal slaves.

“It feels like London,” Jon murmurs.

“What’s that?” Martin asks, turning to frown at his boyfriend.

“This place. It feels like London. Or… not the real London, but the one we just left.” Jon waves a hand. “Miserable people, trapped in a miserable city. I don’t remember the Thames being made of lava, but…”

“It’s called Evernight,” Martin says. “It’s the reflection of a city in Toril called Neverwinter. The real river is enchanted to be warm all the time, so… thus the lava.”

“Ahh,” Jon says in a noncommittal sort of tone. “That explains it, I guess.”

They follow their guides in silence, and Martin looks around at the dark alleys, the moaning undead, the chained people, and sighs.

“It does feel like London, though,” he admits softly. “But I’m sure London isn’t like this anymore.” He glances at Jon, trying to figure out what’s going through the other man’s mind.

Jon just nods, dark eyes lost in thought.

There isn’t much more chance to speak, because they’re standing in front of a portal. One of their guides gestures. “Neverwinter is on the other side,” they say. “In the name of the Raven Queen, we wish you well on your quest.”

Jon eyes the portal, frowning. “I…” They shudder a bit, and then laugh. “I’m nervous,” they admit. “What if I can’t… complete this errand my Queen is sending me on? I know nothing of this world we’re going to, and I ended the one we came from, and…”

Martin reaches out to clasp Jon’s hand. “Hey,” he says. “It’s okay. I’ll be there with you, and I know this world. We’ll be fine.” A pause. “Where you go, I go, right?”

Jon looks over at him and smiles; a small smile, but a smile nonetheless. “That’s the deal,” he replies.

Martin grins widely and squeezes Jon’s hand. “Come on, love,” he says. “Let’s go have an adventure.”

And so, together, they step through the portal.

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