#but specifically this is in response to news about a 'persistent universe' thing being made by disney and epic games

[runemyth0]

Oh, that's a terrible idea. You should totally do it.

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

Yo! Good morning/evening, hope you are fine^^💝. I wanted to ask you a question but I was afraid that it may bother you or something (you know..that feeling when you are scared that you might disturb someone or being an unwelcome person) but yeah I will ask you since i was serious about your answer for some time now so I hope I'm not annoying you or something *feel free to answer only if you wish^^. You seem to know the characters pretty well, you are quite capable and great at reading and understanding them, one of the things I'm serious about is what do you think would make someone qualified enough to be with malleus? Do they have to be of the same species?certain Reputation, stature or traits?(sorry can't help it since I can't rest until I know everything about what interests me and figure it all out😅). Thanks for giving me some of your precious time I really like your blog, you're amazing💜

No worries, you’re not bothering me at all ^^ I love to talk about my hyperfixations www

Now, I know a lot of fans (particularly on the EN side) like to ship Malleus with their OC and especially with Yuu so I want to first make it clear that my response is NOT meant to invalidate those Malleus shippers. Whatever I say here is based on my own interpretation of canon lore (and let’s be real here, TWST won’t ever confirm if anyone is romantically interested in Yuu because it might not work with how some players view their own relationship with that character). In fanon, anyone can be with anyone, but in canon there are very specific in-universe rules and expectations laid out for Malleus so these are what I will be referring to.

I also want to emphasize that the final traits I discuss in this post do NOT reflect Malleus’s personal tastes or views. He has little say in what kind of an individual his spouse would be, so his own preferences are not speculated about or taken into account here. The traits I will be bringing up are based on what I believe the lore implies are the desirable traits for those marrying into the Draconia royal family.

We got it? Good 👍 Read more below the cut!!

Firstly, I’m completely disregarding the ideas of “Malleus can love whoever he wants to love”, “Malleus can scare people into accepting who he loves”, and/or “Malleus can change the law so he can marry who he loves” (a la Sultan from Aladdin or through some other Disney magic or logic). Here’s why:

In general, those solutions for “high stakes issues” are too simple, and that has never been how Twisted Wonderland tackles complicated problems. Just look at every single OB boy’s backstory. They’re so complex that they aren’t totally resolved by the end of their books; these problems persist and are long term things each of them are working on addressing. This is also true of the politics TWST introduces to us; Leona for example explains how there is social pushback and resistance to the idea of infrastructure reform because the culture of the Sunset Savanna stresses harmony with nature. This has made it difficult for them to adopt new technologies because real politicians in their world have to seriously weigh their cultural values with their health and societal progress. The only time there are really easy solutions are in events or vignettes where the emotional stakes are not super high, but who Malleus marries is, in fact, super important since this will entirely change the life of a main character and his country.

With that first bullet point in mind… No, Malleus cannot love whoever he wants to love. Certainly, he may feel affection for another but he can never truly be with them. He is royalty and the only heir to the throne of Briar Valley. It follows that he is expected to marry for political reasons/to better his nation. This is a non-negotiable obligation for him.

Rather than saying, “Malleus cannot scare people into accepting who he loves”, I think it’s more accurate to say Malleus knows he probably shouldn’t. I mean, yes, he may be upset about his S/O not being accepted by his people but I feel that is discrediting a lot of the loyalty he has for his own country. As a kid he may have thrown tantrums when he was upset and potentially harmed staff, but as a 178 year old he has a much better understanding of decorum and maintaining it in spite of his own grudges. For example, even though he personally dislikes Leona he still commands Sebek to apologize to him because, at the end of the day, this could harm Briar Valley’s relationship with the Sunset Savanna. That’s not to say that Malleus can’t be petty (he definitely is)—but implying he would be petty toward basically his entire country just because they would disapprove of the one he loves?? (We know this would likely be true because Sebek’s parents faced similar backlash when they got together.) I feel like his own sense of awareness and responsibility for his country, crown, and people would override that. As an example, Malleus states that he has never been in a car before because the senate would be against it and often kept Malleus in the castle. Someone of his power could easily ignore them and sneak out and do whatever he wanted, yet the dialogue implies Malleus didn’t. He obeyed his political advisors even when he was younger and arguably much more immature. Malleus might not like certain decisions made about his life but it sounds like he ultimately complies with them.

Continuing from the previous point, let’s say for the sake of argument that Malleus does scare everyone into line. What about his public image and the mental health of his S/O? Maybe Malleus can frighten people to not talk out of turn to his face, but he cannot control what people whisper about him behind closed doors or to treat his S/O well or like they actually like them. Not only would they be alienated (away from their own home and forced to adapt to a new one) but they’d be treated oddly by others too. What kind of reputation is that for Malleus? To be a tyrant king who throws a hissy fit anytime someone talks about his partner in a way he doesn’t approve of? With a spouse who is not at their best mentally because of the constant ostracization? (This is similar to what Leona experienced in his childhood.) I don’t think Malleus would want to subject anyone to that kind of life, especially not one he loves. And again, this attitude would be the vast majority of his people. It’s not like it can be avoided or resolved in an easy manner, especially when the people of Briar Valley have proven to be against change.

Lastly, Malleus would not change the law so he can be with whoever he wants to. To begin with, I doubt this is a unilateral position the senate would approve of. But okay, let’s accept that Malleus is royalty so his power overrides the advisors’ power. So he effectively just changed a law for a very selfish and personal reason rather than changing something to actually benefit his people. That doesn’t feel in-character for him, not when Malleus seems to understand that it is the duty of those in higher status to help those below them rather than themselves (see: Riddle’s Suitor Suit vignettes. Malleus has acted selfish before, yes (who remembers Endless Halloween Night? His Dorm Uniform vignettes? I do.)—but never at the cost of changing the status quo of his country. (Book 7 is not included here because he’s in a very distressed emotional state then; this “new law” scenario posits that Malleus is in a normal state of mind.) This is a major change��change which Briar Valley, its people, and most importantly, Malleus, are not ready for. You think there wouldn’t be social pushback against this? From a society that has become complacent with its own way of life and is still isolated from the rest of the world? That Malleus, someone who struggles greatly with accepting life changes himself, could enact such a big change so easily? (On a more technical level, you don’t just pass a law and it instantly becomes tangible or real, there is a process of approval and then implementation.)

Additionally, it’s made clear in Ghost Marriage that “[Malleus] cannot enter into an engagement lightly”, which is why Sebek goes in his place. Eliza, the Ghost Bride, is royalty (er, albeit dead) but it seems that royal status is not enough to qualify as his partner. Maybe this is because she’s dead and doesn’t have anything of value for Briar Valley (no land, no people, no political power), but it could also mean that the partner has to be given the thumbs up by other parties.

All that being said, here are some of the conditions I think would have to be met for Malleus’s future spouse:

Has to be someone of equal or at least high status. This means they also have to be a royal or at least of nobility. This appears to be true of Malleus’s dad, who is referred to as a duke.

Because of how self-contained Briar Valley is + nocturnal fae having beef with diurnal fae, I imagine his partner would have to also be a nocturnal fae. This would also solve the MASSIVE lifespan difference between fae and non-fae because at least fae would be far closer to each other even if their lifespans fluctuate but subspecies.

Someone suited to rule by his side. Being married into any royal family is no joke—it comes with the expectation that you will contribute somehow, and the partner should be fully equipped to enter the world of politics with him.

Piggybacking off the last point, I think mental fortitude is also a prerequisite. This is because being a politician (navigating the social climate both within your country and outside of it, keeping your people and colleagues happy, maintaining public approval, managing laws, dealing with potential attempts on your life, etc.) can be very stressful and can hurt those who are faint of heart or not prepared for the responsibility. Leaders have to make tough calls at the drop of a hat, and they have to be ready for it.

Has a lot to offer in terms of benefits to Briar Valley as a country. This could be in terms of resources, connections, and/or political savvy. This appears to be true of Malleus’s dad, who acted as a diplomat for Briar Valley.

Vetting and formal approval from the senate. lmao good luck with that

Has to be able and willing to have a child. They at least need an heir to the throne to succeed Malleus. (However, knowing how exclusionary and conservative as heck the senators are, I doubt they would accept anything but a biological child 💀)

Preferably someone with powerful magic or is skilled at magic already so as to lessen the chance of “tainting” the bloodline with a weak mage or a non-mage.

I believe that Briar Valley would prefer someone with old fashioned values like them, not someone pushing for massive reform. They have a culture that is resistant to change and a history of fighting for resources with outsiders, so if Malleus’s new spouse tries to introduce a bunch of technology or open its borders to other countries (even if they have good intentions), the people + the senate may oppose them. His father is implied to be open-minded, but he at least understood that such change isn’t reasonable without time and effort dedicated to the endeavor.

All that being said 💦 I think that this topic is actually less about what Malleus as an individual wants and what his country, his people, and, yes, even his asshole senators, want. This is basically an arranged marriage situation so that their country can maintain power and relevance. It’s about the collective and what Malleus must do for their perceived security and prosperity.

[skriblee-ksk]

Kalmia von Viradin

Summary:

[A confident yet pitiful girl who believes herself to be the perfect heroine. A hardworking student of Pomefiore with a well-hidden superiority complex, she adapts to peoples’ desires willfully to be loved (or at the very least, not hated). She acts in a range of personalities, all of which she believes are her real self. However, there are some parts where she hides permanently, which are things that she thinks aren’t suited for the ‘perfect female lead’.]

[An intellectual who shapes herself through the basis of romance fantasies (usually with some mentions of royalty and high society), she obtains a new goal when a foreigner descends on this world and steals the spotlight she worked so hard on. It’s not as if she’d ever fall to dirty work, of course. If it backfired, her reputation would plunge, and she never does things she isn't confident she'll be able to achieve. No, all she’ll do is help the new kid return home and do everything in her power to follow them.]

General Info!

Name: Kalmia Maury von Viradin

Nickname: Kami (which, ykw. she does have some god-complex like things. it’s fitting.)

Birthday: July 2nd

Pronouns: She/her

Sexuality: Bisexual (male preference)

Dominant Hand: Left Right

Hobbies: Reading, Learning ballroom dances, Singing, Baking, Playing otome games.

Likes: Buying pretty dresses, Romance fantasy books, The stars/space, Thunderstorms, Crabs, Apples, Rubies, Spookiness or Things commonly considered gross.

Dislikes: Being depended on constantly, persistent people who can’t take a hint, Uncute animals, stubborn people, vegetables, people too smart for their own good, people too dumb for her own good, actions that force her to be unfeminine, and- Nothing particularly. “I can like anything if others need it.”

Fears: People finding out her past.

Traits: She is very adamant on self-improvement to become the best female lead, is independent (because she likes taking responsibility for her own actions/dislikes getting played with) but also helps others as much as possible, has an elegant air around her (but anything else you feel towards her is something she made you see in her).

Extra Information: She’s not really good at art, Her hair is dyed white (to give an image of purity. Her natural hair is a brown with orange/red tones), She can run super fast in heels, She’s obsessed with astronomy (even if she doesn’t let it show).

"I’ll create my happy ending through love." Pink Filtered Vision: Kalmia's unique magic that she uses for new beginnings. It makes people lower their guards around her. This can make people not care about Kalmia at all if used too heavily, but Kalmia mastered it at an early age. When used, others see her as someone “good”, having them potentially ignore the dangers of answering her invasive question. Of course, it all pairs with her body language and specific words, but it's effective nearly all of the time. She has kept her unique magic well hidden, but she doesn't consider it a secret.

More about her under cut!!

Her Goal:

I’m the perfect heroine. I adapt flawlessly to my surroundings. I can play the part of a ditzy yet hard working girl who tries her best. I can act as if I’m not as weak as others think I am. I can be as mysterious or as innocent as others want to see. I can be the perfect heroine to everyone’s eyes. I can save them, and perhaps they will save me.

I practiced for years to get to this spot. I built up my connections and relationships brick by brick, with constant analysis to become who they liked, or at the very least, could tolerate. So that I could be universally loved.

That’s why it’s unfair. It’s unfair. Your grand entrance captured the most princely beings. The important male leads. It’s unfair that my hard work was overshadowed just because of your uncertain origins and connections built on circumstance instead of hard work. I could do the same thing if I was in your place.

If I was…

Aha. So that’s all I needed. If I can take the place of you… If I can make as grand of an entrance as you did…

And all I need is to arrive in another world. But a portal to another world? How could I ever create something like that on my own? And it’d be weird if I suddenly fixated on it.

I need an excuse.

“I heard you need help getting back home.”

You who took my rightful place. You who planted this idea into my head… I need Yuu.

“I’d love to assist you, darling.”

“So don’t worry, alright?”

- - -

A/N: ITS MY GIRL KALMIAAAAA!!! I didn’t write her backstory here bc that’s her fear and main trauma and I don’t want to expose her TOO soon.

With. like. 3 ocs w white-ish hair. ppl may think i’m obsessed w it. I can explain (i can’t).

I sorted her into Pomefiore because. like. i think that fit her aesthetic, first off, but she’s also she fits in with their self-betterment thing. Kalmia, however, abandons all self-preservation to attain what she believes is better for her. She maintains her weight through unhealthy dieting, and I KNOW that all that hair dye is NOT going to be good for her head later on (this is fiction though so let’s pretend for now). She’s aware that it’s bad for her, but she’s also the type to focus on the present.

She doesn’t really have anything to look forward to. She just wants to be saved with love.

Childishly, she wants a prince charming she can marry and live happily ever after with, but that’s as far as her future thoughts go. After all, what truly matters is how she’s treated in the present.

Fun fact! Vil hates (?) her btw. He sees Kalmia's efforts and acknowledges it, but he's disappointed that's it's misdirected and short-term. Kalmia abandons self-preservation for self-betterment. Vil wants her to do both. He thinks she's wasted potential. It's not like he's going to give up on changing her mind, of course. As long as Kalmia's in his dorm, he'll make her realize a couple things about herself.

Anyways, that's basically it for my TWST OCs!!!! Congrats on making it to the end (as of now) Now to expand on them!!!!!!! See u around!!!

[shushiyuii]

Demonic chains (Part 1)

Note: Not me and Dicey staying up late and obsessing over this new au. I’m not kidding we’ve talked about this for 2 days and Dicey has already made a bunch of art for it! (I really appreciate you little muffin!) 

So presenting Demonic chains, an au mainly based on the bonds of humans and demons :3 (This au is fricking allium duo because I do too much Crimeboys dwdkadkad)

Warnings: Demons (Which would include, rituals and other things demons may have?) Also some subtle themes of vore? Kinda?

Words: 2.6K+ (Ghosties, calm down please. I can see your demands, please don’t hold me at gunpoint dkwknkawdna)

The world had its many rules, many for the afterlife to follow. One of those main rules as to why the system itself was created entirely. The soul, the soul could be many things, but one thing was definitely certain.

It was the display of your existence within the universe, the culmination of your being, to show that you are in fact alive. For humans, their souls are the reason they live, pumping through their veins, giving them emotion, traits and so much more.

The soul was a key factor in existence, it displayed who a person was. At least for humans, humans had souls, ones that indicated their main trait to keep existing. For some, it could be the burning fiery red of ambition, or the yellow to display their pride or the calm, safe feeling of kindness from the colour of a green soul.

Humans weren’t the only creatures with souls though. In the effects of the afterlife, if a soul wishes to persist and continue existing, it will turn into a Demon. Demons are the remains of human souls, terrifying creatures that control the afterlife.

There are different kinds of Demons, animals, spectral, reptilians and humanoid. The demons have many ways of displaying power, one of those ways is through appearance, for example, animal-based demons will appear more animal-like than humanoid as a display of power.

Now, Demons live within the afterlife, good or bad. The afterlife itself is actually very complicated to explain, even some demons don’t have a full comprehension of it, but the basics are that there’s a hierarchy, a hierarchy of powerful demons.

Power is displayed not only through appearance, but the number of souls they have consumed as souls are their source of energy, their hunger if you will. The more souls you consume, the more powerful you become. But souls aren’t always too easy to achieve.

Demons like to play fairly and don’t usually wish to take souls from humans for granted. So, to combat this, contracts were established. Humans can summon demons through an ancient art of rituals or runes, rituals being a way to summon more specific demons whilst Runes are more at random.

When summoned, a demon will show themselves to the humans. And while discussion, the demon will grant whatever the human desires, may it be for a fortune, dreams, popularity, or protection and in return the human will offer their soul to the Demon in exchange.

Not too many humans know about demons themselves, so if in conversation there’s only many rumours and speculation, Humans don’t even know what their soul is or the fact that it exists…

…

The legal papers were finally done and over with, he was granted his freedom. He could finally live out his life as an orphan independent teenager living out in the city… Sure, it’d be difficult all on his own in a run-down apartment, but he’d make do!

Especially since he was getting a somewhat steady income from funding. Eventually, he’d get a job, finish school, and live out his adulthood. All he had to do was get through the struggles of loneliness and carry on his day-to-day life.

16 meant he was technically an adult right? He was responsible too! The apartment itself may be a little run-down and dusty but nothing a touch of home can’t fix, right? All he would have to do is clean up the place, everything was already included in the apartment.

Rumours were speculated about the apartment Tommy was staying in, it was often said that the previous tenant that had lived there died from unknown means. Not only that but it was freaky as the neighbours would often hear the tenant either talking to someone or scream, but they lived alone.

But Tommy doesn’t care about that. It’s worth its price and the landlord is a very sweet lady who helped him. So, Tommy doesn’t need to pay any mind to any stupid rumours!

…

He left his suitcase by the door as he entered, a strange smell hitting his nostrils. Okay, he’d definitely need some refresher in the place if it smelt like this, he thought as he brought his sleeve to cover his nostrils.

He flipped the dusty light switch and bright light that almost blinded Tommy was brought into the room. After his vision adjusted, he could see the furniture of the room, along with the many boxes sent to assist with his moving in process.

There was a comfy old couch with a decent television, which was actually quite a pleasant surprise because if Tommy saved up enough, he could play his console and watch tv. The apartment itself wasn’t entirely dirty as new bedsheets, a fresh-looking bathroom and a clean kitchen were there waiting for him.

It was just the other part’s Tommy wasn’t so keen on. The carpet of the apartment was old and had a strange smell to it. Not only that but there was also an extra room for Tommy to use as perhaps his office space or something.

But then again, the room was a lot darker than the others within the house. Not only that but there was an ominous feeling to it, it scared Tommy a little bit. But after shortly gaining the confidence, he entered the room.

It was completely empty aside from the rug in the middle of the room, something felt off about the rug though, so he crept closer to it… A feeling of dread shivered down his back as he knelt to flip over the carpet…

His hands gripped the carpet and ever so quickly he flipped it over. What he saw was a red circle with strange inscriptions within it, in the centre was a four-pointed star. It was definitely strange with how it looked…

In curiosity, he touched the circle with his finger…

Bright red flashed across his face as it illuminated the room. He quickly picked up the words of incoherent whispers, it became louder by the second and the light became ever so brighter, causing Tommy to cover his eyes.

“W H O  S U M M O N S  M E ?”, a voice spoke, it had a strange feeling to it as if he had heard the voice multiple times, ringing in his head. If he had one way to describe it, it would be demonic…

“I- uh”, Tommy stumbled out entirely confused. What on earth was happening? First, he had moved into his new apartment, then find some strange symbol thing on the ground, and now there was a voice talking to him with no holder. The fuck?

Was he summoning something like in one of those horror movies?

The voice repeated itself, “W H O  S U M M O N S M E?”, this time the tone was more demanding of an answer. In a panic he answered, “T-Tommy!”. Great, he may have just given his name to a demon, wasn’t that a bad thing?!

“T O M M Y?”, the voice seemed decently confused now and a hand? Claw? Paw? He wasn’t sure, but it began to raise itself from the circle, a giant hand… It gripped onto the floor; Tommy began to back up against the wall in fear…

A gigantic figure began to emerge from the circle, but before it even managed to get halfway it bumped its head onto the ceiling, receiving a growl from the thing as it adjusted itself to kneel into the room and stare down at Tommy.

It was vaguely humanoid in shape with a monochromatic colour tone to them, one side was considerably a lot whiter compared to the contrasting black on the other. He had strange long antlers along with his head with strange decorations of green crystals upon their head.

They had fur, with their hands being quite paw-like in appearance in addition to sharp claws. It had visible sharp teeth on display as it smiled down at Tommy, it had long pointy ears that occasionally twitched, a tail that was coated with fur at the end wagged around the room, barely.

It wore a tuxedo to accommodate its appearance with a rich gold bracelet upon its wrist. Its heterochromia eyes illuminated the room, one was a bright red and the other a bright green. Each sclera of the eye matched as a different tone to its iris.

Tommy could’ve sworn its eyes stared through to his very soul…

“Why was I summoned?”, it sounded much friendlier now although its voice still rumbled across the room. Tommy could’ve screamed right then and there; he didn’t dare answer. Its ear twitched as it titled its head.

Its eyebrows furrowed; the tail stopped moving. “Judging by your reaction, it seems I was not summoned purposefully. Was I?”. The tone was much more human-sounding and gentler, it even sounded like it had an American accent.

“You think?”, he remarked. Its eyes widened at the remark, seeming caught off guard. “Well, you’re a determined human, aren’t you? Facing a demon and not afraid to talk back.”, it covered its mouth to giggle under its sleeve a little bit, but there were no traces of malice.

In fact, he seemed rather pleased. But then, he turned his attention back to Tommy and spoke. “Then again, you seem rather young…”, it began. Tommy held back the urge to give another remark to it. “Where are your parents? I don’t sense anybody else nearby.”.

Wait, the thing could tell if people were nearby? And no one was around? Does that mean he was completely alone with the thing? No help at all? He curled in himself slightly, trying to make himself appear smaller as he stared at the thing in fear.

It hummed slightly as there was no response, its eyebrows furrowed more as it appeared to be concerned. “Are you alright, Tommy?”. The tone seemed to belittle and pity him like one of those teachers at school that would worry about your wellbeing.

He let out a huff of frustration, “I’m fine, whoever or whatever the fuck you are!”. The figure just stared at him blankly as realisation hit it, “My apologies! I forgot to introduce myself!”, he reached out his giant paw for Tommy to shake, which was about the size of him. “My name is Ranboo, Ranboo the demon.”.

Confused, Tommy attempted to shake the demon’s hands. “Uh- nice to meet you?”, judging by how the demon was being quite friendly, maybe it was safe to say that Tommy could at least trust the demon enough to communicate with them.

The demon sighed, “My size isn’t very satisfactory, is it? One moment!”, the demon was then silhouetted in black, as its size changed from one that barely fit into the room into one that was actually human-sized, roughly the same height as Tommy. Just taller by a couple of inches.

“Better?”, the demon asked as he adjusted his tie. Tommy nodded as it was much more comprehensible to see the demon now. “Now, as my summoning was unexpected. I guess I should need to explain some things, do you have somewhere where we could discuss?”.

Tommy nodded again, leading the demon into the living room onto the couch. The demon seemed unpleased with the condition of the couch as it coughed. “Excuse me, where were we? Oh right! Contracts!”, he began the explanation.

“Demons I believe you’ve heard rumours of the tales, summoning demons are bad and such”, Ranboo looked to Tommy for confirmation which he received in the form of a nod. “Well, when Humans summon Demons it's usually for the sole reason of contracts”.

“Humans make these contracts with demons in turn what they want, it could be fortune, revenge, theft, murder or more. It’s all up for the human, and in return, the Demon decides what they get in turn which is usually the human’s soul”.

Tommy gulped, right. He was in fact a demon, a thing that desired human souls as a form of payment for their services. And then the enviable happened, “Do you wish to form a contract, judging by these home conditions. It appears that you live alone and don’t get a lot of income”.

Although true, he was alone and not with a lot of money, but he was fine. He didn’t need some demons deal, right? “Don’t worry, judging by your expression you believe I would give you a mass fortune in exchange for your soul, correct?”.

Tommy’s eyes widened as he stared at the demon, it was almost as if he could read his mind? “You are very easy to read with your facial expressions.”, the demon laughed. “Worry not, I do not wish for your soul in exchange.”, Tommy let out a sigh of relief.

“Allow me to go into some detail, Tommy. I will assist you with your current household conditions, including finances. And I will also watch over you during the entire process. And in exchange, I will feed on your soul, not entirely. Just on the occasion that will allow the soul to regenerate”.

So, help for help in a way? But why would the demon need a soul in the first place, “I-I guess but I have a question?”, Ranboo hummed in reply. “Why do you need a soul in the first place?”, “As a demon, we need to not only to raise in power but we also need to feed, we require human souls”.

Wait so, he was kind of food? In a way? But he said that his soul would gradually regenerate meaning that he was kind of a consistent form of food? That’s weird. The demon laughed at his confused expression.

“So, Tommy the human.”. he began as he stood, a smirk on his features. “Do we have a contract?”, the demon reached out his hand. Tommy stood up to match the height of the demon, he let out a sigh as he shook the hand.

The demon smiled, “A pleasure working with you!”. It turned out he hadn’t sold his soul though as the demon continued, “Now allow me to get the contract”. The demon’s eyes then began to glow as so did their hands as they whispered non-understandable things.

Tommy stood there dumbfounded, so he hadn’t just taken the deal just yet. The demon just wanted to shake his hand or something? The fuck, why hadn’t he gotten just gotten the contract?

“WHY DIDN’T YOU GET THE CONTRACT TO BEGIN WITH? ASSHOLE!”. The demon jumped as a scroll appeared into his hands, along with a pen. The demon turned and stumbled out, “W-what?”. Wait, why was the demon now nervous?

The demon then shook it off, “Never mind! Don’t worry about it, let us just sign the contract, shall we?”, the demon handed him the scroll. Which he couldn’t even read as it looked entirely like scribbles.

“Just sign here!”, the demon mused as he directed towards a blank line. With the pen, with was a feather. He managed to scribble down his signature. And then, the scroll seemingly went on fire, burning to ash and disappearing. “Perfect!”, the demon smiled happily.

“I can’t wait to get to know you!”.

…

He was an experienced demon, he could read humans like books and not only that, but he was very observant, usually picking up on things from a first glance. He did not pity the human he sympathised with him.

He knew what it was like to be alone, not have any family or someone to have your shoulder. That’s why he didn’t take his soul, he couldn’t. Something in him screamed to help the boy and although the deal he explained did come with that that isn’t the only thing…

He may have left out a certain detail…

Although not visible to Tommy, it was also written in the contract...

“The demon Ranboo will care for the human Tommy and protect him throughout life. Ranboo will bond with the human and become their protector whilst also helping with the human's needs.”.

[troquantary]

Edward Cullen: That Boy Ain’t Right

So I was doing a reread of @therealvinelle 's collection of Twilight metas, as one does, and in "Edward, Denial, and a Human Girlfriend" she mentions that she doesn't believe Edward is sane. I thought, "ha, yeah, he's definitely not," and also, "but wait, what does that mean exactly, please say more about that." But since she's already inundated with asks, I've decided to use my own head-muscle and explore this idea. (TL;DR: I start out more or less organized, synthesize some points Vinelle has made across several posts (and have hopefully linked to them all where relevant but please tell me if not), touch a little on narcissism, then take a hard left into the negative effects of being a telepath.)

Just a couple things to note at the outset, though. Theses have been written already (probably) about Edward as an abuser. Edward being insane doesn't negate that at all; he's definitely an asshole and just...a disaster of a human being. (I find it more funny than anything, but YMMV.) I'm also going to try to avoid talking specifically about mental illness and how it relates (or doesn't relate) to abusive behavior -- that's territory I'm not really equipped to discuss, like at all. My starting point is "Edward has a deeply warped perception of reality," not "Edward has X disorder."

So: deeply warped perception of reality. The evidence? Goes behind a cut, because my one character trait is Verbose.

Vinelle provides a great example of it in the post linked above, which I'll just quote because she does words good: "[Edward] keeps acting like his romance with Bella is a romantic tragedy, and all the cast of Twilight are actors on a stage making it as sublime as possible." Edward's the one to pursue Bella, but he does so with the full belief, from the very beginning, that it will never last; Bella will "outgrow" him, go on her human way, and he can spend the rest of eternity brooding magnificently over his too-short romantic bliss. [Insert premature ejaculation joke.] Turning her is never an option, even though Alice, Noted Psychic, says that romancing Bella will either end with her dead (exsanguinated) or dead (vampire).

This framing, where he's a dark anti-hero in love with -- but never tainting! -- the pure maiden and eventually leaving her in a grand, tragic sacrifice to preserve her soul? It's fucking bonkers. Bella isn't a person to him in this scenario. As Vinelle points out, Bella's never really a person to him at all; he falls in love with his own mental construct, cherry-picking from what he observes of her behavior and her responses to his 20 (thousand) Questions to convince himself that she is the ideal woman.

Bella's not the only one who gets the projection/cardboard-cutout treatment. Edward sees everything and everyone through a highly particular, personalized lens. He filters his entire reality, which we all do to an extent, but the thing with Edward is that he starts with his conclusions and then only pays attention to the evidence that supports those conclusions. Often that evidence consists of what he admits in New Moon are only "surface" thoughts -- but recognizing that limitation doesn't keep him from taking those thoughts as representative of what people are. Edward then becomes absolutely convinced by his own "reasoning" and won't be swayed from what he has decided is Objectively True. It's obvious with Bella; it's also painfully obvious with Rosalie. (Vinelle explains this and brings up Edward's raging Madonna/Whore complex in the same post, so refer to that again -- she's right.)

He also catastrophizes. Everything. Bella's just vibing in her room, rereading Wuthering Heights for the 87th time? She's gonna be hit by a meteor, better sneak into her room while she sleeps. Bella's going to the beach with the filthy mundanes their human classmates? She's gonna fall in the ocean. Jasper's cannibal pals are stopping by for a visit, but know not to hunt in the area? DISASTER, DEFCON 1, ALSO FUCK YOU JASPER FOR EVEN EXISTING IN MY AND BELLA'S SPHERE YOU UNSPEAKABLE BURDEN. Edward must believe that Bella is vulnerable and in near-constant peril, to support the reality he has created in which he is the villain turned protector and maybe?? hero??? (!!!) for his beloved. So when the actual, James-shaped danger arrives, he goes berserk, snarling and flipping his shit and generally not helping the situation. His fantasy demands that Bella remain human, so instead of doing the very thing Alice, Noted Psychic, assures him will neutralize the threat (and not just a threat to Bella, either, but to Bella's family and any other human James might decide to include in the "game"), he vetoes it immediately, no discussion. Bella Must Not Turn, and he sticks to those guns despite James nearly reducing her to ground beef, despite leaving Bella catatonic with depression (but human! success!) in New Moon, despite Aro's order and his family's vote and, let's not forget, Bella's clearly and repeatedly stated desire to be a vampire. It's going to happen. But he doesn't accept it until Renesmee busts out of Bella like the Kool-Aid man and the poor girl's heart finally, unequivocally stops.

Sane people don't behave this way. I don't want to slap labels on Edward, but I can't help but note that he comes across as highly narcissistic. He's the only real person in his universe, the lone player among us NPCs. That probably has a lot to do with him being frozen in the mindset and maturity of a seventeen-year-old boy, but I think it's also just...him, on some fundamental level. His failure to connect with others and recognize them as full, independent beings with their own wants and priorities isn't like Bella's failure -- she's badly depressed. Edward is...something else, and I get the sense that his sanity has been steadily deteriorating over time. And a cursory google of narcissistic traits turns up some familiar-looking stuff. He's self-loathing, yes, but also grandiose; he hates himself for the monster he is (and hates most vampires besides Esme and Carlisle for their monstrosity, too) but still feels superior to humans, to the extent that he felt entitled to human blood and resented Carlisle for depriving him of his "proper" diet. He eventually returns to Carlisle, but he's far from content -- the beginning of Midnight Sun finds him in a state of ennui, bored and dismissive of (if not outright disgusted by) everyone around him, that has apparently persisted for years and years. He doesn't play the piano, he doesn't compose, he doesn't enjoy anything...at least until Bella comes along and then he becomes obsessed to a disturbing degree with her and his new, romantic tragedy spin on reality.

[Next-day edit: I’m not sure where else to fit this in, but the way Edward casually contemplates violence against people who have, at best, mildly annoyed him is...chilling. I have a hard time writing off his strategizing how to murder the entire Biology class as a result of bloodlust -- it’s so calculated, nothing like the blackout state of thirst Emmett describes when he encountered his own “singer,” and that is probably the default for when a vampire is extremely thirsty. But even ignoring the Biology class incident, Edward still does things like consider, with disturbing frequency, how he might grievously injure or kill Mike Newton, all because...Edward considers him his romantic rival (despite Bella barely giving the kid the time of day). He thinks about slapping Mike through a wall, which might be an amusing slapstick image, except as a vampire Edward’s actually capable of turning this boy’s skeleton to a fine powder. So it’s, y’know, kind of sick when you think about it.

But even worse than that, when Bella tells Edward about how she flirted with Jacob to get at that sweet, sweet vampire lore, Edward chuckles and then, after dropping Bella home, flippantly observes that now that the treaty’s broken, why not genocide? I’m not even kidding, it’s right there in Midnight Sun; he seriously thinks about the fact that he’d be technically justified now in wiping out the entire tribe because a teenager tried to impress a girl with a spooky story. That is fucked. Remember, Edward was there with Carlisle when the treaty was first established. He knows how remarkable it is that they even came to a truce in the first place, that it was only ever possible because Carlisle is...well, Carlisle, and that it marks a pretty significant moment in supernatural history. He doesn’t care; he doesn’t respect it, or he’d never think something like “Ha ha, if I went and killed them all, I wouldn’t even be wrong. I mean, I won’t do it, but I’m just saying, I wouldn’t be wrong.”

Again: not the thought process or behavior of a sane person. (Or a person that respects life in general -- sorry Carlisle, big L.)]

Finally, whether he's a narcissist or not, I think the fact that Edward has constant, unavoidable access to everyone's thoughts is a powerful contributing factor to his instability. He can tune out the mental noise to an extent, but he can't stop it -- so he comes to rely on it like another sense. This causes issues with disconnect and lack of empathy, of course, but there's another facet to this shit diamond: he's basically experiencing a ceaseless flow of intrusive thoughts. His narration in Midnight Sun suggests that he "hears" the words people think, can "see" what they visualize in their mind's eye, and can sense the emotional "tone" and intensity of their thoughts. Therefore, perceiving Jasper's thirst through his thoughts makes Edward more aware of his own, "doubling" the discomfort. This would be a lot to deal with even from just his immediate coven members, but Edward gets all of this pouring into his head like a firehose on a day-to-day basis because the Cullens live right alongside humans. I know Meyerpires have galaxy brains or whatever, but that's a ton to process.

Besides the compounding effect on his own thirst when he "feels" the thirst of others, Meyer never suggests that Edward has difficulty separating his own thoughts from other people's; even when he was newly turned, he recognized Carlisle's "voice" in his head as Carlisle's. That would create a whole different host of issues around identity, but it looks like Edward's escaped that particular torment. However, I can easily imagine that what he does experience is just shy of unbearable nonetheless, with an eroding effect on his sanity over decades. He can't sleep to escape it; he's on a dishwater diet and probably (like the rest of his family) experiencing a perpetual, low-grade physical discomfort due to his thirst never being fully satisfied; and he's around far more people than is the norm for vampires -- even discounting all the humans, his own coven is unusually large -- meaning more noise.

Honestly, it would be weirder if he were all there, considering.

And even though I feel like I lost a sense of structure around where I started ranting about telepathy, I've written like 1.5k words about Edward fucking Cullen and I think that's enough for one post.

[panharmonium]

@dreamersscape said: 

Part of why I like Shikamaru testing the would-be chunin with Kakashi’s principles so much is that Kakashi living by those words keeps Obito alive through them, right?  And Obito already had those values, but he was verbalizing them in connection to why he believes Sakumo was a hero, so this combined principle that defines who Sakumo, Obito, and Kakashi are, is now going to live on in Naruto, Shikamaru, and the rest of their generation.  And ofc “don’t put the rules above your comrades” is a good way to live regardless of whether any of their names are attached to it…I dunno, is it dumb to just want this to be Kakashi’s legacy over his other prowess/renown? (x)

NO IT IS NOT; I AM RIGHT THERE WITH YOU!  (And I agree with what you said, that this is likely already how he’s going to be remembered - and I’m so grateful for that, because I think we know that there are many things in Kakashi’s life that have brought him renown but that he doesn’t want to be remembered for.  Thinking specifically about that scene where Kakashi takes out an enemy and Yamato makes that comment about “keep this up and you’ll be famous,” and Kakashi is clearly so uncomfortable with that...Kakashi doesn’t want that kind of recognition, the kind you earn from being particularly efficient at killing people.  He doesn’t want to go down in history as “cold-blooded Kakashi” - that was never something he wanted to be known as in the first place.)

Anyway, I was partway through writing the below post when I saw your replies about Kakashi’s family/legacy in relation to the new Chunin exams, and I just went, “we REALLY are having the exact same thoughts about this show” 🤝 so I’m just turning the rest of this post into a response to your comments, because I could not possibly agree with your angle on this topic more, and I knew my response wasn’t going to fit in the replies XD

The thing I kept thinking about when I saw that Shikamaru’s version of the Chunin exams was passing/failing students based on Kakashi’s criteria was that this is a HUGE paradigm shift for the Leaf Village (and for shinobi culture as a whole).  The new exams say that if you abandon a teammate to complete your mission (aka to pass your test), you’ve made the wrong decision.  The mark of a worthy shinobi, in this new framework, is your commitment to choosing people’s lives over the success of your mission.  But to have something like this enshrined into the Chunin exams would have been unthinkable in earlier generations.  When Kakashi’s father made a decision like this, he was breaking the law, and nothing about his choice was considered honorable or worthy or in any way acceptable.  He was blamed for it by the Land of Fire and the Leaf Village, “slandered and vilified” by his peers (even the ones whose lives he saved), and hounded to the point of suicide.  And even as little as four years ago, when Kakashi started working as a Jonin Leader, his philosophy for evaluating genin was still notorious, and his standards were considered to be abnormal (“It’s a good thing we didn’t get that jonin everybody talks about”/“Who does he think he is, making up his own criteria?”).  

But just a few short years later, the script has been completely flipped.  Now you can’t even become a chunin unless you demonstrate your commitment to putting your comrades’ lives first.  And I just keep thinking about how that must feel for Kakashi, to see the systems that punished his father so mercilessly finally start to crumble and fall.  To see a shift in the culture that indoctrinated Itachi and brainwashed Yamato into murdering family and friends, on the pretense that it was necessary for the sake of a mission.  To see the values Kakashi has tried to live by ever since Obito’s death incorporated into the official structures of the shinobi world, when previously they were grounds for vicious persecution.

To have Sakumo’s choices validated and affirmed by the shinobi world’s promotion structure when just a few short years ago those choices were universally reviled and earned Sakumo nothing but shame, hatred, and harassment must be such an emotionally overwhelming experience for his son, who went through his own kind of crucible in the wake of Sakumo’s departure but ultimately came out the other side more committed to his father’s ideals than ever.  To finally see things changing, and for these changes to be the direct result of Kakashi’s own teaching choices - I can’t imagine what that must feel like.  I don’t even think that Kakashi ever expected to see a world that’s progressed this far, to be honest.  He made a decision to embrace his father’s values, yes, but he did so long before they were considered acceptable, long before they were something he could ever expect to be rewarded for.  That’s why Obito told him “no matter what the village or anyone else may say, I think you’re a great jonin” - he knew Kakashi broke the rules to rescue Rin the same way Sakumo broke the rules to rescue his comrades, and he knew it was entirely possible that Kakashi would catch flak for it upon returning home.  In the shinobi world, the mission is absolute, and people who buck the system are branded as traitors.  If the Battle of Kannabi Bridge had gone poorly because of the detour Kakashi and Obito took, Kakashi may not have been welcomed home quite so warmly.  

Kakashi never really expects his choice to be rewarded or respected.  But despite this, and despite the fact that he knows the potential consequences better than anyone, he chooses to stand by his father’s values anyway.  He makes that decision the day he loses Obito, and he never looks back.  No matter how lost he becomes, or how much pain he goes through (I’ve thought this world was hell, too), he never loses sight of this one thing: he’ll never abandon a friend, and he’ll never bow to anyone who tells him that his mission requires him to do so.  That’s true throughout his time in ANBU (if your orders are to kill a friend, then those orders are wrong.  and the one who gave you those orders is wrong!), and it’s true when he becomes a teacher, too.  He persists in his convictions, no matter how unpopular they are, and he teaches them to an entire generation of children, even when people keep giving him the side-eye for failing entire teams of genin year after year.  

He never expects his behavior to make this kind of difference, and he’ll probably never give himself credit for any of the changes that we’re starting to see now, but the only reason these things are happening is because of the choices he made back then.  The new world we’re on the brink of building now is a direct result of Kakashi having taught his students the values that his father and Obito died for.  Kakashi’s teaching is what helps Naruto go from “when I become Hokage, the whole village will have to stop disrespecting me and start treating me like i’m somebody important” to “how could i ever become hokage if i can’t even save one friend/a true hokage never steps over his comrades’ bodies.”  It’s what helps Sakura go from “you obsessed about Sasuke, who was gone, while Naruto was right in front of you and you wouldn’t lift a finger to help him” to a decision to put her feelings for Sasuke aside in order to release Naruto from the promise he made to her, which is killing him.  It’s what helps Sasuke go from "you thought [your teammates] were so far beneath you they were worthless” to “I don’t ever want to see that again - my trusted comrades falling right in front of me,” as he offers to die for them against Gaara.  It’s what helps even Neji Hyuga go from a disdainful “who does he think he is, making up his own criteria” to an affirmation of those same criteria when telling the Hidden Rain ninja “it’s just the Chunin exams.  The safety of our teammate is more important than passing.”  

All of the changes that we’re seeing now are happening because Kakashi was committed to teaching the next generation the lessons he feels are important, contrary to widely-held public opinions and in defiance of the people who made a near-successful attempt at turning him against his own father: We never abandon our friends.  We never sacrifice our comrades.  If your orders are to kill a friend, then those orders are wrong.  We do what’s right, not what we’re told.  

The Hatake clan may not have a hereditary jutsu to be passed down to others, but THIS is their legacy.  This massive sea change in shinobi culture, the hard-fought shift away from a repeat of the tragically sacrificial Sakumos and Itachis and Tenzos of the old shinobi world, the total inversion of Mission > People to People > Mission - all of that started with Kakashi’s father, who died before he could see his work completed, but whose torch was picked up by Obito, and then by Kakashi, who made it his mission to pass on those ideals to the Leaf Village’s children, some of whom are now making policies that affect promotion criteria for the entire shinobi world.  

Just...I’m thinking about Kakashi taking Sakura out to celebrate and to hear all about her test, and I know she won’t even give Shikamaru’s last question a second thought, because to her it’s just natural that they’d be tested on that; Kakashi’s been testing them on that stuff since day one; it doesn’t even occur to her that there’s anything novel or strange or revolutionary about it; it’s just expected and accepted by her entire class that the principle “people are more important than rules” is something all shinobi should understand - when in reality, things have NEVER been like that before, and it’s taken SO much work to get here.  A question like this being included as pass/fail criteria on the Chunin exams would have been unimaginable just a few short years ago.  Kakashi’s father was harassed to his death for answering this question in the exact same way that is now required of anyone who wants to pass the test.  

What an incredible feeling that must be for Kakashi, who worked so hard and endured so much to keep these values alive.  To see how far the world has come - and to know how much of this progress is the result of his own choices, which he never thought would amount to anything so substantial - what a bizarre, beautiful, bittersweet feeling that must be.

[letterstomilen]

i discuss the classification of igneous petrology as you fall asleep during my lecture (PART 2) (ASMR)

Childe/Zhongli, Alternate Universe  When Childe's younger sister tells him about the volunteer at the library, he does not make the connection between that and his new favorite ASMR YouTuber, Rex Lapis.

Childe’s unfortunate love life starts at the age of eight. He, of course, did not call it “love” when he’s eight. When he was eight, he plucked a couple of weeds and sunflowers from his neighbor’s garden before he went to the park and handed them over to a classmate he doesn’t remember the name of now.

Handed over is an understatement here, seeing that she fell over from him shoving the flowers towards her chest before declaring, “Please marry me!”

In hindsight, storming over with the delicacy of an elephant with two left feet was not the best idea. But as somebody who recently discovered that watermelons could not grow out of your stomach no matter what, he was not the brightest. (Lumine now would argue that this is still the case. Unfortunately.)

She, as all eight-year kids would when faced with a loud boy that shoved you to the ground, started bawling. It didn’t help that Childe wasn’t aware of the fact that some worm wriggled in with the weeds and sunflowers he uprooted, with said worm now wiggling on the glittery, cursive ‘i’ in ‘Magical’ on her t-shirt.

This promptly resulted in her mom heading over and a long talk over dinner that night on why you should not ask girls to just marry you at your age.

“So I can ask boys then, right?”

Pleased with the loophole he discovered at age eight, Childe toothily smiled at his mom, who sighed and shook your head.

“You can’t ask anybody to marry you when you’re eight. And please don’t throw flowers at them too.”

The stolen flowers resulted in him being on his neighbor’s blacklist for the next couple of years; this in itself was fine, seeing that Childe was always a bit of a troublemaker and it was bound to happen at some point. However, the crying girl left a big impression on him even as he got older.

It did help that the older he got, the more silver-tongued he became, but this resulted in short-term relationships and a famous incident that once got dubbed ‘Tartaglia’s Shakespearean Slipup.’ (It involved a drunk retelling of Macbeth, several dumb questions, and a shirt that could never get the stain washed off of it.)

So in short, Childe’s love life is, to put it bluntly, a travesty. It has been downhill ever since he was eight years old, and nearly two decades later, he’s sure that he finally hit rock bottom.

“Tonia,” he begins, wondering how his little sister could be so cute yet so cruel at the same time, “what did you not tell Zhongli?”

“Hmm… Oh, I didn’t tell him about your obsession with his channel!” And cue the self-satisfied smile before she took another sip of his coffee.

Oh lord, she learned it from him.

“Anything else?” he presses, wondering what kind of image he has of him now — definitely not a good one. No amount of smooth talking or knowledge about petrology could save him from his past mistakes. He’s sure that Zhongli would not take kindly to the plethora of times that his insobriety has made him infamous among certain groups of people.

And he’ll admit just to himself, he was wholly unprepared for this. He couldn’t even be lulled to sleep by his voice last night — which is unfortunate because the series where he discussed the inspiration behind Tao Yuanming’s work just came out and if there’s one thing Childe likes, it’s poetry — because he couldn’t stop himself from thinking that he knew who he was.

Except not as Childe. As Tartaglia, his younger sister clarified, ever so proud of herself that she taught somebody how to say his birth name correctly, never mind that it stumped even the most persistent of professors.

“Not really! He said he likes listening to me brag about my older brother! ‘Cause he’s an only child and everything. Actually… he mentioned that you’d like to hear your stories sometime. Sweet, right?”

“My stories,” Childe echoes slowly. “The ones I told you when you were a kid? The fairytale rip-offs?”

“Yup.”

“Including the one where the kids locked the evil queen up and used her Magic Mirror to cheat on their tests?”

Admittedly, he was a bit lazy with that one. But Tonia was just eight and Childe was half-awake, trying to remember the difference between Hudibrastic and hija. So, like any good literature major with a bone to pick with their academic advisor, he decided that he’d very subtly rehash Snow White and make it all about cheating. (On tests of course.)

“Yuup. They got in trouble, right?”

They didn’t, but his mom would have his head if he said otherwise, so he smiles at her, ruffles her hair, and says with the attitude of a picture-perfect older brother, “Of course. The evil queen immediately sent them to the dungeon. So don’t cheat, okay?”

She nods, rewarding her compliance with another sip of his coffee. The library is fairly close to their apartment, as all things in Liyue are. A tightly packed city by the sea where you were sure to know everything about your neighbor and their neighbor. Which meant that the tenants next door still remembered when Childe first moved in and spent a week high on ambien, only to invest his time in writing a paper about how Snowpiercer was the sequel to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. (When they spoke for the first time, they asked politely if he could please turn down the volume, because it was difficult to sleep when your neighbor watched the two movies consecutively with the volume all the way up at three in the morning, don’t you think?)

(The paper ended up being legible to only the most dedicated of readers anyways.)

Deciding that they’re an appropriate distance from the entrance of the library now, Tonia stops walking and drags her brother towards the benches. “Now, before I take you to meet Zhongli, I just want to ask you one thing.”

He looks at her expectantly, wondering if she’s going to ask if he remembers what Lumine said. Don’t embarrass yourself, don’t act shady, and before you do something—think ITWTWW? (A.K.A Is This What Tsaritsa Would Want? A joke that arose after a particularly hellish class last year after the professor’s attention towards Childe was a source of debate—did she hate him? Did she think of him as her son? Did he—a suggestion brought forth by Aether—remind her of annoying neighbors that’d spend all night partying? To this day, he still doesn’t know.)

“What is it?”

“Did you bring your library card?”

“Huh?”

It turns out, Childe learns five minutes later with relief that his long-forgotten library card was collecting dust in his wallet, that Zhongli has a limit on books he can check out because he’s always forgetting them. And his overdue fees are quite an impressive sum—both for a library volunteer and anybody that’s frequented a library for the past decade.

But to the library’s great relief, he’s only checking out books nobody has ever checked out in the past so by default they belong to him now. (No harm no foul—unless you’re the occasional poor individual that has to research an incredibly specific and niche topic only to find out that the book is not in the library at the moment.)

Tonia sounds immensely proud of herself as she informs him of this while they wait for him to finish help somebody find a book. Help is an understatement, Childe realizes, as he watches Zhongli talk, smiling as he ensnares the visitor in an answer to a question where “yes” or “no” would have sufficed.

It’s ridiculously cute. Really. Tonia seems used to this sight as she drags Childe closer to the two. Zhongli must’ve realized that he slipped into a tangent because he apologizes and points to the nonfiction section before opening his book once more.

“Oh… I forgot.” Tonia purses her lips the same way Lumine does as she sighs, lowering the hand that she was enthusiastically waving moments earlier.

“Hm?”

“He won’t notice us. Ah, Zhongli,” she says melodramatically while they watch him flip through pages in a book, her tone every bit the longing princess in books they poured over when she was younger. “Why can’t you see us? Isn’t my wonderful big brother enough to catch your attention?”

He’s very flattered. Really. He knows that compliment was partially influenced by letting her have a lion’s share of his drink and Lumine’s sarcasm, but he takes it in stride, squeezing her cheeks. Tonia rolls her eyes in response, and heads over to Zhongli, chatting him up quicker than Childe can respond.

“And this is my older brother,” she introduces, gesturing her hand towards Childe, who smiles brightly, hoping he looks every bit the composed person he doesn’t feel like right now.

Zhongli is just as charming in person and it doesn’t help that just the realization he’s standing right here makes Childe’s pulse race, contributing to his increasingly forced smile that he reserves for uncomfortable situations. Oblivious to that, Zhongli smiles at him—one that is ingrained in his memory from days of watching it on loop —and says, “You must be Tartaglia, right? Tonia told me a lot about you.”

Oh fuck. 

His first thought: of course she told him about him. He knew beforehand, the dread of being characterized through his sister’s dramatizations of Childe’s mistakes. It’s partially why he could only get up this morning through two cups of coffee and dunking his head in the freezer for several minutes.

But also his name— 

Childe’s torn between asking why the hell his sister told him his real name or excusing himself to go read a dictionary to cool his nerves. Even though he’s well aware most of his family calls him Tartaglia still—mainly his parents when he’s in trouble (which, to be fair, is most of the time)—most people in Liyue call him Childe for two reasons.

One, Tartaglia is a mouthful and two, after many questions about how his name was pronounced only to get it butchered on several occasions, he’s stopped. (Scaramouche, Tsaritsa, and Signora are the only ones who call him that at this point, really; but he’s convinced Scaramouche does it just to vex him.)

“Yes,” he chokes out. “That’s me. Tartaglia.”

Childe decides that if Zhongli would just say his name and nothing else, he would die happy. Which is a mortifying thought but maybe a little bit of an upgrade from falling asleep to listening him talk about rocks. Isn’t it?

“You can call him Childe,” Tonia offers. “My brother doesn’t like it when people call him Tartgalia.”

His mouth forms an ‘o’ out of realization and sheepishly says, “My deepest apologies, Childe.”

“N-no—” Childe starts, his sister’s expression burning into the back of his head. “It sounds really nice when you say it. Call me Tartaglia—anything you’d like, really.”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot.” Tonia smiles mischievously, implying that she never forgot all along as she raises a finger to her chin in mock thought. “You watch his ASMR channel, don’t you?”

“You do?”

They both turn to Childe, who’s sure this is turning into an interrogation; their burning gazes, the expectant silence, and a question he’s reluctant to answer.

“Yeah. I’m a huge fan,” he confesses brightly. “My favorite series of yours is the petrology one. It felt really nostalgic.”

He never thought he’d remember high school clearly ever again, but the videos made his classes a little less lazy. And the heat of the sun on the back of his neck as he slept in class would follow, lulled to sleep by a lecture he couldn’t quite remember. But he recalled his friends’ amusement clearly when they asked how he managed to sleep nearly every class, only to get a cheeky smile as an answer.

“Is that so? May I interest you in some books then? There’s quite the collection here, although I’m not sure which would interest you the most then. Any preferences?”

Ohhh, his expectant look was so cute. But Tonia looks bored at the prospect, so he clears his throat instead.

“Actually, I came here to check out Legend of the Lone Sword so I could follow along with your newest video,” he finally says. “Could you show me where it is?”

“Hmm… We do have two copies but unfortunately both have been checked out. One has just been checked out by Xingqiu and the other… ah, it’s still at my house. We’re having difficulties with the video unfortunately because Venti said… now what did he say?” Zhongli asks himself, humming as he takes out his phone and reads out loud.

“’Find somebody that’s willing to record the video and help you set up b-c’… er, before Christ?”

“Because,” Childe clarifies.

“Thank you. ‘Because I can’t do it without laughing’,” he finishes before sighing. “Also several crying emojis followed by a wine emoji and a suggestion for me to find Diluc…? There are also several other texts that I would not be able to read out loud but that’s the gist of it. As soon as I manage to find somebody, I’ll be able to return the book so you can check it out. My apologies.”

Diluc? All Childe remembers about him is what Lumine once said about him.

‘I was convinced him and Kaeya hated each other until I found out they were siblings.” A pause. Then: ‘I’m still fairly sure they hate each other. They’re at each other’s throats a lot. Diluc more so.’

He had not considered him to be a rival in love. Granted — that’s limited information from several years ago but it’s not as if Childe knows that many people outside of his own department. But still. 

Eager to save any chance of a love life, Childe says, “Why don’t I help you record?”

“That’s a great idea! Then my brother can read the book while he stays over. Right?” Tonia presses on, smiling far too brightly for his taste as Zhongli muses, considering the possibility.

“Are you sure that wouldn’t be too much trouble?”

Childe nearly stumbles at the sight of his relief. Really, his smile isn’t good for his heart—neither is the look he gives him, as if he hung over the moon that very moment. “None at all.”

“What a relief… I’ll tell Venti immediately that I can record the ‘ASMR: Boyfriend Reads to You’ video.”

—What?

Zhongli looks up from his phone after he texts his friend and tilts his head slightly in confusion, his earring brushing against his shoulder.

He looks adorably concerned and maybe a little bit aware that he’s responsible for Childe’s reaction. “Is there something wrong?”

“N-no. Nothing. That’s great. Good. I’m excited to be your boyfriend.”

Tonia lets out a little giggle and he’s sure that there’s somebody at the library silently praying for his downfall as he hurriedly corrects himself. “For the video, of course. Should I give you my number so we can set a date?”

Not deterred by Childe’s flustered expression, Zhongli nods as he hands him his phone. Maybe this is what he expected—that’d most likely be the case if most of his prior knowledge about Childe came from Tonia, who delights in both embarrassing and complimenting her brother like there’s no tomorrow. “Of course. Please give me your number.”

So with the shame of a college student that never managed to shake off his competitive streak from high school, Childe types his number in and promises himself that this won’t happen again.

(His younger sister lords it over him anyways on the way home, a skip in her step as she recalls it.)

Childe 2:34 i got his #

Twin 1 2:35 for the video recording*

Twin 1 2:35 u also embarrassed yourself. tonia told me all about it lol

Ugh. Of course she did. Childe peeks his head into his sister’s room, hearing her recount the library incident with a few more exaggerations poking fun at what he did than he’d like. Aether must be having the time of his life, which should make them equal considering that Childe made him think that Scaramouche was the best TA ever and would be even nicer if you made him an apple pie. (He hated apples.)

Well. They’re even now, aren’t they?

Childe 2:38 ya but he didn’t notice so its ok. BTW neither of u told me he was that airheaded

Twin 1 2:38 itd be funnier that way

Childe 2:39 oh yeah it was really cute

Twin 1 2:41 didn’t need to know that. anyways u do know how to work a camera right?

Childe 2:41 yea…? who do you think takes all of tonia’s pictures

Twin 1 2:42 no i mean like actual professional cameras used to record

Hm… That was a bit of an oversight on his part, wasn’t it? He texts a quick ‘yeah’ because it couldn’t be that bad and he’ll watch several videos on how to work a camera later, won’t he? There should be three buttons max. Easy.

Not to mention he took an elective on film and he’s watched Zhongli’s videos more times than he can count at this point. So really, there’s not much to worry about. The only problem is that he needs to build up immunity.

If he looks like a “blushing maiden”—Tonia’s words, not his—every time Zhongli looks at him, wouldn’t that be trouble? It’s bad enough that he embarrassed himself in front of his twelve-year-old sister but to look like a fool in front of the same guy his sleeping schedule depends on would be debilitating in more ways than one.

Deciding that he won’t let himself lose this time around, he sends a quick text to Zhongli saying ‘Saturday at 4:00 PM, right? See you there :)’ to psyche himself up before deciding a plan of action. There must be something that’ll impress him—no, completely sweep him off his feet.

More aware than ever that he’s fitting the image of a lovestruck idiot his sister painted him as, Childe watches his phone as it pings with a single ‘OK’ and ‘I am looking forward to working with you’ trying to convince himself that his erratic heart rate and the heat rushing to his face is just a side effect of working with somebody that he greatly admires. (It is, by all accounts, infatuation — but he’ll try to ignore that for now.)

[sunflowerandco]

After the Fact: Act V - The Duncan Special

Rating: T

I wanted to dedicate this chapter to @straighttxhell for just being so nice and supportive of this story! And I really hope you all like this one for the fact that’s it’s all very soft so prepare.

previous acts here

         Duncan, DJ, and Geoff were all settled on the couch in need of a game plan.

         "As much Courtney gives off that energy, I can't imagine her wanting this grand gesture, and I don't either. I'd rather it happen in the moment, like in a moment you wouldn't expect." DJ came up with an easy solution to Duncan's dilemma.

         "So basically, do the complete opposite of what Geoff did." Geoff responded in offense to DJ's suggestion. "Then why am I here?!"

         Duncan removed the hands behind his head and shrugged his shoulders. "Moral support?"

         "I think there'd have to be morality involved then..." DJ trailed off. They heard the door unlock and immediately straightened up despite only having to stop talking. Courtney walked into the living room and their joint silence automatically raised her suspicion.

         "Why are you being so quiet? What did you do? Did you eat my key lime squares?"

         Duncan didn't know what the hell a key lime square was, but his answer gave him a free ticket out of her line of questioning. "...Yes?"

         Courtney gasped like she just witnessed him kick a puppy. "Carlos makes them specifically for me! Now I have to go back to the bakery!"

         "I'm sorry, baby." Duncan grabbed one of her reusable grocery bags, handed it to her, and kissed her on the cheek in baseless consolidation. "Tell Carlos he's gonna be busy making you more." He went as far to turn her toward the door by her shoulders. She yelled out before closing the door.

         "You're picking up the order though!" As soon as the door closed Duncan turned back to his friends.

         "I don't even know what the hell a key lime square is." DJ felt sympathy for Courtney's unneeded frustration.

         "You didn't have to lie to ol' girl."

         "If I didn't, she would still be on my ass. Trust me, you don't wanna see Courtroom Courtney." It was the nickname he came up with after she got accepted into law school. It made her even better at arguing her point across, which Duncan didn't even know was possible for her to do.

         Geoff got up from the couch, eager to get his point across to his friends. "All I'm saying is it would be a shame if it wasn't a memorable moment. That's why I went all out for Bridge."

         Duncan pondered on what he said. He could understand why Geoff felt the way he did, considered the aspect of the event being memorable for Courtney, and not just a passing moment between them. He thought maybe grand gestures weren't such a bad idea. "Alright, then. What do you think I should do? When it comes to big, I have a few ideas.

        The three of them exchanged ideas until they could think of the most extra idea for the amount of time they had left to plan.

                                                        ***

        Duncan stood in the kitchen, leaning his back on the counter as he awaited an answer on the other end of the phone.

         "Hi, yeah, I'm calling to book a balloon ride for two on Saturday evening?"

        …

        "Uh, yeah it's Duncan Miller and Courtney Álvarez. I haven't been on one, but I think she has."

       …

        "Five-thirty's great. Okay, we'll be there. Thank you."

        Duncan mentally crossed a line on his list. If doing this meant they'd have a memorable, story-worthy day, it would all be worth it in the end. He turned to walk back to the living room but jumped at the sight of Courtney looking in the refrigerator. "Oh my God! How long have been standing there?"

        Courtney looked at him before refocusing on the contents of their refrigerator. She seemed to be low-energy and confused by him being startled. "Oh, hey, Babe. I just got here?" He appeared to calm down after she told him. She couldn't find anything that she wanted, so she closed the door defeated, and sighed against the door.

        "What's wrong? Didn't you have another class today?"

        "Yeah, but my professor went into labor, so it got cancelled. I'm happy for her and all, but now I'm glum." This was one thing he knew upset her, but one thing he couldn't understand. Her personal enjoyment for classroom settings, participation points, and homework made her feel most productive. So, missing out on it made her star dim.

        "Needa hug?" Duncan held his arms out to invite her in and hoped his heart rate didn't give away nearly getting caught by her. She responded by entering and wrapping her arms around his torso. She looked up at him. Her voice was so low and the number of times he'd seen her like this were very seldom.

        "Thank you. I'm gonna go shower now." He let her go do whatever she could to raise her spirits, but he couldn't help but find her crestfallen demeanor cute.

        He heard the bathroom door shut and he let out the breath he didn't know he was holding in. He couldn't remember the last time he felt this nervous around her. Duncan habitually relied on his confidence as a stand in and he couldn't decipher whether it weakened from the act of posing the question, or the method he chose to take under the influence of his best friends' views.

         Duncan's cell phone went off. It was a number he couldn't place but answered anyway. before he could say anything, he heard another man's voice speaking in a sultry tone.

         "Hey, Courtney. It's Carlos. You gave me this number for the order, right?"

         "This isn't Courtney. It's Duncan, her boyfriend. She wanted me to pick up her order. But, if you plan on talking to my girlfriend like that again, I can give you something I'm good at, too."

         "Oh, alright. it's ready for pickup. Bye"

         The call dropped immediately after he spoke.

                                                       ***

         Duncan sat on their couch with a picnic basket in his hands. It would be their first time in a month where they were able to devote a day to themselves without their busy lives getting in the way. Duncan was feeling the pressure now in hopes of the success of this day; he just hoped he'd done right by her with his plans. His head filled with preoccupations and all the possible ways it can go while Courtney readied herself for their outing. Duncan looked in the direction her voice was coming from, abruptly bringing him out of his contemplative state.

        "What do you think?" Her white dress highlighted her warm skin. The puffed sleeves-cottage core look was not her usual style, but she pulled it off effortlessly. He stood up from the couch, ready to hype his girl up.

         "I just thought I'd try something new since I haven't dressed up in a while. I think I look pretty good."

         "My god you look gorgeous, Princess."

         "Oh, stop. You really think so?" Courtney feigned bashfulness before she broke out into a few poses, looking over her shoulder and putting her hands on her hips. Duncan playfully scooped her up and kissed her on her cheek.

        "Ready to head out?"

        The car ride to the dock park filled with conversation of Courtney's excitement and Duncan's guise of normalness. When they arrived, the sky took on a gray hue, one Duncan did not expect from the forecast he checked today. They found the spot of their choice and unfolded their blanket. Their time was spent indulging in their favorite foods packed, relaxing, and reading.

        Courtney laid her head on Duncan's lap, holding a book in her face while he fed her grapes, helping her live up to his name for her. She closed it when she looked up and noticed Duncan was being quieter than usual. "What are you thinking about?" Courtney sat up to face him.

        Duncan tried to shift the focus of the conversation to her to deflect. Still, Courtney persisted. "How beautiful you are right now."

        "Nice one, but seriously. What's going on?"

        "Nothing. Why are you being such a lawyer?"

        "Because it gives me answers; you've been acting weird, key-lime-square-eater."

        Duncan threw a grape at her hoping to distract her. Courtney tried not to laugh when her mouth dropped open. To counter, she reached for the can of whipped cream to dispense some on top of his head. She couldn't suppress her laughter after some of it fell on the tip of his nose, using her finger to catch enough to eat. Duncan challenged her even further. This was just their one of many food wars, just at a new, unexpected location. "You really wanna do this. Right here?" He grabbed the can, making Courtney retreat behind a nearby tree. He felt a few droplets from the sky fall on his head, but it was nothing serious enough to wreck their plans. He caught up to her, grabbing her from behind and carrying her back to their blanket while he threatened to dispense confectionary mousse on her hair. Courtney pleaded for mercy in between laughs.

        "Duncan, please don't!"

        "Don't dish what you can't take, Princess!"

         Then, there were more droplets to which they didn't mind. The rain got a little heavier, but it didn't interrupt their preoccupation.

         A bolt of lightning near a tree and shower-like pour down confirmed their decision to make a run for it in the boathouse near the docks.

         They thanked the Gods for the door being unlocked as they entered the boathouse; the rain still beating loudly on the tin roof. This cabin proved to be nightmare fuel and they were surrounded by live bait, large, sharp fishhooks, and surprisingly no boat resting on the inside dock. Thunder rumbled loudly over the roof of the cabin just as they secured the door shut. Duncan's instincts compelled him to slip his leather jacket over Courtney's shoulders to stop her from shivering but took the ring box out of his pocket before doing so and stuffed it in his jeans pocket. He tried his best not to show his annoyance to their plans, but then it dawned on him that maybe this happened for a reason. He could read the signs the universe usually gave him, and this time he determined that the storm was a sign that he was right all along. He subtly joked about the fortunate event, trying to throw a curve to keep her surprised.

         "Worst date ever, huh?"

         Her hair was still dripping wet, and her natural waves made her hair shrink slightly. She was cold, wet. Her response surprised him. It was as if she tore a page from his book and didn't base her happiness on perfection. "I mean... it depends on how you look at it. I'm with you. We haven't had a day like this in a while." She wrapped her fingers around his arms to pull him in and attach her lips to his. Her acceptance of their situation confirmed his perception of their moment, and he felt more ready than he'd ever been to ask her. Their kiss was shortened when Duncan pulled away slowly, and his hands went from her hips to hold onto her forearms. He kept his eyes on hers as he brought one knee to the floor, still holding onto her when he started.

         "It isn't gonna get more memorable than this."

        Courtney caught on immediately and had no control over the tears flowing to her eyes. Her voice broke when she tried to speak. "Duncan..."

         "Courtney, when I told you that you save my life every time, I meant it. I don't know where the hell I'd be if you weren't in my life." He continued, and the more he spoke, the more relief he felt.

         "You are the only person who makes change worth it because you deserve the best of me if it means dealing with the worst sometimes. I want to keep giving the best of me to you. I love you so much, it's been this way for so long, and I don't think I'll stop."

        He reached into his pocket and pulled out that small box, and held it open in front of her while she tried to wipe away the tears on her face. "Will you marr-"

        "Yes" Duncan let out a breathy laugh, both relieved and humored by her fervent nature.

        She giggled as she choked back tears while Duncan slid the ring on her finger. He stood up to hold her in his arms tightly, not wanting to let go as she left lipstick marks all over his face and neck.

         Courtney forgot they were in a fish cabin. Duncan often had that effect on her.

                                                       ***

        When the rain let up, they decided the best way to spend the rest of their day was in the comfort of their own home, on the couch, wrapped up in blankets. Courtney finally got her hands on her favorite dessert, and they were watching whatever interested them on TV.

         "Carlos always nails it perfectly with these!" He glanced at her and remembered his interaction with that baker.

         "By the way that guy has it bad for you. I don't blame him though. Now, he knows better than to bother you, though." Courtney objected in disbelief, still chewing her dessert.

         "He does not!"

         "Of course you're blind to any guy having the hots for you. If it weren't that way, we would've been together since ninth grade."

         "That sheer confidence. What gave you the idea I wanted to date you in the ninth grade?"

         "The ring on your finger tells me otherwise."

         She held her hand out proudly and admired the oval-shaped gem on her finger.

         "How did you afford this? You didn't rob a jewelry store, did you?" Duncan gave her a blank stare before she started giggling. He brought her hand down and intertwined his fingers with hers, looking at the TV again.

         "No. I started saving the day before you moved in with me."

         Courtney's chest warmed up with an unexplained feeling of completeness when he told her. She looked in his direction and into his eyes; she felt even more soothed after realizing he rubbed circles on her hand with this thumb. She gave him a look of contentment before positioned her head on his shoulder and stared at the TV while he slid his arm around her shoulder.

        "Thank you." He looked down at her, puzzled at her sudden gratitude.

        "For what?"

        "For giving me your shirt at the beach. For opening conversations about our feelings that I was too scared to have, and just growing with me. Had it been anyone else, I think my life would be very... fragmentary. Like, this just wouldn't feel right with another person. Maybe even... insipid? We might not make total sense to some, but I feel like I perfectly fit here." She let her mind speak for itself in this moment while she traced the lines of the tattoo on his hand out of habit.

        "You said it better than I did. I love you, and if I can express that in any way, I'll take it." Duncan knew he'd always remember feeling unfathomably lucky to have taken this route of fate.

        "I love you, too."

A/N: Well I hope you all enjoyed this one! Again thank you for reading and I’ll see you in act vi

[ill-will-editions]

Covid-19: The 21st Century Begins Now Jérôme Baschet

Historians readily accept that the global 20th century began in 1914, with the onset of the cycle of the World Wars. One day it will no doubt be said that the 21st century began in 2020, with the introduction of SARS-CoV-2. The range of scenarios to come remains, of course, very open; but the sequence of events triggered by the spread of the Coronavirus offers a preview of the disasters that are bound to intensify in our convulsive world, marked as it is by the effects of a global warming well on its way towards an average increase of 3 or 4 degrees. What is happening before our eyes is an increasingly tight intertwining of multiple crisis factors, which it suffices for a random element, both unforeseen and widely announced, to activate. The collapse and unravelling of life, climate disorder, accelerated social decomposition, the discrediting of governments and political systems, the unbridled expansion of credit and financial fragility, failure to maintain a sufficient level of growth (to mention only a few): these dynamics all reinforce one another, generating an extreme vulnerability that derives from the fact that the world system is now in a situation of permanent structural crisis. Henceforth, any apparent stability is merely a mask for growing instability.

Philippe Sansonetti, a microbiologist and professor at the Collège de France, recently remarked that Covid-19 is an "Anthropocene disease”. The current pandemic is a total fact, in which the biological reality of the virus is inseparable from the societal and systemic conditions of its existence and spread. Invoking the Anthropocene — a new geological period in which the human species has become a force capable of modifying the biosphere on a global scale — invites us to take into account a threefold timeline: firstly, the recent period in which, under the pressure of perceptible evidence, we became aware, albeit too slowly, of this new era; secondly, the decades after 1945, which were those of the rise of consumer society and the great acceleration of all the markers of humanity's productive (and destructive) activity; lastly, the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries which, by setting in motion the cycle of fossil fuels and industrialization, caused the curve of greenhouse gas emissions to take off, thus marking the beginning of the Anthropocene.

The virus that afflicts us has been sent by the living, who have come to present us with the bill for the turmoil that we ourselves have caused. The Anthropocene means: in whatever befalls us, human responsibility is involved. But whose responsibility is it exactly? The three timelines mentioned above allow us to be more precise. On the most immediate horizon, our attention is monopolized by the staggering affair of the evaporation of mask stocks since 2009 and by the indolence that has failed to replenish them urgently as the epidemic approaches. This is merely one more aspect of Europe's overwhelming lack of preparation. In this inability to anticipate, we bear witness to another disease of the times, namely, its presentism, that force by which everything that extends beyond the immediate disappears from our view. The coldly calculative neoliberal methods of hospital management took care of the rest, with its persistent lack of resources, reduction in the number of beds, on top of a shortage of staff and personnel who are already exhausted during normal times. Care workers have been howling their despair for a long time, without being heard. Today, the criminal nature of long-standing policies has been proven to everyone.  As Philippe Juvin, head of the emergency department at the Pompidou Hospital in Paris recently stated, "careless and incompetent people" have caused us to find ourselves "naked in the face of the epidemic". And if Emmanuel Macron wanted to set himself up as a war chief, he should not overlook the fact that this same rhetoric, invoked by so many rulers these days, could also one day one day turn (metaphorically?) into an accusation of high treason.

Glancing back over the second half of the twentieth century allows us to identify several of the major causalities behind the multiplication of zoonoses, those diseases caused by infectious agents that are able to make a species leap from animals to humans. The expansion of industrial livestock farming, with its despicable tendency toward concentration, led to the sort of deplorable health consequences we now know far too well (swine flu, H5N1 bird flu, etc.). Meanwhile, excessive urbanization and metropolization have shrunk the habitats of animals, pushing them into closer contact with humans (HIV and Ebola, in particular). These two factors may not have played a role in the case of SARS-CoV-2, although more still needs to be known about the entire chain of transmission. On the other hand, it is clear that the sale of wild animals in the Wuhan market would not have had such consequences had Wuhan not become one of the world capitals of the automobile industry. The globalization of economic flows is indeed at work; and this is the third causality to be invoked, all the more so as the senseless expansion of air traffic was the vector of the rapid planetary spread of the virus.

But we can't stop there; we must also look back two centuries and give the Anthropocene its real name: Capitalocene. For it is the result, not of the human species in general, but of a specific historical system. The principal characteristic of this system, capitalism, is that the bulk of production is based, above all else, on the imperative of turning a profit from the money invested (capital). Although its configurations are variable, the world is ultimately organized according to the imperious demands of the economy. The result has  been a civilizational break with all previous human experience, in which private interest and competitive individualism now reign as supreme values, the obsession with pure quantity and the tyranny of urgency opening up a void in being. The result is also and above all a deadly productivist compulsion, one which lies at the origin of the overexploitation of natural resources, the accelerated disorganization of living things, and climate change.

When the current quarantine and health emergency ends, nothing will be the same as before; that much has been made clear. But what will change? Will our self-examination be limited to a short-term temporality, as is to be feared, or will we take into account the full cycle of the Capitalocene? We have now reached the threshold of the twenty-first century. The real war that is about to be waged will not have the Coronavirus as its enemy, but will be fought between two opposing options: on one side, there will be the continuation of a world in which the fanatical drive for merchandise reigns supreme and whose compulsive productivism will only lead to the deepening of the ongoing devastation; on the other side, there lies the invention, already being explored in a thousand places, of new ways of existing that would break with the categorical imperative of the economy, in order to lend priority to a good life for all. Preferring the joyful intensity of the qualitative to the false promises of an unlimited impossibility, the latter would combine an attentive concern for inhabited milieus and the interactions of the living with the construction of the common, mutual aid, and solidarity, and the collective capacity for self-organization and self-government.

The Coronavirus has come to sound the alarm and stop the mad train of a civilization hurtling towards the destruction of life on a mass scale. Shall we let it continue down its course, once again? That would only guarantee new and unprecedented disasters, which will make what we are experiencing now look pale in retrospect.

Paris, March 27, 2020

Translated by Ill Will Editions

****

Jérôme Baschet is an historian currently teaching at the Autonomous University of Chiapas in San Cristóbal de Las Casas. Author of several books on medieval history, he has also published Défaire la tyrannie du présent. Temporalités émergentes et futurs inédits (2018), La Rébellion zapatiste (2019), and Une Juste colère. Interrompre la destruction du monde, on the Gilets Jaunes.

[scabopolis]

the gift of gab, the gift of you

Here it is @thisonesatellite! your 2020 CS Secret Santa gift. It was a complete and total delight to get to be your gift giver this year. That is not hyperbole - you are a gosh dang delight! Each of your message responses left me in stitches and while I will NEVER try and convince you a movie you think is bunk is good, I am delighted at the opportunity to recommend rom coms that don’t make you want to gouge your eyes out. 

This fic is heavily inspired by your love of coffee shops AUs (except...you know, a pub), your travel stories (which I shamelessly incorporated into the fic) and I believe rates about a 4 on the reindeer scale of Christmas cheer.  You’re a total eagle eye, so I just need to say I am well aware that Colin O’Donoghue’s accent in no way resembles an accent from Cork, but I just need that to be ignored, please and thank you.

Also, I’ve decided we’re fandom friends now. Okay? Okay! Finally, thank you to @cssecretsanta2020 for organizing this exchange and being the actual best and most patient fandom soul. 

*** Title: the gift of gab, the gift of you

Summary: Emma needs an Irish man. Wait! No! It’s not what it sounds like. And then the universe just has to go and provide her with the world’s chattiest, flirtiest, blue-eyesiest Irish man in existence. 

Available on AO3. ***

Emma is in no position to complain. From where she sits both literally – (perched upon a comfy barstool in the world’s coziest pub) – as well as existentially – (traveling abroad for the first time in her life) — she is fortunate and blessed. 

It’s just – 

It’s just it would be easier to enjoy it all if she didn’t have to deal with a rather annoying request from her rather annoyingly persistent mother. 

Her headphones are in but Emma still takes great care to speak in hushed tones over video chat. There’s nothing she wants less than to be the loud American who shares her private conversation with an entire establishment. The pub she found is at the end of a quiet lane off of Cork’s high street. The customers within the pub appear to be locals well known by the staff who tend the pub. In truth, she wouldn’t even be having this conversation if it wasn’t for —

“Who have you talked to today?” her mother asks. 

“Uh, I’m pretty sure I thanked the barista who made my coffee. And I ordered a pint in this pub.” 

“That’s not talking.” 

“It is by definition talking.” 

“That’s not what I meant. How else are you going to get to know the city?” Her mom interrupts before Emma can properly formulate a snarky reply. “And don’t you dare say ‘guidebooks.’ Your father and I raised you better than that.”

“Mom, please don’t make me do this.” 

“You said I could have anything I wanted as a souvenir.”  

“What about a mug? I bought Grandma Ruth one with a big fat sheep on it.” 

“Sounds lovely, sweetie, but no.” 

“Mom.” Emma realizes that as a twenty-six year old woman it is probably unbecoming to whine, but her mother is being absolutely ridiculous. Where is her dad when she needs him to rescue her? All he requested was a bottle of whiskey. What a sensible person!

“No. It’s fine. If you don’t want to get your mother the one thing she asked for on this trip that’s okay. I won’t say one word about paying for this celebration trip, or paying for graduate school, or —” 

“Shit, mom. Did you take a Guilt Trip 101 class or just Google how to?”

“Oh, this is natural talent. My present, please.” 

“Fine.” There’s a group of bearded men, the ones she pegged as locals, tucked into one corner of the pub. They’re probably her best bet, but she just arrived last night, and the combination of jet lag and travel nerves make her feel not yet up for that. Which leaves the staff working the bar. 

One of the two men she’s seen pouring pints and serving up food has gone missing. Besides, Emma wouldn’t trust herself in her sleep-deprived state to not say something utterly absurd to the blue-eyed, dark-haired, scruffy bartender. Probably a good thing he’s gone. Much safer is the other man working the bar – the one who refused to serve her Guinness but was very kind about it. While arguably attractive, he is a decidedly less intimidating sort of handsome. Unfortunately, he is in the midst of a heated discussion with one of the patrons, the two of them gesticulating to something happening with a football match on the screen. Which leaves the blonde haired woman currently polishing glasses. 

Emma lightly clears her throat. “Excuse me, ma’am?” When the woman turns to look at her, Emma smiles, and signals her over. She sets aside the pint glasses and tucks the polishing rag into her apron. Her mother, on the other end of the video call, is not satisfied. 

“Did you say ma’am?” 

“Mom,” Emma whispers.

“I said an Irish man, Emma Blanchard Nolan. Man.”

“No. You said person.” 

“The man was implied.” 

“Then you should have been more specific.” 

“Ready for another?” the woman at the bar asks. 

Emma looks down at her half-full pint. “Not quite.” She frowns. “And, uh, you’re not Irish, are you?” 

“No. Canadian.” 

“Ah. Okay.” Emma lowers her voice again and looks at her phone screen. Her mother remains unimpressed. “That’s foreign. Technically she’s a foreigner.” 

The sternness of Mary-Margaret’s expression is evident even over the video call. “Emmaline —” 

“Not my name, mother.” 

“Emmaline Blanchard Nolan, you promised me.” 

“I’ll find an Irish person tomorrow.” It’s about this time Emma realizes she’s rudely ignoring the very kind and apparently Canadian bartender. The one she asked to speak with. What’s more, the very kind and apparently Canadian bartender has been joined by the curly haired bartender. Both of whom peer at her with matching expressions of amused befuddlement. Emma removes her headphones and addresses the man. “You’re Irish, right?” 

“Well, miss,” and the gentle brogue of his accent, even with those two short words, is quite evident, “you are in Ireland.” 

“Excellent! Can you talk to my mom?” She detaches the headphones from her phone and turns the camera around to face the man and woman. “My mom wants to have a conversation with an Irish person.” 

“Irish man,” her mother corrects.

“An Irish man. Out in the wild.” The bartenders stare at her, nonplussed. “It’s her souvenir.” 

The woman presses her lips together – an obvious attempt to stifle a laugh. 

“Well, uh, aye.” The man tugs at his ear. “I guess I could —” He’s interrupted from his stuttering by the return of the blue-eyed, stubbly bartender, hauling a new keg into the back of the bar. 

“Actually,” the woman cuts in. “My husband,” she hip checks the curly-haired man, “needs to replace the keg.” 

“I do?” he asks. 

“He does?” This from tall, dark, and holy hell! also possesses an Irish accent. 

“But Killian is in the middle—”

“Shh,” the blonde woman interrupts her husband. 

“Yeah. Killian is—”

She goes on to shush the man Emma now knows to be Killian. 

“Oh no,” Mary Margaret whispers over the video call, “there’s two of them.” 

“What is happening?” Emma’s not sure which of the two men asked, this whole interaction spinning rather absurdly out of control. 

“I don’t know,” Emma says.

The woman ignores all of them. “I’m Elsa, this is Liam, and that,” she points to Killian, frozen with a hand on the keg like he’s uncertain what to do, “is my very single, very Irish brother-in-law.” And all at once it becomes clear what Elsa’s intentions are. “Killian, can you come over here and help our lovely patron and her lovely mother?” 

“Oh, Emma, Killian even sounds like an Irish name.” 

“Mom!” Originally she found her mother’s request to be silly but harmless. The more people who become involved, however, the quicker it approaches mortifying. Emma watches as Elsa whispers something to her brother-in-law, likely explaining the unconventional request. 

“I’m very friendly,” Mary-Margaret reassures anyone who might be listening. 

“You are a flirt, is what you are,” Emma scolds. “And what would dad say if he found out about this?”

“He asked for whiskey. I asked for this.” 

“Come on, lass. Don’t deprive me of a dashing rescue.” Killian leans across the bar, his hand reaching out for her phone. All that stubble and the blue-eyes and the accent are worse when directed directly at her. “Besides, your mum sounds like a woman after my own heart.” 

“If you’re sure—?”

“Absolutely.”

To her abject horror, the moment she hands Killian the phone, he walks away with it in hand. 

“As requested, milady,” he says to the screen, “one genuine Irish man.”

Her mother’s delighted giggle is embarrassing for all Americans everywhere but it seems to delight Killian. She can just makeout her mother’s question about where he grew up when he rounds the corner, out of her hearing. 

“Where is he going?” Emma asks, craning her neck. “Where is he taking my phone?” 

“If I know Killian, your mum is probably about to get the most thorough oral history of Irish pubs she could have asked for,” Liam says, tossing a towel over his shoulder. 

“Oh. Okay.” She drums her fingertips on her glass. “I’m sorry about all the trouble.” 

“Nonsense,” he waves her off. “This is the most exciting thing to happen in our pub since Seamus and Willy hosted their wedding reception here.” He jerks his chin towards the group of bearded men she noticed earlier, though which one is Seamus and which is Willy she can’t be certain. 

After another fifteen minutes, Emma has finished her pint and Killian still has possession of her phone. He crossed through the room once, merrily chatting with her mother as he regaled  her with the story of how he got the scar on his cheek. 

Elsa is filling a series of pint glasses for a group of women standing at the bar, and Emma feels the need to apologize again. “This isn’t what I expected,” she explains. 

“What’s that?” Elsa asks. 

“I was kind of thinking, best case scenario, there’d be an exchange of hellos and that would be that.” 

Elsa nods, hands the pints off to the women, and then fills one more. “Are you familiar with the legend of the Blarney stone?” 

Emma nods. She has absolutely no intention of kissing the dang thing (her research indicates local teens do all manner of ungodly things to the stone, knowing that tourists intend to kiss it), but it’s on her list to go see. 

“Well, Jones family legend —”

“I take it your husband and his brother are Jones’?” 

“And me by marriage. Jones family legend has it that Killian must have been birthed upon the stone because never has there been a man more endowed with the gift of gab.” Elsa finishes pouring the pint and sets it in front of her. 

“Oh, I didn’t order this.” Right at that moment, Liam returns to the bar and sets a turkey sandwich in front of her. “Or this,” Emma says. 

“Knowing my brother, you might be here a while,” Liam explains. 

“Gift of gab?” 

He nods, pleased that the Jones family lore has reached her. “Gift of gab.”

Liam proves to be correct, which means Emma has ample time to get to know both Elsa and Liam. The two of them are freakishly adept at juggling bartending, interacting with their customers, and keeping up a steady flow of conversation with her. The highlight is hearing the full story of Seamus and Willy (she is able to identify them by their matching navy sweaters – sweaters which Willy apparently handknits for the both of them), two men who worked on the same fishing boat for decades before realizing they were in love. 

“Once they sorted that bit out, they got married three weeks later,” Elsa says. 

“So which one of them is the designated driver?” Emma asks. 

“That whole lot lives down the street.” Liam raises his voice so the group can hear them. “And they do nothing but hassle me every day of my life!” The group all raise their pint glasses and cheer, indicating this kind of teasing is something central to the pub’s dynamic. 

Killian returns from wherever it was he was busy flirting with her mother and sets her phone on the bartop. She looks down at the display only to find it blank.

“Uh, your mum had to run to the market, but she indicated she’ll call you later.” 

“She didn’t even say goodbye? Unbelievable.” As Emma gears herself up for peak mom-annoyance, she gets a text message. “Speak of the devil.” 

4:38 PM - Mom to Emma hubba hubba

“Ah, geez, mom,” she grumbles. 

“What’d she say about me?” Killian asks. 

“What makes you think that text was about you?” 

“Because you have roses in your cheeks.” Emma frowns. She what? “You’re blushing,” Killian says. 

“No I’m not.” 

“It’s getting deeper, I’m afraid.” He takes away her empty pint glass. “Another?” 

“Yes, please.” 

He sets another pint of Murphy’s in front of her (Liam was the one to inform her that one drinks Murphy’s when one is in Cork). “Your mother is lovely.” 

“Yeah, she’s something alright.” She sips the beer and licks the foam off her lip. “What were the two of you talking about for so long?”

“Oh, just having a chat. She wanted to know about the pub and how Elsa and Liam met.” 

“The gift of gab.” 

“Ah,” he says, “Elsa told you of that, then?” 

“Like my mom didn’t tell you anything about me?” 

“It was all good, Emma.” 

She snorts. “Yeah, I’m sure.” 

“Why a conversation with an Irish man?” Emma frowns at Killian, not quite certain of what he’s asking. “For a souvenir. That’s truly all your mum wanted?” 

“Oh, that. In between flirting, did she tell you anything about her and my dad?” Killian shakes his head. “It’s kind of a long story.” 

As if waiting for his cue, Liam comes up behind Killian and slings an arm around his brother’s shoulder. “My dear little brother has time.” 

“Younger brother,” Killian corrects. 

“Shorter brother.” Liam bumps Killian towards the other side of the bar. “Why don’t you keep Emma company?” 

“I have another three hours on my shift.” 

“I think Elsa and I can handle it until Will arrives.” 

“Liam.” 

“Don’t make me fire you.” 

“You can’t fire me. We’re co-owners.” 

“Fine. Don’t make me quit.” 

Killian rolls his eyes but slides out from under Liam’s arm. He crosses to the other side of the bar and sits beside Emma. “I’ll take a pint, then.” He raps his knuckles on the bartop. “And make it quick.” 

Emma hides her smile in her pint glass. Both Liam and Elsa have been so lovely. There’s no reason to switch allegiances at this point. Regardless of how much she might be tempted by the stubbly-faced, blue-eyed flirty Irish man sitting beside her. 

“Between the two of them and my mother,” Emma says. 

“Yeah, not the most subtle lot.” Liam shoots Killian a glare as he sets the pint down to which Killian responds with the cheekiest grin Emma has ever seen. The interaction has older and baby brother written all over it. “So, your mom and Irishmen. Go.” 

“Oh, that.” Unlike her mother, and even her father, Emma holds the details of her life close to her chest. She’s made the mistake in the past of sharing too much too fast. When people leave her, either by choice or circumstance, it physically pains her to know there are people out in the world with knowledge of her worries, fears and dreams. But maybe it’s the sandwich sitting warm in her stomach, or the jet lag, or simply the buzz of international travel, because she feels inclined to share at least a few details of her life with Killian. 

“My mom and dad both took a gap year after high school and met while backpacking across Europe. They met at the Roman Colosseum, decided to match up their itineraries, and by the time they arrived in Budapest five months later they were in love and my mom was pregnant.” 

“And they’ve been together ever since?” 

“Almost 27 years.”

“That’s quite the story.” 

She nods. “They cut their year of travel short, and went to live with my Grandma Ruth, my dad’s mom. They always talked about returning to Europe, finishing their trip at some point, but by the time I was old enough to leave behind with my grandma, dad was in vet school, mom was teaching, and they were running a wildlife rescue from the family farm. They kept making new plans to travel but they just kept getting pushed back and back and back. Until, one day, they decided to put all that money towards sending me on my first trip instead. So, as much as I fight every silly request she has of me, I would do anything if it made her smile.”

“Your mum and dad never made it to Ireland?” 

“Nope.”

“Thus the strange request.” 

“Thus the strange request.” 

“Well, it gave me a reason to chat with the lovely lass at the bar, so for that I’ll be forever grateful.” 

Her Grandma Ruth, Aunt Ruby, and frankly everyone who knows her parents well, routinely comment on the resemblance between Emma and her dad. Apparently in temperament and affectation they are almost identical. But maybe she’s more like her mom than anyone knows because the conversation between her and Killian flows fast and easy. Easy enough that she barely notices when she and Killian finish their pints and Elsa slides new glasses in front of them. Emma’s head is feeling a little buzzy, and that turkey sandwich was more than a couple hours ago. Maybe she can hint at Killian that she wants to go to the Christmas market. Hint even more specifically that she wouldn’t hate if he went with her. 

No, she can’t do that. To even think such a thing would be ridiculous. 

She can’t possibly ask a practical stranger to walk up and down the stalls of the festive market with her. She can’t expect him to want to sample all the baked goods and food they can handle. Or to hold her hand while they drink spiked apple cider. That kind of thinking is romantic, and hopeful, and not at all her brand. 

“This is really your first trip out of the states?” Killian asks.

“I mean, Canada, but that’s so close to home it doesn’t count.” Emma catches herself, eyes darting to Elsa. “Don’t tell your sister.” 

“Your secret’s safe with me.” Killian angles his body on the stool to face her more directly. Without Emma realizing it, they’ve drifted close enough together over the past hour or so that the move makes it so their knees knock together. Emma could move away, put some distance between them, but everything is foggy and hazy in that delicious way, and she can’t bring herself to move. “What does that make me, then? The ruggedly handsome foreigner you intend to seduce as a notch on your bedpost?” 

“Who said anything about seduction?”

“You’re giving me bedroom eyes.” 

“I do not make eyes of any kind. Especially bedroom eyes.” 

Elsa jumps in, setting glasses of water down for each of them. “Yeah, but Killian does. And he needs to put them away.”

Emma tries to react quickly enough to Elsa’s teasing to evade Killian’s detection, to turn away and hide her smile in her shoulder so he can’t see, but the gentle tug on the end of her braid indicates he caught her. 

“Think that’s funny, do you?” 

“You and my mom ganged up against me. I deserve to join with your family against you.” 

“Your mum is great.” He shrugs. “Well, based on the little I know.”  

“I know she can be a little intense. I hope she didn’t—”

“She was as lovely as her daughter.” Before his words can fully sink in, perhaps bringing that blush back to her cheeks, he’s moved on. “You’ll have to bring her with you when you return.” 

She rests her chin on palm, blinking up at him. Okay, maybe she sometimes makes eyes. “What makes you think I have any plans to come back?”

“Ireland gets in your blood. You’ll be back.” 

This time they’re interrupted by Liam. He swipes away the pint glasses in front of them, remaining beer and all. “That’s about all I can stomach of that.”

“What do you mean?” Killian asks. 

“You’ve been flirting with the kind tourist long enough. Time to go.” 

Oh. Emma looks down at her boots. A surge of deep embarrassment heating her cheeks and causing her stomach to churn. “Sorry,” she says quietly, her eyes turned down. “I didn’t mean to—”

“No!” The twin cries from both Liam and Killian startle her. She’s not sure which one appears more stricken by her announcement she intended to leave.   

“Apologies, Emma, I wasn’t clear,” Liam says. He extends his hand to Killian. “Apron.” It takes Killian a moment to react but when Liam stays in his place, his hand extended, Killian removes his apron and hands it to him. “See you tomorrow, little brother.” 

“Younger.”

“Dumber.” 

“Stubborner.”

“Not a word.” Liam stalks back over to Elsa who is shaking her head at the whole display. “They’re both idiots,” Liam says, and Emma is just going to pretend she didn’t hear that, thank you very much. 

“Have you been to the Christmas market yet, Emma?” Killian’s voice brings her back to the pub, and this particular bar stool, with this particular man. This particular man who has somehow intuited the secret desire of her heart to go to the town’s Christmas market with him. 

“No. No. Not yet.” 

Killian jumps down from his seat and extends a hand to Emma to help her down. “Come on, love. Let’s sail away.” 

There’s 100 ways Emma could respond to that. She could tell Killian she isn’t his love. She could jump down from the stool on her own. She could insist she’s fine going to the market by herself. But she tries to channel a little magic, that particular magic which for her mom and dad turned one day in Rome into a lifetime, and chooses differently. 

(Not that she’s saying she expects—)

She takes Killian’s offered hand and his answering grin is all the confirmation she needs she made the right decision. 

And so they go to the Christmas market, and at Killian’s insistence she tries mulled wine but quickly trades it in for a cup of boozy cider. They ride the ferris wheel, the cold stinging her cheeks from the top, the lights of Cork spread out before her, and that thrum of love for this place beats loudly in her veins. Suddenly every travel story her parents have ever told her makes sense and maybe Killian is right  – maybe Ireland is in her blood. 

They walk together side-by-side and at a point Emma can’t remember – somewhere between sampling whiskey, buying several bottles for her dad, and licking salt and malt vinegar from hot chips off her fingers – they transition to walking hand-in-hand. The heat of Killian’s skin, even through two layers of gloves, is what she blames for the fact that she actually starts humming along to Christmas carols. Where’s that deep cynicism she has been committed to for her life when she needs it? 

“Told you,” Killian says after the two of them step away from a stall with handmade ornaments. She must have been channeling her mom because she couldn’t stop herself from striking up a conversation with the vendor. Somehow by the end of the interaction she’d agreed to join him and his wife for their annual holiday pub crawl the following night. 

“Told me what?” 

“That you would fall for Ireland.” 

“You get the honor and privilege of keeping me company on my first full night on my first real trip out of the country and all you can say is ‘I told you so’?” 

“I believe what I am trying to say, love, is you appear very much at home here.” 

The sentiment makes everything in Emma buzz, but she does what she does best and works to diffuse it. “Well, uh, I don’t know. Does it ever snow here?” 

“Eh, we get about 50 mm every year?” At her look of confusion Killian smiles. “Not much.” 

“Have you ever had a white Christmas?” 

“Can’t say I have. They’re pretty rare in Ireland.” 

“In that case, I think this means you should come to Maine. We do a great white Christmas.” 

“Maybe I will.” 

“Great. Next year sound good?” 

Killian laughs and squeezes her hand. “Sounds great.”

She hears the faint echo of advice her dad once gave her. It was right when she was fresh off her heartbreak with Neal and wasn’t sure she had it in her to apply for grad school. He said something to her about moments. About the need to notice good moments even in the midst of bad ones. 

Standing here hand-in-hand with a man she met only five hours ago, the glow of Christmas lights dancing in technicolor hues against his cheeks and hair, Emma is absolutely certain this is a good moment. 

“Emma?” 

She answers Killian’s question by rising up on her toes and kissing him. It’s quick and fleeting, barely a brush of her lips against his, but the look on his face as she pulls away, all bright eyed-wonder, deserves to be classified as a good moment all on its own. 

It takes self-control Emma wasn’t aware she possessed to not drop their shopping bags to the ground, grip him by the lapels of his jacket, and kiss the crap out of him. Instead she loops her arm in his. 

“It’s getting late,” she says. “Want to walk me back to my hotel?” 

He swallows, that poleaxed expression still on his face. “Aye.” 

The next morning, Emma is woken up by the sound of her video call alert and boy it was a mistake to not extend her do not disturb until noon. She reaches out and blindly bats at the bedside table until she makes contact with her phone. As soon as she swipes up on her mom’s call, she squeezes her eyes shut again. 

“Hello?”

“Oh, sweetie. Are you still jet lagged?” 

“And a little hungover.”

“Sounds like you had a very eventful night.”

Killian grumbles from somewhere behind her. “What time is it?” he asks.

It’s right about this moment Emma realizes her error. Her mom goes quiet and Emma considers taking the opportunity to end the call. And then maybe ignore every call thereafter for the next five days. 

“Emma Nolan. Is there a man in bed with you?” 

“No,” Emma answers, though it’s perfunctory and not at all convincing. 

Killian presses closer to her, and shifts so his chin rests on her shoulder. “Hello again, Mrs. Nolan. And this must be Mr. Nolan.” 

That gets Emma’s attention and she opens her eyes enough to see her mom and dad sitting beside one another on the couch. While her mom is positively gleeful, her dad looks as though he wishes he could melt into the couch cushions and disappear. 

“There are certain things I don’t care to see,” her dad says. “Certain things I don’t care to know.” 

Emma rotates in bed and onto her back, holding the phone above her head so both she and Killian are still in view of the camera. “Oh hush, Dad, you and mom did it the first night you met.” 

“You told her that?” 

In response, her mom shrugs. “She asked.” 

“And not that it matters, but Killian and I didn’t have sex.” 

Though it didn’t stop them from trading long, slow kisses that left her dizzy and wanting more, more, and more. Killian must have felt the same because it took little to no convincing to get him to stay the night. Perhaps most remarkably, after extending the invitation, Emma had no desire to retract it or pretend it didn’t mean anything. 

“Your daughter was far too drunk to have sex.” Emma turns her head so fast in Killian’s direction she hears something crack. 

“That, for instance, is one of the things I don't want to know about,” her dad says.  

Killian cheerfully waves at the camera, ignoring both her father’s indignation and her glare. “I’m Killian, by the way. Happy to meet your acquaintance, Mr. Nolan.” 

Emma elbows Killian. The man is a total menace. “I’ll call you guys back when I’ve had coffee,” 

“I want details,” her mom says. 

“And I want no details.” 

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Emma hangs up the phone and tosses it in the direction of the foot of the bed. She flips over onto her side and Killian mirrors her, reaching out to trace the freckles on the bridge of her nose. “So that was my dad.” 

“He seems a charming fellow.” 

“Don’t let the responsible tough guy act fool you,” she says, and snuggles closer to Killian. He responds just as she hoped, by wrapping his arms tight around her. “He once spent all his money on a cross country train ride and stole oyster crackers from the dining car for food. And during a California road trip, my mom almost froze to death sleeping in her wet bathing suit on the side of the road.” 

Killian chuckles, the vibrations of his laugh making her feel even warmer. “You’re saying they can deal with a half naked man in their daughter’s hotel room?”  

“Yeah, they can deal.” After a moment’s hesitation, Emma slips her hands up and under Killian’s shirt. It’s the one he wore to work, and she can still smell the faint aromas of beer and fried food that linger. She presses her palms against his back and bunches the shirt up, up, and then over his head. 

“Emma?” 

A girl could get used to the way his voice moves over the syllables of her name. “They might have a problem with a fully naked one, though.” She kisses his bare shoulder.

Killian’s hands move under her shirt to span her waist. Goosebumps breakout across her skin. By the slight twist of his lips, Killian notices. “So you’re saying—?” 

“I’m saying you should quit gabbing and kiss me before they call again.” 

“As you wish.”

And a week later, when she is back in Maine celebrating Christmas with her family and Killian is in Ireland with his, Emma convinces herself she imagined it. She must have. She must have imagined how safe she felt in the presence of another person. Imagined the comfort she felt as he joined her for a quick road trip to Dublin. Imagined that it could feel like your heart was split in two, half residing in the chest of a person you just met. 

But the week of New Year’s Eve, when he arrives in Maine to celebrate with her, she’s startled to find it was all real. 

The morning after Killian arrives, she sits with her mom in her parents’ breakfast nook, the two of them sipping coffee as Killian and her dad make waffles. 

“Not such a dumb souvenir after all, huh?” her mom whispers.

Emma shakes her head, too happy to even react to her mom’s shameless gloating. “No. Not so dumb.” 

[akielonsummer]

Mortal Errors

This is only loosely based on the Blade Runner universe and can be treated as a generic sci-fi AU. If you’re not familiar with Blade Runner, you only need to know that: Replicants = Bioengineered androids that look exactly like humans, but sometimes certain qualities can be enhanced to serve different purposes. Blade runners = Bounty hunters whose job is to track down and kill (retire) rogue replicants. Technically belong to the police department.

Give this a chance please? :* (I’ve also posted it on AO3 if you prefer to read it there)

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By 9pm, Damen was positive he got stood up by his informer who was supposed to rendezvous with him in this night club an hour ago. It was pouring outside, and he was overworked and exhausted, stuck in this raucous and filthy place without a lead or an umbrella.

If he would be completely honest with himself, like he usually was, he would acknowledge that there was another reason for still sitting here other than reluctance to get soaked in the rain on the way back.

The blond man sitting across from him at the large oval-shaped bar had just politely refused the second drink a bulky male stranger was trying to buy him. From afar he could see that the blond wore a high-neck black top that was possibly an effort to keep a low profile, but only served to highlight the slim lines of his shoulders and chest even more. Damen could see why the other man was willing to try so hard. The moment Damen had noticed him, he had been sure he’d been looking at the prettiest face in the entire club tonight.

The big guy was persistent, shameless enough to linger around, still trying to chat up his target. Damen unselfconsciously began studying the blond man’s demeanor, the way he eluded the other person’s gaze and carefully positioned his body. All of Damen’s detective instincts were telling him that the blond was utterly annoyed by the other man’s presence, but would prefer to keep things civil. He was waiting for a specific person in that spot, and therefore could not easily retreat to a less noticeable corner to escape all the attention he was attracting. You would have to be very unobservant not to notice that several other pairs of eyes nearby were preying on him likewise, impatiently waiting for the next chance.

Damen made himself look away, drank some of his beer, and reminded himself of his purpose of coming here.

“Sorry, I’m late,” Damen heard himself say casually as he appeared on the vacant side of the blond man. Inwardly, he cursed himself for giving in to his own curiosity.

And vanity. This had always been his favorite part on a night out.

Getting the beautiful, but difficult ones, while others watch.

“Hey,” the blond looked up, and quietly eyed him once before he continued, “I was beginning to worry that you might have been blown away by the thunderstorm.”

“Looks like you took the underground streets,” he raised a hand to feel Damen’s curls, which were dry. If he was surprised by Damen’s sudden approach, he didn’t let his reactions give away any of it.

Up close, Damen saw that he wore a small dangling earring in a starburst shape, the gold just a shade deeper than his hair. This place had an awful diffused pale purple lighting that made almost everyone at least a bit sickly, and he looked absolutely gorgeous.

He turned his face to the other side to send off the big guy with a final “Excuse us”, then turned back to stare at Damen. The corners of his mouth lifted to form a conspiratorial smile that disappeared too quickly, but at least he didn’t look like he wanted Damen to be gone immediately.

“That was smooth,” he waited until the man was out of earshot to say, “I’m Laurent.”

“Damen,” Damen replied as he felt the deep blue gaze from those almond-shaped eyes do funny things to his stomach. Something deep inside him whispered danger. He promptly dismissed the alert, and went on, “Why didn’t you just tell him to get lost?”

“I didn’t want to start anything. I’m waiting for somebody,” said Laurent, then after a brief pause, “—was waiting.”

Laurent shrugged and gave a wry smile. Damen was pleased with this answer because it both validated his earlier theory and broadened the range of possible things that could happen tonight.

“That makes two of us,” and so he advanced.

“Let me guess,” said Laurent, humming as he sucked on the olive of his martini, then licked the drops of alcohol trickling down his fingers, “it’s a woman.”

“Someone who was supposed to bring me good news tonight.”

“That’s frustrating. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Apparently I’ve found something better to do here,” said Damen. He started to wave the bartender over to buy both of them drinks as a man in a terrible, flashy silver jacket got close to Laurent from behind. It was hard to tell at that moment whether he was too drunk to see Damen or simply audacious—it could be both, because he was bold enough to place his hand on the side of Laurent’s waist and was beginning to lean in to mumble some drunken nonsense in his ear.

It was happening fast, but Damen’s reaction was faster. He slapped off the stranger’s hand and as the man tardily became aware of the situation and glowered at him, warned with a low but clear “No”. The man took two seconds to evaluate the physical difference between himself and Damen, and wandered off grudgingly.

Laurent considered him briefly and let out a poorly stifled snicker.

“What,” Damen snapped, not entirely in an unamused fashion. He was aware that his hand had replaced the other man’s to linger around the smalls of Laurent’s back, and decided to keep it there.

“When I first saw you over there earlier, I thought there’s no way you’d be into men,” Laurent said with a slightly bashful expression, lowering his gaze on the bar table. Damen felt a surge of satisfaction upon hearing his honest confession. He was ready to respond with something nice and clever until Laurent looked up again and finished, “or you should at least prefer real boys.”

Laurent kept his meek, picture-perfect smile as he waited for the meaning of his words to sink in.

“You’re a replicant,” attempted Damen, a part of him still reluctantly trying to make sense of the now-conspicuous truth.

“And you, a blade runner,” Laurent enunciated each syllable as he held Damen’s gaze unwaveringly. In that instant, Damen could see from an angle a flash of a curious reflection at the center of his blue eyes. A sharp, contrasting color. Of warning, and of blood. Laurent blinked once, and it was gone.

“How—” Damen began, and was immediately interrupted by the huge noise of a brawl that had just broken out behind them at one of the VIP tables.

“Just before you came over, I was telling big guy that the people I knew at that table had some extra pills they’d gotten as samples from a supplier, and that they were happy to share,” said Laurent matter-of-factly as he got up from the bar stool and began putting on his black leather jacket.

Damen turned to look, and saw that the first man he had warded off from Laurent was now deep in a fist fight with two of the men in black suits from that table.

“You don’t know any of those guys,” said Damen, a bit awestruck by now.

“No,” answered Laurent. He popped one last piece of peanut in his mouth and started for the exit. “We should go now.”

-

Thirty minutes later, they were both sitting in the couch in Damen’s living room, sipping whisky from heavy-bottomed glasses with a rain-drenched towel draped around the neck.

“You’ve been laughing for the past fifteen minutes. Get over it,” Damen said sourly when he saw that Laurent was still smirking around the rim of his glass.

Their escape had not been completely free of obstacles. They had intended to sneak out through the less noticeable side exit of the club, until they had realized there’d been simply no way not to get noticed when you were moving with someone of Damen’s stature. With the brawling in the VIP area escalating in the background, the bouncers had become more vigilant with people getting in and out of the place.

It’d appeared that Laurent had gotten through the control at the exit without a hint of effort but just by being himself—a seemingly harmless young man with the face of an angel—while Damen was inevitably stopped, by not one, but two of the most intimidating-looking bouncers guarding the exit. They had padded him down scrupulously and proceeded to ask questions to make sure he’d had nothing to do with the rows in the club. Perhaps more out of curiosity than necessity, before they had let him go, one of them had asked what he’d been doing for a living.

“‘Same as you. I work at a club uptown.’” Laurent repeated his response in a way that was more a derisive reenactment than an honest impression, then added for accuracy, “‘a small one.’”

Damen rolled his eyes in disapproval and sought to detach himself from this conversation by refilling his glass with the bronze-colored liquid.

“And now, to answer the question you’ve been waiting to ask,” said Laurent, gradually dropping the amusement in his tone and replacing it with his default placid composure, “I knew you’re a blade runner because I know someone who wears a device like that too.”

He pointed at the black wristband on Damen’s left wrist.

It was a location tracker that would have been concealed more carefully with clothing when he was on an active assignment. Anybody who shared his job title would get one on the first day they reported for duty so that their superiors could track their locations real-time, to make rescue or body retrieval easier. Unsurprisingly, hunting down rogue androids meant putting yourself on a knife edge too, quite literally.

“You’ve chosen a tough job,” Laurent continued when Damen said nothing. “Someone’s got to do it, I guess.”

He sounded like he was talking about the work of a butcher or an undertaker, which was not that far from the truth.

Despite their dramatic encounter with each other, Laurent didn’t seem like he had anything against Damen’s kind. In fact, he had just mentioned that he personally knew another blade runner. He must be a registered new model if he was able to roam the city freely, perhaps the vocational type, even. It was not uncommon to see new generation replicants that were indifferent to the nature of a blade runner’s job. After all, they only retired the obsolete rogue models who posed potential threats to society, and most of these fugitive replicants lived in underground communities that were completely segregated from the legal models.

“I didn’t,” said Damen, at last.

Laurent gave an inquisitive glance.

“I didn’t choose it.”

And that was all he was willing to say about why he had fallen to the current point of his career. Realizing he had brought the conversation to a cul-de-sac, he tried for a different direction of the topic, “it’s neither pleasant nor glorious, indeed. But I try my best to make it quick, at least.”

“Quick and painless. They won’t even feel a thing,” Laurent mused. There was a subtle edge in his voice that disturbed the relative ease of Damen.

“We use a special type of taser,” said Damen, because he felt that the word “gun” might just sound a little too strong. “It takes less than a second.” If you aimed at the right place, and if your target didn’t struggle.

“Has it ever crossed your mind that,” said Laurent, leaning back into his corner of the couch so that he could look right into Damen’s eyes, “you could be one of us, you just didn’t know all along?”

“They run tests on us every day, at work,” answered Damen, finding the question a bit absurd. “I know what I am. I know what I’m doing.”

“Oh, so do we,” Laurent huffed, staring at the remaining content in his glass as he whirled it. Damen didn’t miss his choice of pronoun and that familiar edge in his voice that came and went.

“For better or worse, your job is certainly much more exciting than mine,” Laurent began again as he adjusted his position, crossing his legs. For two seconds Damen’s attention was stuck on the smooth fair skin showing through the ripped parts of his grey jeans so he didn’t registered that Laurent had shifted closer in his direction. “I work in a biotech lab.”

“As a technician,” he then added, probably for fear of confusion.

The lack of immediate response betrayed Damen as much as his briefly widened eyes did.

“I… had different assumptions about your occupation,” admitted Damen.

“You thought I was a pleasure model,” said Laurent, surprisingly seeming more amused than offended by Damen’s presumption. His eyes were the color of fine blue topaz in this lighting, his dampened hair ready to drip liquid gold.

“You’re way too attractive to be anything else,” Damen tried his best to make it sound like a compliment but not derogation, as it was supposed to be.

Laurent hummed as if plotting something in his head. He lowered his gaze to look at his own hands, which long and delicate fingers he was now slowly flexing. When he blinked, his dense lashes brushed against the highest points of his cheekbones, flapping and trembling like wings of birds.

“They say I’m a customized model,” he lifted his wrists slightly to examine the inner side of them, like they were some novel objects instead of parts of his own body. Blue veins ran under the finest skin there—replicants were bioengineered to look exactly the same as humans, but it still shocked Damen sometimes how much they resembled the real thing.

“Who knows where they had gathered the parts to build me?” said Laurent, it came out like a question that was not demanding an answer.

“Where, I don’t know. I just know the person who commissioned them to make you must be filthy rich.”

To that, Laurent didn’t answer. He picked up his glass from the coffee table, tilted his head back and downed all the alcohol in it.

“I might just have too much to drink,” he said, leaning his upper body forward to put the glass back on the table, suddenly looking like he might topple over. The towel fell from Laurent’s shoulders. Damen grabbed on his arms in time and pulled him back in place.

“I thought alcohol didn’t affect you,” Damen said as he still kept both hands wrapped around Laurent’s arms from behind, but they went from just supporting them to a soothing, sweeping motion against the now half-dried black fabric. He felt the lean muscles underneath tense and relax in his palms.

“The effect, like most other things in us, is also customizable,” Laurent pointed out as he briefly luxuriated in Damen’s massaging hands like he was genuinely enjoying it. Then, in their awkward position of Damen half-embracing Laurent from behind, he tilted his head to one side so that he could turn his face to look at Damen, “I’m only doing this so that you could take me to bed.”

Damen’s hands stopped abruptly. But then Laurent began to snuggle up to Damen’s chest, fitting himself perfectly in the space there, looking up at him with his marble glass eyes with intent.

Damen knew his own weakness, knew that once he was caught in a situation like this he would have no means to back away from it if he ever found out it was a trap, as it had happened once in the past.

“We don’t have to,” he tried to resist, and it sounded too much like pleading.

“I think we both know why I’m here,” Laurent cooed as he gently pressed the side of his face onto Damen’s shoulder, then, in a voice that was not completely free of self-disdain, “a stray android, clinging to the arms of its executioner.”

The sudden realization of how this was a much more precarious situation for Laurent than for himself, coupled with the intense urge to feel the fine strands of gold now rubbing on his sweater, was all it took to dismantle Damen’s feeble defense.

“Only if you want,” Damen yielded, lifting one hand to smooth the soft hair around Laurent’s face.

“To let you take me apart and examine me everywhere?”

There was a change in the quality of Laurent’s voice that Damen couldn’t exactly fathom. He looked down, and saw that the smile on Laurent’s face was devious, saccharine and sad, at once.

-

Simulated fire crackling from the atmosphere panel in Damen’s bedroom masked the distant sounds of incessant rain and thunder outside. The advanced thermostatic system kept his living unit at an optimal temperature at all times, but it was Laurent’s human-like body heat that was keeping him warm tonight.

Damen slid his hands over Laurent’s still-clothed thighs, which were now aptly straddling his own atop his queen size bed, delighting in the soft sounds Laurent made between deep kisses as his thumbs drew small circles on his inner thighs. Laurent smelled like rain mixed with expensive perfume, and tasted like honeyed wine. It kept Damen wanting more, how Laurent’s kisses were alternately hesitant and unrelenting, a liquor that was sweet on the tongue but burned the back of his throat.

“Have you ever,” Laurent managed, in a charmingly breathy voice, as they broke off once.

“With a replicant?” Damen took over seamlessly, Laurent’s question communicated in means other than words somehow. “Not knowingly.”

Flashbacks filled his mind momentarily against his will, as the ambiguity of his answer hung in the air. He mentally shook himself out of it. Turning back at Laurent’s pale hair and blue eyes, he suddenly saw the irony in it, plain as day. Then, when Laurent didn’t push further but accepted his partial truth with only a raised brow and curious eyes, he corrected himself. Laurent possessed beauty that was comparable to that of hers, but they were evidently two entirely different things.

“And you, have you ever?” Damen whispered as he leaned back in to kiss the spot behind Laurent’s ear, nuzzling the silky golden hair there. His hands had since taken on an exploration of Laurent’s body, albeit still hindered by a layer of fabric, around his taut waistline, up his back, down the flanks and then up again. He surveyed Laurent’s reactions to his different touch, logged them, and imagined doing it all over again. Later, on bare skin.

“He thinks he’s the first,” said Laurent as he visibly fought back the gasps elicited by Damen’s nibbling along the underside of his jaw. The sentence uttered with summoned scorn, complemented with the reddening at the tips of his ears and the glint in his dark eyes, had a heady effect on Damen. He could feel himself rousing—in more ways than one—but more than anything his body ached with a deep, growling desire uncaged.

“He just thinks,” Damen cooed, soft and low, “that he’s very, very lucky.”

He dragged a trail of kisses across Laurent’s left cheek. He paused when he reached the corner of his lips, waited for the first sign of hesitation from Laurent, then took over his mouth as his hand found its way to Laurent’s nape to pull him in. This time, he kissed him like he hoped to deliver all the praises that would sound excessive in words, in the form of long, hot and deep exploitation of Laurent’s mouth.

When he finally pulled away, it was to check if he could find a hint of annoyance on Laurent’s face at the interruption. Convinced that he did, he tugged at the hem of the top Laurent was wearing to signify that the break would only be brief but was necessary. He pecked on his cheek in compensation, and asked softly, “Can I see more?”

He would have spent more time to consider the momentary disbelief on Laurent’s face upon hearing that, if he hadn’t been so stunned by what he saw when Laurent swiftly lost his top.

It was at that particular moment that Damen had the strange epiphany that Laurent, despite everything, was indeed man-made. If God existed, he did not make this. He thought as his eyes savored the fine alabaster skin now fully on display, a stark contrast to the dark veil that had covered it and was now discarded on the floor. He tried to recall art terminology he had heard of: golden ratio, perfect balance; but none of these could even begin to describe the way lines were placed on Laurent’s body. The hollows and protrusions around the shoulders and collarbones were shaped like grips of luxurious handcrafted bows, elegant to look at and perfect to touch. When he breathed, the lines that cut in all the right places over his chest and abs deepened and faded. God made men the way he liked them to be, and men did the same with things. Damen continued to muse as his admiration went on. God did not make this. A man did. This was made according to men’s liking, not God’s.

“I bet it turns you on to know you could do virtually anything you want to a body like this without any real consequences,” said Laurent, in a tone that could be either seductive or provocative, or both. There was a cruel degree of truth to what he just said. Yes, there were laws which prohibit abuse of replicants, but according to them, anything that could be fixed with money and some tweaking of programs was never considered to be out of line.

“When I see a body like yours,” Damen began to disagree. The prettiest, finest thing I’ve ever seen in my life, he added only mentally. “I only want to do everything you want.”

At that, Laurent again gave a subtle scowl with distrust, but was quick to turn his face away as Damen finally smoothed his hands on his bare waist, where the skin was soft as cream. Damen was not sure why Laurent should get offended by his saying a thing like this or asking for permission, but he was currently too fascinated by the way Laurent was responding to his hands gliding all over his body to be truly concerned.

“It suits you,” Damen praised as he passed an index finger over the navel piercing on Laurent. It was small and simple, adorned with a tiny blue gem. “Are there more?”

“You’re insatiable, you know?” The look Laurent gave him as he said this was supposed to be chastising, but only served to send a thumping pulse down Damen’s lower abdomen.

“I once heard,” Damen said, as his hands went up to Laurent’s chest to roll his nipples between his fingers. They were small and hard like summer berries; Damen’s mouth thirsted for a taste of them. Laurent’s body gave a jerk that was frankly overreaction to such a minor stimulation, which he tried to conceal with a quick kiss on Damen’s lips as Damen leaned closer. He finished his sentence against Laurent’s lips, “That certain parts of the pleasure models’ bodies were specifically designed.”

He adjusted his tone so that it fit the topic he was discussing. His tone was lewd. One of his hands left Laurent’s front and traveled to his back to cup his buttock, still clad in jeans but soft and full all the same, as if he feared he had not made his meaning clear. Damen was aware he was taking liberties both with his words and his body, but he couldn’t wait any longer to show Laurent what he wanted Laurent to see and feel, what no one else could give him. He wanted, to see his sophisticatedly engineered mind to be able to process nothing else, and to hear his wonderful mouth sigh only his name.

A wicked smile appeared on Laurent’s innocent face, informing Damen in his own unique way that his invitation to this night-long venture had been accepted. He rolled his hips once, twice against the burning core of Damen, which was hard as rock, then began to walk his palms onto Damen’s chest to push him down onto the bed. Damen’s head landed on the pillows as he heard Laurent’s clever mouth say one last thing,

“I guess there’s only one way to find out.”

-

Laurent got back to his neighborhood by his motorbike when the sky was a ghostly white. “Neighborhood” was a nice way to put it, while it really was just the gutter where everything that fell through the brighter parts of the city gathered. Drizzle wetted his outfit which hadn’t been fully dry since he had left that night club last night. He took off his helmet and habitually shook his head twice once he reached close enough to the building. A homeless man lay at the open entrance of the building, next to which black letters “SKINJOB RIGHTS” were sprayed on the cement wall. There was not enough information to tell whether the man was just asleep or dead.

Over the past two years, Laurent realized that there were a lot of similarities between the life here and playing a new game. There were a lot of rules to learn. Many things that were forbidden in other parts of the city were allowed here, such as off limits drugs, contract killing, trafficking and prostitution involving underaged replicants; and vice versa, like how you should never fly a hovercar around here although they were everywhere in other areas, because they would attract too much attention from the cops. Then, like in games, there were things you could practice to get better at. Like getting yourself out of trouble, or looking for it intentionally then getting out of it. Good thing Laurent was a fast learner, because the biggest difference between his life now and a game was that if he slipped up, what awaited him could be worse than death.

Laurent opened the door to his unit and was relieved to see no one in the living room. He proceeded to his own room with footfalls as light as a cat.

As the familiar smell of the air of his own space filled him, he realized suddenly he needed a moment to collect himself. He lay down on his bed and started breathing deeply in a rhythm, imagining the fatigue from the escapade at the club fading with each exhalation. To his frustration, the more he tried, the more he felt a different kind of soreness take shape instead. Soreness resulted from other uses of his body last night. He allowed himself to stay like this for two minutes.

The monitor on his desk, switched on automatically when he entered the room, was showing widgets of information such as sightings of police in the area and job requests from the black market repair shop Laurent worked at. At the top left corner was a gallery displaying photos, taken from times when wanting to remember specific moments of his life was still a normal thing to Laurent.

On the screen was a photo of Laurent in polo uniform, posing next to a stocky white pony. He had been eleven years old. That same year, he had been given the truth about what being a son to Aleron and Hennike Arles of the Arles Corporation had really meant. He learnt that his resemblance to his mother was not a result of the wonder of inheritance, only state-of-the-art engineering. He also learnt that human boys didn’t receive a new body and have their memory and operating system transferred to it each year. It was shocking to him, because between homeschooling and only playing with a carefully selected group of girls and boys of his own kind growing up, he had never once doubted his realness.

For countless times, they reassured Laurent that not a thing in his life was ever going to change due to his nature, that the very reason he had been created was because there had been love and wealth with no place to go. Yet, in the end, what really brought him peace was knowing that Auguste, his golden shining star of an elder brother, was also a replicant. At eleven, Laurent had thought, how could that possibly be bad, if it meant being just like Auguste?

Another photo popped up. In the picture, Laurent’s ski goggles were pushed up to show his cold-pinked cheeks; Auguste was next to him, laughing and wearing a beanie covered in chunks of snow which had been Laurent’s doing. Laurent looked at himself on the screen—he was smiling just like an ordinary teenager having the time of his life—and felt an urge to look away.

Everything had changed after that trip. They had come home to the news of their parents’ fatal private jet accident, and the subsequent board decision for their uncle to take over the Arles Corporation. Several months later, the company had announced a list of older replicant model numbers manufactured by the Corp that had been found to be seriously fault-prone, together with Auguste’s removal from the board. Auguste had been one of the original models pioneered by the Corp.

Laurent lifted both hands to cover his eyes with his palms. He remembered that night like yesterday. Auguste had appeared in the doorway of Laurent’s room, still in his business suit and carrying a duffel bag. He’d wrapped his arms tightly around Laurent’s shoulders and kissed the top of his head wordlessly. He had only come to say goodbye, but Laurent had been taught to make his own decisions his whole life. A life without Auguste or a lifetime of side-stepping, dodging and running away. It had been the easiest decision he had ever had to make.

Hot water from the shower warmed Laurent’s body, washing away the rain that had soaked every inch of him last night.

The only tricky part had been building the connections he’d needed to get the name of the blade runner assigned to hunt his brother. That had taken time, money and effort. Everything after that had been easy.

Damianos had been easy.

Most of the information Laurent had successfully obtained about Damianos turned out to be accurate. The excessively powerful physique. The imprudent, egotistic demeanor. The lack of discretion and self-preservation. The strong tendency to give in to physical attraction—it was almost ludicrous, how simple it had been to seduce this man. Perhaps even the unverified rumors he had come across about Damianos were indeed true. How he had slumped from deputy chief to a bottom-ranked, scavenging blade runner, all just for covering up some data breach committed by the mistress of his chief of police half-brother. It sounded like cheap soap TV, but after meeting Damianos in person, Laurent’s doubt about the authenticity of this story had now shrunk significantly.

The only discrepancy Laurent hadn’t expected was how Damianos had behaved in bed. Laurent examined the marks scattered all over his body in the mirror as he toweled himself down. They looked like crimson scars of various sizes, burned there by Damianos’ mouth. Laurent’s mind wandered off as he discovered more and more of them, in places he didn’t remember had been touched.

Tell me how you like it. Damianos had whispered near his face, as his palms had slid down Laurent’s thighs, spreading them. Rough. Eyes closed, Laurent had responded, because that way it would be over sooner and more tolerable than this. Then you don’t know what you like. Damianos had said with an infuriating smile in his voice before he had begun to put Laurent through rounds of slow, torturous, dragged-out pleasure.

It had been nothing like Laurent had rehearsed mentally with the theoretical knowledge he’d possessed, especially with Damianos. He recalled the sounds he had made when Damianos had pushed him to the edge, repeatedly, and felt heat creep up his cheeks.

None of that mattered anymore. He demanded himself to shut last night out of his mind as he pulled on a sweatshirt he’d borrowed from Auguste and returned to his room. This had been planned to be a one-off, and his plan had worked out.

He keyed in the pin to the lock on his drawer and picked up the mobile device stowed in there. A few taps and swipes and a map of the city was pulled up on the screen. There used to be only one moving dot on it, but now there were two, thanks to the codes Laurent had loaded onto Damianos’ tracker wristband while he had gone in the shower after they’d been done. Laurent had been extremely lucky he hadn’t even had to consider using any of his backup plans.

He watched the dot that was Damianos hovering around the downtown police station as his other hand reached deeper into the corner of his drawer. He knew it was there, but he needed to feel it. His fingers slipped along the cold metallic barrel, then to the curve of the back of the grip. He lifted it slightly, sensing the grounded weight and the finality it carried.

Withdrawing his hand, he took one last look at the screen and saw the other dot approaching his own current location. He put the device back, shut the drawer and heard the lock click.

Outside, there was the sound of the main door opening.

“Laurent, I’m home,” said his brother, coming home from a night of strenuous, exploitative labor, the only type of work he was able to sustain without proper documentation.

His brother should not have to live like this, but even living itself was quickly becoming a thing he had to fight for. Fury was a hissing snake perched in Laurent’s artificial heart.

His plan was simple, and only one more step remained: One day, the dot on the map that was Damianos would finally get too close to the one that was Auguste, and that would be the day when Laurent would pull the trigger on Damianos.

There was nothing Laurent would not do to save Auguste’s life. And he knew Auguste felt the same way for him, too.

So he ran his fingers through his damp hair once, pretending he had just freshened himself up with a morning shower after a good, undisturbed night’s sleep, and opened his bedroom’s door.

“Morning, Auguste.”

-------------------------------------------------------- This is a completely self-indulgent fic and I enjoyed writing every word of it so that was noice. That being said, writing in a second language will never not be nerve-wracking and there were times I simply had no idea what I was doing. Please pretend you don’t see bad grammar and weird phrases because I know they must exist. I apologize if Damen sounds like a complete douchebag at times. It’s entirely intentional. I tried to downplay the potential Auguste/Laurent in this but no matter what I did it’s just kind of there LOL they’re also not REAL brothers when you think of it so

[tsskyx]

Determination, Frisk, suicide, etc.

https://whatwillyoudodifferently.tumblr.com/post/150477111451/why-would-you-ever-climb-a-mountain-like-that

This post will deal with topics similar to the ones stated in this linked post. It’s not a response to it, I was just inspired by it to talk about my head canons. As per usual, this will be a very specific writing that will probably not apply to you, you will most likely disagree with it. I personally am simply feeling the need to write these things down again.

So, to start, it is true that Determination in Undertale could be interpreted as some sort of allegory to suicide. After all, it deals with hope and willpower, and those things are something that depression / suicidal ideations directly relate to.

However, I’m not sure I feel it fits perfectly, at least to me, it’s different enough to wonder if I can construct a better head canon for myself. Depression is poetic, but as a content creator, I wish to explore other avenues of thought too.

For one, we know that Chara was suicidal; if not outright when climbing the mountain, then at least later with the entire buttercup plan. To me personally, it seems strange to overuse the same trope again for Frisk, so when I first saw Asriel’s line about climbing the mountain, where he implied exactly this, I was doubtful that he just happened to guess it right in Frisk’s case.

The concept of Determination is also finicky. Frisk is almost constantly feeling determined, save for New Home, where the narrator no longer says that they are, and the number of save points per area rises sharply. If Frisk was coming from the same or similar place as Chara, then at least we could use this to pin down the nature of their Soul Trait. If traits are variable (which I’m slowly starting to think they are), then perhaps that implies the red trait is something along the lines of “not being alright”, “being more troubled with your own issues than projecting your interests and energy outwards”, something that depression could be a subset of. Hell even the soul color kinda matches, the heart is in essence “bleeding”.

However, if Frisk is not in the same mind state as Chara, then what can we actually deduce about them? Well, to begin with, I think the other possibilities that Asriel listed could just as well be true, fate or foolishness. Personally, I think it’s both, I think Frisk was somehow being foolish, but themselves thought (at this point in the game) that it was fate. (I mean, we did get all that dialogue about Suzy and synchronicity or whatever.)

So, what about Determination itself then, what role does it play, and does it relate to Frisk and Chara’s Soul Trait at all? For one, I also wanted to mention that I always found it weird that being determined and being depressed could somehow coincide/coexist. Isn’t Frisk’s determination less indicative of depression, and rather more indicative of the fact that they are able to effectively push through their depression, if they do have it? Plus, the RESET power is supposed to be universal, so isn’t the feeling of being determined less indicative of anything specific about Frisk and more about the fact that they are the player right now? But then indeed, why does the narrator feel the need to remind them all the time, what do they know about determination and SAVING?

There is a theory out there that Chara themselves could save, load and reset. (It’s called the Chara reset hell theory if you’re interested. Too lazy to grab the link rn.) If true, it could explain why Chara is telling Frisk these things, and would make more sense than if they somehow correctly guessed that Frisk is feeling down or that Frisk told Chara that they are feeling down so early on.

So, do I think that Frisk is depressed? It’s certainly one way to interpret the canon, but it doesn’t affect anything else about the game, and as a theory, there’s not much specific evidence for it either, most of it could very well be indicative of other things, as I’ve shown.

What about Frisk then, and also the red trait? Due to how little we know about them, every single theory that people make up for them feels very cliche to me, and literally everything in UT could be interpreted as an allegory for Frisk’s backstory, including that damn quiche under the bench in Waterfall. What’s worse, some of the best theories (in the sense that they are the most self-explanatory) regarding their origin are usually posited by those who believe that Frisk is the player, that they are not human but a piece of code, which, as a head canon, is not my thing, and as a theory, is making me barf. I just don’t like it... no, I hate it, it’s very dehumanizing and I wish to make up something for them that makes sense, but without using “the meta” to do so.

However, there is a lot open space in regards to the red trait. Even if I don’t believe that Frisk is depressed, ergo they are feeling very determined (since as I said, the logic of it doesn’t seem completely sound to me), it could still be the case that the red trait is indicative of a depression, or perhaps, some other mind state that they happen to share with Chara.

(Not to mention that Flowey came back numerous times despite being suicidal, that Chara was suicidal yet hopeful and determined, which, if the reset theory is true, actually made their soul persist instead of initiating a reset, and that the 6 fallen humans all met the same fate instead of any of them beating Asgore and taking his soul. In other words, we know so little about how Determination actually relates to willpower that it’s almost useless to theorize about it. I for example think that all humans have a base level of determination which grants them certain basic powers, but that proaction, whatever the goal might be, might help them accomplish other things too, be it something positive, or in Chara’s case, something negative.)

We know the red trait could also be “being yourself”, so again, if soul traits are descriptive of something else, rather than being prescriptive and immutable themselves, then perhaps the red trait is indeed indicative of... whatever Frisk and Chara might have in common. On the other hand, if the trait is immutable, then perhaps it denotes an inclination/predisposition towards certain kinds of behavior, which however would go to erase Chara’s ill experiences on the surface, so I’m not sure about that, unless I find an alternative way of interpreting this take without effectively blaming Chara’s hardships on their own Soul.

Perhaps I will revisit this post sometime in the future, should I think of something else.

[traumatized-motherfuckers]

Friendship Dissolutions; A Lesson in Asshole Trauma Reactions

So this is normally my school day, but I’m feeling the need to dig into something else this morning. The past events of this weekend, annnnd the past nearly two years. Because, if you  hadn’t heard, relationships are hard and I like to embarrass myself by telling you about all my fuck ups.

You know, romantic relationships are a disaster for yours truly, but I always thought I was pretty good at the friendship thing. Since high school I’ve almost always had robust friendly relationships - both in depth and breadth. With the exception of a few difficult points in my life since 16, my phone has never been quiet, my weekends have only been isolating when I’ve been isolating myself, and I’ve always felt like I had humans on my side who were closer to kin than my actual family.

The thing is, there have been periods when this hasn’t been the case. I want to say that it’s generally when I’m in my worst mental health downfalls, but I don’t think that’s universally true. There have been variable reasons for separating myself from other people, or vice versa. Sometimes getting too busy, sometimes naturally growing apart, sometimes getting too obsessed with a romantic partner.

But, taking a more analytical view, underlying my lost friendship events, trauma has often been one of the influences that corrupted my friendships and left me lonely, even if it doesn’t seem like it at face value. The thing is, the trail of breadcrumbs might go back 20 years or so. I might not have been in a full-blown trauma state at the time, but those early life non-learnings about relationships have left their mark. So, yes, I do believe that CPTSD is the prerequisite for interpersonal disruptions and we’re not alone in that.

Anyways, in this Fucker’s life, for the past almost 2 years I’ve been in one of those friendship lulls. I’ve had casual friends, roommates, work-associates, distant relationships, some of those hey-how’s-it-going-every-two-months relations. But I haven’t had those deep, rich, all-encompassing friendships that used to define my existence. The ones that used to make me feel safe enough to have an existence, at all.

It’s all because I lost my core group of friends, I didn’t understand and couldn’t fix the problem, and I had no idea how to move forward.

And this last time when I lost everyone I loved, it was definitely due to trauma. Acute, historical, and recovering trauma, to be specific. It was a horrible period of my life, I was a human wrecking ball, and I had no emotional control… because, partially thanks to said friends, I never had to develop those skills.

Basically, I’ve been on my own since a whole series of mental health related isolation events and relationships dissolutions that have persisted since - I want to say 2019 - but to be more holistic, the ship started sailing earlier than that. Like, when I was born.

This has all come to mind more than usual because, this weekend? I had a strange rush of humans back into my life. For the first time in a long time, I saw my best, closest, most important old friends, who were closer to siblings…. In our natural habitat, with our normal friendship routines, with hundreds of memories from the past decade flying around the room.

And today… or, realistically, since I tried to go to sleep after seeing them each day this weekend… I have the relationship reckoning to deal with. The emotional and cognitive processing of everything that’s happened. The lost years. The sense of abandonment. The feeling of being cast out of a family. The inkling that everyone was talking about me. The realization that I was acting a fool, and maybe they should be talking about me. The sense that all parties were partially responsible, but I was the one to blame. The voice in my head that has called me a crazy, miserable, unlovable mess the entire time I debated this at 6am and 6pm and 3am for the past several years.

And now, in the aftermath, I have to work through the dynamic cocktail of feelings, the sense of waiting for the other shoe, and the big decision - are these relationships that I feel secure pursuing again?

And I don’t think I’m alone in this one.

So, today I thought it would be good to talk about this. The history of losing my favorite people on the planet, how I perceived it at the time, how I see my own trauma-actions fucking shit up in hindsight, how I’ve forgiven myself for being such a wild one, and… well… my hesitancy to have close friendships with humans who hurt me in the past. The ways I realized that being separate was beneficial to my mental health and life progress. The self-sabotaging enablement patterns that I now recognize, ran deep, in our old group of friends. The fear that being around them again will let my trauma brain run away with me.

Woo - it’s a whole personal relationship reckoning over here. Let’s just do this, so I can get to my school work at some point soon.

History

So let me set up this situation. You need the background details, of which, there are many dramatic twists and turns.

Be me, Spring of 2019. My romantic relationship with my ex in Atlanta - the musical narcissist that I followed to the city - is going terribly. Since we moved things have been rocky, but now our relationship has been pumped full of disappointment, unfair expectations, emotional codependency, resentment, horrific fighting, and abuse of all colors. Every day is a battle. We’re rarely ever “happy” together. We’re closer to enemies than friends. And we live under the same roof - the one his parents bought for him, outright in cash - to make matters even more fun.

Other than him, I’m alone in this city. I work at the brewery, where no one really likes me. I have one friend from work, but little time to interact thanks to the demanding schedule of my ex with his gigs and out-of-state child visitation.

Financially, my savings have been depleted by floating my significant other’s horrible decisions for the past 2 years. We can never get ahead. He never pays me back for anything. I’m basically in his pocket, as far as needing resources to survive.

As you can imagine, and as I’ve described previously, my mental health is in THE SHITTER. Maybe worse than it’s ever been, although this is hard to judge against some of my earlier years in my 20’s. I’m definitely ramped up in an aggressive and defensive trauma state more than ever before, thanks to living with my aggressor every day. I feel like I’m surviving against the will of my partner, who seems to legitimately be doing his best to drive me into an early grave every single time the sun rises. He’s moved into the territory of intentionally triggering me for hours on end, upsetting me to the point of mental breakdowns, and then gaslighting me for “acting so crazy.” Things have become dangerous, I have no one to turn to, and no cash to get myself into a better situation… not that I know what a better situation even looks like.

But one day, I left. Packed my two bags, went to work, wound up at that single sort-of-friend’s house, never went back home.

And that’s when the real nightmare started. I mean, my ex was a terror over time as we lived together, but a narcissist scorned is a narcissist determined to ruin your fucking life. He harassed me daily via text, phone call, FB messenger, email, stalkings… whatever you can think of. When I blocked him on everything, he started trying to leverage our therapists against me until they refused to interact anymore. He wouldn’t let me into his house to get my stuff. He tried to have me arrested for attempting to do so, after he made arrangements with me to move that weekend. He suddenly refused to even acknowledge that he owed me a dime, and found a way to tally up venmo transactions to show that I actually owed him. He took my only support - our dog, who was really my dog - away and wouldn’t let me see him. Later, he reported my car stolen, so I had to purchase a new one without warning.

The list goes on and on. Just, assume every pathetic, cruel, desperate attempt at getting under someone’s skin and reminding them that they had the audacity to leave you. That’s what was going on in my world.

Meanwhile, with those financial and social pressures I mentioned earlier. No close friends in the area, no spare cash, an unstable job where I was on the chopping block for the reason of “the CEO didn’t like my personality,” nowhere to live, no idea where to go next or how to start a whole new life.

Annnnnd this is right about when my closely knit friend group back in Illinois sort of, well, dipped.

My bestest, best, most treasured friend in my lifetime had always been there for me. But now, she wasn’t. We had exchanged a handful of phone calls over the past month in the aftermath of this relationship ending, but she had been pretty detached from it. I wasn’t offended, because she had certainly heard enough of the drama in real time… of course she was tired of hearing about it...  but I was feeling especially alone and incapable of handling everything on my own, so the distance was difficult, nevertheless. Then, one day she told me that I was being too much for her. I had too high of expectations. It had been bothering her for a while. She needed me to understand and give her some space.

And this was the completely avoidable beginning of the end of my friendships. Let’s talk about why.

How I perceived it

So, I’m pretty sure you can guess how I took this challenging message from my best friend. Uh, poorly. I was so shocked that in my darkest hour, my comrade would feel like my problems were out of her paygrade. It felt like a stab to the heart and straight down through the gut. Here I was, completely alone and isolated, reaching back to my most trusted companions for a lifeline to keep my head above water, and… nothing. She didn’t want to reel me back into the boat.

I responded with some shitty messages about how I really wasn’t asking that much from her and I didn’t appreciate being blindsided by her sudden decision to get rid of me. I had only taken up a few phone calls to talk things through based on her schedule. I had visited her one weekend as I went to a job interview nearby. I had asked her to come visit me soon, so I could feel less alone for a few days. I didn’t think it was fair that she was responding this way. I couldn’t believe she would turn her back on me at this particular moment.

And so, the rift developed. We stopped speaking. I started sobbing. I was absolutely beside myself, as if I hadn’t already been. This wasn’t what I wanted, at all, but I also felt like I had no control in it.

.......

Like it? Well I’m too lazy to post the whole thing here. Check t-mfrs.com for the full blog AND the podcast recorded version. Yawelcome. 

www.t-mfrs.com 

(Traumatized Motherfuckers)

[coldcolourchords]

Turning 21 - an unwanted landmark

It happened an hour and 20 minutes ago, as the clock hit midnight CEST and the date changed so seamlessly to the 12th, without any hesitation, uneventfully and in complete silence, just as expected. The day I've been negatively anticipating for the better half of the past one year has come, and it caught me sitting at my computer alone in the living room, drinking hot tea on a summer night in a sweater and doing my silly little tasks that I call "work" (because despite my best efforts, middle of the night is still the only time of the day I can function as intended).

I remember ever since I was a child I always used to start mentally preparing myself for my birthday from New Year's Day. Even my mother used to say, "now that it's 2010, you're already 10 to me", even though August was still nowhere to be seen. But that felt good at the time. The beginning of a new year and my birthday approaching meant hope and progress, as the only thing I wanted as a child and as a teen was to grow up and not have to be a child anymore. I didn't like going to school, I didn't like being told to do things, I didn't like not being taken seriously, as I'm sure no one does. But by "didn't like", I mean it caused me severe emotional distress, the stuff that happened to me every single day without my control. It's hard to tell now in retrospect what caused what, but I have memories of developing my two most prominent and persistent mental disorders at around 6 years old (social anxiety and a BFRB) which have isolated me and often subjected me to cooler kids poking fun at me, shortly followed by starting school in the middle of my parent's divorce and moving houses. One of our last dinners in my father's comforting family home at the dinner table, I remember being visibly sad and my mum asking me what was wrong. My slightly belated answer ("everything") did not quite get the desired reception, as she and my little brother went on to have a little giggle over making assumptions about what that must include ("I'm sure she's sad over dinosaurs going extinct too..."). And, from then on, it's pretty much been downhill. I didn't like being home and I didn't like being at school (or at any of the million extracurricular activities my mum had picked out for me falsely thinking they could stop me from hurting myself and not just accelerate it). The ever-present social anxiety, bottled up frustration, high academic expectations and confusion about the nature of my very own self-destructive behaviours did not make for an enjoyable time in any of my 12 years at school. So, obviously, all I could do was anticipate the end. The end of being vulnerable to the very systems that were meant to nurture me and protect me.

I think that was my way of thinking all the way until I turned 19. Two years ago. At 19, I had graduated high school, I was about to start university studying something I was interested in, I had a semi-stable student job I liked and I was ready to move in with my boyfriend (a former classmate), separate from our parents. I had an artistic goal that I was ready to work for in my free time, and living away from home I was finally going to get the capacity to do so as well. And then when all of this happened and my thoughts became occupied with the new kind of responsibilities that came with "adulting", I started getting this overwhelming feeling of "what now?". A couple months have passed in the blink of an eye, it was November and I wasn't happy. I was making virtually no progress on my creative goals, my flat was a smelly mess, I didn't see my friends and I wasn't making new ones, and I found university to be draining and incompatible with my brain. I wasn't enjoying anything. I thought, "is this how I'm going to have to spend another 3 years?".

And then a miracle happened. I had to give a presentation at uni with a couple of other girls, and one of them suggested a book to do it based on. Reading my part of the book to prepare for the presentation has unlocked something in me - it was a book about the way people manage to feel like hostages due to their own decisions and thoughts. First it hurt to read because I had to face the truth: I wasn't really a hostage of expectations, university or responsibilities, I was a hostage of myself and my own attitude. I even wrote a song about this (my ultimate way of being honest with myself), and that's when I've felt ready to start working on myself in order to take back control over my life. And hell, I have done it. In a couple of weeks, I was feeling the best I've ever felt and I went into exam season thinking I was capable of the impossible at this point. Who knew I had it in me? I had gotten through a couple of exams and assignments and I was thinking soon I was going to start improving in other areas of my life as well. I was going to make art, see my friends again, go out, have fun, maybe learn to cook and be a better girlfriend too. Not a lot of that has happened. Came the end of exams and the second half of January and I was already exhausted. My job was at a halt and uni wasn't back on until mid February, so I spent a few shallow weeks at home just thinking "why am I doing this again?". It was difficult, suddenly having too much space for negative thoughts and rumination.

But it was only the start of the pandemic when my race with time has really begun. Which is ironic, because when the restrictions were first announced in my country, I really saw a lot of opportunity in them to grow for myself (and I mean this is in the least "this deadly virus is a blessing in disguise" way possible). University moving online and social gatherings being nothing short of illegal all of a sudden felt more than convenient for my social (but very luckily not health) anxiety ridden brain, and I had imagined this was going to be the most prosperous phase in my life, in terms of moving forward with my goals.

Ever since I was little, I had dreamed of becoming a musical artist. No one ever encouraged me - maybe for a good reason - and I tried to keep quiet about it as well. I was so ashamed of desiring something that was so "unlike me" according to everyone who knew me. I never had a good voice and everyone perceived me as shy, on top of being seen as more of a "STEM girl" (until I went to high school for maths and ended up not understanding any of it anymore). I'd been writing lyrics into my phone since 14 and attempting to turn them into actual songs on my laptop since 17. At 18, I even took a beginner's course in Ableton. Still, I just never felt like anything I wrote was of any worth or that I had a single ounce of talent in any part of the process. But I kept on dreaming and pushing because I thought "if I don't try, how will I know?". My work ethic was awful too, I was an inconsistent writer and an even more inconsistent producer. I never got anything finished because I got lost in the details and gave up due to my perfectionism. Plus, and this is what I perceived to be the biggest problem at the time, I could only record music at home, and my family were home all the time. Moving out, I thought I was going to prosper, then I didn't prosper for a bit, told myself it was okay because uni was making me depressed, then I continued to not prosper, told myself it was okay because I had to rest up after exams. And then it's like the universe said "Stop. You're just making excuses. Stay home and produce those songs now because there will NOT be another opportunity like this".

I put so much pressure on myself then to get stuff done. It felt like my time - all my adolescence I was looking at teenage popstars rising to fame and each year they were just getting younger and all I did was compare myself to them and worry. Worry that I was running late, that no one was going to ever care about me because I am late, but growing up I excused it every time. I was home with my family and stressed because of school all the time, duh, how could I have made good art? But right there, at the beginning of "quarantining", it was just me and my willpower. No school, no job, no impromptu social plans. And who knew how long it was going to last? Some people said only four weeks, some others said months, some the rest of the year. All I knew was I was 19, still young and practically a teenager, and I had to act. And I did. I made two of the worst songs you've heard in your life and I put them both out in the summer under my own name. Like proper released them on streaming services and all. Looking back now, holy hell, how desperate was I, posting it on my social media that people I actually knew followed? With my fear of being ridiculed? I was setting myself up for an emotional disaster. Shock horror: my songs didn't blow up (although I have had a few friends say lovely things about them, at least to me). By the time of scheduling the second one for release (mid July) I was already feeling burnt out. Yes, there was another exam season in the meantime, and the unexpectedness of the elongated pandemic has definitely been a factor as well, but generally I was just so let down by the overall underwhelming experience. I made such bad decisions - why my own full name? Why did I have to let people know and thereby handicap myself? Of course I wasn't going to promote my songs now or even speak of them positively because I feared coming off ridiculous. So I just let the whole thing pass without a sound and made myself sad. By last August, I was back to "what now?".

Needless to say, there were no festivals last summer. Festivals used to be my ultimate summer happy place and I always celebrated my birthday at a specific one (the biggest one in my city to be exact) starting with the 15th. Concerts and festivals were somehow simultaneously an adventurous escape from all my worries and the root of a lot of my confidence issues and anxiety. I dreamed of being on stage and presenting my art to the world, pouring my heart out to even just one person who will listen, the same way that I listen to my favourite artists and what they have to say. Some nights were emotional, some nights were energising, some nights were spent worrying about the people who surrounded me and some nights were just pure jealousy and feeling far away from my goals - you never knew what you were going to get at a gig. I think that overall most gigs were bittersweet experiences for me, but that's how I liked them to be. The whole point was just to feel something. But there were no festivals last year. There were concerts, though, put on by local bands, but lord do I wish there hadn't been any. I went to two of those last summer - one I went to alone and walked away feeling like shit, another I went to with my friends and felt extremely guilty and anxious about the virus after. This second one happened to be two days before my 20th birthday. I spent my birthday worried to death that I got the virus (even though numbers were extremely low at the time in my country and going to small gigs was perfectly legal and deemed not dangerous) and that I was going to infect my elderly relatives who I was going to meet with later. That didn't happen, but I haven't been to a single show since then, and it's been a year. So that's how my first non-festival birthday worked out.

Turning 20 didn't feel good and my birthday aligned with the onset of a bunch of new problems as well as old ones accelerated. I began to think deeply about everything. What was the point of anything I was doing? Was any of it going to get me anywhere? Was any of it causing me joy, even? I didn't know what to do about my musical efforts - should I keep trying to put out songs or admit defeat? I still had that creative drive in me and I worried so much about my role in the world - "I'm not a good friend, not a good girlfriend and not a good daughter, and I certainly will never become a good psychologist directly helping people with their problems. I need to give something to the world - I need to find a purpose". I didn't do stuff because I was anxious, and then I was anxious because I didn't do stuff. But I think at that point I also realised I didn't only want to succeed and produce. I also wanted to live. Having fun was missing from my life too. I rarely saw or talked to friends and my relationship wasn't going well either. Every day I tortured myself looking at other people live their lives on social media and thinking to myself I wanted what they had. I wanted to be someone. I wanted to create, to connect and to matter, but all of these things have only ever caused me anxiety in my life and I didn't know where to go from there.

With the virus getting worse again and the start of another online semester, there was one silver lining to locking myself in again though. During the pandemic, I have been playing a lot of video games, possibly even more than before. They weren't only a nice way to numb my brain and relax - no, the opposite, they were actively giving me a temporary sense of direction and progress with each gaming session. I have always loved The Sims for this reason, I had spent so many years building and perfecting my little worlds to my liking and practicing full control over my characters' lives, but this time I began to feel like it was something bigger. I discovered the Sims side of the internet, something I had not really done before, and the amount of content, help, info and Sims-related entertainment has blown me away. Whole new levels of playing have been unlocked for me and I began to dive deeper than ever. I wanted to be part of the community, so in the autumn I started streaming the game on Twitch and this time I knew better than to tell anyone I already knew about it. That didn't quite turn out as I expected, and my streamer phase was cut short in January by someone I knew from high school accidentally finding my stream. Before that, I would only get moderately anxious before streams, not worried much about what viewers were going to think of me (if they find me annoying they'll just leave and I'll never have to hear from them again), but then that unexpected turn of events ruined everything in my head. All my confidence I had built up was suddenly gone. I never streamed again after that. It wasn't really for me anyway, I told myself.

Instead, insistent on further pursuing the only thing that was giving me joy at the time, I started my YouTube channel initially uploading Sims tutorials, because I thought I had useful stuff to show people that has a greater chance of making someone happy than just watching me try to put together a sentence for 5 minutes straight while my Sims struggle to get in the shower by themselves. And much to my surprise, it was gaining decent traction, although I put a lot of it down to luck even today. But either way, it's been growing more or less consistently ever since, and beginning of the summer I stopped to think "could I not just be doing this for a living now?". "Could this be my new creative ambition?". As much as I would have liked to say yes based on my progress and how I managed to earn the same amount I would have earned in a month at my part-time retail job (we're talking Eastern European sums kids!), it wasn't that simple. Thoughts around this have of course been puzzling me for months now. I like to think of myself as a natural talker, just because I am anxious I am NOT quiet or shy. I can even make small talk very well, it's just that because I'm mortified by the possibility of an awkward silence I tend to avoid situations where it might be required. And I talk to myself all the time. So on paper, talking to a camera should not be an issue. And yet every time I record a video I feel my soul being sucked out of my body because I need to make sure I say every sentence correctly and that ends up in draining 4 hour recording sessions. Editing videos, on the other hand, is a rewarding process, a kind of flow-experience I have not really known before, though extremely long and usually detrimental to my sleep schedule (which is far from being rosy by default). Maybe I just put too much effort into everything, but it really makes you question - is it worth it? Can I really be doing this on the long run without destroying myself? And will I ever get used to the social interactions that come with it?

It's weird, suddenly getting recognition for something, people giving me positive feedback on the daily. This certainly happened more suddenly than I thought it would and I don't think I was prepared. Naturally, people taking the effort to leave me nice comments and messages makes me want to reply, appreciate their kindness and return the favour but the trinity of little demons inside me - social anxiety, impostor syndrome and a chronically low self-esteem - makes this a difficult task to complete. To combat the overwhelming weight of responsibility that comes with making sure I appreciate everyone who appreciates me enough, as well as to shut out the fear that what I have now can be taken away from me any second, I have built up a mental wall between me and my relative success. This wasn't a conscious choice, it's just the way my brain has started dealing with this new situation. I do not allow myself to internalise the rewards of what I work so hard for and that contributes to why, when I look back on 2021 so far, all I see is depression despite having "gotten what I wanted". My YouTube channel has been the only thing bringing hope and the only thing I've got going for me and yet I am incapable of embracing it.

The past one year has been enlightening. It has enlightened me that there must be something deeply wrong with me because I have not been able to enjoy life even at times I had all the reasons to. The times I am capable of letting go and feeling happy for short periods come exactly based on that - short periods. I'm drifting into states of bliss only when I know the situation is temporary and doesn't come with commitment and responsibility. Some of these moments of calmness come to me while walking to the store by myself after dark, getting invested in my video games, meeting up with my friends for an evening every once in a while and writing a therapeutic song just for myself using the simplest chords on the piano. The feeling usually doesn't last and disappears at the first attempt to get back to any kind of organised schedule (that attempt on most days is the simple act of trying to force myself to go to bed). Isn't that ironic? I wanted purpose. I wanted to get it together. And yet... every day is a struggle. I know now, I am the problem. Whether it's a chemical imbalance or another anomaly in my brain or my own fault somehow, it's not my circumstances, it's me. I wanted to be free and to make my life my own, and now I just can't. Every day I worry about running out of time, rapidly approaching death and not being able to say that I have lived. This is why turning 21 fills me with so much panic. I am no longer a child and I'll never be again, although I wouldn't even like to be. I just can't help thinking that I wasted so many opportunities to enjoy myself and to push for my goals. But it's gone now and there's no point regretting how I used to think about life back then. If I look back on my life so far I see a lot of stuff that happened that made half of my brain temporarily happy, but the other half was always filled with anxiety, anticipation to get out or dissatisfaction. It was just never fully right and I keep hoping that there will come a time when it will feel fully right. Before turning 19, I thought independence was going to give me that. Now at 21, I'm not quite sure there's anything that's going to give me that if I don't also start to work through every single one of my issues (although part of me still likes to cling onto the idea that once I'm done with my first and last degree, a lot of underlying stress and guilt will be taken off my shoulders and I'll see everything in a different light). So for a start, I just finally signed up for psychological counselling. I don't know if it will help but it's something and I've done it for myself. I need to do more for myself.

There is so much more I could talk about. Like the pandemic, how I've turned into a hermit, my relationship, struggling to be honest with myself and slowly losing touch with my all time number one passion because of it. I could talk about how I know that society has been deliberately making us (especially women) feel scared of aging and yet I still file it under personal issues, how I've been trying to fix my sleep schedule for a year and a half straight now, the guilt I feel from my family and friends all the time, my inability to concentrate and how I fall into despair concerning the future and present of humanity every time I read the news and people's opinions on social media. I could talk about how I want to cry every time I see a picture of somewhere beautiful in the world - a street in Japan, a lake in the Alps or the trees in the Mediterranean - because I feel a longing that is almost nostalgic for places I've never even visited. There is always so much to still be told to complete the story, but why do I want people I'll never fully know to understand me that well? I need to let go of compulsions like these.

Deep down I just hope that I'm not the only one terrified of growing old.

[since-it-must-be-so]

A Wild Sheep Chase: Chapter 2 of Choujin X!

It's here! I've gushed about the chapter over at my Twitter, but like I said in my previous post, I want to see how the story progresses and keep a log about it. So here it goes!

Background info on Ely Otsuta

So before we delve into Chapter 2 which almost exclusively featured Ely... Let's take note of the new things we learned about Ely:

She's from a rural prefecture. I think she lives in the mountainside specifically since that's where she grows her tomatoes.

She's a greenthumb (we already kinda knew this from the previous chapter but we learn more about her life pre-Choujin X). I understand that even if the soil is infertile, she's able to grow tomatoes so nutritious and plump. So plump, they resemble butts, hence, "bumbums!" It appears she uses advanced equipment for her farming stuff. So yeah, based on these, it's established Ely has a green thumb!

Oh, and it appears that it's clarified that her "Grandpapi" whom she talks about in the 1st chapter is an adoptive grandfather (not biological, hence, maybe in the future we'd know her parents and learn why Ely is special).

It's just me but I get the impression that Ely is being introduced as some sort of "fertility" choujin, since she also dreams of having 9 kids. Haha!

It's kinda weird though why the burning tomato has a face. Was it just from her dream, since after plucking a bumbum - she woke up? Hmm, after some thought, I think the burning tomato with a face is just from her dream.

Ely Wakes Up from Reality

When Ely woke up, she finds herself in the South Yamato prefecture. Okay, so I think this leaning tower of some sort has a significance to the story.

It's featured in every spread with the title "Choujin X" and also in the last chapter. Can you see it? Maybe it has something to do with how the powers are made, like pollution-related or a botched experiment. Dunno. Just my wild speculation.

A Wild Sheep Chase

This is the exciting part. So when Ely wakes up, Chandra Hume offers to "escort" her, but really it appears he wants to kidnap her. And from, *checks the manga* page 10 to 40, we have Ely running away from Chandra until she fell in what looks like a similar area where Tokio and Azuma fought Johnny Kiyoshi Takeyama.

The chase sequence consisting of 30 pages were so fun and I was smiling all the while I was reading! Ely is so cute trying to parkour her way through the buildings (kinda reminds me of Touka?? I miss Touka!). Chandra looks really cool, he seemed to be flying too, using his powers (more on that later)!

But not to be outdone, Ely borrows a "Roller Boy Yay-Yay" which basically is a scooter with something that resembles a driver's wheel. Its literal translation of ローラーBOYイェイ・イェイ -- which, checking Twitter and in Ishida's latest live stream, I think the locals found it hilarious too. Ishida is just unleashing his crazy here, I love it!

After that sequence, we get the tractor and sheep chase. Ah! I love it.. So what happened is that, Chandra and Ely fall off from their Roller Boy Yay-Yay. Ely who just claimed she can outrun Chandra if she were riding a tractor, suddenly found one right in front of her! Then Chandra lands near a gang... or should I say, a flock of sheep-bikers. They're all wearing these Kanji-printed tracksuits and basically look like they're a bunch of delinquents? They even describe themselves as "cryptid bikers"... Cryptid supposedly means mysterious? Idk why the weird choice of words for the translation though.

Funnily, I was just reading Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase (羊をめぐる冒険 --- Hitsuji o meguru bōken or literally An Adventure Surrounding Sheep). I wonder if this scene something to do with this book?

Anyway, Chandra entices the sheep to help hip capture Ely by bribing them with a Docomo flip phone. I don't know why a flip phone - could mean the following: (a) the sheep are so poor, a flip phone is cool; (b) maybe flip phones are a status symbol in that universe; (c) maybe the setting is in the 2000s when the flip phones really were all the rage.

So they all chase Ely, but Chandra suddenly has a car too. Someone on Twitter said it's a Porsche? But I can't tell, though Chandra said his car is a four-wheel drive... Heh? Idk what to do with this info.

As for Ely, she is really good with the tractor as she said. The hilarity of outrunning motorcycles and what could be a Porsche. That tractor prowess! Later on, Chandra and the other sheep figure into an accident with a "safety-loving" truck (oh the irony, lol). Chandra flew off the car and so did his fancy shoes...

Ely didn't exactly come out unscathed. Ishida allocated 4 double spreads for this epic fall. Some of the sheep definitely should have died from that spectacular accident.

At first, Ely was smug about escaping the sheep. But then, I think she was moved by compassion and I think she hurt herself in order to revive the sheep. I just wonder though, how she learned to do that?

Then we get another awesome double spread of her transformation, similar to Tokio's. Augh Ishida-sensei. These are soooo good!!!!

Because of her transformation, the whole area was engulfed with smoked and I think the sheep were effectively revived. It appears Chandra saw all this (while he was regenerating... so we now know choujins or at least smoke choujins like Chandra has regenerative powers), hence he marveled at Ely's newfound power. It was kinda confirmed that Ely was responsible for keeping the casualties to a minimum. Specifically he said Ely possesses: quick judgment, though resolve, persistence... making her a human with the makings of a choujin... while also kinda noting Ely's silliness.

Here we go again with Chandra's "fancy gentleman" facade... Even the way he talks is fancy ("I am well-acquainted with the roads here") but more than that... he's self-important. I talked about my other views on his character on Reddit. I get the impression he's something of a "Choujin supremacist", you know what I mean? So, he wants to kinda recruit Ely into his organization or whatever.

Ely is righteous

So we see that Ely is further introduced as a good character, standing up against Chandra and rejecting his offer to be his pupil or something. Ely was clearly upset about the grandma getting hurt (did she die? I hope she didn't) and made it clear she would never join him. Chandra takes offense at this rejection, especially when Ely said Chandra is worse than a turd.

As Chandra tries to inflict pain on Ely (something about marking her on the face), she recalls her resolve from Chapter 1: drones for farming, a greenhouse, her grandpappy, a mansion, the big dog, paying back the kid for his roller boy yay-yay, the Goldilocks hubbie, nine kids... But just before we can see if she can fight Chandra off...

The most handsome man of all Sui Ishida's works (haha!)

This buff mysterious man with a bandana reminiscent of the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles seemed to have blown Chandra and Ely (also the cars and motorcycles) away by a mere clap of his hands. It appears even Chandra is afraid of this guy and recognizes him... he leaves the scene using his smoke powers before the guy can do serious damage. I think his power has something to do with wind since there was like a little hint with all the ventilation stuff in the setting.

The guy manages to create a circle of protection around Ely. He tells Ely that Chandra's modus is to target "people with aptitude like Ely". He helpfully mends Ely's punctured hand with his bandana.... And when Ely looks up at his face, what do you know? Haha!

Our girl Ely has a love interest! Haha.

Tokio's Gregor Samsa moment

I've observed from the manga I've read that characters with transformation abilities always, always go through this adjustment period with the power. Gregor Samsa, Peter Parker, our boy Kaneki... Anyway, it seems Tokio doesn't know or can't turn back into a normal-looking person. But the last panel sure is interesting because we have them experiencing this transformation at the same time. Also, since it reminds me of Touka and Ayato's volume cover. I hope they find each other soon though!

Types of Choujins and initial premises on the Power of Choujins

So there are 3 confirmed types so far: Flexi (Johnny), Bestial (our boy Tokio), and Smoke. It seems that pretty boy Hoshi doesn't have a category yet, but like I said I think his has something to do with air or ventilation lol.

We learned that Chandra is a Smoke Choujin, and Ely is now one too and she was may have been somehow infected by Chandra's smoke/fumes. It appears now that there are 2 ways to become a choujin: injection and inhalation. Chandra wonders if Ely was infected with his power... But I'm thinking the infection theory might not be that accurate. After all, it seems Ely has a green thumb.

But, I think as Chandra said, only some people have an aptitude for this. So, Ely and Tokio are examples. I wonder if Azuma also has choujin powers or did it not manifest yet? Is the aptitude inherent or something you can acquire? If so, what does Tokio have that Azuma doesn't, especially since everyone thinks Azuma is "better" than Tokio in all aspects?

We'll find out in Chapter 3 more or less!! I'm sorry for any grammar mistakes! I'd like to hear your thoughts or comments if any :)

[libermachinae]

Tags: Teen and Up Audiences, Major Character Death, M/M, Transformers - All Media Types, Transformers: Prime, Dreadwing/Optimus Prime, Optimus Prime, Dreadwing (Transformers), Skyquake (Transformers), Post-Predacons Rising (Prime Movie), Canonical Character Death, dead characters meeting in the afterlife, Mutual Pining, Enemies to Lovers, speed version, First Kiss, DreadOP Day Word Count: 3148 Summary:  Deep in the Well, Optimus runs into a familiar face. Twice over, in fact. Notes: DreadOP Day, you say? 👀 No way I wasn’t going to put something together for this.

---

Heat.

Like the friction experienced by a meteor hurtling down, destined to expire, Optimus flew into the light at the center of his world and felt welcome.

His Autobots had stood under many foreign stars and held under lights curious, interrogative, and revealing, but he knew none would ever hold such presence or penetrate so deeply as the one they all emerged from. It sunk into the seams between plating, prying and leveraging until the gaps yawned and with a click, the excess plating fell away.

And he was a protoform again: delicate mesh and wires and struts exposed to the impossible light. It was in him, sinking between the atoms of his body until they shivered and shook, dancing away from each other. Metal melted, edges dulling and structures collapsing, and drop by drop Optimus felt it all fall away, one billion beads sprinkling away like shards of glass in a night sky.

There was no pain. Not here. Optimus stepped out of his body while it was still partially solid and let all of it fall away, into an abyss he could not see against the light.

And from there he had no way to tell which direction was which, or if he was still moving. All he knew was light, to such an extent that it took him another moment to realize he was seeing it, that even without a body the world around him persisted. He pressed in on himself, felt it out. He considered his name. Time passed, as he explored the boundless confines of his new existence, and he considered for a time whether he might try to close his eyes, or let the light pull him micron by micron into eternity.

As it turned out, he did not need to worry so much about his choice. Time finished passing (which, if he recalled correctly, was not in the nature of the thing, and yet) and he saw a point, what he could only describe as a single unit of contrast against the light. Its darkness grounded him, reminding him who he was and where he had come from (though not for how long he had been away) and he endeavored to draw himself to it by mechanisms it did not occur to him to consider closely.

It was a point, then a spot, then a dot. It developed variation in its tone, darker splotches on the bottom that developed into shadows, its squirming edges sharpening into corners. It took on dimensions, stretched, vertical expanding while the horizontal stayed squashed. Lighter grey tones highlighted the darker: reflections, though he could not tell their source, when every particle between here and there blasted the same white light.

Still, somehow, shadows slid and clipped together, and forming the façade of a simple Cybertronian house. Minimal decorations outside and the windows were closed, but still it had the appearance of a place lived in: a couple of oil cans sat on the front porch, behind two steps that led down to empty, and in one of the upper windows he thought he saw the shine of aged crystal growths. There was also noise coming from inside, voices too dulled to understand.

Directly in front of the building now, he could not see either side and so did not know how far back it extended. He had the impression, though, it was a comfortable size. Only as big as the space its occupants needed, no room for unwanted excess.

His momentum carried him the rest of the way, until he could place his pede on the first step and walk up to the door on his own. He did not need to send a ping, which was a lucky thing, since his comm suite had fallen away with the rest of his processor. The door slid open for him, and he stepped inside.

The gray shading of the exterior persisted inside, clear shadows that built around him the image of a home almost like what one would have found on Cybertron before the war. The metal walls were painted with a matte finish, the seams between them cut with delicate patterns of straight lines and right angles. Like the door, the entry way was large enough to accommodate him twice over, a feature of lower caste residences, but he could feel the hum of complicated circuitry throughout the foundation, optimization the caliber of which only the upper caste could have afforded.

“Optimus!” He startled at the noise. “Stop staring at my walls and come in.”

He stepped walked down the main hallway and turned at the first open door. Within was a sitting room, a couch on one end with a table and chairs closer. Two identical figures sat there, a cube of energon in front of each of them with a third before an empty chair.

“Well?” Dreadwing asked. Skyquake said nothing but stared at the intruder.

“Am I welcome?” He did not know what this place was or what it meant for him to have found himself here, but it clearly belonged to Dreadwing and Skyquake both. He had no wish to insert himself somewhere he did not belong.

“My brother has been waiting for you,” Skyquake said. “It seems that somehow, in the months I missed, you managed to gain his respect.”

Optimus glanced at Dreadwing.

“I would be honored if that were so,” he said.

Dreadwing’s lips twitched and his helm tilted to the empty chair. So much of the way they had spoken to each other in life had been based on the unspoken, it was no surprise it would continue here, where they were stripped to their purest elements.

Optimus stepped inside and took the seat. Sitting here, he faced the windows, but even through the cracks in the shade none of that overwhelming light came through. In here, it was peaceful, comfortable, like it had been designed with the intention that they might stay here for some time.

Dreadwing raised his cube to his mouth.

“How did it happen?” he asked around the rim.

“I sacrificed myself,” Optimus said. “The Allspark was at risk, so I drew it into my own frame and returned it to its rightful place.”

“Then the Well is back online?” Skyquake asked.

“Yes. Cybertron will awaken to new life once more.” He smiled, imagining new beings waking up, drawing themselves to the surface of a world that was theirs to build upon. He wished he could have been there to see it, but with his Autobots to guide them, he knew the next generation would be well looked after.

“And the war?” Dreadwing asked.

“Megatron followed your path, actually,” Optimus said, turning to his former assassin. “He renounced the cause and turned his back on his army. He will not be back.”

But Dreadwing’s lips curled down, and he set the energon back on the table with force. It seemed he had drunk none.

“Do not compare me to Megatron,” Dreadwing said. “He made a mockery of a cause we dedicated our lives to fighting for. I betrayed the Decepticons because to continue supporting them would have gone against my beliefs. If he simply left, then the Decepticons remain a flawed entity, and there is no honor in abandoning something one has the power to change.”

Optimus listened and nodded along.

“I will refrain, if that is what you prefer,” he said. “But if the Decepticons are as far gone as you say, are you sure it is still possible for anyone to change them from within?”

“Megatron could,” Skyquake said. “If any force in the universe were powerful enough, it would be him.”

And Optimus found he could not argue with that, so he nodded and attempted to take a sip of the energon he had been given. It tasted like energon, and he felt the impression of it moving down his intake, but the cube itself did not seem to drain. No matter how long he drank, it seemed to stay at the same level.

So curious he was about the phenomenon that he did not realize how long his silence had passed before he heard snickering. He lowered the cube and looked around: both twins were laughing at him.

“This place operates on its own rules,” Dreadwing explained. “Too many to bother explaining in detail. You will find discrepancies and you will adapt, and eventually it will become as natural as life once was.”

“So, this is death?” Optimus confirmed.

Dreadwing tilted his helm, first to one side, then the other.

“Something like it,” he said. “You will find the specifics don’t matter so much. We are here.”

“And occasionally we are not,” Skyquake said, rising from his seat. His cube, also full, remained on the table.

“You’re leaving?” Optimus asked.

“Stepping out,” Skyquake corrected. “My brother has been looking forward to your arrival.” He grinned, and Optimus turned to catch Dreadwing’s reaction. Too late: his expression had already shifted back to annoyed-neutral.

“I suppose so,” Optimus said. “Your revenge has been achieved, after all. though unfortunately not by your hand.” It was easier than he might have expected to make light of his own demise, or the effort both these mechs had expended to hasten him toward it. Perhaps such things dimply did not matter so much, here on the other side of the Well.

“You think my mission was for revenge?” Dreadwing asked, leaning forward on the table. “For what? Skyquake’s death was just another in a long line of our being separated by Cybertronians who thought themselves worthy of making such decisions. It was a question of honor, Optimus: Skyquake was denied an honorable death, and as his kin it was my responsibility to secure that honor in his name.” He traced patterns on the table as he spoke, like he was drawing the concept of honor and the way it could be passed around like energon siphoned between lines.

“In my estimation, you did,” he said. He glanced at Skyquake. “If you are unsatisfied, though, I would be willing to duel again.”

“Perhaps,” Skyquake said. “If Dreadwing decides you are worthy enough to stay.” He gave them a short bow, then ducked away, disappearing into the same hall Optimus had entered from. He heard a door activate elsewhere and was not sure whether it was to the exterior of the house. It didn’t seem there was anywhere to go out there, but then, he still had a great deal to learn about this place.

He turned back to his remaining host.

“He seemed to imply that I’m being tested,” he pointed out.

“Somewhat,” Dreadwing said, leaning back in his chair. Optimus didn’t think he had ever seen the Decepticon lieutenant comfortable before.

“What is your determination so far?” Optimus asked.

The corners of Dreadwing’s lips pulled up. A grin wasn’t the right work for it, nor a smirk; it was the attempt of a mech who had never tried to form a single cordial relationship in his life to look friendly.

“You are entirely too optimistic, Optimus,” he said. “Don’t you remember the last time we spoke?”

“You handed over the Omega Keys and offered us an opportunity to revive Cybertron under Autobot control,” Optimus said. He could never forget it: the memory often replayed in the last few moments before he fell into recharge.

“I also refused to join your cause or leave my own,” Dreadwing pointed out. “We were enemies for most of our lives, Optimus.”

“And now all those matters rest in our past,” Optimus said. He gestured to the window, though he had no idea which direction the living world lay in. “Cybertron lives again, headed toward a peace founded on the same ideals you fought for. We may not be able to witness it, but we can know that all of our actions, battles fought and sacrifices made, were building to this end.” He glanced to the hallway. “Perhaps it is bold of me to assume, but I feel it worthwhile to ask: have you found happiness?”

He looked back. Dreadwing was watching him, that forced smile eased into something more natural for his handsome face.

“There is no simple way to answer such a question,” he said.

“We have time,” Optimus pointed out. He stood from his chair, taking a moment to look around the room. It was a utilitarian space, but there were a few decorations that betrayed some sentimentality on the part of its owners: image displays on the walls, a mantle with a collection of = stones from other worlds, and a tin of wax that had been left out all contributed to a personal feeling that allowed Optimus to relax a bit more.

For Dreadwing and Skyquake, this place was home, and they had welcomed him into it. Whatever hostility might remain between them, nothing could overshadow that fact.

He made his way to the couch, its back against the windows, and sat down. It was comfortable, though he had no way to know whether that was because of the strange magic of this place, the make of the furniture itself, or the fact that he no longer had a body in which to feel discomfort. Dreadwing remained at the table, and he watched Optimus as he settled, helm rested on one hand.

“I wished to live to see Cybertron’s revival,” Dreadwing said. “I wished to watch if from the air once more, the way its inhabitants moved as if in a perpetual dance.” His hand moved across the surface of the table, imitating traffic. “I was assigned to energon drilling, and occasionally tasked with passing rapid communication between facilities. It was during my flights I started to get a sense of how truly large Cybertron is, and how much was being denied to me and others of my caste.”

“I had a similar experience,” Optimus said. “While working in the archives, I would receive data that indicated a much wider world than I had experienced myself. Until Alpha Trion’s intervention I had no means to reach beyond.”

“So, you understand what a gift it is to behold Cybertron as it lives,” Dreadwing said. “Not everyone does. But I digress, I did not live to witness it, and so in that way I do not know if I can call what I have here happiness. How can I claim a peaceful afterlife if I did not first achieve that which I desired in life?”

It was a valid question. But by the way his wings relaxed down, and how he gazed at Optimus with a look like a familiar friend, it seemed Dreadwing already knew the answer.

“I have spent more consecutive days with Skyquake here than I ever did in life,” he said, ducking his optics. His voice was gentler suddenly, as though speaking too loudly would make his joy obvious and break the spell. “It is what I imagined security must feel like. We part ways, and I know he will always come back; neither of us will ever be forced to choose to leave the other. Even if we had lived to see Cybertron again, any number of things could have intervened to separate us. To exist without that fear is, I believe, what happiness might feel like.”

“Then I am happy for you, old friend,” Optimus said. He smiled and hoped Dreadwing recognized his sincerity.

There was a beat of contemplation, and then Dreadwing stood and approached, broadcasting his movements before he made them. Optimus was not sure the sofa would be wide enough for both of them, but when Dreadwing sat the space was perfect, just wide enough that their knees could have touched, though Optimus kept his own drawn in for now.

“And you?” Dreadwing asked.

“Hm?”

“What will it take for you to find your happiness here?” He was facing forward, but Optimus still got the sense he was being paid attention to.

He turned over the question for a moment, inspecting it, though not too closely. He trusted the Allspark would do him no harm, which meant he trusted Dreadwing and his questions, and wanted to give them as honest an answer as he could fathom.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s not something I’ve considered in a very long time.” This was a good start, though. Knowing that Dreadwing had made it here and found peace gave him hope. He had lived a long life and done so much; he was ready for a place where he could rest.

“If you leave here and wander a bit,” Dreadwing gestured behind them, toward the window, “you will find the Pious Pools, as they were before the channel was blown up and they were drained. Perhaps a walk will give you guidance?”

Optimus misunderstood him.

“Anywhere I could go with you would be a gift.”

That wasn’t a bad thing, though.

By the time Optimus realized Dreadwing had meant for him to go on his own, the latter was already watching him with a smile on his face like it had snuck on and was hiding from him. He leaned closer, hand up to trace a delicate claw over Optimus’ audial.

“If we had lived,” he said, “would you have walked with me then? There was a trail from the lower end of Staniz that led up into the foothills, a dented trail formed by the weight of all the mechs who walked it. A mile out, the city disappeared, and the wind would blow so strong it would threaten to knock you over and send you tumbling back the way you had come. Would you have preserved that path while the rest of Staniz was restored? Would you have walked it with me, allowed me to hold you against the strength of our planet?”

“Why would it not have been me holding you?” Optimus asked, and then what must have been lips, warm lips, were pressed to his own.

He shut off his optics, leaned in, chased Dreadwing when he started to pull away. It did not matter that they were without frames: they kissed, held each other, phantom plating slotting together. Dreadwing had a scent and Optimus locked onto it, archived it, saved it to what might have been the fabric of the Well itself. He trailed his fingers along a ghostly wing and felt a shiver run through Dreadwing, strong enough to break them apart and force their optics back online.

They stared at each other, panting. Optimus did not know his mouth was still open and he wouldn’t have cared regardless.

“You’re beautiful,” he blurted.

And Dreadwing smiled, and there was no fleeing from it, no hiding. He smiled at Optimus, and happiness no longer seemed like such an unknowable thing.

“The wonders of life yet to be lived,” he murmured. And then he kissed Optimus again.