#forces her to be straightforward in a way no one else ever has

[hyperbali]

Straight up tripped into (Inquisitor!)Jeanne/Solas and saw into eternity.

It's like. One of the most hilariously fitting ships she has ever had.

Shit boy I die!!

[all-purpose-dish-soap]

59 / 3.4k / part 3 of shark mermen Gaz and Soap with human!reader <3

kinktober keywords: dubcon, monster mermen, monsterfucking, teratophilia, overt predator/prey dynamics, hypnosis/hypnokink, praise

...

"You gonna behave?"

You bite your lip and keep your arms tightly wound around your upper half. "I thought I was."

The movement catches Gaz's eyes. They darken. "Don't do that."

"Do what?"

He reaches out, catching your bottom lip between his thumb and forefinger. He pulls it gently lower and lets it snap back into place, and your lip stings with saltwater. "That."

You squirm in his hold.

Gaz keeps his grip, but lets you keep moving. His gaze drops again to your lips and keeps getting lower until it's obvious that he's staring at your neck. Even if he weren't a predator sensitive to the quick heartbeat and rushing blood of startled prey, he'd see the nerves all over you. He draws closer.

"You're so small," he murmurs.

You press back, but it does no good.

"And weak," Gaz continues. The clawtip of his index finger presses into the damp flesh of your stomach. "I could crack you open like the shell of a clam. Can I touch you?"

Before you can answer, Soap's hands wander up your legs again. You tense. Gaz's tail tightens under you in response.

"Bit late to ask if you can touch her," Soap says in their mer-tongue.

Gaz ignores him. "Stay still," he murmurs, his tail tightening. Not quite enough to crush anything, but enough to restrict more of your movement. "I won't hurt you."

As Soap makes a grab at one of your wrists, the coldness of your skin and the quickness of your pulse sends a small thrill down his spine.

You try to still your movements and steady your breath. It seems like the more you squirm and protest, the more it snags their interest. You're pretty sure by now they're not going to eat you, but their interest in you has taken an unmistakably carnal tilt.

"See?" Gaz says. "You can be good." He drags his claw lightly over your belly again, and you feel all the muscles of your midsection tense. If it weren't for him squeezing you so firmly, you'd almost be lifted out of the water.

"Good," he murmurs again.

"What do you want to see? I already showed you my legs."

"Everything else."

It's a blunt, straightforward answer. The way Gaz says it seems almost disinterested—matter-of-fact—but his gaze is fixed intently on your belly. He wants to see every inch of you, the softness and the curves and the hollow spots and the sharp dips.

Soap's hands find your waist, and he pulls you closer in in a way that forces you to arch your back, bough toward him, and spread your legs wider over Gaz's tail.

You steal a glance down at the glass-sharp rocky sand and the cold waves rising in. "Here?"

They don't bother to answer. Gaz shifts your hips up his tail, contorting you further. Soap stares openly down at your tits through your wet shirt as he drags his massive hands down your thighs and back up in an exploratory motion.

Gaz's scales push up against the crotch of your shorts. Your brain skips. This can't be happening right now and you can't be feeling kind of hot under the collar about it. No, nah, nope.

You plant your hands against Soap's shoulders and push him back. "I said not here! Take me somewhere nice." No, that's not quite right. "Somewhere private."

nsfw ⬇

Gaz digs his fingers into your hips and pushes you further up his tail. The movement grinds you into him like he's starting to feel you get warm and wet.

"Yeah?" Soap purrs, letting you push him away. There's no way you could throw him off unless he lets you, but he does. "Where d'you want us to take you, little human?"

"Somewhere soft and dry."

The two merman trade looks with one another. Gaz tilts his head down at you and narrows his dark eyes. "I know a place."

You swallow. "You do?"

"Mmhm." His tail shifts beneath you. "Have you ever seen a merman's bed?"

"No..."

Gaz’s tone drops to something just above a murmur. "It's carved out of sloping reef rock and lined with the softest, sun-warmed sand. Perfect to lie in."

Despite his attempt to soothe you, Soap's claws catching the hem of your torn shirt make you even more tense. You grab his hand and push it down. A muscle in your jaw jumps with irritation.

Soap stops pushing, but there's a look in his eye that you don't like at all. He knows he's bigger and stronger than you. All he has to do is pull back a little too hard, and he could easily yank you off Gaz's tail and into his own arms instead. He can make you do whatever he wants, and he knows it.

It makes you all the more aware of the strength of his body between your knees. He could pin you down so easily—he could crush you with the sheer size of him—and you'd never be able to do anything about it.

Before either of you makes a move, Gaz growls at Soap in their mer language. Soap's eyes snap up to Gaz's. His face tightens. His hands loosen and slide slowly out from under your shirt.

You watch it happen with an unsteady glare. But now they're watching each other rather than you. It only holds for a moment before Soap pulls his gaze away. He looks almost bored as he lets his hands drift back to your thighs.

"Fine," he murmurs. But the look in his eyes still leaves you with the uneasy feeling that he isn't entirely done with you.

Fine is the only word of it you understand, but you still feel the agitation in their tone and the subtle shifts of muscles in Gaz's back and shoulders against your chest. Still, he seems fine with Soap's hands on you as long as he's not agitating you further.

You look down at Gaz's claws. His grip on you stays tight. He isn't rough, exactly, but his hands are big and his touch is insistent and slightly possessive. His hands drift lazily over your hips, up your ribs, across the tops of your thighs. It feels like he's keeping track of every inch of you he's already felt.

You squeeze your legs together stubbornly when he gets close to your inner thighs.

His grip is like iron. You feel the muscles of his tail working beneath you as he shifts to get you just right again.

"Let me in," he murmurs.

"I don't think that's a good idea."

"And why not?" His hands wander up and down the seam of your legs.

You get the impression that he can smell you getting wet when you when you're squished up close against him like this. Does he think you're putting out crazy pheromones or something? A twinge of shame makes you look away. "Because we're mismatched."

"Mismatched?" He snorts and pulls you forward so you're leaning further back and against his chest. It exposes your neck to him and his eyes darken. "Your kind has a real obsession with categorizing everything, don't you? We can be matched just fine."

"But we're not, like, physically... you know... it would be weird. It's like having sex with an animal."

"I don't think humans are animals," Gaz murmurs. He draws his claws over the outside of your thigh--not causing pain or leaving marks, but stimulating the nerves under your skin with small jolts. "Besides in the literal sense. But then we both are."

You say nothing. His fingertips brush up the backs of your knees, and a shiver of awareness travels all the way down your spine to your toes. His voice is low and soft as he speaks to Soap in their language again. He rubs his thumb in tiny circles on the back of your knee.

If you knew what he was saying, you'd realise that he's telling Soap that you're nervous.

"It would be weird," you say again.

Soap scoffs. "You keep saying that word. Weirrrd," he repeats in a voice edged with disdain and mimicking your accent. "Why does it matter? There's no one else here."

Gaz tilts his head down in an attempt to catch your eye. "You're not even a little bit curious? You humans are always so desperate to know why and how things work. You used to poke and prod us. You're usually curious about stuff like this." His voice drops lower. "About new experiences. What if I told you that this could feel good?"

"It's still wrong." Even as you say it, you're starting to wonder. You're already pretty sure they won't hurt you. They would have already if they didn't care, right? But you can't bear to think about how disgusted people would be if they knew you were seriously considering this.

"You think it's wrong?" Gaz’s voice takes on an edge. "Humans have a lot of strange rules that don't make any sense. Do you really think we're that different?"

"Yeah."

His gaze drops to your lips. "That's what you humans get so wrong. You think everything means something. Rubbish. Sometimes things can just feel good. And this" --he strokes the sensitive skin of your ankle-- "could feel so good. If you let me in, you'll be warm and safe. That’s what you want, yeah? To be looked after?"

"I don't... I don't know."

Gaz hums and rubs your ankle. Your skin is softer than the salt-smoothed calluses of his hands, and your leg is so small. He feels like he would barely have to squeeze to break it in two. "It's okay not to know, you know," he says. "You've been through a lot. Can I tell you more about us?" he asks, voice low and soft. "About our kind?"

His voice seems to soothe your ragged nerves. "I guess so."

"Good human." He leans very close, his mouth against the shell of your ear. His hands tighten on your thighs again. You’re at his fingertips. You’ll be his in no time. "We're not so different. We hunt and we play. We fight and we... enjoy things." He traces his claw along the line of your legs again. "We can feel things other creatures can't. Sounds too quiet for other prey, smells under water, under the salt. We like the smell of other creatures. What do humans like to smell?"

"Um... flowers, I guess. And food. Baked goods."

He huffs a laugh. "What a waste of your senses." He slides his claw along the outside of your calf. "You humans like things to be clean, huh? Nice warm water and soap. So many rules and little rituals with your cleaning."

"Yeah, so?"

"But then you spend half of your time dirtying each other again. Fighting and rutting and making messes. Humans are strange. Your rules get in the way of your senses."

"We need rules to protect ourselves."

"You need rules to limit yourself," Gaz says. "No wonder you act so fragile. If you'd let yourself enjoy things, everything wouldn't seem so dangerous."

Soap watches you steadily. He can smell the way you're reacting as Gaz's voice washes over you and the way you melt slightly every time he touches you.

You huff. "That's easy for you to say."

"Humans keep themselves vulnerable. No claws, no callouses," Gaz says as he runs his free hand over your upper arm. Your skin is so smooth, he can feel the tiny hairs standing up as his hand passes over them. You really are like a seal—all big eyes and soft give everywhere and no bite to you whatsoever. Except your words, maybe. " How do you defend yourself like this? How do you hunt?"

You don't reply.

His hand finds its way into your hair, claws tracing lines over your scalp. "Do you know what it is to hunt by yourself? Taking charge when something catches your interest. Taking things that you want."

"Not really."

"It's thrilling."

"To be stronger and faster?"

"More than that. Feeling another creature's pulse beneath your teeth, hearing the crunch of bone as it gives way. Knowing you've caught your prey." Gaz strokes the hair back from your ear. His voice and fingers send pleasurable tingles down your spine. He pulls you closer to himself as he speaks so you can fully feel his large frame cradled around yours. “We don't have many possessions," he says. "We like having something that's ours."

"Oh."

"And humans are small," he murmurs. "So soft and small." He rubs circles into your scalp, and you feel his voice as much as you hear it. "So warm and pliable. Easy to hold and keep."

You catch Soap grin and realize you've been staring at him.

"See somethin' you like, hen?"

You flush and look away.

Gaz shifts to comfort you. "Don't look away," he murmurs. His big hand comes up and catches your jaw to make you look up at Soap again. "Watch his eyes. Listen to my voice."

You blink at Soap. Your mind feels sluggish. But Soap is nice to look at. And Gaz is nice to listen to. His voice is low and soothing. His hands drift. The fingertips of one hand trace your collarbone and the other strokes the softness of your throat. Your eyelids are a little heavy.

Gaz watches you for a moment before leaning very close. "Good," he whispers, and Soap's eyes darken. "Easy to hold. Just like I said."

You feel the vibrations of his voice in his chest. His voice soothes you so completely that the old legends about sirens enticing humans with their hypnotic voices surfaces briefly in your mind. Then it disappears.

His hand continues, and the soft, slow touches lull you further. Your stress ebbs away grain by grain. It’s replaced by anticipation. He rubs the soft skin of your cheek with the pad of his thumb, and you feel the calluses on his hands.

"That's a good human." He keeps using that low voice to praise you. Soft warmth and anticipation curl low in your belly. "Just keep looking." He slides a hand down your spine and across your lower back. Your muscles and your mind unwind slowly like a fraying rope. "You remember when I was telling you about a merman's bed, yeah?"

"Mm."

"That's good. Now pay attention. I want you to hear what I say. They're comfortable," he murmurs. "Warm and soft, all lined with sand that's been warmed in the sun. Perfect to lay in. To writhe in. To sink into." As if to show you, his hands slide under your wet shirt and press against the small of your back. He rubs the warm softness of your skin, and goosebumps rise where his hands pass over. "Imagine it. Imagine sinking in. Sinking in. Sink with my voice."

Your eyelids droop even more. You're sleepy.

"You're doing so well." Gaz feels how relaxed you are—the tension out of your muscles and how your limbs feel like they're melting into his. "Sink with my voice," he repeats. "You don't need to struggle anymore. Everything's alright. You're safe with us. Just let yourself… drift."

A sweet, heavy, warm softness like sinking into a hot bath. Like sinking into the sand under his hands. He guides you into a light doze and continues stroking your back and murmuring praise, your body growing heavy and lax beneath his warm hands.

"Shh," Gaz says. You're sinking deep. He guides you down into a soft, warm haze full of quiet, soothing sounds. Even Soap is watching you with a soft, rapt interest, not wanting to ruin the moment. They're taking care of you right where you belong. Deep. Safe. Warm. Comforting.

"What do you see in that bed with you?" Gaz murmurs. "One merman? Two?"

"Hmm?"

"Can't think straight, can you? You're so relaxed." He moves so his hands slide around your waist again. He knows you can't escape this time, even if you wanted to. And you look so sweet and soft. He knows you're almost asleep, almost floating away from him. "I know. Keep listening. Can you tell me what you see yet?"

"Blankets."

"That sounds so nice, doesn't it?" Gaz murmurs. His hands shift again, one drifting all the way to the back of your neck. His voice is as quiet and warm and comforting as a blanket over you. "Just sink into my voice. Keep listening. What else is in that bed with you?"

"Stuffed animals."

Gaz laughs, but it's low and soothing. "Like a child has? That's cute. But it's not like you need them."

You huff, your hypnotic trance vaguely disrupted by his words. "You asked me."

"And I got my answer." Gaz's hand slides up your neck to rest on your jaw. He strokes your pulse point again. "You're getting a little too close to falling asleep. You need to stay awake for this."

Soap has drifted closer, his dark eyes watching you. He looks hungry, but Gaz doesn't push you towards him yet. Not while you're so out of it. "Fine, fine." He rubs your neck again, and you feel your muscles melt under the pressure. "What kind of stuffed animal?"

"Hmm..."

Gaz hums back, his voice deep and soothing. Your eyes are already so heavy, your body is so relaxed in his arms. Your breath is slow and steady, and your skin feels warmer to his touch. Gaz can smell the change in your scent, your body's response to him—to all of this.

"I'm curious now." His voice is low and dark against your sensitive ear. "If you're going to have stuffed animals in your bed, I want to know what kind."

"Octopus."

"An octopus?" He murmurs. "So you want something with so many arms to wrap around you? Something tight and big?" He's so close to your ear now that his lips brush it. "You want to be wrapped up and covered and surrounded?"

"Mm... maybe. Yeah."

Your voice is heavy with drowsiness. He keeps you skirting that line between consciousness and sleep. Your body in his arms is puppet-like.

"You want to be surrounded by so many arms. Maybe even pressed against us with no space to move, yeah?" He slides a hand down your stomach.

"Mmhmm."

"Mm. So you want to sink into a nice bed, surrounded by an octopus with its big, plush arms. Surrounded on all sides with soft, soft tentacles that cover you. You want something big and soft and heavy on top of you--resting between your legs and keeping you warm and safe." His hands slide around you again. "Would that make you feel safe and protected?"

You murmur an affirmation.

"And do you feel safe and protected here? Now?"

You murmur another one.

Something like a smile curves Gaz's mouth. It's sweet that you're answering without thinking. "Mm," he hums, and he slides both hands down your thighs. His claws trace little circles on your sensitive skin. "Very good. Hold onto that feeling as you come up, human." Gaz lifts his eyes to Soap's. "We're just curious. We won't hurt you. We just want to see what you feel like. Is that alright?"

"What I feel like?"

Soap looks down at you. You barely open your eyes. Barely even react, even though you can feel his claws grazing your thigh, even though his eyes are dark and his lips parted slightly. Your eyes are so heavy, your brain so slow.

"Mm," Gaz murmurs again, and his chin brushes your ear. "Your skin's soft. Soft and warm. We want to feel you." His hands slide up your chest again, your breath shuddering at their passing, and he holds you up so your back is against his chest but your legs are still spread over his tail. He smiles. You're so close to sleep, but he doesn't want you to miss this. "Shh. You'll see. You just need to let us touch you, okay?"

"Oh." You let your legs slide to the sides of Gaz's tail and into Soap's waiting palms. "Okay."

...

part 1 / part 2 / [part 3] / part 4 / part 5

more Gaz / more Soap / more mer au / masterlist

[yesimwriting]

A Matter of Timing

Midway part 2!! read part one here: Midway

Summary: Despite the hardships of your marriage to Aegon, the two of you reach a new understanding during the aftermath of his accident.

Warnings/info: forced marriage turned to awkward, subtle pining masquerading as friendship, descriptions of (chronic) pain, aegon's recovery being sped up slightly through a small time skip for the sake of plot, slight aemond slander, canon compliant incest (reader is rhaenyra's daughter)

----

The light spilling in through the window is a beacon, the warmth of it offering the king's apartments something beyond the somber sterility that followed his father throughout his final years.

At times, if Aegon allows his mind to dwell on the similarities between his situation and Viserys's the ache of his body morphs into something else, an all consuming beast that nearly makes him wish Sunfyre's wing had never cradled his broken body. It'd be a simple thing to spend the rest of his days being constantly mended within the safe confines of this room.

Someone else would rule in his place--like his mother and grandsire had done for his father--likely the same man, the same brother that betrayed him, and Aegon's role as a vestigial only ever visited out of obligation would be cemented into reality.

"I'm sure you're tired of novels..." The voice is not much different than the sun's light, a thing of warmth. His father did not have anything similar to you. "But I do not have much to speak of."

Aegon believes it. His authority was one of the few things holding you to your position. Now, with him here, he imagines your existence within the Red Keep has only grown more precarious. His mother had been petitioning to separate you from the monarchy since before the incident. He can't imagine anyone of significance telling you anything.

"Your small council meets often, which seems to be occupying a great deal of your mother's time." Your summary is blank, straightforward as you search your thoughts for information he might be interested in. "Aemond's recently been named regent, though I'm sure someone must have told you that already."

Aemond. The confirmation of his suspicions jabs at him, the assuring nature of your voice briefly losing its hold on him. He begs his body, his mind to cry out...All he can manage is a rasp that's almost a name and twitch of his fingers.

The seat you've pulled next to his bed side creaks as you shift. You've always been encouraging of his movements, invested in each sign of the life still clinging to him in a way that implies a devotion someone like you could never feel for him. "Aegon?" He tries again, another ragged distortion of his brother's name. "Are you--Do you want him?"

No. You are the only one that seems to be on his side entirely. You may detest his family, you may desire your mother's rule, but his recovery matters to you. Even with your care, he has no way to express what he needs to.

He squints his eyes open, a task that takes more from him than he'd ever admit. His sight is weak, the side of his face that took the worst of Vhagar's flames agitated by the effort. You're close enough for him to make out your features, your expression. With your eyebrows pinched together like that, you look a little younger, like the girl that used to pretend to understand the crude jokes made by her brothers and uncles.

You shift closer, your hand finding a place on his bed. With trembling fingers, Aegon manages to place his hand over yours. Your gaze dips downwards, briefly landing on where your fingers meet before finding his features again. You study him with a focus that'd be unnerving coming from anyone else.

Your lips part before you're ready to speak. "You don't want Aemond here." It's not a question.

Your understanding reaches something deep inside of him. The relief offers him the strength needed to tilt his chin downwards, an approximation of a nod. You let out a breath, a question clearly waiting on the tip of your tongue.

The sound of assured footsteps stops you from asking it. You press your lips together, attention shifting towards the room's entrance. The door groans as it's pulled open, the footsteps continue, clearer now. Aegon's eyes flit towards the doorway in time to see his brother.

Instead of looking at the results of his betrayal, Aemond's eye settles on something just past Aegon. You. "Your grace."

Dread coils itself inside Aegon's stomach. His fingers bend as much as he can will them to, his hold on you attempting to convey anything that might get you to stay away from Aemond.

Overnight, Aemond has been consumed by a monster that's fed off his loyalty, leaving nothing in its wake but a shell of who his brother used to be. That beast has no place near you.

Your eyes don't leave Aemond, but your fingers do press into his, a subtle confirmation of something. "My lord."

Aemond steps forward, his hands politely held behind his back. "How is my brother?" Another step towards his bed, towards you. Aegon's body aches with the desire to move, to place an even greater wedge between you and Aemond. "You are by his side more than ever these days."

Your lips press together, a tight lipped smile that doesn't reach your eyes. "It seems someone should be." The lack of subtlety in your comment seems to hit you a moment too late. In an attempt to remedy your mistake, you tack on something polite, "With you all understandably concentrating on the war efforts and ruling over your people. You more than most, prince regent."

Your shift to docility paired with the reminder of Aemond's new position seems to work. The corner of Aemond's mouth pulls itself upwards, a predator's smile. "So you've heard."

"Your mother told me this morning," you pause, "She often comes by during the mornings when Aegon's bandages are replaced to oversee his recovery." Aemond moves even closer, his knees practically against the side of Aegon's mattress. "It feels odd to congratulate you considering the circumstances, but I am sure it is still a great honor to serve your realm."

Aemond's single eye focuses on your expression. Aegon feels the inflation of his lungs stall. "Thank you, my queen." His brother's gaze does not leave you. "You seem to have taken to your own service." Aegon's stare does not leave you. "Mornings, evenings, sometimes through supper...you stay by your husband's side." He lets out a low breath. "Though noble, I do worry that you are not making enough time for your own rest."

The concern in Aemond's voice ignites something in Aegon's blood. It is not enough to disfigure him and steal his throne, now Aemond needs his wife as well. This is another aspect of Aemond's greed that Aegon should have long ago suspected.

Despite your questionable parentage and the circumstances surrounding your union, your beauty has never been deniable. Of course Aemond had seen it as well. Your way of being is another factor that made being forced into this marriage tolerable, even when you hated him most, your arguments and protests had never been cruel, they had only been vexing in the most intriguing way possible. Aegon should have known that, too, would not go unnoticed by his brother.

Aegon's fingers tighten around yours. "Though appreciated, your concern is unnecessary." Your voice is even, words measured. "I often rest in my own apartments, as they are connected to my husband's, which means that I do not have to worry about him needing something and no one being around to hear him."

"Your loyalties to the king are admirable." Aemond moves even closer to Aegon's bed, his knees pressing into the bed's side. "And they have been noticed. We are both aware of the skepticism some hold towards you because of your mother, but no one can deny that you are a good queen. You are poised, intelligent, and beloved by the small folk."

Aemond extends an arm over Aegon's form, his fingers gently brushing against the edge of your hairline, pushing a stray strand of hair back into place. "And I plan to look after you in the ways your husband cannot, as my brother would have wanted."

If Aegon were capable of full movement, he'd take his brother's remaining eye. As if sensing his unease, or perhaps even feeling some of your own, your hand squeezes his. "That is very kind of you, my lord. Thank you."

He nods, straightening fully. "Of course. I must now leave you both, the small council is waiting for me. I was only given a moment to check on the king's health."

"Yes, attend to the king's small council, your brother is well looked after."

Aemond presses his lips together, his expression uncertain. "I am sure."

With that, Aemond turns around. His footsteps are even, unhurried as he moves towards the room's entrance. You're quiet as he leaves, attention focused on the doorway.

After a long moment, once you are certain that Aemond is no longer within the confines of Aegon's apartments, you scoff. "I wouldn't want him involved in my recovery, either."

Your thumb drags against his knuckles, the contact so soft it borders on overwhelming. "But you--the two of you were close, weren't you?" Your eyebrows pinch together curiously. "At least, relatively so. You defended him after..." You blink, eyes glossier than they were a moment ago. "After Luke."

Aegon should have known then that Aemond was never meant to be an integral part of his reign. That type of instability, that connection to rage...loyal as a hound. The only thing his brother feels a sense of duty towards is his own ambition.

If he had punished his brother for Lucerys's death, exiled him, he wouldn't be here. You'd also--it would have been an opportunity to demonstrate his commitment to his wife.

"I--" His throat burns around the syllable. You blink, the grief melting away from you as you focus on his words. "Things are different now." The energy it takes to form the words is not worth the cost. He cannot even decide what to focus on. You--comforting you, or attempting to explain Aemond's betrayal.

You squeeze his hand. "Even when it hurt, a part of me always understood why you sided so adamantly with Aemond. That is not to say that I was not angry..." He remembers your rage, the threats you had made again and again before breaking down. Aegon said nothing as you cried, but he did smooth circles against your back until you fell asleep. "I would have done anything for my brother."

You let out a low breath, the grief behind your eyes melting into something more present. "You are speaking more more these days." There's a warmth to the phrasing that soaks into his skin. "It is...assuring." Your fingers press into his. "If you do not mind me asking, why do you not wish to see Aemond?"

Aegon watches you openly, taking in your features and the softness behind your eyes. After everything that happened between the two of you, the circumstances of your marriage, you found it in you to tend to him as he struggled to not lose his hold on life. How could he repay your kindness by telling you the truth?

You're quicker to action when it comes to defending others, he had seen it in the way you spoke of Lucerys. As of now, Aemond seems to like you, or at the very least, want you. And though the thought makes his skin crawl, that is a much safer position for you than knowing what Aemond is. At the very least, until Aegon recovers enough to be in a position to defend you.

"He saw me go after Meleys after--he told me not to." The lie leaves a bitter taste in his mouth. He squeezes your hand, reminding himself what he's doing this for. "And--and he is ruling now, he should--he should remain focused."

You watch him for a moment, eyebrows pinched together uncertainly. He lets out a breath, slowly moving his arm. Aegon ignores his pain as he lifts your hand to his lips. What the gesture takes from him is returned by your smile.

----

Evenings are usually his respite, the time between the late afternoon and true nightfall.

These fleeting hours provide him something much needed. A way of pretending that he is no patient, no burden. With no one around to hover and spare him pitiful glances, Aegon can almost imagine that his life has gone unchanged.

Especially during the evenings in which you join him. The solitude softens you, allowing you to speak freely and sometimes even jest about some of the happenings of his court. You’re rarely able to update him on any significant political changes, but he finds the gossip you can offer him distracting enough—or, at the very least, your delivery of the rumors is.

Tonight, however, there have been no stories recounting a supposed affair between Ser Criston Cole and some unknown woman or of the changes in the small folk’s attitudes. There has only been silence and the flickering of candlelight.

He glances towards the seat to left of his bed, one of your books abandoned in your place. The cane one of the maesters had encouraged him to begin practicing with is propped up against the wall behind the chair. Perhaps you are starting to realize that what drew you to Aegon was not some newfound appreciation of your connection, but your goodness, your desire to repair him the way you would a wounded animal.

Though still healing, Aegon has made it a few paces away from death's doorstep. He's been instructed to practice moving as much as he can bear to, to get used to strain of his limbs and the protests of his body. However, Aemond and the small council have made a point of suggesting Aegon does all he can to keep his recovery process away from prying eyes for the sake of morale.

The soft sound of footsteps echoes from beyond one of the walls that keep him from the outside world.

"I appreciate you taking the time to escort me to my husband's apartments, my lord."

Aegon's fingers dig into his sheets, his body incapable of giving him the force needed to exhaust any real frustration. That's another thing that seems to have changed in these last few days. With the crown on his head, Aemond has pivoted towards a new goal--you.

"These are uneasy times, my queen, I am glad to be assured of your safety."

His queen. Aemond has done all he can to protect your position within the Red Keep. He continues to promote you, partly out of a way of placating the small folk that support you and mainly as some kind of ploy to draw you in.

"Thank you, again," you say, "I won't keep you any longer, your time is valuable."

Without another word from his brother, the door to his apartments creeks open. Less than a minute later, the final door dividing the two of you is pushed open slowly. The hinges still creek, but you're still more careful than you need to be as you continue forward.

You turn to face him before the door can fall shut. "You're sitting." The words are said with such warmth, Aegon's frustrations are nearly banished from his mind.

"You've seen me sit."

His flatness does not quell your joy. "I know, but you're not with the maester...and it--it's later than you'd usually sit." You continue forward, stopping at the foot of his bed. You allow yourself to watch him openly. "And your skin is losing its yellow undertones." You place a hand on the foot of his bed, eyes shifting away from him. "Watching you recover...it has brought me a great deal of peace."

There's a hint of vulnerability in the way you stare at his bedding. Aegon lets out a breath. You are not the conniving type, and you have no way of knowing what Aemond really is. "Well, you deserve a great deal of credit." The words are enough to get you to begin walking again. "I do not know where I'd be without you."

You smile, stalling at the other side of his bed. "I am wonderful, I know." You place your hand against the bedding, but not yet pulling them back. "In reality, I wish there was something I could to ease your pain. You are the one that is still recovering from Meleys's flames."

He turns his head enough to look at you. "You deserve a great deal of credit for that as well."

You smile again, this time the look a much more genuine thing. "Can I stay in here tonight?"

The question is one of the few formalities that you still cling onto. You sleep in his bed more often than your own these days. "I'd never ask you to leave my bed."

You roll your eyes as you push back his sheets. You push off your shoes before crawling into his bed. He enjoys your proximity more than he'd ever be able to tell you.

You settle close enough for him to be able to feel the warmth radiating off of your skin. "I missed you tonight."

"Then perhaps you should have taken your supper with me."

You let out a low breath. "I wanted to, but Aemond asked me about how often I have supper here, and I couldn't think of what to say."

Aegon cannot help his scoff. "And when Aemond calls..."

You turn to face him, your body shifting even closer. "He is acting as the king, he is your regent--"

"My regent, my throne, my wife." The embittered words come out before he can stop them.

"What?" You're staring at him with wide, bewildered eyes. "You cannot possibly think that I, of all people, have been disloyal to you."

Regret immediately jabs at his chest. His anger, his fear, none of it has anything to do with you. "No, I did not mean it in that way."

"I am here when you go to bed, I am here when you rise, I am here more than I am anywhere else. In what moment would I have had time to be unfaithful?" You push your weight onto your knees, hurt pooling in your eyes. "Perhaps while eating with your family, or--or sitting with the ladies of a court that loathes me?"

The yellow glow of the candlelight highlights the shininess of your eyes. "I tolerate my brother's murderer because we are married, because I am left no other option. Do not ever accuse me of betraying you or Luke like that ever again."

The words are sharp, tears brimming in your eyes as you force them out. Guilt ensnares some vital force in his chest, the pain of his body amplified by reget.

He whispers your name, the sound raspy and pathetic. "It is not you, it is the fucking traitor that is determined to take everything of value from my life."

You blink, the self righteous anger and offense briefly leaving you. "Traitor?" The mistake leaves his face warm. "What--" Your eyes flit towards the door. "Aegon, I am going to ask you something, and I want you to be honest with me. If these last weeks have meant anything to you, I want you to be honest with me."

He swallows. You reach for his hand. "Your injuries--are they from Meleys's flames?"

Aegon squeezes your palm to his with a force that leaves pain pulsing up his arm. Beneath the weight of your stare, your silent pleading, he breaks. Aegon shakes his head.

You exhale, an odd sort of tranquility coloring your features. "Okay." Carefully, you bring his hand to your lips, pressing a kiss against his knuckles. The serenity of your movements throws him. "Thank you for your honesty."

Aegon watches as you set his hand down gently. You begin to shift back, forcing Aegon to straighten his spine even further. "Where--where are you going?"

"To tell the guards that their prince regent, the same man that removed his own mother from the small council, the same man that killed my--" Your voice cracks at the last syllable. "My brother, has now attempted to kill--" The words waver before breaking off entirely. "To kill the king."

Aegon reaches for you, his fingers finding their way around your wrist. He latches onto you as if you might disappear if he allows you to. "We cannot say anything."

The sentence pushes you away, sending you to that distant place that took you after your brother's passing. Aegon ignores the way his side protests as he sits up even further, his hand coming to rest against your spine.

"Guards know no loyalty beyond orders and their wages, Aemond is in a position of immense power. You are beloved by the people, but hold little standing in your own court." He runs his knuckles against your lower back. "Look at me. Any number of incidents resulting in my death could be deemed an accident. I can't--I can't protect myself, let alone you."

It takes you a moment to return. "He killed my brother." Tears begin to run down your face. "He almost killed you." You're crying openly now. "We need--we--"

"I know," he whispers, "But as of now, we have nothing except things to lose." Aegon moves his hand, allowing it to settle against your waist. "He likes you now, and that--that is a safe thing."

You inhale sharply, the sound a little more than a sniffle. "I don't care."

"I do." This is one area that he is unwilling to compromise in. "I won't risk you." He releases your side in favor of reaching for your face, his thumb wiping at already spilled tears. "Promise me that you will not do anything. Please."

"We cannot let him get away with this."

"We won't," Aegon vows, "Because we will wait until the right time. I will heal further. He will make a mistake, and if I do not hear of it, you will." He drags his thumb against your cheek again, his fingers settling beneath your jaw. "Promise me."

After a moment, you nod. "I promise." The words are shallow and uncertain, but Aegon does not fear them. You mean your promises. "What if he hurts you again?"

"As long as I am feeble and making no attempts to regain control or expose him, he has no need to." You look up at him, expression unconvinced. "And he will not do anything in front of you."

You dip your chin downwards, a halfhearted nod. "I will not leave you." There's an earnestness there that rattles something inside of him. Your unflinching resolve to promise that you're there for him, that this is not his battle alone.

Aegon shifts forward, his body begging him to resume neutrality as he begins to pull you towards him. You're quick to respond, leaning into his touch. Aegon presses his lips against yours.

He's kissed you before--at your wedding, a few times during your handful of attempts at producing a child, and even less times during the day when particularly enjoying your company. But this is something else, something more desperate and meaningful. His lips drag against yours with less ease than he'd like, a dull ache nearly taking him out of the moment.

You pull back first, your breaths ragged as you look at him. "I'm sorry, did I hurt you?"

It was not simple, but far from agonizing enough to make it unworthwhile. "Do not apologize for that." You nod without looking him in the eye. Aegon moves back, allowing his back to rest against cushioning. "Go have your ladies help change you into your night gown, and come back."

It's early for you to get ready for bed, but no one would find it strange. The two of you are married, which means you are welcome to spend as much time together as you'd like. Besides, Aegon likes the thought of you leaving now and not needing to go anywhere until morning.

You agree without question, moving away from him with a subtle nod. "I'll return in a moment."

You leave out of the door that connects his apartments to yours. Before he knows it, you're knocking on the door once before entering his space again. You seem a little lighter, hair brushed and face washed. You return to bed wordlessly, covering yourself with his sheets before resting your head against his shoulder.

Aegon's hand settles against your knee. "I walked a little longer with the maester today."

"That's wonderful," he can hear the smile in your voice. "I'd like to see that. Tomorrow I'll be here instead of sitting with the ladies."

The thought is easing. "I'll put on a good show for you."

"I'm sure you will." You place your hand over his. "I know that you said not to say anything, and it's a timing issue...but there has to be something we can do."

He turns over his hand, his fingers intertwining themselves with yours. "It would help weaken Aemond's claim if I were to have another, more evident heir."

The implications of the statement take you a moment to understand. Once you do, you squeeze his hand a little tighter. "Oh."

The few times the two of you had attempted to create an heir had been far from unenjoyable, just a little uncertain. After Lucerys's death, you were clearly and understandably not in the mood to be looked at a moment too long let alone touched. Aegon obliged you, and would be willing to keep leaving you to yourself if that's what you want.

"We could go back to trying to produce an heir," you mumble, body becoming a little more rigid against him.

He runs his thumb along your knuckles. "Really?"

"I mean, once you're healed enough to feel physically ready," you pause, a little unsure of yourself, "It seems a fitting course of action, and we are married."

He smiles to himself, lifting your hand to his lips. "We are."

----

a/n i'm leaving for my birthday trip tonight so if u liked this u should def send me aegon asks to come back to 🙏💗

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[eightmakesonebraincell]

our leaves must fall before our flowers can bloom (teaser)

genre: poly hockey team!ateez x coach fem!reader, enemies/strangers to lovers, athlete!au, slow burn, fluff, angst

length: 1.0k (teaser) + approx. 38k (full fic)

c/w: sweaty ateez (warning well deserved), lots of hurt/comfort, one of the slowest slow burns to slow burn, remaining tags to be revealed with full fic

synopsis: you become the new coach of the elite men's ice hockey team, the red devils. but with both yourself and the team carrying burdens of the past, you all find it difficult to see eye to eye. as you lead them to the championships in the korean ice hockey league, you discover that teamwork and trust is not as straightforward as it seems.

a/n: when i started writing this i really thought it wouldn't exceed 25k but here we are :D full fic will be released in about a week and i am so ready

“she’s the new coach?” yunho frowns in confusion. “no offence, but we’re not a bunch of kids for her to practise being a soccer mum to.”

“she was the assistant coach for the grey eagles,” coach cho discloses.

“the grey eagles? the under-21 men’s championship team?” yeosang looks incredulous.

mingi sceptically comments, “the fact that we’ve never seen or heard of her before probably tells us enough.”

hongjoong’s lips purse sourly as he tries his hardest to analyse the situation with the professionalism of the team’s captain. but with the sudden change in coaches and the same critiquing doubts as mingi, hongjoong cannot help but feel his personal judgement webbing over his mind. over the team’s entire career as an elite ice hockey team thus far–five years, now well into their sixth–the red devils have only ever had two coaches. coach cho has been with them for the longest and whilst it took the team a while to eventually warm up to him, he has been with them for almost quadruple the amount of time it took to trust him.

the team’s alternate captain, seonghwa, speaks to you directly, “if you don’t mind me asking, why are you not playing as an athlete yourself? you’re clearly our age–nowhere near retiring.”

you knew from the very start that your age would make your credibility as a coach much lower, and your answer to seonghwa will not help your case either. “i stopped playing.”

“how come?”

the trigger of memories fills your nose with a sharp stinging smell. you blankly reveal, “i chose to stop playing.” you know exactly how it sounds like to somebody else, even more so to professional athletes. coach cho has also told you of the team’s hardheadedness and strong will when it comes to the passions of their career, so you are expecting the cold receptiveness that you are met with.

your response strikes the wrong chord within wooyoung. there was a point in his career not too long ago when the choice of continuing to play or not was at risk of becoming a forced decision. the way you answer so callously with those very words that had threatened to tear his world apart has his jaw grinding and eyes darkening, and he is not the only athlete in the arena who feels similarly.

“i would rather choose to die before i choose to stop playing. ice hockey is my entire life and without it, i am not living either,” hongjoong jabs and you cannot help but clench your fists because you know exactly what he means. still, you stay quiet as he continues, “sorry, but i can’t respect a ‘coach’ who chose to stop playing.”

at the captain’s words and subsequent move to leave for the changerooms, the rest of the team also gather their equipment and follow his steps. san’s feet falter in front of you, expression hesitant until he decides to voice, “our team needs a bit of time. it’s hard for us to warm up to…outsiders, and i know it might not mean much to say this but we have our reasons. don’t expect us to blindly trust you just because you’re a coach.”

the use of the word ‘outsider’ does not go unnoticed as you nod, “of course.”

san jogs off to rejoin the others and coach cho hums, “guess some things haven’t changed. they were just as prickly to me when i first became their coach.”

you raise an eyebrow, “prickly? to you?”

“yes, believe it or not,” he chuckles nostalgically. “we’ve come a long way because i’ve been their coach for years now. but it took me a while before i was able to break down their walls.”

you briefly mull over the information, then ask out of curiosity, “what would you have done if i didn’t sign the contract?”

“begged you to rethink your decision,” he jokes with a pleased chortle. “i would have to start looking for a different coach, i suppose. you were my only pick.”

“but why me, of all people? there are so many other experienced coaches that you can choose from.”

he looks at you, eyes glinting with intuition and confidence as he simply says, “you’re familiar with their playing style. they play just like you used to.” at your silent processing, coach cho probes, “why didn’t you tell them the real reason?”

you smile wistfully, “i didn't tell them because i’m not here to gain their pity.”

some of the boys’ voices grow louder as they emerge from the changerooms, changed into fresh clothes and their kit bags slung over their shoulders. you hear one of them ask, “captain, is she really going to be our new coach?”

they step out from the facility’s corridor and you accidentally make eye contact with hongjoong, yet neither of you look away. maintaining a steady gaze directly at you, he responds with a slight glower, “maybe, but she’s only the coach by title. i’m still the captain of the team, so let’s see who everyone listens to.”

as they exit the rink’s arena, you feel a fire of determination growing inside of you. you have won over your own demons and you have won the championships before–this is nothing in comparison. whether your next words are for coach cho or for yourself to hear, it does not matter.

“i may not play anymore but i was still once an athlete and no athlete has ever, in their career, wanted pity. i’m here to earn the team’s respect and i will win over them, especially their captain.”

you watch the swing of the glass door as it shuts behind the players, catching a brief glimpse of the trees lining the arena’s perimeter. it is the first day of autumn when you meet the red devils for the first time and outside, the leaves are beginning to change their colours.

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[theyluvkarolina]

౨ৎ PLAYING FAVORITES ౨ৎ

masterlist / rules / requests & talks with me!

SUMMARY౨ৎ Oscar’s daughter has favorites. And sadly, he isn’t one of hers, in fact her favorite happens to be her favorite American, Logan. He says it’s fine and that he doesn’t care… but actions speak louder than words.

PAIRING ౨ৎ Not really a pairing, but reader makes multiple apperances 🩵

WARNINGS ౨ৎ Sadie being a menace

A/N ౨ৎ got requested more sadie, the more sadie you shall receive. i was writing this before the logan news and i’m absolutely distraught. i decided to start from the group up and include logan to feel a bit better hurt ❤️‍🩹

Part of the Dad Oscar mini-series 🩵

“Sadie, are you ready to see Dad drive fast?” You asked, adjusting her little McLaren cap as I held her hand to the garage.

“No.” Sadie says bluntly in her toddler way, her lips forming a small pout as she clutched the tiny stuffed koala Oscar had bought her from her a year ago from Australia.

You couldn’t help but blink at her straightforwardness, crouching down to be at eye level with her. “No? Not even to cheer him on?”

Sadie shook her head with determination. “No. Wanna see Logan.”

Sadie’s pout deepened, and she hugged her koala closer to her chest. “Logan’s funny.”

“Yes, he is. But you know who else is funny? Daddy. Remember when he made silly faces during breakfast?” You suggested.

Sadie tilted her head, considering this for a moment, before shaking her head again. “Logan’s funnier.”

Before you could respond, you heard footsteps approaching, and there was Oscar, already in his race suit, with a forced grin on his face, clearly overheard the conversation. “Hey, little miss,” he greeted giving a kiss on your cheek before crouching down beside you and holding out his arms for a hug.

Sadie looked at him for a moment, then back at you, before finally deciding to toddle over and give him a quick hug. It was short, sweet, but not as enthusiastic as the ones she usually reserved for Logan recently.

Oscar’s smile faltered for just a second, but he quickly recovered, lifting her up in his arms. “Guess I’ll have to up my game if I want to be the favorite, huh?” he teased, though there was a trace of something more behind his words.

“Daddy’s funny,” Sadie said, almost as if she was trying to console him.

“Yeah?” Oscar’s eyes lit up with hope, but Sadie quickly added, “But Logan’s funnier.”

You winced, but Oscar just laughed it off, giving her a playful tickle. “Well, Logan better watch out then, because I’m coming for his title.”

This was going to be a long day for Oscar.

`· . ୨୧⭒๋࣭ ⭑

The buzz of the McLaren garage was background noise to Oscar as he watched his Sadie, toddle around with a bright smile on her face. It was a year after her first ever Grand Prix… and safe to say you and Oscar have definitely learned a lot from it. Normally, her little smile would make his heart swell with pride, but today, it was bittersweet. The reason? Logan Sargeant was the source of her joy, not him.

Logan, Logan, Logan. that was the name coming out of her mouth the past month.

Sadie had been enamored with Logan since the first time she was born. Who wouldn’t when their godfather was her dad’s best friend who happened to have the same job?

She would light up at the sight of him, smiling at every chance she could excitedly in her toddler way, always eager to be scooped up into his arms. And Logan, the ever-charming American, was more than happy to oblige.

Oscar leaned against the wall, arms crossed, watching as Logan lifted Sadie into the air, eliciting giggles that echoed around the garage. He tried to convince himself that it didn’t bother him. So what if Sadie liked Logan more? It wasn’t a competition. He was her father, not Logan. Surely she likes him more.

…

Right?

“Hey, mate. You good?” Lando’s voice snapped Oscar out of his thoughts. His teammate had appeared beside him, eyebrow raised in concern.

Oscar forced a smile. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just… thinking.”

Lando followed his gaze to where Logan was now letting Sadie play with his cap, much to her delight. “Looks like someone’s got a new best friend.”

Oscar’s smile faltered slightly. “Yeah… guess she does.”

Lando didn’t miss the hint of disappointment in Oscar’s voice. “You know she still loves you, right? Kids go through phases.”

“I know, I know,” Oscar replied, trying to sound nonchalant as he rolls his eyes. “It’s just… I didn’t think I’d be playing second fiddle to Logan, of all people.”

Lando chuckled. “Well, at least she has good taste. Logan is fun… in his weird American way. Baseball, football, hotdogs and stuff like that. But you’re still her dad… no one can take that from you.”

Oscar nodded, though his eyes were still glued to the scene in front of him. Logan was now teaching Sadie how to high-five, her little hand smacking against his with enthusiasm. The sight should’ve made Oscar laugh, but instead, it made him feel… left out.

“Maybe,” Oscar said quietly, “…but sometimes it feels like I’m just not enough for her.”

Lando looked at him, surprised by the admission. “Oscar, she’s a 2-year-old. It’s not about you being enough or not. She just likes Logan because he’s fun and new. Trust me, when she needs comfort, when she’s upset or scared, it’s you she’ll run to.”

“Did you indirectly call me old and boring?”

“You know what I meant!”

Oscar wanted to believe that, but watching Sadie beam up at Logan made it hard. He knew he was being irrational, that he shouldn’t let a child’s innocent preferences get to him, but the sting was still there.

“…Zak is calling me over.” Lando gave a sigh, running a hand through his hair as he spots the CEO waving a hand over. “Just keep what I said in mind. She loves you Oscar. Sadie’s just happy to see a face she rarely sees. Good luck in quali, yeah?”

Oscar nodded as Lando walked away, but his focus was still on Sadie and Logan. He wasn’t used to feeling like this—jealous of his best friend, of all people. It was silly, really, but he couldn’t shake it.

As the preparations for Qualifications continued, the garage was abuzz with activity. Oscar was trying to get back into the right mindset when he felt a familiar hand on his shoulder.

“You look deep in thought,” You said, coming up beside him with a warm smile.

Oscar turned to her, managing a half-hearted smile. “Just thinking. You know how it is.”

Your eyes followed his gaze to where Sadie and Logan were now playing with a small toy car. “She seems to be having a blast with Logan.”

Oscar sighed. “Yeah, she’s been obsessed with him lately. It’s like I’m invisible.”

Your expression softened. You wrapped an arm around him and gave him a reassuring squeeze. “You’re not invisible, Oscar. Kids can be unpredictable. Logan’s just the new fun thing right now. It doesn’t change how much she loves you.”

Oscar looked at you, the weight of your words hitting him. “I know you’re right. I just hate feeling like I’m second place.”

“Oscar,” You said, lifting his chin with a gentle touch. “Sadie is 2 years-old. I think you need to remember that Sadie’s attachment to Logan doesn’t diminish her love for you. She’s just interested in her godfather she rarely sees. If anything, it just means she’s comfortable with the people around her, and that’s a good thing. Remember how she went from hating everything Lando did in the free practices to loving him at the end of the day? It’s the same thing. You’re her dad, and that’s a role no one else can fill.”

Oscar took a deep breath, letting your words sink in. Your gentle touch and reassuring smile helped ease the knot of insecurity that had settled in his chest. He glanced back at Sadie and Logan, and the sight of his daughter’s unrestrained joy started to warm his heart, even if the jealousy still lingered a bit.

The buzz of the garage continued around you both, and Oscar gave a thoughtful exhale, a much needed one. “Thank you, lovely. I guess I needed that.”

You gave him a soft smile, then glanced over at Sadie. “Logan might be fun for her at the moment, but remember that she’ll always be the one calling you dad.”

Oscar’s lips curved into a grin at your comment.

Yeah. Dad does sound pretty nice.

“Dad!”

[starsenha]

[4] FIRST IMPRESSIONS - no more glaring

synopsis: riki was a big fan of your group Devilish, but when he met you for the first time, he made a very bad first impression and now you hated him. rumors started to spark saying how you hated each other and to calm the rumors, the company decided to make you two hosts a variety show together for two months. wc: 1,3k

You, Youngji and your manager, Jiyeon, entered the HYBE meeting room. You were so nervous, but tried to stay professional. You had opted for a casual outfit, but still putting in some efforts.

On the other side of the room, Riki, Jungwon and their manager were already seated. When they saw you enter the room, they all got up and bowed. Riki's eyes involuntarily flickered to you. Tou looked so different, so casual and accessible. And somehow, even more beautiful. He quickly adverted his gaze though, praying no one caught him staring.

"Thank you all for coming," the PR manager of Hybe started. "I think you all know why we're here today."

Youngji shot you a quick ‘don’t-say-anything-stupid’ glance before Jiyeon responded. "Of course, we’re here to clarify any misunderstandings between the two groups."

You forced a smile, clasping your hands together to stop yourself from fidgeting. "I’d just like to say—I don’t hate Enhypen sunbaenims, or Niki sunbaenim, or anything like that."

Riki perked up slightly at her words, but Jungwon, ever the professional, jumped in. "We appreciate you saying that. Honestly, we never thought there was an issue. Right, Riki?"

Riki coughed awkwardly, rubbing the back of his neck. "Y-Yeah, no hard feelings here."

The PR Manager smiled, sensing the tension. "That’s good to hear, but as you know, the internet doesn’t quite see it that way. The ‘glaring incident,’ as fans are calling it, has gone viral, and while it’s mostly lighthearted, we want to ensure there’s no long-term narrative of bad blood between your groups."

Youngji leaned forward slightly, her tone calm but firm. "So, what’s the plan?"

The PR Manager exchanged glances with the Devilish and Enhypen managers before speaking. "We’ve decided the best way to address this is through positive interaction. Yn and Riki will co-host a new seven-episode variety show. Each episode will feature fun activities, idol interviews, and chances for you both to show camaraderie."

You blinked. Your professional mask slipped for a moment. "Wait, co-host? With… him?"

Riki’s eyebrows shot up. "You mean… with her?"

The PR Manager nodded, unfazed. "Yes. The two of you are in the spotlight right now, and the fans already enjoy the dynamic—whether they think it’s rivalry or something else. This is a perfect opportunity to shift that narrative into something more positive. And I've seen plenty of fans shipping you together, so that could bring good publicity."

Youngji quickly stepped in, shooting you a calming look. "What exactly will this entail? We’d like details before agreeing to anything."

Jungwon nodded in agreement. "Same here. We want to make sure the schedule and activities are manageable."

The PR Manager opened a file. "The show will be shot once a week for seven weeks. Each episode will involve various segments, including games, challenges, and interviews with other idols. Think of it as a blend of fun and candid conversations. It’s lighthearted but engaging."

You stayed quiet, trying to process the situation. You sneaked a glance at Riki, who seemed to be doing the same. Your managers and leaders were already in negotiation mode.

"I assume this will require some prep time before each shoot? Who handles the scripts and activities?" Jiyeon asked.

"The production team will handle scripts, but we’ll consult with you to ensure it aligns with both idols’ comfort zones. And yes, there will be prep time, though most activities are straightforward."

Riki leaned slightly toward Jungwon, whispering, "This sounds like a lot."

Jungwon gave him a look. "You’ll survive. Stay professional."

Youngji tapped her pen on the table, addressing the room. "I’ll make sure Yn is prepared for the shoots. As long as the schedule doesn’t conflict with Devilish’s existing commitments, we’re open to this."

Jungwon nodded. "Same for us. We’ll cooperate to make this work."

You finally spoke up, your voice steady but a little exasperated. "So, just to clarify… this is seven weeks of me and Riki being buddy-buddy on camera to convince the internet we don’t hate each other?"

The PR Manager chuckled. "More or less. Though ‘buddy-buddy’ is optional. Just show mutual respect and have fun."

You nodded and you saw from the corner of your eye Riki nodding too.

As the meeting concluded, the groups stood to leave. You adjusted the strap of your bag, your mind swirling with thoughts about the upcoming variety show. Youngji was chatting casually with Jungwon about logistics, but you remained silent, trailing slightly behind. Riki, spotting an opportunity, decided to approach you.

He hesitated for a second, then fell into step beside you. Clearing his throat, he started, “So… I guess we’ll be working together a lot now.”

You glanced at him, your expression polite but icy. “It seems so,” you replied curtly, her tone professional.

Riki tried to maintain his grin despite the obvious frost in her voice. “I just want to say, I really respect your dancing. Your stage at MAMA was insane.”

You slowed your pace slightly, looking at him out of the corner of your eye. “Thank you, sunbaenim. I appreciate that.” The words were formal, almost robotic, like you were reading from a script.

Riki blinked, caught off guard by the sudden formality. “You can just call me Riki, you know.”

You gave a small, professional smile, the kind you reserved for interviews. “Of course, Riki sunbaenim.”

Riki opened his mouth to respond, but Youngji, catching the interaction, stepped in. She slid between the two with a practiced ease, flashing her trademark grin. “Riki sunbaenim, it’s great to know you appreciate Yn’s work. We’re all looking forward to the show, aren’t we, Yn?”

You nodded, your expression neutral. “Yes, unnie. It’ll be… a good opportunity.”

The way you said “good opportunity” sounded more like “seven weeks of suffering,” and Youngji gave her a subtle nudge with her elbow.

Riki laughed nervously, glancing at Jungwon for backup. “Uh, yeah, it’ll be fun. Right, hyung?”

Jungwon, who had been listening quietly, nodded. “Definitely. I’m sure you’ll both do great.” He turned to you, his tone warm and respectful. “If there’s anything you need to make the shoots smoother, let us know. We’ll make sure the team takes care of it.”

Your expression softened, and you nodded. “Thank you, sunbaenim. That’s very thoughtful. I’ll be sure to let you know if anything comes up," and you smiled.

Your demeanor toward Jungwon was completely different—friendly, collaborative. Riki couldn’t help but notice the stark contrast. “Wow, no cold shoulder for Jungwon?” he joked, attempting to lighten the mood.

Your smile didn’t falter, but your voice took on a sharp edge as you turned to him. “Jungwon sunbaenim is very easy to work with.” The implication hung in the air: You, on the other hand…

Riki raised his hands in mock surrender. “Got it. I’ll try to earn your approval too.”

Jungwon, sensing the tension, decided to steer the group toward the elevators. “Let’s head out. We’ve all got a lot to prepare for.”

As you reached the elevator, Riki tried one last time, turning to you. “If there’s anything I can do to make this easier, just let me know. Seriously.”

You finally met his eyes, your tone still polite but colder than before. “I’ll keep that in mind, Riki sunbaenim.”

The elevator doors opened, and Youngji gently guided you inside. As the Devilish duo stepped in, Youngji glanced over her shoulder at Jungwon, her expression shifting back to friendliness. “Let’s coordinate schedules soon. Thanks again, Jungwon-ssi.”

Jungwon nodded. “Definitely. Take care.”

Riki, left standing in the hallway with his leader, scratched the back of his neck awkwardly. “That… didn’t go great, huh?”

Jungwon smirked, patting him on the shoulder as they walked toward their own elevator. “Not your smoothest moment. But hey, at least she didn’t glare at you this time.”

Riki sighed, leaning against the wall. “Yeah. Progress, I guess.”

Jungwon chuckled. “Baby steps, Riki. Baby steps.”

previous / m.list / next

TAGLIST: @pkjay @d-dilemma @heartheejake @lunaritex @dreeki @inishij @rikirritated @whoiss4m @sleepyxxhead @aanniikkaa @right-person-wrong-time @aespaqq @starry-eyed-bimbo @nerdywitchcrown @yuniesluv @lovestruck-sky @ariluvssssss100 @rei4sunoo @wildtigerlili @jakef3ver @seungminsapuppy @kittsnewera @regalfoxbunny @rairaiblog @pairinnn

[ilguna]

Hi again this is from the supply run. Could you please do #17 from aisle 1 and # 22 from aisle 2 with finnick? Thank you! 🎉 -🪐

☼ only friends (Finnick Odair) ☼

warnings; swearing, gore, blood mention, death, death mention.

wc; 5.7k

prompt; 17. denying their relationship strongly. 22. "They won't take you away from me ever again."

—

“Tomorrow morning, when we pull Katniss Everdeen’s body from the ashes, we will see exactly who the Mockingjay is. A dead girl who could save no one, not even herself.” Snow’s voice is haunting as he gives the final word. The Capitol seal replaces his face, the anthem plays, and the television shuts off.

“Except that you won’t find her.” Finnick says to the empty screen, turning his head to glance at you.

The Peacekeeper’s that will be sent to retrieve the bodies tomorrow will be missing twelve of them, actually. All they’ll come across is Boggs and one of the Leeg sisters. The rest of you made it out safely.

“We can get a head start on them at least.” Katniss says, pulling out the Holo. She moves closer to Jackson, listening to a set of directions on how to work the device. She manages to get the coordinates in, and a projection of the surrounding streets fills the air.

The silence is suffocating as you watch all the different colored blinking lights. No matter what direction you decide you’re going to go, there will be hundreds of pods waiting for you. And these all happened to pop up in the past couple of hours.

You look at Finnick again, and find that he’s got his eyes on you already. This trip has just gotten ten times more dangerous, and your options on travel are beginning to dwindle, quickly.

“Any ideas?” Katniss asks.

“Why don’t we start by ruling out the possibilities.” Finnick tears his eyes from yours. “The street is not a possibility.”

“The rooftops are just as bad as the street.” Leeg says.

“We still might have a chance to withdraw, go back the way we came.” Homes suggests. “But that would mean a failed mission.”

Katniss frowns briefly. “It was never intended for all of us to go forward. You just had the misfortune to be with me.”

“Well, that’s a moot point. We’re with you now. So, we can’t stay put. We can’t move up. We can’t move laterally.” Jackson shakes her head. “I think that just leaves one option.”

“Underground.” Gale agrees.

Your nose crinkles at the idea, but you force your face to smooth. Now is not a time to be picky, especially when you’re being cornered so harshly. You want to make it out of this city alive, which means you’ll do anything for it to happen.

Katniss switches the Holo to show the pods beneath the surface. While it appears that there’s not nearly as much pods underground, the sewers are going to be harder to navigate. The streets are straightforward, the sewer is full of twisting and turning tunnels. It’s a mess.

With no other option, it’s decided.

“Okay, then. Let’s make it look like we’ve never been here.” Katniss says.

You all get to your feet, picking up empty cans to send down the trash chute, while packing the full ones into your bag. The others flip the couch cushions over to hide the blood, wipe the tracks of black oil from the tile, and lock the second bolt on the door from keeping it from looking like the door got kicked in.

Peeta sits on the blue sofa. “I’m not going. I’ll either disclose your position or hurt someone else.”

“Snow’s people will find you.” Finnick tells him, you stop next to him, crossing your arms.

“Then leave me a pill. I’ll only take it if I have to.”

“That’s not an option. Come along.” Jackson says.

“Or you’ll what? Shoot me?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Peeta.” You say.

“We’ll knock you out and drag you with us.” Homes says. “Which will both slow us down and endanger us.”

“Stop being noble! I don’t care if I die!” He shouts, proceeding to turn to Katniss. “Katniss, please. Don’t you see, I want to be out of this?”

Katniss stares at him for a long moment. “We’re wasting time. Are you coming voluntarily or do we knock you out?”

Peeta takes in a breath, burying his face in his hands, letting out a long sigh. He then gets to his feet to join you.

“Should we free his hands?” Leeg asks.

“No!” Peeta snarls, pulling the cuffs closer to his body.

“No.” Katniss agrees. “But I want the key.” Jackson pulls it out, handing it over to Katniss, who slips it into a pocket in her pants.

With this decided, you all begin to head for the maintenance shaft that you have to enter through the back closet on the upper floor. From there, two doors down, a vertical tube connects the row of apartments to the tunnels below. When Homes opens the small metal door to the shaft, it’s clear that the shells Castor and Pollux are wearing will not fit.

They shed them, stashing the shells in the closet, because that’s the only option they have. Castor and Pollux settle on using their emergency cameras, which are roughly the size of a shoebox.

You let them go in through first, motioning for Finnick to go next. He does the same, the two of you stare at each other for a long second. “Come on, Finnick.”

“I’m not letting you take up the rear.” He tells you.

“It’s not that big of a deal.”

“Which is why you’ll be going first.” He raises his eyebrows.

You roll your eyes, shedding your backpack to drag next to you while you shuffle through the tight space. You sidestep past the first apartment, and join the others in the second one, where they’ve already begun to crowd around the tube to the tunnels.

Messalla frowns at the circular cover behind the utility door. “It’s why no one ever wants the center unit. Workmen coming and going whenever and no second bath. But the rent’s considerably cheaper.” He mutters, when he looks up and sees the way you and Finnick are looking at him, he adds, “Never mind.”

The cover opens easily, there’s a wide ladder with rubber treads on the steps to allow quick movement up and down. You don’t bother to argue with Finnick about this one, sliding down the ladder, gathering at the bottom.

It’s terribly dark down here, even with the strip of dim lights. You wait for your eyes to adjust, while being forced to breathe in the smell down here. A sickening mixture between chemicals, mildew and sewage.

“Are you alright?” Finnick asks, moving a hair out of your face. “You look like you’re going to puke.”

“It’s the smell.” You rub your nose.

Pollux is pale, sweat running down the side of his forehead. He grabs onto Castor, holding on with white knuckles.

“My brother worked down here after he became an Avox.” Castor says. “Took five years before we were able to buy his way up to ground level. Didn’t see the sun once.”

It’s quiet between you all, no one knowing how to respond to something so horrid. You couldn’t imagine being forced down here for an extended period of time. You would go crazy. You’d break out and run and get yourself killed because you’re so desperate to see the sky.

“Well, then you just became our most valuable asset.” Peeta says, turning to Pollux. Castor laughs, and Pollux manages to smile.

Pollux leads the way down the first tunnel, you and Finnick walk side by side in the very back, behind Jackson and Gale, who are watching over Peeta like hawks. He doesn’t seem to care, hunched over, watching the ground. 

It turns out that there’s a network of wide tunnels that corresponds to the main street plan above. They call it the Transfer, because small trucks use it to deliver goods around the city. The pods are deactivated during the day, but at night it’s a different story. It’s as bad as the ground above. 

Pollux knows details that would be dangerous for a newcomer. The tunnels hold hundreds of additional passages, utility shafts, train tracks and drainage tubes that work together to form a multilevel maze. Some offshoots might require gas masks, have live wires, or rats the size of beavers.

He'll alert the gush of water that sweeps through the sewers like clockwork, and anticipates when the Avoxes will be changing shifts. He even brings you into damp, obscure pipes to hide from almost silent cargo trains. And most importantly, he has knowledge of the cameras. There aren't many down here, except in the transfer.

You make remarkable time, compared to when you’d been traveling above. Still, after six hours, everyone is tired and irritated. It’s three in the morning, when Katniss suggests to rest. Pollux leads everyone into a small, warm room that hums with machines. He holds up his fingers to tell you that you must be gone in four hours.

Jackson works out a guard schedule, one that has you take watch right in the middle. You grit your teeth, unhappy because you won’t be getting much sleep after all, but Finnick objects and tells her that he’ll work your shift, and his.

“Stop it.” You whisper to him. “You need to sleep too.”

“I feel fine.” Finnick looks at you. “You can’t think straight when you’re tired.”

You narrow your eyes. “Yeah? And you become a walking hazard.”

“I’m not arguing with you.” He laughs. “Just be grateful I’m your best friend and go to sleep.”

You press your lips together, tilting your head back to rest against the wall. It’s not very comfortable, you adjust several times, until Finnick pushes your head to rest on his shoulder. You let out a snort, and he shushes you.

It doesn’t take long for you to fall asleep, but it’s too easy to wake you. Finnick slides out from where he’d been sitting next to you, and you can’t fall back asleep. He sits next to Pollux, watching the opening you came from. You watch him quietly with tired eyes. 

“Are you okay?” Finnick murmurs to Pollux.

He nods, waving away Finnick’s concern with a hand. And then, he motions to you and Finnick, and signs the word ‘date’. You can see Finnick begin to turn his head in your direction, so you close your eyes and fight the smile that wants to come across your face.

It was only a matter of time before he asked, Cressida already did yesterday. She watched Finnick give you a hand down after doing a propo with Katniss. He made a joke, you crinkled your nose at him in response, and he told you that he thought it was cute when you did that.

Cressida had bumped your shoulder a few minutes later, and asked if you and Finnick were dating, or if there was anything between you two. You had to tell her that you and Finnick are only friends. You’ve known each other since high school, which was a decade ago. If either of you had feelings, then it’d be obvious.

You’re used to the assumptions by now, that’s why you’re not bothered by it, and you find it funny.

“No, we’re not dating.” Finnick says, you peek your eyes open to see Pollux blink in surprise, and begin to move his hands. Finnick lets out a laugh. “Yes, I know sign, so does (Y/n). Annie, the victor that was rescued, uses sign language from time to time to communicate when she’s having trouble.”

Pollux nods, making a face, and begins to sign again. Finnick falls quiet enough for the drowsiness to wash over you. You tilt your head back to sleep.

—

“(Y/n).” Finnick shakes your shoulder. “We’ve got to go.”

You take in a breath, holding it for a second, until it erupts into a yawn. When you open your eyes, you’re met with Finnick, making sure you’re alright. You squint, rubbing your face to make yourself more awake.

“You didn’t sleep well.” Finnick says, it’s not a question.

“I woke up after you moved.” You admit, “It’s fine, I fell asleep again.”

He makes a noise, going to open his mouth to speak, when Katniss shushes the group of you. She’s got her eyes on the entrance, listening hard. For a second, all you can hear is the humming of the machines around you, and then you make out the hissing sound.

“Katniss.” 

It echoes throughout the tunnels, coming back to you, repeated over and over. Katniss is confused, glancing back at you briefly, before looking away. She jumps at the sound of her name coming from inside of the room, and lands on Peeta. She waits, slowly pulling an arrow out to put on her bow, positioning it over the sleeping Peeta.

He jerks up before she can act on her violence. His eyes are wide, head whipping in her direction, but it’s not because of the arrow pointed at him. “Katniss! Get out of here!”

Katniss lowers the bow slightly. “Why? What’s making that sound?”

“I don’t know. Only that it has to kill you.” Peeta says. “Run! Get out! Go!”

Finnick gets to his feet at the sound of that, holding his hand out for you. You let him pull you to your feet, adjusting the straps on your body until they’re comfortable again. This makes the others move as well, Katniss returns the arrow to where it came from.

“Whatever it is, it’s after me. It might be a good time to split up.” She says.

“But we’re your guard.” Jackson tells her.

“And your crew.” Cressida adds.

“I’m not leaving you.” Gale shakes his head.

Katniss looks between the eleven of you, eyes going from person to person. “Okay,” She agrees. “Finnick, give a gun to Castor. Jackson, will you eject the empty cartridge from Peeta’s and load it with a real one? And (Y/n) do you still have the other Leeg sister’s gun?”

“Yes.” You reach for it, pulling it out for her to see.

“Give it to Pollux.” She tells you. She and Gale then give up their guns, handing them over to Messalla and Cressida because they have their bows. They give a brief lesson on how to shoot the guns, which is all you can afford to do at the moment.

Everything is cleaned up and packed into backpacks, including empty cans to avoid leaving a physical trail, just a scent. When you step foot out of the room, the hissing becomes louder, coming from a fair distance behind you. Without a second thought, you go out in front of Finnick, and you can feel the weight of him grabbing onto your backpack.

You try to move quickly and quietly, but it’s nearly impossible with this many people. The sounds of your shoes splashing in water, the clang of a gun against a pipe, and Katniss giving directions. Still, you manage to cover more blocks before the screaming begins.

You go rigid.

“Avoxes.” Peeta tells you without missing a beat. “That’s what Darius sounded like when they tortured him.”

“The mutts must have found them.” Cressida murmurs.

“So they’re not just after Katniss.” Leeg says.

“They’ll probably kill anyone. It’s just that they won’t stop until they get to her.” Gale says, and he’s right.

Katniss shakes her head. “Let me go on alone. Lead them off. I’ll transfer the Holo to Jackson. The rest of you can finish the mission.”

“No one’s going to agree to that!” Jackson says.

“We’re wasting time!” Finnick whisper-shouts, leaning over your shoulder.

“Listen.” Peeta whispers.

The screams have stopped, and the hissing has resumed, much closer than it was before. Katniss nudges Pollux wordlessly, and the twelve of you begin to run through the tunnel. She opens up the Holo when you reach a staircase, scanning for another route, when she begins to gag.

“Masks on!” Jackson orders.

Katniss forces her way through a door, stumbling out onto the Transfer. She begins to move, pulling out an explosive arrow to activate the pod. The streets are pastel, smooth, easy to run on. The road is empty from deliveries as far as any of you can tell, but cameras could be at any corner.

Regardless, she sprints for the next intersection, telling you to keep close. Finnick lets go of your bag, running past you to grab a hold of her. “Katniss!”

A beacon of white light encapsulates Messalla, who is as still as a statue inside. With his head tilted back, on the ball of one foot, mouth opened wide. You watch in horror as the flesh melts off of his body.

“Can’t help him!” Peeta shoves you from behind, making you stumble a step. “Can’t!”

You begin to move again, following after him and Katniss, dodging beams of light as they come down from the ceiling. You’re sweating bullets by the time you’ve made it to the next intersection, where a spray of gunfire brings you to a stop.

Peacekeepers are running down the Transfer after you, shooting. You swing your gun up to start shooting back, because you have nowhere to go past here. This is the pod that Katniss wanted to activate first before moving on. The others begin to join you, and together, you manage to bring down a good portion of the Peacekeepers before more begin to swarm in from the door you’d just come from.

You can’t help the startled scream that leaves your mouth when you realize that these aren’t, in fact, Peacekeepers. They’re mutts. They’re naked, about the size of a human, with heads that are jutted forward, arched backs and reptilian tails. They hound the Peacekeepers, living and dead, and begin to rip helmeted heads off of shoulders.

It’s only seconds before all the Peacekeepers are decapitated, and they’re slithering toward you on their bellies.

“This way!” Katniss shouts, hugging the wall and making a sharp turn to avoid the pod. As soon as you’ve successfully cleared the pod, Katniss shoots at it. Mechanical teeth burst through the street and begin to chew the tile to dust. She turns to Pollux, you keep your eyes on where the mutts should be coming from. “Forget the mission. What’s the quickest way above ground?”

Pollux moves, going down the Transfer and through a doorway. The shiny tile turns to concrete, Finnick pushes you in front of him as you travel through a tight pipe and onto a ledge that leads you to the main sewer. 

A yard below, a nauseating brew of human waste, garbage and chemicals slide by, bubbling when it touches the wall. It’s hard to tear your eyes away from the parts of the surface that are on fire, and you can physically see the vapor that it emits.

You hurry down the path, over a narrow bridge and into an alcove on the far side. Pollux smacks a ladder with his hand and points upward. Katniss turns to look at you, and her face twists. “Wait! Where are Jackson and Leeg One?”

“They stayed at the Grinder to hold the mutts back.” Homes tells her.

“What?” She lunges toward the bridge, and Homes pulls her back.

“Don’t waste their lives, Katniss. It’s too late for them. Look!” Homes nods to the pipe, where the mutts are coming out by the dozen.

“Stand back!” Gale shouts, firing an explosive arrow into the bridge’s foundation. It snaps, bringing down a good number of mutts.

With them being so close, you’re able to see what they actually look like. Their mouths are wide, teeth sharp, smeared blood on their reptilian skin. Their clawed hands and feet have chunks of flesh stuck between them. You gag.

The mutts throw themselves into the sewage without thinking, wanting to get their hands on you. Everyone open fires, and this lasts for a good few minutes, throwing everything you have at the monsters. They don’t die easily, though. Not even with a dozen bullets in their body, which causes everyone to come to the same consensus. 

You have to run.

You have no other option, especially because of the sheer volume of them that are still coming out of the sewer pipe. Finnick tries to make a grab at you to swing you toward the ladder, but you shove him first.

He opens his mouth to speak, but doesn’t get a chance to when you point your finger and bark, “Go!”

Finnick begrudgingly grabs the ladder rungs and begins to climb up after Peeta, Cressida following directly on his trail. It’s you, Gale, Homes and Castor left at the bottom. You shoot what you can, making a big enough gap for Gale to begin to climb the ladder. When Castor goes to follow, a rogue mutt from the sewer river reaches up and grabs him. He disappears over the edge. 

“Go ahead!” Homes shouts at you, “I’ll hold them!”

You make it to the ladder, you’ve got your right foot placed on a rung, looking up to see how far you have to climb. You’re met with the sight of the Holo, falling down in your direction, projecting a bright blinking red light, and beeping like a dangerous bomb.

“No!” You scream.

Homes turns to see what’s happening, when your body slams into his, bringing the two of you to the ground. The mutts begin to pile on top of you, just as the bomb explodes.

The blast pierces your eardrums before you have a chance to cover your ears. You squeeze your eyes shut, feeling the ground shake beneath you. A shower of wet and clumped matter rains down on you. When you open your eyes, you find that the mutts on top of you are gone, and with their sacrifice, you’re still alive.

You roll over, the mutts in the surrounding area are dead. You struggle to breathe through the smoke and debris that rains down from the ceiling above, your throat and lungs already raw from breathing in the poisonous soup below. You look at Homes, shaking him to get him to move, because the ringing in your ears is so strong.

He doesn’t move. You turn his head, and it moves with no resistance. You scoot away, eyebrows twitching, heart pounding in your chest at the sight of his face, half blown away from the blast.

You struggle to get to your feet, limping over to the ladder, which is covered in the gore from the mutts. When you look up, there is no opening like there had been previously. They threw the cover over. You begin to climb quickly, and at the top, you try to swing it open. It doesn’t budge.

They locked it.

You hang off of the ladder for a moment, taking deep breaths. You have to get out of here. You’re not going to be trapped here. You go back down, and shuffle through the bodies of the mutts to stare at what’s left of the bridge that Gale decided to blow. It’s not much.

It’s possible, though. You swing your bag off of your shoulder and throw it the distance to the other side. You watch helplessly as it slides on the ledge, coming close to falling. Right when you’re sure it’s going to stop, it slips over the side, and into the sewage.

You let out a defeated sigh.

You stare at what you have to work with, and it’s virtually nothing. The bag wouldn’t have helped much, anyway. It just had food and other supplies if you managed to get stuck down here for an extended period of time. 

That won’t happen, you’ll get to the other side of the bridge. You grab a hold of Homes’ body, flipping him onto his stomach to expose the back of his vest, which is clean of blood. You carefully push him to where the bridge should be, and then walk all the way back to the ladder, where you’ll start.

You can cross the gap, the issue is slipping on the blood. That’s why, when you break out into a run, you use Homes body as a launchpad. Your stomach is in your throat the second you’re off of the ground and flying over the gap. You come into harsh contact with the cement on the other side.

You get to your feet, starting to backtrack the way you came. It’s through the tight pipe, down to the doorway until concrete turns back to cute pastel tile. It leads you back to the Transfer, where the grinding pod has stopped. You pick up a piece of broken tile to throw at it, and when it doesn’t start back up, you go through it.

There’s a sea of bodies of Peacekeeper and mutt alike. Among them, you find Jackson and Leeg, both decapitated. You start to head in the direction of where you’d come from, from here. The sight of Messalla stops you, and you turn around to go back through the grinding pod.

You begin to walk down the street of the Transfer, taking your time, occasionally throwing broken tiles in the direction you’re going in hopes that it’ll set off a pod. The familiar sound of hissing seizes your heart, making you stop dead in your tracks. You turn your body slightly, afraid to see if it’s true.

It is.

You begin to run down the Transfer, abandoning your original plan of taking your time to find a place to crawl out. You have nothing to defend yourself with. You almost took the gun off of Jackson, but you thought that you were past the mutts and you had to worry about the pods. You should’ve known better than to trust the silence.

You throw yourself at the first door you see, slamming your shoulder into it because you expect it to swing open. It’s locked, a pain begins to blossom in your shoulder, but you push through, heading further in.

Every door you run across is locked. The mutts are practically on top of you, if you slow down for even a second, it’ll surely mean your death. You don’t know how long you go on like this for, triggering pods, trying to kill what’s sent after you, getting injured because of it.

It must be an hour later when you finally see a door ajar. You throw yourself into it, right as you step off of a tile that had sunk with your weight. It explodes, launching you further into the hall. This does nothing to stop the mutts, as it went off too soon. A sharp claw scrapes your ankle, beginning to pull you toward it, when you slam your foot into its absent face.

You manage to scramble back to your feet, hurrying to the ladder that’s waiting for you at the end. You cross your fingers that this latch won’t be locked, because it’s your last chance to get out of here. You can’t go back, they’re swarming beneath you. The ladder isn’t slippery this time around, you yank yourself up in record time, reaching the top of the ladder in a matter of seconds.

You shove the cover open, pulling yourself out. When you’ve cleared the top, you slam it shut, twisting the latch to lock it. The mutts pound on it from the other side, you sit directly on top of it, gasping for air after running for your life for an hour straight.

You hold your arms out, looking at the cuts and bites you’ve received. The blood that’s on your body is more than your own, it belongs to the mutts and Homes, too. You won’t know the real damage until you’re clean, and that could be days from now.

When you feel like you can move, you get to your feet, stumbling to the next ladder that’ll surely lead you to the surface. You’re not going to run around in this tunnel looking for the others. They have to think you’re dead, which means they’ve moved on to the next place. 

Thankfully, you know where that is.

At the top of this ladder is another cover, you open it to find that you’re in a utility room, which means that you’re in someone’s apartment. You pat down all of the pockets in your pants, trying to find a weapon. You come across something solid further down your pant leg. When you pull it out, you can see that it’s Finnick’s knife.

You let out a breath of relief, flicking it open. There are times when he makes you mad when he doesn’t listen to you. Other times, it comes in handy. If you run across anyone in this building, you have only one choice.

You open the door, heading into the room quietly. You can hear the sound of a television playing a room over. You slip into the hallway that’ll lead you to the front door, stealing a glance at the bedroom to see a Capitol woman with brightly colored yellow hair and white skin laying on a bed.

You make it to the kitchen and out the front door, into a small hallway with one other door. You leave down the stairs, almost going out to the street, when you see the light pouring through the windows. You back up, shaking your head. You need a disguise if you want to go out there. You’ll be spotted in the matter of minutes, every Capitol citizen knows your name and your face.

You sigh through your nose, going back up the stairs and into the apartment you just came out of. You fix the knife in your hand, creeping around the kitchen and to the hallway that leads to the bedroom. When you peek, she seems to be sleeping. Still, you don’t risk going up close, throwing the knife from where you stand.

Now you enter the room, leaving her body while you go to search through her belongings. You find several large coats, all brightly colored, and outfits you wouldn’t imagine wearing if it weren’t forced on you. You throw several aqua blue and lime green items onto the bed, pulling the knife out of her skull.

The front door is unlocked, so you relock it. In the woman’s bathroom, you start the shower, shedding everything you’re wearing to step beneath the warm water. It stings every cut on your body, you grit your teeth, watching as the water turns pink and doesn’t run clear for several minutes.

When you step out, you get dressed in the outfit you’d set aside. You tie your hair back into a tight bun at the back of your head, and opt for pulling on a brightly colored wig. As soon as you’re dressed and fairly disguised, you drag the woman to the utility closet, dropping her body down the ladder. The outfit that District Thirteen provided for you follows, as well as the bloodied bed sheets and towel. By the time you’re done, it doesn’t look like you were here at all. You shut the cover, lock the latch, and leave the apartment building.

It takes you a moment of wandering down the roads before you begin to recognize where you are. You’ve been here before, a couple times, actually. The Peacekeepers escorted you to these buildings, and then back to the Tribute Center when you were done working.

It takes you over an hour to get to the designer shop that Cressida was talking to you about. By then, the sun has risen and it’s got to be around noon. You enter through the door, trying to be casual about the way you do. It’s warm inside, there are pants and shirts and underwear made out of fur on mannequins, but there’s no sign that your friends were ever here.

“Can I help you?” A voice purrs. 

You turn to see a tall woman, who has been surgically altered to have the appearance of a tiger. With her skin pulled back tightly, tattooed to have black and gold stripes. Her nose has been flattened, there’s whiskers protruding out of her lips. She wears a long fur coat that matches what she’s wearing.

“Possibly.” You murmur, “Are you Tigris?”

“Yes,” She says, looking over your face, eyes squinting. “And you are?”

“Looking for some friends.” You say, pulling off the wig. “I was told by Cressida that you could help.”

She hums, walking past you to the door. You turn to watch her, body tense, terrified that she’s about to shout to everyone out there that you’re a fugitive. Instead, she turns a lock, coming back your direction. 

“Follow me.”

You do, she brings you behind a rack of clothes, sliding open a panel at the base of the wall. You peer inside and find that there’s a staircase on the other side. You look at her.

“Thank you.”

You have to crawl through the space, she slides the wall shut behind you. You go down the steep steps, eyes searching the darkness. You run into a hanging chain, which you instinctively reach up to pull on. Light fills the room, and you’re met with the sight of several people on the floor, now covering their eyes as they struggle to see their intruder.

It’s easy to spot Cressida, Pollux and Gale. You have to take a few more steps down in order to see Katniss and Peeta.

“(Y/n)...” Cressida’s voice is quiet.

“Where’s Finnick?”

The sound of moving fabric makes you turn your head. Finnick’s on his feet, coming in your direction, arms outstretched to take you in a hug. You run into him, pulling at his vest to bring him flush against your body.

He’s breathing heavily into your shoulder, a hand on the back of your head, the other wrapped around the middle of your back. “It’s okay.” You tell him, fingers wrapped in his curls. “I’m okay.”

“They won’t take you from me ever again.” Finnick tells you, pressing a kiss to your cheek.

You close your eyes. “I know.” You stroke his hair for a moment, and then pull away to hold onto his face. Finnick searches your eyes, you offer him a soft smile. “I’ll never leave you.”

--

this is part of my 3k celebration!!

[star-anise]

So, Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper-Jones is not by any means a straightforward tale of the specific traumas and experiences of being a disabled woman. In many ways, it's an examination of how holding onto those traumas too tightly can keep you not just from positive chances for connection and experience, but understanding when your choices and behaviours are hurting other people.

But. It does talk about the trauma. And specifically, this splinter I've spent months now slowly drawing out of my soul, because this never happened to me except for the version of it that did happen to me. In her case, it was a conversation with a friend in high school:

I approached him in the library of our school. He was studying for a geometry test. He saw me, closed his notebook, and smiled. “I feel like,” he said, teasing me, “there might be something you want to talk to me about.” I told him yes, there was, and I said that I wanted to go to the homecoming dance with him and would he take me. “Of course,” he said. Relief flooded through me so quickly it turned my stomach. “But,” he continued, “there’s something very important I need to talk to you about first.” He proceeded to tell me that our female friends had been pressuring him for weeks to ask me to the dance, not wanting me to feel left out. “They love you,” he said, “but they pity you and their pity won't help you in the world.” I can, to this day, recall the exact even tone in his voice, his smile. He reached across the table and took my hand. “I want to tell you something as your friend,” he said. “I want to protect you. When you ask a man like me on a date, you put us in a bad position.” He was still smiling; I was having a cute delusion and was in need of his loving, if uncomfortable, correction. “It’s just the truth,” Jim said. “No man will want to date you unless he, too, is desperate or ugly.”

What I've felt, since I was very young, was this sense not just that no one would ever love me, but that I was so pitiful, so unlovable, such a complete failure of femininity, that expressing interest in another person was tantamount to forcing them to pity-fuck me. And how could I do something that horrible to them?

Well, at least in the years since then, I've learned that actually people feel no compunction about rejecting me!

I have almost always felt like such a complete failure at femininity, to the point that discussions about the female experience feel hypnotically surreal, because these things never happen to me. Y'all get catcalled and hit on? I'm struggling to dredge up memories of experiencing that firsthand. I grew up with grownups always warning me about men who'd want me for sex but didn't actually love me, and now I'm like... being wanted for sex? What's that like? I have literally ten seconds of experience of my desire for someone else being something that excited and interested them.

This is my own personal neurosis, not a prescription for widespread behaviour. But I've always kind of hated when people talk about slowburn romances and stories with pining as "two idiots in love" because on a visceral level, it doesn't feel stupid to me to believe you're repulsive and nobody will ever want you. It has always felt like the natural and obvious conclusion to enter adulthood with.

Up until two weeks ago I've always been very careful to describe my feelings about my body as part of me being crazy--I hate the way I look, I don't like seeing or hearing recordings of myself, I think I'm not pretty. Because obviously that means I'm actively working to rid myself of those emotions and attitudes! I've got it handled! I've admitted that I have a problem!

And that's because I always had it locked away in my heart that if I tried to make a factual claim about being ugly, people would say "No you're not!" just to make me feel better, and then I would never ever know if anyone who found me attractive really meant it, or if they were just doing it out of pity.

That is crazy. That's holding onto the lesson of that fucking shitbag who found Chloé attractive and fuckable two months fucking later once he got over himself. That's sitting around waiting for someone to come climb up into my unfuckable tower and do all the work of establishing a relationship themselves. That's lesbian sheep behaviour.

It's only just begun to feel possible that I could begin to take steps to seek people out and express interest in them, instead of holding perfectly still and making someone else do all the heavy lifting to get to me, when I haven't even made it known I wanted them to.

But this doesn't get talked about as part of "the female experience". When men talk about women's experiences in the dating market, they absolutely never mean women like me. Why bother with the experiences of women they wouldn't want to fuck anyway? It's not like we're people or some shit like that.

[amygobrrr]

a Jackie Taylor character analysis

or, why—

[I'm serious btw. this is ~3800 words, or about 15 minutes reading time.]

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The Facts of the Case

"For the record... I was trying to save you." Jackie. 1996, 1x02

(Nothing else Jackie ever says sums up who she is more succinctly than that.)

Our first real introduction to Jackie Taylor as a character—the first shot of her bedroom scene in 1x01—is a framed photo of her sitting close to Shauna, at a party. This is also the very first protagonist-centric character scene of the entire show; from the outset, we are told that the relationship between Jackie and Shauna will be critically important to the narrative. They are best friends, it's implied they do practically everything together, and right from their very first scenes we see how important they are to each other.

Yet likewise from the beginning, we see the fractures between them.

Shauna hides her acceptance to Brown from Jackie, and is uncomfortable with the assumption that she will be following her friend to Rutgers. She disapproves of Jackie's boyfriend sneaking out of her room, and is frustrated by Jackie telling her what to wear and who to hook up with. She is visibly upset at seeing Jackie and her boyfriend together at a party, and, on the way home, has sex with said boyfriend.

Jackie makes her boyfriend drop her off from the party first, forcing Shauna to wait much longer to get home. After Shauna chooses a rival plan for survival over hers, she gives her the cold shoulder, even actively tries to make her jealous. Jackie steals and reads Shauna's journal, and outs her pregnancy to the rest of the team. She sleeps with the only eligible man in the wilderness, just to try and hurt Shauna.

Jackie and Shauna may care deeply about each other, but we see them spending an awful lot of time driving wedges into the space between themselves.

So why do they behave this way? Why does Jackie fidget sadly with her necklace, why does she look at Shauna the way she does before giving the necklace to her, why is she so heartbroken over a boy she says she barely even likes, why is she so crestfallen at the idea Shauna lost her virginity without telling her, why does she pull Travis away at Doomcoming and look back at Shauna the whole time? Why does Shauna seem to think Jackie has abruptly backtracked with Jeff, why is she so disapproving when she sees Jackie leave Doomcoming with Travis, or when she sees Jeff leave her house? Why does she look so heartbroken when she sees Jackie and Jeff dancing together at the party? Why are they both so hurt and hardened towards each other at the end of it all, and yet why does Shauna's heart still seize in anguish the next morning?

I believe all of those questions have the same, straightforward answer:

Before the crash, Jackie and Shauna were hooking up with each other in secret, and never mentioning a word of it—let alone talking through their feelings for each other.

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Some Mysteries Are Better Left Unsolved

"[Jeff and I have] been together for so long that if we're each others' firsts, then we'll be linked forever. It's more poetic that way. Oh! That reminds me—I decided on a color palette for our room at Rutgers next year." Jackie. 1996, 1x01

They make an unspoken habit of it; one always dragging the other away at parties after a few drinks under the pretense of mere friendly accompaniment. Jackie is reluctant to go all the way with her boyfriend Jeff; even after four years together, something always holds her back. She knows (or strongly believes, anyway, which is the same thing) that that's not entirely normal, and she wants more than anything to be normal, so she takes it in stages. She builds up to it with her boyfriend—slowly—and with her best friend—less slowly, but more comfortably. And it's fine—because Shauna is a girl, after all. Nothing they do together even counts. It's just fun. It's practice, for the real thing. It doesn't count.

But tipsy trysts alone aren't enough to fully explain the dynamic we see. Jackie had a change of heart regarding Jeff—what happened? Shauna seems a little hurt but also genuinely confused that they're back together at the beginning of the show, and even more so that Jackie intends to sleep with him 'for real' before college. I don't believe guilt over her actions fully accounts for her reaction. No, there is something else here, too; I think that, as important as Jackie and Shauna's clandestine hookups are to their dynamic, just as important is the fact that at some point they end. It's Jackie who puts a stop to them, possibly in the midst of the final time it happens.

I think Jackie, at a party some time around the beginning of the show—and maybe even giddy with the fresh excitement of a game or championship win—allows herself to be swept away in the moment with her best friend. Maybe she catches herself about to push too far with Shauna, about to venture into territory that she would have real trouble pretending "doesn't count," even with alcohol and adrenaline buzzing through her veins. Maybe she catches herself wishing that this could be her normal, that she could be with Shauna instead of Jeff. The specifics aren't what matters.

I think Jackie has long been vaguely aware that what she feels for Shauna falls outside of what you would expect for a friend, even a best friend. Normally, she doesn't give it a second thought; it's Shauna, of course it feels different. This time, though, she has a moment of extreme clarity about what exactly it is they're doing, and what it means that she wants it. More specifically, Jackie realizes what it says about her that she craves everything with Shauna that she cannot bring herself to crave with Jeff.

Jackie is in love with her best friend—and that makes her gay.

Jackie realizes, and the knowledge terrifies her.

──── ◦✦◦ ────

The Necklace

"And, here... it's a good-luck charm. Now nothing can touch you." Jackie. 1996, 1x01

Our attention is drawn to Jackie's heart pendant four times in the pilot episode. In order: we see it on the body of the girl hunted in the cold open, we see Jackie fidget with it after brushing her teeth, we see her fidget with it again during the pep rally, and we see her give it to Shauna on the airplane before takeoff. Three of the four scenes feature Jackie, with only the first finding her absent. That initial sighting certainly seems the most cryptic—we learn very quickly that it's Jackie's necklace, so why is someone else wearing it?

While we would need to see through Shauna's eyes to truly satisfy that question, for now at least the fourth scene—in the airplane—provides an answer: the necklace has nomadic tendencies. Jackie gives it as a protective charm to Shauna, who doesn't seem at all surprised by the gesture. Quite the contrary, exchanging the heart feels more like a known ritual between the two, maybe even first established during the trip to Hilton Head that Jackie references in preamble. (This ritual will be repeated—in the other direction—when Shauna gives Jackie a pep talk in 1x05.) Shauna holds the pendant close, clutching it with her entire fist. The thing seems just as precious to her now as it does to Jackie in the remaining scenes; perhaps it was originally a gift from one to the other?

Regardless of whether or not we are meant to infer that the necklace was a gift, in the pep rally scene we are explicitly shown that Jackie does strongly associate it with Shauna. It's a very brief moment in comparison to the full scene we get on the airplane—just one look exchanged, a set of smiles shared. After the Yellowjackets stream into the gym and line up to victorious music, Shauna looks past Lottie over to Jackie. And Jackie is already looking back, smiling as she plays with the heart pendant. Shauna's own grin widens, full and genuine, until it reaches all the way to her eyes. Jackie savors the look for a moment, then glances away, smile unbroken... her goal seemingly achieved.

What goal?

The bathroom scene is an even quicker blip than the gym, yet I believe it's the most impactful and telling of the four. One single shot with a punch-in. Jackie brushes her teeth quickly and then gazes in the mirror, looking forlorn as she fiddles with the necklace. On its own this one scene is not particularly remarkable—its true significance comes from the two others it glues together.

The scene preceding is the aforementioned bedroom introduction. Jackie is in bed with Jeff and he is clearly pushing their activities farther than she finds comfortable. Jackie fakes it to get things over with, powering through as he tells her he loves her. She lets Jeff think he's doing well... and as her immediate reward is coaxed into reciprocating his advances, and then some.

Jackie scrubs her teeth violently. She is unhappy.

The scene following is the car ride with Shauna where we learn that Jackie has suddenly gotten back together with Jeff. When Shauna brings him up, Jackie laughs and shrugs it off, but not before a flash of nervousness escapes in her chuckle—she tries twice to change the subject away from her boyfriend, only finding success once they pass a sign prompting her to talk shit on the boys' baseball team by singing the praises of the girls' own soccer team. Jackie leans out the window as her best friend rolls her eyes and giggles at her antics.

Jackie whoops for joy. She is happy.

Viewed as a whole, the sequence paints a clear picture: Jackie does not truly want to be with her boyfriend. She is unhappy both while and after she is alone with Jeff, happy while alone with Shauna, and while truly alone between the two encounters, draws some kind of strength from the necklace we know she associates with Shauna. In the car, she is eager to turn conversation away from her boyfriend and onto her best friend.

In her mind, everything she's doing with Jeff, everything she's letting him do with her? She is doing it to save her friendship with Shauna. She is working to build plausible deniability.

"I have a curfew too, you know." "Yeah, but... you know what my parents are like." Shauna and Jackie. 1996, 1x01

Conformity is the only weapon Jackie has against her parents' expectations, and naturally she is an expert in its misuse. Plausible deniability is the only tool at her disposal to avoid scaring Shauna away, and so Jackie picks up a double major. Half her work is already done; it's not like they'd ever talked about what they were doing or what it meant, so she can count on Shauna to never bring it up—as long as Jackie withdraws to the safety of being normal best friends.

If Shauna knew the truth, if she knew what Jackie cannot un-know... she would walk away, their friendship ruined, and it would be Jackie's fault. It would be Jackie's fault for being this way, and so the other half of her work must be undertaken. Jeff is living proof that whatever they've done together wasn't real, that Jackie could never be interested in her friend that way. Jeff, therefore, must stay, so that Shauna will stay. Jackie must be strong, for Shauna.

Each of the three necklace scenes Jackie has in the pilot shows us something very specific about her relationship to Shauna. On the airplane, Jackie wraps Shauna in her love—for protection. In the privacy of her bathroom, Jackie wraps herself in Shauna's love—for strength.

And in the gym, in public, Jackie suns herself in the warmth of their friendship—her strength rewarded.

──── ◦✦◦ ────

Abandonment and the Wilderness

"What did I do? When did you stop wanting me to be your best friend?" Jackie. 1996, 1x07

The thought of Shauna replacing her with another is something Jackie dreads above almost all else. Whether in conflict, in resolution, or both, most of the battles and the skirmishes that we see play out between the two revolve around this fear.

Shauna gets upset and causes trouble at the party in the woods before seeming hurt that Jackie hasn't complimented her, so Jackie attempts reassurance by emphasizing how important their friendship is. Her choice of approach here seems at least partly motivated by a guilty conscience (with a side of projection): deep down, she knows that she is trying to replace Shauna... with Jeff. Jackie feels guilty for ending their hookups in favor of her boyfriend, so she assuages that guilt by firmly stating no, Shauna, you're not going anywhere. Jeff could never be my best friend. Only you. This fight ends when Shauna confirms she understands her importance to Jackie.

(As an aside, the timid "Hi" and "Are... are we cool?" Jackie greets Shauna with after the team-building exercise have such a soft lilt to them that they seem decidedly more than friendly.)

After the crash, Shauna snubs Jackie's plan for survival in favor of Taissa's—so Jackie gets buddy-buddy with Mari. Here, Jackie nakedly projects her fear through her actions: Shauna wants to choose Tai over Jackie, well, we'll see how she likes it when Jackie chooses Mari over Shauna. Things are only patched over between them when Shauna comes to Jackie with extra blankets saying she is scared and needs her best friend. Jackie melts at once.

This next one is not really a fight, but does involve reassurance: when the team grows annoyed with Jackie for not pitching in, Shauna pulls her aside to try and find something she can do. Jackie flunks out of badass butchering school, so Shauna switches gears to attempt a pep talk, which goes badly until she lands on the winning words.

"You taught me how to be like this, you know. You make people think things are gonna be okay, just by showing up and being your dumb, hot, awesome self. At least you always did that for me." Shauna. 1996, 1x05

Jackie softens, but holds firm on putting a knife through a deer knee, which Shauna accepts, but counters that Jackie still needs to find something to do. "We need you, Jackie." Shauna pulls out her trump card—she returns the heart pendant to its place around Jackie's neck. "I mean, you're basically the best, remember?" she says. Jackie preens, and a hug seals the deal.

By the time Taissa leads her ill-fated expedition away from the cabin, Shauna has been sneaking around around conspiring with her for a while, so Jackie jumps on the opportunity to corner her and demand an answer. This fight also happens to be when Jackie finally gives voice to the worry she carries; she openly wonders what she could have done to make Shauna want to replace her. And again, the fight ends not so much when Shauna spills a half-truth, but when Shauna allows her to simply be there. Jackie's relief is palpable as she stays cheerful for her best friend, wrapping her in maybe the tightest hug we see throughout the entire show.

Throughout the entire season, virtually all conflict between Jackie and Shauna can ultimately be solved—in Jackie's view, at least—by a reassurance that they will still be best friends no matter what. That is the core of the matter to Jackie, the driving force behind everything she does; she can withstand any blow, weather any storm as long as her best friend remains by her side. Shauna's love will carry her through.

Jackie fears being replaced, because more than anything... she fears being unloved.

──── ◦✦◦ ────

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

"It's funny, I used to pretend I didn't know if I loved Jeff, when the truth is: I didn't even like him that much. And I was so mad at Shauna, but now I realize she's right! Friendship doesn't matter. Love? Doesn't matter. They're just things we use to pretend like we aren't gonna end up like dead cabin guy, like rotted-out husks in some bullshit attic. But of course that's how it ends. That's all we are the whole time. It doesn't matter. We're just shells with nothing inside." Jackie. 1996, 1x09

Whatever reassurance Jackie has gleaned by the time of the pregnancy half-confession is shattered once again by the revelations contained in Shauna's journal—and yet, she doesn't seem to give up on Shauna entirely... until the end of their explosive argument.

Jackie spends the bulk of 1x08 and 1x09 depressed, bitchy, and passive-aggressive, yes—but through it all, she tries to make things work. She outs Shauna's pregnancy to lend urgency to Laura Lee's mission, but conspicuously deflects questions about the father, despite having the opportunity to go for the jugular. She does her Doomcoming preparations side by side with Shauna, makes her entrance to the party itself next to Shauna; continues to smile at Shauna when she's not looking.

Jackie doesn't cut ties with Shauna—to the contrary, she gives her multiple opportunities to course-correct. When Shauna confronts her about spilling the secret of her pregnancy to the group, Jackie responds with "It's not really the time to be keeping secrets." While wandering through the forest together picking flowers for decoration, Jackie brings up Rutgers before asking "You ever think about what we'd be doing if we hadn't crashed?" and stating—even more plainly—"What if this is it, Shauna? Everything we did, everything we didn't do? All the mistakes that we made, it's like... permanent." In both cases, Jackie knows what Shauna is still trying to keep from her—Jeff, Brown—and is handing her an opening to come clean.

When Shauna deflects away from her mistakes, Jackie scoffs. "Well, I was naïve. I realize that now," she muses.

Jackie still looks back at Shauna to make sure her friend is watching as she leaves the dance on her way to sleep with Travis; to make sure she cares. Just like she did with Mari at the lake, Jackie is trying to inflame Shauna's jealousy—all the way up until the very end, right up to the moment when uncertainty becomes lost to her entirely, Jackie still holds onto hope that deep down, Shauna cares for her.

In her attic confession to Travis, Jackie contrasts friendship with love—directly after explicitly stating that she never loved Jeff.

She is very obviously talking about Shauna.

Shauna was supposed to be the one person who truly loved her. The one person who loved Jackie, not as a soccer captain (like the team did), or as just a girl (like her boyfriend did), or as the mirage of perfect daughter (like her parents did), but loved her as her, as Jackie. Shauna's journal reveals even that to be a lie.

Jackie sees now... she sees that none of it matters.

The curse of the viewer is that we see what Jackie never does. We see morning light fall on the snow, sparkling. We see Shauna fall on her knees, screaming. We see the inhabited meat shed, and the pyre, and the bacchanal, and the empty meat shed, and the bridge and the uniform and the childhood bedroom. Jackie, however, is neither prophetic nor clairvoyant; all she sees is an incomplete account of Shauna's actions. She certainly doesn't see the whole picture, can't imagine the chain of events that drove Shauna to such extremes. Jackie is hurt, not over Jeff—though he provides her with a convenient excuse to the others—but over what Shauna being willing to sleep with him says to her about how Shauna must view their friendship.

Shauna has told her that love and friendship don't matter. The romantic love Jackie knew she didn't feel for Jeff, the romantic love she believed Shauna didn't feel for her, and the platonic love she believed Shauna did; none of them mattered, none of them ever existed. Jackie shaped herself into a shell by pretending, a shell perfectly tailored to accept what Shauna was willing to give—only to find that what her friend really handed to her was rotting faster than Jackie could build the husk around it. But it's not until the night after Doomcoming that Shauna twists the knife in Jackie's heart, removing any last shred of doubt.

And that, more than anything else, is what breaks Jackie in the end; the knowledge that Shauna never cared for her.

"I'm sure everyone back home is so FUCKING sad to be losing their perfect little princess, but they'll never know how tragic, and boring, and insecure you really are. Or how high school was the best your life was EVER gonna get." "Fuck you." Shauna and Jackie. 1996, 1x10

"I don't even know who you are anymore." "Or maybe you never did." The last words Jackie and Shauna ever spoke to each other. 1996, 1x10

Jackie was trying her best, she really was. She offered Shauna her love in the form of everything she endured to keep Jeff in front of her, and therefore to keep their friendship intact. Shauna knows Jeff is her boyfriend, she knows he's off-limits, and yet she gets pregnant by him anyway. Jeff is Jackie's shield (her beard; not that she would know THAT term), her proof that all is right and she can be normal. Shauna ripped that protection away from her. From Jackie's perspective, she saw Shauna take her love, crush it underfoot, and spit right in her face. Not only does Shauna not love her back the way Jackie wants, but she doesn't love her even as a friend.

Jackie is, at this point, totally convinced that no scrap even of the friendship she was so desperately clinging to really exists. Everything she feels for Shauna is unrequited—everything except, of course, the anger and the hurt. So when her attempt to banish Shauna backfires and she is told to leave instead, Jackie listens; she walks outside to reenact the ending of Romeo & Juliet.

Jackie tried hard, so hard, not to let her baggage—her longing—ruin her most valued friendship, or push away the most important person in her life... and in the end it was all for nothing. She lost her anyway.

Or worse, she never even had her in the first place.

On her way to oblivion, Jackie dreams of being loved.

──── ◦✦◦ ────

──── ◦✦◦ ────

If you read all the way to the end here, you're the best, especially cause tumblr posts are so <--> narrow. I'm sorry for leaving things on such a downer note... but Yellowjackets do be that way.

this has been Jackie's side of things—I have a partially-written follow-up half from Shauna's perspective, but it has proven even harder to stick to some semblance of objectivity when arguing from Shauna's POV than it was for Jackie. if this one resonates with people I might refactor and finish part 2, we'll see.

in the meantime though, if you agree with my conclusions in this essay and hunger for a taste of Shauna's side, check out this "Jackie lives" fic I wrote:

featuring 4k of Tai trying to get Shauna to use her words, followed by 6k of Shauna's words! I wrote it between bouts of working on this (some snippets I cut from the Shauna section for being too un-essay-like made it in there), and it pretty much assumes everything I talk about here, both Jackie's-character-wise and jackieshauna-history-wise, holds true. except, of course, the part where Jackie stays dead lol

later haters (mari and crew)

[beigetiger]

I would adore a post about how Skulduggery treated Valkyrie in phase 1, your stuff is so fun to read

HEHEHEHEH IVE BEEN ENABLED

There is so much stuff to unpack in phase 1 it’s kind of ridiculous, but I’m going to talk about literally whatever comes to mind because this would be SO fun to talk about.

The first thing that comes to my mind when I think of their super early dynamic is that Skulduggery really neglects Valkyrie’s physical needs as a living human. In book 2, Valkyrie mentions how she hardly ever gets the opportunity to eat or sleep because she spends so much time doing things, but brushes it off as just another sacrifice it takes to be with him. This was one of the first things I noticed while also reading this book. Skulduggery doesn’t need to eat or sleep, and Valkyrie doesn’t want him to leave her behind and so just…doesn’t tell him that she actually needs something, and he’s too caught up doing his own thing and viewing her as a fully responsible adult to note that she’s not getting the basic necessities for a teenager. He does eventually get better in this way of course, doing things like adjusting parts of his house so Valkyrie can eat and sleep without the back and forth of going home.

There is also, of course, the repeated endangerment. Phase 1 Valkyrie never holds it against him of course (even phase 2 Val barely mentions it), but he definitely has no problem bringing her into situations where she’s likely to be killed, including situations that are kind of unnecessary (like him telling her to drive a truck when she’s thirteen on account of the fact that it would be funny). I think a big moment of reflection for him was in The Faceless Ones where Valkyrie’s tooth gets broken and it’s a really traumatic experience for her, but she holds a brave face for Skulduggery and only breaks down crying when Kenspeckle expresses worry over her. The book kind of brushed over his reaction to it, but I really think he realized in that moment that he was actually hurting Valkyrie with the standards he was enforcing on her. This point is honestly pretty straightforward, but it’s also pretty relevant to their phase 1 dynamic and so I wanted to mention it. Pretty much all the trauma Valkyrie has can be arguably traced back to Skulduggery.

Because while Skulduggery definitely loves her and has his protective moments over her, he really does have an insistence on treating her as an adult, even at the points when she was barely a teenager. It gives Valkyrie a life where she has no safety bars on anything she does and is free to make her own mistakes and possibly get herself killed. And while he is willing to step in and help if she requests it, Valkyrie is also ridiculously independent (a trait that Skulduggery also encouraged) and clearly tried to avoid going to him with personal problems as best she could. While there are definitely issues to this approach to raising Valkyrie, I think Skulduggery was hoping to avoid becoming overly controlling of her and instead overcompensated by giving her full control of her own life, for better or for worse. Alternatively, it could be that Valkyrie’s extended freedom originally came from a branch of Skulduggery’s neglect of her, and later on in phase 1 just became a thing of habit.

Now, Valkyrie is a pretty independent person in phase 1. BUT. Since she has so much control over her own life, she refuses to socialize with other kids her age, which does lead to an emotional dependency on Skulduggery that is really apparent in the earlier half of phase 1. He’s effectively the god of her world, and even if she isn’t forced to do what he wants, she will do it with no hesitation or regard for her own well-being. Even when she’s an older teenager (16-18 range), it’s still pretty apparent that Skulduggery and whatever he wants or says is the first priority in her life, with everything else coming second. I also think this is a big reason as to why she dated Fletcher for a bit, because he was literally the only person she was hanging out with at the time who wasn’t literally hundred of years older than her.

Another thing I wanna point out that I always found really amusing is how physically comfortable they are with each other. Like, they’re detective partners who get into fights together, of course they’re gonna be pretty comfortable with each other, but it’s just so fucking funny. There is an entire scene in Death Bringer where Valkyrie is going about her morning routine (taking a shower, getting dressed, etc) and the whole time Skulduggery is following her around and chatting with her, and neither of them are weird about it or mention it at all. This is literally just normal for them (and also they’re conversation is kind of unhinged, I need to reread DB because there was SO much weird stuff in there). Valkyrie literally sleeps at his house on the regular, sometimes even more so than her own house. When Valkyrie finds out that the man is casually standing in her backyard, her reaction is to let him into her room through the window, which is so weird that even SOLOMON FUCKING WREATH commented on it. And while I do love having characters not being weird about other characters having bodies, having that dynamic between a teenager and an adult that her parents don’t know she hangs out with is absolutely wild.

And speaking of absolutely wild, having a “I’d fight loyally by your side until the end” scene with a fifteen-year-old is crazy, but so in-character for this series. I’m not complaining about it though, because the continual use of that phrase throughout this series sucker-punched my emotions every time and that’s exactly what I’m going for.

Something I also really liked throughout the series is them learning to place more trust in each other. In book 2, Valkyrie actually has a moment where she’s worried he’s going to kill her. In book 4, she’s worried his emotional breakdown will push him to physically harm her. In the first part of book 5, she’s subconsciously worried that he’ll kill her for being Darquesse. In the last part of book 5, she puts up no resistance and instead lies in his arms when he puts a gun to her head and threatens to shoot her. In book six, Skulduggery is brave enough to actually have a discussion with her about being Lord Vile. There are so many more examples of this, but I really adored their slowly growing relationship and how it was depicted throughout phase 1.

Don’t get me wrong though, the whole fiasco with Lord Vile in Death Bringer was really toxic. Specifically the fact that Skulduggery sort of emotionally blackmailed Valkyrie into forgiving him for being Lord Vile? I know that he didn’t mean for her to find out, but taking advantage of an emotionally vulnerable teenager who’s going through an especially rough part of her life right now is not a great thing to do.

I do understand why he did it though, because Skulduggery is really not normal whenever Valkyrie leaves, and he might have gone through another bout of mental instability if she actually left him because of Lord Vile. I think this part of him is best seen in the second half of LSoDM and the first half of DotL. He’s angry, lashes out, emotionally cold, and he threatens tries to shoot an eighteen-year-old for the crime of being Valkyrie’s reflection. He’s also so aggressive when they have to revive Valkyrie with the Sunstone, because he’s scared that he messed up and that he’s now going to lose her forever, which causes him to act really scary towards everyone around him. It’s definitely not a side of him that he likes and that’s why he’s so determined to stay with Valkyrie no matter what. Not phase 1 related, but I will always find Skulduggery’s explanation for what he was doing while Valkyrie was in Colorado hilarious because what do you mean you decided that a lapse in morals would be fine until Valkyrie gets back.

Skulduggery also seems to have a really hard time admitting with words that he loves someone (and given his history, I really do not blame him) but Valkyrie casually saying that she loves him in KotW and teasing him about it while Skulduggery will express that he loves her in literally any way other than actually saying the goddamn words (it takes him seven fucking years to actually say “I love you” yahoo) and it made for some really sweet but also heart-wrenching moments in the last three books of phase 1. Because Valkyrie doesn’t really need him to say that he loves her, because she knows it already. But still having him refuse to say it does kind of sting, and it’s fun to watch the two of them dance around their emotions like funny little acrobats.

What makes Skulduggery and Valkyrie’s dynamic in phase 1 so wild to me is the way that it kind of casually glazes over the raging abuse going on, but I actually really like that because it highlights just how much this series is written from Valkyrie’s perspective. She loves him so damn much, and you really can’t blame her for it. He gave her a life where she could express herself and do what she wanted and be with people that made her happy instead of being stuck in a school she hated, with people she hated, in a life she hated. She was traumatized and scarred by him but he gave her the opportunity to actually live, and no way in hell was she ever going to risk giving that life up and going to back to what she had before. Toxic as their phase 1 relationship was, he represented her freedom and autonomy and Valkyrie viewed any hardships she went through as a simple sacrifice necessary to keep what she had. It’s not healthy, but you kind of get it.

I love their phase 1 relationship so much, but there is so much to unpack between them and I definitely missed a lot, so everyone else feel free to add on your rambling.

[stxrquotes]

yanqing & yunli except i headcanon yunli as audhd so it’s yanqing and his disaster gf

i’ve seen this one really really really sweet couple on insta, it’s a nt guy and his audhd wife and theyre so sweet. he takes the time to understand her and how their brains are different and it’s so lovely. anyways i kind of imagine yanli like that when their relationship develops more. especially because we got to see them outside of their squabbling in the last part of the tb quest—they work together well; they actually have grown to trust and respect each other (there’s also a dialogue if you choose to talk to yunli before confronting hoolay w/ feixiao where she compliments yanqing on his finishing atk and asks him to teach it to her—she even lightheartedly admits he might be stronger than her), and i feel that their trust and respect will only grow more with time. and of course they will always squabble and pick at each other

so to elaborate on audhd yunli, first off we all know how blunt and stubborn she is. her thinking is so straightforward that even her fighting style is “smash with big stick, everything die” (she prefers brute force over strategy or dexterity—doesn’t mean she can’t strategize, i just mean to point out that even in her fighting she gets straight to the point which i find amusing). i adore her so much my beautiful autistic daughter. special interest is swords. yanqing gets an honorable mention because he’s also obsessed with swords but i think he’s just a sword nerd who collects swords while yunli’s interest goes into the forging, the history, the personalities of the swords

yunli: we may both be obsessed with swords but i am obsessed with them in a much deeper and more autistic way than you could ever be

i have also considered though that yanqing could be headcanoned as having adhd; he’s impulsive, and i do still love the idea from pjo of demigods having an advantage in battle because of their adhd. reminds me of yanqing, he’s a hyperactive little dude bouncing all over the place in battle and idk. he’s also just. a teenage boy. so idk, remains to be determined

anyways i just hc that in all parts of yunli’s life except for anything having to do with swords she’s a complete mess and a ticking time bomb. everything in her room is a mess—except her swords (and old mettle is given the most pristine treatment). she’ll ignore any expectations put upon her unless it has to do with swords or something else she’s a little interested in. she has a few safe foods she eats on rotation in mass amounts.

also im imagining her in school and all i can picture is the leg bounce and the thousand yard stare. +10000 aura she doodles swords on all her papers. every project where students are given enough creative liberty and freedom to choose their topic, you fucking bet yunli is going to talk about swords in one way or another. idk how school works on the xianzhou zuming or frankly anywhere in hsr, but i guess that doesnt matter and i dont really care

also her sense of justice and tunnel vision with cursed swords. it’s so black and white to her (it has a lot to do with trauma ofc, but still i see that same kind of black/white thinking and extreme sensitivity to injustice as a trait on the spectrum).

i also would like to share headcanons about her sensorial and tactical development as a child lol. something about her screams sensory seeking. i use the korean voiceover, and i ADORE how they’ve voiced her and the direction they went. i haven’t listened to the english much, but from what ive heard she seems a lot more softspoken, which isn’t at all wrong or bad, it just is different than what i expected. in the kvo she’s got this monotone shrill going on that little girls with zero vocal control have and it’s fantastic. i hc she has no sense of volume whatsoever, can’t perceive her voice and doesn’t realize she’s shouting, things like that. it really fits with how she acted in her story quest, she’s just absolutely tone-deaf, both literally with her voice and figuratively with social cues, reading the room, etc.

practicing with old mettle has got to be so fucking loud, she’s throwing that shit around and it’s going CLANG CLANG CLANG and there’s no way she doesn’t have massive tolerance to high sensory input. for kids who are on the extreme end of high sensory needs, they’ll sometimes just seek out loud noises constantly, and of course, won’t realize it might be disruptive to others because they don’t even feel like it’s loud. so yeah yunli stims by throwing swords around because hell yeah. the fucking CLANG CLANG CLANG regulates her nervous system i just know it🗣️🔥

while some people are just born with dif sensory needs/issues, they can also develop due to your sensory experience, or lack thereof, as a child. kids who weren’t held/interacted with enough might have difficulty with lots of sensory input, while on the other hand (i dont know this one for sure, i am making a guess) i would think that a lot of exposure to excess sensory input might cause that kid to develop high sensory needs.

and that’s what i think with yunli would be part of her sensory issues, whether or not we’re even talking about autism—she grew up in the forgery around all that constant noise, not to mention the traumatic cursed sword event which could have exacerbated the way all that affected her nervous system because it also messed with her emotions and trauma is stored in the body AND she was a child, yadda yadda :3

i could keep going but idk this has been in my drafts for so long bc i kept thinking of shit and i didnt even talk that much about yanli

the reason i see them as disaster gf and nt bf is because although we’ve seen yanqing being a little shit, so much of that is about his maturity level as he’s still a teen. i just feel it and can’t articulate it well, i just feel that he’s got a calm spirit in there somewhere and as he grows he’s going to become so measured and patient and self-disciplined and it’s fantastic i want to see him grow into a fine young man (i know we probably wont but i can imagine it😞). it feels like that’s the direction he’s going with all the development from the recent tb quest, not to mention the parallels he has with jingliu

i hope this makes sense to others and not just me, for some reason i really see them as the wholesome nd girl and nt boy unlikely wombo combo cause yanqing has so much spunk and fire and yunli has so much spunk and fire but neurodivergently and they just burst into flames around each other but as they grow older it will wane and they will fan it down into glowing embers, soft and warm in the hearth; yanqing will hold her explosive spirit in his hands so gently, he’ll admire and understand her like no one else because somehow he just gets her, and she thrives in his comforting warmth. and when yanqing’s spirit crumbles and he loses that warmth and loses faith in himself, yunli can remind him of his strength and reinstall his sense of justice; she also brings the fresh autistic perspective of carefree innocence and autonomy that i feel yanqing needs in times where he might be overwhelmed by expectations or outside opinions. i just ugh i just . i love them i am going to throw up they’re beautiful and i just think that autistic yunli being understood by neurotypical yanqing is something that is so important to. society at large ,

[attonposting]

Just thinkin' about how showing your companions the Force in KotOR II is about healing, about teaching them to confront their traumas and cope with them in a healthy way, and on a Dark Side run, it's about yanking on that trauma and twisting it until it becomes all that they are.

Atton is a goddamn mess of a person. The war wrecked him and shaped him into a sadistic monster who committed mega war crimes until he met the one Jedi who forced him to see what he'd become. And instead of taking any responsibility, he bolted, coping by drowning out the world and doing his damnedest not to feel. The Exile forces him to stop running and confront himself – to face all those emotions he chopped up into little pieces and wore like masks, his guilt, his hate, his fear. I don't think Atton ever thinks of himself as a Jedi; him learning to use the Force is him learning not to be afraid of it, and himself, anymore. Atton decides he's going to finally try to do something with his life – maybe not for goodness' sake, but because he owes that last Jedi that much. And a DS Exile extinguishes whatever seeds of decency she planted, destroys his last remaining shreds of idealism, and convinces him not to fear himself in a much, much scarier way.

Bao-Dur is a genuinely good guy, but he's shackled by guilt. It's not straightforward, and it'd maybe be easier for him to deal with it if it was - Bao-Dur simultaneously regrets and doesn't regret what he did. He believes... not necessarily that Malachor had to happen, but that the war needed to end. But he's horrified that it was his hands and his mind that conceived the Mass Shadow Generator, can never banish the sight of so much death at his hand. And he can't reconcile how what drove him in the war was pure hatred, and the galaxy treats him like his service was a noble thing when he knows it was anything but. That rage hasn't left him even though he tried to move on and turn his hands towards kinder things. Through the Force, he's able to move on and at last find peace – but a DS Exile convinces him to give into his anger and let retribution rule him completely.

Mira is at her heart a scared little girl trying desperately to prove to herself that she's tough and capable – that she's over everything she's lost, that she's not alone and afraid. She tries not to care about anyone, because the galaxy certainly doesn't give a shit, but she does despite herself. A LS Exile teaches her how to come to terms with the things that hound her, and in that, find true strength. A DS Exile teaches her to cover up that fear by preying on others so that nobody ever has the chance to hurt her again, and convincing herself that hardness means strength until it becomes true.

Brianna has tried to find purpose in servitude, but she's isolated in an otherwise tight-knit unit. She's desperate to prove herself, but she's never good enough for anyone, and she knows why she continues to fail even as she's unable to let the source go. A LS Exile teaches her to transcend those concerns and be true to herself above all else – not only to follow her own path, but to find strength and value in herself, for the first time in her life. What Atris thinks, what her sisters think, is immaterial. A DS Exile doesn't free her from her mindset of servitude so much as twist her loyalties. That Brianna instead becomes convinced she's better than her sisters, better than Atris, and takes her anger out on her ex-family and beyond – becoming driven by scorn, seeing nothing but the failures of the Jedi to live up to their own standards.

Mical lost his future at a young age – something that probably saved his life, considering everything that happened in the following years, but which left him trailing in the shadow of the Jedi seeking answers nobody could give. He wants to believe in the Jedi Order, but recent history has left him with far too much evidence to the contrary. A LS Exile acknowledges the flaws of the Jedi teachings, even personifies those flaws through their history, but convinces him through their actions that their core still rings true and is worth striving for. A DS Exile utterly demolishes his faith in the same manner. Mical takes the Exile's fall as yet another betrayal by the Jedi, but it's the hardest hitting yet - this sheer debasement of the figure he idolized most. It finally extinguishes his idealism, even gnawing away at the compassion that defines him until he's yet another soulless cog in the Republic machine.

And Visas is already attuned to the Force, but a LS Exile gives her hope for the galaxy and teaches her of the beautiful little moments of connection and the greatness people can achieve together, where she'd become convinced that life was pain and the only thing any being could aspire to was an end to the suffering. What she witnesses is strong enough for her to come to terms with the death of Katarr and choose to keep going despite all that's happened. And a DS Exile... doesn't. They reaffirm her desolation and then give her the callous end she sought.

The Exile themselves went for ten years avoiding connections, and then the Force thrusts them back into the role of a leader – a role they've got decidedly mixed feelings about, when it was literally their empathy that caused their self-destruction in the Mandalorian Wars. Major YMMV on how you characterize your Exile's motives, but the way I saw it, a DS Exile isn't going to be hurt again. They're not going to get attached to their soldiers – they've made that mistake before and it brought them nothing. They know how to say the right words to get people to fight and to die for them, and that's all it is. And for a LS Exile... they know the danger of caring, but they won't allow it to stop them from living any longer, not after they've spent ten years dead to themselves. And it's the human connections they form that heals them, that allows for them to touch the Force once more.

Obviously a DS Exile is bad and they should feel bad. For a LS one, though - the Jedi Council's repudiation of your powers at the end of the game used to really bother me until this part clicked. You're all a bunch of broken people who find each other and learn to move on. Even if you're drawing them in with freaky black hole space magic, they are genuinely better off for your presence, and it's because of who you are as a person, not any way you've molded them through the Force.

[watori-fics]

Arashiyama’s Pet Peeve

Pairing: Gen Summary: Arashiyama is that guy—polished, popular, humble, and effortlessly charming—so the idea that he has this one glaring pet peeve (his statue) feels refreshing. Then there’s Osamu who, despite being so unassuming, can unintentionally put someone like Arashiyama in an awkward spot just by saying something as innocent as “It’s nice, let me take a picture.” Then, everyone catches a little crack in his otherwise flawless persona. Note: If you buy the World Trigger 2025 calendar, you can see a bead of sweat trickling from Arashiyama’s cheek. Wow. He must’ve hated that statue.

Osamu’s life had taken some unexpected turns since joining Border. Defending Mikado City was one thing, but becoming part of Border’s PR efforts? That was something else entirely.

It had started after his impromptu appearance at the press conference where he, battered and bruised, revealed Border’s away mission to get the abducted C-rank trainees. The broadcast had gone viral, with clips replayed endlessly on local TV and snippets shared online. Suddenly, Osamu was that guy from Border who talked on TV. It was enough recognition to earn a few glances in public—awkward for someone who’d rather blend into the background.

Then again, there’s also his heroics during the attack at the school where he and Arashiyama’s younger siblings—his juniors at the school—went to. This led to Arashiyama Squad taking a special interest in him—Kitora with her usual sharp critiques, Tokieda offering advice during training sessions, and Arashiyama himself feeling grateful and proud of him. So when Netsuki, the head of PR, decided to rope Osamu into a TV segment alongside Arashiyama Squad, no one was surprised.

When Osamu arrived at Border’s PR office floor for the first time, though, the first thing to catch his eye wasn’t the bustling office or the state-of-the-art equipment.

It was the statue.

He’s immediately greeted by the sight of the infamous 1:1 replica statue of Arashiyama. It’s towering, majestic, and so lifelike that for a second, Osamu almost greets it with a bow.

“What… is this?” he murmurs, his glasses slipping down his nose.

“Ah, the statue,” Tokieda chimes in cheerfully, appearing out of nowhere. “Impressive, right?”

“It’s… amazing,” Osamu says honestly, but his face is a picture of awkward sincerity, beads of sweat forming on his temple.

“That’s one way to describe it,” Kitora mutters, crossing her arms and eyeing the statue with disdain.

Arashiyama arrives just in time to catch the exchange, his usual warm smile slipping for a fraction of a second. “It’s… something, isn’t it? They thought it’d boost morale,” he says, his tone so polite it’s painful.

Tokieda laughs. “You mean Netsuki-san thought it’d boost his idea of morale.”

To lighten the awkwardness, Osamu hesitantly says, “I think it’s… nice. Can I take a picture?”

Arashiyama blinks in disbelief, his forced grin twitching as if held together by sheer willpower. “You’d really want that?”

Tokieda, ever the instigator, immediately declares, “Oh, if Mikumo-kun’s taking a picture, we’re all doing it!” He drags Kitora, Ayatsuji, and Satori into the frame, pulling out his phone for a group selfie.

Kitora grumbles but doesn’t resist, standing stiffly next to Osamu. Ayatsuji, ever calm, smiles politely, while Satori flashes a double peace sign. Tokieda poses, and Osamu stands there awkwardly in the center of it all, glasses catching a glare from the overhead lights.

And Arashiyama? He stands right next to his statue, trying not to look too mortified as Tokieda clicks the picture.

“Perfect!” Tokieda declares.

“Delete it,” Kitora says flatly.

“Absolutely not,” he replies, already setting it as his phone wallpaper.

The segment filming goes off without a hitch, with Arashiyama effortlessly charming the crew, Kitora giving curt but impressive answers, and Osamu… well, Osamu doing his best. As usual, his modesty and straightforwardness win over the staff, who all agree, “He’s so genuine—just like the Arashiyama Squad!”

Back at HQ, Tokieda sends the group selfie to Netsuki as a “bonus.” It’s printed and framed the next day, placed right next to the statue for everyone to see.

Arashiyama sighs every time he walks past it, but when he notices Osamu sneaking a glance at the photo with a small, almost invisible smile, he decides it might not be that bad.

[hazelkjt]

For the touch prompts

_ "how long has it been since someone hugged you?

Touched Starved Prompts Write up below ----------

The two lay on the bed in near silence, the crackling of the fireplace nearby breaking the quiet periodically. Hazel rubs her thumb overtop Zero's shoulder, taking note of the way the Voidsent almost seems to squirm under her touch...like before...

It wasn't the first time she's noticed this. Every time the two of them had physical intimacy of any sort, Zero almost seemed to recoil at every touch, though in spite of this the Voidsent has never spoken a word about being in discomfort. She eventually leans into the contact but it's happened enough times for Hazel to notice.

Hazel purses her lips and ponders her words before speaking. "Hey Zee...you mind if I ask you something?" The Au Ra goes over her next words carefully as Zero opens her eyes and gazes back to her. "Of course." Straight and to the point, as always with Zero.

"...How long has it been since someone hugged you? Or like, held you close like this?" Hazel decided to answer Zero's straightforwardness with her own. Hazel immediately felt the Voidsent's grip on her knee tighten ever so slightly. The two sit in silence for a few moments, Hazel's mind racing as she begins to believe she said something wrong. Thankfully a reply comes not too much later.

"I...can't say I remember." Her tone was more somber than usual. Hazel holds Zero closer to her chest as she continues. "I assume it was my mother, though all my memories of her have long since been forgotten. I can't recall ever being as close to someone else as I am with you either, so there is little chance of any other opportunities. What brought this question about?" The return question stopped Hazel in her tracks, though she really should have seen it coming.

"Well, I mean, it's just, you know..." Hazel stammers, going back to rubbing Zero's shoulder again, this time out of nervousness. "Whenever someone or something touches you, you seem to pull away from it. If you don't want to get this close we can-"

"No, it's quite alright...we can stay like this." Zero cuts her off before the rambling truly gets going. "It...it's merely taking some time for me to adjust to this...being vulnerable like this. Normally letting another Voidsent this close would lead you to being devoured...keeping others away is a force of habit. I am sorry you find it off-putting."

"No! Nononono! It's fine, I totally get it!" Hazel quickly tries to reassure Zero, pulling the Voidsent closer to herself. The swiftness and force of the gesture must have been a bit of a shock as the Au Ra could feel Zero tense up as she did it. "Sorry about that, it's just..." Hazel trails off for a moment as she brings her forehead down to touch the back of Zero's head. "I don't want you to have to feel on edge all the time anymore. You deserve to have this kind of love in your life again, after everything. So I guess, just let me know how I can help."

Hazel begins to pull her head away, only to find Zero moving her head back as well to keep up the moment of contact, resting the back of her head on Hazel's chin. "You are already helping...thank you." She looks up at Hazel with a gentle glimmer in her stare. The two returned to their silence, content with gazing into one another's eyes as time begins to slip away.

[sapphic-scylla]

First Impression Best to Worst Boss Fights in Shadow of the Erdtree

DLC has been out for a minute and I’ve done my initial runthrough and taken as much as I could from it. Suffice to say, I did love it a lot and thought that it has a solid amount of staying power. This list covers the main bosses only (and a few notable side bosses) and as usual, unless you don’t care about SPOILERS, I recommend not reading past this point:

Midra, Lord of Frenzied Flame: Now, already, I feel like people are gonna disagree with me. Hear me out. When I first hit this fight, I was like “they integrated a PVP-centric status condition into a boss fight. How is that fair?”. And then I thought about it for a second. No fight style makes this fight easier. No weapon, no spell, no armor makes this fight easier. It is as you see it. This man’s attacks can cover almost an entire room, snipe you from a thousand miles away, his melee attacks hit like a train, and builds up your Frenzy, which can leave you vulnerable and chunk your health and FP. But, he also is easy to stagger, he doesn’t move very fast, and his attacks are telegraphed a year in advance. It’s perfect. He doesn’t have a ton of health, but he is absolutely savage. He’s what difficulty SHOULD be and the sigh of satisfaction when you beat him is REAL. You can’t really cheese or simplify this boss beyond KILL HIM and it’s so refreshing to find a boss that no matter your choice of loadout, Midra will keep you on your toes in the most horror game-like way. Also lore wise, the vibes in this entire area were unsettling and immaculate and the “Eyes of Sauron/Winter Lantern” enemies actually made me jump in that horror game fun way and I adored it.

Messmer, The Impaler/Base Serpent: Now, this was the fight I forced myself to learn through sheer force of will. I literally slammed my head against this man for a day because I knew that the only thing that was killing me was my own arrogance and IT PAID OFF. By the end when I finally beat him, I adored this fight. This man lets you fucking have it, but at no point did it ever seem unfair or bullshit or, hell, even free. This fight is a perfect mix of cinematic, difficult, and a riot to learn and improve at and I genuinely look forward to this fight each playthrough now.

Rellana, Twin Moon Knight: A scaled-up version of my favorite base game Dark Souls 3 boss and she didn’t disappoint. Incredible fight, solidly learnable, and definitely one of the highlights of my first runthrough.

Bayle the Dread: The quickest love-hate relationship I’ve ever had the pleasure to wade through. In my first ten tries, I could not help but think “this is the worst. What can I do against this man except die?”. But the more I fought him, the more I enjoyed it and the more fair I found it. He is overwhelming, yes, but his tells are obvious and when you recognize the areas his attacks affect, he becomes a lot less oppressive. He also has the greatest phase 2 transition of all time. I mean my love for Placie has grown over the past few months, but I think Bayle edges out for Second place in best Dragon fights in Elden Ring. Fortissax takes first.

Scadutree Avatar: This fucker seems easy at first, and then he starts driving around. I severely underestimated this boss at first due to how much damage he was taking compared to everything else. Then he hits second phase and until then, I’d never been jumpscared by a sunflower before. Still not the hardest boss by any means, but definitely checks you at the door.

Romina, Saint of the Bud: I mean, outside of the obvious, I don’t know why I enjoyed this fight. Her rushdown is legendary and she deals in Scarlet Rot, so you’d think I would hate this fight. But her tactics ended up being fairly straightforward, her Rot wasn’t as oppressive as I thought it would be, and she really is such an aesthetically pleasing fight.

Putrescent Knight: The goofiest looking creature on this list by far, but this dude kicked my ass several times. He definitely came with his fair share of surprises, but he never felt overly obnoxious or overstayed his welcome. Not the most fun fight, but definitely worthy of more praise than scorn.

Allies of Miquella: Debated putting this in here because it’s more of a PVP standoff than a boss fight, but I feel it’s worth a mention. Nothing particularly exciting, but it definitely is much more of a marathon than I was expecting and a very difficult one at that. Come prepared here. These people don’t pull punches.

Ghostflame Dragons: More a mention than anything. Nothing unique, but it did force me to rethink how to fight dragons a la Darkeater Midir which I enjoyed.

Metyr, Mother of Fingers: Well, we had to hit the lower half eventually. Metyr doesn’t have a ton of health which puts her up here, but I generally dislike bosses that remind me of The One Reborn where it feels like no matter where you hit the boss, you’re still being dealt damage just for walking up to it which, I’m sure, incentivizes spellcasters, but frustrating nonetheless.

Promised Consort Radahn: Malenia without all of the charm and enjoyment. Malenia, I still firmly believe takes the cake in terms of hardest (and best) boss in Elden Ring, but Radahn did not skimp on the difficulty round two. That being said, his move set is far less enjoyable to learn than Malenia’s and often, it just felt the impressive amount of health and the absolutely unhinged amount of capable range this man has is unjustifiable. Plus, Malenia invites aggression and allows for so many ways to contest her despite her making you work for it while Radahn just hurts. Pain for the sake of improvement is great. Pain for the sake of pain is a lot less fun.

Ancient Dragon Senessax: I did not think that the thing that would make me hate a fight like Lansseax or Fortissax would be just setting the damn thing in a pool of water, but here we are. The lightning AOE’s in this fight are ruthless and are a lot less avoidable for how much they stagger on a regular day. Definitely not the worst, but not a fun development.

Golden Hippopotamus: This thing definitely killed more innocent players than real hippos do every year in real life. This thing SUCKS to fight. Camera monsters in general are just a pain, but when half of your screen is covered in porcupine quills (yes, YOU HEARD ME), this thing becomes substantially more of a drag. That and this abomination punches above its weight class and I just generally found this fight as entertaining as a mosquito bite.

Commander Gaius: Fuck this man. I’ve never had a dude kill me so consistently or so consecutively in the first 5 seconds of the fight. It’s been a minute since a boss legitimately made me yell at my TV screen and I did not welcome the experience. Also, this man had absolutely no right or privilege to ride my ass this fucking hard unless he bought me dinner first. Will not enjoy revisiting this dude.

Divine Beast Dancing Lion: Brace yourself. This is gonna be a long one. I apologize in advance. *breathe in* *heavy sigh* I’ve never actively thought any boss in any Dark Souls game was purely unwarranted or worthy of true hatred. Despite all of the bosses I dislike fighting across all FromSoft games, I always attempted to find a bright side or something like lore or environment or something to justify its existence and I had succeeded. Until I met this fucking thing. This menace didn’t have the most kills on me (that goes to Malenia and Messmer) or did anything in particular that actively exploited my playstyle (like Maliketh, Mohg, or the Crucible Duo). This cockroach merely existed and it was enough. Its body is a giant blob. Its hitbox is horrific. It punishes aggression. It punishes passivity. This thing has ranged attacks, melee attacks, magical attacks, passive effects, movement patterns, retaliatory tactics, and even him just looking at me hits like a goddamn truck. He is so hard to read and does so much damage and does the most unhinged, wtf follow-ups that I’ve ever seen with the most hairpin trigger aggression I’ve ever experienced in my life. He does frost damage, lightning damage, physical damage, I’m pretty sure there is fire damage in there somewhere, emotional damage, and mood damage. And, to top it all off, THERE’S A FUCKING SECOND ONE OUT IN THE BOONIES THAT IS EVEN FUCKING WORSE. Basilisks have been in the Soulsborne conglomerate for as long as I can remember and I’ve tolerated their existence until FOUR OF THEM WANDER INTO THIS FUCKING FIGHT AT THE BEGINNING OF PHASE 2. THIS LION HAS A DEATH BLIGHT PHASE. You know, the one status effect in Elden Ring that INSTANTLY KILLS YOU. And the best part? If you don’t kill him fast enough, HE CAN DO IT AGAIN. It would not surprise me if the same sadist that came up with the Double Gargoyle fight came up with this one. And like I said, he doesn’t have the most health I’ve ever seen, but it doesn’t fucking matter. The only thing that matters is how fast you can remove his health because he WILL kill you if you give him any leeway. I fought this thing twice and I know about as much about how to fight this thing as I did the first time I walked into its arena. I succeeded twice by SHEER DUMB LUCK. I despise this thing and if I could actively avoid it, I would not hesitate.

[ipsen]

Kamishiro and Kirishima: Ends of a Spectrum

(Alternatively: Women Too Pretty to Ignore So I Wrote About Them)

Thanks to @just-another-tokyo-ghoul-fan for unlocking a part of my brain I didn’t even know existed. It’s definitely not like Touka is tied for 2nd place for my favorite character in TG. No, sir.

As always, I’m using the official translations because of my monolingual curse.

Under the cut.

Let’s get this out of the way first. Rize and Touka are not friends. I doubt they could ever be friends due to their opposing philosophies. They are fundamentally different people who should not be left in the same room together. Why?

(she hates her so much)

Besides the obvious, it’s because they view their common circumstance-- being born a ghoul-- very differently.

(TG ch3)

(TG 46.5)

Touka blames her status as a ghoul on the reason why she’s had to run and hide her whole life, especially after losing both her mother and father. Rize prides herself on her ghouls powers because being a ghoul in the Garden meant a lifetime of imprisonment, and she wanted out. Touka is tethered down by her identity, while Rize flies around using it.

Ironically, Touka becomes “free” at the end while Rize remains trapped and dies. Let’s tackle that next. Why, in the context of the overall story, does Touka live, and Rize die? It’s pretty straightforward, fortunately.

Rize doesn’t confront her problems, instead electing to always run away. Whenever she gets bored, she leaves. Whenever someone, in her view, tries to tether her down, she leaves. Because she doesn’t want to return to anything resembling that helpless womb in the Garden. Watch:

(TG 46.5)

(re 64)

Running away isn’t a bad thing in a vacuum. Personally, I think you should try to run away when you can afford to. But the thing about Rize’s brand of running away is that she forces the consequences of her actions onto someone else. Like Banjou, who was forced to take over the 11th ward because she killed the last one. Shachi as well, who takes the fall for her and gets imprisoned in Cochlea.

And as a result of her constant running and tendency to leave behind no trace, any chance at a meaningful connection is lost. No one really helps her, because she’s already disappeared. She literally cannot be helped. One of the positive themes of TG is the achievements people can achieve together. Rize, embodying the opposite of this, does not achieve anything substantial. And in the end, she is reduced to someone else’s plaything with no mind of her own.

(re 119, featuring the tip of Touka’s head.) ("Tip of Touka.” “Touka’s Tips.” Someone should use those. She offers very sound advice.)

It’s sad.

Meanwhile, Touka reaches out to people (when the story wants her to). Because unlike Rize, who does the leaving, Touka is the one who is left behind. She deeply understands the loss and hurt that comes with it, and she has tempered that helpless feeling into a kind hand to reach out to anyone.

And I mean anyone.

(re 69)

Even the brother who, when she last saw him, violently tore out her kakuhou. She doesn’t blame him, only supports him when he needs her.

(re 120)

Even the daughter of the man she killed.

God, she’s so cool. Peak big sister. I wish we saw more of it; her contributions to Goat would have changed the tides if the story just let her.

Sorry, focusing. Okay.

But it’s because of this willing to work together with people, seek peace through proactive methods, that she succeeds and lives through the horrors of the world. She uplifts those around her and is lifted up in return. Kindness begets kindness, and I’d say kindness is one of the best parts of living.

It’s nice.

... “What about their relationship to Kaneki?” What about their relationship to Kaneki.

--

Anyway, hopefully this made sense and you got something out of it. These lovely ladies are such a joy to talk about.

Thanks for reading!