#firsts to grow up AU

[cityzenshark]

Full Terran cast for "Firsts to Grow Up"

Edit: fixed JB and Sunflower

[cityzenshark]

Yeah the show presents the Terrans as Earthborn-Cybertronians rather than as the Earthborn Transformers they're meant to be.

In my Firsts to Grow Up AU, the Terrans gain energy by consuming fruits, vegetables, minerals and freshwater (by drinking or bathing in them). Energon is like what coffee does to children: energizing them instantaneously but doesn't give them proper, lasting energy. They must take Emberstone water at least once a month.

Ultimately, the Emberstone is more like saline. It doesn't affect the Terrans or organics, but Cybertronians will start feeling weird the longer they touch Emberstone water.

I don't blame anon for forgetting that the Terrans are techno organic, the showrunners have done everything in their power to remove enough organic traits from these Terrans, and never touching that side of their existence, that it's amazing anyone still remembers that their techno ORGANIC. I mean, this isn't even the first time we've had techno organics either: Beast Wars and Transformers Animated gave us characters who were just that. 1/4

Hi Anon! I put all your asks together to make it easier.

Sadly, ES is the perfect example of 'interesting idea, bad execution'. It doesn't help that the show also has a strong vibe of 'please don't think too hard about this' most of the time even in S1.

There were so many interesting ways the writers could've explored the Terrans organic nature, but all we get is that they run on cave water and them having some leeway with how they scan altmodes. That's so basic and boring. Why not have the Terrans be capable of photosynthesis as another way to get energy? I actually do this in my Lotus AU. The Terrans don't know they're capable of it at first and find out their bodies have the ability to evolve (to a certain degree) to suit their environment much like organic organisms do.

The crazy thing is that Mandroid is pretty much the only character in the show to be mind blown at the idea that the Terrans are tech/organic hybrids. He even gave them their species name. Meanwhile, most of the other characters reactions to the Terrans nature are on a sliding scale of "That's weird".

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Sorry for not having a Year of the Dragon MDZS artwork; Unfortunately, I can only picture Dragon LWJ in this particular flavour.

[starry-bi-sky]

No.

No, no, no, no, NO!

He's shaking. His heart is burning in his chest, pounding like a jackhammer against his ribs, and there's a trembling, aching rage building beneath his tongue and pressing against his teeth.

In his hands, his fingers tense and wrists locked, the article reads in big, black font: JOKER LOCKED IN ARKHAM ASYLUM AGAIN!

Danny shouldn't feel so angry about this, this is a good thing. Gotham doesn't have to deal with him for another few months at the least. He should feel relieved, a little more at peace.

He is not.

He cannot swallow the fury thudding behind his eyes, the burning white heat searing a deeper hole in his chest. A searing green filling static in his ears in the way only the rage of the restless dead can have.

How is he going to kill him now?

Arkham may be the only asylum in America made entirely of tissue paper, but it's still an asylum. There are cameras, guards, other patients resting inside. Danny can think of a million different ways to sneak in and kill Joker, but someone will hear his screaming.

It'd have to be rushed.

He doesn't want it to be rushed.

It's a cruel thought. Cruel and cold and merciless, but Danny doesn't feel an ounce of shame, not an ounce of guilt, for it. He wants to be alone with the Joker when he kills him, that's all he wants. In Arkham, you are never alone.

He forces his anger to bubble back down into his chest, stuffing it between his heartstrings and his ribs like a blanket you're trying to bunch up into a corner. It sizzles and burbles. The static begins to fade out into a high-pitched ringing; it sounds like distant screaming.

Danny is still trembling, but he can think a little clearer now.

He can wait.

He can wait. He can wait. He can wait. He canwait. Hecanwait. Hecanwait.

He can wait.

He's waited five years for this. He can wait one more week. One more month. One more year. However long it takes for the Joker to break back out, Danny can wait.

And when the Joker does, inevitably, break out.

Danny uncrinkles his fingers around the edges of the newspaper, loosens his limbs just enough so he can pay for it.

He'll be waiting.

The dead, after all, have all the time in the world.

[ping-ski]

"Remember, no tears, okay?"

[canisalbus]

Vasco parents 100% called him Sunshine and dresses him in sun themed clothing as a toddler

They toned it down as he got older, but went right back into it when they meet Machete. Vaschete are sun/moon coded and everybody knows fr fr

(they also do winter and summer nicknames to break it up a little)

The theming stuck to him so tightly, he continues to be subconsciously drawn to sun imagery as an adult, both in canon and modern au.

[beetledee0]

Bitches !!! good gods why did this take so long

minor gore warning under cut

[blue-mood-blue]

I’ve grown to appreciate the aus where Shen Yuan enters the story as “Shen Yuan” - same name, probably similar face, generally able to interact with PIDW as himself and change the story through his added presence. I like the sense of “if only you’d been here, things might have been better the first time around” of it all.

And I was thinking, it’s a funny coincidence in that scenario that someone named Shen Yuan gets put into… another Shen Yuan. What are the chances? What a weird twist of fate that Airplane would pick out the name that his most dedicated critic could slip into seamlessly.

What about a version where it’s not coincidence at all?

Airplane goes to school with a kid named Shen Yuan. He’s prickly and hard to approach and a little intense, but Airplane is persistent. In fairness, Airplane is relentless - and maybe it’s a good thing that they end up being friends, because they’re a little too much for anyone else to handle. They balance each other out. They’re the “weird kids” in class and they’re okay with that, because even when they don’t have any words for it, they know they’re not like their classmates, not really. That’s okay; they don’t want to be.

Recesses and breaks are consumed with the elaborate stories that Airplane wants to tell, and all the holes Shen Yuan pokes into them. It’s not mean-spirited, though, even though Shen Yuan isn’t the kind to temper his words. It’s passionate. He cares about those stories the way Airplane cares about them, and it can’t be mistaken for anything else when they lean together conspiratorially across the lunchroom table. They’ve both got notebooks filled with details and characters and monsters. Shen Yuan’s practically got a whole bestiary sketched out in wobbly childhood attempts at art, entries fervently scrawled beside them. Airplane prattles out plots nonstop, always with the promise of shining eyes and being asked “what happens next?”

They come up with a whole world together. Airplane’s going to write about it someday. Shen Yuan is going to read every word.

Shen Yuan misses school. Shen Yuan starts missing school a lot.

Airplane goes to the hospital room instead. He doesn’t think to worry, because Shen Yuan is okay - that’s what he says. He looks okay, and he’s a kid, and it doesn’t feel real that anything bad should happen to a kid. He doesn’t think to worry. He doesn’t think to say goodbye.

It’s one of the older Shen brothers who catches him on the way up to the room one day, in the hallway just outside - snaps at him to go the fuck home, and when Airplane hesitates, pushes him into the elevator and tells him not to come back. “Tells” is a generous way to describe the way the words come out - a growl, a hiss, the sound an animal would make when a hand got too close to a wound.

(It’s not fair to name a villain after him, even if the name never really comes up in the story. He wasn’t trying to be mean. He’d lost a brother minutes before, and he was getting his brother’s friend out of the way so he didn’t have to… see. It isn’t fair, but then, none of it is fair.)

Death feels very real after that.

The notebooks get shoved into a closet, and it’s not until Airplane’s moving out and one falls on him from a high shelf that he thinks about it again. He’s written things, lots of things, but nothing as ambitious as this - nothing as important. It could be good, he considers. He’d promised. Shen Yuan wanted to read it.

The problem was that no one else does, not for a long time, not until Airplane has whittled himself and his art into a corner and into such an unfamiliar shape that he has to wonder how it’s still his own face he sees in the mirror. He has to eat. He has to pay rent. Shen Yuan would yell at him, but Shen Yuan isn’t there to yell at him, and who cares. Who cares if it could have been better? The people who actually are here love it, and it’s paying his bills, and sometimes stories don’t go the way they’re supposed to and the world is fucking unfair. It doesn’t matter.

(It does. But he shoves that thought away along with styrofoam cups and soda bottles to the bottom of a garbage bag.)

Authors are not gods and their power is limited, but Airplane exercises just a sliver of what he’s been granted and gifts an inconsequential sort of immortality. He thinks about making him a rogue cultivator, maybe the kind that goes around documenting beasts and compiling his findings. He thinks about making him someone too powerful for death to touch, or too important to threaten, but when Airplane looks at the world he crafted and everything that’s become of it, it feels like the kindest thing he can do for Shen Yuan is a childhood where he’s loved, and a death that’s peaceful. What does it say about that world, that he’d kill off his best friend too early again instead of making him live there?

(The best writing he ever does is the only, shining moment of humanity that his scum villain ever displays: a lament about death that comes too early, about a brother gone too soon. The commenters praise him. The commenters flatter over how real the emotions feel. The commenters don’t get any response from Airplane on that chapter.)

Death is incredibly real when it comes for him too early, too, still hovering over his keyboard with the story technically finished and incredibly incomplete. Airplane could tell himself that’s because the written version can never be the version in the writer’s head, always shifting and with every possibility still on the table, but he knows better than that. The System knows better than that, with its condescending message about “improving” his writing and “closing plot holes” and “achieving his original vision”...

…and he’s a child again. He’s a child in his own story, he’s Shang Qinghua now without the benefit yet of a peak or cultivation or anything, and maybe he’s a little bitter, and a little scared, and…

And Shen Yuan - with longer hair, with robes, with a couple of older kids watching him from across the street, but undeniably the prickly little boy who used to sit down imperiously across from him and tell him everything that was wrong with the chuck of writing that had been handed to him last period, but with that smile that said he was only invested because he knew it could be better and they were going to make it better - marches up to him with a fire in his eyes and a frown that warns of a coming tirade.

“You told it wrong,” is the first thing he says.

Shang Qinghua wants to ask how him how he’s here, how this is possible, or maybe laugh because, yeah - yeah, Shen Yuan has no goddamn idea how wrong he got absolutely everything.

(Shang Qinghua wants to say “I missed you” and “why did you leave so soon” but he’s here now. He’s right here.)

“I know,” he says instead. “I’m sorry. It all kind of… spiraled out of control.”

Shen Yuan frowns, but then it dissipates the way it always does, and his eyes shine with ideas the way they always used to. “That’s okay,” he relents, grabbing for his hand. “We’ll fix it. We’ll make it what it was supposed to be.”

[ricky-mortis]

Curtwen Week Day 6: Happy Ending

[lotus-lamps]

like father like son

hes just toji but smol

[otaku553]

More reluctant king sabo au! I realized recently that this au is an excellent excuse for drawing sabo in pretty outfits that he would be absolutely miserable in :)

[cityzenshark]

Twitch & Thrash are excited about something. The feeling emits to the triplets who are more confused than amazed.

Hashtag is itching to open an encyclopedia/google to know what exactly that "amazing thing" is.

Nightshade observes the "amazing thing", taking mental notes on its design and figuring out why the twins found it "amazing".

Jawbreaker is a little scared of it. What's so fascinating about a thing that looks almost the same as the spiderbots from that mad man with the giant robot arm?

Thus begins Twitch & Thrash's journey of being the older siblings to the three Terrans who are not themselves.

[eikichi-supremacy]

If nothing else Koenma is a Kuwabara stan and I'm right there with him o7 (I need to write the kuwameshi fic that goes with this fr)

[bythepen98]

Doodles || Tomarry || Childhood friends/Growing Up Together au

(Ignore the not-so-time-period-accurate outfits)

Think of this as a timetravel au where Harry accidentally gets sent back to the past in Wool's orphanage at a young enough age where he barely notices the changes caused by the time displacement and thus grows up nonethewiser to his destiny as the Chosen One. Even when, objectively, his life at the orphanage could be considered worse considering the growing lack of food, his environment's state of decay and overall unrest happening outside the orphanage's walls, something about his situation felt right(?).

He'd always felt disconnected and out of place based on the few memories he still had from living with the Dursleys but now, it felt like he was home in a way. Like something finally clicked in his brain, his soul.

His instant connection to Tom helped cement that fact. It wasn't easy at first because the pull they felt when they first met was so strong that it scared Harry shtless and Tom, already half-full of resentment by this point, was horrified feeling anything to anyone that wasn't disgust. In the end, it didn't take long for them to meet halfway since they were still children and curiosity at the connection lured them in like candy; Harry wanted a special friend of his own and Tom convinced himself that Harry was worth his time because there was no way anyone ordinary could elicit such a soul deep response from him.

Tom has a mean streak and is more bloodthirsty than his charming facade would show but is honest about it with Harry. Although he doesn't have much to his name, Tom is serious about his self-imposed role as Harry's provider, giving him gifts (from the money he steals) during his birthdays and keeping him as warm and well fed as possible (by bullying the other kids into surrendering their share).

Sometimes, Tom....worries.....that his methods would eventually drive Harry - who has such an inherent goodness in him, so often kind to people who don't deserve it - away but what he fails to understand is that Harry's love and loyalty to the first friend he's ever made trumps any kindness he has for others. He'll never like needless violence and won't react if he was being targeted but all bets are off if he even a catches a whiff of plots against Tom. If he has to help hide a body or two in the future so that they won't be separated by something as inconvenient as jail or the law, then that's nobody's business but his own.

P.S. This Harry will probably go to Hufflepuff instead of Slytherin like in other fics. It just feels right. Probably should've drawn him wearing a yellow tie but only just got the idea as I'm typing this. Tom would rather eat slugs than go to the Hufflepuff common room but he's more than willing to entertain Harry at the Slytherin common room at every available chance. They have their own seat there and everything.

P.P.S. They also co adopt a tiny(??) baby snake when they realize they can both speak parseltongue and bring him along to hogwarts. Imagine being parents at the big old age of 10 to a possibly magical snake that may or may not grow past nagini-level size.

P.P.P.S. Future power couple in the making. Didn't think that far ahead whether I wanted Tom to go the political route or Dark Lord Voldemort style minus the horcruxes. Don't ask for me the details, just know that with Harry's help, Tom finds a way to prolong their lives without the consequences that come with using horcruxes. They may or may not discover that Harry is in fact a horcrux of Tom already but will never get the answer as to how it happened. Harry worries but Tom just chocks it up as the universe's way of paying him back for his shtty pre-Harry childhood. Ironically the type to believe in soulmates and destiny while Harry is a bit more skeptical on that front.

Alternatively, they could also decide not to do anything too significant -politically- at all and instead retire to the country side while doing research on as many branches of magic as they can. A bit laughable because of Tom's world altering ambitions and Harry's indulgent, enabling behavior but at the same time, anything's possible.

[starry-bi-sky]

I'm in A Mood™ (stressed) so im going back to my roots of melting two character together into one person. So bruce wayne!danny fenton. Danny Fenton who, for eight years, grew up in a beautiful gothic manor with his mom and dad under the name "Bruce Wayne". Playing piano with his mother, running around the manor with his father.

Then when he's eight it's ripped away from him. There's blood on his hands and pearls pooling at his feet, and both his parents are dead in front of him.

And he gets shipped off to distant relatives "the Fentons" shortly after, Alfred close on his heels because someone needs to take care of him, someone that knows him. Bruce goes to the Fentons for the safety of anonymity. Gotham's press wants to sink its teeth into him.

Danny misses his city even if it took everything from him. There are shadows in his eyes and he's pale as a sheet even beside his distant cousins, and they change his name to "Danny Fenton' because nobody should know that their newest child was illustrious orphan Bruce Wayne.

They call him Bruce behind closed doors. Danny prefers it that way, he clings onto the name -- the one his parents gave him -- like a lifeline. He makes friends with Sam and Tucker. Tucker takes one look at the willowy, morbid little boy standing in the corner like a shade, ghosts in his eyes, and drags him out into the sunlight, and takes him over to Sam.

When Danny is twelve, he's still not over it -- and he's a little obsessed with the Fentons' research, with the morbid. He has books upon books on death, murder, detective work. Anything he can get his hands on. And stars. He loves stars.

Alfred owns the apartment next to them and comes over regularly. Danny clings to him.

When Danny is twelve, he's still quiet, meek, a shy little thing prone to being bullied. Freaky little Fenton with the night in his eyes and too-cold skin even before he put one foot in the grave. in a sleepover in his room with Sam and Tucker, he tells them the truth. They're his friends, he trusts them.

"My name is Bruce." he murmurs, voice quiet as the breeze, always quiet. he's staring at his star-covered sheets.

"Like Bruce Wayne?" Tucker asks, a joking tone in his voice.

Danny smiles a little, lamb-like with insecurity. "I am Bruce Wayne." And he takes them down to the lab, disrupting Maddie and Jack, to prove it. Sam tells them of her own wealth then shortly after. They start calling Danny "Bruce" in private too -- its trust. Thats what it is. It's trust.

Sam goes to media functions and comes back with aching feet and complaints on her tongue -- and Danny soaks it up all like a sponge, splayed across a beanbag chair with Tucker in her room. He's not envious of her, he used to go to events with his parents and they kept him safe from the ugly of Gotham's Elite. For the most part. He's had comments made at him, he doesn't miss them.

Alfred returns to the manor semi-regularly, Danny goes with him. he wanders the hallways and helps Alfred clean, the last thing either of them want is for their home to fall into disrepair. He brings Jazz with him next time, then Tucker, then Sam. They all help him clean, and he shows them his room. The one across from his parents', it feels strange.

When Danny dies when he's fourteen, the first adult he tells is Alfred. He and Jazz go over to his house more often than they stay in the Fentonworks building. At least at Alfred's, the food doesn't come to life. Alfred sits at the kitchen table and weeps when Danny tells him, Jazz is upstairs, and its just the two of them.

Danny's ghost form wears pearls around his wrist and the gloves look stained with some kind of black substance. He looks like a child who died in a lab accident, but he also looks like a child who has shadows dripping off his shoulders, curling at his feet, hanging from his eyes.

because amorphous blob batman has my heart always and danny/bruce will not escape it even in death even if that IS the only reason im giving him Mild BatBlob Vibes...so far

when they go to the manor, alfred helps danny make a pile of stones between Martha and Thomas' graves, nobody but the two of them (and sam and tucker) will know what it means. (not even bruce's children later down the line, not for a long, long time)

danny dives into ghost fighting on shaky feet and not half as witty as he once was in one world. he's skittish, skittering between blasts from shadow to shadow and clumsily making his way through each battle. but helping people lights a fire in him. he still has shadows dripping off his feet but there's a purpose in his eyes.

and god help him, he's going to help people.

[invye]

Me, gasping awake: "Omg, I haven't thought about Rosinante in days!"

My brain: "No worries fam, here's a huge CoraHawk fake dating fix it AU."

Me: "Thank you :)"

*10 minutes later*

Me: "But you know we can't have Mihawk without Shanks, especially if this is set during their duelling times, and also I think Shanks and Rosinante would get on like a house on fire--"

My brain: "This is gonna be a polyamorous Rosinante/Mihawk/Shanks story before long, who do you think I am??"