#drawing lolita stuff is hard but i like the way it came out
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I'm not like, an art blog or anything but if anyone is feeling super discouraged as all this ai shit roles through and is maybe thinking 'art is so hard and impossible to achieve without years and years of practice, i might as well use ai because it's the only way to make what I'm envisioning', I made this in like two hours:

I'm not an artist and you can probably see that. Pretty much all art I have done is either done by my brother or commissioned. I have 0 art training, I don't draw on the regular, last time I seriously drew was probably a couple of years ago. And I did this in two hours. I looked up a bunch of things, used plenty references, googled stuff like 'pose references' and 'how to draw boots' and here is the result. Just like, don't be discouraged, art is not some mystic skill only a chosen few can master. All I needed to draw this can be found in any store that sells school supplies and some time and effort. You got this, I love you, never give in to the easier path.
And now me rambling about the process under cut cuz I had a bunch of fun!
So this is a drawing of one of my dnd characters. She's an eladrin (fairy flavored elf for the uninitiated) and her original class was barbarian but I'm going to reclass her into a druid next time I play her because I decided it fit her backstory more.
Here's her initial design from like two years ago

The concept was 'barbarian but she's a magical girl lol' and a darker color scheme prevailed because I was trying to fit her into a CoS campaign :I I ended up changing characters hvhnvh. Anyway since I decided to reclass her into a druid and focus on her backstory more, making her a more serious and grounded character, I decided to switch from a lolita inspired style to a mori kei inspired one instead. At least when it came to styling and layering. I decided to leave colors leaning more towards pastel pinks to keep the original hyper fem feeling of the character. I also decided to change her hairstyle from twin tails to twin braids to give her a more mature look reflecting her more thoughtful and reflective rebranding. I kinda wanted to make her braids even longer but uhhh drawing braids is kinda confusing to me but I did my best anyway.

Pose is always the hardest part of drawing for me aaaaa, I'm shit at judging proportions and not nearly passionate enough to try and do that part slowly and precisely so I usually just kinda end up winging it. I also gave up on the legs cuz like...I'll give her a dress anyway :I...have I mentioned I'm not an artist. Her pose doesn't have much to do with her character the way it does in her original picture, I honestly just wanted an easy pose to draw so I can show off hair and outfit. Dynamic poses make drawing clothes a lot harder for me (if u would call the pose in the og pic dynamic...once again I'm not an artist)



Hair and outfit are like my fav parts to do and what I spend the most time on, from looking up references, to trying to get it just right, to making little tweaks and changes to trying to do my best with store bought colors to get the colors just right. The part where her shawl and braid and top of the dress are was the hardest to make sense of and I did my best about it hzbhjbhj hopefully it looks nice. Also the top of her dress was a test bunny for how i wanted to combine brown and beige for her dress and i accidentally used the wrong and stronger shade of brown, hence the top looks different...drawing by hand hard. Also yeah I did change the positioning of one of her legs between pose sketch and outfit sketch...I couldn't figure out how to draw a boot like that.
Here are some outfit references I used! I took elements from all of these (the white bits are supposed to be lace but like...I'm just one girl with a pen).



That's about it :3 I'm very happy with it, she ended up super cute. I honestly surprised myself with how good it looks. It reminded me how much I actually like drawing hair and outfits, I used to do that a bunch back in high school and college. I should play more girls in dnd so I can draw more cute outfits. I can't draw men because if I try to draw a man I will die.
#lucy blabs#lucy....draws :O#me through this whole process: this is hard and im unsure of what im doing but im still doing better than an ai bro#my girl deserves the best
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Ouran High School Host Club AU (Inspired by this post)
Yes, I used everybody they offered as the characters (and more!), itâs just a really big club.Â
(It will 200% get bigger if I keep writing this, donât test me)
Ship Tags: MiyaHina, AtsuHina, OsaHina, OiHina, KurooHina, BokuHina, AkaaHina, TsukiHina, UshiHina, AoHina, HyakuHina, NishiHina/NoyaHina, Hinata Harem aka Hinata/Everyone.Â
Loosely follows plot, but a few things have been changed to match Haikyuu more, such as:
â˘Hinata isnât an honor-student, heâs on an athletics scholarship (and while there are plenty of decent athletes there, theyâre all rich enough to not need a scholarship)
â˘Hinata wears blue-light glasses often. He has good vision but having the glasses framing his vision helps him focus in class instead of getting (as) distracted.
â˘Yachi and Hinata switch off on some Haruhi stuff but Yachi isnât the one the guys are all simping for.
â˘Yachi is an actual honor student but sheâs not on the kinda full-ride scholarship Hinata is on. Sheâs like, partially rich, but not enough for Ouran (so she gets bullied or at least teased.)
â˘Hinata and Yachi got to be really good friends at orientation since she can sympathize with him better than all the actual rich people, and she helps him with his studies so he doesnât completely flunk his classes.Â
â˘The Twins, like Hikaru and Kaoru, have the same color hair (brunette) atm
â˘Hinataâs mom is a drag king to parallel Haruhiâs dadâs sitch
â˘Oikawa doesnât let Iwaizumi into the club because he kills his eccentricity and egotism. None of the others can vibe check him the way Iwa-Chan does so thatâs why he seems even more unbearable and thus more Tamaki-like.
â˘â˘
Hinata tried to figure out where Yachi disappeared to, peering down halls and into classrooms through small openings of the doors. âYachi-saaaan...â
He barely registered the vague scent of roses and sweets saturating the air as he pushed the door softly.Â
The wood swung open as though pulled, Hinata stumbling through with a shout. A breeze and rose petals drifted by his face as he opened his eyes, head whipping up to view the silhouettes of the boys not too far from the door.
âWelcome to the Harukou Host Club!â
âTh-The... --Whatâs a host club?â
Hinata watched as all of the boysâ faces fell into befuddlement.Â
âW-What a funny joke,â a brunet, sat upon a throne-like chair, commented, his fingers interlocked beneath his chin. âIsnât that cute? Trying to win our hearts with humor.â
âBut--â
âSo, what kind of guys do you like? Weâve got plenty of types to spare, and I donât think any of them have any problem attending to a male--ah, sorry, whatâre your pronouns? That was rude of me to assume.â
Hinataâs instinctive, âHe/him,â came out before he could attach his protests at the services offered, his stress elevating as the brunet hopped out of his chair and sauntered over to him, hands extended in shows of eccentricity.
âWe havenât gotten a boy, yet, huh, âTsumu?â one of the guys still in the group commented, his arm draped over the shoulder of his exact copy (sans the parting of the brown locks).Â
âNo, but thatâs because the only boys weâre involved with are each other,â the copy, âTsumu(?), said, grabbing the otherâs chin to hold his gaze. They stared into each otherâs eyes for a second before their faces got a little green, the two of them separating to mime vomiting whilst laughing.
Hinata had to tune back into the brunet approaching him, who seemed to be going off on a tirade about beauty and elegance. He tuned back out almost immediately, finding even schoolwork to be more interesting.
ââTsumu and âSamu are awful at the twincest-schtick, donâtcha think?â
âRight? I thought so, too. Weâd be ten bajillion times better at it if we were identical twins!â
The ravenette rolled his eyes, although he drew in the other smugly. âIdentical or not, the reason we work is because Iâm a good actor.â Then, placatingly, he amended, âAnd youâre not hard to tease and smother with affection.â
His silver companionâs eyes lit up. âMan, youâre so cool, Kuroo.â
âMake sure to call me Tetsu when there are girls here.â
âOooh do I get a nickname? Like, Kouta instead of Koutaro?â
Kuroo grinned, âDonât give me an offer like that. Iâll call you Honey or Beloved, and while weâre raking in the cash, Akaashiâll sell a bunch of merchandise with it.â
Another ravenette, probably Akaashi, nodded calmly as he penciled into his notebook. Beside him, a tall blonde smirked, his glasses flashing menacingly as he tapped away into a calculator. Kuroo and the silveret both paled and protested at him, which he seemed to ignore.
Speaking of ignoring things...
âYouâve been talking a long time, havenât you?â
The brunet, knelt on the floor near a table, glanced over at him like he forgot who he was talking at. âIs that praise of my oratory skills? Iâve always been told that people get lost in my speeches, and itâs no surprise that youâve gotten so enthralled with one!â
Seems like I wasnât the only one who got lost, Hinata thought, noting the despondent, glazed eyes of some of the occupants. A short guy with a patch of blonde hair jumped up into a handstand on the shoulders of one of the taller guys in the back with white hair, and it was made evident that, no, some of them just always appeared completely detached from reality.
âSo, anyway, what kind of guy is your type, Mr. Athlete? Maybe you like the cool type? The boy lolita?â
ââI AM NOT THAT SHORTââ
âYou are quite that short,â the brunette continued, âOr maybe you like the strong silent type? âWe have three of those. We also have twinsâidentical and fraternalâ if youâre into the taboo kinda stuff. We donât kinkshame here.â
âMaybe we should,â muttered the blonde guy with the calculator. His mouth was covered by a silver-haired guy with black ends, whose face betrayed no emotion even as the blonde fought against his palm irately.
âIâm not into this kind of thing,â Hinata said quickly, âBesides, doesnât it cost money? I donât think Iâd be able to afford something like this, anyway.â
âSpeaking of not being able to afford things... Shouldnât we check up on her?â Probably-Akaashi motioned to a corner of the room with a piano and a familiar blonde girl hiding beneath its bench, sobbing meekly into her knees.
âYachi-san!â
Hinata raced over to her, her head whipping up at his call. Her teary eyes let loose some sparkling droplets as she leapt at him, although the rope binding her ankles to the bench prevented her from fully reaching him. He thankfully was close enough that he saved her from a tumble to the floor.
âHinataaaa,â she whined into his shoulder, âIâm going to have to sell my organs!!!â
âWhat!?â
âShe came into our clubroom earlier and broke the vase we were supposed to sell at an auction,â explained one of the twins.
âIt was worth eight million yen, and she told us she doesnât have enough money but that sheâll sell her organs in order to pay us back, which is impressive in the dedication but very concerning.â
âWe had Wakatoshi-kun put her on the bench to calm down, but she tied herself to it because she thought she would be our prisoner as a punishment.â
Yachi clearly tuned them out, too busy crying and hiding in Hinataâs arms. The redhead patted her on the head, wondering how things could get this weird in less than twenty minutes of her being out of his sight.
âYachi-san.â
No response. Her blubbers were even less coherent now.
âYachi-san!â He shook her by the shoulders until she blinked up at him. âIâll help you, okay? Just promise me youâll be more careful. And help me with my homework again!â
âHinata...â
He grinned at her and patted her head. When he turned back to the group of boys, he could see they parted somewhat to allow the brunet to be visible whilst lounging on his throne that was turned to face them.
âIâll be taking on Yachi-sanâs debt,â he declared. The brunet rested his cheek on his fist and peered down his nose at him, smirk drawing his lips.
âKurooâ spoke up, âHoh? All eight million? Are you sure you can make it up, Chibi-chan?â
âYou couldnât even afford a school uniform; how do you plan to pay us back?â said the blonde guy, eyeing his white-and-pink tracksuit with no lack of judgment.
âIâll...â Hinata glanced back at Yachi, her eyes glistening, and steeled his resolve, âIâll do whatever it takes.â
âThen, Chibi-chan, from here on,â the brunet guyâs voice, initially dropped, lilted upward as his amusement mounted, "Youâll be our bitch.â
âWhat.â
â˘
Hinata frowned at the smudges all over his lenses, ignoring the twins (both sets) measured him for his uniform.Â
He almost didnât notice when Kuroo bent down to meet his eye-level and gently grasped the frames of his blue-light glasses. âAlright, Chibi-chan, weâll be taking these. Though it doesnât even seem like you need them, huh, since these lenses donât really have any magnification?â
âWell, no, but since we have a lot of work on laptops here I thought theyâd be better to have.â
Kuroo hummed and slipped them off his ears and nose, and all of the twins gawked at him as he blinked up at them.
âWhat?â
Osamu kicked Atsumuâs calf, and the Miyas dragged Bokuto away with them.
âNothing,â said Kuroo, âMaybe they just forgot youâd have a face behind these.â
âOh, Iâve done that before! Like when people are sick for a long time and they wear a mask, I kinda forget they have mouths!â
âYeah, just like that.âÂ
â˘
âWhat kind of coffee is this?â The brunet, now known to be Oikawa Tooru, asked, beckoning Hinata over with the most obnoxious âcome-hitherâ motion to ever exist.
âInstant. I donât really understand coffee, but this is what my mom buys. Itâs just cheap enough that I still have money for lunch.â
Oikawa sputtered at Hinataâs lackluster funding for his nutrition, although his mind finished processing what was said about the coffee itself before he could really express any amount of disbelief at the former.
âWhat do you mean âinstantâ? Are the beans already ground or something?â
Hinata blinked. âCoffeeâs made of beans?â
Oikawa sighed heavily and drew up to his full height, holding the coffee container skyward as a few girls approached for their hosting appointment.
âAlright, you know what? Iâm up for a challenge! Iâm going to try some commonerâs coffee!â
The girls in the clubroom gave shrieks of surprise, Oikawaâs announcement drawing the attention of the entire room. Hinata longingly and despondently stared outside at the people running around the track and beginning practices for their various sports, allowing himself to be dragged away by the club president.
âDarn rich people,â he mumbled.
â˘
Oikawa was very clingy, Hinata found. Every spare second he had at the club was spent with the other nearby, coddling him and encouraging him to learn up close. It was so draining that the Miya Twins and the Fraternals dragging him into their games was infinitely more appealing, but that could also be his bias for Bokuto coming into play.Â
Kuroo was cool, too, yes, and the Miya Twins gave him food, but Bokutoâs energy was so perfectly aligned with his that Kuroo whined about his brother being snatched away on multiple occasions.
This time, with Oikawa monologuing as dramatically as ever, Hinata had no sets of twins to free him from the absolutely boring speech. He spaced out so hard, he didnât notice Oikawa coming closer and hugging him to his chest excitedly.Â
He shouted, the fright sending tears into his eyes, and he reached desperately at the tall trio nearby. âHelp!â
All three of them instinctively drew closer, but it was the white-haired eyebrowless one who pulled him out of Oikawaâs grasp by the armpits, Hinataâs legs dangling in the air while the brunette sat stupefied.Â
âA-Aone-kun, you didnât have to go so far...â Oikawa tried.
Hinata smiled at Aone in thanks and patted his head gently to express further gratitude. Whence he was placed down, Aone bowed to him, and he bowed back.
â˘
Nishinoya was a very fun person to be around, although their interactions were sparse. He shone under the attention from the girls, and if Hinata didnât know the girls were paying for his time, heâd have assumed the reverse was true. But it made sense, you know, since Noya-san was just such a cool dude.
The girls cooed at him and giggled at his jokes, and his dorky personality coupled with his small-but-wild looks made him a charmer. He also offered Hinata cake on a frequent basis, and often accosted the others to make sure they ate up--especially Tsukishima, who seemed prickly enough that Hinata didnât want to get near him with a ten foot pole.Â
Unfortunately, Tsukishima was also the one mostly in charge of handling his debt, so he could not actually be avoided. Hinata was assured by Akaashi that heâd remove any undue charges Tsukishima would add to the debt, although Hinata wouldâve preferred he hadnât said anything about those undue charges and just did the removals with Hinata none-the-wiser, as then he wouldnât be paranoid about the things Tsukishima would charge him for.
â˘
Hinata hadnât meant to attract the attention of one of Oikawaâs most attached clients. She gave off a weird vibe and when he mentioned her to Yachi, the blonde girl went a little paler than usual (which, while a frequent occurrence, didnât fail to raise alarm bells in the redheadâs mind).Â
âSheâs territorial,â Yachi managed, eventually, and Hinata had to go through all of the lessons the girl kindly drilled into his head in order to remember what that word meant.Â
âOh. So why would she be interested in a guy at a host club? Isnât he, like, one step from prostitution?â Yachi choked at that, shaking her head to fight down any amusement.
âI donât think she thinks those other girls are a threat.âÂ
Hinata hummed, âWell, she keeps glaring at me, so maybe sheâs just a little dumb and confused.â
Yachi pursed her lips, barely able to keep her laughter contained.
â˘
Hinata wondered why Yachiâs schoolbag was tossed into the pond. Alongside it sat his, and as he began running through the halls to go attend to the issue, he spotted that client.Â
Hinata quite pointedly ignored her, continuing down the halls and stairs. He felt a small flame of rage light up in his chest at seeing Yachiâs notebooks scattered across the surface of the water, covers just buoyant enough that the papers were only starting to soak in water, and he prioritized getting her items out and organized before he could even ponder grabbing his own.Â
Heâd been in the pond for twenty minutes, thankfully having managed to salvage most of her things, before a voice broke through the quiet of the grounds. âWhat are you doing?â
Hinata didnât need to glance over his shoulder to know it was Oikawa, his voice light and airy, with a hint of playful exasperation.Â
âI canât find my wallet.â
âYouâll get sick with your clothes all wet. Canât you just let it be?â
Oikawa didnât seem to understand the necessity of what heâd likely consider pocket change. âI need the money for food. Iâm not going to get paid for a couple days and I donât want to starve in the meantime.â
There was a lengthy period of silence. He wondered if Oikawa left, trying desperately to make out the shape of his coin pouch amidst the colorful pebbles lining the bottom of the pond. He nearly growled in frustration as a series of ripples tore through surface, though as he heard the telltale sound of someone wading through water, he spotted the brunette with his pants rolled up and bare feet gingerly resting on the stone.Â
âWhat are you doing?â Hinata quarried, eyebrows drawn up in confusion.Â
Oikawaâs face was concentrated yet somewhat peaceful as he copied Hinataâs searching motions, fingers gliding across the smooth pebbles. A few strands of hair caught the water and were left with shimmering drips that occasionally fell back into the pond.Â
âIâm helping.â
He never turned to look away from the bottom, focused mostly on the task at hand. Even his distant, deeper, and yet airier voice conveyed how little attention he was giving his words, and Hinata could only wonder if this was the most genuine heâd ever heard the other in their past week of interactions.
âWhy?â
âWell, why not? I mean, everyone tells me Iâm dripping with good looks,â he chuckled, the breathy quality sending something through Hinata that made him duck his head down and resume seeking his funds.
The two sought it out for over ten minutes before getting any results. The small coin purse, shaped like a small black crow, sat cradled in Oikawaâs palm. He proffered the item to Hinata with a wink, the redhead unclasping it and sighing in relief at the dryness of its interior.
âThanks, Grand King.â
As Hinata beamed up at the other, the reflected light from the water seemed to hit Oikawaâs eyes harder, as though a flare traveled across the distance between the earth and the sun solely for this moment. He held up a peace sign and smiled back at the other, wondering if such luminance could ever be reproduced.Â
(If it could, then heâd love to bottle some up and save it for a rainy day, but maybe there was a hint of greed in that thought.)
â˘
âOh, dear, I canât believe someone would do such a thing!â the client across from him cooed. Her face tilted down a bit, and shadows draped across her eyes and cheeks. âStill, I canât believe you got Tooru to scrape through that filthy pond for you. He always has been excessively charitable.â
âYeah,â Hinata mumbled, stuffing a bite of cake into his mouth. The sweetness was significantly dampened by the presence of the girl. What was her name, again? His focus shifted to trying to recall it.
âI couldnât imagine having so little shame that Iâd be a charity case, though. I mean, doesnât it embarrass you to have Tooru waiting on you hand and foot?â
Yachi, whoâd been standing just within earshot, turned to their conversation just then, a disgruntled look on her face. Despite the anxiety that spread quivers across her body from her sternum, she frowned heavily and managed to inquire, "Arenât you just jealous?â
Something flashed across the clients face then: anger, most likely. Hinata was drawn out of his attempt at recollection by her hand shooting across the table to yank him over to her, a scream escaping her as they toppled to the ground. Teapots and cups burst apart upon contact with the pink tiles, some of the tea soaking into the knees of his gifted uniform pants as it puddled.
Hinataâs palms and wrists ached from the way they slammed against the floor, on either side of the clientâs head. People were quick to crowd them, murmuring and gazing in horror.Â
âHelp!â she cried, âHe attacked me! He just jumped across the table, I--â she scooted out from under him, and he slowly sat back on his haunches before accidentally falling onto his bottom. The discomfort of his soaked clothing did little to distract him from the confusion welling within.Â
She crawled over to Oikawa whence the brunette stepped closer to the scene. He was the first one over, ever keen regarding the clubâs new pet, but only after surveying the situation did he close the distance.Â
Her fingers clutched at Oikawaâs pant leg, creasing the fabric as she shivered with tears in her eyes. Hinataâs jaw was slack. Did he do something? Did he try to do anything to her while he was spaced out? He was sure she pulled him, but should he have been expecting such a thing and made to avoid it?
He slowly turned his eyes over to Yachi, whose face was creased in an anger heâd never quite seen before. Her meekness took a sideline to the frustration and disbelief drawing together her brows and tugging her lips downwards.Â
âTooru, please, you have to do something. He was like an animal, I--â
Her desperate face fell into shock as warm water rushed across her face and scalp, soaking the top of her uniform dress. Her panting became a squeaking staccato, and she blinked as her brows drew up steadily.Â
âTooru?â she whispered, before whipping her head around to the Miya Twins, who glared down at her, unimpressed. âWhat are you doing? Didnât you hear me?! I--â
âGod, you pigs sure like to squeal, donâtcha.â
Osamu glanced down at the jug in his grasp. âI oughtta grab another one at this rate.â
âWhy did you--â Hinata startled as Yachi stepped in front of him.Â
âYou pulled him to you! I saw it! You were envious that he got Oikawa-sanâs attention and tried to frame him!â she blurted.Â
More whispers and gasps spread across their audience easily. Oikawaâs face was steely and impassive as the client stared up at him with a cocktail of hurt and anger. âYou canât believe her, Tooru, I--â
âYou really are beautiful,â Oikawa interrupted, his fingers gliding under her chin. âBut nothing more than that. It seems youâre not classy enough for our club, my dear, and so Iâll have to ask you to leave.â
Tears streamed down her cheeks, Hinataâs heart clenching with a mild bit of sympathy, before she got to her feet and took off, her broken shout of, âTooru, you idiot--!â echoing through the clubroom.
âIâm sorry, ladies; regrettably, weâll have to cut our time short for today.â Tsukishima said with his paper-thin smile. It dropped as Akaashi continued for him,
âAll of you will receive a full refund of the costs for todayâs appointments. You can also use those same funds to reschedule, if youâd like to. We deeply apologize for the inconvenience.â
The girls cooed and cheered, and Tsukishima barely kept his frown from forming.
Eventually the clients filed out of the clubroom, exclaiming their farewells to the hosts. Hinata and Yachi silently stared after them, not wanting to look back to the hosts surrounding them.
âSo, what should I do about you?â Oikawa said, drawing Hinataâs reluctant attention. The appraising look and grasp of his own chin were not reassuring at all; Hinata and Yachi glanced at each other and gulped. âHmm, Tsukki-chan?â
âDonât call me that,â the bespectacled blonde groused, before pushing up his glasses and smirking. âSince our guests had to leave and receive refunds, our profits for today are at a zero. And because of the drama earlier, we have a few broken teapots and cups from one of our specialty sets, as well as a table that needs to be repaired. To make up for all the damages and overall loss... Akaashi?â
The ravenette typed into a calculator quickly. Bokuto hid behind a sinisterly-grinning Kuroo with his fingers half-heartedly covering his eyes from fear of Akaashi. Akaashi presented the calculator screen within a second.
âApproximately one hundred thousand yen.â
âH-Hundred...â
âThou...-sand...â Yachiâs eyes swam. Hinata caught her as she half-fainted, both of them shaking with tears welling in their eyes.
âThatâll be added onto your debt, you two. Youâd better hope one of your descendents pays it off.â Tsukishimaâs smirk shaved additional years off their lives, and Hinata had to pull Yachiâs soul back from the air to shove it back into her body.Â
âDarn rich people,â he whined. Kuroo cackled.
â˘â˘
That was fun ngl. Like, some things go slightly different than in OHSHC, but overall it has some of the same vibes I think
I feel like Bokuto and Akaashi as Honey and Mori respectively would be funnily fitting despite the roles I have them in here, but I think Iâm gonna be fluid and loosey-goosey about who is which OHSHC character most of the time (since Noya isnât entirely Honey-like and there are lots of people who can fit different roles). Kenma and/or Kuroo can fit Kyoya and Tamaki roles too, now that I think about it. Damn this show for having so many characters.
Also this is a nightmare to tag since a lot of characters have multiple spellings for their names and there are so many characters. Heck, thatâs why I wrote all the ships at the top!
Anyway, I hope yâall liked it! Might write more if askedÂ
Also, should I cross-post some of this to Ao3?Â
#akaashi keiji akashi#tsukishima tsukki kei#nishinoya yu yuu#aone takanobu#ushijima wakatoshi#hinata shoyo shouyou shouyo shoyou#oikawa tooru tohru toru#hyakuzawa yudai yuudai#bokuto kotaro koutaro kotarou koutarou#kuroo tetsuroo kuro tetsuro#tetsurou#miya osamu#miya atsumu#miya twins#yachi hitoka#ouran hs hc au#haikyu haikyuu hq
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Foresight is 20/20 Chapter 13
I sighed, then took another bite of my dango. The page of my book flipped and my frown deepened. Poison-making looked hard... And more than that, it was complicated and boring. Sure it was practical, but nowhere near as fun as, say, the chakra threads I was using to "levitate" both my dango and my book (I didn't want to get dango on my book or book on my dango).
"'Sup, kid," a familiar voice said, and I extended another thread to catch the hand that reached for my dango. "Almost didn't recognize you there with that tan, but who else casually uses a jutsu like that?"
"Anko," I greeted faux-angrily. She was somehow almost always there whenever I went to get dango, and I eventually managed to talk to her. "I do believe that I told you not to touch my dango." The thread around her wrist went slack and dissipated, allowing her to withdraw her hand. She just shrugged, sat down across from me and started eating her dango.
"So is that a book about poison?" she asked me.
"I don't really understand it, but yeah it is."
"I happen to know a thing or two about poison, especially after..." Her expression soured. "Him."
I closed my book and licked my lips. "Speaking of him," I said. "I do believe I've figured something out." I raised my hand to one of my demon gem "earrings" and it floated to the back of her neck, where her curse mark was. "Ah, I was right. I should be able to partially nullify your seal."
Her eyes widened. "You can?"
"I mean, I don't think I'll be able to remove it without causing major damage to you, at least not without the original notes, but this..." I used the demon gem to extract the natural energy from the mark, then placed a seal on it to prevent it from drawing in more. "Feel better?"
She rubbed the curse mark. "Yeah, lots..."
I smiled slightly and my gem returned to my ear. "That's because I just removed its ability to accumulate natural energy, and drained it too. Basically halted most of its functions. Now that I've become more adept at using these things, I can use them to detect the natural energy around me. Orochimaru's mark certainly is interesting, shame the man himself was terrible."
Anko grinned at me. "You know, I actually have access to all his stuff, seeing how I was his apprentice and all. He didn't like the idea of anyone else touching his notes, so me giving it to someone is probably a good way to spite him. Plus I could teach you way more about poison than some dumb old book!"
My grin widened. I'd have sealed her mark either way, but finding a dialogue tree that got me Orochimaru's notes and explanations on it was a godsend. "Looks like I found myself a teacher, then. Oh, and by the way."
"What's up, kid?"
"That seal was probably screwing with your metabolism. You'll probably have to actually work off all those sweets now."
Anko winced. "Dammit..."
kukukuku~
I meditated under a tree again, paying some attention to Hinata playing with Naruto and Tenten as with before. This time, though, I was just doing the regular sage training and not my weird convoluted separate-recombine approach. I'd managed to use a single demon gem to make a really thin barrier that pivoted like the platforms on the spires the toads had that also made it look like I was just mildly floating. "What are you doing?" a voice asked. I couldn't see him with my eyes closed, but Chikage within my shadow shared her sight with me. And then I would've figured it out anyway from the sound of someone eating chips behind the original speaker.
"Why hello, Nara Shikamaru and Akimichi Choji," I said, not even opening my eyes. "I am meditating on the energy that abounds in nature, and surrounds us all. With it, a true sage can do incredible feats."
"That can't be true," Shikamaru said. "Wouldn't we know more about such a troublesome power?"
I smirked, and a random falling leaf that got too close to me was shredded from a disturbance in the surrounding natural energy.
"Woah!" Choji exclaimed. "What was that?"
"Mendokuse..." Shikamaru muttered. "So why don't people use this more often?"
"I don't know," I admitted. "I think it has something to do with how the only other user of the sage power that I know of with no relation to the snake or toad summon animals was Senju Hashirama, who at the same time one might argue had a slight relation to toads through his distant ancestor. And I have a theory that he actually had some sort of natural energy-related power even beyond normal sage powers, one tied to his bloodline."
"Mendokuse... How do you know this?"
"Magic. While I don't suggest you actually draw in natural energy without supervision from someone who would be able to expel the natural energy from your body, you seem like the type to be content to lie still from elongated periods of time, which you could use to try and sense the natural energy in the air, which is the basis of using sage power."
Shikamaru blinked. "So you're saying I could potentially get a lot more powerful just by sitting around?"
"You need to draw in natural energy for a bit before you can actually use it, but yeah. Also, you need a good amount of chakra before it's safe to do it, so don't expect to just take a nap and get superpowers."
"Well then why are you doing it?" Choji asked. "Even if you have more chakra than normal, you're a kid like us. Is it really that safe?"
"Tseseseseh~" I chuckled. "Nnnope, I'm just an idiot with a lot of chakra."
"You're the one kid Ino told us about, aren't you?" Shikamaru asked. "The weirdo."
"Yup."
"Mendokuse..."
I felt a wave of bad vibes through Chikage and heard some shouting. I bolted upright, forgetting that I was in the middle of absorbing natural energy. My leg gave out from under me, causing me to drop to one knee and suck in a breath. "Are you okay?" Choji asked me.
I rolled up the pant of the offending leg, revealing skin that was half crystallized and half scaled. And some of the scales were made from crystals, too. "Ah, that's not good," I muttered, then licked my lips. "This is why you don't mess around with natural energy without adult supervision, kids..."
"Mendokuse... Is there any way we can help you?"
"No, hang on. I got this. Let's see here..." I concentrated, using my experience manipulating natural energy with my various unconventional forms of sage jutsu to help me. The problem was that I had natural energy concentrated in my leg. I didn't have much in the other parts of my body, so I just redistributed the natural energy. My leg returned to normal as I felt the surge of power from a proper sage mode. Thanks to Chikage, I was able to see that the markings around my eyes changed to be the yin-yang symbol thingy, and moon symbols appeared on my cheeks.
"There, that's better," I said. "Really hope this stuff isn't carcinogenic... Let's go check out that shouting." Before either of them could object, I shot off. Even with my sage chakra not quite as potent as it could have been on account of my age and chakra capacity, I was still a lot faster than the two. I did go at a pace that they could easily catch up to, though, on account of the fact that I didn't want to burn through all of my sage mode. At what Chikage told me was the source of the negative emotions, I felt two familiar chakra signatures, very much in a panic. I came upon the scene. Thankfully, there were only a few people there, and they all appeared to be too afraid to do anything.
"Get back!" the guy holding the knife to Ino's throat shouted. He appeared to have taken her and Sakura hostage. Judging by the sack of loot on the ground by him, he'd robbed someone and was trying to get away. I could tell that neither he nor any of the onlookers had much shinobi training with the exception of one man who was probably a low chunin judging by his chakra, which was probably why there was such an impasse. "I'm not afraid to use this!"
"Really?" I asked. "This is the third young clan heiress that I've had to save. This is starting to be bad writing."
The man pointed the knife at me. "What are you gonna do, kid?"
I gave him a twisted smile. "This." I flashed through a series of practiced seals as fast as I could, drawing on the power of my demon gems, punctuated with a technically-superfluous slam surface seal. "True Demonic Illusion: Summoning of the Shadow Demon!" I shouted as an illusory seal made of some sort of dark energy formed underneath me. As I stood back up, a false, distorted Chikage rose from the ground behind me with chains made of an ethereal, shadowy material connecting it to the seal, forming from the dark energy. The illusion of Chikage looked older and larger (and larger, because we felt like it), and it had sharpened teeth, claws, and eyes of pure shadow. To add to the dark imagery, it was wearing Chikage's new outfit, which she'd made inspired by the gothic lolita style to go with her whole "demon of a thousand shadows" shtick, plus shackles on her wrists and ankles.
The shackles usually only had a few links of chain on them for the aesthetic and to act as foci for a variation of the Adamantine Chains jutsu we'd make, but for the illusion they were for the chains that were linking it to the seal. You know, the outfit actually looked rather good on our tanned skin. The illusory shadow demon beckoned to the man, the sound of jangling chains causing a feeling of unease in the bystanders.
To the would-be kidnapper, though, the illusion caused a pressure of unrelenting foreboding as the sun went dark and the land turned to shadows. "What the hell is that!?" He dropped his knife and hostages and tried to run.
"I think not," I said dully as my shadow, the true Chikage, reached his shadow, causing him to freeze up and my shadow to return to normal from Chikage entering his. "You've been possessed by my demon." In truth, the entire genjutsu was just smoke and mirrors, albeit elaborate ones. The illusory Chikage was both a medium to the hallucination suggestion and misdirection from Chikage's shadow movement. The reason that that worked, though, was because Chikage had the ability to possess people by entering their shadows, which was awesome. Without need for the genjutsu, I dropped it, letting the phantasmal copy fade from existence. I snapped my fingers, causing the man to stand up straight so he wasn't stuck in an awkward position, then walked up to Ino. "You okay?" I asked, holding a hand out to her.
She sniffed. "My neck hurts a bit and I scraped my knees, but I'm good now." She smiled and let me pull her up, and I placed two fingers on the thankfully small cut on her neck. Green-hued chakra sprang from my fingers and sealed her wound. I moved on to her knees, then walked over to Sakura.
"What about you, Sakura-chan?" She whimpered and showed me her hands, which were all scraped up. I smiled at her and placed my hands on hers, but before I could even use my basic healing jutsu something weird happened. The natural energy flowed out of my body and into her. Whatever she was doing, I could tell she didn't even know she was doing it. Once my sage mode was depleted I pulled her up and removed my hands from hers, revealing perfectly unscathed palms.
"Thank you, Kouki-kun," she said. Whatever the heck happened, she was now naturally passing natural energy through her body. If I had to bet, she'd automatically heal any injuries that happened to her. Not that I'd test it... Interesting.
"Thanks, Kouki," Ino said. I looked over to her and noticed she was smiling and blushing slightly. She probably didn't have an actual crush on me considering her age, but I knew how she would probably think about the dashing knight in shining armor who saved her...
"Mendokuse..." I internally sighed.
"Mendokuse..." Chikage telepathically agreed.
"Mendokusai desu ka?" Usagi asked.
"Mendokuse..." Chikage and I mentally chorused. At least if she kept that up I'd save Sasuke a bit of trouble and she wouldn't ruin her friendship with Sakura, but... ugh... I'd probably have to deal with that at some point...
"Where's the thief?" an Uchicop asked as he landed, then saw the guy standing there and whipped out a kunai. "You! Stop!"
"He's under my spell, he literally can't move without my say-so," I said. "Or at least I'm assuming the guy who took some hostages and had a sack of what appeared to be ill-gotten goods was also a thief."
"What do you mean, under your spell?" he asked. The thief's shadow morphed into Chikage's for a moment, just a flash.
"A genjutsu that I thought of after hearing of the Sharingan's genjutsu-casting abilities," I lied. "It uses a special ability of mine with an illusion as a visual medium to place a suggestion on a victim that allows me to control them. Unfortunately I can only do one person at a time so far and a powerful enough shinobi would probably be able to resist it, but hopefully it'll get a lot more useful when I'm older."
"Right," the cop said, then cuffed the crook. "Well, thanks for the help." If I had to guess, he was one of the more good-natured Uchiha. I doubted he'd have anything to do with the rebellion. "I'm sure you'll be a good ninja when you're older. For now, though, maybe you should stay out of trouble, kid."
"No promises." He snorted and escorted the guy away, taking the sack with him.
"What was that?" Shikamaru asked me. "And don't say genjutsu, because I know the difference between an illusion and shadow-manipulating jutsu."
"Definitely not your clan's jutsu, don't worry," I muttered so only he'd hear. I leaned over just a bit so that the tip of my shadow touched a nearby shadow, letting Chikage come back to me. "I was telling the truth when I said it was a special power of mine."
"It have anything to do with that weird meditation thing you did earlier?"
I smirked a bit and licked my lips. "Let's go with that, though there's also a bit more to it that's, as far as I know, unique to me. You'll never be able to use it, if that's what you're asking."
"Mendokuse..."
kukukuku~
I sighed, lying down on my bed. "What are we going to do about Ino?" I asked Chikage.
She shrugged, floating around as always. Not that I could blame her. "We... let her down gently?"
"Yeah, but how? Relationships are hard..."
"Gonna have to get back to you on that one..." We both sensed someone coming to the clan compound.
"Hey, is that..."
"Lemme check." She shadow-travelled there and back, only gone for less than a second. "Yup, Aburame Shibi. And it looks like those bugs we spared earlier were kikaichu, 'cause he's bringing a couple mutant ones in a bug cage." I nodded, then we became whole again. I silently walked to the front door, where the clan leader already was.
"...apologize for the intrusion, but earlier a member of our clan's kikaichu were drawn to an unusual source of chakra located within your compound," he explained to my father. "She managed to regain control of them, but not before some had died and others had... changed." He brought out the mutated bugs, which had rune-like markings much like the first-stage curse marks. They were acting pretty crazy. "They may not be able to escape this cage, but they are still far livelier than the normal variety and much harder to control. I am not accusing you or any of your clan of anything, but I would very much like to know what caused this, as it might prove useful to our clan."
"Well, the thing about that is..." Dad said.
"Would you trust him, father?" I asked, announcing my presence.
He nodded. "Go ahead, Kouki."
"Right, let's go somewhere more private," I suggested.
"So," I said once we went to a suitable room, "what the kikaichu felt was... let's just say a jutsu of mine." I brought out the half-sized demon gem that fed on the Aburame's bugs. "This is called a demon gem. Despite all appearances, it's a living thing that generates special chakra that, among other things, can be used to make more demon gems by compressing and cannibalizing living animal tissue. Unfortunately that's the only way to make it, though, and since I don't want to mass-murder people or large animals, that pretty much means I have to use its animal-attracting properties to occasionally draw in and cannibalize insects. I was doing that earlier, which is why you're here." On a hunch, I reached out to the demon kikaichu, influencing them through my power within them. They instantly calmed, becoming absolutely still. "Could you release them?"
"I see..." He opened the small cage. I commanded the bugs, causing them to fly out of the cage as one. They entered a formation on my command and began orbiting my body.
"Don't worry," I said, noticing a small shift in his emotional state. "I have no interest in usurping the kikaichu jutsu and even if I did I can only control these mutated ones through my power that they absorbed, if that's what you're worried about."
"I understand. It is interesting, though, that you're able to control them so easily."
"I doubt I could control anything more complex than them with so much ease. Not without a lot more of the special chakra, anyway." A thought occurred to me. "Actually, I thought of another thing I'd like to try, though this one might possibly have the potential to be arguably a usurpation of your clan secrets, so I'll only try it with your permission."
Dad sighed. "Why am I not surprised... I apologize for my son, Shibi. He... can be rather focused on power, even if he tries not to overstep boundaries."
"I am fine," Shibi said. "Why? Because he asked for my permission, and clearly wishes not to overstep his bounds. Tell me, Kouki-kun, what is it you wish to try?"
"I don't have much data to go by, but I think I might be able to gain special chakra-related powers by granting my special chakra to a subject and then absorbing it once it's fused with their chakra," I explained. I'd noticed, after the whole demon sage seal debacle, that I'd gained extra, Uzumaki-like vitality. After a talk with Ai, I found out that I could still manifest the adamantine chains that I used against her, despite that chakra having been fully processed by my body, much like how absorbing enough of Shukaku's chakra combined it with Kurama's chakra in me.
It made sense, all things considered, that a combination of my red chakra, which was easy to transfer from body to body, and natural energy, which had mutagenic properties, would allow my body to adapt to others' chakra intead of just adapting other chakra to me. In fact, I could also make my chakra signature almost identical to Ai's, which was probably useful somehow. Though that part I tested and found out that all I need for that is to have my red chakra exposed to someone else's chakra signature, like my red chakra was somehow easily imprinted with other people's chakra signatures.
"I'd like to see if I could gain the kikaichu's ability to drain and absorb regular chakra by, well, killing some of them by draining them dry," I requested. "With your permission, of course."
Shibi nodded slightly. "An interesting power. Could you grant that ability to another?"
I shrugged. "Maybe. I mean, I didn't exactly come with a manual, but if you want me to see if I could grant some of your people kikaichu powers then I'd certainly be willing to find out. Plus, the possibilities..." I grinned. "Tseseseseseh~" I hiss-chuckled, then licked my lips. "It's certainly something I'd be willing to do for you. Is that a yes?"
"I would prefer if you left a few for us to study, but take as many as you need."
"Alright, then. Let's see if half works, shall we?" Half of the beetles returned to the cage, while the other half landed on my hand. They didn't bite me, but I had them start draining me to get a feel for how their power worked. "Assimilation Jutsu." Safisfied by what I felt, I reversed the flow of the chakra, capitalizing on the connection the chakra-draining gave us to more easily suck the chakra out of their bodies. Despite the enhanced lifespan and vitality granted from their mutation, they stilled and fell from my body as all the chakra left them. "Do you want the corpses or can I try to resuscitate them to add to one of my gems?" I asked.
"Do as you please. We can always drain more, if we need to. Did it work?"
I commanded the demon gem to go at the recently-deceased beetles, then looked inward. "It feels like it's working, but my body has to 'digest' the chakra before I can use it. And it might be partially physical, in which case I might not have the power. I'll get back to you on it. Now." The demon gem, slightly bigger now that it was done absorbing the bugs, floated over to Shibi. "Don't worry, it's harmless unless it's specifically made to attack someone."
He took the gem. "Why are you giving this to me?"
"As Father said, I'm... more than a little obsessed with power, I admit. It doesn't have to be my power, though. I'm also interested by my allies' power, even my enemies' power. And giving my allies power?" I grinned slightly. "Well, I'm sure you can tell how I feel about that. I'm not even worried about if you turn against me for some reason. We've already established that those things are less than useless against me. Not to mention, I'm getting something else out of this too."
"How so?" Shibi asked.
"Kikaichu, like most insects, have a low lifespan, and can reproduce at a rapid rate because of that. It wouldn't be too much to ask, then, to sacrifice any of your kikaichu at the end of their lifespan when they start to become less useful to you to that gem to produce more demon gems for me, would it?"
"We feed our dead kikaichu to the living, but we can feed some to it, if that is the price for having it to study."
"Good. Make a snake seal and pulse some chakra at the thing to send it into 'eat' mode for a couple of minutes, which'll make it eat any insect-sized organism that touches it. Hopefully. Just in case, don't touch it while it's in eat mode."
"Suddenly I feel as though I should not be holding this," Shibi said, then placed the gem in a little baggie that was probably for dead bugs. Fair.
"Probably a good idea, once it's fully out of my influence. This close to me, though, I don't have to concentrate on it to have some measure of control over it. It should stay more or less inert, though, in a state where it'll produce chakra enough to fill its stores and not resist kikaichu draining. Tell me if it doesn't work quite right, though, and I'll try to make adjustments."
Shibi got up. "Thank you for this, Kouki-kun. I will do my best to make you not regret giving it to me."
I gave him smile. "Goodbye. Make sure to only let people you trust near that thing, or even aware of its existence for that matter. Good luck!" Shibi faltered a bit, then continued on. "This is going to be fun," I said.
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Fandom: TeenWolf

âPen Name
Author: rootbeer
Summary: Anxiety (/aNGËzÄŤ-itÄ/): A feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome. ~~ "The set was busy; people bustled about with their various jobs. No one seemed to notice, or maybe they just didnât care, as the gangly boy looked about nervously. He was all skin and bones, a track of moles across his light skin. He carried a bag across his shoulders, a coffee cup in his left hand and a curious look on his face. There was nothing remarkable looking about him at all, and perhaps, that was the most remarkable thing."
DILF
Author: twentysomething
Summary: "Today is Scott's first day of kindergarten and Derek is terrified."
**sidenote: you need an AO3 account to view this fanfic
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Author: owlpostagain
Summary: âHe can't blame me for the fact that I live in a building full of people united in the singular effort to ogle Hot Fireman as often as humanly possible."Laura laughs, loud and echoing in the empty restaurant."Hot firemen can make a girl do crazy things," she agrees, nodding towards her brother's name on the menu. "Derek won't let me date anyone from his company, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate the eye candy.""Send them my way," Stiles suggests, finally loading up a forkful of pie. "Apparently I'm incompetent enough that I need to be babysat at all times, because it would be cheaper than dispatching a truck every time I try to use a kitchen appliance."
Prince Among Wolves
Author: tylerfucklin (Zimothy)
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Summary: Derek has had a crush on Stiles, a young omega who goes to his school since he first laid eyes on him. He has watched him continually come to school with bruises and flesh wounds delivered by his abusive father and all heâs ever wanted to do was help but Stiles never let him get close enough. Until, one night, Stiles ends up at Derekâs house, with more than a flesh wound and Derek will do everything in his power to protect him.
Fly a Little Faster
Author: mirrorkill
Summary: Everyone knows when you go back in time, you shouldn't step on an ant, just in case you accidentally kill your own grandparent or something. But what happens when you go back in time and, uh, accidentally interrupt the one event that apparently made the Grumpiest Alpha in Town into a ball of mindless manpain?Well, if Marty McFly can do it, so can Stiles Stilinski. All he has to do is get Derek and Paige to fall in love before he gets pulled back to his own time. And before he makes anything worse. That's easy as pie, right? Right?
In the Solstice of Our Hearts
Author: ravingrevolution
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His Only Defence
Author: LunaCanisLupus_22
Summary: Stiles had just accidentally challenged an alpha.Oh God, and Scott had just stood by and let him do it. He was the worst best friend ever. Stiles was going to kill him. Except, oh right, the alpha was going to kill him first. Like beyond dead, ripped into tiny little pieces dead. So far dead that his dad would not be able to identify him, dead.
The Undisclosed
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Part 1: Not Like Bond & Moneypenny
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Part 2: What Bond Did Without Moneypenny
Summary: The lost months in Not Like Bond & Moneypenny, in which Derek pines, Laura tries not to meddle, Stiles blogs, and everything works out in the end.
Part 3: After Bond Got Moneypenny
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Author: Stoney
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Author: zosofi
Summary: âThree weeks,â Derek says.âStill donât want to,â Stiles says.âIâll pay you,â Derek says, and that⌠that has Stiles interested. Alfâs Antiqueâs may be a great job, but itâs not a high-paying job, and half of Stilesâs tuition is coming from financial aid, soâŚâHow much,â Stiles asks, âare we talking here? Because I know your family, dude. And itâll be kind of awkward after.ââMy family thinks youâre some sort of fucking gift to the world,â Derek seethes, like heâs jealous, âtheyâll probably be pissed at me when we break it off, so donât worry about that. Five hundred bucks.ââA thousand,â Stiles says, because screw ethics. Also, the Hale family is loaded. Derek can deal.
The Skies Above are Blue
Author: Trelkez
Summary: Derek is a wedding DJ. Stiles just happens to go to a lot of weddings.
The Amber of the Moment
Author: redhoodedwolf
Summary: Ever since he was eight years old, Stiles had been running. Fate decided it was time to stop.
Academia Series
Author:Â KuriKuri
Part 1: Hemingway Can Suck It
Summary:Â âFor those of you who just transferred into this class or simply decided that day one wasnât important enough to attend, Iâm Professor Hale. Welcome to English 346, The American Novel.âStiles is pretty sure his mouth is hanging open right now and that his eyes are wide with shock, because holy fuck, he thinks he knows why his students transferred. Hell, if he was still an undergrad, he probably would have transferred, too.
(Or: In which Stiles is a Biology professor and Derek thinks he's a student.)
Part 2: Misinterpret Me Like Lolita
Summary:Â âYou donât even know the course name?â Derek growls after the guy blushes and stutters out an answer, because, Jesus, he thought the university had standards.And it sounds like the course the guy is describing is his. Isnât it just his lucky day? No breakfast and another student who doesnât give a shit about the course material.This class is going to be hell â heâs calling it now.
Part 3: Leave the Black Light
Summary:Â âWe shouldnât,â Derek protests, although the way he grips Stilesâ hips a little too tightly betrays what he really wants. âThereâs another class in here in less than half an hour.ââThen I guess weâll have to be quick,â Stiles says, unconcerned. âGood thing I came prepared.â
Tonight, the Fox Hunts the Wolf
Author: LucifersHitman
Summary: Stiles always knew finding a mate would be hard for him. He's not bright and beautiful like Lydia, or strong like Danny or adorable like Scott.He was just Stiles, fox kid with ADHD who loved to draw. Derek Hale was everything, popular, strong, smart and gorgeous.They get put together on an English assignment and it doesn't go at all like Stiles expects.
Honey Eyes and a Wolf's Heart Series
Author: Underestimated_amateur
Part 1: Pup and Kit
Summary: Derek is eight when he first meets Stiles. Peaking over at him from the end of the bed, he stared in awe. The thing was so small and chubby with lovely pale skin covered in the cutest of freckles. The little one didn't even have hair yet, just fuzz on top of his head. And the prettiest amber eyes he's ever seen.
Part 2: Itâll Be Okay
Summary: Derek was nine when he first stayed the night in the Stilinski household. Stiles was a few months past one year old.When the door suddenly opens, he races in like a man on a mission. Listening to the two other heartbeats in the house, he quickly knows which one is the one he's looking for. Stiles.
Part 3: Sourwolf
Summary: Derek was eleven when he learns the answer to a question that's been burning inside his mind since he met Stiles. Stiles is three when he shows the world what he is. Eleven was also the age when Derek begrudgingly gets a nickname that'll last a lifetime.
Part 4: Wishing Flowers
Summary: Derek is twelve when he teaches Stiles about wishing on flowers when the little one visits him. Stiles is four when he knows for sure what he wants.
Part 5: My Batman, My Catman
Summary: Stiles was in first grade when Derek learns he has to share sometimes.
Part 6: Innocent Lips and Locked Fingers
Summary: Derek is fifteen when he first takes the little one out by themselves. Stiles is seven when he gives his first kiss.
Part 7: Cindered Wreckage
Summary: It was like a story how everything played out. Like a tragedy his mother could've read to him from her library when he was younger.Derek is fifteen when he feels broken.
Part 8: Hiraeth
Summary: It's been a year after the disaster, but sometimes Derek comes back to his broken home.He is sixteen when he learns what it means to grieve. He is sixteen when he re-lets people in.
Part 9: Taking a Shot
Summary: Derek is seventeen when he finally plays a basketball game. Stiles is nine when he sees his first game.
Part 10: Healing
Summary: Derek pays a certain someone another visit.
The Noble Tie That Binds Series
Author: minusoneday
Part 1: There Is A Brotherhood
Summary: So far, college has taught Stiles three things:1) Eight am classes are cruel and unusual and should be avoided at all costs, even if it means having to enroll in something truly hideous instead, like Econ 101.2) Dorm security is just as tight as Stilesâ orientation leader had promised it would be, and the dude guarding Scottâs dorm in particular does not respond well to bribes.3) Mrs. McCall clearly had no clue what she was talking about when sheâd insisted that Scott and Stiles needed to branch out and room with strangers, so itâs all her fault that Scott ended up with a total dick of a roommate and Stiles got stuck all the way across campus with some guy who has a girlfriend two towns over and is thus never around.Or, the one where pledge brothers Stiles and Scott start a prank war with Derek Hale's fraternity.
Part 2: Your Lifelong Membership is Free
Summary: Uncle Peterâs spent years regaling Derek with tales of his time as President of the Alphas. Derekâs paid close attention, because Peterâs stint as President is a pretty comprehensive guide on âHow to Successfully Run a Fraternity into the Ground,â so Derek plans to do the opposite of what Peter did.***A Derek POV to There is a Brotherhood. In which Derek's life is hard.
Fang & Fur Series
Author:Â heartsdesire456
Part 1: Somewhere I Belong
Summary:Â When Stiles got an interview for an internship at Fangs & Fur magazine, the publication owned by the well known and widely respected alpha Talia Hale, he never expected it to be offered an actual job by Alpha Hale herself. He also never expected for his life to change so much after he met the man whose department he was assigned to.Stiles was not prepared for Derek Hale's cub, either.
Part 2: The Same Chains That I Kept You In
Summary:Â The story of how Peter and Chris got together in the Fangs & Fur 'verseâWhy are you so annoying?!â Â âBecause I CAN BE!ââOh wow, thatâs so mature, Hale-ââOh bite me, Argent!â Â Stiles was actually impressed by how long Peter and Chris had been fighting. He looked at Derek, who was holding out the book he was reading to show Alex the pictures where he was sitting in Stilesâs lap. âDude, are they okay?â he asked softly, nodding to the doorway where Chris and Peter kept reappearing.Derek turned back just as Peter stalked past with Chris following him, arms waving as he argued with him. âOh yeah, this is a near-monthly thing,â he said, and Stiles raised a skeptical eyebrow.Series
Part 3: A Gift From The Easter Bunny
Summary:Â SummaryStiles and his father are invite to the Hale Pack Easter Celebration.Stiles get's a special Easter Egg in his basket.
Part 4:Â Feelings That Iâm Wrong
Summary: Stiles looked at him closely. âI know why Derekâs eyes are blue⌠but Iâve never heard anything about you.âPeter looked at Stiles and Stiles saw a slightly manic glint to his eye when he grinned predatorily. âMuch like Derek was defending his cub, I killed another werewolf defending something I hold very dear,â he said bitterly. âIt was kept out of the media by my sisterâs influence, but it was actually just a few years ago.â He looked down at his drink, swirling the cup. âLetâs just say you donât come to visit a pack and threaten the alphaâs baby brotherâs mate.â
Part 5: Donât Wanna Hear You Say Maybe
Summary:Â Stiles was getting really annoyed with Derek being secretive and excited over something he refused to talk about. All day at work Derek seemed distracted and happy but Stiles couldnât work out why.
Part 6: Canât Wait To Call You Mine
Summary:Â Derek and Stiles get married... and set up their friends.
Part 7: Baby Makes Four
Summary:Â When Stiles and Derek decide to adopt another child, they run into an unexpected obstacle that sends them down a painfully difficult path in hopes to adopt a child.
Part 8: New Beginnings
Summary:Â The start of the new year brought some changes to Fangs & Fur that nobody had really expected. The biggest of which shocked far more than just the Hale pack, or the company. It also shocked pretty much the whole supernatural community.
Part 9: Anything You Like
Summary:Â After an afternoon out shopping with his uncles, Alex asks a question that Stiles never expected (though he probably should have).
Part 10: A Very Hale Halloween
Summary:Â Stiles, Derek, and the kids get ready for Halloween night.
Part 11: In Memorium
Summary:Â On the 20th Anniversary of the Argent Terrorist Attack that took the lives of eleven people in the town of Beacon Hills, California, Governor Talia Hale gives a speech at a memorial event for the tragedy that killed her sister, her husband, and two of her children.
Part 12: Iâm Thankful For...
Summary:Â Primary school Thanksgiving assignments and notes sent home from Alex's Pre-K teacher make Stiles cry.
Part 13: Whatâs Christmas Without A Trip to the ER
Summary:Â Stiles was just testing the lights to see which ones worked and which didnât when there was a loud bang on the roof and the sound of a lot of smaller thuds going further towards the front of the house. He huffed and rolled his eyes. âDerek, be careful what you drop! You might break a hole in the roof!â he shouted, knowing Derek could hear him from inside.About five minutes later, Molly came skipping in. âDaddy fell off the roof and I think he has a booboo,â she said without preamble.Stiles jerked. âDaddy did what?!â
Part 14: Leaked
Summary:Â âIn other news, Peter Hale, CEO of Fangs & Fur, the groundbreaking werewolf magazine, and brother of Governor Talia Hale, woke up to scandal today when racy photos of Hale and his husband were published on a website called The Den, a popular website aimed towards gay werewolves. So far Hale hasnât been available for interview regarding the apparent leak.â
more top favouritesÂ
part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8
#Sterek#stiles stilinski#derek hale#teenwolf#fanfiction#fanfics#fanfic rec#tyler hoechlin#dylan o'brien#topfavs
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Lana's trying so hard to be something she's not. She reminds me of me. At the end of the day she's only hurting herself, I hope she wakes up after this era.
Idk.. I feel like she goes through different phases.. definitely a âchameleon soulâ.. I remember a quote a magazine wrote about her âLana Del Rey embodies searching for yourself in someone else.â A lot of the phases seem to do with inspiration from whoever sheâs dating and where she is/ her surroundings... & right now her surroundings are LA, rappers, friends, Instagram, pop culture
1 - âI once had a boyfriend who talked about all the reasons why he loved flags, Rock-and-Roll, and America. I didnât know much about all of that, but I did love him and I wanted to be just like him. So everything in the videos â the Vegas pyramid, the bridesâ smile, the groom motioning âcheersâ â theyâre all different expressions of the happiness I had when I loved a man who loved me and America.â
2 - Gene âI had this teacher who was my only friend in school. His name was Gene. He read us Leaves of Grass and we read Lolita in class, and it changed my world, which was a really solitary world. I didnât have a connection to anyone in class and when I found these writers, I knew they were my people.â âHe would sign me out and we would listen to Tupac and stuff in his car. He taught me everything.â âThe first Biggie Smalls track that I really loved I would say, just like everyone else, was âJuicyâ. I realized what cool was. I wasnât that young - I was 15 and my best friend at school, was actually my teacher. He was a white English teacher who played basketball and listened to hip-hop. I didnât know what everyone thought was cool. He played Biggie Smalls for me in his car.â âGene Campbell, told me about hip hop and the beauty of soundtracks.â On our driving trips around the Connecticut counties, he introduced me to Nabokov, (Allen) Ginsberg, (Walt) Whitman, and even Tupac and Biggie. He was my gateway to inspirational culture. Those inspirations I got when I was 15 are still my only inspirations. I draw from that same well. Itâs one world I dip into to create other worlds.ââThis passion for words I own to my best friend Gene, my English teacher at the time.â
3 -  Barrie - âHe is definitely a poet. I didnât really know what being a poet meant until I met him. He has changed me in ways that I didnât expect. On the one hand I have everything Iâve dreamed of in terms of a soul connection, itâs almost telepathic. But I would be lying if I said it wasnât difficult. He is a much darker character than most people Iâve ever met."âIâm a dark character and he very is an even darker character than I am. Trying to get some consistency and some normality within the dynamic of that relationship has been impossible. Songs like âShades of Coolâ came out all that.â âWe talk about the future, what we want to do, and how weâre going to work out everything with timing, since I have a lot of shows coming up. Driving is our thinking time. Then weâll come back and write.â [Kurt Cobain] âHeâs a big part of our daily conversation. Jeff Buckley is another big inspiration. And Jim MorrisonâI mean, we talk about these people like we know them. Theyâre a part of our relationship. We always say, ��All of our friends are dead, and they never knew us.â Iâm lucky to have met someone who feels that way, too. âHeâs on tour and opens for me. We sing some Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood duets together. Iâve been seeing him for a year and a half and heâs even more of a meticulous, devout artist than I am.  He canât keep his hands off the piano, ever. Whenever Iâm not writing he always asks, âwhy arenât you writing?â We kick each others asses. We give each other input every night.ââI met a person who was a much better person than I was, like had a lot of artistic integrity. He would really die before he sold out, you know. He was a lot like me, but even more strong. I would say, like, the way I would sum up his qualities at the time was he was very admirable. Even before things got bigger, I hadnât met that many guys who understood or who were as passionate about the grunge era, or cult bands, cult movies, as I was. For me, it was a lifestyle and a way of life. Living off the grid was important to me, not having much to do with people I didnât feel I had a lot in common with. He was exactly like that. He lived and made music in his own room for like, 10 years, and I totally related to him on that level. Weâve had a very tumultuous relationship. Heâs a really dark character, and he has his own poetic process thatâs way darker than mine, so as supportive as he has been, a lot of my energy has gone to making sure heâs in the right mindset, cause heâs really prone to long periods of quietness. Heâll go for a month being really quiet, and thatâs just part of his process. I didnât know that in the first year. But, you know, everyoneâs kind of creative process is different and it changes, so, yeah. Itâs been really up and down. Heâll tell you that too. Anyone who knows us, like, itâs really tumultuous.â
Lana - âI live in my obsessions and then the music comes from there.â âI thought my tastes and likes were pretty normal, but then I met everyone and I was like, âThese people donât actually care about music and art. They want to be cool.â I never met anyone who cared about music as deeply as me and my boyfriend, or who really cared about poetryâwho really lived it and breathed it. I havenât met anyone so far. I just canât affiliate with those people.ââI hoped to find people that want to base their life on art.â â[Writing] Itâs a form of escapism for me in some ways, now that I donât go out much.â
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Personal update thingy
So I've been having problems at home for a while, right? Mom supporting everyone with her crappy minimum wage job but refusing better because she likes getting all her little discounts on the craft supplies she almost never uses and wastes all her money on (subsequently blaming me and my younger sister when she can't pay rent.. for needing food.) She made me buy groceries for everyone with my financial aid money for college, acting like it was her right or something. She never did anything around the house, always laying down playing on her phone and ignoring us. If I ever got upset or showed any emotions around her, she'd tell me I was "retarded" and everyday reminded me of what a "freak" and a "whore" she thought I was.i wasn't allowed to dress myself till I was fourteen and she had strict rules about what I had to wear. She used to force me to wear pink despite me hating the color, force me into dresses even though I hated them. She always threatened to home school me because she didn't like my friends (best friend in highschool was gay, other friends were "annoying" and bad influences even though they were the ones who scolded me gently and were concerned about me when I used to come to school with scarred wrists and when she found out she'd just .... Hit me and ask if I was some divine punishment sent by god as revenge for something she'd done) she is a devout mormon most of the time, except the rules she's doesn't like. Hard core, super far right Republican. You now the type. Thinks Obama did 9/11 somehow. Thinks me being bisexual isn't real because it has to be that my friends corrupted me because no child of hers is allowed to be a "fag" and oh she called me that a lot too. But of course, she's always hated my boyfriend almost as much as thay fact. My boyfriend whose abusive ex left him a mess, who I protected so desperately those first two years while he healed who now protects me from anything he can, who will stay on the phone with me for seven hours in a day if I'm feeling a little upset because he wants to make sure I'm okay.
Well, last night it escalated to a point it hasn't reached in a while. She hit me repeatedly over the head and threw me on the floor. She told me how horrible of a daughter I am and how I'd had this coming. How I "deserved" every hit and probably more. When I ran to my room with my phone, she chased me down to make sure I didn't call the police on her. I should've, but I was panicking and all I could think was of how my boyfriend said even if he's sleeping if I'm in danger I should call him. We'd gotten off getting phone and hour before hand to go to bed but... We stayed up till maybe 3 am with him comforting me and planning ways to get me away from there. He had me text my dad and so, even though my dad's out of town right now, he had my oldest brother come get me. And my brother took the day off of work to make sure I'm okay and... I found old things of mine my dad kept since highschool because my mom had convinced me to leave his house forever. That I should hate him. He kept them I case I came back and I started crying cause I just....mom convinced me as s kid that he didn't care and he's always been bad at showing his feelings (same as me) so I believed her for a while but I.... Understand now.
I'm a little worried she might burn the things I couldn't get in my mad dash out. Lots of important things. Old birthday and Valentine's and anniversary gifts from my boyfriend. Our old prom photos. Drawings friends gave me. Years worth of my own art.... I'm worried it'll all be lost forever. The Lolita stuff I'd saved up for for so long. My cloud costume that was almost finished. They're all still there....
But after this morning I'm scared to go back for them. After she threatened to destroy my things, implied that my own brother would rape me? And told me that I was somehow the abusive one..... I don't know what to do
I'm kinda worried about my phone being taken off their plan too.
#personal#i don't normally do this#but#i guess#my struggling#my ....story#might help someone else#im nervous talking about ths#its really personal and even most of my friends don't know
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Brevity is the  soul of lit...reviews -- 2016 Part 1
City on Fire by Garth Risk Hallberg (2015)
"You are infinite. I see you. You are not alone."
I was as excited about Hallberg's debut novel as any in a long time, going back to my appreciation for his criticism over at The Millions. But his 911-page tome dedicated to 1970s New York tries so hard to say anything meaningful that it doesn't really care what that meaningful thing is. Hallberg set out to write a big ideas book without grounding it in any worthwhile ideas.
I read this shortly after watching Master of None, and I was thinking a lot around that time â maybe too much â about whether art earns its message; i.e. does it construct the foundation well enough to merit a cathartic payoff? (In Master's case, I thought not, contrary to most popular opinion.) Similarly, the connections Hallberg fosters among his diverse characters seem haphazard and rarely come together meaningfully. His thesis is this above-quoted line, which concludes the novel and, if we're being frank, is rather passĂŠ. I mean, this is the thesis of an awful lot of art (and a lot of awful art), and much of it earns it in a more fulfilling and cathartic way than City of Fire.
The narrative voice is inconsistent; teenage Charlie, in particular, uses a whole host of words I have a hard time seeing teenage Charlie actually using â things like après-ski and sepulchral and "the chaotic stalactites of the sprayed-on ceiling texture." The writing often reeks of effort, with batting gloves "scrunched scrotally" at the base of a nightstand or summer "like a flash of thigh beyond a janitor-propped door." No thanks, on both of those.
This is all coming across rather harsh, when the fact is I read these 900+ pages rather quickly. I don't think Hallberg is a bad writer by any stretch of the imagination. I felt while reading this the way I felt while reading something like Franzen's Twenty-Seventh City. This is the rough draft for what will be a much better and more fulfilling novel.
S by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst (2014)
S is a wonderful idea and engrossing project that, like The Usual Suspects, falls apart with the more scrutiny you apply to it. The dual explorations of a literary mystery and an incipient relationship through the marginalia of a bygone novel? Sign me up.
But by its end, S becomes a victim of its conceit. You can't make the suspense of Jen and Eric's literary discoveries linger if you tell the whole story non-chronologically â as the writing in the margins purports to do. The way around that, then, is to unrealistically limit their most revelatory commentary to the latter stages of Ship of Theseus. It's here where it crosses the line from just contrived enough to too.
The stakes of the literary mystery, which seem so high starting out, gradually decline throughout as you realize Jen and Eric will always be fine, and that the dangers they face can never actually be shown, only told.
Nevertheless, this was as engrossing a book as I read this year.
The Game by Jon Pessah (2015)
Read this in the spring considering it was a CBA year, and it was a fascinating glimpse at the behind-the-scenes owner-union dynamic around the '94 strike. Pessah doesn't hide his allegiances much; I doubt he'd have voted Bud Selig to the Hall of Fame, if you know what I mean. I learned a lot that I didn't know about how Selig gained power, how owners found their way to public money for stadiums and how they played the public relations game when it came to steroids.
My only problem was the incorporation of well-reported though seemingly irrelevant details about George Steinbrenner and the Yankees dynasty.
By Night in Chile by Roberto Bolano (2000)
"It's good to love. It's bad to be impressionable."
It has less to do with poetry or The Church than I expected, as it focuses more on the culture of acquiescence, even among artists, around the Pinochet Coup. I won't pretend to know enough about Chilean history â let alone Chilean literary history â to fully absorb the incisiveness of the satire. But holding soirees â and I know it's translated, but man is that the perfect word for the juxtaposition â a floor above torturous interrogations makes for a delicious critique.
Like some of Dostoevsky's works, Bolano can fall prey to a rambling, unlikable protagonist. In this one, though, that comes with the conceit.
Despair by Vladimir Nabokov (1965)
"I lied as a nightingale sings, ecstatically, self-obliviously."
Nabokov is that wonderful mix of fun and literary high-mindedness â an author who never bogs you down while delivering masters courses in how to craft a story. His protagonists make their monstrousness more relatable and often even palatable through their overwhelming self-centeredness â who can't relate to that? â and hilariously searing criticisms of others. Despair is not a masterpiece like Lolita, but it's still a damn good time.
10:04 by Ben Lerner (2014)
"Prosody and grammar as the stuff out of which we build a social world, a way of organizing meaning and time that belongs to nobody in particular but courses through us all."
Like the best shuffleboard players, Lerner pushes right up to the threshold of being too meta without ever falling over the edge. 10:04 starts then to serve as an insight into the writer's process, with its excerpt that was used in The New Yorker explicitly mentioned as being used in The New Yorker. There are still individual scenes that don't work â I don't think I ever like hallucination sequences â but they don't detract from the overall contemplation of conscious experience â what's authentic, what matters.
Lerner's also just really fun and insightful to read. He describes staring straight ahead past a friend as "a condition of our most intimate exchanges," alcohol as a hedge "so that whatever happens only kind of happened" and how "nothing in the world is as old as what was futuristic in the past." An exegesis of Reagan's Challenger speech speaks to the power of words (and to Lerner, poetry) while a scene in which the protagonist donates sperm would fit neatly in a DFW short story.
Of our time, but maybe it transcends it, too.
1984 by George Orwell (1949)
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face â forever."
You will gradually notice a theme emerging in my choices this year, and you will connect it quickly to 2016 events. I'd been meaning to read 1984 for years, and by February, I figured there would never be a better time to digest it.
I don't know what exactly I anticipated, but I know I didn't expect it to be quite this good. I suppose my reservations going in revolved around whether Orwell could construct realistic characters in his world, and whether that world was extrapolated properly.
Orwell does both to a remarkable degree. The manner in which 1984 builds its own vocabulary â and explains its principles in a simplistic appendix â is outstanding and terrifying in its external validity. Crimestop and doublethink seem particularly plausible concepts these days (as do its ideas of "rectifying" the past through historical revision and stripping war of its danger by making it neverending).
The entire novel contains this ambience of utter hopelessness, evidenced by the way parents grew scared of their children's potential as informants or how emotions in general became sterilized over time. Winston and Julia's rebellion is a small transgression, because they knew they couldn't beat the entrenched system.
This was depressing, just like the year was. I was kind of scared before reading 1984 and really scared after it.
Death in the Clouds by Agatha Christie (1935)
Man, sometimes after spring training, when you haven't had time to sit down and read something cohesively in a while, you just need a boost. Reading a Christie mystery in an afternoon or two has always done that for me, even if this one isn't as good or as interesting as I remembered from the first time I read it.
The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas (1961)
"At times to be silent is to lie. For silence can be interpreted as acquiescence."
The reason I hadn't read anything cohesively in a while? Because I was trying to tackle this large history of a time period I knew next to nothing about. (My interest in the Spanish Civil War basically dates back to someone justifiably pointing out my extreme ignorance about it â and its impact on the FC Barcelona-Real Madrid rivalry â in a blog comment some years back.)
My main error, if you want to call it that, in choosing this specific history of the war is that I probably didn't need this much depth to satisfy my curiosity. But that's obviously a strength and not a flaw of the book. Thomas places the events in Spain within the larger context of Europe's imminent disintegration, showing it as the proxy/practice war that it was. He's withering in his criticisms of the other powers and their willful impotence: The non-intervention committee among other nations "was to graduate from equivocation to hypocrisy" while the US practiced a policy of "moral aloofness." Â
Thomas does his best to keep the dozens of sides involved in the conflict in order; reading this over the course of two and a half months made that very important indeed. He shows how each side was able to drum up such hatred for the other that compromise was rendered impossible â boy do Catholic murderers come off poorly here â and he's able to draw as straight a line as possible through the convoluted causes and effects during the war, explaining how and why Franco was eventually able to emerge as the key and victorious figure.
The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer (2005)
Reading Moehringer is always fun, but if I'm being honest, I found it hard to justify spending time reading a memoir about him. The stories are excellent, but I just didn't care enough about him or the bar.
#litreviews#brevityisthesouloflit#cityonfire#s#thetenderbar#deathintheclouds#1984#thespanishcivilwar#1004#despair#bynightinchle#thegame
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I Would Totally Kick Jiraiyaâs Butt Chapter 13
I sighed, then took another bite of my dango. The page of my book flipped, and my frown deepened. Poison-making looked hard... And more than that, it was complicated and boring. Sure it was practical, but nowhere near as fun as, say, the chakra threads I was using to "levitate" both my dango and my book (I didn't want to get dango on my book or book on my dango).
"'Sup, kid," a familiar voice said, and I extended another thread to catch the hand that reached for my dango. "Almost didn't recognize you there with that tan, but who else casually uses a jutsu like that?"
"Anko," I greeted faux-angrily. She was somehow almost always there whenever I went to get dango, and I eventually managed to talk to her. "I do believe that I told you not to touch my dango." The thread around her wrist went slack and dissipated, allowing her to withdraw her hand. She just shrugged, sat down across from me and started eating her dango.
"So is that a book about poison?" she asked me.
"I don't really understand it, but yeah it is."
"I happen to know a thing or two about poison, especially after..." Her expression soured. "Him."
I closed my book and licked my lips. "Speaking of him," I said. "I do believe I've figured something out." I raised my hand to one of my DSC earrings, and it floated to the back of her neck, where her curse mark was. "Ah, I was right. I should be able to partially nullify your seal."
Her eyes widened. "You can?"
"I mean, I don't think I'll be able to remove it without causing major damage to you, at least not without the original notes, but this..." I used the demon sage core to extract the natural energy from the mark, then placed a seal on it to prevent it from drawing in more. "Feel better?"
She rubbed the curse mark. "Yeah, lots..."
I smiled slightly and my core returned to my ear. "That's because I just removed its ability to accumulate natural energy, and drained it too. Now that I've become more adept at using these things, I can use them to detect the natural energy around me. Orochimaru's mark certainly is interesting, shame the man himself was terrible."
Anko grinned at me. "You know, I actually have access to all his stuff, seeing how I was his apprentice and all. He didn't like the idea of anyone else touching his notes, so me giving it to someone is probably a good way to spite him. Plus I could teach you way more about poison than some dumb old book!"
My grin widened. I'd have sealed her mark either way, but finding a dialogue tree that got me Orochimaru's notes and explanations on it was a godsend. "Looks like I found myself a teacher, then. Oh, and by the way."
"What's up, kid?"
"That seal was probably screwing with your metabolism. You'll probably have to actually work off all those sweets now."
Anko winced. "Dammit..."
kukukuku~
I meditated under a tree again, paying some attention to Hinata playing with Naruto and Tenten as with before. This time, though, I was just doing the regular sage training and not my weird convoluted separate-recombine approach. I'd managed to use a single sage core to make a really thin barrier that pivoted like the platforms on the spires the toads had that also made it look like I was just mildly floating. "What are you doing?" a voice asked. I couldn't see him with my eyes closed, but Chikage within my shadow shared her sight with me. And then I would've figured it out anyway from the sound of someone eating chips behind the original speaker.
"Why hello, Nara Shikamaru and Akimichi ChĹji," I said, not even opening my eyes. "I am meditating on the energy that abounds in nature, and surrounds us all. With it, a true sage can do incredible feats."
"That can't be true," Shikamaru said. "Wouldn't we know more about such a troublesome power?"
I smirked, and a random falling leaf that got too close to me was shredded from a disturbance in the surrounding natural energy.
"Woah!" ChĹji exclaimed. "What was that?"
"Mendokuse..." Shikamaru muttered. "So why don't people use this more often?"
"I don't know," I admitted. "I believe it has something to do with how the only other user of the power of the sage that I know of with no relation to the summon animals of snake or toad was Senju Hashirama, who at the same time one might argue had a slight relation to toads through his distant ancestor. And I have a theory that he actually had some sort of natural energy-related power even beyond sage powers, one tied to his bloodline."
"Mendokuse... How do you know this?"
"Magic. While I don't suggest you actually draw in natural energy without supervision from someone who would be able to expel the natural energy from your body, you seem like the type to be content to lie still from elongated periods of time, which you could use to try and sense the natural energy in the air, which is the basis of using sage power."
Shikamaru blinked. "So you're saying I could potentially get a lot more powerful just by sitting around?"
"You need to draw in natural energy for a bit before you can actually use it, but yeah. Also, you need a good amount of chakra before it's safe to do it, so don't expect to just take a nap and get superpowers."
"Well then why are you doing it?" ChĹji asked. "Even if you have more chakra than normal, you're a kid like us. Is it really that safe?"
"Tseseseseh~" I chuckled. "Nnnope, I'm just an idiot with a lot of chakra."
"You're the one kid Ino told us about, aren't you?" Shikamaru asked. "The weirdo."
"Yup."
"Mendokuse..."
I felt a wave of bad vibes through Chikage and heard some shouting. I bolted upright, forgetting that I was in the middle of absorbing natural energy. My leg gave out from under me, causing me to drop to one knee and suck in a breath. "Are you okay?" ChĹji asked me.
I rolled up the pant of the offending leg, revealing skin that was half crystallized and half scaled. "Ah, that's not good," I muttered, then licked my lips. "This is why you don't mess around with natural energy without adult supervision, kids..."
"Mendokuse... Is there any way we can help you?"
"No, hang on. I got this. Let's see here..." I concentrated, using my experience manipulating natural energy with my various unconventional forms of sage jutsu to help me. The problem was that I had natural energy concentrated in my leg. I didn't have much in the other parts of my body, so I just redistributed the natural energy. My leg returned to normal as I felt the surge of power from a proper sage mode. Thanks to Chikage, I was able to see that the markings around my eyes changed to be the yin-yang symbol thingy, and moon symbols appeared on my cheeks.Â
"There, that's better," I said. "Really hope this stuff isn't carcinogenic... Let's go check out that shouting." Before either of them could object, I shot off. Even with my sage chakra not quite as potent as it could have been on account of my age and chakra capacity, I was still a lot faster than the two. I did go at a pace that they could easily catch up to, though, on account of the fact that I didn't want to burn through all of my sage mode. At what Chikage told me was the source of the negative emotions, I felt two familiar chakra signatures, very much in a panic. I came upon the scene. Thankfully, there were only a few people there, and they all appeared to be too afraid to do anything.
"Get back!" the guy holding the knife to Ino's throat shouted. He appeared to have taken her and Sakura hostage. Judging by the sack of loot on the ground by him, he'd robbed someone and was trying to get away. I could tell that neither he nor any of the onlookers had much shinobi training with the exception of one man who was probably a low chĹŤnin judging by his chakra, which was probably why there was such an impasse. "I'm not afraid to use this!"
"Really?" I asked. "This is the third young clan heiress that I've had to save. This is starting to be bad writing."
The man pointed the knife at me. "What are you gonna do, kid?"
I gave him a twisted smile. "This." I flashed through a series of practiced seals as fast as I could, drawing on the power of my sage cores, punctuated with a technically-superfluous slam surface seal. "True Demonic Illusion: Summoning of the Shadow Demon!" I shouted as an illusory seal made of some sort of dark energy formed underneath me. As I stood back up, a false, distorted Chikage rose from the ground behind me, forming from the dark energy. The illusion of Chikage looked older and larger, and it had sharpened teeth, claws, and eyes of pure shadow. To add to the dark imagery, it was wearing Chikage's new outfit, which she'd made inspired by the gothic lolita style to go with her whole "demon of a thousand shadows" shtick. It actually looked rather good on our dark skin. The illusion beckoned to the man, causing a feeling of unease in the bystanders.
To the would-be kidnapper, though, the illusion caused a pressure of unrelenting foreboding as the sun went dark and the land turned to shadows. "What the hell is that!?" He dropped his knife and hostages and tried to run.
"I think not," I said dully as my shadow, the true Chikage, reached his shadow, causing him to freeze up and my shadow to return to normal from Chikage entering his. "You've been possessed by my demon." In truth, the entire genjutsu was just smoke and mirrors, albeit elaborate ones. The illusory Chikage was both a medium to the hallucination suggestion and misdirection from Chikage's shadow movement. The reason that that worked, though, was because Chikage had the ability to possess people by entering their shadows, which was awesome. Without need for the genjutsu, I dropped it, letting the phantasmal copy fade from existance. I snapped my fingers, causing the man to stand up straight so he wasn't stuck in an awkward position, then walked up to Ino. "You okay?" I asked, holding a hand out to her.
She sniffed. "My neck hurts a bit and I scraped my knees, but I'm good now." She smiled and let me pull her up, and I placed two fingers on the thankfully small cut on her neck. Green-hued chakra sprang from my fingers and sealed her wound. I moved on to her knees, then walked over to Sakura.
"What about you, Sakura-chan?" She whimpered and showed me her hands, which were all scraped up. I smiled at her and placed my hands on hers, but before I could even use my basic healing jutsu something weird happened. The natural energy flowed out of my body and into her. Whatever she was doing, I could tell she didn't even know she was doing it. Once my sage mode was depleted I pulled her up and removed my hands from hers, revealing perfectly unscathed palms.
"Thank you, Kouki-kun," she said. Whatever the heck happened, she was now naturally passing natural energy through her body. If I had to bet, she'd automatically heal any injuries that happened to her. Interesting.
"Thanks, Kouki," Ino said. I looked over to her and noticed she was smiling and blushing slightly. She probably didn't have an actual crush on me considering her age, but I knew how she would think about the dashing knight in shining armor...
"Mendokuse..." I internally sighed.
"Mendokuse..." Chikage telepathically agreed.
"Mendokusai desu ka?" Usagi asked.
"Mendokuse..." Chikage and I mentally chorused. At least if she kept that up I'd save Sasuke a bit of trouble and she wouldn't ruin her friendship with Sakura, but... ugh...
"Where's the thief?" an Uchicop asked as he landed, then saw the guy standing there and whipped out a kunai. "You! Stop!"
"He's under my spell, he literally can't move without my sayso," I said. "Or at least I'm assuming the guy who took some hostages and had a sack of what appeared to be ill-gotten goods was also a thief."
"What do you mean, under your spell?" he asked. The thief's shadow morphed into Chikage's for a moment, just a flash.
"A genjutsu that I thought of after hearing of the Sharingan's genjutsu-casting abilities," I lied. "It uses a special ability of mine with an illusion as a visual medium to place a suggestion on a victim that allows me to control them. Unfortunately I can only do one person at a time so far and a powerful enough shinobi would probably be able to resist it, but hopefully it'll get a lot more useful when I'm older."
"Right," the cop said, then cuffed the crook. "Well, thanks for the help." If I had to guess, he was one of the more good-natured Uchiha. I doubted he'd have anything to do with the rebellion. "I'm sure you'll be a good ninja when you're older. For now, though, maybe you should stay out of trouble, kid."
"No promises." He snorted and escorted the guy away, taking the sack with him.
"What was that?" Shikamaru asked me. "And don't say genjutsu, because I know the difference between an illusion and shadow-manipulating jutsu."
"Definitely not your clan's jutsu, don't worry," I muttered so only he'd hear. I leaned over just a bit so that the tip of my shadow touched a nearby shadow, letting Chikage come back to me. "I was telling the truth when I said it was a special power of mine."
"It have anything to do with that weird meditation thing you did earlier?"
I smirked a bit and licked my lips. "Let's go with that. You'll never be able to use it, if that's what you're asking."
"Mendokuse..."
kukukuku~
I sighed, lying down on my bed. "What are we going to do about Ino?" I asked Chikage.
She shrugged, floating around as always. Not that I could blame her. "We... let her down gently?"
"Yeah, but how? Relationships are hard..."
"Gonna have to get back to you on that one..." We both sensed someone coming to the clan compound.
"Hey, is that..."
"Lemme check." She shadow-travelled there and back, only gone for less than a second. "Yup, Aburame Shibi. And it looks like those bugs we spared earlier were kikaichĹŤ, 'cause he's bringing a couple mutant ones in a bug cage." I nodded, then we became whole again. I silently walked to the front door, where the clan leader already was.
"...apologize for the intrusion, but earlier a member of our clan's kikaichĹŤ were drawn to an unusual source of chakra located within your compound," he explained to my father. "She managed to regain control of them, but not before some had died and others had... changed." He brought out the mutated bugs, which had rune-like markings much like the first-stage curse marks. They were acting pretty crazy. "They may not be able to escape this cage, but they are still far livelier than the normal variety and much harder to control. I am not accusing you or any of your clan of anything, but I would very much like to know what caused this, as it might prove useful to our clan."
"Well, the thing about that is..." Dad said.
"Would you trust him, father?" I asked, announcing my presence.
He nodded. "Go ahead, Kouki."
"Right, let's go somewhere more private," I suggested.
"So," I said once we'd come to a suitable room, "what the kikaichĹŤ felt was... let's just say a jutsu of mine." I brought out the half-sized demon sage core that fed on the Aburame's bugs. "This is called a demon sage core. Despite all appearances, it's a living thing that generates special chakra that, among other things, can be used to make more demon sage cores from living animal tissue. Unfortunately that's the only way to make it, though, and since I don't want to mass-murder people or large animals, that pretty much means I have to use its animal-attracting properties to occasionally draw in and cannibalize insects. I was doing that earlier, which is why you're here." On a hunch, I reached out to the demon kikaichĹŤ, influencing them through my power within them. They instantly calmed, becoming absolutely still. "Could you release them?"
"I see..." He opened the small cage. I commanded the bugs, causing them to fly out of the cage as one. They entered a formation on my command and began orbiting my body.
"Don't worry," I said, noticing a small shift in his emotional state. "I have no interest in usurping the kikaichĹŤ jutsu and even if I did I can only control these mutated ones through my power that they absorbed, if that's what you're worried about."
"I understand. It is interesting, though, that you're able to control them so easily."
"I doubt I could control anything more complex than them with so much ease. Not without a lot more of the special chakra, anyway." A thought occurred to me. "Actually, I thought of another thing I'd like to try, though this one might possibly have the potential to be arguably a usurpation of your clan secrets, so I'll only try it with your permission."
Dad sighed. "Why am I not surprised... I apologize for my son, Shibi. He... can be rather focused on power, even if he tries not to overstep boundaries."
"I am fine," Shibi said. "Why? Because he asked for my permission, and clearly wishes not to overstep his bounds. Tell me, Kouki-kun, what is it you wish to try?"
"I don't have much data to go by, but I think I might be able to gain special chakra-related powers by granting my special chakra to a subject and then absorbing it once it's fused with their chakra," I explained. I'd noticed, after the whole demon sage seal debacle, that I'd gained extra, Uzumaki-like vitality. After a talk with Ai, I found out that I could still manifest the adamantine chains that I used against her, despite that chakra having been fully processed by my body, much like how absorbing enough of Shukaku's chakra combined it with Kurama's chakra in me.Â
It made sense, all things considered, that a combination of my red chakra, which was easy to transfer from body to body, and natural energy, which had mutagenic properties, would allow my body to adapt to others' chakra intead of just adapting other chakra to me. In fact, I could also make my chakra signature almost identical to hers, which was probably useful somehow. "I'd like to see if I could gain the kikaichĹŤ's ability to drain and absorb regular chakra by, well, killing some of them by draining them dry. With your permission, of course."
Shibi nodded slightly. "An interesting power. Could you grant that ability to another?"
I shrugged. "Maybe. I mean, I didn't exactly come with a manual, but if you want me to see if I could grant some of your people kikaichĹŤ powers then I'd certainly be willing to find out. Plus, the possibilities..." I grinned. "Tseseseseseh~" I hiss-chuckled, then licked my lips. "It's certainly something I'd be willing to do for you. Is that a yes?"
"I would prefer if you left a few for us to study, but take as many as you need."
"Alright, then. Let's see if half works, shall we?" Half of the beetles returned to the cage, while the other half landed on my hand. They didn't bite me, but I had them start draining me to get a feel for how their power worked. "Assimilation jutsu." Safisfied by what I felt, I reversed the flow of the chakra, capitalizing on the connection the chakra-draining gave us to more easily suck the chakra out of their bodies. Despite the enhanced lifespan and vitality granted from their mutation, they stilled and fell from my body as all the chakra left them. "Do you want the corpses or can I try to resuscitate them to add to one of my cores?" I asked.
"Do as you please. Did it work?"
I commanded the demon sage core to go at the recently-deceased beetles, then looked inward. "It feels like it's working, but my body has to 'digest' the chakra before I can use it. And it might be partially physical, in which case I might not have the power. I'll get back to you on it. Now." The demon sage core, slightly bigger now that it was done absorbing the bugs, floated over to Shibi. "Don't worry, it's harmless unless it's specifically made to attack someone."
He took the core. "Why are you giving this to me?"
"As Father said, I'm... more than a little obsessed with power, I admit. It doesn't have to be my power, though. I'm also interested by my allies' power, even my enemies' power. And giving my allies power?" I grinned slightly. "Well, I'm sure you can tell how I feel about that. I'm not even worried about if you turn against me for some reason. We've already established that those things are less than useless against me. Not to mention, I'm getting something else out of this too."
"How so?" Shibi asked.
"KikaichĹŤ, like most insects, have a low lifespan, and can reproduce at a rapid rate because of that. It wouldn't be too much to ask, then, to sacrifice any of your kikaichĹŤ at the end of their lifespan when they start to become less useful to you to that core to produce more demon sage cores for me, would it?"
"We feed our dead kikaichĹŤ to the living, but we can feed some to it, if that is the price for having it to study."
"Good. Make a snake seal and pulse some chakra at the thing to send it into 'eat' mode for a couple of minutes, which'll make it eat any insect-sized organism that touches it. Hopefully. Just in case, don't touch it while it's in eat mode."
"Suddenly I feel as though I should not be holding this," Shibi said, then placed the core in a little baggie that was probably for dead bugs."
"Probably a good idea, once it's fully out of my influence. This close to me, though, I don't have to concentrate on it to have some measure of control over it. It should stay more or less inert, though, in a state where it'll produce chakra enough to fill its stores and not resist kikaichĹŤ draining. Tell me if it doesn't work quite right, though, and I'll try to make adjustments."
Shibi got up. "Thank you for this, Kouki-kun. I will do my best to make you not regret giving it to me."
I gave him smile. "Goodbye. Make sure to only let people you trust near that thing, or even aware of its existence for that matter. Good luck!" Shibi faltered a bit, then continued on. "This is going to be fun," I said.
kukukuku~
A/N: The next chapter's going to be a time skip. Well, an even longer time skip.
And I'm actually going to do a poll! I'm not entirely sure how the HyĹŤga clan would take Kouki having the power to copy their bloodline, but the subject would definitely come up over the course of the time skip, so I'll leave that up to you guys!
A: Kouki is allowed to gain the Byakugan, on account of being a HyĹŤga.
B: Kouki isn't allowed to gain the Byakugan, on account of not being born of the clan.
I'm leaning more towards B, but I won't not do A if enough people want to see it. And by the way, I'm welcome to and invite other suggestions.
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