#everyone is over 20 years old in this fic i do not want COMPLAINTS. about people who have known each other for years at this point.

[witchfall]

warm bright eyes [e]

[Jullus pyr Norbanus/Warrior of Light/Alphinaud Leveilleur] [~3200 words] [explicit - MMF threesome]

Tension pools in Izzie's body, right alongside confusion. Somehow, despite all her years on the road, she'd never run into this question before, of…a tent’s suitability for…things. [read it here or on ao3]

---

The setting sun glitters yellow-gold over the salt flats of the Lochs.

What had turned into a visit over Starlight became a whirlwind of activity requiring Jullus to stay longer than he expected. After some issue involving the actual fucking Twelve — one of them had nearly stolen Alphinaud from them all — Jullus received command from his superiors (such as they are) to remain until the threat was resolved. And to keep their favorite twins safe, besides.

Jullus watches Izzie tease Alphinaud about setting up the tent — the Elezen’s too-long arms flying into the air in frustration over it — and a smile alights across Jullus’s face.

While the time away from home pings him with guilt, he cannot say it upsets him overmuch. All the more time to imbue memories upon his heart of the two people who cleave him to the very earth.

---

Luckily, for now, they have a moment of quiet. The (former) Scions’ camaraderie zips about the campfire with ease, dipping into shocks of teasing as Izzie finds herself comfortably ensconced between her chosen two. Her legs stretch into Alphinaud’s lap while her body curves into Jullus’s side, ears lowering over his shoulder like little dust mops.

“The marshmallows aren’t as good without the chocolate. Don’t waste them by throwing them,” Noel demands of Izzie, blue eyes winking with joy in the firelight. “Throw something comparatively useless. Like Jullus’s shirt.”

But that particular brand of teasing is…still new. Even Izzie tenses like a burr to it, snapping with easily triggered embarrassment in response, regardless of the fact Noel teases her like that constantly.

Jullus says nothing. Izzie catches the offered bag of decadent chocolate, pouting. "Stop flirting with him for me," she says, popping a chocolate in her mouth. "It’s too cold for that."

“Yes, do remember that our tents are not soundproof,” Thancred mutters.

“Shut your damn mouth,” Izzie hisses.

The conversation moves on, spiraling outward and inward like one of those loop-de-loop kites Jullus saw in a shop once upon a time during the warm season.

His arm tightens around Izzie’s waist as he slips into thinking. He watches Alphinaud’s fingers draw patterns into her bare thighs.

Tonight, they will get to hold her close under the stars. Not much privacy to be found here, true, as Thancred had made quite clear, but wouldn't they need to figure out how to be quiet in the first place? When they come to visit him in Garlemald, there’s a low chance he will be able to keep either of them in any kind of fine house.

He ignores the shame of that in favor of…the wondering. He thinks of her in his small office-slash-bedroom made out of an old train operator office, sprawled in comfort upon the actual mattress he’d obtained recently, her naked body buried beneath piles of woolen blankets.

He can’t pretend. At least with Alphinaud, their connection is the type that makes him feel safe and curious and cherished; they are of one mind split in half, able to while away the hours talking about any number of things. They’ve kissed no few times. They enjoy the ways their bodies slip together, like touching cool water and emerging clean.

And they are united in how Izzie drives them both to utter distraction.

Jullus is deeply aware that Izzie and Alphinaud are connected by the very soul in a way unique to the Viera. Their hearts, their very past lives yearned to join together, or so the stories have said.

But Noel has commented that some strange connection exists between himself and Izzie, too, formed by Izzie’s sheer force of will that he survive. He can feel no such thing. He hasn’t a lick of context for what any of that could possibly mean for someone aetherblind as he.

He does know, however, that touching Izzie is like fire to ceruleum.

The moment she comes to visit him, he won’t be able to think about anything else. There will be no considerations of decency outside of the bare minimum, which is that they are out of sight and as much out of earshot as they can manage.

Much like tonight. If she is willing.

At some point, the teasing starts back up again. He misses the catalyst for it, but he senses Izzie’s hackles rise like static building under his arm.

"Oh my gods!" Izzie hisses, throwing a chocolate right for Noel's head. "Stop it! Come on! And you," Izzie says, turning pointedly to Thancred, "are one to fucking talk! You and Urianger have been doing it under our noses for years at this point. Lay off!"

Alphinaud looks down at her with a knowing smile, his dark eyes shining like ghosts in the firelight. Jullus is caught by the expression; how the man’s face so easily takes on the qualities of the paintings he so loves.

Izzie frowns. "What?"

"Nothing, beloved," Alphinaud says — and he means it. His palm smooths out some of the knots in her leg. "They are just teasing you."

"I know that," she mutters, petulant.

So Jullus takes his opportunity.

His arm tightens around her waist and his mouth comes close to her ear so no one else will hear. This close, even for a half second, the heat of her skin curls toward him; her lemony scent sends his mouth watering. His body’s reaction to her is primal. He wonders if that will ever ease. He doubts it fully. He hopes not. "Don't worry about it, mea vita. It won’t matter."

He’s so deeply predisposed to the sense of her movements, like his body has accepted her as an extension he must watch, that he nearly sighs aloud to feel her coil just slightly in response.

He will take her problems and snap them in half over his knee. If she wants him — wants them both — tonight, it will be done, regardless of teasing.

And he knows her well enough to know…to hope…that when given the opportunity, she will jump rather than think too hard about it.

---

Izzie, Alphinaud and Jullus retire with casual ease to their tent once the campfire is down to red-gold embers — even if one look inside them would reveal the simmering beneath their skin. They won't be able to resist close quarters for long.

Not when every moment together is preciously hoarded like gold.

Jullus zips the tent closed. Within, their three bedrolls are pushed together, making one large mat with various warm quilts. A heater whirs pleasantly in the corner (all of the tents are provided with one) — creating a nice blanket of sound both within and...hopefully...without...

Tension pools in Izzie's body, right alongside confusion. Somehow, despite all her years on the road, she'd never run into this question before, of...a tent’s suitability for…things. She peels off her coat and her outer layers with rote speed, her back to the boys as if to get it over with so no one would have to be concerned about her wanting or her worries.

She's down to her smalls — for that split second of a moment! — when Alphinaud whispers: "Izzie, come here."

She freezes at the tone in his voice, her long-sleeved sleep clothes in her hands. His soul hooks into hers, pulling. "Um," she whispers, utterly at a loss. "Do you...shouldn't I...are you sure this is a good idea..."

"Hush. Come here."

Well, her willpower was already weak. She has secretly always liked it when he was commandeering, especially now that she knows it is all for her sake.

She turns on her bare heel to see Alphinaud lying upon the bedroll, down to his last layers of his Sage gear — that forever weirdly tempting set of white tunic and loose pants — with his hair down and arms outstretched toward her. Jullus kneels beside him like a knight in waiting, face unreadable.

Unreadable by choice, because if she interprets it, she will combust in a loud explosion of wanting and Thancred will be very mad.

So Izzie burrows into Alphinaud's arms, finding immediate comfort in the scent of him, the feel of his body around hers. She leans her ear into the sound of his heartbeat, of his quiet sigh of relief. There is no need to doubt. There is never need to doubt when he is around her like this...she could do anything he asks of her...

Jullus's careful, callused hands turn her slightly. He kneels down between her legs, his body hovering over hers, gaze the intense sort of blue upon her. "We have to practice, don't we?" he whispers, so quiet, so fucking incendiary. One of his hands smooths her hair out of her face. His thumb lingers on her lips "There's not much privacy back in Garlemald just yet..."

Izzie swallows, dry. Alphinaud hums gently in her ear.

"And I will not be able to keep my hands off you when you visit the first time," Jullus says, leaning just over her mouth. "There's a chance I might just abscond with you to the nearest alcove."

"You wouldn't," Izzie says, half-teasing, almost scared. He's far too serious for such shenanigans. And she wouldn't ruin his reputation like that.

"You don't know what I would do for the chance to hold you, my life."

He pauses for a single moment more over her lips. As if to give her a chance to say no, to say she's truly uncomfortable with this, to say she doesn't want to risk it. She could not say that and be truthful. She already feels herself sinking into that beautiful pastel where she doesn't have to think anymore.

Suddenly, Alphinaud's hand goes to her forehead and pulls her face back, exposing her neck. "We will keep you quiet, my love," he whispers.

Her eyes flutter shut. Jullus's lips descend to her neck just as Alphinaud kisses her half-open mouth. Levin skates down her spine. A sharp breath comes in through her nose as their hands slide through her hair, over her breasts, down the divots of her ribs, her waist, her hips. She vaguely recognizes Jullus scooting down her body, lips leaving a trail of wanting, tongue slipping over the curves of her bones, across her scars.

Then he yanks aside her smalls and presses his mouth to her cunt.

Her reaction is immediate. Her hips jerk into his mouth and he half-growls with delirious need, hands slipping under her thighs to lift her toward him. He throws her legs over his shoulders, pressing himself closer. Izzie forgets, sometimes, how strong he is.

She finds herself unable to cry out, instead moaning into Alphinaud's mouth as he holds her tightly to him, arm about her neck. She is truly trapped, barely able to writhe against them.

And then Alphinaud replaces his mouth with his fingers. Those long delicate things, tasting still of dusted cinnamon somehow against her tongue — right as Jullus presses his own fingers into her, tongue still against her apex.

Izzie's whole body spasms, eyes squeezed shut so tightly against the instinct to call out their names. "Shh, shh, you're doing so well," Alphinaud whispers into her ear, breathless. "Gods, to see you like this..."

She nearly bites his fingers but she does not — instead swirling her tongue about them in a way that makes him tense hard behind her.

She is not entirely helpless in this game.

She comes apart not much longer after that. Jullus moans into her as her body flutters around his tongue, desperate for the very essence of her. But she, too, can scheme on the fly...and the moment he finally releases his bruising hold on her hips, the moment she can move her body of her own accord, she sits up to seize Jullus about the jaw.

She tastes herself on him first, claiming him in a kiss so total that his body nearly collapses into her dominion. She is half in his lap, kissing him until they can’t breathe, her fingers nearly pulling on his hair. She is intent upon devouring him right there. He would let her, she knows. He would let her bury him within her very being, kept all to herself forever.

It’s only fair, isn’t it? If Alphinaud is in her soul…then someone else must infuse her body.

She whispers, so quietly against his mouth: "Do you think you could be quiet while coming inside me?"

Jullus takes in a breath through his teeth; his whole body jolts to painful attention. But he has no time to say anything before she's spinning herself about until her tail is wiggling at him and her nose is at Alphinaud's stomach, pushing aside the fabric there.

Jullus sees where this is going, and a cuss falls out of him. "Fuck."

"Are—are you sure, beloved?" Alphinaud whispers, his face so dark a pink to be a dangerous red now.

"Oh, very," Izzie whispers back — before pulling down his waistband and taking him in full with her mouth.

The sight is so agonizingly perfect — her hair spilling in red sheets across her strong, freckled back onto Alphinaud’s snowy skin, her spine curved just so — that Jullus can do little but follow his instinct in this regard. He leans over her back, lips to the nape of her neck, one palm to the valley of her spine, and he presses himself inside of her.

He silences himself by fastening his mouth over her skin. Every single neuron in his body lights up with pleasure and wanting, hearing her squeak around Alphinaud's cock when he takes her, the full softness of her surrounding him so completely.

Alphinaud throws his head back. One of his hands goes to his mouth, squeezing to smother his cry, while the other threads into Izzie's hair between her ears, half-pulling.

Neither of them can last long like this. Jullus can scarcely believe the beauty of her muffled cries against Alphinaud — and while he would prefer her able to sing out loud for him, for them both, there is something so deeply lovely in how she has to smother herself or be found out. How she wants to save it just for them.

His fingers dig into her waist. He tries to keep his pace controlled, something akin to quiet, but the sight of her so taken between them is intoxicating, heady, everything he could ever dream of. He leans down again, hand rough in her hair, yanking it aside to nearly bite down on the meat of her shoulder as he comes hard inside of her — an insane part of him wanting to leave a mark that would never fade.

If he cannot touch her soul like Alphinaud, by every star, he would mark her body with proof of his conviction. Fill her, paint her, kiss every last jut of bone and muscle.

Alphinaud comes not long after that, back bowing, eyes squeezed shut from the effort of not calling her name aloud. He yanks her up by the head into a long, searing kiss, leaving Jullus, suddenly boneless from exhaustion, to kiss a trail across her hips, arms still circled about her waist.

They collapse then into their shared bedrolls, a tangled mess of limbs and sweat, ears buzzing, fingers numb. Izzie is pressed between them on her back. Jullus sprawls possessively over her, face buried in her neck, while Alphinaud pulls her half onto his body, her head lolling into his chest, where her ears can align with his heartbeat.

Alphinaud's arms encircle them all.

Let the gods march in, Jullus thinks, sleep tearing him down into the void. Not even they could pull me from this.

---

They are a little more sane by the time the blue light of morning pools in.

And in an unusual twist — one perhaps inspired by Izzie recalling her old life — Alphinaud still sleeps while Jullus and Izzie wake.

Jullus leans over her body, propped up by an elbow. He stares down at her, his muscles sleepy and honey-like as he takes in her bare, morning-lit body, a silken sort of pink beneath him. His fingers slip her hair from her face and out of her mouth. He rumbles with quiet laughter. Nothing about her is ever truly peaceful.

Her hands come up to touch his chest as she curls into him. One palm spreads over his beating heart.

“Is it very strange for you?” she asks, voice so quiet. “That we…that this is how we…connect?”

He searches her face, so wide open. A nightblossom moments before moonset. “What do you mean?”

“I…” Her gaze goes to that middle distance, like she could physically summon the words in front of her to sort them out. “I find myself…shocked by it, sometimes, how badly I…want you like this.” Her fingers stretch up toward his collarbones. “Because for a long time I…worried such things were just…surface level because that’s how people around me…talked about it.”

He curls a finger in one smooth lock of fire red hair. “I know it’s not surface level, sweetling,” he whispers gently. It hits him slowly, molasses pouring out. “Are you worried it makes it seem like you love me less?”

Izzie’s shoulders loosen. She nods, a little jerky motion. “I know it has to be different, from Alphinaud, or else…there’s no beauty in that, if it was all the same…” Her eyes flutter shut for a moment. “...and you do complete me in a wholly different way than he does. I need you to know that. That it matters to me, so much.”

He leans down and kisses her gently on the lips — slow and gentle as the light outside, quiet and intent. His hands cradle her head, fingers in her hair. “I do,” he says against her skin. “Of course I do.” He noses her jaw aside and presses a kiss to her heart’s vein in her neck. She gives the softest, tiniest sigh.

They had both been raised by societies that wielded sex as a strange double-edged weapon, with rules as impossible to pin down as the people who lived in those worlds. A dark vein of shame haunted them both. You’re being frivolous, you’re hedonists, you’re corrupted and too voracious and selfish. You’ve ruined her; she’s supposed to be nothing to you, a notch. You are dirtied by the power of how much you want the other — to say nothing of the presence of another man, which makes you not only frivolous but deviant.

“I love you,” she says, relieved.

Looking down into her sea glass eyes — glancing at Alphinaud, a snow prince in the morning light — he does not know how any of that could have ever been true.

“And I love you,” he says back, because it is the easiest thing in the world to do so. He grins, all teeth, down at her. “Now come here. Our time together is always so limited, you know.”

Alphinaud, poor sweet Alphinaud, wakes to the sight of Izzie’s back pulled in tight against Jullus’s chest, one hand around her mouth and the other two fingers deep inside of her, her whole body lit up like fireworks.

“Well, aren’t you audacious,” Alphinaud half-growls at Jullus, the cat having caught the mice at play. He leans in to steal the man’s mouth in a kiss of his own, hand tight and possessive about his jaw. The other goes to Izzie’s waist. “The nerve.”

Jullus chokes down a laugh, quite at the taller man’s mercy as he pushes them over, smothering them both.

They are, the three of them, quite distracted for long moments after that.

[goddessofmischief]

Hey, thanks for tagging :) I am 34, so the "old men" are not so old to me and quite frankly, watching Shanks, Buggy and Mihawk in OPLA is feeling like coming home to old friends back from 20 years ago. (I was crushing on Shanks and Buggy so much...😅) So I thought, maybe you could write something where fem!reader already knows them and has a soft spot for each of them, since back when they were flirting and making fun when they were young. Now as adults they meet again and the chemistry is still there.

I remember one of my stories from back then. I was jealous of mermaids, because all the pirates got stupid once they're around, and a drunk Shanks said: "nah, you wouldn't like to be one; You'd be missing slamming doors and Buggy would drown on daily basis just to say hi-." Both Buggy and Reader: "shut up! So not true!". Just like young stupids are... :)

Anyways, thanks for your writing and I can't wait to read more about the "get-shit-done"-squad Mihawk, Shanks and Buggy

     — MERMAIDS (YOUNG SHANKS X READER, YOUNG BUGGY X READER)

A/N: Hope this is alright: since your formal request was so in line with what the theme of the series will be anyway, I used the excerpt of your line as basis for this particular fic. All credit of course goes to you for coming up with the lines and the idea. On a personal note, I just want to say how much I respect that you were an OG fic writer and still have interest in and love for these characters. Welcome home.

...

You would have believed that you had been at sea for years, until Buggy reminded you that it had only been weeks.

Granted, this is how he reminded you:

"It's been wee-eks," Buggy whined, stretching out on his hammock. Shanks was collapsed against the wall, fingers knotted together, eyes not really focused on any particular place.

And you? You were lying on the floor, gazing up at the wooden ceiling, wondering if it would be a good idea to leave the cabin and see the stars.

Being on the ship for weeks was highly irregular for your crew. Great captain he was, Roger knew he could only keep this ragtag group sane if they stepped onto shore and ate an orange every once in awhile. This concern was triply inflated by the fact that he had three young adults onboard who became very antsy if they had to stay in one place for too long. Your patience certainly rivaled Buggy's or even Shanks', but even you had your limit, and you had met it long ago.

The ship would have planned to make port nearly a week before, but the World Government was closer to finding you than ever. It was simply too dangerous.

You soon learned how your friends reacted to a situation such as this. Shanks had retreated mostly into silence, with exception of the odd joke or attempt at conversation, and Buggy had decided he blamed you both somehow for this situation and that any words exchanged with either of you would only be of the complaining nature.

"I know, Bugs," said Shanks, and you were surprised to hear him answer Buggy's complaint. You exchanged glances with him, then turned back to Buggy.

"Let's go outside, yeah?" you suggested. "Do something fun."

"Everyone's outside," Buggy complained. "They've been yelling over something for hours."

"And you didn't think that was important to mention, Bugs?" Shanks asked, irritably. Buggy shrugged.

...

The thing that had sparked such interest in the crew was simply that, as your ship had sailed very far into the deepest waters, much farther than usual, you had sailed into a home of mermaids. Extremely dangerous, and the crew knew it.

It did not negate their interest whatsoever, though.

Pirates get stupid when mermaids are around. It is a core trait of pirates and no less than a sacred tenet of piracy itself. More than a few decent men have been seduced to the sea by the very concept of mermaids, and to that end, the idea of finding one.

Shanks and Buggy were no exception.

You had never really taken the care to notice how they behaved with girls. Their flirting was of no interest to you, and so you didn't bother to surveil it. But it came to your attention now that they had terribly different styles: namely, that Buggy was mostly content to sit and watch from the edge of the deck, and Shanks was more interested in yelling, waving, and nearly falling off the boat.

Granted, by this time, alcohol had become involved, and all bets were off.

Despite all the excitement, the first in weeks, Shanks had begun to notice how quiet you'd become. He approached you, somewhat cautiously, hoping you wouldn't react with a retort or a threat.

"You okay?"

You nodded, staring at the drink you held.

"You sure?"

You shrugged, whispering something under your breath that Shanks struggled to hear.

"What's that?"

You spoke again, slightly more than a whisper, but Shanks heard it all the same.

"...I wish I was a mermaid."

"You wish you were a mermaid?" He repeated loudly, almost outraged. You shushed him, and he just laughed.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, it's just... nah, you wouldn't like to be one. You'd be missing... slamming doors, and Buggy would drown himself on a daily basis just to say hi-"

"Shut up!" you giggled. "So not true!"

"And then, of course, there'd be all the pirates. I wouldn't like sharing you with them."

"I'm a pirate. You're a pirate."

"I'm a different sort of pirate. And you're barely a pirate at all."

You shrank back, inexplicably hurt by Shanks' drunken offhand insult.

"I'm as much of a pirate as you."

"Of course you are. I didn't mean that. Not like that. I mean, you're just... you're very careful, you're much too good for us. You're not messy or mean like the rest of us are."

"What do you think I am, then?"

"A princess," he blurted out, and you tried not to laugh. "I've always thought so."

"Always?"

"Mhm. The whole time."

You studied Shanks' face, seeing him in a new light that you'd never glimpsed anyone in before. Had he always been this cute, or charming, or kind?

Well, it didn't matter if he always had been, because he was now, and before you had given much thought to it at all you were pushing his straw hat back and he was meeting your lips in a kiss, your first, his first.

"You're a terribly nice pirate," you mumbled.

"You're a terribly beautiful princess," he replied.

You both parted awkwardly, staring at each other with confused half-smiles and resigning to focusing your attentions back on the ocean. For now, it was merely a strange evening, a shooting star, but later on, you would remember that night as the precise moment you began to love Red-Haired Shanks.

And Buggy, watching from across the ship, would remember that night as the second time a deep knot of resentment grew in his chest, one that would only become larger with time. The first time had been as a child, when Shanks had done something exceptionally well where Buggy had failed, and Roger placed his famous straw hat onto his head.

The second time was tonight, because of you.

taglist: @sawendel @twinklesnake

[romaine2424]

Daily Blog June 26, 2023

Daughter was off work today so we went to lunch, the grocery store (Trader Joes), and then the to our local nursery to pick up some annuals...I'm a month or so late in doing so. The pickings were slim. She's now upstairs taking a nap. Ha ha ha.

What I'm reading:

Oops nothing today. This morning I was busy trying to figure out how to write myself out of a box I put myself into. I sent off the dilemma to my Alpha, @m0srael, looking for advice. If you've read her stories you know she can methodically plot!

I hope if you missed yesterday's blog that you take a look for the Drarry rec I made.

Tumblr posts of interest:

Oh this is a good one. Just came across my feed. It's a post from @givereadersahug, who I just followed. In HPRECS community on Dreamwidth they are starting a weekly post called "What have I been reading?". Take a look at the post for details and then go over to Dreamwidth and check out even more posts they want to do on a weekly basis like a self-rec day. Building a community to share love of fic and art is terrific.

Okay, this link isn't on Tumblr but it's dead useful for those posting on AO3. Its the AO3 Work Skins/Tutorial. Ever come across a fic that has a newspaper article posted in it that looks very cool, or invisible writing that has to be highlighted, stickynotes, etc... Go take a look and you can see what all is offered.

One last item of Interest. Wondering what hp fests are going on or about to go? To this day, I think Potterfests' HP Fest News Round-up on LJ is the best. Seriously, take a look at that 2nd link for last week's roundup! Amazing.

Musings or Old idea but don't know how to implement it.

When I came back to fandom, I saw a topic that is as old as posting fanfic on whatever site and that is complaining about the same authors and stories being recced. It was a common complaint 20 years ago, too. Whether it's true or not, I'm not going to get into that kerfuffle, but I will say, it's much harder to get a fic seen these days. On LJ and Dreamwidth there was and I assume still are communities that anyone could post a fic or art to and everyone that subscribed to that community would see it. For Drarry on LJ harrydraco and on Dreamwidth (okay can't find the hd community there. I'll fill in the link when I can).

On Tumblr, you are at the mercy of your tags or the fest you might have joined. Also, thankfully @drarryspecificrecsdaily helps out too. In Discord, depending on the server, there's usually a channel for self-rec. Also the fabulous reccers (a topic for another day) do help immensely.

This discussion happened on Discord 2 years ago and I proposed that somehow we have a place where every author could post a link to what they considered to be their best Drarry story already posted on AO3. I was hoping to do this on AO3 and even came up with the corny name of "My Drarry Best". I also bid in @fandomtrumpshate for @ihopeyoubothstaysafefromharm to create a banner. However, after reading what's allowed for posting on AO3, I don't think it's possible to do it there.

I still think it's a good idea for both authors (to be showcased) and readers (to find quality fics and authors they weren't aware of) but I haven't a clue how to implement it and where. Any ideas? BTW I selfishly stopped @ihopeyoubothstaysafefromharm from working on it and instead I'll be having a Christmas fic with some illustrations once I finish the final chapter. :D

That's all for today.

Have a good week! Rom

[sineala]

How would you say fandom culture has changed over the years? What are some differences you notice between older and younger fandom folks?

I’ve been thinking for a while about how to answer this, and I’m not sure I have a really good answer, but I’m going to try.

I’ve been in fandom since approximately 1995. Maybe 1994. At that point, the world wide web was a relatively new part of the internet, and the fandoms I was in had most of their activity on privately-hosted mailing lists (predating eGroups/OneList/Yahoo Groups) and on Usenet newsgroups, with fiction beginning to be available on websites as part of either fandom-specific or pairing-specific archives as well as authors’ individual pages. Fanfiction.net did not yet exist. LiveJournal did not exist. AO3 definitely did not exist. If you wanted real-time chat, there was IRC. I was coming in basically at the tail end of zine fandom; zines were no longer the only way of distributing fanfiction, as fandom started to move online. So I have a selection of zines from 90s-era Western media fandoms but even by then zines weren’t where I was doing most of my reading.

I think in terms of generally “what it was like to be in fandom,” the big-picture stuff hasn’t changed. Fandom still produces creative fanwork and likes to, y’know, get together and talk about fandom. Also, almost every fight or complaint that fandom has about something is a thing that has been going on for actual years. People complain that, say, the kudos button is ruining comment culture because back in the LJ days the only way you could comment on a story was, well, by leaving an actual comment, or sending an email on a mailing list, and this might mean that people who would have otherwise commented have left a kudos instead. But back in the LJ and mailing list days, people were complaining that commenting was going downhill since the days of zines, when in order to comment on a story you had to write a real paper letter and mail it and because you had to do that, the quality of feedback was so much better than you got nowadays because people could just dash off a quick email or comment. You get the idea. Top/bottom wars are not new either. Pairing wars are not new. If you’ve been in fandom a while, you will pretty much have seen all the fights already. I think one thing that is new, though, is the fandom awareness of things like privilege and intersectionality and various -isms, as well as things like “providing warnings might be nice” (do you know how much unwarned deathfic I have read? a lot!) and I sure won’t say we’re perfect at any of this now, but I think fandom is trying way way more about all that stuff than it used to.

There are some fights we actually don’t have anymore, as far as I can tell. I feel like it’s been years since I’ve seen the “real person fiction is wrong” battle, but also I don’t hang out in a whole lot of RPF fandoms, so it’s possible that’s still going and I just don’t see it.

There also used to be a recurring debate about whether gay relationships that were canonical were slash or not. When slash started, obviously this wasn’t a question because there weren’t canonical gay relationships in fandoms, period. But as gay characters began to appear in media, people started to wonder “does slash mean all same-sex relationships, or does slash mean only non-canonical same-sex relationships?” Now, you may be reading this and think that sounds like an incredibly weird thing to get hung up on, but that’s because what appears to have happened is that the term “ship” (originally from X-Files Mulder/Scully fandom) has, as far as I can tell, come up and eaten most of the rest of the terminology. Now people will just say, “oh, I ship that.” For any pairing, gay or not, canonical or not. Fandom seems to have decided that for the most part it no longer actually needs a term specific to same-sex relationships as a genre.

Similarly, there are a few genres of fic that we used to have also pretty much don’t exist anymore. There are also plenty of genres that are well-entrenched now that are also extremely recent -- A/B/O comes to mind. But there are some kinds of fic we don’t write a lot of now. Like, I haven’t seen smarm in years! I also haven’t seen We’re Not Gay We Just Love Each Other in a while. There was also a particular style of slash writing where you’d basically have to explain, in detail, what made you think that these particular characters could be anything other than straight. You’d have to motivate this decision. You’d have to look at their canonical heterosexual relationships and come up with a way to explain why all those had happened in order to reconcile how this one guy could have romantic feelings for another guy. When had he figured out he wasn’t straight? Who might he have been with before? How does he interact with people in ways that make you think he’s not straight? That kind of thing. You had to, essentially, show your work. And these days a lot of fanfic is just like, “Okay, Captain America is bisexual, let’s go!” It’s... different.

Fandom also used to skew older, is my sense. A lot older. I don’t know, actually, if it really was older, but I get the sense now that there are some younger people who are surprised that adults are still in fandom. I have seen people saying these days that they think they’re too old for fanfiction because they are not in middle school anymore. And I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that the barriers to access fandom are a lot lower than they used to be. You used to basically have to be an adult with disposable income (or know an adult with disposable income who was willing to help you out; but even then if you were reading explicit fiction you also had to swear you were 18+, usually by sending in an age statement to whoever you were buying the zine from or to the mods of the list you wanted to join, so a lot of fandom was very much age-gated). Internet access was not widely available. Even if you had internet access, you maybe didn’t have your own email address, so you couldn’t sign up for mailing lists; free email providers didn’t exist. If you wanted to buy zines, you had to have money to buy them. If you wanted to go to cons, you had to be able to afford the cost of the con, travel to the con, et cetera. If you wanted to have a website you had to know HTML. Social media did not exist. You want to draw art? Guess what, you’re probably drawing it on paper! You might be able to upload a picture to your website if you have a digital camera or a scanner, but both of those things are expensive, and also a lot of people don’t have the capability or the money to download pictures from the internet (some people have data caps with overage charges, and some people have text-only connections!), so they won’t get to see it. Maybe you can sell your piece at a con! You want to make a fanvid? We called them songvids, but, anyway, you know how you’re doing that? You’re going to hook two VCRs together and smash the play and record buttons very fast! If you want anyone else to watch them, you are either making them a tape personally and mailing it to them or bringing your vids to a convention. Maybe you can digitize them and upload them, but it’s going to take people hours to download them!

(Every three hours my ISP would kick me off the internet and I’d have to dial in again. If it was a busy time of day, it might take me 20 or 30 minutes to get a connection again. And that was assuming no one else in the house needed to use the phone line. Imagine if your modem went out every three hours now.)

And now, for the cost of my internet connection, I can read pretty much whatever fanfiction I want, whenever I want it. I can see all the fanart I want! I can watch vids! Podfic exists now! Fanmixes exist! Gifsets and moodboards exist! If I want to write fic I can write it with programs that are completely free, and as soon as I post it everyone in the entire world can read it. If I want to draw or make vids that may require some additional investment, but I may also be able to do it with things I already have. Do you have any idea how good we all have it?

There are a couple of kinds of fan activity that don’t seem to exist anymore, though, and I miss them. I know that roleplaying still goes on, but I feel like these days most people who do real-time text roleplay have switched to things like Discord. I know that in the LJ days, RP communities were popular. But I really miss MU*s (MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, MUXes..), which were servers for real-time text-based RP with a bunch of... hmm... features to aid RP. There were virtual rooms with text descriptions, and objects in virtual rooms with descriptions, and your character had a description, and they could interact with the objects as well as with other characters, and you could program things to change descriptions or emit various kinds of text or take you to different rooms, and so on. Just to, y’know, enhance the atmosphere. It was fun and it was where I learned to RP and I’m sad they’re pretty much gone now.

I also don’t think I see a lot of fanfiction awards in fandoms. Wonder where they went.

Going back to the previous point, the barriers to actually consuming the canon you are fannish about are way, way, way lower now. You can pretty much take it for granted that if right now someone tells you about a shiny new fandom, there will be a way to read that book or watch that show or movie right now. Possibly for free! Of course you can watch it! Why wouldn’t you be able to?

This was absolutely, absolutely not the case before. I’m currently in Marvel Comics fandom. If there is a comic I want to read, I can read it right now on the internet. I have subscribed to Marvel Unlimited and I can read pretty much every comic that is older than three months old; the newer ones cost extra money. But I can do it all from the comfort of my own home right now. I was also, actually, in Marvel Comics fandom in the nineties. If I wanted to read a comic, I had to go to a comic book store and hope they had it in stock; if they didn’t, I had to try another store. Not a lot of comics were available in trade paperback and they definitely weren’t readable on the internet. I used to read a lot of Gambit h/c fic set after Uncanny X-Men #350. I never found a copy of UXM #350. I still haven’t! But I did eventually read it on Unlimited.

Being in TV show fandoms also had similar challenges. Was the show you were watching still on the air? No? Then you’d better hope you could find it in reruns, or know someone who had tapes of it that they could copy for you, otherwise you weren’t watching that show. It was, I think, pretty common for people to be in fandoms for shows they hadn’t seen, because they had no way to see the show, but they loved all the fanfic. The Sentinel had a whole lot of fans like that, both because I think it took a while for it to end up in reruns and because overseas distribution was probably poor. So you’d get people who read the fic and wrote fic based on the other fic they’d read, which meant that you got massive, massive amounts of fanon appearing that people just assumed was in the show because it was a weirdly specific detail that appeared in someone’s fic once. Like “Jim and Blair’s apartment has a small water heater” (not actually canonical) or “Blair is a vegetarian” (there’s an episode where his mother visits and IIRC cooks him one of his favorite meals, which is beef tongue).

Like, I was in The Professionals fandom for years. I read all the fic. I hadn’t seen the show. As far as I know, it never aired in the US, and it certainly never had any kind of US VHS or DVD release. I’d seen a couple songvids. I eventually saw a couple episodes in maybe 2003, and that was because my dad special-ordered a commercial VHS tape from the UK and paid someone to convert it from PAL to NTSC. I didn’t get to see the whole show until several years later when I got a region-free DVD player someone in fandom sent me burned copies of the UK DVD releases and then I special-ordered the commercial release of the DVDs from the UK myself. But if I were a new fan and wanted to watch Pros right now? It is on YouTube! For free!

I think also one of the things about fandom that’s not immediately evident to new fans is the way in which it is permanent and/or impermanent. There are probably people whose first fannish experience is on Tumblr or who only read fanfic on FFN and who have no idea what they would do if either site, say, just shut down. But if you’ve been in fandom a while, you’ve been through, say, Discord, Tumblr, Twitter, Pillowfort, Imzy, DW, JournalFen, LJ, GeoCities, IRC, mailing lists. And sure, if Tumblr closed, it would be inconvenient. But fandom would pack up and move somewhere else. You would find it again. It would, eventually, be okay. Similarly, if you’ve been in a lot of fandoms, if you’ve made a lot of friends, drifting through fandoms is like that. You’ll make a friend in 1998 because you were in the same fandom, and then you might go your own ways, and ten years later you might be in another fandom with them again! It happens.

But the flip side of that is that I think a lot of older fans have learned not to trust in the permanence of any particular site. If you like a story, you save it as soon as you read it. If you like a piece of art, you save it. If you like a vid, you save it. Because you don’t know when the site it’s on will be gone for good. I have, like, twenty years of lovingly-curated fanfic. And I feel like people who have only been in fandom since AO3 existed might not understand how much AO3 is a game-changer compared to what we had before. It’s a site where you can put your fic up and you don’t have to worry that the webhost is going out of business, or that the site might delete your work because they don’t allow gay fiction or explicit fiction or fiction written in second person or fiction for fandoms where the creator doesn’t like fanfiction, or whatever. Because all of those things have absolutely happened. But, I mean, I still save pretty much everything I like, even on AO3, just in case.

So, basically, yeah, fandom is a whole lot more accessible than it used to be. I think fandom is pretty much still fandom, but it’s a lot easier to get into, and that has made it way more open to people who wouldn’t have been able to be in fandom before. There is so, so much more now than there ever was before, and I think that’s great.

[mrpenguinpants]

Genshin: Roommate HCs [V1]

To be honest, I just wanted to ramble some more and let my brainworms take over. This is sorta late but Happy Valentine’s everyone! I was gonna post this earlier but this honestly took me a long time to write so I moved it to today. 

Once again, this is 90% crack 10% content. Seriously, as much as I love writing this non-serious fics. Why do you people like this?

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Based off my ramblings with Keqing anon: Link

Genshin: Holding Hands [V1]

Genshin: When you’re cold [V1]

Genshin: University AU [V1]

Genshin: Royalty AU [V1]

[Masterlist]

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[taglist]  <- if you want to be added, please read this first.

@youaskedfurret @diaxfeliz @wintergreen-aix @kaechu @thegayrubberducky @lovelykittycatmeow @yuunoagivesmelife​  @dokidokisama @rokipersonal​@minakohasmanyhusbandos​ @strwbrry-lia @tigerpriestess​ @yuu-yuukurotsuki​ @hanniejji​  @mikeysbike @unionwitch @musekala @sunnshiii​ @stanzastic @akaasea​ @xoneaboveallx​ @adoring-ghost​ @asheseiler​ @childelover​ @dilucsz​ @dai-tsukki-desu​ @thicmitten​ @nonniechan​ @htnicayh​ @genshins1mpact​ 

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Diluc

What? Diluc has a roommate? Did you blackmail him in living with you? Is that even possible? Did you throw yourself in front of his car because you needed someone to pay for your student loans and the easiest way was to file a lawsuit? In this economy no one would blame you. Diluc seems like such the self-isolated character that would murder his roommate in cold blood but in reality, he act’s detached from the world because he forgot how to socialize and he’s desperately trying to cover it up without choking. That or he’s trying to learn how to astral project. If he could drink away the pain he would but instead he buys 20 packs of grape Kool-Aid and injects it into his veins. 

Does not and will not ever have a normal sleeping schedule. You’ll wake up to him working, come back home to him working, and will sleep to him still working. His daily dose of Vitamin D is from the brightness of his screen rather than the sun and he’s filter feeding at this point. It’s concerning. He’s going to crumble and he’s bringing the world down with him. Through the power of tax evasion. But as soon as he needs to walk out into society, he pulls movie magic and looks like perfection. It’s both physically and mentally disgusting. 

He’s actually is a really nice roommate to have just so long as you give him space. Great cook and knows to clean up after himself. Though he does have crash and burn days where’s he’s completely out of commission. You could set the entire apartment on fire and he would sleep through it. The entire two weeks are dedicated to zombie eye marathons and then he’ll suddenly collapse and sleep for 46 hours straight. When he wakes up from his hibernation he’s the most groggy and nonsensical person. His life blood is coffee because you keep hiding the 5 hour energy away from him because, you know, life is enjoyable and those cancer bottles will actually kill him.  

“University sucks our money out of our bodies faster than our will to live.” 

Beidou [Happy Birthday Queen 💕]

Despite her appearance, she’s actually really strong and it scares the piss out of you when you’re doing something or scrolling through your phone mindlessly and you suddenly get your spine re-arranged when she slaps you on the back to ask what you’re doing. Likewise, when she hoists you up and throws you over her shoulder so you come with her on her 3am convivence store raids for alcohol. It’s either you change now or else we’re walking out of the apartment in your t-shirt and no pants self. She can and will carry you under her arm that way. It’s both incredibly attractive and horrifying at the same time. 

She’s really friendly and a great talker if you’re alright with her “I must hold you in my arms, fresh prince of bel air style”. It doesn’t matter if you’re taller than her, she’s doing it. She does however, get in a bit of trouble from her rowdiness and you often get noise complaints but Beidou just passes them off to Ningguang and everything is fixed. She has ovaries of steel when neighbors rather confront her personally and she’s ready to 1v1 in the parking lot. You’re trying to desperately hold onto her shirt to stop her from pile driving your neighbors for the third time this week but she’s too strong.  

She’s constant party until we die attitude and suffers the hangover in the morning. It’s actually really funny to catch her in her hangover moods because whatever filter Beidou had, which is none, is gone. She really takes “cursing like a sailor” or the next level and the amount of creativity she comes up with is actually impressive. She can be a bit messy but she’s really likeable and always down to go anywhere with you as long as you’ll do the same. It’s a very ride together, we die together situation. You’re my best friend, you’re dying with me. I’ll see you in hell. 

“Imma T pose over my dad and then crash the car into the parking garage.” 

Kaeya

Kaeya on the surface seems like such a chill roommate. And he is for the most part. But he’s such an ass. Your things are his things, no questions asked. If you just bought a really nice sweater or you had leftover food, that’s his now. He’s innocent until proven guilty even if he’s literally holding your lunch. The pure amount of bullshit he can spit out to convince you that no, he did not pull the fire alarm because he wanted an excuse for not going to work, puts him on Shakespeare level. He’s also very pretty, way too pretty, sir can you share some of your genes? 

But aside from that, he’s actually super dependable. You forgot something at home? Sure, he has nothing better to do so he can bring them for you. We’re missing eggs? No problem, he’s just by the store. You’re 95% sure that he just wants to be cheeky and make you thank him for 20 minutes before he actually hands you what you asked for. It’s better for you if you never tell him anything you’re afraid of because Kaeya has no social cues, or more like he throws them out the window, and he’s probably a psychopath. 

He’s incredibly private of his room and things despite his attitude towards yours. You’re convinced he either has a secret lab or that’s where he’s storing the bodies. I was the good guy but due to unfortunate circumstances, I need to stab a bitch. But he’s a really good serious talker for those 3am, because everything happens at 3am, talks about life and the meaning of the universe. It absolutely wrecks your sleep schedule but some of the things you talk about are the most crackhead things like what’s the lowest amount of money someone would have to pay you to walk outside without clothes? It’s a legitimate question. 

“Never before have I been so offended with something I 100% agree with.”

Jean

Okay, what world did you save in a past life to live with his absolutely wonderful woman? Mother Teresa take a load off, take a seat. You have nothing to worry about. She’ll bring home little treats back home and it’s the most wholesome thing ever?? Is this what love and affection feels like? We’ve been starved for so long. She says it’s not a big deal and anyone would do it BUT THE MOMENT SOMEONE BUYS FOOD FOR YOU. IT’S A MAGICAL MOMENT. They are forever stuck in your will until proven otherwise. An absolute ray of sunshine that must be protected. 

She does get super busy so you don’t often see each other or get to hang out as much. She’s a bit of a workaholic but a lot more easier to talk her into taking a break. She’s also a pretty decent cook but she prefers baking and jesus christ, girl can you calm down? Be still my beating heart, I’ve been smitten. Has mother hen vibes that you’re not sure if she’s your roommate or if she adopted you into her family. It’s time to start a petition for the Jean protection squad. Given the opportunity, I would aggressively hold your hand. 

She’s always open to whatever you want to do. Any recommendations or things that you like she will try out at least once despite her busy schedule. She’s lowkey lonely because work consumes her so any time you want to hang out or do something together, she jumps on it like she’s feral. She get’s a bit shy to ask if she can join in on your plans because she doesn’t want to bother you or intrude no matter how many times you tell her that’s okay, she still get’s a bit iffy about it. Please save this girl before she trips. In your arms. Platonically. Just kidding haha. Unless?

“I can’t wait to see you happy and not hating everyone again haha.”

Childe

First impressions of Childe were great, until he opened his mouth and you realized how much of a two brain cell child(e) he was. He has two braincells because they constantly have to 1v1 in his brain. He’s lived with a lot of siblings so he has no social awareness or concept of privacy that you’re lucky if you come home and he’s half-dressed. It doesn’t matter if you’re 2 weeks older than him, he’s going to call you 82 years old and why your bones aren’t being fossilized at this point. He’s such a little shit, this fucker licks the yogurt lid peel.  

He get’s really restless when he’s stuck under house arrest, because apparently 1v1ing in the parking lot of a Wendy’s is illegal for some reason, so he makes dying whale noises until he get’s to go outside again. But he’s actually a really wholesome guy, probably because of his younger siblings, that he’ll sometimes get you something because you seemed down and it’s such whiplash? Who is this man and where did he come from? You’re starting to have a change of heart before he tells you that he got banned from the library for accidently punching the school’s computer. How you “accidently” punch something you have no idea but Childe always comes home with some sort of injury. Maybe he’s just incredibly clumsy. For your sanity, you’re going to go with that. 

He’s actually so uncultured that it’s crippling. You can’t blame him too much considering his upbringing and it’s great that he’s so interested in learning new things but...child no...It makes you want to take your spine out of your ass and rip it like a Beyblade. Watching him take chopsticks and stab his food like it’s marshmallows makes you want to fall into a blackhole and let the chair consume you. 

“I, too, fantasize about beating the living shit out of people.”

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Is this another tag yourself game cause I resonate with Diluc. I’m crying in insomnia. As much as I enjoy writing these fics I absolutely hate tagging them. I remember I used to have a tag anon but that was back when I wrote for bnha. 

Valentine’s Day was fun tho. I had a drinking game with friends as we played league then ended it off with a movie night. 

[harrypotterbrainworms]

Found Family

Summary: “hi! I hope u r having a great day!💛 I was the one who request the ron x trans male reader and I have to say that I loved it! it was beautiful! if u are ok with it can I request one about how the weasley family would react about the reader first vacations after the transition? fluff please? a george x trans male reader pleaseI love ur fics! thanks for reading!” (request) 

Pairing: George Weasley x Trans Male Reader

Key: (Y/N)- your name 

Word Count: 1812

(A/N): Took a while to get this done, but I really like it and it was very sweet.

“Oh my god, they’re gonna hate me. My hair is too shaggy, it got too shaggy, didn’t it? My face, oh no. I look nothing like I did. My voice, my face, me.” (Y/N) moved uncomfortably running his hands through his hair every second he could. He felt as nervous as he did at the beginning of the year.

“It’s gonna be fine, love. They already love you, I promise they’ll just love you harder, knowing them.” George Weasley, his beloved boyfriend, grabbed his hands holding them gently in his hands with a sweet smile on his face.

“But-“

“No butts, but mine, my dear.” George replied pointing at the beautifully round mother who came running toward them, one hand carrying a bag of lunch for the car ride home and the other ready to pinch any one of her kid’s faces.

“Here goes nothing.” (Y/N) sucked in a long breath and exhaled with a huge smile on his face. He was happy to see his basically second mother, but more nervous by the seconds that passed.

“Oh my boys! It’s been so long since I’ve seen your beautiful faces” She kissed each of the kids except (Y/N). The anxiety really started to build up when she turned around to face the twins not even acknowledging his presence. He was starting to spiral fast, quickly grabbing Geogre’s hand for support.

“Fred. George. I didn’t get many complaints. Good job.” She said sterningly, a cautious finger pointed at them as she looked around for someone, oh no, (Y/N) thought. She didn’t get the 20 letters he’d sent or maybe she’d make him stop dating George. No way this was gonna work.

“Thanks, mum” The twins sighed with a slight smirk on both their faces, even with the instant hurricane (Y/N) was pulled in, he wondered what they were planning.

“Well who’s this?” Molly asked, turning to (Y/N). His nerves hit an all time high and his heart stopped for a moment.

“It’s-uh-“ He stuttered out, of course she didn’t know who he was. He was so different, he felt like running away at this point.

“I’m just messing with you, deary! We missed you so much (Y/N)” She laughed giving him a huge hug and a pat on the back. He laughed nervously and steadied himself again. Her “pats” were devilishly strong.

“I missed you too, Mrs Weasley” (Y/N) said self-consciously, he wasn’t usually so formal with her. He’d known her for years now, but it felt like he was presenting a completely new version of himself.

“Don’t be so formal, my dear. Molly will do just fine, now boys and Ginny. We have a long trip and a lot of food to eat” She was smiling wide as she helped (Y/N) pull his trunk up from the ground.

The car ride was long and tiring as usual as he watched London pass and the country come into view. He was especially nervous about tonight’s big dinner. George squeezed his hand and smiled as they both looked on to the unfolding countryside.

“It’s gonna be great. Dad is gonna get drunk and we’re gonna laugh. Just like old times” He tried to cheer his boyfriend up, but it weighed on his heart more.

“Just like old times.” A phrase he didn’t particularly enjoy in his life right now.

Arthur Weasley loved winter, especially when he was downing glass after glass of fire whiskey as he tried to make jokes and fork at his meal. He stood up suddenly and everyone knew what was coming-

“A toast! I would like to make a toast” He shouted a little too loudly as he brought his glass up to the air.

“Oh no. Dad’s drunk toast.” Fred huffed out nudging George’s who was too busy dazzling (Y/N) for the 10th time that day.

“Oh Merlin.” He whispered back and mentally buckled up for the ride.

“To this wonderful family, a wonderful evening and most importantly to this lovely gentleman for coming!” Arthur pointed not so subtly at (Y/N), a deep crimson starting to appear on his face.

“Cheers!” The twins chanted in unison, egging their father on. Trying to length the speech as much as they could for entertainment of course.

“And might I add! To my lovely wife and her big beautiful bosom-“ Mr. Weasley was about to go on about his beautiful wife’s beautiful bosom, but was thankfully interrupted by Molly spitting out her drink as he was pulled back into his seat.

“Arthur.”

“Ham. Her big beautiful ham, always the best cooking in this house of course.” He added from his seat raising his glass once more, everyone raising their own glasses to toast Molly’s “ham”.

“This family” George whispered into (Y/N)’s ear causing him to giggle as he was clinking glasses with the room full of people.

He sighed in bed as he rolled over to look at George who was actually reading for once, but he suspected it was for prank research. He kissed forehead lightly and grabbed his night robe.

“I’m going to get some water”

“Cool, love you”

“Love you too, idiot” He sighed and walked down the rickety stairs of the burrow finding him and George were probably the only ones awake at this hour. He didn’t really need a glass of water, just a quiet moment alone as he watched the snow fall from the kitchen window.

In his silent moment he must’ve lost track of everything in existence because he barely heard Molly coming down the stairs and sitting in the chair besides him.

“Hello, dear. Can’t sleep?” She spoke up making him jump.

“Yeah.”

“Let me make you some hot chocolate” She pushed herself up from the chair and pulled out a pot and ingredients.

“That’s oka-“ He tried to answer, but it wasn’t really a choice. He didn’t really mind. It was just about 2am and he didn’t want to cause her any troubles.

“Nonsense, we’re having hot chocolate” As she filled a pot with some milk, cocoa and sugar. He liked that she didn’t really use magic when cooking, it reminded him of home. Finishing their drink she placed two mugs on the table and sat beside him once again, staring into the window with him.

He sipped on his warm drink a little awkwardly, he wanted to ask what was plaguing his mind. He just never knew when was the right time, he took another sip and sighed.

“Um- Mrs- I mean Molly. You don’t think it’s weird?” He asked quickly before his courage faded.

“What is, deary?” Molly said absentmindedly, looking at him a little puzzled. He darted his eyes back and forth before looking down at himself and she then understood.

“Oh. Not at all, dear. I’ve known many young wizards such as yourself, very upright young men” She smiled warmly at him, his eyes widened a bit in hope and excitement.

“Really?” He said, a question no one really needed to answer. He knew the answer now.

“Of course. I’ve been around, my dear. Meet a lot of people” She put her hand on his and he choked up a bit.

“So you-“

“Yes, dear. Family is family. I would accept you in any form and way no matter what. You’re a Weasley and I’m proud of you” She knew what he needed, she had. He looked at her with so much love in his heart as his eyes started to well up.

She immediately put their mugs down and embraced him tightly as he silently sobbed into her clothing.

“Oh my, dear. It’s okay, you always have a place at this table” She hushed him as she rubbed circles around his back.

“Thank you, Molly” He said, looking up at her and she just smiled sweetly.

“You don’t need to thank me. It’s what a mother does, I have your back and every one of my children’s back.”

“Of course you do” He laughed a little and really let his thoughts ease up as he embraced him.

“Now, finish that hot chocolate and get to bed. I bet George is very worried about you right now” She said snuffing a bit as she stroked his hair as he continued to cry a bit. He gained composure and nodded into her.

“Yeah” He said, muffled by her nightgown.

“You’re a fine young man, my dear. George is lucky to have you, you keep those hooligans in check and most importantly. You love him and he loves you very much” He looked up at her pulling away from the hug, he swore he could see a few tear drops threatening to fall.

He took one last sip of the now room temperature drink and hugged Molly again, she gave him a kiss on forehead and sent him on his way.

He climbed up the stairs, his anxieties in the back of his mind as he rode his new found rush of happiness all the way back to George’s room.

“You smell like hot chocolate- oh no. Did mum talk to you? I hope she didn’t say anything weird, that woman is mad” George said as (Y/N) entered his room, but when he looked up from his copy of “Inconvenience Creation”, he saw the happiest smile on his boyfriend’s face. His heart felt warm and full, he was glad it went well.

“No actually. She said she was proud of me” (Y/N) smiled as he sat on the side of the bed, staring into space.

“Woah. She never says that to me, it’s worse than I thought. She’s replacing me with a better son” He teased and pulled his boyfriend into the bed with him, putting his book down. He breathed in his scent, his mum’s hot chocolate.

“Must’ve been some talk” He yawned and hugged his waist.

“Just don’t replace me anytime soon” He teased further earning a scoff and an eye roll.

“Shut up, asshole.” (Y/N) hit his arm and held his face up, planting a kiss on his forehead.

“I told you they would still love you.” He smirked at him reaching up to give him a soft kiss on the lips, but yawned mid kiss making (Y/N) laugh.

“I shouldn't have expected any different” (Y/N) pushed his hair out of face with a huge smile on his lips as he pulled the duvet over them.

“Damn right.” Geogre replied tiredly.

“I love you” He planted another kiss on his forehead, hugging him tight as he rubbed his boyfriend’s hand on his chest softly.

“Mhm. Me too” He snuggled his face into (Y/N)’s neck, he just stroked George’s hair until he heard soft snores coming from his boyfriend. He sighed happy and exhausted as he slowly fell asleep himself.

[morganaspendragonss]

request for you -> no. 65 💗💜💙

holly's august extravaganza day 20: can't smile without you

thank you! this is a follow-up to my previous fic a hole where your memory goes

65) “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can barely fucking breathe because they’re gone and it’s my fault. And god knows what they’re doing to them right now and I’m just sitting here doing nothing!” (from this list)

ao3 | 1.6k | angst with a happy ending, supportive firefam, kidnapping, mentioned amputation

before.

Carlos would be lying to himself if the possibility hadn’t occurred to him before. He has always worried for TK’s safety, and the knowledge that a serial killer is on the loose in Austin has sent that worry skyrocketing. Especially because he’s the lead detective on the case; he’s spent hours poring over horrific crime scenes, examining all the facts until they’re burned into his brain.

Admittedly, the killers seem to be mostly indiscriminate in who they take, meaning the chances of it being TK are slim.

But there’s still a chance.

Carlos doesn’t like the thought of TK going out alone anymore, but he tries to push down his protective instincts to normal levels, for TK’s sake. TK thinks he’s being ridiculous—but then, TK only knows what the news has said about the case. Carlos has refused to talk about it at home, mostly because he’s not supposed to, but also because he doesn’t want to scare his husband.

He won’t admit it, but Carlos is scared enough for the both of them.

But as the case wears on and no new leads appear, things change. The fear… It doesn’t get lesser, or disappear, but it becomes something he’s used to; something, really, he’s been used to ever since they first began dating all those years ago. And the thing about being a detective—the person who investigates and solves the crimes—is that it’s easy to believe that these are things that happen to other people.

Carlos knows he’s not invincible. But there’s something about his job that has him marking out his home as a safe bubble, where the horrors he sees on the daily can’t enter.

Later, when he thinks back on it all, he won’t remember the moment he let himself get so lax. What he will remember, all too clearly, is the moment he lost everything.

“Babe, I’m going out!” TK shouts, his voice reaching Carlos where he’s washing up in the kitchen. “I’ll be back soon; don’t wait up.”

Carlos smiles, but doesn’t turn around, knowing TK will probably be halfway out the door by now anyway. “Have a good run,” he says instead. Seconds later, he hears the door shut and lock, and he carries on with his night. His shift had been long, so he goes to bed pretty quickly, certain in the knowledge that, when he wakes up, TK will be by his side again, as always.

He wakes up at two am to a cold bed, and Carlos’s world crumbles.

during.

Seventy-three days after TK’s disappearance, Carlos is sitting in the firehouse kitchen, nursing a cup of coffee and wondering what, exactly, he’s doing here. He should be at work, going over the case, doing everything he can to find TK; not here, the one place he hasn’t set foot in since that awful day.

“Carlos,” Paul said, surprise colouring his voice. He narrowed his eyes, clearly noting the grief hanging heavy around Carlos, and a brief fear flickered across his expression. “Is everything okay?”

Carlos swallowed, unable to meet Paul’s eyes. “I, uh. Is Owen around?”

“Yeah, he’s in his office. You can head on up if you want.”

He nodded and took a step forward, before being suddenly hit by a realisation. “Actually, Paul?” he asked. “Could you gather everyone? You all deserve to hear this from me, but I don’t think I have the strength to say it twice.”

Paul’s eyes widened, the fear returning in full force. Carlos knew he must have joined the dots by now—TK not showing up for work, Carlos appearing, looking, probably, wrecked… There was only one conclusion to be drawn.

Even so, Carlos didn’t think any of them would have imagined something this bad, and the looks on their faces when they found out broke him all over again.

He sighs and stares down into his coffee, swirling the cooling dregs around the mug. He doesn’t want to be here; even now, seventy-three days afterwards, part of him still thinks he’s going to look up and see him walking around the corner. The feeling is even worse at home, but Carlos only really goes there to sleep and, occasionally, eat. TK’s nightstand is still occupied by the book he was reading, his shoes lie abandoned by the front door, his shampoo going untouched next to Carlos’s own.

The memories there threaten to suffocate him, so he chooses to let them gather dust.

The firehouse is quiet, and there’s an itch in Carlos’s bones telling him to get up and get going. He grits his teeth and tries to force himself to stay put, for his friends’ sake if nothing else, but it’s an impossible task, and he ends up shoving himself out of the chair. For once, no-one is around to spot him, so he turns, fully intent on sneaking out, when his eyes catch on the 126’s memorial wall.

It’s the same as it has been for years, Tim’s photo right alongside those of the old 126. A thought enters Carlos’s mind, unbidden, and it sticks in his head, keeping his gaze locked on the wall.

How long until TK ends up there too?

Carlos’s breath trembles, his hands bunching into fists at his side. The rest of the firehouse fades into background noise until all Carlos can see is the wall of photos and the memory of TK’s voice on the night he left.

Judd appears from seemingly nowhere, Carlos jumping when his hands land on his shoulders. “Sit.”

“No,” Carlos protests, shoving at Judd. “No, let me go.”

But Judd just folds his arms and refuses to budge, looking down at Carlos with a mixture of sympathy and determination in his eyes. “Look, Carlos, I have no idea what you’re going through,” he says, “but you’re running yourself into the ground and you’re going to burn out. TK—”

“Don’t.” Carlos grits his teeth, glaring at Judd. “Don’t say it. You all—You all keep saying the same shit, but I’m pretty sure the only thing TK wants right now is to be away from wherever they’re keeping him. And it’s my job to do that for him! Judd, it is literally my job to find these people and I just keep failing and I should be out there; I should be looking for him, so just—just let me go!”

“Carlos, you need to calm down.”

“Calm down?” There’s a sob building in Carlos’s chest, the ever-present ache growing until it eclipses anything else he has inside him. “I can’t calm down, and you know what else? I can’t eat, I can’t sleep, I can barely fucking breathe because he’s gone and it’s my fault. And god knows what they’re doing to him right now and I’m just sitting here doing nothing! I’m sitting here, drinking coffee, when he’s—he’s—”

The words stick in his throat and Carlos gives in to the tears, letting the emotion overwhelm him. His legs give out and he slumps back down in the chair by the kitchen island, saved from sliding to the floor by Judd, who cradles Carlos’s head against his chest. Judd’s uniform is probably getting soaked, but he makes no complaint, simply holding Carlos as he cries.

“I know,” he shushes, rubbing a large hand in circles on Carlos’s back. “I know.”

He doesn’t, but Carlos takes solace in it anyway.

after.

Carlos chews on his lip, anxiously watching as TK is settled in his wheelchair. It’s been a month since TK came home from the hospital, and the first time he’s going out without Carlos.

“Ready, Strand?” Judd asks. TK nods, and time feels like it slows down as Judd grips onto the chair’s handles, muscles tensing to push.

“Wait!” He seizes a blanket from the couch—TK’s favourite—and rushes over, kneeling down in front of his husband. “You’ll get cold.”

It’s true; after all the weight he lost, TK feels the cold so much more these days. He knows that TK, and probably some of the crew, thinks he’s being over-protective, but Carlos is terrified of him getting sick. Of losing him, for good this time. So he tucks the blanket around TK’s leg, the other one’s absence still glaring after all this time, giving more attention to the task than it warrants.

He’s stopped by a hand slipping into his, and he looks up to meet TK’s eyes, brilliant green shining with understanding.

“Carlos,” he murmurs, squeezing his hand gently. “It’s okay. Y—You don’t—have to—w—w—” TK frowns, his face scrunching up in frustration as his tongue refuses to cooperate, and Carlos reaches out to caress his face.

“I know,” he says softly. “I’ll see you later, okay? Love you.”

Every instinct Carlos possesses protests as he watches TK disappear out the door once more, and he takes an involuntary step forward. But Paul and Grace, both of whom insisted on keeping him company, place a hand on each of his shoulders, gently but firmly guiding him towards the couch.

“I—I don’t…”

“He’ll be fine, Carlos,” Grace says, sitting next to him. “Let us take care of you, now.”

Paul walks over with a bowl of something steaming, practically forcing it into his hands. “I’m gonna tell you right now, I’ll be real offended if you don’t eat that, Reyes. I didn’t spend hours slaving over it for you to turn your nose up because you got used to all that gourmet shit they serve in the hospital.”

Carlos laughs weakly, taking the proffered fork. Between the hospital and TK’s strict diet while he gets used to food again, he hasn’t had a proper meal in a while; he didn’t think he had the appetite for one, but the spicy aroma wafting from the bowl sets his stomach growling.

They eat, and they talk, and it seems like normality might be in reach once more.

An hour later, TK comes home.

And Carlos finally starts to feel safe again.

[blouisparadise]

Upon request, here is a rec list of bottom Louis fics with everyone’s favorite trope - sharing a bed! We hope you enjoy this list. Happy reading!

1) Just Like Live Wires | Explicit | 5427 words

Harry climbs into Louis' bed when he's cold. Louis pines.

2) Been Gone Way Too Long | Explicit | 8836 words

“This can’t be happening,” Louis says, banging his hand against the window. “This seriously can’t be happening right now.”

Things like this only happen in the movies. Things like this don’t happen in real life. There’s no way that he’s seriously been snowed in. There’s no way that the heating is broken. There’s no way that it’s going to take upwards of twenty-four hours and probably a lot longer for the storm to break and someone to come and rescue them.

“Just sit down, Louis,” Harry sighs from somewhere behind him. He sounds miserable, like he’s already feeling the cold.

Louis whirls around and points a finger at him. “Did you plan this?” he demands a little hysterically. He regrets the question as soon as it’s out of his mouth, but he thinks he’s got a valid point. It’s not like this storm just came out of nowhere - it has to have been on the news for a couple of days, at least. Plenty of time for Harry to have canceled this excursion.

3) I'm Trying Not To Make A Sound | Explicit | 10452 words

Louis thinks he could die right there. He can’t feel anything but the tingling sensation all over his skin. He’s throwing away all his past thoughts on trying to be straight and denying his reactions towards other men, he just wants more of this numbing feeling. Everything else is a long lost memory, can’t think of anything else besides, wow, this feels incredible.

4) Enjoy The Ride | Not Rated | 11103 words

The one where Louis, an omega more than tired of being treated as lesser than alphas, is forced on a road trip by his beta besties only to meet Harry who might just be the alpha he never knew he wanted.

5) Cuffed | Not Rated | 15254 words

What would you do if you were handcuffed to your enemy for 48 hours?

6) Up For It | Explicit | 18223 words

The one where Liam is Mr Organised, Zayn is too perceptive for his own good, Niall is a compulsive matchmaker, and Harry and Louis might just have the surprise to shock them all.

7) Holiday Greetings (And Gay Happy Meetings) | Not Rated | 18417 words | Sequel

Note: This fic has no smut, but it has omega Louis. The sequel has smut.

The one where Niall's dead car and and a foot of snow conspire to force Louis into spending time with an alpha he hates.... or does he?

8) The Aurora Zone | Explicit | 19633 words

The one where Harry is busy crossing off his bucket list while Louis is busy falling for the guy he's supposed to hate.

9) I Wanna Be More Than Friends | Not Rated | 20721 words

The one where Harry’s an alpha with no sense of smell, Louis’ an omega who isn’t allowed to scent his best friend, and that’s all they’ll ever be. Obviously.

10) Etched In Salt (Is A Cathedral Of The World) | Explicit | 24417 words

Note: This fic has BH mentions. It is also locked and can only be read by AO3 users.

Louis asks for very few things in life, and they are: to solve cases, to keep bad people from doing their bad things, to get good coffee, to go home to a spacious apartment with nobody else in it, and to manage his stupid telempathy powers with minimal interference. And now he's stuck in a tiny cabin in a snowstorm in the middle of god-awful-nowhere with Harry Styles. Because of course he is.

11) Like A Siren In The Night | Explicit | 25868 words

“There is an infestation in my home,” Louis hisses, righting himself quickly and pushing his way past Harry, heading directly for the kitchen. He’s rather haphazardly dressed himself, a coat thrown on over a loose flannel shirt and black pants, slippers on his feet.

Harry resists the urge to sigh, closing the door and trailing behind him slowly. “What kind of infestation?”

For all he knows, Louis is going to claim that there’s a ghost infestation. Harry has no idea what the end game is here – all he knows is that Louis has found at least three complaints a week to bring up since he’s been living on Harry’s property, and he’s been living here for six months.

It’s way too many fucking complaints, is what Harry is saying. Especially when most of them are ridiculous to start with.

12) Always Come Back To You | Explicit | 28682 words

“I’ll do it,” Harry offers brightly. No one even blinks. “I’ll do it?”

Louis sighs irritably. “Shut up,” he orders, tossing a pillow in the general direction of Harry’s face. This is a terrible time for jokes, especially Harry’s lame, old people ones.

Not that it was an old people joke. Just that most of the time Harry’s jokes consist of knock-knocks or terrible puns. The type of jokes old people like, Louis’ pretty sure. His nan always finds them hilarious when Harry tells her one.

Harry bats the pillow out of the air without even blinking. “Be reasonable, Lou,” he says in his most reasonable voice.

Louis is perfectly reasonable, thank you very much, and he’s also frustrated and upset and tired and he really wants to punch something. Maybe he should have held on to that pillow a little longer.

“You’re not gonna fucking do it,” he snaps. “That’s the last thing I need.”

13) We’re Not Who We Used To Be | Explicit | 30611 words

“Harry…” Louis’ voice catches in his throat, thick with tears threatening to fall out, so he coughs to clear it before trying again. “Harry is Liam’s best man?” “You didn’t know?” Harry is standing at the entrance of the garage, mouth slightly open and face pulled together. He sets his bag on the ground and puts his hands on his hips. When he does that, he looks just like the Harry that Louis remembers (and loves, he thinks with an aching heart). “I’m sure I mentioned it,” Liam says, but Louis can tell he’s lying by the way he chews on his lower lip and twists his fingers together. “You’re all a bunch of dick heads, I’m getting in the car.” Louis isn’t sure if he’s being unreasonable. He has no idea what the protocol is when your ex-boyfriend shows up after three years and nobody bothered to give you a heads up. He’s pretty sure he’s allowed to be upset about it, even if it’s only for a bit.

14) Blind From This Sweet, Sweet Craving | Explicit | 31170 words

"So, I guess we'll go?" Louis asks later, when Harry has calmed down and eaten his weight in Chinese food. He plays with this chopsticks, spearing another piece of chicken and pops it in his mouth. "I mean, I wouldn't mind. We could make it an adventure."

Harry observes him, watches him seated across from him on their old living room carpet, with a container of food on his lap. He's fidgeting, avoiding meeting Harry's gaze–he probably knows that Harry's mad at him for ruining the one chance they had to get out of this situation. And he's not wrong, Harry is definitely very mad. Harry wants to strangle him and castrate him and smack him upside the head.

But he's also Harry's best friend, and despite everything, despite all the fuck-ups and the plot twists and everything just not playing out the way it should, he'd still rather be stuck in this situation with Louis than any of the other boys. He's got Harry's back, and in a weird, abstract way, he knows they'll be able to get out of this situation, together.

Harry sighs. "We're going," he says resignedly, his shoulders slumping.

Oh well. There are definitely worse ways to spend the weekend than pretending to be engaged to his best friend.

15) Welcome Back From The Friend Zone | Mature | 32584 words

The one where an idea to create a fake wedding with the sole intent to receive gifts from billionaires took a turn no one, but also everyone, saw coming.

16) Let Me Feel Your Heartbeat | Explicit | 34572 words

Harry is 98% sure Louis hates him. So he feels like his bewilderment is justified when the omega offers to help him through his rut.

17) Close To Nowhere | Explicit | 34589 words

Louis and Harry are psychics who kind of hate each other. They go to Tennessee to investigate a haunting.

18) Playing To Win | Explicit | 36732 words

Big Brother UK alumni Louis Tomlinson and Harry Styles are selected for the UK vs Australia All Stars series with a massive one million dollar prize in the offing. They’re both fit and smart and would make a great alliance... if only they can stop their feelings from getting in the way.

19) If I Stay | Mature | 37226 words

Harry and Louis agree to a temporary arrangement that Harry can't seem to walk away from no matter how many times he tries.

20) The Space Between | Explicit | 39917 words

Harry Styles is the alpha rockstar who can’t sleep and doesn’t know why.

Louis Tomlinson is the omega PhD student who helps him figure it out.

21) Strangers In Love | Explicit | 42207 words

Louis wakes up to find himself in a marriage with the last man he thought he'd ever end up with.

22) Tangled Up In You | Explicit | 45152 words

Harry blinks once. And blinks again. And says, his voice dangerous: “Niall, did you get me a mail-order bride?”

Because what the actual fuck. It kind of looks like Niall’s just purchased a person. For Harry.

Niall blinks back at him for a few moments, before throwing his head back and howling with laughter. Harry throws a pillow at him. Hard. “No, what the fuck, Harry.”

“A prostitute then?” Harry also doesn't want a prostitute.

“Of course not!”

“A stripper?”

“No!”

Damn, he’s running out of ideas. He settles for launching another pillow at Niall’s head. Niall bats it away easily, still laughing. “Stop!”

“What did you get me, then?!” Niall must hear the tinge of hysteria in his voice, because he’s pulling himself together, trying to stop himself from laughing.

There’s still a big grin on his face, though, when he says, “I got you a professional cuddler.”

A professional…what. “What?”

23) No Going Back | Explicit | 56102 words

Sales reps Harry and Louis are bored with their jobs and their lives. After meeting at a conference in Cardiff they hook up, have a few too many drinks, and jokingly apply to become remote lighthouse keepers. Six months, just the two of them, looking after the southernmost lighthouse off the bottom of Australia. It’s not like their applications will be accepted. Right?

This is the story of how one choice - a left instead of a right, a go instead of a stop, a yes instead of a no - can change the future forever and that sometimes, taking that leap of faith, is worth the risk.

24) Waiting For The Tides To Meet | Explicit | 59873 words

Soulmate AU. Everyone is born with heterochromia — one eye is their own eye colour, while the other is the colour of their soulmate's. It's only when they meet their soulmate for the first time that their own eyes match properly. After a hazy night at a frat party, Louis wakes up to blue eyes and the shocking realization that he had met his soulmate, without any sober recollection. Seven years pass where Louis comes to terms with the fact that he'll never know who his soulmate is. Then one fated summer, a beautiful green-eyed photographer arrives at Louis' workplace, with promises of endless laughter and a familiar feeling in Louis' heart.

25) Swallow The Knife | Explicit | 76158 words

“You came,” Louis says, still breathless, clinging to Harry, uncaring that his sweat is getting all over Harry’s presumably clean dad shirt, or that he’s making Harry hold up all of his weight.

“Of course I came,” Harry says. He shifts, one arm curled underneath Louis’ arse, the other spreading wide in the middle of Louis’ back. “If I ignored you every time you pissed me off we would have stopped being friends a long time ago.”

Louis already knows that, of course. It doesn’t do anything to stop the pleased squirm in his belly every time Harry proves it, though. They fight like nobody’s business, both of them too stubborn to pull their punches when they’re arguing, and it used to get them in trouble, but they always make up.

Adrenaline makes Louis loose-lipped, and they both know it. He tightens his arms around Harry’s neck, buries his face in his hair. “I missed you,” he confesses, quiet. “Doesn’t feel the same up there by myself.”

26) Waiting On You | Explicit | 76584 words

“Vampires,” Louis says with disgust, glaring over at the vampire who is noisily slurping from the woman’s neck nearby.

Zayn gives the neat fang marks on Louis’ neck a meaningful look.

“Can’t live with them, can’t live without them,” Louis finishes, ignoring Zayn when he rolls his eyes.

Louis takes a long sip of his milkshake, presses his fingers against the marks on his neck, and definitely doesn’t think about the vampire who left them there.

27) Perfect Storm | Explicit | 80230 words

What do you do when your best friend asks you and your (now) ex to be the best men at his destination wedding? You can either tell him the truth, tell him you’re not together anymore, and deal with the consequences, or you can pretend you’re still together and roll with it, just pray you don’t spiral. Fake it ‘til you make it. You know, for the sake of the wedding.

Harry and Louis choose the latter.

28) Nothing Worsens, Nothing Grows | Mature | 102528 words

Another roadtrip AU featuring Harry as the misunderstood hipster, Louis as the bitter psych major, Liam as the one with the secret boyfriend, and Niall as the one who just wants everyone to be happy.

Check out our other fic rec lists by category here and by title here.

[wordsinwinters]

Then Again, Part 26 (Peter Parker x Reader)

Masterlist (with AO3 links)

Total word count: 50,293

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25,

Summary: After an intense argument and a forced-to-share-the-bed situation during their junior year decathlon trip, Peter and the Reader examine their faults and failings. As they attempt to fix their mistakes and improve their friendship, that friendship quickly begins to evolve into something else.

Slow burn fic in which all characters are included and their dynamics explored; multiple character POVs.

Betas: @girl-tips-from-satan and @fanboyswhereare-you

A/N: This isn’t my favorite chapter, but it’s been sitting in my drafts for over a year and I figured if I don’t post it now, I’ll never move on to the next. Additionally, as always, I live for feedback. 😉

Without further ado,

Then Again Part 26:

(Words: 2,825)

The bus ride will probably get boring soon, or at least as long as the girls stay asleep, but even as quiet as it is, it’s almost a perfect morning. Being early (around 6:00, I think?), there’s barely any light except street lamps and car lights, but some of the clouds on the right have caught a pretty bluish purple tinge. It reminds me of that Rainbow Fish book Aunt May used to read to me as a kid. To make it better, the morning air is chilly enough that the driver turned the heaters on low so it’s wrapped-in-a-blanket-while-it-snows warm in here. Although that also might be why, apart from general dirt and old gum, the strongest smell on the bus is salty grease— since the nearest heater is under the seat Flash spilled french fries and chicken nuggets in yesterday. It could be worse, though. I mean, it’s not necessarily a bad smell and the traffic isn’t horrible. It’s not the best, but it could definitely be louder and a lot slower. The field of flowing red tail lights ahead of us is oddly comforting, like a snail-slow pasture of mechanical color. 

All in all, it’s a pretty cozy start for a dreaded five hour bus ride. It’s giving me quiet time to think. So that’s where I’m at. Or should be. I got some stuff organized in my head last night even if I keep getting distracted now. Well, it was more like a couple hours ago, since I wasn’t able to get to sleep for so long after we said goodnight. But anyway, I’m trying to focus. It’s just hard, even with both of them sleeping.

From my and Ned’s spot behind them, watching the girls’ heads gently shake and bump against each other as the bus shudders through potholes is kind of calming. They seem so peaceful from this angle, like two people who’ve never pranked me and Ned to the point we were nearly suspended, or kept us awake and annoyed by asking paradoxical hypothetical questions because they know how Ned and I will argue for days if we don’t agree on an answer, or anything else like that. It’s like finding two mischievous cats sleeping, curled up on a chair. It’s easier to appreciate them when they aren’t causing chaos. But it’s not that hard to appreciate them when they are anyway.

Though Ned and I won’t admit it when they’re fully awake, seeing their heads smack into the seat in front of them each time the bus lurched to a halt at stoplights (during the first ten minutes after they’d fallen asleep) was funnier than it should’ve been. Even knowing then that we wouldn’t mention it later didn’t stop us from exchanging silent laughs when they leaned back up, muttering unintelligible complaints before settling their heads back onto one another. For the last couple stoplights before the highway, at least, we decided to be better friends. We both stood up with one leg on the floor and one knee on our own seat so we could easily hold their foreheads back each time it happened. Again, I wouldn’t admit this out loud, even to Ned, but it’s a little bit funny that Ned was a split second slower than me, so while I kept catching MJ’s head before the stop, he half-smacked Y/N’s forehead, like a really-close-to-the-floor basketball dribble, and made a wincing face each time. A lot of times. But it did stop her from colliding with the seat, and she didn’t wake up or complain. 

As nice as it is with them and almost everyone else sleeping through the dark, quiet first hour of the bus trek back to New York, I am excited for her and MJ to wake up. Whenever that is. I’ve missed them. 

But anyway, I really need to focus. God. I’m not doing a great job of that this morning. Apparently. So I’m focusing now. It’s like Ned said. I need to be honest with myself. 

Okay. 

Alright. 

No distractions. 

I’m going to set myself straight now, before we get back, so I can make a game plan and be more decisive and make less mistakes. Fewer? Yeah, fewer mistakes. She’s told me that half a dozen times this since she read that grammar book last summer. But that’s not important.

If I’m being honest... I think I’ve avoided the real possibility that things could work out between us because it felt too risky. And I make some dumb, impulsive choices. So that’s saying a lot. If she said no, what’s the worst that could happen? May and Ned have been asking me that for months, and it’s been so frustrating. The answer should be obvious. The worst thing wouldn’t be the rejection, it’d be if it made her uncomfortable and she broke off our friendship. Or, even if she stuck around, if our friendship changed and I had to watch her get more and more distant, knowing it was my fault and nothing would ever go back to normal. 

Those were the worst — and, I thought, most probable — possibilities. For months I’ve been certain that if anything changed, everything would, and it’d all go to shit. So I kept dodging it. And dodging her before the trip. But, then, things did change this weekend. Things are changing. We fought, and it was super shitty and awful and a total nightmare fiasco, but we made up. And she seemed almost as relieved as me when we did. Now we even have this pact about spending more time together. I know it’s officially only in the name of friendship, but something’s… different. I feel it, and I think she does too. And it doesn’t seem bad. That’s the craziest part. I mean, she even kissed me last night. On the cheek, but still. “Keep it.” Maybe May’s not ridiculous: she really might feel the same way. 

I’ve been texting her this morning, actually. Aunt May. I had to admit that I’m happy she forced me to do the forehead kiss thing last night. As annoyed as I was that she and Ned ganged up on me like that, I can’t dispute the results. She kissed me! Kind of. (To be fair, she did hit my mouth a little bit even if it was an accident.) At first it made me wonder if she heard any of Ned’s shout-comments before I could turn the t.v. up to cover what he was saying. But I doubt it. Even if she felt the same way, I know her too well to think she wouldn’t freak out more and enough that it’d be noticable. Yeah, no, I’d definitely have been able to tell if she’d heard him saying things like, “Nobody’s saying you have to tell her that you googled the probability of high school sweethearts getting married that time she saved your ass on that Bronte essay, but yeah, Aunt May’s right! Just ask her to come over and either talk to her or do the hair/forehead thing!” Anyway, May’s on board with her coming over a lot this week and next week and giving us some space. So are Ned and MJ. Ned said they agreed on giving us two weeks (starting tomorrow) without them hanging out after school. And who knows, if the dance goes really well, maybe it’ll be normal for us to hang out, just us, without the whole group. Because… well, I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself. 

I’ll admit, they’re the best friends I could ever have. All three of them. 

And it’s nice to have them all here now, Ned to my left and the girls in front of us. It’s even nicer to be outside of class or the city or crazy study sessions and have had a short breather from all that (despite the shitshow before we smoothed things over and could enjoy it). To be somewhere chill together. Yesterday and today probably feel even better because the last few days, or even weeks… no— months, if I’m being honest— have had me in a kind of less than happy place. But that’s over now. We’re all here and things are finally good. I just wish the girls would wake up, especially since Ned’s back on his phone. Again. 

Yesterday, everybody hung out for most of the afternoon, but being in the whole decathlon group isn’t the same as just being the four of us. Or two. 

Speaking of two— Ned being away during this next week or two is going to make everything so… unfiltered. New. Without his interference and being able to talk to him as often as normal, it’ll mostly just be her and me. Nobody to distract attention or blame stuff on or help me out when I’m doing something dumb (which is often). Like, for example, last night when I maybe let my excitement get the better of me and I might’ve jumped on the bed and thrown a pillow that accidentally broke the lamp on the nightstand. While I don’t really think writing that “Bill Mr. Harrington” note with the school’s address was Ned’s best idea, it helped me not care too much, enough that I didn’t do something dumber like actually tell Mr. Harrington. It might come back to bite us, though. Still, he was genuinely helpful this morning when Flash showed up too. 

While we were hanging out in the girls’ room waiting for them to finish packing, there was a knock on the door. I figured it was Mr. Harrington about to yell at me and Ned for the broken lamp, so I motioned to Ned to shut up and move closer to the head of the bed we were already sitting on where, courtesy of the wall between the bedroom and bathroom, he wouldn’t be able to see us as long as he stayed by the doorway. MJ gave us an odd glance before she got up to answer it. Her annoyed, “What are you doing here?” didn’t immediately disqualify Mr. Harrington, but the sound of Flash’s voice saying, “I, uh, brought you guys some muffins,” made me tense at the first syllable.

“The free muffins they give us for breakfast?”

MJ’s dripping sarcasm nearly made me laugh even though I couldn’t see her, but Y/N turning from her suitcase and walking over to join them killed it still in my throat. 

“Nope,” he said. “They’re fancy muffins from a bakery a few miles away.”

I wanted to roll my eyes out of my skull.

She may not like him, but that doesn’t mean I was wrong about him being into her. What a dumb way to impress someone. “Fancy muffins.”

“Expensive?” MJ asked. Even without seeing her face, I could tell she was giving him the squint death stare. It’s scary to have to respond to that face if you don’t know what the right answer is.

“Yes, especially with the delivery fee,” he said, sounding prepared for the question, “but they’re from a small local place, not a chain, which I figured you guys would appreciate. Actually, I think you’d like the woman who owns it, she was super grouchy and hard to convince.”

“Convince?”

“They don’t normally deliver at 5 in the morning.”

“Oh, so you thought you could just—”

“What kind did you get?” 

That’s one of the things I like about Y/N. She knows how to manage tempers and when to jump in; she has Flash and MJ down to a science. In that moment, though, I wanted MJ to fire her most confrontational questions at him with no mercy.

“Well, they’re all apology muffins—” I heard MJ scoff. Exactly. She gets it. “But I got blueberry, chocolate, obviously, coffee, cranberry orange, maple, I think that one has chicken in it or something, and banana nut.”

Ned and I turned towards each other with silent smirks at the last one. It’s a dumb joke, but under normal circumstances we’d never resist—

“Cool. Since you’ve brought so many, you can come in.”

Sometimes MJ drives me up the wall. This was one of those times. 

I mentally took back my agreement with her scoff.

The three of them came into the room, and for a couple seconds, Flash didn’t see us. The girls were closer to the window than they were to the wall and the bed Ned and I were sitting on, and he didn’t look behind him. Until MJ pointed us out directly.

“You can give them some too,” she said, her expression bordering on smug. “Apology muffins, right?”

Flash froze for a second. I straightened my back. Neither Ned or I said anything.

“Yeah, yeah,” he nodded. “Of course.”

Surprisingly, he shook his shoulders like a bug just buzzed by his head and walked over, opening a giant rectangle of a box up to us. 

“Take however many you guys want.”

I stared at him, not moving. Nobody flinched. Then I realized he was tapping the side of the box with his thumb. Not in an asshole come on, hurry up way, but in an anxious way. Just as I started to reach toward the box, Y/N asked:

“Why’d you get so many of the coffee ones?”

Flash looked away at just the right second. 

Did I technically cave first by reaching into the box? Yes. But did anyone see? No.

Although, I guess he technically caved by offering us the muffins in the first place. Ha. All the same, I took a blueberry one. 

“They’re my dad’s favorite. I wanted to surprise him, you know? But I can’t even get a hold of.... Um, are your guys’ parents going to pick you up when we get there, or are you actually staying for school?”

“Staying.”

“All of you?” 

He looked around to ask all of us, even me and Ned. We all nodded. When he looked at me, though, his eyes twitched. It’s a face I’ve gotten a lot before. He realized he said parents. 

“You said these are orange cranberry?” Ned asked, pointing. 

Flash nodded. 

“They’re solid, though the banana nut ones are probably the best.”

As I said, under normal circumstances, like if one of the girls had said it, I would’ve laughed right then, but I’m not used to laughing around Flash. Ned, who usually follows that same rule, shook his head and grinned, if a little bit... nervously?

“Hell no!” he said, pretending to be mildly outraged. “I’m not eating banana-bust-a-nut muffins.”

A second surprise: Flash tilted his head and paused, clearly as stunned to be told a joke by Ned as the rest of us were to witness it— and laughed. So did everyone else. It was only for a few seconds, like literally three quick seconds, but for the first time for as long as I can remember, all of us were laughing with Flash. It stopped almost as soon as it started. 

Tension crept back in soon so he left pretty quickly after that with an awkward, “See you guys in a few.” Thank god. 

The girls finished tidying their room and going over the homework that’s due today (which we did last week since we knew we’d never get it done on the trip), before forcing me and Ned into the hallway so Mr. Harrington wouldn’t need to check our room for us and potentially find the broken lamp. 

And then, pretty soon, we ended up on the warm bus, loaded in with everyone else. It seemed like everybody but Ned and I were too quiet and sleepy and squinty to be able to talk much before dozing off or staring blankly out the window or scrolling social media on their phones, the latter two options leading to the first in most cases. At this point, I think Ned, Flash, and I are the only ones still awake. 

I’m going to work at tolerating him. As long as he doesn’t cross any lines with anybody from now on, I won’t bait him either. (Admittedly, I’ve been guilty of that, especially recently.) I mean, his comment about his dad was hard to miss. And even when he said it, it wasn’t a shock. Everyone in our grade at some point has had to listen to Flash’s rambling excuses for his parents ignoring or forgetting to show up for school events. Maybe being a dick is just hereditary for him. Or a family tradition. 

I don’t remember how I got so off track. Where was I before? Oh yeah. Risk. Possibilities. The almost-worst case scenario that turned out not so bad. It’s been a messy weekend with plenty of re-evaluating, but the point is simple: I think I’ve got to give a few new things a try, and I’m excited to have a chance over the next couple weeks.

Next update: God only knows.

Tag List: If you’d like to be tagged, send me a(n) ask/message or reply* to this post!

*Notice: If you reply, I may not respond back; if you need/want confirmation, send me an ask/message instead :) Also, there are a few blogs whose tags aren’t working and I haven’t been able to contact them. For the time being, I removed most of the dead tags. If you weren’t tagged and should have been, or if you’ve changed your url, send me a quick message and I’ll put you on my message list!

Tagged: (If I’m missing anyone, send me a message!) @spideymood @solarspidey @tiffanypooh @carrotsunshine @breebree1198 @idontlooklikereginageorge @stumb1ing @bit-bot0711  @justthatshortlittlenerd  @avzuzu   @melonmochi   @happysynonym @the-redthread  @i-love-superhero @ohgloryyy-blog @nicunty @pxrrished @shugr12110629 @realitykilledtheteen@thehanneloner @lionfart   @tryn25 @slythergirlimagines@twentyjuanpancakes @littlekay15  @hi-mishamigos @eversweet-imagines  @thisisthetragicstoryofme @augurydemon@daisy-john @siriuspadfoot14 @debiwolf-t @casual-vaporwave@swimmeranxiety @dangerousluv1   @ghosthiam @homecomjng @deep-thoughts-in-the-shower @bughead-isendgame @qu3en-of-letters @brightcolorsoffendme @cutehollands @enoumen-t @dottirose @justthatshortlittlenerd  @thatgirlthatlikesmarvel@moonofmy-life @royal1958  @ashleyhearto   @pinkleopardss @cutie1365  @spideyschmood @dragoste-lunes @peterparkley @gold-masks @stonesandskeletonbones @myhealingstar  @a-typical-antisocial-fangirl   @love-and-protect-bucky-barnes@fangirldreamsandstuff  @fandom-stuff @unabashedlyswimmingtimemachine @jellzu  @aussie-mantle@stevieboyharrington  @septicquill @thingfromlove  @dude-whatawave   @me-a-hopeless-romantic @condy-wants-a-cookie @susurrantsoul  @kawaii-girl-101  @lxstneverfound  @ukulele-tea-and-ocean @tepidtrash @emilymarie0422 @styles-bucks@shortstack-ofpancakes @lilbeatlebear @imyourdadssideblog @the-introverted-loner-art @marvelcuties @lesdragly @atomic-chickenwings  @reanne @schwankyblock @nedthegay @kateelyse96@outsider-underwater @omg-lexiloveyou @le-yona  @desteweirdo@thingfromlove @madasameg @bookish-and-shy @lowkeyfriggason @arya-and-sansa @hot-pocket01 @icantthinkofanyusername0 @ajkenwo

[c-c-cherry]

Bucci Gang Headcanons!! (pt 2)

I was in the Bucci gang mood, so I managed to compile these together!! Jade wasn’t bouncing around ideas with me this time, but @achairwithapandaonit​ was with me on Discord for some of these! Go check them out, as well! Both their fics and art are *mwah*

These are a little less cracky than the ones that Jade and I came up with, but they were still super fun to come up with! I hope you enjoy!

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Contrary to popular belief, Narancia is actually much closer to Abbacchio than he is with Bucciarati

-Any shit going on in his head? He’ll go to Abba. Maybe not directly, but he always find himself talking to Leone about stuff at 3am or burying his face into the man’s shoulder on bad nights

-Bruno is great for hugs and trying to help him in any way he can, but sometimes Nara just needs someone to listen and understand. Cue dadbacchio

-Abbacchio hugs are rare in general, but they’re almost always for Narancia

On the other hand, Bucciarati and Fugo are probably the most tightly-knit in the entire house

-Fugo was the first one that Bruno finds in the whole gang and they spent a significant amount of time living together before everyone else came into the picture

-Fugo will not hug people, but Bruno is an exception (Although it took years of trust to get there)

-Bucciarati claims not to have a favourite but like,,,,Fugo ;-;

-They basically have each other’s mannerisms nailed down. Bruno can usually tell when Fugo’s about to snap and Fugo can tell how stressed Bruno is no matter what blank expression he holds up as a front

-Bruno is the only one who knows why Fugo can’t talk about his experiences at University and Fugo is the only one who knows why Bruno loves (and simultaneously hates) the sea so much. Not even Abba really knows that shit.

-They’re just used to destressing together. Sometimes they just sit together when no one else is around and literally *become* the “Lie down. Try not to cry. Cry a lot” meme and then they watch Star Wars after and never talk about it again because they’re both emotionally constipated lol

Giorno seems well-rounded with intelligence but he’s actually a registered dummy™

-He’s actually only really good at Biology and some math, but any other subject is like No Man’s Land to him

-Everyone thinks he has all this paperwork all the time when in reality he just reads really slowly and doesn’t understand half the shit he’s signing off on

-He’s so tired of avoiding Fugo who always wants to do weird smart people shit and he’s so tired of Mista asking him intellectual questions because he thinks Giorno’s the smartest being on this earth so he turns to the one person who he knows won’t judge him; Narancia

-He admits to Nara that he’s really not smart and he’s scared that people won’t think him valid anymore if he proves to be “useless” and Narancia’s like “shit bro I know exactly what you mean”

-He helps Giorno make up excuses to try and get him out of shit when Bruno slinks out of the shadows like “heyyyyy uhhh I don’t even have a middle school education I get it”

-Honestly Bruno and Gio are the CEOs of “fake it til you make it” and they make Narancia do all their math even though he’s shit at it too

-Narancia has the choice to stop learning math and all that stuff but after Bruno admitted to them that he never had the chance to learn it and wished he did he keeps learning to make our man proud ;’)

Giorno has a really confident personality as a front but when he's outside of meetings and missions he's the most socially awkward person on earth

-Him and Fugo will both be sitting stiffly on the couch between missions and they fuckin bond over being able to command capos but not being able to ask Bruno where in the kitchen he put the cookies

-Him and Fugo create a master plan to try and find the cookies without asking anyone for them but end up giving up and creeping over to Narancia in defeat

-They're both awkwardly hovering behind him as Narancia walks into the kitchen and is like "YO WHERE THE COOKIES AT" and Bruno pulls open the one drawer they didn't look in

-Part of it stems from him being brought up with “if you want things or ask too much from people you are worthless” so he’s too scared to ask for basic things like where the extra blankets are or ordering food he actually wants at a restaurant

-Bruno and Giorno go out for lunch together after a meeting and Bruno has to go take a call and tells him to get the bill for him while he's gone and meet him outside and after like 20 minutes he ends the call and goes back in like ??? only to find him still sitting at the table

-Bruno's like "do you just want me to ask for it?" and he's like "uhhh yeah..."

-The waiter says some shit like “yeah I was wondering when you were gonna ask for it, this kid wouldn’t even look at me whenever I would walk by” and Giorno is absolutely visibly mortified and has an existential crisis on the way home because his “sit down and be quiet” mindset that he has to be contradicts the “don’t cause trouble for people” that he also has to be and now he’s questioning everything he’s ever done ;-;

-Bucci notices immediately and takes him for gelato and they have a really long conversation about it on the walk home and it ends with a really awkward hug :)

-Bucciarati’s gone out of his way after that instance to tell him that he just wants him to feel comfortable and he can talk to him about anything without judgement and it’s okay to be awkward and out of his element because he’s literally 15 and has the worst trust issues on the planet but Gio just ends up feeling guilty that he’s wasting everyone’s time with his “problems”

Bruno will hole himself up in his room and absolutely hates attention and contact when he’s sick while Abbacchio is the clingiest, whiniest thing that lives when he’s under the weather

Giorno longs for physical affection but he has no idea how it actually works

-He’s never really been hugged before and tries to suppress the fact that he just wants to trust people and be open about stuff and hug people but his mind always consciously rejects it

-When Giorno's sick or out of it he get weirdly clingy cause he's too out of it to control himself and the first time he got properly sick he half-consciously clung to Mista the entire day

-After that day, Mista slowly starts giving him all these spontaneous hugs and head pats and hand squeezes and Giorno gets all flustered about it because he is just drowning in serotonin :)

The first person in the gang Giorno cried in front of was Trish

-He was really emotionally drained from endless meetings and angry capos and everyone asking everything from him for the past week

-He also ran into some kid from his old neighbourhood who asked him why he hadn’t been “home” lately and it fucked him up for the rest of the week

-He just finished a shit ton of paperwork when he got a knock at the door and he was expecting another task or favour or complaint but instead Trish asks him if she can paint his nails and he just absolutely crumples

-He’s being pulled into her room before he can even notice and there’s a fluffy blanket wrapped around him and she lets him cry into her softest pillow

-She doesn’t ask about it but just lets him sit there with her and he ends up falling asleep on her bed :’)

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God Giorno and Trish being a nice lil platonic duo makes me so soft :)

Have you seen Bucci Gang headcanons part one? Go check it out if you haven't yet! <3

[qiankunfics]

KunTen Masterlist Part 1

AO3 

1.  Body Talk by smallchittaphon

Summary:  He had feared the statement more when the days to His and Kun’s one year mark approached but he shouldn't have. It was childish too, not every relationship is the same he realizes. Rating: Mature Status: One-Shot

2.  cut through the clouds by heartsighed

Summary: Qian Kun, microbiology major, vice-president of the ISA, part-time poster model and full-time mom friend, is perhaps more stressed than he would like everyone to think. Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot

3.  something new by creamsoda (bobahoney)

Summary: Ten finally asks Kun to fuck his thighs. Rating: Explicit Status: One-Shot

4.  the aesthetics of beauty by hoeunki

Summary: when Kun’s required to create something that defines art, he decides to draw a stranger that he finds sleeping on the campus grounds. Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot

5.  kiss me under the light of a thousand stars by gabilliam (vvhymack)

Summary: Ten calls the wrong number, Kun comes to the rescue. Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot

6.  The Customer is Always Right by 021497J

Summary: Ten honestly isn't a picky eater, the chicken was dry. His complaints earn him a visit from the very cute head chef. He can't help it if he wants to see him once more, all he has to do is complain...right? Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot

7.  red, orange, yellow, green, even thicker by eatthatup

Summary: Kun isn’t used to being praised. Physically, at least. Rating: Mature Status: One-Shot

8.  incandescently (for him.) by gabilliam (vvhymack)

Summary: They were no longer the likely protagonists for the typical romance and it saddened Ten. (Historical AU) Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot Trigger: Slight homophobia mentioned

9.  we’ll be alright by syugafairy

Summary: kun never thought of himself as an anxious person Rating: General Status: One-Shot

10. light me up

Summary:  Ten spends most of his life dreaming of being a superhero, and by luck, his wish is granted. Chaos ensues. Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot

11. the store by _helios (the_heliades)

Summary:  His cat, quiet and proud, will watch with piercing eyes, as they wander out of The Store and into the world again. Rating: General Status: One-Shot

12.  Rain. by softyjseo

Summary: Ten is in love. Kun isn't, apparently. Rating: General Status: One-Shot

13. sweeter than cake by eatthatup for adarkalleyway

Summary: Ten, pouting just slightly, makes Kun melt instantly. Like heating sugar, near its burning point. Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot

14. kiss me if you like me (slap me if I'm wrong) by mikararinna

Summary: Ten was starting to feel bored of life. He needed a challenge, something to excite himself. Kun had an idea. Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot

15.  Magnets by orphan_account

Summary: Kun and Ten are roommates. Rating: General Status: One-Shot Trigger: slight harassment 

16.  sibilance by andnowforyaya

Summary: Doctor Qian Kun chases the stories he hears on the rivers to their origins, and he meets a beautiful boy underneath a waterfall. Rating: Teen Status: On-going

17.  get you good by gift

Summary: “Please, don’t make me beg,” Kun whines.“I like when you beg,” Ten tells him bluntly. Rating: Explicit Status: One-Shot

18.  sweet, sweet love by RedamancyEffect

Summary: Kun is the sweetest omega ever, Ten is head-over-heels for him. Too bad, Kun is a little dense. Rating: General Status: One-Shot

19.  stupid spinach dip

Summary: Yukhei and Mark visit Professor Kun and they find out he’s married to news anchor Ten. Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot

20.  sunchoke by flyway

Summary: Kun, Ten, and summer at the Sunchoke magazine test kitchen. Rating: Explicit Status: One-Shot

21.  Handle Perfection

Summary: Ten was going to need Kun to stop this kind of behaviour, his heart couldn’t handle this type of perfection. Rating: General Status: One-Shot

22.  you are my favorite everything

Summary: Ten and Kun meet during the perfect summer. Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot

23.  no matter how long i wait by dreamlaunch (mayuaka)

Summary: in his search for a dream blocking enchantment, ten finds kun. Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot

24.  the truth hurts (and secrets kill) by thereisnoreality

Summary: Ten kills while Kun is at work. Rating: Mature Status: One-Shot *Part of murdery martrimony collection 

25.  Open Windows by Mntsnflrs

Summary: Ten constantly locks himself out of his apartment, Kun saves the day and him.  Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot 

26.  green, pink, blue, yellow by rowenabane

Summary: Imagine: a town with manicured lawns, cotton candy sunrises, houses that all look the same. Imagine: a neighbor with a beautiful smile, a terrible secret, a hidden past. Rating: Mature Status: One-Shot Trigger: Slight alcohol abuse

27.  dreaming (are you thinking what i'm thinking?) by okamiwind

Summary: They could not be more different, the pair of them. Rating: Explicit Status: One-Shot

28.  click, snapshot by kwonjis

Summary:  photographer!kunten fic Rating: General Status: One-Shot

29.  Office Hours by violetpeche

Summary: Kun’s chest starts to ache again as he watches the soft, pink tip of Ten’s tongue slip across his lower lip before biting it. Rating: Explicit Status: One-Shot

30.  open invitation by andnowforyaya

Summary: Ten’s asleep, and his pink, soft lips are parted, that mouth that gave Kun so much trouble earlier today. Rating: Explicit Status: One-Shot

31.  What's Life Without a Little Worry?

Summary:  Kun was a notorious worrier. He worried about his grades, about his friends and whether they were eating enough, sleeping enough. Rating: General Status: One-Shot

32.  To All The Boys I Ghosted Before by cobalamincosel

Summary:  The Tinder AU where Ten ghosts Kun in date night— and months later finds out that Kun is his new neighbor. Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot

33.  Miles Above by violetpeche

Summary: Ten looks up at Kun and lets out a deep sigh. “No.” He leans over to tap on the faucet to rinse out the sink for Kun. “I came in here to suck your dick.” Rating: Explicit Status: One-Shot

34.  getting closer by flowerhairclips

Summary: Kun is in for a long ass ride when a demon he exorcised ends up falling in love with him. Rating: Explicit Status: Completed

35.  a labour of love by eggboyksoo

Summary: renjun is an artistic genius with a tendency to keep things from his family. his parents struggle to support his interests while pretending they don't know about said interests. Rating: General Status: One-Shot *Part of chaos, family, love collection

36.  Hunger of the Pine by cobalamincosel

Summary: Kun and Ten are ex-college friends-with-benefits who end up becoming so much more when they bump into each other again at the airport after a few years for the wedding of their respective college roommates and best friends, Johnny and Taeyong. Rating: Explicit Status: One-Shot

37.  We’ll Get Lost Together (Let Me Flow) by easycomeeasygo

Summary: When Ten really gets to look at Kun, his brain short circuits. He’s hot. Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot

38.  if you believe in magic, come along with me by mainvocal

Summary: Deep down, Kun knows Ten didn't ask to join Card Magic Club because he'd suddenly become enamored with the art of card tricks. Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot

39.  Antedate by Lertsek

Summary: There are some nights where Kun wakes up and can't hear Ten breathe. Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot

40.  Permeating and Perfect by Kkaepsongiya

Summary: He can’t stop making noise, not as Kun fucks him so well, the older boy holding his hips tight, pulling him back to meet his thrusts. He knows his hips will be bruised for days after this—he can’t wait to see the marks, to press into them when he’s all alone. Rating: Explicit  Status: One-Shot

41. Open Doors by Mntsnflrs

Summary: He decides he likes the way Kun says his name.He decides he wants to hear it more. Rating: Explicit Status: One-Shot 

42.  let's stay together by madhoney

Summary: Kun smirked and squeezed around his boyfriend’s waist. He could really get used to a lifetime of his sass. Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot

43.  Someday by almostkun

Summary:  Kun laughs at him, caressing his cheek with his thumb. They stay in silence for a while, as Mr. Baudelaire chases Mrs. Austen with the help of Yoshihiro-san. Rating: General Status: One-Shot

44.  i come apart at the seams (so you can stitch me back together again) by okamiwind

Summary: Ten is the shot, and Kun is his chaser. Rating: Explicit Status: One-Shot

45.  space rocks by gaysadandtired

Summary: no celestial being could compare to Ten and his blinding smile. Rating: General Status: One-Shot

46.  old times by madhoney

Summary: Since his husband was just set on being ornery tonight, Kun decided to just take the L and try again tomorrow. Rating: Explicit Status: One-shot

47.  oh, let's start some rumour by mikararinna

Summary: Rumour has it supermodel Ten has a crush on famous actor Qian Kun. Ten called bullshit. He didn't have a crush on Kun. Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot

48.  you're insatiable by 10softbot

Summary: kun takes ten to a cabin in the woods so they can finally fuck Rating: Explicit Status: One-Shot

49.  Reset by violetpeche

Summary: This particular Thursday morning spiraled into Hell on Earth.  Rating: Explicit Status: One-Shot

50.  Intersequence by pinkwinwin

Summary: a love story in photographs Rating: Teen Status: One-Shot

[sodalitefully]

Santa Slash is coming to town...

This fic is the Christmas-themed spiritual successor to my Easter Bunny AU.  Special thanks to @slashscowboyboots for supporting all my holiday nonsense! 

Four snapshots from Slash’s Christmas prep marathon through the years:

🎄🎄🎄🎄

Jingle bells.  

Fucking jingle bells.

There were FIFTEEN of them on the stupid-fucking-candy-colored costume he had to wear at this godforsaken excuse for a seasonal job.  “Earn some extra cash,” they said.  “It’s easy, you barely have to do anything,” they said.  "You'll be perfect, you already look the part!" they said.  

"They are about to find a size-ten jingle-toed bootie up their ass,” Axl said – to himself, as he rushed into the storage room turned "dressing room" and buttoned up his itchy red and green vest with one hand while sipping an Orange Julius from the food court with the other.  

“Hey, Axl! You’re barely late today, awesome!”

And then there was this weirdo.

Axl could not for the life of him explain why a shopping mall in Indiana elected to hire a skinny dude in his 20s with a dark complexion and a nose ring to portray Saint Nick himself, but whatever the reason, Axl was stuck working with this fruitcake until Christmas Day.  Sure Slash was nice enough (oh yeah, and his name was Slash, or at least that's how he introduced himself without offering any explanation or even a last name), but he was way too enthusiastic about getting paid minimum wage to let strange kids sit in his lap at a grimy old shopping mall.

Uh, not in a weird way, Slash was good with the kids, really.  But sometimes... it seemed like he was taking his role a little too seriously.  

"How come you don't have a beard?" the first customer of Axl's shift, a little girl in a Tweety bird sweater and blonde pigtails, asked suspiciously.

"That's a good question,” Slash said, scratching at his bare chin. The neck of his Motörhead Beyond the Threshold of Pain Tour T-shirt was visible over the faux fur collar of the Santa costume, and his shiny black boots clearly came from a military surplus store. “I get asked that a lot but the truth is, it just isn't a flattering look, trust me.  I tried it once, and the elves could barely look at me in the eye." To Axl’s incredulity, the girl actually accepted that answer.  "Now tell me, what would you like for Christmas this year, sweetheart?"

As usual, Axl tuned out at this point.  Fake a smile for the overprotective parents, take the painfully awkward commemorative photograph, try not to look like he would rather die than hear Slash try to gently explain that Santa will probably not be delivering a pony this year one more damn time, rinse and repeat – until about an hour later, when the unthinkable happened.

The less said about about the incident, the better.  Suffice to say, one of the darling angels tossed his Christmas cookies, and some of the resulting mess wound up soaking into the front of Axl’s elf costume.  As if he needed another reason to hate his job; this was just adding insult on top of injury (that is, the injury to Axl’s pride as a result of being forced to wear the most ridiculous-looking costume he’s ever had the misfortune of laying eyes on). 

“That’s it. I quit.”  He grabbed the elf cap off his head and slammed it on the ground, then stormed through the exit gate past the sign wishing customers a "Holly Jolly Holiday Season," the bells on his costume ringing merrily as he stomped his feet.

“Hey, wait!”

“No,” Axl growled, but he did turn around to look back at Slash, still sitting in the plastic candy-cane throne unbothered by the mess or the sniffling child now mostly placated by a peppermint candy.  "What."  

Slash offered him a bright, beguiling smile.

"What do you want for Christmas, Axl?" 

-----

Nothing said "holiday cheer" like wandering the tinsel-adorned labyrinth that was a Walmart superstore a week before Christmas, with Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime" echoing through the tinny PA system and surrounded by other last-minute vultures hopelessly scavenging the picked-over aisles.  

In Izzy's defense, he actually finished all his shopping early this year, for once.  But then his two little brothers begged him to drive them around town to find the perfect gift for a girl at school that they apparently both had a crush on, and like a fool he agreed. 

He was regretting it now.  Anything would be better than subjecting himself to nearly an hour of top-40 Christmas music.  The jingle bells were jingling, the carolers were caroling, the B-list pop stars were spitting out god-awful covers of Christmas classics, and don’t even get him started on the commercials. 

He wasn't about to walk around in public with his fingers shoved in his ears (at least, he wasn't that desperate yet), but he did squeeze his eyes shut and pinch the bridge of his nose, trying to force himself to relax.  Just take deep breaths and think of The Rolling Stones... 

"Hey, uh, you doing okay?"

Izzy opened his eyes reluctantly.  In front of him was a young man wearing a concerned expression and a Santa hat, stuffed onto a massive pile of dark curls.  

"I'm fine.  Just finding out if it's possible to die from overexposure to Christmas music."

"Ahhh."  The man nodded in understanding.  "It's not, unfortunately.  I've tested it, trust me."

"Do you work here or something?" Izzy asked.  A leather jacket and ripped jeans didn't look like an employee uniform, but his hat matched the store decor and he didn't have a cart or shopping basket.  

"No, I'm actually a seasonal distributor.  Just checking in to make sure everything's in place before that last holiday rush, you know? Shit always gets crazy at the last minute."

"Tell me about it," Izzy responded, as if he knew a thing about marketing as a cynical 16-year-old.  But he had first-hand experience with last-minute crises, and as if to prove it, his brothers came running up to him at that moment.

"Jeff!  We can't find anything good, what should we do?"

"What's the problem?" the stranger in a Santa hat asked, looking genuinely concerned.  

"We don't know what present to get for a girl at school," the boys explained.

"Hmm..." He tapped at his chin.  "Why don't you just – oh wait, you're underage.  Well, how about you bake her some cookies or something?  That's what everyone does for me and I have no complaints."

Desperate to remove himself from this musical hell, Izzy jumped on the idea.  "Yeah, you could do sugar cookies!  And decorate them like horses, she likes horses right?” The boys had only mentioned that a dozen times; Izzy was starting to wonder if this girl even had any other personality traits.  

To his relief, a spark lit up in his brothers' eyes.  Cookies were a perfect idea, and suddenly they were dragging him away to look at cookie cutters and sprinkles.

Izzy turned around to shoot the helpful stranger a grateful look, but when he looked back, the man had disappeared with no trace, leaving not even a furry white pompom behind.

-----

Slash glanced out the window and grimaced – it was cold as a witch’s big bouncy tit outside, nothing but snow and ice as far as the eye could see. He pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders and took another swig of hot Irish coffee.   Damn the North Pole, there was a reason he took his summer vacations in Malibu.

But despite the miserable work conditions, Slash was nothing if not dedicated to his job.  In front of him was a sack overflowing not with toys but with the most recent letters to Santa, straight from the North Pole's post office.  With Christmas only a few days away, his daunting task was to go through the whole mountain of letters as quickly as possibly in order to take their special requests into consideration before it was time to start loading up the sleigh.  

Well, there was no time like the present to get started.  Slash stretched his back and got comfortable in his coziest armchair (by throwing his legs over one armrest and slouching until his head rested on the other), absentmindedly tapping the end of his peppermint stick on the edge of an ashtray.  He grimaced when he brought the stick back to his lips and realized his mistake. 

With a sigh, he dropped the peppermint stick back in the ashtray already full of cigarette butts and ruined candies, and unfolded the first letter.  In barely legible green marker, the message read: 

Dear Santa Claus,

My name is Steven and I'm 5 years old.  Please give me a skateboard for Christmas.  My brother has one and he won't let me borrow it to learn tricks.

Hmmm.  Five years old was a little young for a skateboard.  Knowing Steven, he'd probably knock his teeth out by New Year's...

...Slash shrugged.  Why not?  All things considered, he would have killed for a skateboard when he was five, so who was he to say no?

-----

Duff was seven years old when his older brothers cornered him in the backyard and gleefully informed him that Santa Claus was a fraud.  It was all a lie made up by parents to convince their children to behave during the year, they explained, and the toys were made on factory lines not by magical elves.  Their mother gave them a hell of a scolding afterwards but it was too late, the deed could not be undone. 

He tried to play it cool, but the truth was, Duff was very distraught as Christmas Eve inched closer.  Could his siblings be right?  He didn't want to believe it, but if he was being honest with himself, he'd suspected as much for some time.  He braced himself to accept the hard truth come Christmas Eve – but only if he was presented with definitive proof.

When the fateful night finally came, Duff and two of his brothers laid out their sleeping bags behind the couch, where they'd be hidden from view if anyone tried to approach the Christmas tree.  They all swore not to fall asleep, not even for a second until Christmas morning... And it wasn't until his brother started snoring that Duff realized he was the only one still awake and silently anticipating the moment of truth.  

It was imperative, of course, that he stayed hidden and didn't make a sound, or else risk giving their plot away.  But... it was past midnight, dinner was hours ago and Duff's empty stomach was starting to distract him from the task at hand.  He couldn't stop thinking about all the food he would get to eat with his family on Christmas Day: the glazed ham, mashed potatoes, apple pie and Christmas cookies... 

In the dim light, Duff could just barely make out the plate of cookies for Santa, waiting in front of the tree.  The cookies were still there untouched, all six of them... Surely no one would notice if Duff ate just one?  

He tiptoed over his sleeping siblings, as silent as the snow falling outside, making his way around the sofa to the plate on the coffee table.  But just as he reached out to pluck a gingerbread man from the assortment, he saw a shadow of movement out of the corner of his eye.  There, beside the Christmas tree in the flickering glow of multicolored string lights, was a mysterious figure in a fur-lined coat and a red cap.

Duff stared at the intruder, slack-jawed.  The cookie clattered back onto the dish, and at the noise the stranger whirled around to face him. 

"Duff!  What are you doing still awake?" he demanded.  Duff took a breath to answer – or more likely to ask how the man knew his name – but before he could, the man peered over the couch, narrowed his eyes and frowned.  "Oh I see what this is. You thought you would catch your parents pretending to be me!" he accused.  "Well, here's the real truth: adults are always wrong and you should never do what they say!" 

The man – could he really be Santa Claus? – he planted his leather-gloved hands on his hips as he scolded Duff.  "And don't even get me started on teenagers..." he griped, casting a stare over Duff's shoulder where his older brother's leg was sticking out from behind the couch, tangled in a blanket.  

Tears started to well up in Duff's eyes.

"Please still give them Christmas presents!  I know they said they don't believe in you, but they've been good, I promise!" he begged.  Santa's expression softened.

"Aw, I know, kid.  I promise they'll still get their presents, alright?  Let me just finish up here and then maybe you can help me out with those cookies, sound good?"

Placated, Duff sniffled and nodded, scrubbing his eyes with his sleeve. He hopped onto the sofa, swinging his feet and watching with awe as Santa pulled beautifully wrapped gifts out of seemingly nowhere and stacked them around the tree, one after another until all eight of the McKagan children were represented. He took a step back to take in his handiwork, made a few minor adjustments, then turned back to Duff: “Voila! That’s the magic of Christmas. Now pass me that plate, would you?”

Santa sat down next to Duff and propped his boots up on the coffee table. When Duff held out the plate of cookies, he selected one decorated to look like Santa Claus, white beard and all, and promptly bit its head off. 

“I love my job, but delivering presents is exhausting,” he sighed, accepting a glass of milk from Duff’s outstretched hand. “I’ve already covered Asia, Africa, Europe, and most of the Americas, so I’d say I’m due for a break.  Cheers, Duff.” He held up his glass and Duff tapped it with his half-eaten cookie. 

“To a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!”

🎄🎄🎄🎄

[kangaracha]

tell me about your ocs tho

you asked for this

so it’s been like, a while, since i really looked at my ocs outside of zombies, and also my work with the most proper ocs for zombies isn’t published yet, so i’m just going to do the three from other fandoms that i have big fics for and if you wanna hear about my little zombies ocs you can ask about em. okay. okay.

this is also really hard cause these characters go through so much change over the course of these fics, and i’m trying not to give away spoilers xD i will try. my best.

the OG. the one and only. the working-through-your-teenage-frustrations character. i love her.

IMOGEN HAYLOCK

mcu -  read sparrow

so the thing with imogen is that i wanted to do something different to the other oc fics I’d seen so far in this fandom. which is not to say those fics were bad or anything, i love them, i just want to be different. I was interested in writing a character that was like....not the perfect fit for the avengers, or the girl that got along with everyone, and then i saw TWS and related media (lookin at you, agents of shield), and i was like, ‘okay but if you were just hydra by name and working by shield values and principles all that time, and then suddenly you had to get up and kill your coworkers....’ and imogen Began.

i find her interesting for her wit and dry humour, her sarcasm and her big attitude - but also, her frustration with life, the deep-cut anger that she’s carrying with her like a rock, her struggle with self-worth and the way she presents herself to the world, and her complete average-ness in a place where everyone is exceptional. she’s nothing special - she’s just skating by, actually, she’s a high school dropout and on probation as a shield agent, and she’s really only off the streets because hydra value her as an object that might hold some valuable information related to a twenty year old cold case that doesn’t even have any relevance anymore in the grand scheme of things.

in sparrow, she finds something to relate to in clint barton - avenger, but also human disaster zone, making things up on the fly, most overlooked superhero of the century, completely regular guy with one unusual skill. she has to learn to be open to change and to want to be a good person, instead of an angry, ignorant person who will blindy follow whatever order she’s given and pick fights with anyone that disagrees with her. she also realises a lot of things that she should have realised sooner - that what’s left of her family is toxic as hell, that she’s been blindy following the forces of evil for years, that she doesn’t have to be an angry child from a broken home anymore, and that there’s a whole, scary world out there waiting for her and she can go and find anything she wants.

the rest of the trilogy, flicker and swift, follow her finding her way in the world, figuring out who she’s going to be and what she’s going to do, which is very relatable to me rn. it’s like therapy. flicker is also a great opportunity for me to have a crack at writing a romance as a side plot, and getting to let this character grow and realise her own self-worth and that yes, she can actually love and be loved in lots of different ways, is so satisfying. swift is just the icing on the cake, swift is her coming into her power, in her own way, it’s her looking back and realising that she’s changed her life and that she could do it after all, it’s a satisfying ending, i promise. i’m going to share it with you one day.

the slaughter of the lambs is kind of the sequel to the very first ac game that i always wanted and never got - except it’s not about altair because. i’m ~special~. the fic is set 20 years after the game, in the Levant, and is split into 4 parts spanning most of marwa’s lifetime, starting in 1211 AD and ending in 1257 AD and following her through the golden era of the assassin’s and the brotherhood’s downfall. it’s canon complaint, but runs like....canon adjacent. it’s its own story.

MARWA ABADI

assassin’s creed - read the slaughter of the lambs

marwa begins this story as a novice training in masyaf, the only female assassin in all of the levant. she’s raw and half-trained, never seen combat, her strength and ability put into doubt every day - but she’s talented too, and she works twice as hard as the boys, determined to prove everyone wrong. she’s tough and scrappy because she has to be to survive in the world she’s put herself in, and just a little too self-confident, which leads her to a downfall but also an important learning curve about wit and wisdom and loyalty, and the importance of striking a balance between free will and service to a cause. 

the rest of the story follows these themes on through the times of most upheaval in her life, as she struggles with following the creed and the beliefs of the assassin order and playing her role as a soldier for this cause, and with doubt and acting in accordance with her own personal morals and beliefs, which as time goes on and the assassin’s change, she finds do not always align. she has a strong sense of right and wrong and a strong character to back this up, and she strives throughout her life to become wise like her mentors were and to guide the world as best she can towards the right kind of future, as an assassin is supposed to. 

i wrote this character to explore the idea of being a servant to a higher order, to being faceless and lost to time and serving your cause knowing that, and how you find peace with giving your life over to that. especially coming from this day and age, when everything is recorded and everyone wants to be remembered for something, i found this interesting to explore. as marwa developed as a character, the other things came; her struggle with blind loyalty and festering doubt and the careful balance that she needs to strike between them, the folly of youth and the wisdom that she gains as she grows older, and the struggle of being a woman living in a male-dominated period of history and dedicating herself to a craft usually reserved for men. 

the first thing you need to understand about this fic, and this character, is that this is the therapy fic. this is me working through my own issues, but like also add +10 drama so that it’s interesting. and a romance plot, because i need the practise.

ANGIE SOMMARS

pokemon - read to go beyond your borders

angie’s story is mostly a sword/shield fic, though i borrowed some characters and stuff from diamond/pearl. the timelines are not canon. it’s set the year after the events of sw/sh, in galar. it follows angie through the gym challenge and her own personal conflicts, of which she has a laundry list. the fic finds her freshly arrived in galar from her home region in sinnoh, having run away from her responsibilities and the pressure of them at home looking for some kind of answer to her problems, or reassurance that she’s still good at what she does.

angie’s main conflict centres around her being the champion of the sinnoh league, a talented and experienced pokemon trainer sitting painfully exposed in the public eye. she struggles hugely with the reality of this position, and all the expectations that are put up to the person that holds it - she’s expected to be the strongest trainer in the region, to keep up a positive public image as the figurehead of the pokemon league, to be on the job most days of the year and ready for whatever it might throw at her. there’s always someone pushing her to be better, to present herself the way they think she should - and she’s used to being pushed and to being shaped, but there’s only so far you can bend a person before they will break.

angie is burnt out. she’s been in the public eye since she was five years old and competing in pokemon contests, and she’s far from the perfect princess of the league. her mistakes follow her around like a black cloud, creating controversy every time she reaches a new goal and drawing more and more bad press every time she messes something up. she doesn’t know what her own goals are anymore, and she doesn’t know where to go from the platform she’s found herself stranded on - she’s clinging to a position she’s too afraid to admit she doesn’t want anymore, and she’s scared to fall, or to break, or to look out to different horizons.

angie’s story explores the double-edged sword of fame and fortune, the satisfaction of being the best but also the scrutiny people place you under, the impact of ‘cancel culture’ on an individual, depression and anxiety and the endless circles of guilt in a toxic family environment...but also the hope of finding new horizons and finding the courage to take those first steps into the future that you want. it’s a coming of age kind of story, it’s young people finding their feet and new friends and new dreams and supporting each other through hard times. and it all ends well, which, to me, is the most important thing.

[satorinni]

𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐛𝐢𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲

synopsis: you were his everything; sun, moon, stars and all. he treated you so much like royalty that you expected nothing less. but it seems you took him for granted.

pairing: sakusa kiyoomi x fem!reader

warnings: angst, mostly angst, some fluff, readers kinda toxic ngl SUPER UNEDITED DONT YELL AT ME

a/n: uhhh idek if this counts as a fucking fic tbh, but it was inspired by a hc (that wasn’t even angst) that i saw, also i listened to grow old with you by adam sandler on repeat soooo yeah enjoy happy birfday to my future self cs this is queued<3

shit. you were late, again. it was your own fault, you knew that much. you went to bed late and didn’t bother setting an alarm. whatever, you were already late, why bother rushing? surely your professor would understand? 

this was your fault. no, not waking up late & not setting an alarm, (though that was still all you). no, the whole reason you never, ever bothered to wake up early enough to cook yourself breakfast: because you knew there would always be a fresh plate of eggs & bacon on the counter for you. the reason you never set an alarm or fixed your sleeping schedule: you knew someone would be there to wake you up & ensure you went to bed at a decent time. losing that, see, that was your fault.

to most, sakusa kiyoomi was a pretentious neat freak who disregarded everyone else’s comfort in preference of his own. to most, he was an outrageously good volleyball star who didn’t take interviews because his personal life was his personal life. to most, he was, well, kind of a dick. but alas, that was to most. you? you were not part of that majority. no, kiyoomi made sure to remind you of that every single time you saw him. whether it be through washing the dishes because he just knew you were stressed from school (without you ever having to say it). texting you good morning & good night every time he was away for a game (because yeah, he missed you just as much as you missed him). or even through the way he would cradle your face in his hands to kiss at your eyes whenever he finally came home (you cried every time, but he was always there to kiss your tears away). 

maybe you should’ve gone to his games more, cheer him on like the rest of his fans. though he never considered you a “fan”, merely his inspiration. maybe you should’ve dropped out of school to become his doting housewife. sakusa would never ask that of you, but sometimes the thought would creep into the back of your mind when school was too rough. maybe you should’ve traveled with him,  part of you thought the distance is what made it end, but that was your brain making excuses because deep down you knew distance would never be the reason.

 ~~~

“don’t you miss me when you’re gone?” you knew the answer, but moments like this were rare, so you held onto them when you got the chance. your eyes were still closed, but you knew his were open by the flutter of his eyelashes against yours.

“i miss you every single minute that i can’t see your smile.” as if on cue, a soft smile builds on your face. he could probably feel your heartbeat with how close he was. your fingers grazed the curls at the nape of his neck and you shiver, as if the goosebumps you left in your wake were contagious. 

“what do you miss about me?” humor me, you thought, because he was leaving tomorrow and you needed something to savor for the next few weeks. he hums softly, large hands stroking small circles against your cheek. 

“i miss going to dinner an hour early to avoid the swarm of paparazzi trying to snap pictures of my girl.” you giggle at this. the paps were actually always trying to snap pics of him, because of his tendency to never leave hotel rooms, photos of him were always so rare. 

“i miss fighting over the remote because you always wanna watch those nature documentaries.” he constantly complained about how boring they were, but always let you have the remote anyway. you try shifting closer to him, as if your foreheads and every part of you body wasn’t already pressed against his. 

“i miss the nights i get to spend putting you to bed when you drink too much with your friends.” you open your eyes at this. he’s looking directly into yours. 

“i thought you hated that?” mornings after are always filled with his complaints of how you reeked of alcohol and sweat. you always told him he didn’t have to clean up after you, but he would just roll his eyes and change the subject.

at this, he smiles and kisses you softly. suddenly, you forget what you’re even talking about until he pulls away. 

“mostly, i just miss you, princess.” at first, the nickname started as a joke. when you first started dating, his friends thought you were a mooch. always having sakusa clean the house, get the groceries, remind you of your dentist appointments, treat you like a princess. despite this, whenever you tried to protest that you were an independent woman or that you could do things yourself, he would laugh and kiss away your complaints.

“i would travel across the seas everyday for 20 years if it meant i could see you smile and hear you laugh.” a grin spreads across your face. “even if it means i have to deal with your morning breath.” your eyes widen in embarrassment. you cover your face with your hands and whine. 

“yoomi!” he laughs, but pries your hands away and kisses you again. you smile into the kiss, reveling in the feeling of being his girl.

“i love you.” he whispers against your lips. you kiss him harder, not bothering to say it back because you both know you’d walk to the ends of the earth for him. 

~~~

after a while, you became dependent on him. on the occasions he was home, he did everything for you. and even when he wasn’t, he would still call everyday to make sure you feed the cat and call your mother. little things. maybe after 4 years you started getting selfish. 

“princess, it’ll just be for two days?” he was trying to reason with you, but you didn’t see the point. nothing he said would’ve made you change your mind. 

“yoomi, i don’t want you to go!” looking back, maybe you were being a bit insufferable. after all, it was nationals, there would be olympic recruiters there. kiyoomi had a shot at being in the olympics.  but still, it was your anniversary. “we were supposed to go to paris remember? the city of love? don’t you love m-” he cuts you off before you finish.

“of course i love you. don’t ever doubt that i do. but i can’t let my team down. i can’t let japan down. i have to go, princess.” you turn away from him, fingers running across your forehead in rapid annoyance. school had been extra stressful, but you were graduating this year. this was the only break you had, and you had really been hoping to spend it in paris with the love of your life.

“why don’t you come with me?” it was quiet, but something about the suggestion made you furious. you had never gone to his away games before. not because you didn’t want to, but because sakusa preferred to keep your relationship private. he liked it better when you watched him through the tv screen. 

“i don’t want to. i want to go to paris. i want to celebrate our anniversary and come back home so i can finish my finals. so i can graduate and i can travel with you as much as you want.” maybe that was the breaking point. maybe he finally realized how much of a brat you were being, regardless of how much you loved him and he loved you.

~~~

in attempt to stop the words ringing in your head, you open your eyes and sit up. you were already two hours late, what was the point in going to school at all? didn’t matter if you graduated anyway, you didn’t have anywhere to go, no one to be with. your professor would understand.

you sob quietly into your hands. It was no use, you could still hear him. 

“i can’t do this anymore, y/n.” you wanted to scream. youcanyoucanyoucan. you should’ve. but you knew you couldn’t. he was going to be in the olympics. he had his whole life ahead of him, and who were you? just his selfish girl. his girl who couldn’t even bother to go to his game that day on your anniversary. the game where he scored the winning spike and pointed directly to the cameras. the game where he screamed through tears, this one’s for you, princess. 

the game you didn’t watch. 

this was your fault. you knew it was. there was no point in being angry with him. he loved you. you knew that. but after he left you couldn’t help but wonder, did i really love him? or did i love everything he did for me?

three months. it took three months to realize that, yes, i love him with every fiber of my being. It took three whole months to realize that you tore out your own heart and his when you let him walk out. because after three months you realized he would’ve stayed the second you asked him to. but you didn’t. and that was your fault.

© satorinni 2020 // do not copy or repost //

[wolfandwild]

My Shadowlands Wish List

Now that we’re getting closer and closer to pre-patch and the inevitable launch of the expansion, I thought I’d rattle off a wish list of things I hope we get to see in Shadowlands, largely from a lore/story perspective. (Or rather, my stupid foot was hurting so badly I couldn’t concentrate on writing my fic properly, so I decided to ramble off some not-so-hot takes, honestly they’re pretty mild in the grand scheme of things). I was in the first alpha wave, so I’ve had a pretty good opportunity to play the game as it is thus far, and I did want to make it clear up front that I’m fully aboard the hype train. Shadowlands is looking like a great expansion for a number of different reasons, and while I do have a few areas of concern, on the whole I am currently feeling very positive. Please also note these are just my random, late-night personal musings - your mileage may vary, and that’s a-okay.  Mild Shadowlands spoilers below the cut.

You Get A Customisation! You Get A Customisation! Everybody Gets A Customisation! This one is pretty much a no-brainer. I don’t necessarily think Blizzard need to have absolutely every possible character customisation ready to go before launch, but I’d like them to continue adding further options over time. I move in a couple of different circles in Warcraft - I’m obviously involved in the writing/lore/character aspect of the game, but I’m also GM of a raiding guild and closely follow the gameplay/competitive side of things too - and customisation is one of those few things that gets everyone excited, regardless of their reason for playing the game. I’m looking forward to seeing a much more vibrant, unique and diverse Azeroth come Shadowlands pre-patch. (Mostly irrelevant side story - when Wrathion returned in the Patch 8.3 cinematics, my Twitter and lore Discords were basically going berserk with excitement, meanwhile there’s a hundred very confused dudes in my raiding guild who don’t read quest text being all, “What the hell is a ‘Wrathion’?”. I live in two different worlds, honestly). Another reason I’m excited about customisation (and I’m probably in a very small minority on this one) is because I actually really dislike allied races, and I think it gives Blizzard an option to add more flavour to character creation in the game without always having to cobble together a new race. I honestly think they should have simply gone for sub-race customisation from the beginning, to avoid having to ass-pull allied races out of nowhere. Using customisation over allied races also makes it far simpler to give something to both factions (e.g. high elves), or to add something for one faction without necessarily having to always add something to the other faction to keep things in balance. Giving an extra hairstyle to humans but not orcs generally isn’t going to cause that much of a fuss, but if one faction were given an allied race and the other wasn’t because there wasn’t a logical racial option, there would be a shitstorm of epic proportions. So you end up in a situation where one faction* gets saddled with a really random, sucky allied race just to be ‘fair’. *The Alliance. It’s the Alliance. Leave Britney Arthas Alone Arthas has never been a personal favourite of mine, but I respect that he has a fantastic story, and that he’s a cornerstone of Warcraft lore. His story is both satisfying and complete, and that’s exactly why they should leave him the hell alone. I don’t mind if he’s visited in flashbacks (like the Bastion cinematic), or if we explore how he affected still living characters (e.g. Jaina, Sylvanas, Bolvar), but I think it would be a mistake to try to make him a central character in the expansion. In contrast, someone like Kael’thas is an excellent choice for an additional arc, because his original story was a bit all over the place and there is still plenty of room for his character development. Arthas doesn’t need it, and I don’t think the minute potential gain is worth the risk of retroactively making the rest of his story worse. On a similar note... Warcraft III Was Released Nearly 20 Years Ago, It’s Time to Move On The Warcraft RTS was a landmark series of games, and was obviously without them we wouldn’t have the World of Warcraft. However, I think the future health of Warcraft’s lore depends on the ability of the writers to grow the story outwards and upwards, not to always default back to the same handful of characters for nostalgia’s sake. While characters like Jaina, and Thrall, and Sylvanas are great, they can’t carry the narrative forever. Shadowlands represents a unique opportunity to build up the next generation of characters and to blow the cosmology of the universe wide open. From what I’ve seen on the alpha/beta, Blizzard are definitely taking a step in this direction, and I’m hoping that’s what we get instead of Patch 9.2 - Oh Look, It’s Thrall Again. On an additionally similar note... Sylvanas Is Crazy, And She Needs To Go Down (I don’t actually think she’s crazy, but one should never miss the opportunity for an Avatar reference). One of my complaints about the recent lore developments in Warcraft its that it’s starting to feel a lot less like the World of Warcraft, and more like the Sylvanas of Warcraft. She’s playing 469D chess; she’s behind everything; she’s the sole driving force of the narrative. I don’t think that works in an MMO that’s meant to tell the story of an entire expanded universe. It makes things feel small. And before I get eaten alive, I want to be clear that I don’t dislike Sylvanas as a character - in fact, I think she’s very compelling and on a night when my foot wasn’t killing me so much I’d be happy to get into an argument as to why she’s actually one of the most consistent and well-written characters in the World of Warcraft. I don’t necessarily think she needs to die, either, but I think it’s time for her narrative to come to a close to make room for other characters in the story, and I don’t think Blizzard are going to get a much better opportunity to give her a satisfying ending than in a death-themed expansion. Justice for Tyrande (Or Vengeance, Whatever Uther Wants to Call It) Tyrande got done dirty in Battle for Azeroth, probably more than any other character. I’m not a massive night elf fangirl by any means, but their entire race was basically used as grist for the mill in Sad Orc Dad’s story, with no next to no narrative follow-up besides a cool cinematic that went absolutely nowhere in game. Outside the game, her character then got subjected to the cacophonous misogynistic crowing of the fanbase that occurs whenever a female character dares to be angry in the World of Warcraft. Much like Jaina, she’s decried for being ‘crazy’ or ‘irrational’ for, you know, being pissed that her people and her homeland were wiped out in an act of wildly disproportional aggression. I don’t know about you guys, but that would tend to make me a wee bit testy, but maybe I’m crazy and irrational too. In any case, I want to see her go off in Shadowlands. Fuck ‘em up, girlfriend. You Get One Villain. If You Drop It, I’m Not Buying You Another One I think most people will agree with me that the two weakest expansions (at least from a narrative perspective) were Warlords of Draenor and Battle for Azeroth. There are a few reasons for this, but for me one of the biggest issues was that they were chop-and-change expansions. Both were advertised and started off with narratives and themes that were wildly different from where they finished up. Warlords was part Iron Horde expansion, part Legion expansion; BFA was part faction war expansion, part Old God expansion... and that’s exactly the problem. Both times, I felt like we got two half-done expansions, instead of one single, cohesive narrative experience.  If you look at expansions like Wrath of the Lich King and Legion, both of which were very well received, a lot of their success hinges on their presentation of a consistent narrative with a clear goal for players within the story. The Lich King, for example, was a consistent and very present villain. He menaced you throughout your entire journey, and so his eventual defeat on top of Icecrown Citadel was meaningful and impactful. Defeating N’Zoth, by contrast, felt pretty hollow, as we hadn’t had enough narrative build up to really care about taking him down. Part of the reason I’m excited for Shadowlands is it looks like we’re getting a nice, focused story development that builds up to a logical and satisfying villain in the Jailer. Why Can’t We Be Friends? Look, I bleed blue. I love the Alliance... but the faction war should not continue to be a driving narrative element in the World of Warcraft. I don’t want the factions to be removed, I think they’re a core part of the Warcraft experience and I’d be pretty sad to have to let them go entirely, but the cycle of hating one another then teaming up in an uneasy alliance in order to defeat a bigger bad, only to go back to being at one another’s throats the next day is... tiresome.

Ideally, the war would have ended after Legion - it was the most logical place to do so, and I think it was a big missed opportunity that they ran with Battle for Azeroth immediately afterwards. Unfortunately, I think this means the Alliance is going to just have to forgive and forget, which doesn’t really make a lot sense at this point given everything that happened in BFA, but for the sake of the overall story, it might be a necessary sacrifice. That said... I Am Once Again Asking for Alliance Narrative Agency I know there are a lot of (valid) complaints to be had about the Horde storyline, but the one thing the Horde has always had over the Alliance is that they actually get to drive the narrative forward. The Alliance are pretty much exclusively reactionary, and in a lot of ways are side characters to the main Horde storyline. I’ve made this argument elsewhere, but it honestly wouldn’t be too hard to remove Anduin’s part in Saurfang’s storyline in Battle for Azeroth and have it turn out more or less exactly the same way... which says a lot about the importance of the Alliance in the overall storyline. In short, the Alliance are secondary players at best, and downright irrelevant at worst. One of my biggest hopes for Shadowlands is that we’ll actually get to see some Alliance narrative agency. To be clear, however, this does not mean a simple rehashing of Horde conflicts with a blue coat of paint. Alliance stories are not Horde stories, and nor should they be. Having an Alliance leader turn into a genocidal despot is not the only way to create conflict or agency in the story - there are plenty of opportunities for character growth, development and conflict on the Alliance side without having to have one of our leaders do a heel turn (e.g. Tyrande as the Night Warrior, Anduin dealing with his experience in the Maw, Jaina confronting the fates of people like Kael’thas and Arthas, Taelia meeting her father, etc.), and I really hope we get to see some of those narrative threads come to fruition. I Want to Mount Everything Add a hundred new mounts. Two hundred. A pot plant with googly eyes, the four hundredth Alliance horse, your mum. I’ll ride anything; I don’t even care. (Please note this is the most important opinion I have).

[kurokoros]

So, I noticed that a few people have been getting anons today accusing smut writers (and a few sfw blogs which??? okay) of being p*dophiles. I didn’t get one of these asks, but did receive one like it a few weeks ago which you can see HERE. I don’t mean to insert myself into discourse here, but as someone that’s been writing smut for 6-7 years now I figure fuck it, might as well compile my thoughts about anime and smut in one place when I’m not angry or anxious about receiving hate mail online.

I’m going to repeat something I’ve already said about my own writing, writing in general, and animation/television/marketing/etc, as well as how fiction reflects on reality.

I’m going to start this by saying I don’t think anyone that was sent an ask is gross towards children/minors. I think there are definitely some people who watch anime and sexualize characters (usually young girls) because those characters are children. Personally, I don’t fuck with anyone into lolicon bullshit, and I think that a lot of people into lolicon can and would be reflect that behavior in the real world. I’ve never seen someone into lolicon that hasn’t also tried to use certain countries age of consent laws (Japan) to justify wanting to have sex with girls as young as 13 (note: Japan’s age of consent doesn’t apply to grown ass adults having sex with minors, it makes it legal for two consenting minors in the same age range to have sex without it being a sex crime).

With that in mind, most fandom smut I’ve seen (or have written myself) does one of two things:

1) Ages up any canon characters involved. This can be for an AU, or kept in canon. As I’ve mentioned in other posts, most anime isn’t really about characters being children/teenagers. There’s usually something else going on, and the only reason the characters are that young are for marketing reasons. If you think about some really popular anime and manga (Naruto, My Hero Academia, Bleach) it’s kind of fucked up that the characters are ~15 and being trained to fight in wars. Yeah, it’s for marketing. The characters don’t look or act like teenagers in most cases, and it’s the equivalent of casting 20-30 year-olds to play teenagers in Western television. (Anime and the CW are basically the same and you can’t change my mind.)

2) The characters, if the fic takes place in high school, are the same age. Even in x reader fics, usually if the story takes place in high school, the reader is also a high school student, so it’s no different than character x character fics or shows like Riverdale having sex scenes.

And, let’s be honest here, x reader fics are just OC fics without names and physical appearances. A lot of them aren’t even told in second person. The argument about (adult) smut writers imagining themselves having sex with underage characters is just... not usually true, in my experience. I’m more concerned with remembering where everyone’s arms are than thirsting over the characters.

Personally, I usually age up the characters even when I’m not writing smut. A lot of people do. Because the smut isn’t about the characters being young. Because the writers (and readers) aren’t taking sexual gratification from the characters being underage ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ A lot of complaints about smut seem specifically targeted towards 20-30 year old women who are just trying to mind their own business. People who write erotic fiction already get shit for it, it’s never depended on who the character is.

That being said, I will never condone minor/adult fics, or their romantic portrayal in media in general.