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hxnbi · 19 days ago

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hi!! I love your writing :). I wanted to request an angst to fluff scenario where reader likes the boy and confesses to him but he turns her down, but then he later regrets it and comes back?? and they live happily ever after??? i don’t really have any specific preferences other than that but im such a sucker for rejecting and regretting/she falls first he falls harder scenarios!! im using her/she to refer to the reader rn but i dont have any preference, just not sure how else to write it haha id love if you could include suo, togame, and umemiya but totally up to you :).

hey so thanks sm for your request! i loved writing this and with these boys, tho umemiya's does end on a pretty angsty note with how i was initially drafting it. i hope thats okay ♡

confessions, rejections, and regrets

⸻ °♡⃘ . you confess to the boy you liked, only to be rejected. or so you think, as, unbeknownst to you, the next time, it would be him begging for your heart

⸝⸝ 𑅛𑅫 Suo Hayato

Tears. All you could feel dripping from your face and down your cheeks was the salty aftermath of your own tears. And standing before you, the boy who had just rejected you.

"I'm sorry, I just don't see you in that light," Suo, with his hands firmly placed in front of the other, repeated, further breaking your heart into a million pieces.

Pitifully, you laughed—but little humour was found in the dreary quiet of your heart. "I know," you whispered, choking down the ache that was your confession to the person you'd grown to admire and love.

The pain lingered with every thought—that Suo was simply just too good for you, but so did your respect for him. Even if you tried your hardest to do so, you just couldn't find it in yourself to dislike him.

Suo had always been kind, even as he rejected you.

That was part of why you liked him so much in the first place. Even if it hurt, you couldn't blame him for having such feelings about you that just weren't the same. You couldn't continue to be selfish.

"I know. Just, thank you, for hearing me out," you said, your voice becoming surprisingly steady, slowly accepting what you heard. "That's just the kind of person you are."

And then you walked away. You refused to let him see the fresh tears welling up in your eyes. You respected his choice. If he didn't reciprocate your feelings, you couldn't force it. It had to be mutual—or nothing at all.

Days turned into weeks, and though you still felt the ache of his rejection, like with most things, you had to move on and push forward. You treated Suo the same way you treated everyone else. Although, you couldn't deny that it was rather awkward after Suo saw you well up with tears dripping down your face like a waterfall. And it didn't help that you both were friends with the Furin first years, like Kiryu and Nirei, whom you were very close to.

So, time and time again, you would avoid Suo like the plague; all the while, he seemed to watch from afar, unsure of how to bridge the gap. You were always respectful, never bitter, never clinging. It was difficult, but you refused to let your emotions tarnish your friendship or make things awkward.

Suo, however, found himself unable to stay away. He'd initially assumed your feelings for him were just surface-level, a kind of shallow attraction to his looks, but that couldn't have been further from the truth. He only realized this when he peeled back the layers of who you were—a kind, genuine individual so far removed from the superficial affection he had imagined. And as time passed, he began to notice more—the way you treated everyone around you with the same kindness and consideration.

But over time, Suo would see you purposely trying to hide from him, all the while pretending everything was okay and nothing changed. It was saddening, in a way, how your laughter grew quieter, your gaze avoiding his, and the fun and games you two once shared together seemed to slip through his fingers like grains of sand.

But you couldn't hide from Suo forever.

"He just doesn't like me, Nirei.”

Taking a walk around the neighbourhood that evening, following his typical routine, Suo had unknowingly overheard you talking to Nirei. And unlike his straightforward character, he continued to hide behind the wall and listen, his heart aching with every word he caught from your lips.

"It’s not that I don’t care…" you said softly to Nirei, who had asked about what had happened between you and Suo. "He rejected me, and I have to respect that. You can't have a relationship if both sides don't feel the same."

"I see... B-But do you still like him?" Nirei finally asked, twiddling his own thumbs.

You hesitated for a moment before answering, "I do."

That conversation was what really hit him hard. That you still liked him. That maybe... he wasn't too late to come around.

"Nirei, not knowing what to say to a person who seemingly still had feelings for one of his closest friends, winced, "He'll... he'll come around," not necessarily finding the right words, but you didn't appear to mind it. Rather, you were too distracted with your own feelings.

And Suo, hidden from view, felt his chest tighten. He wasn't sure why he'd been hiding in the first place, but suddenly, he couldn't bear to listen any longer. He shouldn't even be here, listening to your conversation and very obviously intruding on your privacy.

But just before he could slip away, though, very conveniently, Sakura popped out from behind the corner. "The hell are you doing back here?" loud enough for both you and Nirei to hear and turn your heads to meet the noise—and Suo, right before your very eyes.

Your eyes went wide in shock as you spotted Suo standing right there, seemingly who had heard everything.

"S-Suo, what are you—"

Back-and-forth looks were exchanged, and so too was the silence. Nirei and Sakura gave brief, knowing glances, and with a single look, Nirei left you two alone, much to your dismay and humiliation.

You stood frozen, your mind racing with a thousand thoughts, none of which managed to form coherent words to say to the boy who had basically just heard you confess your feelings to him once again. Nervous and fidgeting, you finally let out a sigh. "Hayat– Suo, I'm really sorry if I made you uncomfortable. I promise that I'm not going to bother you anymore. I really—"

But your words and apologies were left on deaf ears—cut off mid-sentence before Suo suddenly reached for you, his hand gently pulling you toward him. Before you could even process what was happening, you found yourself wrapped in his arms, your head resting against his chest.

"I was wrong."

"…H-Huh?"

"I was so, so wrong," he muttered, grasping at the edge of your sleeve even tighter than just a second ago. "I thought you only liked me for shallow reasons, but... I've realized that I like you too. More than I ever let myself admit. And I apologize for making you wait."

You blinked, your brain going haywire, trying to comprehend every word that left his lips, but Suo only held you tighter, his chin resting on the top of your head. When you didn't answer, he went on—whether that was for your or his own reassurance that you wouldn't be the one rejecting him this time was unclear.

"I'm sorry it took me so long to see it, but I don't want to let this go," he murmured. "I don't want to lose you." He regretted every moment of him rejecting you since that day. And if you were to be the one rejecting him this time…

Your breath hitched at the base of your throat, disbelief seeping into your every thought. Was he serious…? The boy who had rejected you, who had caused you so much heartache, was now confessing to the very feelings you had once longed to hear.

'You make it so unfair…' you muttered.

Part of you wanted to reject him, to make him feel how you felt after he rejected you. But deep down, you knew you couldn't find it in yourself to throw away this chance. And neither could Suo.

"I… I still like you, too."

Your voice was hardly audible, but Suo heard it loud and clear. He pulled away just enough to meet your eyes, his expression soft and vulnerable. "Then let's start over."

Your lips trembled into a small smile. "Alright."

Suo leaned in, pressing a gentle kiss to your forehead, until Suo suddenly grabbed your hand, making you jump slightly. "Come on," he said, tugging you gently. "Let's go grab something to eat. I know of a good spot that just opened that serves your favourite food."

"W-Wait, Hayato, I thought you were on a diet?" you stammered, completely caught off guard by his change in behaviour. He had always been strict about his routine—always so disciplined, so focused. But now, he seemed different. Lighter, somehow. But that was Suo for you.

He smiled, softer this time, his eyes lovingly meeting yours. "I can't miss this opportunity to spend time with a special someone. You can't keep avoiding me forever," making your face flush crimson as his words sunk in.

⸝⸝ 𑅛𑅫 Togame Jo

Shit… he shouldn't have said that.

Togame's words had slipped out before he could stop them, and the second he did, he knew he had fucked up. He cursed from under his breath, his hands already reaching out toward you as your face crumpled with hurt.

You stood there, staring at him—processing every snide word that left Togame's mouth—your chest rising and falling as if you were struggling even to breathe. He didn't mean it. He knew he didn't mean it, and he was pretty sure you knew that, too. But the damage was done, and he could see it in your eyes, the way he could see the shimmering of unshed tears ready to drip down your flushed cheeks..

"I'm sorry," Togame said immediately, his voice softening as he pulled you into a tight embrace, his arms wrapping around you like a protective barrier. He could feel you stiffen in his hold, your hands pushing weakly against his chest, but he wasn't about to let go, not on that horrible note.

"Let go, Jo," you said, your voice barely above a whisper. "You made your decision. You've... I've already said enough."

But Togame wasn't listening. Not with what he just had done and said that only left him with regrets. He couldn't take it anymore. Not the sadness in your voice, not the way you tried to pull away from him like he was a stranger. No, he wasn't letting you walk away like this, not after everything you had shared. And certainly not after everything he just spat at you.

"I didn't mean it, okay?" His words were rushed, almost desperate. Togame's grip on you only tightened with time, refusing to let go even an inch. "I was stupid. I-I'm sorry, I didn't know what I was saying, but I promise you, I'll fix this. I can't stand seeing you like this."

Your heart hurt at his words. You were utterly torn between wanting to believe him and protecting yourself from further hurt. After all, he had already said plenty… "You don't get just to say something like that and then take it back, Jo. It doesn't work like that..."

Togame's breath hitched as your words sliced the air and, in turn, his heart. His mind and body froze

That wasn't it. Not at all. He liked you. He loved you.

His rejection was but a projection of his own insecurities—that he wouldn’t be the right person for you.

But never did he think that he too didn’t want anyone else in your life, that it made his heart ache just thinking about it, the idea of someone else seeing your smile, hearing your laugh and holding the piece of your heart he so desperately longed for—that he previously had thrown away.

He hated himself for it—hated that he’d let his fears dictate his actions, that he’d hurt the one person who made his world feel less empty.

But he couldn’t let this end here. Not like this.

"I know. But— fuck…" he said quietly, his voice breaking, cracking into incomprehensible pieces of a heartbroken sentence. His shoulders trembled as he finally loosened his rough grip on you. Although his hands still rested hesitantly on your shoulders. “I know I can’t undo what I said, but I need you to know... I was wrong. I’m so damn wrong, and I’m so sorry.”

Scrunching your face, you shook your head, gaze fixed on the ground as you tried to will away the tears that had long streamed down your face. “Why, Jo?”

Why. A simple explanation as to his stupid, idiotic, impulsive mistake was all that you wanted from him.

His heart clenched at your words. Pure guilt tore him apart. He wished he could go back and rewind time to the moment before his insecurities took over. But he couldn’t. All he had now was this moment to make things right.

“Because I’m a coward!”

His confession all tumbled out in a rush, unfiltered. “I’m a fucking coward.” Every word was a weight being lifted from his chest, all in hopes that you might understand might hear him out, even if it wouldn’t completely change things. “I thought... I thought you deserved someone better. Someone who wouldn’t screw things up like I always do. Someone who could make you happy without dragging you into all my mess.”

Your eyes flickered up to meet his, for once, the honesty in his voice catching you heavily off guard. He appeared to be so unusually vulnerable, completely stripped of the bravado he usually wore like armour on his fists.

“But I can’t stop thinking about you,” he continued, his hands sliding down your arms as if needing a sense of reassurance that you were still with him and by his side and not a figment of his imagination. Hesitant but hopeful. “Every time I tried to push you away, it just made me want you more. And I was a complete idiot for thinking I could ever be okay without you.”

“Togame...”

“And I get it if you hate me for this,” he interrupted, all the words tumbling out of his mouth before he lost his nerve. “But I need you to know... I’m not asking for a second chanc—” he paused his sentence, before he could lose his resolve completely. “I love you. I’ve loved you all along, even when I was too scared to admit it.”

Your chest tightened. You oh-so-wanted to stay angry, to hold onto the pain, but his confession was undoing every wall you had tried to build.

“I'll do whatever it takes to make it up to you. Just... don't walk away from me. Please. Not like this."

“.....”

“...Do you mean that?”

Your voice was hardly audible as you looked up at him.

“More than anything.”

Togame cupped your smaller face in his callous hands, his thumb brushing away a stray tear that had escaped down your cheek, kissing the pain away. “I’ll spend the rest of my life proving it to you if that’s what it takes.”

For the slightest moment, neither of you spoke. You could hardly hear a thing other than the sound of your breathing and the beat of his heart pressed tightly against yours. You felt his arms around you, warm and safe, and despite everything, a part of you wanted to stay right there, to believe that things could be okay.

Then, slowly, you nodded, the smallest of smiles breaking through your tears. “I hate that you’re so good at making me believe you,” you said softly, for the first time all day, a small laugh escaped your lips. And it was heavenly. It was what he loved so much about you.

Togame’s lips quirked up in a tentative grimace. “Does that mean… I get another shot?”

“Don’t make me regret it,” you murmured, but your voice was warm, filled with the hope that maybe—just maybe—this time things could be different. "I'm not going anywhere," you finally said. "But you have to mean it this time, Jo."

He nodded, his forehead resting against yours. "I do. I promise."

So, just like that, you let it go. Slowly, you relaxed in his arms, letting the weight of your sadness slip away, if only for a moment. Togame didn't let go, and neither did you.

And in that moment, wrapped in his arms, you allowed yourself to believe him. For now, that was enough.

⸝⸝ 𑅛𑅫 Umemiya Hajime

"But we can still be friends!" Umemiya's voice rang out, almost too cheerful for the conversation you'd just had. He flashed you that familiar smile, oblivious to how his words felt like a punch to your chest.

"Oh! There's actually an event at Furin soon. I know you like a good barbecue. You should join us! It'll be fun!"

You stared at him, nonblinking, and for a brief second, you couldn't believe he was serious. How could he be so, casual? He must be playing you, right...? But no, that was just how Umemiya was, as you've found him for years.

You had just poured your entire heart into him, and in return, he offered you friendship—a friendship that you already had with him for years—as if it were a consolation prize.

But your heart ached so much, desperate for any kind of connection to him, that even the slightest bit of attention, however hollow, felt like a lifeline. So you nodded, forcing a polite smile across your face. "Yeah... sure, I'll come."

And just like that, you became that of a shadow, a close friend who laughed at his jokes, stayed by his side when he needed someone, and cheered for him during the times when you both would play video games. You were nothing more than a mere member of his Furin family. All the times you would talk and laugh together with them were great, and even the occasional late-night hangouts. But it wasn't enough. It was never fully enough.

Staying close to Umemyia only made you want him more, and that fact haunted you. Being so close to him yet knowing you couldn't have him the way you wanted was agony. The more time you spent around him, the more you craved his attention, but not as a friend, no, but as something more. It gnawed at you, that longing, and with each passing day, it became harder and harder to pretend.

It wasn't just unfair to you—it was unfair to him, too. He deserved someone who wouldn't secretly hope for something more, who wouldn't keep pushing the boundary between friendship and something deeper. You knew this arrangement couldn't go on, not without tearing you apart.

So, one night, after finally gathering the courage, you decided to put an end to it. But unbeknownst to you, Umemiya wasn't doing any better either.

Before, he never considered you more than a friend—someone who'd been there through all the ups and downs, always supportive, always kind, always you.

He never questioned the ease with which he could talk to you or the way your laughter seemed to brighten the atmosphere of any room you were in.

So when you finally confessed to him that very day—that your feelings toward him were more than what he thought—he hadn't thought much of it beyond friendship. He didn't think it was deeper than that… not until after he turned you down.

At first, Umemiya was convinced it was the right thing to do. He told himself he didn't feel the same way. But as the days passed, those same thoughts weighed differently on him. The way you still smiled at him, still treated him the same even after his rejection—it gnawed at him.

He started seeing the little things he hadn't noticed before. The way you always knew exactly what to say to cheer him up after a bad day, the way your eyes lingered on him for just a second too long, the way your laugh sounded like it was just for him.

And suddenly, it wasn't just about friendship anymore.

At night, alone with his thoughts, he realized he had been wrong. So, so wrong. The feelings he'd dismissed as just a fleeting affection had grown—almost insidiously—into something he couldn't ignore. It became a constant. An ache of longing to be near you, but this time, not just as a friend, but as someone who could hold you, kiss you, call you his own.

So when you suddenly asked for him to, and you meet up together alone after the barbeque, Umemiya's heart jumped in his chest. This was it. This was his chance to fix everything and correct his mistake, to tell you the truth, to apologize for being so dense. He was ignorant, blatant even, to one of the dearest people in the world to him.

Tonight, he was going to do it. He was going to make it up to you by apologizing and asking for forgiveness. He was excited, hopeful even, imagining the moment when he'd pour out his heart and beg for your forgiveness. You were kind, after all. You'd understand. You had to.

He could barely contain his nerves as he waited for you, replaying his apology speech over and over in his mind.

But when you arrived, something felt off. But Umemyia merely brushed it off as mere nerves. But then you spoke.

"I can't do this anymore."

Your eyes met his, and for a moment, Umemiya's heart stopped. He forced a laugh, trying to shake off the unease creeping into his chest. "What do you mean? O-Oh! If you're talking about how Sakura was acting earlier, hah, he doesn't mean it! You know how he is, just messing around."

But you didn't smile. You didn't laugh. Your expression remained serious, and it made his stomach drop. No, it couldn't be, right?

"Umemiya, I can't do this anymore," you repeated once again, your voice breaking, trembling in a way he had never heard before. "I can't just act like nothing happened anymore. I thought that I could continue being your friend. I really tried. But... it hurts too much. Please, I—"

His heart clenched. No, no, no—this wasn't right. This wasn't how tonight was supposed to go. He was supposed to apologize, to tell you how he felt, to fix things. But now, seeing you like this, so hurt, it paralyzed him.

"Don't say it."

"Hajime, please. Don't make this any harder than it has to be."

No, he couldn't let you walk away. Not like this. Not when everything had finally clicked for him. Before he could stop himself, the words spilled out, desperate and unplanned.

"—BUT I LOVE YOU!!"

And he said it.

The moment those words escaped his lips, everything seemed to freeze, and the silence that followed was unbearable. He watched you, waiting for some sign, some reaction that would let him know he wasn't too late. But your eyes... they were filled with so much pain, it made his heart ache even more.

You didn't speak right away, and the longer the silence stretched, the more regret began to claw at him. Why hadn't he seen it sooner? Why did he wait until now, when you were standing here, on the verge of walking away, to realize how much you meant to him? His own foolishness, his blindness—it was too much to bear.

"Why now?" you finally asked. Your voice was soft, barely audible, as if you were afraid of the answer he was giving. It wasn't angry, but it wasn't hopeful either. It was aching, that desperate part of you. "Why... after everything?"

Umemiya couldn’t answer. He didn't have a good reason. He just knew that he loved you now, that he couldn't imagine his life without you in it. But he also knew that might not be enough.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, his hands trembling at his sides. "I'm so sorry. I didn't realize... I didn't know until it was too late."

The tears in your eyes broke him. This wasn't how it was supposed to go. He thought he'd be able to fix things, to make everything right, but now it felt like everything was slipping through his fingers.

And much to his horror, you shook your head slowly, stepping back, the distance between you growing—both physically and emotionally. "It's not fair, Hajime. You can't just say that now... not after everything."

For the first time in his life, Umemiya Hajime didn’t know what to say. He stood there, stunned, the words he wanted to say lodged in his throat because, deep down, he already knew.

He didn’t have the right to ask for more when he had rejected the very thing he now realized he couldn’t live without. He had turned you away, convinced it was for the best, only to understand far too late just how much he had thrown away. His indecision—his cowardice—had led to this moment. And now, it wasn’t just his heart breaking; it was yours, too.

He opened his mouth, tried to reach for you, but his arms fell back to his sides. He couldn’t keep making excuses. He couldn’t selfishly try to pull you back, not when his own fickleness had caused you so much pain.

So he let it happen. Right before his very eyes, he watched you take another step back, your face etched with a hurt he knew he had no way of easing. And when you turned, it felt as though the entire world had slipped out of his grasp.

The streets around him blurred as he stared at the spot where you had just stood, his mind and body going through the realization that he might just never get the chance to fix this.

“Wait...” he whispered hoarsely, hand unconsciously reaching forward, but the word fell into the silence, unheard and unanswered.

And with that, you were gone, leaving him behind—alone, with but the cold remnants of his mistakes.

lol i also noticed how each just gets slowly more bittersweet to straight up angsty in umemiya's

©hxnbi. comments, reblogs and likes are always appreciated ♡

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yakuzacanons · 1 year ago

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hiiii!!! I think I read your posts pretty much everyday and am loving absolutely everything you write!!

This one thought has been bothering me for a while: what would our boys think of their s/o being a foreigner? I guess some of them would pay no mind, some of them would be bothered at first, maybe some of them would even use their s/o as a token! What do you think?

Good question! Sorry for taking so long to get back to you. Last post of the night kiddos, see y'all tomorrow eve.

Kazuma Kiryu

Doesn't mind and doesn't care. People are people. He likes you because he likes you. It's that shrimple. Seriously though, it never phased him. He doesn't ask questions about it either. Feel free to share exactly as much or as little about your culture as you'd like.

Majima Goro

Similar mindset as Kiryu but he would ask some questions. Somewhat interested in cultural differences, like the fact that Americans don't take off their shoes before going inside. It's not always aimed at YOUR culture specifically, he's just curious.

Saejima Taiga

He's a little resistant at first. Saejima's a little more old school and likely always saw himself with a more traditionally Japanese spouse. Mildly confused at some of your cultural differences but gets used to them. His affections towards you are more powerful than his confusion. Besides, he's easily confused anyways by a lot of things.

Akiyama Shun

Thinks that it's really cool that you're a foreigner. Might even think that's what makes you so interesting in the first place, at least when you first meet. Tries to learn words in your language but never pronounces them well.

Tanimura Masayoshi

As a mixed race guy, he kind of relates to you. He's pretty respectful of your culture and enjoys sharing his with you but he would never pressure you to do the same. Mostly just accepts it as is, no questions asked.

Ryuji Goda

Like Akiyama, he likely finds your cultural differences enticing when he first meets you. Finds himself actually caring about your cultural and is pretty respectful of it. Goes out of his way to try to remember important holiday events from your culture. Would punch anyone who makes fun of you.

Nishikyama Akira

Generally prefers an Asian spouse but he's open to other possibilities. Kind of guy to dumbly ask "Why" or "Huh" when you do certain things that relate to your culture. Little bit dumb about it all. Doesn't exactly judge you though but he can be openly confused at times.

Daigo Dojima

Honestly he has never thought about dating a foreigner and probably thinks it's expected of him to have a Japanese spouse but doesn't let that stop him. Daigo's a big sweetheart when in love so where you're from or what culture you partake in doesn't bother him none. Genuinely supportive and loving all the way.

Mine Yoshitaka

Might be a little guilty of fetishizing your culture or using it as a token point of interest. What can I say, Mine really does want to look cool in front of everyone, even more than Nishiki. If you tell him, he'll immediately knock it off. He likely just didn't realize that it bothered you or offended you.

Tatsuo Shinada

Also guilty of making your culture or foreigner status into a token subject, but more so in the way he just asks a LOT of questions. He doesn't realize it makes you feel like you're a zoo animal or like a science project. His intentions are well placed though, he just doesn't know when to stop asking.

Ichiban Kasuga

He'll just be like "Okay, cool!" with a thumbs up. That's how much you being a foreigner affects him. Bless his gentle heart, he could never fathom how anyone could judge you or treat you differently just because you're a foreigner.

Tianyou Zhao

Sympathizes with your struggles and is really understanding. Would be down to share cultural foods or holidays with you, either from his culture or yours. He's just generally really chill about it.

Joon-Gi Han

Similar vibe as Zhao but would whoop the ass of anyone who made fun of you. He knows all too well what it's like to be outcast just because of who you are and how much that hurts and he'll be damned if you ever feel bad for being yourself.

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dj-of-the-coven · 1 year ago

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Neku and Joshua - Detail Diatribe

Otherwise known as my complete analysis of Neku and Joshua's relationship, from the first moment they share to the last.

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BEFORE YOU READ:

This post is an opinion piece and will thusly be colored by my biases. I am not a big fan of Joshua or the Joshneku ship. This means absolutely nothing about what I think of the people who do like him or Joshneku. I don't think liking villains or morally gray characters makes a person immoral or villainous themselves, nor do I think having a ship that CAN be read as abusive makes anyone an abuse apologist or an actual abuser. Ship and let ship--we're all just here for enjoyment. If reading a negative depiction of Joshua or Joshneku will upset you then I implore you not to read this essay. Please take care of yourself and block liberally! This post is also NO EXCUSE to send harassment towards Joshua fans or Joshneku shippers. It is meant to be analysis of a fictional relationship in a game that I enjoy, not a reason to bully or make fun of people who disagree with my reading of the text. To ensure that those sensitive to Joshua-critical arguments do not see this post, I will not be tagging it with any of Joshua's character or ship tags and I humbly ask that you refrain from adding them as well. BE KIND TO PEOPLE AND BE UNDERSTANDING OF THOSE WITH DIFFERENT PREFERENCES.

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Whether or not you liked Yoshiya "Joshua" Kiryu after finishing The World Ends With You, it's no stretch of the imagination to say that his character is incredibly complicated--both morally and textually--to fully grasp. His opinions are often hidden behind layers of fluff and fancy words, and his actions might be even less comprehensible at times. He was the one responsible for kicking the plot of the entire first game into action. To put things bluntly: Joshua wanted to purge the world of something he deemed worthless, humanity, so he non-consensually "employed the help" of the moodiest teenage boy in the city to gamble over the lives and deaths of about 203,500 people in a game that cost his proxy...

his memories (initially)

three full weeks of his life

the life and safety of a new friend (twice)

the life and safety of a new friend's little sister (whose erasure he witnessed)

the lives and safety of literally every person he's ever met in his lifetime (e.g. the roughly 203,500 people living in Shibuya, Tokyo in 2007-2008)

his own safety

his stable perception of reality

And eventually, upon being sent to Shinjuku...

three whole years of his life

three years of his living memory (it's unclear as to whether ANYBODY but Beat and Shiki were able to remember him)

three years he could've spent with his new friends

three years of physical touch and interaction with living humans

the rest of his already ruined health and sanity

And this was after the proxy extended his friendship and good will to Joshua, despite him being unable to forgive the atrocities committed against him during those initial weeks of the game.

This begs the question, "Is Joshua a good person?"

Well, I wouldn't say he's a great one. I'm personally not so fond of those who perform genocide as a silly thought experiment, and I don't think most people are either--however, in the context of the game, this doesn't feel true. It does not feel true that Joshua wanted to kill, or was at least ambivalent about killing, 203,500 people in one swoop. Joshua's definitely supposed to be annoying, a bit disturbing, and NOT the good guy, but he also doesn't feel like a genocidal maniac within the context of the story. He feels like an annoying little bitch, and that's for the very important reason that he needs to reasonably be comparable to Neku Sakuraba, his proxy.

Part 1: Sides of the Same Coin

Neku Sakuraba was a boy who had closed himself fully off from the world before his involvement in the Reaper's Game. He had no friends, nor did he want any, as he was under the false impression that humanity had literally nothing to offer him; to Neku, people were burdens he was forced to bear and obstacles to weather through in order to live a peaceful life. This makes him the perfect proxy for Joshua at the start of TWEWY, because Joshua was operating on nearly the exact same axis of thinking. Humanity had nothing to offer him. He thought himself above it, so he felt no real remorse at the idea of making them all go away.

The way that the two of them differ, however, is that Neku was essentially being untruthful with himself in order to maintain his fragile worldview. It took less than a full week with a kind person for his ideology to start crumbling around him. This only continued to happen when he was confronted with someone who hated people, a boy exactly like him, in week 2. Neku's time with Joshua was fraught with conflict, manipulated actions and memories, and confrontation with the existential horror of needless cruelty. It served to show that he was already displacing himself from the niche he'd wanted to fit into. Neku no longer worked as a real, proper proxy to Joshua once he started to open up to others and expand his thinking. This was only cemented when Neku started his third week learning about acts of selflessness, first with Joshua's "sacrifice", then with Beat's act of true mercy, benefiting nobody but Neku himself. Neku could no longer be a proxy to a murderer. Through Beat's actions (and Joshua's perceived death), he learned the value of human life--why someone he didn't even get along with would put himself in danger just to make sure Neku had a fighting chance.

Neku was like Joshua, but he was able to start seeing the humanity in others after spending time with only one of them. Neku is what happens when someone like Joshua deconstructs their worldview at its core, opens up to new people, makes friends, and truly gets to know them. That's the first half of the foil. In order to complete this foil, Joshua is what happens when someone like Neku does not deconstruct their worldview. While Neku was learning an ideology of trust and mutual benefit, Joshua was still viewing everything as transactional, up until the very end. He crushed what little was left of Neku's trust by proposing the shootout at the end of the game--also taking Shiki and Beat for good measure--then asked the boy he'd been emotionally and physically manipulating for weeks to kill him.

When Neku put down his gun, he was displaying an ultimate act of selflessness. Not because he thought Joshua was deserving, as he admitted through his own words that he didn't forgive Joshua for what was done to him, but because he wanted to trust that Joshua could change.

Neku had the maturity at that point to realize that he and Joshua were fundamentally the same: neither of them understood why people bothered to help each other, but Neku, crucially, had been offered a way out through Shiki, Beat, Rhyme, and a number of other side characters. At the end of the first game, Neku had learned all he needed to know about why humanity was worth saving. He even tried to extend a hand to Joshua in spite of his deep hurt, asking him to come meet him and his friends at Hachiko for a second chance. But Joshua didn't take this invitation. And by refusing his second chance, Joshua's foil with Neku was completed, leading him to a life of literal inhuman detachment as an angel.

Now, how does Neku feel about his act of mercy being rejected?

Part 2: A New Day

During the events of A New Day, we get to see Neku after an indeterminable amount of time since the Game ended, at least more than one week and less than one year. There are a few important things that get established on this day:

Neku regularly sees Beat, or at least has seen him recently, not commenting on any long separation when they get inexplicably paired up for a game

Beat has a very negative view of Joshua, exclaiming "Priss Kid!? Lemme at 'im!" when his name is first mentioned

Neku does not have major qualms about this behavior, only responding with "Wh-whoa, slow down."

When having memories of his first death, Neku's face is dark, implying that he has no fond recollection of the incident

It is implied that Neku and Beat have not seen Joshua at all since the end of the Game

Beat calls Joshua a whack-job, and Neku again has no problem with or comment on it

Beat is rude and confrontational towards Joshua during their entire conversation, and Neku has no reaction to any of it, implying his silent approval

Immediately upon returning to the RG, Neku makes plans with Shiki to hang out, and chats lightly with Beat, but shows no concern for the whereabouts of Joshua

When Neku is shot by Coco, the camera first pans to Joshua's gun, NOT Coco's, mimicking an episode of PTSD from Neku's perspective

In short, we can see what Neku is like in a world without Joshua's continued presence... and it appears that he's doing fine, minus the lingering pain of a traumatic incident. He hangs out with his friends. He talks to them, or at least to Beat, enough for him to know that Joshua has majorly wronged him. Beat's anger can be extrapolated as protective, and his anger towards Joshua is treated by both of them as justified. Neku has told Beat enough about his death and partnership with Joshua for it to be old news--old news that Beat is sympathetic about to the point of wanting to immediately wail on the angel at the first mention of his name.

So, how did Neku feel about Joshua after the first game? Based off this information, it seems like Neku had been willing to befriend Joshua for real--but treated it as a missed opportunity. He moved on with his life as normally as possible given the circumstances, and even began to consider his time with Joshua to be somewhat traumatic, at least enough that was willing to pour his feelings about it out to Beat at some point. And this, keep in mind, is before the reckoning.

Part 3: Isolation and Desolation

Isolation does funny things to people's heads. According to this article published by the Prison Policy Initiative, people who go through extended isolation or solitary confinement often experience significant changes in memory and personality; changes that are mostly permanent. It's so damaging to memory in particular that isolation physically shrinks the part of the brain that plays the biggest role in memory after too long without human interaction, and this point comes much sooner than many people realize: after only fifteen consecutive days. Beyond the sixteenth day, forced isolation is considered by the UN to be a type of psychological torture.

Neku was subjected to this torture for three consecutive years.

No breaks, no visitors, no living people. Neku was in isolation for three entire years, waiting for Joshua or anyone else to release him.

Knowing about the effects of isolation on personality, it's easy to see the ways that Neku has changed when he returns to Shibuya after his time away. Despite being warm and amicable, seemingly all smiles, it's immediately obvious to players of the original TWEWY that his personality is lacking something important--that being the trademark snarkiness that made him such a compelling narrator. He has his moments of course, but for the most part, he's very different from how he was as a young teenager. He's soft-spoken with everyone and is mostly content to trail behind Beat as he catches up on the things he'd missed in his time away. He takes less action than he used to. He's less blunt. Considering all that was happening at the time, it makes sense that Neku wasn't too talkative about his own problems, but he hardly mentions anything at all about the place he spent three years being fully, completely isolated in. He even lies to the Twisters about knowing who put him there in the first place. Neku is clearly... off. And I bet that not all of it is unintentional on the part of the developers.

A thing that we in the TWEWY fandom joke about a lot is that Neku keeps befriending his murders, but to be fair, this is actually a bit of a non-point when you think about the fact that Neku has gone through a massive, relentless trauma of total isolation. After being by himself in Shinjuku for so long, he was probably desperate enough to talk to someone for his memories of anyone to start shifting, to give him literally anything to hold onto in an attempt to keep himself alive. This is compounded with the fact that time also changes one's own perception of past traumas. It wouldn't be a stretch to say that his memory of the time before his isolation would be hazy and hard to grasp, and this goes double for anything before the Game. He remembers the important bits--the people who inspired him, the intimate moments they shared, the fear and uncertainty that plagued those weeks--but he remembers everything in its vague emotional constructs, and some of those emotions smudge onto each other. So, when he sees Joshua in NEO, he smiles.

I'm not saying that Neku is literally remembering everything improperly, but I am saying that his recollection of the Game is colored by the fact that it was the last time that he'd been with people before he was isolated. He sees his time there as more nostalgic because it was the "before" to his "after". Neku is happy to see anybody from his past at this moment; he's reeling from the experience of suddenly being around them again. Combined with Neku's general dislike for unnecessary conflict (lying to the Twisters & not telling Beat about Coco, both to avoid making a scene), and also being in the middle of something too important to be derailed with petty fighting, he decides to take Joshua's sudden appearance as comforting. He's not necessarily happy to see Joshua anymore than he's just happy to see somebody that he knows.

This is a huge contrast with how we see him thinking about Joshua in A New Day, in which nearly every mention of him is treated as negative or neutral by both Neku and Beat alike. The expected thing for Neku to do here would be to first act surprised, then roll his eyes or make an annoyed sound. But instead, he smiles and allows Joshua to stay before returning to the task at hand. Why is he glad to see the man who killed him and then rejected his friendship? Well, that's because he isn't really, or at least not to the extent that a lot of fanon content would have you believe. It only looks like that if you don't compare how he interacts with Joshua to the way he interacts with Shiki and Beat.

Neku's reunion with Beat is one of the most beautiful cutscenes in the game, full of warm light and soft expressions:

Their eyes meet, and they grasp hands, coming together in a shower of golden bubbles and sparkles. It's pure magic.

As for Neku's reunion with Shiki, it's less spectacular, but appropriately emotional and sweet:

Meanwhile, Joshua gets introduced like this:

The difference is obvious. Joshua gets almost no fanfare from the narrative, not even receiving some sort of special animation or character sprite for the moment. And though Neku does eventually crack a smile, his initial reaction is stunned and doesn't change until the whole dialogue is through. He smiles a little right after he says "Not at all, partner".

"Partner" is the word that's the most important to this reading. Neku smiles after he affirms Joshua as his partner--someone he knew and briefly traveled with before his extended isolation in Shinjuku. E.g., someone he placed trust in. Someone he used to speak to after years of not speaking to anyone. Essentially, even though Neku had little to do with Joshua after the events of the Game, and definitely doesn't get along with him... he also does want to trust him, which runs directly counter to the moment that Joshua admits he didn't trust Neku enough to release him from Shinjuku. Neku's memories are warped by years of being so fully alone that it changed his whole manner of speaking and interacting with the world. Of course he clings to a familiar face and voice, if only for a moment.

But here's exactly where that moment ends:

Neku immediately loses that smile from earlier, confronting Joshua with a deadpan expression.

He asks Joshua about a couple of loose ends. Then, when Joshua mentions that he had plans to intervene if Neku and his friends were unable to do anything, he smiles again and he asks to go home. At this point, his grand reunion with Joshua has been completed: now he knows that Joshua has little visible remorse about what he's done, but at least he also has confirmation that Joshua had been planning some kind of backup in case Neku wasn't able to pull through. Neku's demeanor was largely uncomfortable and stiff until the moment that he realized it was all going to be okay. It was only after Joshua mentioned that he would've saved the city anyway that he truly relaxed--he does trust Joshua at his word, after all. And then he decides to go home, back to Shiki and Beat, the way he'd been wanting to.

Part 4: Conclusion

Neku and Joshua's relationship is like a rubix cube: a question with a simple answer, but a method of solving so complex that the majority of people who pick it up will never finish the puzzle. Most TWEWY fans do what humans do best and slap a romantic label on it, but I think doing that and ignoring some of the other dimensions to their relationship does a bit of a disservice to the way that Neku was treated by Joshua throughout the series, regardless of whatever his true intentions may have been. It's fair to say that Neku, Shiki, and Beat are best friends--if not something much stronger--just based off the way they interact, particularly with the beautiful mundane moments we get to see between Beat and Neku in NEO as party members.

On the other hand, for Joshua, his moments are few and far in between after the original game ends, but his presence is still a lingering thread throughout Neku's life that forces him to reckon with himself again and again. He could've been like him. He didn't end up that way, and so they can't truly be close. Neku wants to remember him fondly. For a moment, he does, until he remembers who was the warden for his years-long imprisonment. They are mirrors of each other and they will each haunt each other's actions forever, with Neku as Joshua's guilty conscience and Joshua as Neku's ironic shoulder devil. I don't think they could ever be described as friends, given their history, though I do think that they'll probably meet up for coffee once a year and make incredibly intense eye contact. Neku will silently ask why Joshua did it all, and Joshua will sip from his cup without ever answering the question. Maybe both of them or neither of them truly know.

#twewy #ntwewy #neku sakuraba #daisukenojo bito #shiki misaki

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jay-j-otter · 1 year ago

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hey hey, do you mind sharing your akiyama headcanons? just saw ur tags talking abt how theyre dark and im very interested!!!! your fem ryuaki fuels me in ways i cannot describe and i havent even played dead souls FHKGJG and your tanimuras have my whole entire heart!!!

Oh wow first of all THANK YOU for the ask!! It's been only couple days since I've discovered I've had them disabled all this time so I'm very happy I noticed it before you found my blog (,:

I've already complained a bit on twt that when I've started to write down ryuaki headcanons, it prompted me to make a 35+ pages google doc with meta on both of them 😅 It pushed me to write more fun drafts tho, so all is well, but it won't fit in this post for sure ahbfght

But ofc, I will share a little about Shun specifically. (TW for implied SA)

Akiyama... I have complicated feelings about him, because on the one hand, he got betrayed by his closest people, lost all the standing in society and lived as a homeless person for a long time, and that's a big trauma to have. But on the other... He's got back up by a miracle, and now he's trying to recreate the miracle for others. He assumes the role of a judge for other people while himself being too young, too flawed, having black and white morals.

(In Y4 I downright despised Akiyama when he refused a loan to an abused woman on the basis that she didn't want to apply for sex work, but in the same substory gave some cringefail guy 4 chances to complete the test just because it was amusing.)

But I've just completed Y5, and it gave me lots of food for thought.

First of all, from what I see, Shun here was written (rewritten?) as a more sympathetic character. For example, now when it's implied that he's gonna make some woman "use her body" for the loan, it means he's sending her to work on the construction site. Well, alright. I'll take the bad taste joke over previous cases.

There's also an important quest when Akiyama meets his former boss, who not only initially fired him on false accusations, which started his downfall, but also married his ex-fiancée. And Akiyama finally admits that at first, he wanted to use his position as a loan shark to be selfish and to get revenge, but got disgusted with himself after seeing some humanity and principles in the former boss.

So, here finally comes self-awareness about his actions. Interesting tidbit.

Another big part of the character building we see now: when he is alone in Osaka, without Hana around, he's a complete mess. His new office is dirty, he barely eats some instant ramen and clearly just uses the place to escape Tokyo and the responsibilities he created himself. If in Y4 we saw him within his element, managing Elise and doing loan business (with a messy table because he's just soooo quirky and lazyyy \s), then in Y5 we get to see a bit of what's inside his head. And it's not pretty.

He's clearly distancing himself - from Hana and his new yakuza friends, because they have their own lives to care about. (Tanimura too mayhaps, but this is a separate friendship that I also like to talk about a lot)

Aaand he escapes to his ugly nook to have his ugly depressive thoughts. Can't let them witness it, can he? They'd lose all the respect for him.

At the same time, he throws himself into helping Haruka with passion, because that's the thing he actually cares about, for the first time in a couple years. (He also provides her with some much-needed parenting about the importance of being selfish, because, being raised by Kiryu, she's entirely too self-sacrificing.)

And suddenly - he's lively and energetic again, he's bouncing off other characters, he risks his life for what he deems right, he's helpful, organizing, charming. He's everywhere.

(But he's also afraid to acknowledge that he's got too close to people again. So he's ready to literally die for them and Haruka's dream, but avoids calling them friends, settling for "acquaintances")

Not much needed to imagine that, after everything settles down, he falls apart again. Because in his head he's never really needed or too important for the people around. They carry on with their life and plans. Such as Eri, Arai, Yasuko. Even Hana got fed up and left at some point, and has been keeping him at an arm's length since. (Good for her, that was unhealthy)

He's not only not that interesting, his trauma is "ugly" (by his self-admission). It's not heroic and it's very mundane. There's no clear villains to blame, like with Majima's torture in Y0.

It's just - waking up is hard. Akiyama can't see the point in much of what he's doing anymore. Money is just paper for him now, they might have bought him the freedom of choice, but somehow it didn't help. Even with all the financial help to struggling people he can't buy healing for himself. Most alive he felt actually was when he lost the money briefly in Y4 - it made him work to get them back again.

Now it gets a bit tricky, hence the TW.

I think that a lot of things about him actually make sense, if while living on the streets, he had it bad enough to the point of selling himself for food. Like, I don't want to make it into torture porn or downplay the traumatic experience of homelessness overall, but something for sure ruined him and his self-perception. That's why he's bouncing between playing a self-righteous entity and hating himself.

Aside from his crippling depression from all this being shunned deep inside and not addressed, there's the attitude about sex work I've mentioned he has in Y4. He is distancing himself from the situation yet again. A little bit of a trick to calm his mind: "If I treat it like every other job, it won't feel as dehumanizing applied to myself". And also: "Well, I was not above doing that! I was not too proud to do it! Why should anyone else be?"

Now, of course he doesn't want to subject his former boss (and, by extension, Eri) to the same hardships. Even though he is, actually, a bit of a cruel person.

So here's Akiyama in Y4-5. Not super pretty and kind of greasy, but nevertheless charming, gallant and crazy smart. Fighting and dancing and singing and networking equally well. VERY annoying, because he considers himself an expert in all things he read about even once (I also hc him eidetic memory, which makes it worse). And with every year getting more secluded and miserable.

That being said, fem ryuaki has slightly different tone even in all-fem AU because of gender expectations. Akiyama's upbringing for example.

I hc his parents seeing him as this very "proper" son, encouraging his risk-taking neurodivergent activity ONLY when it helped to build onto that image. They happily bragged about their son - with prestigious business degree, good banking job and pretty fiancée. But ofc, when it's all came crashing down, they didn't want to hear about him anymore. Nowadays they acknowledge his existance with some disdain, because they care about reputation more then about him or his wealth. And he has some "disgusting jobs, no respectable friends and no wife".

(It's all kinda complicated from both sides, mb I'll get deeper into it in fanfic that I'm writing)

(And forgive me for saying this, but fem Akiyama is more interesting for me to write in this narrative, because she needed to balance fitting "proper little quiet Japanese woman" with her loud banking career, and while she was always openly feminine, she was never proper or quiet "enough". And now she's "not enough" among actual living legends.)

Well, that's all I have to say for now!

I'm always open for further questions and discussions 😊

#jay's askbox #ryu ga gotoku #shun akiyama #headcanon #rgg meta #yakuza #akiyama shun

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dragon-business · 1 year ago

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Goromi dates (yes, plural)

First date with Goromi was Majima overcompensating after bowling with Kiryu. Nishida simply offered to find a setting that would be more comfortable for Majima and a little less comfortable for Kiryu, and Majima went all out.

Nishida: So what's gonna be comfortable for you, boss? Majima: I catch your drift, yeah, let's order a dress!

Here you can read the rggo story, where Majima worked in SHINE as Goromi for a while before the first date!

Here is the comic prequel to the second date.

And let's roll~

- So, for the second date Majima should wear a short slim black dress with an open back and long blond hair loose, so it covers the tattoo, but can be swept over the shoulder at the right time. Considering that we only see yakuza back tattoos before veeeery serious fights this is a bit of playing with danger there. Majima can put the hair over his shoulder when it's time.

Also he has a silver chain on his neck. Maybe gloves can stay on, too! The dress is black or dark blue, velvety to the touch, turtleneck top, sleeves to the elbow. Makeup is very subdued, just an evening look with a touch of red lipstick.

Kiryu will have so many compliments, Goromi better hold on to the couch and her champagne.

- Judging by the glasses Goromi ordered something very strong on the first date. All of it was prep for the fight, so yeah, it was no champagne. But this new meeting is classy, so gotta go all out. Bringing out champagne, cheesecake and idk. They have pretty trashy snacks at this club. Majima will have to look into that afterwards.

Clientele is not so sophisticated there, usually. Kiryu isn't that sophisticated either. But it's the principle! Also it's a special occasion, because it's Kiryu visiting. Again. So Majima might be overpreparing now.

(Remembering the fact that Kiryu thought Majima doesn't eat fast food, only stuff from fancy restaurants)

And while Majima waits for Kiryu, the manager of SHINE is somewhere out there in Kamurocho, sweating on the quest to find vinegar. It's tradition. All managers go through vinegar baptism. And also Majima mumbling "oh, back in my time…" is very endearing.

Majima, tipping wine glass, trying to play it cool in front of Kiryu: Manager, still sweating: *stands on one knee to put freshly made onigiri and curry on the table*

All of this because Kiryu said he wants to learn more about running a cabare club. So here's a trip to the past, so interesting. And Goromi can talk about it for ages.

(And yes, Majima brought his own vinegar. He knew the manager (oh, the poor manager) will not find it.)

- (The date itself includes the love meter boss fight. Both of them have this meters and each is half of monitor in length.)

- "What's your fun opening story to break the ice on dates, Kiryu-chan?" asks Majima not realising yet what he's about to bring on himself.

Kiryu, scratching his head, trying to quickly remember any fun stories: Logic (medium: failure): the ones you shared on the radio back in the day must be safe.

So Kiryu spins the tale about the dominatrix sidestory, finishing with a kiler: -and then I watched their session, hahah. Goromi: …and how, pray tell, you gained all this BDSM knowledge? Kiryu: it's just common sense?

He's full of mysteries. And likes to watch. Goromi is bluescreening hard. This whole thing is already backfiring. On everyone in a mile radius (yes, of course all of SHINE personnel is listening in).

Honestly, talks with Mana prepared Majima for this. But just imagine Kiryu asking Goromi with a straight (hehe) face if he's an S or an M. Or, more likely, if Goromi would rather work at a BDSM club or visit it. Or is she more of a casual street session enjoyer?

Logic (heroic: failure) in the voice of Baccus: you are nailing the casual conversation here, my boy 👌👌👌👌👉👉 Empathy (formidable: success): he will be impressed with your knowledge 😌😌😌

(Dang, Mana. She managed to catch Majima by surprise and he answered honestly. Oh, Kiryu's big honest eyes with one braincell shining through)

Goromi has 3 options:

X attack by attack Y answer honestly B "no you" card

Asking Kiryu about his preferences puts him in deep and serious thought. If he'll answer honestly… about figuring it out by trying, and learning through observation, and having a good feeling when it's clear that the other person is enjoying themselves… Murder. It will be straight up murder.

"Goromi-san, you must really like this champagne! You just downed a whole bottle in one go."

- Kiryu: Are you enjoying our fights, Goromi-san? Logic: you gotta make sure 👌

Majima-san always made sure to ask for consent in their fights! Kiryu should also be responsible. What if he can do better?

It was already straight up murder when on the first date after Majima's rant about strong men and fighting Kiryu asked (in a suave gentleman voice): "Want me to fight you?"

"You like strong men? I'm a strong man. Just saying."

But yeah, back to the point, this was actually bothering Kiryu, he even ranted to Tanaka about it. Clear communication is the key, so if Goromi-san thinks there are things Kiryu can do differently or try harder with… does he know enough moves, what if the same routine gets boring?

Majima enjoys fights with strong men >> logic happening >> Majima's enjoyment is the goal.

Kiryu is clearly getting stronger from the Majima Everywhere system. And Majima is doing it, because he enjoys it. So they both should get equal benefits from what's going on.

Kiryu is a good learner. Maybe he should do more leg over the shoulder throws? Should he still grab Majima's collar from the front? He breaks free from it so easy, but what if it's about trying, about the resistance?

All of this is happening directly after BDSM talk, of course. Kiryu finally found a good segway to talk about it all, he's on the roll.

He's winning this social interaction 👏👏

More champagne for the lady, please. This is a serious topic, Kiryu is willing to pay. It's a second extension too, Kiryu is gonna be here for a while.

- And yeah, Kiryu is talking with Goromi without thinking much, just talking.

Majima accidentally did a lot for him there, by coming up with this date idea (for himself too, but that's another story). Still thinking about Goromi jokingly telling Kiryu "Just don't fall for me", and Kiryu looking at him intensely and going "I dunno. Love can be unpredictable."

Kiryu, apart from being autistic, was raised in an orphanage and in the hyper masculine world of yakuza, with two extremely emotionally repressed men as father figures. He clearly has a lot of trouble admitting his feelings out loud, and knowing the appropriate time to do so. It seems that his way of masking (and generally surviving) is seeing different human interactions as a set of scenarios with set rules and decorations. Like, "the date", "talk with a passerby", "at the bar" and so on. And they help Kiryu with social interactions, sure, but also are quite rigid sometimes, and lock him in a sad and lonely place where he can't really connect to people, because there's not enough nuance in the script and no tolerance for sentimentality in the world Kiryu's building this scripts from.

So, coming from this angle, you can see how on a date with Goromi the scenarios clash.

According to the rules, two men can't really be super open or emotional with each other, or admit interest in each other. But now this is "just a man and a hostess, enjoying drinks together". And normally Kiryu would have 0 interest in being open or flirty with a hostess, he just goes through the motions that you're supposed to do, and is a bit clueless even. But now it's Goromi. It's Majima. It's someone he knows and cares about. Someone with whom he can say all the right things he's supposed to say and it will be true! Incredible. Mind-blowing.

(Later Rina will blow Kiryu's mind even more with "you know you can date men, when you're a man, right")

Majima, putting on stockings: heheheh, yeah, this will immediately prompt a fight :3c Kiryu, sitting with Goromi, moved to the core: this is the best moment of my life, feeling so good right now, can we do this forever please-

- And a note for Majima's POV: on the first date he was ready to go right away, but then Kiryu said with no-objection tone "No. We're just a man and a hostess, enjoying drinks together." And I bet Majima went along with it partially because his little BDSM tendencies rose up to the direct order.

It's one thing to defy or follow orders of your yakuza superiors, which are frankly very tiresome and are mostly bullshit power plays. As we've seen in the Majima saga he is really tired of it all. But an order put in unexpectedly (very expectedly) queer conditions, by a person he's attracted to? Ohwell.

So he complied. On his terms, sure, but he did. Unexpectedly locked on the route of exploring the Goromi side of himself too.

So there's a lot going on on this little date. So many things. And the second one were all of this is hammered home even more is very close to our hearts.

Majima: Pew, hope he will never find out about my sudden dirty thoughts. Almost embarrassed myself there. You're walking a dangerous line there, Goro. Thankfully, Kiryu-chan is not a person to dwell on kink topics. Kiryu: So, about BDSM… Majima: Well! Too bad Kiryu is straight! Ha ha. Ha.

Majima has his own fun little mini-game of finding explanations.

But what is an explanation, when the second date the tiny clasp on the Goromi's heels comes undone. And it sits at an awkward angle, making it hard for her to fix. And Kiryu steps around the table, goes on one knee like "Allow me to help, please", and waits for an answer.

Ambulance needed, person injured themselves with mental gymnastics.

And after fixing the clasp Kiryu holds Goromi's ankle carefully for a just fraction of a second longer than needed.

Explanation for all this will need some serious thought. And this specific moment? Well it's going in the box. And the box is going in the vault. And then under the safety hat.

There's a serious turnaround about this whole thing in Majima's head, he's comparing Kiryu's behavior towards Goromi with how he got along with cabare girls himself.

Majima was more or less gallant with them, too, and often helped them with clothes, makeup, shoes and whatnot. So, obviously Kiryu feels okay helping with the shoes, because he's not attracted to Goromi/Majima! Case solved.

Meanwhile, Kiryu, when random girls flirt with him: let's not go there. Kiryu when Goromi: I will absolutely go there the first chance I have.

Blunt as a rock.

Cabare girls are sideeyeing Kiryu working on Goromi's clasp, holding their breath. Better than any tv show.

- Goromi, clinking her glass on the bottle: Where's my champagne? Your quite slow today, Kiryu-chan, what about being a gentleman. Kiryu, staring at Goromi's sholderblade where the tattoo is barely visible through the cascade of hair: Uhuh.

There's something about the tattoo being partially covered but still visible. Also it's quite a beautiful tattoo. Kiryu has only seen glimpses of it by that point, and not from this close. And even later, after their "final" fight, it's still not the same as looking at it up close in calm circumstances. Can't really stare during fights, or, after seeing Hannya Man's smile, you'll immediately see the ceiling.

This is actually an additional difficulty level for their battles. Kiryu is a curious creature, he wants to see the snakes up close.

– before / navigation / next

#kazumaji #kiryu kazuma #goro majima #rgg kiwami #yakuza #this is canon now #goromi is very special to us #<3 #for kiryu too

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mjm5655 · 2 years ago

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❛ i just wanted to say that i really like your outfit. ❜ (first time seeing Majima in his snakeskin jacket instead of a tuxedo, maybe? :3)

first meetings // accepting ! // @stingslikeabee

it was honestly so good to see that melissa was still doing well, majima had his fun being goromi for a bit, but maybe she'll come back again, being a hostess was kind of fun ... especially when he was able to chat up buff men, then beat them up on their afterhours date. it was so fun to creep out kiryu-chan as goromi, majima thinks he did a very good job as a hostess though, it's not every hostess that can pull off getting an afterhours date on the first session.

but, being out of his goromi disguise now, majima decided he'll pay melissa a visit, as himself, no goromi, no officer majima, no zombie majima, just plain ol' majima.

he pouted a bit, he was getting there wasn't he ? age forty-one now, but he honestly didn't feel or consider he looked like it, good his family blessed him with some good genetics, because they blessed him with fuck all else. he walked up to the man who was seeing to clients at the door, he knew who to request.

❝ melissa available today ? ❞

the man informed him that melissa was already with another client that didn't seem like he wanted to go too soon. well, that ain't about to fly with majima.

❝ i'll pay three times the amount he's paid & extra if ya tell him ta get lost. ❞

there was some considering that seemed to be done, but the man eventually nodded, the more money offered was better for business, & besides, he could see from the tattoos that were displayed proudly upon majima's chest that he was likely dealing with yakuza, the eyepatch as well, all tell tale features of being involved in some way. no one would want to mess with him in case he just decided to ruin their business ... the word of the mad dog of shimano had got around too, known to be a man with an eyepatch & an awful taste in fashion.

he was led over as the other man was forced to go to another hostess, or leave, his expression softened as he met eyes with melissa. sitting down next to her, he made his order, the most expensive champagne of the house, & some chicken for both of them to eat at if melissa so desired to get share. he took out a cigarette, allowing melissa to light it for him.

❝ i figured i should pay ya a proper visit, it looks like the years have treated ya well, n' i can see ya haven't went out o' practice either. ❞

the two chatted about things that had happened to themselves over the years that they hadn't seen each other, majima didn't leave much details out about what he's been doing in the yakuza now that he's back in it, he knew melissa knew of him being yakuza, & he knows she's seen him brutally beat a man to a pulp a few times. this chick was strong, & not fragile like others that would turn away at such sights, majima really liked that about her. he could be himself around her.

what surprised him was when melissa inserted the random compliment, she liked his outfit ? well that was definitely a first, most hated how he dressed, called him a looney wacko & various other names. even those in the tojo clan turned their nose up at his usual get-up, he couldn't care less though, fuck them, some of them were just as bad at fashion ! besides, he liked showing off a bit, these muscles didn't come from lying around all day.

❝ ya do ? someone has taste then, maybe ya even wanna see me without this jacket on, 'ey ? ❞

he teased melissa a bit, but if she ever wanted an afterhours date with him, he would be game.

#stingslikeabee #﴾ ASK ANSWERED #﴾ MAJIMA ⸨ IC ⸩

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sugarsweb · 2 years ago

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DAY THREE - OVERSTIMULATION. Kuro Kiryu x Fem!Reader (Originally posted Oct 6th)

Contains : Overstimulation, slight dacryphilia, Fem!Reader, not proofread.

Word Count : <800

18+ content underneath the cut. By clicking 'Keep Reading' you are knowingly reading content made for people over the age of 18. Read at your own discretion.

You feel like you’re on fire as Kuro’s hands on your body seem to leave a warm feeling in their wake. Your breathing is shaky from previous orgasms your boyfriend has coaxed out of you, legs trembling as small tears run down your face. You sniffle, your whole body on overdrive as a simple, light smack to your clit makes you jolt and moan loudly.

“Kurooo…” you whine, continuing to cry. He gives a smile back at you, his hand cupping your heat.

The anticipation kills you - you know the red-head is far from finished with you, especially after what had happened tonight. Some guy at the club you were both attending decided to hit on you, even after your insistence that you’re taken, and certainly not interested in a drunken man like him. Kuro had seen it all go down as he ordered your drinks, and he had enough once he saw how uncomfortable you were.

“Hey, do you mind?” He growls at the guy bothering you. “That’s my girlfriend you’re hitting on.”

“Whaaat, ya don’t wan’ share?” The man is obviously plastered and not worth Kuro’s or your time, and your boyfriend shakes his head, grabbing your hand to get your attention fully on him.

“Wanna get out of here?” You nod immediately, leaving what was supposed to be a fun night behind.

And now, you were laying down on your shared bed, your juices leaking out of you and pooling onto the mattress below you. Kuro wanted to get your mind off of the disappointment of the evening, and what better way than to finger-fuck you until you turn dumb? Nothing beats that, he thinks to himself, his cock straining against his pants as he sees the brainless, exhausted look you have on your face.

Your tongue is lolling out numbly, eyes unfocused and spit smeared on the corner of your mouth but there’s still a small, satisfied smile on your face - you love when Kuro does this to you, even when you’re so overstimulated you think you can’t take it anymore.

The red-head takes a look at his fingers covered in your arousal, thinking that you’ve both finally had enough of what he claims to be simple foreplay. He needs to feel you wrapped around him now. Tugging his pants and boxers down, his dick is finally freed from his confinements, slapping against his stomach. It’s obvious he’s just as needy for this as you are, the telling blush spread across his cheeks and lidded eyes as he looks at you like you’re the only thing that matters in the world.

Kuro’s body towers over yours, broad shoulders shielding you from the low light of the room. His presence is dominating, the subtle knit in his eyebrows becoming more apparent as he rubs his dick in between your folds to cover it in your juices, and he feels warmth bubbling in his chest - the things you do to him…

He finally slips inside, and your hand slaps against your mouth as you try to muffle a shout from how sensitive you are.

“Fuck, baby…” Kuro moans out, feeling your cunt clench around him. He’s barely even moved and you feel like you could come again at any moment.

“So good…” your words are slurred as you’re overwhelmed with pleasure again, your boyfriend’s thrusts powerful and frantic as he chases his own release. You feel your impending orgasm build up inside of you, but it feels like your body might give up on you if you come once more. “S’too much- Kuro, fuck, too much!”

“C’mon, you know you can take it,” he encourages, his cock dragging along your spongy walls, finding your g-spot easily. “Be good for me.”

More tears stream down your face and you brain can’t decide what you want - fuck, you want to let go so bad, but the other part of you doesn’t know if you can do it. Your moans and whimpers grow louder in volume as Kuro fucks you into the bed, your hands grasping his strong shoulders for support.

His own hand reaches down to stroke your clit, and it’s too much - you nearly scream his name as your juices spill out, soaking the insides of your thighs again. You gasp for air, trying to catch your breath as you dumbly repeat Kuro’s name over and over again, mindlessly begging; for what, you have no clue. Your boyfriend shushes you, the hand on your clit coming to stroke your face tenderly as he praises you.

“So good, such a good job…” Kuro feels himself grow impossibly harder somehow, and you feel it.

This night is far from over.

#sugarsmut #s.kinktober #kuro kiryu x reader #kuro kiryu #kuro kiryu smut #enstars smut #ensemble stars smut

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gorochanfanclub · 4 years ago

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Change of Plans

Majima x Original Female Character

Summary: Alternate Goromi origin story. Majima is trying to train his assistant to be a hostess for his latest Kiryu scheme, but gets more than what he bargained for...

Contains: Goromi, sexually suggestive content, a couple curse words, a very jealous Majima

A/N: Haven’t posted anything here in a hot minute but had this idea and wanted to share. Only reason I didn’t make this an x reader is because the way I wanted it to end, it wouldn’t have worked :/ The only really defining traits of the woman in the story are that she’s a very tall American, has big b00bie, and her name is Hiromi. Also... please don’t take this too seriously >.< it was just something silly I thought of lol. This isn’t usually the type of style I like to write in, but I thought it might be fun to make something not so serious or heavy for a change! I hope you all do enjoy it!!

Running her hands down her body, Hiromi looks at herself in the mirror, turning slowly to view herself from every angle possible. The pink leather shines and gleams in the dim light of the dressing room, flashes of snakeskin detail sparkling in the mirror. She barely felt her ass held into the garment, the highest parts of her thighs getting a cool breeze from the fishnet stockings on them. Her broad shoulders poked out the top, her breasts pushed nearly to her chin.

The entire ensemble was loud, definitely something she couldn’t possibly imagine herself wearing usually. However, she hadn’t been the one to pick out this outfit in the first place, her boss did. Majima, in another one of his crazy antics, had dragged her to a cabaret club of all places, thrown the clothes in her arms, and shoved her into the back room, demanding she change instantly.

Groaning, Hiromi wonders if Majima really intended for her to leave the room dressed like this. It showed so much skin. She barely remembers the last time she was out in public showing this much skin, even swimming, Hiromi always opted for more conservative attire.

A loud knock at the door draws her from her thoughts, her employer’s voice shouting yet muffled by the wooden slab. “Hey, Hiromi-chan,” he barks, “Ya been in there for a while now. How long does it take for you to put a dress on?”

Looking back at herself in the mirror she grimaces. “Majima-san?” she calls over her shoulder, “Do you really want me to wear this?” She pauses, “What is this even for?”

Even through the door, she can hear her boss groan. “I don’t pay ya to ask questions, Hiromi-chan.”

“I know you don’t, sir,” she snaps back, “You pay me to drive you around. Not wear…” her eyes find her reflection once more, “less than modest clothing.”

The doorknob starts to giggle at her remark. “I’m sure ya look great,” Majima mutters, saying something under his breath afterwards Hiromi can’t quite hear. “I’m comin’ in, ya decent?”

Nodding with a hum, Hiromi watches the door fly open, her boss standing in the doorway, the cabaret club’s owner hot on his heels. Eyeing her up and down, Majima soaks her up. A wicked grin plasters itself on his face. “Hot damn, girly!” he exclaims, “Ya look great! The boys are gonna eat you up.”

Blinking rapidly, Hiromi stares at him with eyes like saucers. “‘Eat me up?’” she repeats, “Don’t you think this is…” she can’t finish, only looking at the vast amount of skin showing from under her clothes.

Majima tilts his head, “It’s what? Don’t like what I picked ya?”

Hiromi shakes her head rapidly, “Uh, no it’s fine, it’s just a little… revealing… is all.”

Making his way across the room, Majima claps a gloved hand on his assistant’s shoulder. “Of course it is!” he shouts, his booming voice echoing in the room, “When yer in this line of work, ya gotta show off the goods.” With a flirtatious wink that makes Hiromi’s cheeks feel on fire, he adds, “And trust me, girly... you got ‘em.”

Majima then steps back, looking her up and down once more before stopping at her breasts. The dress was barely holding them in and it made Majima chuckle, “Not to mention, I think Kiryu’s got a thing for big knockers like yers.”

“What?” Hiromi snaps, “This is a Kiryu thing? You’re dragging me into this now?”

The one eyed man only shrugs, “Yeah, why wouldn’t I? Yer on my payroll and I gotta use the tools I got on hand. Right now sweetheart, that’s you.”

Slumping her shoulders, Hiromi knows it was best to simply accept her fate and take her orders. There was no arguing with Majima once his heart was set on something. The man was not only stubborn, he was determined. Sighing, she asks, “Alright, what would like me to do, sir?”

Cackling maniacally, Majima claps, rubbing his leather gloves together in anticipation. “That’s more like it!” he shouts with glee.

He then steps to Hiromi’s side, wrapping an arm around her bare shoulders, leading her past the club owner and out into the main section of the club. “Now,” he explains, “here’s the plan; yer gonna use,” he gestures to her body, making a particularly large gesture to her chest, “all this, to lure Kiryu-chan in, right?”

Hiromi nods in acknowledgement as he continues, “Get him all buttered up ‘n’ shit. Then…” he snaps loudly in front of Hiromi’s face, making her jerk backwards for a second, “I’ll swoop in for the kill- start disrespectin’ ya and all. Kiryu’s a real gentleman, there’s no way he’ll pass up the chance to fight fer a girl’s honor.” He ogles her breasts once more, “‘Specially one as busty as you.”

The woman stutters nervously and incoherently before clearing her throat, “Do you really think I’ll be able to win him over, Majima-san?” Looking down, she rubs the back of her neck, “Kiryu seems to be a rather tough nut to crack. I’m not sure if I’m cut out for this.”

Walking them to a table in the back Majima chuckles once more. “I know yer, not,” he states blankly, much to his assistant’s surprise. “That’s why I’m gonna train ya…”

Before she can protest, Hiromi feels herself being shoved onto the plush velvet sofa behind her. With a huff, she flops down, looking up through her hair to see Majima situating himself next to her.

Sitting up and brushing her hair out of her face, Hiromi meekly asks, “Wh-what kind of training do I need, sir?” Looking down, she notices how far up her risque dress has ridden up. With a faint blush dusting her cheeks, she tugs it as close to her knees as possible, the action completely foiled by the lack of fabric the dress had.

Leaning back, Majima makes himself comfortable. Crossing one of his leather clad legs over his knee, he sighs, “Gotta make sure you can handle Kiryu-chan.” Noticing the look of absolute fear on her face, he grins, waving a hand in dismissal, “Just relax, girly girl, we’re just gonna do some talkin’.”

Majima reaches inside the inner breast pocket of his jacket, pulling out his packet of cigarettes and nonchalantly lighting one. As he inhales, a nostalgic smile works its way across his lips, tugging gently at the corners, “Y’know, I used to do this fer a living. Kinda miss it too…”

He turns slowly to the woman on the seat next to him, “So yer in good hands, Hiromi-chan, nothin’ to worry yer pretty little head about.”

She nods, taking his words in. Hiromi takes the chance to admire Majima as he prepares for his training session with her. The way the smoke floated around his head, it made him look like an angel, resting above the clouds, looking down on the world that belonged only to him.

Majima could feel her eyes on him, watching him intently. Suddenly he felt nervous about being here with her, especially with the way he had dressed her, she was practically naked. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea after all…

“Nuff about that, tho,” he beams, snapping himself from his dull stupor, pulling Hiromi from hers as well. “Let’s get down to it,” he sighs, raising a inquisitive eyebrow, “Ya ever done anythin’ like this before?”

Touching a finger to her cheek, Hiromi tilts her head in thought. Majima smirked, finding the action somewhat cute. “Well…” she starts, “I’m not quite sure how ‘this’ all works but… I used to flirt a lot with men at the bars back in my clubbing days,” she turns to her boss with an expectant look, “Does that count, Majima-san?”

Nodding, he smiles brightly, “That’s exactly the way you gotta act. Talk ‘em up, get ‘em to buy you more drinks,” he points a finger at her, “and usually I wouldn’t say this but since these’re special circumstances… there’s no such thing as ‘too handsy.’ Kiryu-chan’s been in prison fer ten long years, I imagine a perv like him would go wild havin’ a nice little thing like you pawing all over him.”

Hiromi grins, nodding as she takes in her instructions. She hums, “I think I’m beginning to understand what I need to do.”

Majima leans back, fluffing up his jacket then smoothing it down as he situates again, “Alright then, we’re just gonna pretend that I’m Kiryu-chan and yer gonna do yer best to win me over.”

The woman nods shortly leaning back herself. In an instant, she crosses her long legs at the knees, the heel of her left foot tapping the glass table in front of them with a heavy thud.

The action shocked Majima. His eye looks down to the pink stiletto next to his own thigh, the toes so dangerously close to grazing his leg. Trailing his gaze up her toned legs, he notices the fishnets end right at the thickest part of her rather voluptuous thighs, the elastic squeezing them ever so slightly.

Following her body further, Majima trains his eye on the way the dress hugged her body in all the right places. From the way it strained against her hips, bunched slightly at her waist, then nearly ripped at her chest, he realized maybe he went a little too far with the outfit.

Finally, his gaze meets her face. A blush threatens to creep onto his cheeks with the way she is looking at him. It was almost like she had flipped a switch inside her. The usual stoic and no nonsense Hiromi he relied on during a day to day basis was gone. In her place was a tigress, dark eyes staring him down like a wounded prey, ready to be devoured.

Majima swallows, trying his best to keep his composure. He grins again, hiding his discomfort, “Hello there, my name is Kiryu Kazuma, what’s you’re name?” he asks, doing his best impression of the deep voiced Kiryu.

The woman tilts her head with a wicked grin, “Hiromi. It means ‘generous beauty.’”

And what a beauty she is, Majima thinks to himself before tilting his own head in confusion, “‘Hiromi?’ That’s a Japanese name, ma’am. Don’t you think you’re a little tall for a Japanese lady?”

Majima feels something grace his leg and he looks down to see one of Hiromi’s pink shoes rubbing itself gently up and down his thigh. She chuckles, “Astute observation Kiryu-san. In fact, I’m from America. Have you ever been?”

Shaking his head, Majima shrugs, “Can’t say I have, Hiromi-chan. In fact, I’ve never left Japan.”

Suddenly, the soft sensation of a foot rubbing his thigh is lost. Majima nearly lets out a displeased groan, choking it back at the last second. When he looks up to meet her face again, he is greeted with her leaning forward, her left hand supporting her and her right resting on the sofa in the spot her foot had previously been.

“You should make a point to go sometime, Kiryu-san,” Hiromi mutters, her voice barely above a sultry whisper. Her hand begins to trace up Majima’s leg, palming his thigh gently, “I’m sure you’d get lots of young American ladies on your arm, what with you being so big and handsome.”

This time, Majima isn’t able to hold back the blush on his cheeks. Here he was, sitting in a cabaret club with his long legged, scantily clad, foreign, assistant, and she’s fondling him like they’re lovers. It didn’t help that she was so close he could smell the mint of her gum from earlier still on her breath.

“Maybe I’d rather stay right here,” Majima counters, “Why go to America when I have a gorgeous American girlie on my arm right now?”

With a laugh, Hiromi’s fingers dig into the muscle on Majima’s thigh. With them so close to his manhood, Majima couldn’t help himself from jumping in shock. She really took his instruction to heart when he told her to get handsy. Swallowing, Majima wasn’t sure how much longer he could take this.

“You flatter me too much,” Hiromi laughs. Batting her eyelashes she smiles that predatory smile once more, “But… I can’t think of any other place in this world I’d rather be, either.”

Flattening her palm once more, she trails her touch up Majima’s leg, onto his toned stomach, feeling every contour of his chiseled torso. Taking her other hand, she hooks a finger underneath Majima’s chin, forcing him to look at her, also bringing him a bit closer.

“I’ve got everything I could possibly want right in front of me…” she whispers. Instinctively, Majima grabs her hip, desperately needing someplace to put his hands. This earns a light chuckle from Hiromi, “Touching already, are we? At least buy me a drink first.”

Looming over her shoulder, he waves to the club owner to bring something around. Turning his attention back to the woman in his arms, he nearly stutters, “So, Hiromi-chan, ya got any special guys in yer life? Can’t imagine a sexy little broad like you going to bed alone.”

The hungry gleam in his eye starts to grow, almost matching her own hungry gaze. She smiles, grazing her fingertips across Majima’s collarbone, “There might be one, and if he plays his cards right tonight…” The grip on his jaw tightens as she pulls his ear to her lips, “I might just go home with him.”

With fake shock, Majima opens his mouth wide, “That so? Well I hope I do, then. Wouldn’t want to pass up the opportunity to wake up next to ya.” His grip on her hip strengthens, his gloved fingers squeaking against the leather of her dress.

Continuing her motions on his chest, trailing over the edges of his tattoos, Hiromi asks coyly, “Do you have any ‘special’ women waiting for you at home, sir?”

Majima only chuckles, “Now, if I did, would I really be at a place like this, lettin’ you fawn all over me?” She only shrugs, “You might, I couldn’t possibly know.”

Shaking his head, Majima smirks, “Nah, I only got one lady in my life, and that’s you, darlin’.”

Hiromi chuckles, pulling away from Majima once more. The loss of her hands on his skin leaves him feeling lonely and cold. However, suddenly, he finds Hiromi spreading her legs, arcing one over Majima’s hips to straddle him.

Hovering her bum just above him, she grabs his shoulders, one of her knuckles outlining his jaw. She mumbles against his cheek, her breath causing the hairs on the back of his neck to raise, “Then I think we should enjoy our evening together, Kiryu-san.”

Kiryu-san.

Up until she said that, Majima had completely forgotten he was supposed to be training her for a night with Kiryu. Suddenly, the idea of having to watch her touch Kiryu and whisper into his ear the way she was doing to Majima right now seemed extremely unappealing.

Something inside him boiled at the thought of that. He wasn’t sure what it was but with the way her lips were grazing his jaw and the way her weight was pressing upon him, he wasn’t sure he could stomach watching her do all the same things to another man… a man that wasn’t him.

Leaning back, he meets her eyes, still dark, still hungry. Majima’s good eye darts to her lips, plump and covered in a hideous, gaudy pink shade that didn’t suit her at all. He was half tempted right then and there to kiss it all off, just to return her to her natural glory.

Still playing the game Majima had abandoned a long time ago, she smiles, “What do you say, Kiryu-san? Can’t we have some fun?”

Hearing her say his name again was just enough to pull Majima from his daze. Tapping her hip, that he previously had been gripping for dear life, he mutters to her, “Alright, get up, this isn’t gonna work.”

Hiromi instantly stops her motions, furrowing her brow at her boss, “Wait- what?”

Majima, with a bit of difficulty, and reluctance, pushes his assistant off him, sending her stumbling onto the velvet where she previously sat. “I said this ain’t gonna work, girly.” Standing up he glances over her body once more, taking in all the curves, “Kiryu ain’t gonna fall for all that. The guy may be a pervert but he ain’t stupid.”

Sitting up as fast as she can Hiromi shakes her head, “What do you mean? Was I doing something wrong? Maybe I could try again. Was it too much?” she sputters, desperate to please her boss.

Was it too much? Majima scoffs internally. She nearly was grinding against him and she had the audacity to ask if it was too much. Fact of the matter was, she was way too good at this, Kiryu wouldn’t have stood a chance. Five more minutes and Majima himself would have lost control.

Waving his hand to quell her blabbing, Majima shakes his head, still trying to pull himself back to reality. “Nah, it’s useless. We’ll have to think of something else. Yer just not cut out fer this, dollface,” he lies.

Hanging her head in defeat she sighs, “I’m sorry, Majima-san, I really was trying.”

Sighing himself, Majima feels a pang of guilt, “Don’t worry about it.” His eye falls to the hem of her dress that had ridden up a little too high. Finding it hard to breathe looking at her, he turns away, “Why don’t ya go get changed? That old thing is ugly as fuck anyway.”

Hiromi nods, standing up and smoothing her dress down, “Yes, sir,” she states. Before she turns to leave, she looks down at herself one more time. She chuckles once then glances to Majima, “It’s a shame no one will get to see it, though… In fact, it might actually look pretty good on you, Majima-san.”

At that comment, a lightbulb shines in Majima’s head. He darts his attention back to his assistant, eyeing the pink leather dress. “Say that again, Hiromi-chan,” he commands.

Her smile falls, face contorting in confusion again. She slowly repeats herself, “‘It might actually look pretty good on you?’”

Of course, Majima thought. If Hiromi couldn’t get Kiryu to fight him, Majima could. What in this world would piss Kiryu off more than embarrassing him in front of an entire cabaret club by having drinks with a yakuza in drag? And if that didn’t work, Majima knew he could think of something on the fly.

“Hiromi-chan,” Majima starts, “Yer a genius, I could kiss you right now.”

Her eyes go wide as her face goes dark with a blush, “You could... kiss me?”

Realizing what he just said, Majima nervously rubs the back of his neck, “Jeez, it’s just a figure of speech. I just mean... oh nevermind... come here a sec. I wanna see somethin’.”

Doing as she’s told, Hiromi walks up to her boss meekly. Majima moves to stand beside her, comparing his height and build to hers. Seeing how similar they were, he asks, “Say, Hiromi-chan, looks like we’re about the same size.”

She only nervously nods, “Why, yes, sir. I’m a rather large woman and, with no offense to you, you’re a rather slim man. It isn’t too far fetched to think we’d be a similar size.”

Grabbing her shoulders, Majima shoves her towards the back of the club, to the dressing room. “Great, now go take that thing off… and hand it to me when yer done.”

“Hand it to… you?”

***

After a long hour of doing his hair and makeup, Majima came out of the dressing room looking like a new man or in this case… woman.

While he may not have had the assets to fill the garment out, Hiromi couldn’t deny that it indeed fit him like a glove. Not to mention, the pink faux snakeskin looked so much better on him.

Arms crossed as she watches him prance around, fully drowning himself in his new character, Hiromi shakes her head in disbelief, “I had no idea this is what you had in mind as a backup plan but… color me impressed, sir. This might just be your greatest scheme yet.”

With a feminine chuckle Majima flutters his eyelashes, “Why, thank you Hiromi-chan.” Stopping for a moment, he looks into the mirror, a scowl on his face, “Just need a name to match this pretty face.”

Perking back up, he whips around, “I got one. Goromi.” Gesturing between them, he nods, “It’s my name and your name put together. What could be more perfect?”

Hiromi nods, chuckling, “Very clever, sir.” Turning her wrist over, she checks her watch, “Majima-san, it’s getting late, should I phone Kiryu-san and have him swing by?”

A manic grin spreads across Majima’s lips, the anticipation of violence making him giddy. “Do it. I think it’s time for Goromi to make her debut…”

#majima goro x reader #goro majima x reader #goromi #majima goro x ofc #goro majima x ofc #hope you all enjoy :)

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dirt-str1der · 2 years ago

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Kiryu and saejima will absolutely be talking to each other about sports and workout routines and majima will be shrivelling up crying and screaming because theyre too busy male bonding rather than sexy bonding with him (beating the shit out of each other)

#Yakuza loveblog #i think they should feed wll their spare and expored drugs to kiryu knowing full well hes going to start tripping extremely badly #like i think the three of them should hang out irresponsibly and not because saejima doesnt know what majima is up to. its because saejima #wants to see his good friend kiryu (who he hasnt known for long but respects him greatly and enjoys his company) trip balls and try to kill #both of them and now they have to play timed escape room with kiryu who opens doors with his punches #like they should watch tv together and its sports so kiryu is sitting between majima and saejima who are both too close to him and majima #has his hand on the inside of his thigh because hes not really invested in the show but he also doesnt want to distract kiryu from saejima #having kiryu all to himself is fun and all but he wants to share so bad because threes a party

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yozzers-abandoned · 4 years ago

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Why You Should Read The 5ds Manga :)

this is actually meant to just be an art archive blog but I feel like talking about this here anyways lets get to it. more spoilery stuff and my opinions under cut.

It’s only 65 chapters and has been thankfully archived on this reddit post

it’s VERY different from the anime and despite how different the story and characters are it’s really fun to follow along with what we’re given, distinct lack in cyberpunk but there's a lot more emphasis on the aztecs stuff!

Most of the signer dragons were gained through some sort of inheritance style duel which meant proving yourself to the dragon itself, and also emotionally bonding with it. Which is really neat....

The Godwin brothers have a MUCH more fleshed out reasoning for their actions and what they do just made so much more sense. Genuinely really fun villains, well Roman’s actions are a bit questionable at the start but by the end you kind of forget and just enjoy (er there is a weird bit with roman and his sister...personally i just ignored it... changed the context in my head)

Yusei is a bit more standoffish in the manga and is a huge adrenaline junkie. He still loves his friends!!! It’s just a bit more downplayed since we meet everyone in like a couple days he doesn’t get a solid bond with anybody but his pseudo brother, Sect.

Jack just has this sick little evil smile he does all the time he literally never stops looking evil I love manga Jack so much because of this. Also we actually get more backstory on Jack! He shares his backstory with Kiryu and they have a crazy past together. It’s a nice trade off... anime gives us a more fleshed out backstory on Yusei and Crow’s lives before team 5ds is formed while Jack and Kiryu get more in the manga!

Crow is really different from his anime counterpart. He hates kids (says so outwardly...but doesn’t really hate them he just sucks at interacting with kids), and is the painfully straight friend in the group. He’s one of the only characters that really interact with Yusei so if you wanted more Crow-Yusei stuff, the manga is for you.

Aki also changes a lot, she goes to an all girl school, is beloved by the student body and has a posse that follows her around. She has like rivalry tension with this manga-only character and Sherry it is so funny how different she is but her vibes are SO good. She has a Queen title to parallel Jack’s King title.

The Twins are evil for reasons for over half the manga but their characterizations are really fun. They have like a fairytale deck and turbo duel together as a cohesive unit. It’s so fucked up because its really unbalanced but their fights are pretty fun! Also Ruka is the callous mature twin and Rua is a crybaby that tries really hard to protect both of them.

Kiryu completely skips out on his team satisfaction characterization, he has the crash town characterization from when he’s a kid to an adult. I can’t say much because his involvement with Jack really should just be something read for yourself its so good. (or read under cut)

The classism is really downplayed in the manga, people get insulted like twice and that's where it ends. there's still a physical separation, but social boundaries don’t seem to exist between satellite and the city because letting a bunch of people with criminal markers wasn't seen as a big deal in the Fortune Cup (vs people’s reactions to just Yusei being there in the anime Fortune Cup)

Yusei’s lil brother goes through a whole thing that’s kind of similar to Judai’s Haou possession business. The armor even looks similar lol

KIRYU HAS SPENT ALMOST A DECADE TRYING TO REACH JACK AND SAVE HIM FROM HIMSELF. Their backstory involves them being lab rat kids who would duel each other constantly to see who would be fitting to inherit Red Dragon Archfiend. Jack leaves via winning and is meant to inherit the card but Kiryu kind of blows up the facility before Jack ever gets it... because he was trying to keep the other lab rat kids safe but they have crazy history or whatever.... their duel was my favorite.

Crow and Yusei’s dynamic in the manga is genuinely so funny Crow just randomly drops in like “hey hey hey you’re cool, I’m cool, lets be buddies” *punts yusei’s little brother out of the way” and Yusei’s response is, “huh, okay!”

Sniffling, the Godwin brothers got it so good in the manga like it’s such an interesting take on their story. They’re from like 5000 years ago, and were adopted by this duel priestess who got taken over by an ancient dark god or something. The entire plot is caused by their family feud that was a total misunderstanding and accident where Roman had to kill their sister and Rex thought his brother murdered his sister for no reason and tries to kill HIM but ends up killing his sister as well its a WHOLE thing okay but trust me it’s better than what the anime gave us

THERES REALLY CUTE OMAKES BETWEEN THE CHARACTERS!! LIKE THE SIGNERS GOING TO THE BEACH, PLAYING CARD GAMES JUST FOR FUN!!! Theres also little valentines day stuff and I really love the one where Kiryu holds out the little marshmallow monster at you and the mangaka is like: “I FUCKED UP I DIDN’T REALIZE WHAT GIVING A MASHMALLOW MEANT IM SO SORRY KIRYU FANS!!!”

#ygo #yugioh #yugioh 5ds #5ds manga #not art

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linkspooky · 4 years ago

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Another Haikyuu ask! (Hope you haven't answered this one yet. XD) Which are your favorite ships and favorite platonic relationships? :3

I’m not sure about my favorite platonic relationship I’ll have to think on that more. However, I can do a meta on my absolute favorite ship in the series which is Bokuto and Akaashi. Everything I love about the ship is in the story itself. I think Furudate explains their dynamic perfectly. Let’s explore them some more under the cut.

1. We are the Main Characters of This World

What makes the relationship work so well is how much Bokuto and Akaashi complement each other, and contribute to each other’s development without really ever becoming codependent. They are two separate people with two seperate lives. They are total opposites. Yet, they’re kind of the same person.

One of Bokuto’s central flaws is how much of a weirdo he is. His eccentricities make him more needy than other people, more demanding, harder to deal with, harder to figure out. Bokuto has these dual aspirations to stand out more than anybody else (because he’s a bit of a diva), but also to have people surrounding him who can just keep up with him, because the reason his eccentricities are a flaw that hold him back is because his behavior can sometimes isolate him, or drive other people away.

Bokuto is uniquely driven, and he doesn’t find a lot of people who naturally share that drive. Bokuto can be a little confusing, but often people don’t really make the effort to try to understand him, or keep up with him. Bokuto seems like a big weirdo, but he’s actually quite serious and focused it’s just what he’s focused on is different than what everybody else focuses on.

Bokuto’s foiling with Kiryu is just that. Kiryu can’t really understand Bokuto so he kind of projects this false image onto him. That’s why he can’t overcome him at all or even face against him in the tournament. But, sometimes Bokuto’s own friends and teammates will do that too because they can’t keep up with him.

Bokuto’s flashback shows us, he sort of puts all of himself into the things he’s serious about. People who don’t understand that get left behind. So, what Bokuto both respects and needs in a person is someone who can put all of themselves into something and disappear into it, to take things seriously the way he does. Bokuto says he’s just having fun but nobody takes more fun seriously than him. He wants someone who puts their best effort into keeping up with him.

Which is why Bokuto so uniquely values Akaashi. On the outside Akaashi just looks like a normal person. He’s not a star setter like Oikawa, or Kageyama. He’s not someone who is playing volleyball in highschool who is aiming to be a professional or even in the top 5 like Bokuto. However, even though Akaashi is not a star player, when he does something he puts all of himself into what he does in the exact same way that Bokuto does.

These are the two things which are emphasized in Akaashi. He may not be a star player. He may not be an extraordinary talent. Yet, he always overanalyzes every situation, and puts a tremendous pressure on himself to give all of himself to the team and Bokuto.

On the outside they’re opposites. Bokuto is a star and Akaashi is just a normal person. Bokuto is the center of attention, and Akaashi is someone who quietly drifts to the side. Bokuto is high maintennance and Akaashi is low maintennance. Bokuto is loud and extroverted, Akaashi is quietly and extremely introverted.

However, inside they are incredibly similiar because they both put this tremendous pressure on themselves. Akaashi at first views himself as a star player, but when he meets Bokuto he starts to see himself as more ordinary.

I think much like Bokuto’s, Akaashi is also someone attention hungry, and someone who wants to stand out and be important he just never externalizes that desire because Akaashi keeps everything inside of himself.

However, when he met Bokuto he didn’t really lose his place as a star. He didn’t suddenly become a normal person. When he found Bokuto he found a place where not only he was needed, but his passion was needed, and his dedication meant something to someone else. He actually started to care about volleyball more because he felt like his efforts were being rewarded. That’s why he put so much focus on Bokuto’s compliments. Akaashi isn’t a star player, but he’s Bokuto’s star.

The Fukurodani even comment on Akaashi as a secret weirdo. Inside he’s a lot like Bokuto. He has the same sense of showmanship, the same desire to stand out, and he wants someone who puts as much effort into things as he himself puts in. So, Akaashi may lack that star quality, he might not stand out, but he still puts all of himself into what he does and Bokuto sees that, and recognizes it as a special quality of Akaashi’s. Which in turn makes Akaashi feel recognized.

But it’s not just Bokuto and Akaashi needing each other. The two of them work well together. Bokuto works better with people who will put the effort into keeping up with him. Akaashi works better with people who recognize him and his efforts when he’s so low key about everything.

They’re internally very similiar so Bokuto knows Akaashi pretty well. That’s part of why Akaashi feels so much from Bokuto’s praise, because he feels like Bokuto knows him. He feels recognized. More than that. Akaashi is a drama queen the same way Bokuto is. It’s just Bokuto externalizes all of it, and Akaashi keeps it inside.

It’s not a one way relationship. It’s not Bokuto being the baby and Akaashi being his caretaker. When Bokuto sees Akaashi break down, not only does Bokuto uniquely undertand the reasons why Akaashi is breaking down the same way that Akaashi puts so much effort into understanding Bokuto, but also Bokuto will perform better to pick up the slack because that’s what Akaashi is always doing to him. Neither of them ever really baby each other, because both of them expect so much out of the other. They’re always lookig at each other.

When Akaashi and Bokuto are together they’re both stars. Even though to everybody else it looks like Akaashi is a normal person, and Bokuto is a star player. Akaashi’s efforts mean so much to Bokuto, that they end up both uplifting each other to star status. They are the stars of this world.

#mikotofubar #hq meta #haikyu #haikyu!!#bokuto koutarou #kotarou bokuto #bokuto kotaro #kotaro bokuto #akaashi keiji #keiji akaashi #metasks #spooky speaks

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rhetorical-ink · 4 years ago

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Haikyuu!! Observations: Ushijima x Sakusa, Ft. Komori and Tendo

**SPOILERS FOR ANIME ONLY’S BELOW**

Okay, am I about to dive into a lengthy post about why UshiSaku may be endgame in Haikyuu!! and how Tendo may be the best wing man for it all?

Uhm, yes. Yes, I am, so bear with me.

I’ve been stewing on this for a while now, so there’s a lot to cover in this post. Let’s dive in!

Ushijima and Sakusa’s Parallels

Okay, first things’s first -- let’s talk about Ushijima, Sakusa, and the parallels the Manga has made with them. Starting with their views of Shoyo Hinata. Let’s begin with Ushijima. While the stereotypical characterization of Ushijima is to make him completely stoic and unfeeling, Ushijima DOES have emotional responses, especially in the manga -- for example, his reaction on the court to Hinata is MUCH stronger than I believe the anime shows:

This is developed further in the Shiratorizawa vs. Karasuno match -- as Ushijima struggles with the fact that Hinata is not a skilled player -- he just has natural athleticism and his actions are half “luck” and half the gutsy collaboration of his actions alongside the “reckless” and “wild” other players of Karasuno.

This idea of “luck,” interestingly enough, will come back with Ushijima nearly 200 chapters later...but we do establish here, that Ushijima is the type of person that admires and respects strength, and efforts that are backed by natural talent and disciplined training. It’s only natural that Hinata frustrates him, because at this point in the manga, Hinata and “disciplined training” aren’t exactly words that go together (more on that below).

Verrry similarly, Sakusa has no room for people who lack discipline, though his “discipline” relates more to personal health than just physical preparation for a game. This comes in direct focus in a flashback during the Black Jackal vs Adlers game, when it shows Sakusa first meeting Hinata. Unlike Ushijima, it doesn’t seem like he “hates” Hinata, just has absolutely no desire to be around someone that lets themselves get sick...and he only allows himself to be open to Hinata as a teammate after Hinata expresses that he has indeed grown up since High School.

The manga also points to parallels of how they handle defeat, showing both Ushijima remaining proud and quiet after their loss to Karasuno, only quietly declaring to Hinata and Kageyama that he would “beat” them again --

While with Sakusa, he’s more vocal in his musings about losing, in Chapter 368 stating that it would hurt more to be pitied, especially when you did all you could do, and still suffered a defeat. Itachiyama losing their setter could be viewed as “bad luck” in the final set, but Sakusa points to luck not having so much bearing as just it being the result of fate and unstoppable forces in the moment. Ever the realist, Sakusa...(again, more on “luck” below).

Sakusa objectively presents the fact that they lost in very simplistic, albeit nihilistic terms, and similarly, Ushijima doesn’t shy away from using objective information and putting things in simplistic terms without hyperbole. This can be seen through his conversation with Goshiki below.

Ushijima and Sakusa’s “Type”

So, if we’re going to even possibly ship these characters together...does it work? It becomes clear, through the manga and anime, though that both Ushijima and Sakusa admire players who are powerful, can present a legitimate challenge to them, and therefore spurn them to become stronger players, too.

Both Ushijima and Sakusa are portrayed as incredibly strong right out the gate in the manga, which makes sense as both are in the Top Three Aces for high school volleyball. However, unlike Kiryu (the #2 Ace that is depicted as more down-to-earth, friendly, compassionate, and relatable to our other protagonists), both Sakusa and Ushijima have “colossal protagonist” vibes -- seeming larger than life, incredibly stoic, and emotionally distant to others on their team, even if they are around them constantly.

And then, concerning Sakusa...there’s the infamous Chapter 394.

If anything has established what Sakusa’s “Type” would be, it would be these two panels. Ushijima is checking off all of the boxes for Sakusa: Understands personal hygiene? Check. Someone offering Sakusa a challenge as a competitor, and motivating him to keep moving forward and practicing? Check!

Chapter 394 answers many questions, and points us to the observation of:

Sakusa’s “Pining”

Furudate, we see Sakusa lazer-focused on Ushijima from the other side of the court...you’re not fooling us:

Hey, remember where the mystery of Sakusa and Ushijima’s relationship began? Waaaaay back, after the Shiratorizawa match, after the Fukurodani/Nekoma matches; at the start of the National Japan training camp that Kageyama attended in Chapter 209.

A camp, where it was noted by Karasuno, that Ushijima had been the chosen representative of their prefecture for at least the last year.

And who is the first person Kageyama runs into at this camp?

And the first thing Sakusa states isn’t a proper greeting, it’s not about how they beat Shiratorizawa...it’s how the team “somehow” beat WAKATOSHI-KUN.

The next time we get interactions from Sakusa, he immediately jumps on the offensive, DEMANDING to know who the player was that led to Shiratorizawa’s downfall:

It’s interesting that Kageyama implies the “entire” team was responsible for Ushijima’s defeat on the page before this one below, but of course, Kiyoomi does not pick up on this. Then, leave it to Komori to come in with the save. Again, tying Kiyoomi to being a “realist,” which will come into play below.

So, it isn’t until Chapter 394 that we learn about Sakusa’s long-standing history of playing Ushijima in various matches, developing this competitive rivalry with him that has been going on since middle school. Ushijima is literally the one obstacle that he finds himself unable to surpass; the one piece of the puzzle he can’t put into place yet.

It’s no wonder the fact that someone defeated him irked him so much.

We get a little more context from Komori on Sakusa and Ushijima’s rivalry, and more on the flashback on their Nationals loss which will tie into my last point.

Motoya Komori

I would be remiss not to bring up Motoya Kamori’s role in all this.

I think it’s verrrrrry interesting the route Furudate chose with Komori, specifically in revealing that he’s Kiyoomi’s cousin.

This makes a LOT of sense, considering how closed off and antisocial Sakusa is. It justifies not only why Komori is so keen to stick by Sakusa’s side, despite his seeming apathy towards his presence, but it also justifies why Kiyoomi even sticks with Komori: he really doesn’t have a choice. Komori’s family.

Side Note: Ever get the impression that Komori and Kageyama could be a fun friendship/pairing? I mean, the top setter and top libero? Komori seems genuinely friendly with Kageyama, both at the training camp and when they see each other at Nationals, commenting on Sakusa being out of his element...

...Juuuuust a crack pairing side note! Spread the word! Now, back to the post!

Komori becomes our main expositor about Sakusa in Chapter 394, noting how osbsessive compulsive he is, especially in finishing anything he starts. It’s just an odd choice for me, to make Komori his cousin. True, it goes against the stereotype that all family HAS to look or act like each other, and it does make sense to why their friendship is so strong.

It’s just a move that Furudate hasn’t pulled the entire manga, and it comes right at the end of the series...and it disrupts Furudate’s tactic of giving us characters in “pairs” that, as some reactors have noted, are ripe for instant shipping.

Coincidentally, right as we start to make connections between Sakusa and Ushijima. It’s almost as if Furudate sank the Komori x Sakusa ship with revealing their relationship, just in time to reveal the answer to our mystery of why Sakusa refers to Ushijima in such a familiar way...and let that ship sail. How poetic.

Also, if you wanted to know WHY Komori is so good at being a libero, look at this page below. I mean, if YOU had to practice non-stop with the Top Ace in the nation, receiving his spikes, you can only imagine that you’d be amazing at the sport.

I also like how this page points out how, despite Sakusa also having a physical trait that makes him stand out -- like Ushijima -- in contrast, it seems Sakusa’s “oddity” was instantly accepted among his peers and he didn’t face much resistance to it. Of course, this also could be because Komori notes Sakusa wasn’t close with his “much older” and “much busier” family.

Tendo’s Friendship

And, tying this all together, of course, is Tendo’s involvement.

I love chapter 176 and this part of the anime, where we actually get backstory on Ushijima. I love that Tendo is pretty much his “true” friend in this series, as he actually is one of the few at Shiratorizawa to take the time to ask questions and get to know Ushijima.

Chapter 176 is a big source of material for people shipping Tendo and Ushijima together, and I’ll be honest -- until Sakusa came into the picture, I was right there with you all. Tendo shows genuine concern and sincerity in his conversations with Ushijima off the court, and on the court, he’s practically the ONLY character on Shiratorizawa’s team, and in the whole manga (other than Oikawa) that calls Ushijima out and isn’t afraid to tease him.

Of course, in the end, Tendo is just as impressed and in awe of Ushijima’s raw athletic talent. It’s likely this page that fuels a lot of the ship:

And, even later on, Ushijima borrows Tendo’s words to reveal to the team how much he’s enjoying the match, much to their surprise and Tendo’s delight.

So yes, Chapter 176 I believe started the UshiTen ship, and it does become more compounded in the infamous “Boy Ball Arc” before Spring Nationals, as we learn in Chapter 210 about Tendo and Ushijima’s friendship off the court in more detail; one example being them sharing Shonen Jump magazines...

...and another being that they hang out during the practice matches, with Tendo being pretty much the only one talking to Ushijima in a casual setting.

I’d like to point out that while some see this in Chapter 214 below as a “ship” moment, I did start to question if the two were just friends when Tendo likens Ushijima to a “monster” like Hinata and Kageyama. To me, this banter reveals that Tendo, ironically referred to as a monster himself, doesn’t put himself in the same league or category as Ushijima. This is also reflected in how Tendo notes he’s not pursuing volleyball after high school, but hopes that Ushijima ends up becoming famous and interviews him as his best friend.

And this leads to the final point, which I think cements Tendo’s status as Ushijima’s best friend...but nothing more. Maybe. Perhaps. We’ll see.

We get the reveal in Chapter 395 that during Ushijima’s first few years post-high school, he didn’t constantly keep in contact with Tendo. We know this because Ushijima hasn’t mentioned his trip to the United States to Tendo, which had happened three months prior. So some time has passed there.

Of course, that doesn’t mean Tendo hasn’t kept caught up on Ushijima’s Pro Volleyball career, as that’s his reason for calling Ushijima in the first place.

I like that Tendo offers Ushijima advice and genuinely asks how his family is doing, specifically his father, whom Ushijima went overseas to visit with his father. Even if it has been a while since they’ve talked, you can tell that they are close enough friends that everything seems to pick right back up where it left off for them, which is true for many real-life friendships, and I appreciate Furudate giving us that here, and expanded on more years later, below.

I love this page of Chapter 402. Especially Shiribu’s little crush of Ushijima, as he “shhh”’s Semi.

Not only because it reverses Tendo’s original prophecy that it would be himself interviewed as the famous Ushijima’s friend, but also that it cements their friendship. I mean, Ushijima flew to PARIS for the interview. I know that in itself could be considered shipper fodder, but the fact that they identify as best friends...it just fits them so well. And I could see Tendo talking with Ushijima on late night phone calls to talk him through his dating, or lack thereof, woes.

Also, let it be known these men are the most stylish in Haikyuu!! They should work with Asahi.

Also, also, Tendo’s favorite food is chocolate ice cream. That should have been all the foreshadowing we needed for his future career, right? ^^

Black Jackals vs Adlers

So, that leaves us with the meat of the UshiSaku ship: the Adlers vs Black Jackals match, and the final chapter 402. In Chapter 394, we establish Sakusa’s backstory and the potential pining he’s done for Ushijima the last ten years of his life, starting with this page:

Again, tying back to being “lucky.” I like that despite how Ushijima couldn’t comprehend where Hinata attained all of his athleticism and lamented how half of his plays were just “lucky” and a combined effort of him and his teammates, in the end, Ushijima admits here that he himself is rather “lucky” he won the luck of the draw athletically and was born with a particular trait that made him excel in the game (that being lefthanded). Sakusa, incidentally, falls into the same category, though he doesn’t quite admit it as such.

I like that we see these two actually interacting side-by-side, as equals, a visual I think Furudate designs intentionally. Unlike Tendo, who doesn’t situation himself in the same realm as Ushijima, Sakusa positions himself right in the same sphere, of the “Monster Generation.”

By the end of Chapter 394, Sakusa reflects on his own “luck.” In how he is lucky to have been given life -- reflected with a picture of Komori, his family -- to have met people -- reflected by Ushijima specifically -- and to still be playing volleyball -- reflected by his old high school setter, whom went on to play in the Division 1 league after his own injury. His views of “luck” are all represented in ideally, the people that mean most to him...and Ushijima is one of them.

Sakusa also describes his “Ideal Last Game,” which could be represented by the game being played in that moment. It’s beautiful that someone who is so germaphobic and hyper-obsessive with controlling the atmosphere around him (who he comes in contact with, how he finishes everything he starts), is also so content and at ease on a volleyball court, where nothing is in his control but his own body and the contact he makes with the ball. And it also helps that he’s surrounded by amazing players, like Ushijima, here, to keep him rising to the next challenge --

-- which ends up coming his way in the very next Chapter, as Ushijima (coincidentally right after Sakusa) has his “moment” of reflection and growth put on display. Of course, Sakusa isn’t “finished” with catching up to Ushijima yet, as his cousin snidely reminds him with a laugh, here. I love that we see Ushijima smile, though, at Sakusa’s effort.

Speaking of “Effort,” that ties into later in Chapter 400, when we have Sakusa’s own high school banner for Itachiyama put on display. It’s a simple motto, that goes alongside Shiratorizawa’s in “Be Strong.” I also like here, that in contrast to Chapter 395, when Ushijima was smiling at Sakusa, who couldn’t bump his spike, in Chapter 400, we have Sakusa getting the spin off of Ushijima’s hand, and as he lands, he gives a little smirk to a disgruntled Ushijima.

LITERALLY, these two have only truly smiled during a game at each other. Sure, each have scowled and showed irritation and drive towards facing opponents, but have we seen them “smile” at another in the midst of a game? Not really, unless you count Sakusa getting that service ace before Atsumu Miya in this same game...

Speaking of Atsumu Miya, we’ll talk about him a little bit below. But for now, I like that Sakusa describes that there’s no “room for anything that disgusts me” on the court in a pro volleyball game. Everyone is at their fullest potential and peak physical condition, just like Sakusa, and they all have worked diligently to get to that position.

We don’t get much other UshiSaku crumbs post Chapter 400, although, I would like to point out that Furudate, when drawing the National Japan Olympic Team, placed these two right next to each other. You know...for no reason, I’m sure.

And yes, I would be remiss not to mention this tiny panel -- the last we see of Sakusa or Ushijima or Atsumu Miya, I believe -- as it’s Sakusa that digs up Oikawa’s insane serve. I just LOVE the smile that Ushijima has here as Sakusa digs it. Because unlike Sakusa and Atsumu Miya, Ushijima knows exactly what kind of player Oikawa was in the past, and no doubt knows the kind of plays he could pull off...so I’d imagine he’s proud that his teammate dug up this serve right off the bat.

I know there are a lot of people that ship AtsuSaku, and I won’t deny you that Furudate has laid out crumbs for them as well...but I sort of view Miya with Sakusa the same way I view Tendo with Ushijima at the end of the day: as best friends. I definitely think that there is a hilarious friendship angle with Sakusa and Atsumu Miya -- but I think it’s Ushijima that is the player Sakusa is always going to try and beat and surpass...you could argue, very similar to the dynamic between Hinata and Kageyama in their rivalry...albeit, I think Sakusa’s hints more deliberately at something more...but that’s just my opinion.

In the end, I find it interesting the decisions Furudate makes to show us these characters and specific interactions at the end of the series; specifically, showing Ushijima and Sakusa’s backstories back-to-back, and with all the little glances and panels of them near or looking towards one another. But hey, shippers will see what shippers want to see, right?

I do think that Komori’s panel here in Chapter 394 is pretty telling, though:

Sakusa has identified Ushijima as someone he wants to beat and surpass, and he’s not going to stop until he does. And if there are feelings beyond that...well...he’s not going to stop until “he’s satisfied” with that, either.

At least, according to Chapter 378, Ushijima’s already got his flu shot.

I hope you all enjoyed this little dive into this bizarre pairing in Haikyuu!! I’ve wanted to break this apart for a while, and now that the manga is over, I hope to do more of these types of posts with other pairings. Until next time, we can celebrate the ship that is UshiSaku (and KomoYama/KageMori -- pass it on!) with fan fiction and fan art to our heart’s content! ^^

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ygo5dsmonth2020 · 5 years ago

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YU-GI-OH! 5DS MONTH 2020

We’re back! It’s that time of the year! The mods are excited to announce this year’s themes for YU-GI-OH! 5DS MONTH 2020.

Bored during quarantine? Say no more. We hope you join in this year!

Day 1 (July 7th): Stardust Acceleration

Accelerate! We’re kicking off into overdrive by starting this month off with our hero of the hour! Rev it up by showing us how YOU celebrate Yusei Fudo’s birthday!

Day 2 (July 8th): Sink or Sail

As good captains, we all have a ship we’d set sail on. Which is yours?

Day 3 (July 9th): Story to Story

Our tale begins with a fast-paced story that takes us through the city’s tournament with the Fortune Cup, the Satellite’s peril with the Dark Signer’s, to Crash Town, to once again Neo Domino City’s action with the World Racing Grand Prix to the conclusion with the Ark Cradle. Which arc was your favorite?

Day 4 (July 10th): Songs to Fix a D-Wheel To

Let the music play! Do you have a playlist you wanna share? It can be for a character, a ship, an overall arc, or a fanfiction! Come on Eileen, show us what you got!

Day 5 (July 11th): Bloom of the Black Rose

Pitch dark flower, set to bloom! Today we celebrate the Black Rose, Aki Izayoi! How will you choose to celebrate our loyal psychic?

Day 6 (July 12th): As Above, So Below

Heaven or hell. Signers or Dark Signers. The Crimson Dragon vs the Earthbound Immortals. Whose side are you on?

Day 7 (July 13th): This Town Ain’t Big Enough

Yeehaw! Bring out your ponchos, set your guns to duel, and show us what all Satisfaction Town has to bring? Is it a character? The city itself? A duel? Satisfy us!

Day 8 (July 14th): Power Play

Further Turbo Dueling King, the Master of Faster, lover of ramen, and one hell of a (jack)ass. Today we’re celebrating the King Himself: Jack Atlas!

Day 9 (July 15th): Fly Your Colors

The World Racing Grand Prix! Today is all about Teams, whether it be Team 5ds, Team Unicorn, or even somewhere out of the WRGP- Like Team Satisfaction! Which Team are you on?

Day 10 (July 16th): Free Day I/Introduction Day

Our first free day! Use this day to either introduce yourself to the crowd or feel free to leave it open! It’s up to you!

Day 11 (July 17th): Fly, Blackbird!

This Satellite bird is our man of the hour! Our favorite hardworking, lovable, mother hen for kids, and unbeatable duelist, but what else is there? Show us! Give your love for Crow Hogan!

Day 12 (July 18th): Star-Crossed Lovers

Have you ever wanted to see the cast of Yu-Gi-Oh 5ds paired up with someone from another show entirely? Wanna see Yusei Fudo in a relationship with Dawn from Pokemon? Now’s your chance! Anything is possible today!

Day 13 (July 19th): Flip the Script

We all have a favorite alternative universe we’d like to see Team 5ds in. Whether it be a coffee shop, college, or maybe even a glimpse of the timeline Z-ONE came from! Anything is on the table for this day!

Day 14 (July 20th): Words Have Power

Like the Heart of the Cards, there are many signature catchphrases within the world of 5ds. What’s your favorite quote?

Day 15 (July 21st): Spirit World Walker

The holy light of protection, now cross and become eternal life! She may be small, but she sure is mighty! Bow down to the protector of the Spirit World- Rua/Luna! Today’s day is all about her!

Day 16 (July 22nd): Me and My OC

Most of us out there think of an original character to place into the world of 5ds. For many of us, it’s the start of friendships, self-journeys, or just fun and self-exploration into another world! Show us your OC today!

Day 17 (July 23rd): Polar Opposites

The modern-day story of light vs dark. A tale of contrasts. Ying-Yang. What two opposites do you want to showcase?

Day 18 (July 24th): Heart of the Dragon

Envoy of love and justice! This energetic machinist has as big of a punch as his heart! Today is all about Rua/Leo!

Day 19 (July 25th): Flex Your Canon

We all have our different headcanons about the characters or story. What are yours? It can be anything from changing canon to implementing your own ideas!

Day 20 (July 26th): Free Day II/Support Fellow Creators

Our second free day! You can use this day to submit whatever you wish, or you can shout out your favorite artist, fanfiction author, or just your favorite character! Give someone else some well-deserved love.

Day 21 (July 27th). Spin the Wheel, Throw a Dart

Story tropes! This could be anything from a day on the beach, a sleepover episode, or anything in between! What trope do you wish to see in the world of Yu-Gi-Oh 5ds?

Day 22 (July 28th): Tech Genius

The android with a supercomputer for a brain, Bruno stole our hearts as Antimony and continued until the bitter end. Today’s day is all about Bruno!

Day 23 (July 29th): Bad Guy Syndrome

The series had its swarm of enemies: whether it be Divine, Ruder/Roman, Rex, or Z-ONE. Which is your favorite?

Day 24 (July 30th): We’re Here Too!

Out of all the characters in the entire series, who do you feel is under-appreciated, or deserves more attention? Show us!

Day 25 (July 31st): Dead Guy Walking

Former Dark Signer, leader of Team Satisfaction/The Enforcers, and a brooding man looking for some satisfaction. Today’s day is all about Kalin Kessler/Kyosuke Kiryu!

Day 26 (August 1st): In the Z-ONE

Z-ONE is the man behind the madness. What kind of man do you think he is? A man trying to save the world, or destroy it? Tell us!

Day 27 (August 2nd): Pain vs Puff Pieces

Angst vs Fluff. Do you prefer a fairytale ending or a bittersweet tragedy? Pick one and show off!

Day 28 (August 3rd): Tale of Two Stories

We now have seven Yu-Gi-Oh series! What would happen if one of our heroes from Team 5ds happened to meet someone from the past, or perhaps the future? Whether you prefer to rev it up, high five the sky, or get your game on, show us what you got!

Day 29 (August 4th): You Can See Them Too?

The world of the Duel Monsters is filled to the brim with spirits. Showcase either your favorite duel monster or a moment within the Spirit World!

Day 30 (August 5th): Free Day III

Our last free day! Share with us anything your heart desires!

Day 31 (August 6th): Going My Way!

Today is the last day, but we still have the road to tomorrow. What does the future hold?

#yugioh #ygo #yugioh 5ds #ygo 5ds #ygo5ds #yugioh5ds #5ds #yusei #aki #ygo5dsmonth2020 #jack atlas #yusei fudo

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dreamwatchpro-wrestling · 3 years ago

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Dreamwatch: REMember (Match 1)

Elimination 8-Man Tag Match: Takaya Kiryu/Johnny McLaren/Katsu Himuro/Yamato Ryukawa vs Shota Inaba/Keiichiro Asakawa/Ewan Jacobs/Tatsuya Mido (Click here to watch!)

We start off this historic show with a huge tag match! Four of Dreamwatch's most promising talents face off against a litany of mystery opponents! Who knows what could happen in this match? Who will stand out?!

Short answer: Everyone. Everyone stood out. From the first minute of the match we knew we were in for a wild night when MMA fighter Shota Inaba decided to try and burn Ryukawa with fire! Ryukawa has faced off against Carlos Gomez in the past so he was more prepared for something like this than expected, ducking out the way despite being visibly shaken. From there the match was chaotic and frenetic, while simultaneously showing off the best qualities of every participant. Ryukawa's strategy, McLaren's striking prowess, Kiryu's speed, and Himuro's overwhelming intensity were all on full display as if they hadn't been on a hiatus at all! The enemy team was not willing to be stood up, though, as Tatsuya Mido provided the power and intensity of the team, even seeming to match Himuro's at times! Along with him was the heart and explosiveness of Keiichiro Asakawa. These two have only shown us Dreamwatch fans a glimpse of what they can do, but they did look promising out there! Ewan Jacobs looked like he came to do business, getting in the ring and hitting straightforward world-class punches like only a top-level MMA fighter can. Along with him was... "MMA fighter" Shota Inaba, who shocked everyone with his antics! Perhaps you expected a shoot fighter like Jacobs, but instead Inaba's most notable moments were breathing fire and pulling out a scythe to cut Himuro and bust him open! A wildcard to say the least!

As the match rolled on, the opposing team did well and even got off two eliminations, but the Dreamwatch team was too solid all the way through to take a loss here. Team Dreamwatch takes the victory in a chaotic and very fun opening match!

-POST MATCH COMMENTS-

*Ryukawa, Kiryu, and Himuro share a long, uncomfortable look at each other. Himuro then glances over to McLaren and the two share a look. There is no talking for a significant amount of time*

Himuro: *shoving Kiru and Ryukawa out of the way to get closer to the camera* This is the first show back and this is what you give to me. Those opponents... One of them tried to make me bleed to make a name for himself. He's an embarrassment. My heart pumps, and I have more heart than his frail body can muster. He made me bleed with his dulled tools, but I'd grind him into the ground with my bare hands. Also that shitty white-haired guy? He tried to be big and bad and he got embarrassed. Get these pieces of shit out of my ring and don't invite them back. Dreamwatch isn't a game, Dreamwatch isn't big paychecks. Dreamwatch is me. Don't step to the strongest if you're not strong. I'm done here. *Shoves his teammates out of the way to walk off-screen*

Takaya Kiryu: One legend, seven losers. This ain't a welcome party in my book. Let's not forget that I'm the most successful wrestler in Dreamwatch, I've beaten one of the most successful wrestlers in this business is under ten minutes, and yet I'm being put on the same level with the biggest disappointments in this company, facing a comedy act of a team. Gonna need a bit more love around here, considering I'm literally carrying the company on my back. I better be getting paid more than Ryukawa, at least. *Kiryu prepares to take his leave before stopping and turning to McLaren* Also... Johnny, right? I noticed the orange gear. You looking for my attention? Now that we're back, show me what you can do, yeah? I'm watching. *Kiryu takes his exit*

McLaren: I need new gear...

Yamato Ryukawa: We need to step it up now that we're back! My last big match resulted in a loss that cost me in a big way, and it seems like they're trying to replace us with... Whatever those guys were *laughs* It didn't work though, even though admittedly that Keiichiro guy... I've heard of him and he was pretty strong. Mido too... Regardless, I need to change my focus. There's still a struggle for supremacy in Dreamwatch, and no offense to you Johnny, I'm the only one that can stand at the top by the end of this. Now that I managed to avoid having my hair burned off of my head for the second time, I'll at least look good when I get there.

Johnny McLaren: Its good to be back everybody! I was getting ready to fight in the Blood Crown tournament before the hiatus, and I'm assuming that that's still going on, and the look on Ryukawa's face tells me he forgot...

Yamato Ryukawa: Sorry!

Johnny McLaren: I hope you've been working on those leg locks. I don't want to have a rival that's lost a step. No point in beating you then. Anyway, now that Dreamwatch is back its time to begin the long crawl. When I first got here, people didn't think much of me, and during the hiatus I meditated and thought back on how things went, and I can tell I'm in the right direction. Dreamwatch fans, get loud! Johnny's back baby!

Tatsuya Mido: Dreamwatch, huh... They ain't as tough as all the hype makes them seem. That hiatus makes it seem like you boys and girls are all crumbling under your own weight. Perfect opportunity for someone like me to swoop in and take over the whole operation. You need someone strong running things here. Invite me back, Dreamwatch. I dare you.

Shota Inaba: Look what I did to your boy, Dreamwatch! Look what I did to him! That win means nothing, that wasn't a real fight, but I let a present for that bitch! *holds up the sickle he used in the match to cut Himuro* A little souvenir from the baddest fighter on Earth! Nobody can touch me! If I see that tall fucker again I'll carve his ass up! See me one on one, boy!

Ewan Jacobs: That guy's an idiot but I like his energy! Anyway you already know who I am and if you don't you need to wake up and watch some world-class fighters instead of the bums you got here. It's Ewan Jacobs, the most infamous man in sports. Pro wrestling rules are dumb. Over the top rope eliminations, three second pins... idiotic rules for idiotic people and their low-life fans. Pro Wrestling is the most pathetic-

Keiichiro Asakawa: *Shoves Jacobs to the ground* Oy! Watch your damn mouth!

*Jacobs Lunges at Asakawa, and a brawl ensues backstage, with both men having to be separated from each other and escorted out of the building. A distant "I'll kill you!" is heard from Jacobs*

#Dreamwatch Pro Wrestling #Dreamwatch: REMember #Yamato Ryukawa #Katsu Himuro #Takaya Kiryu #Johnny McLaren #Shota Inaba #Ewan Jacobs #Keiichiro Asakawa #Tatsuya Mido #Dreamwatch 9.19.21

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shinadog · 4 years ago

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Oh, hey, forgot to post this here - Mob Part 3 is up (and part 4 is on its way).

Summary : Something happened after Haruka’s concert. (PART 2) (AO3 Link)

3 - BLAME

Eventually, people left him alone.

They had tried their best, but since he had refused their help, they decided to give him some space. He was more than alright with that. Not that "alright" could ever be a word he would use to describe himself. Not anymore.

He felt numb. Disconnected from it all.

All the events of the past few days - the concert, the crowd, the call he received in the middle of that fateful night, the sleepless nights where he almost choked because he couldn't stop crying, the funeral... He remembered living those things, but when he thought about them, he felt like a spectator watching them from afar. Not an actor, but a powerless observer, a blurry silhouette who was barely floating above those horrible scenes.

On his good days, the days where he was more or less aware of his surroundings, the awful numbness of loss was replaced by a burning anger. On those days, he started to think about the people he blamed.

He had managed to get his hands on an impressive number of newspapers and magazines. The hyenas who worked for those rags must have had a field day with this disaster - a lot of ink has been spilled over this, and it didn't look like it was going to stop anytime soon. Good. Every new article fueled his anger, made something warm shake his numb, freezing body.

Sometimes, he would see her name in those papers. His own name, too. The sight of it made him sick, and he usually skimmed past it. He didn't want to know what the idiots writing them thought about him and his pain. More often than not, her name was replaced by a number. Lumped together with the rest of the poor souls who lost everything that night. He wasn't sure he liked that better.

The journalists who were feeling exceptionally bold sometimes talked about the yakuza. He kept those articles close. In one of them, he had seen the face of that man for the first time. The buff, scary looking guy in a bad suit. The "Dragon", a big name in the yakuza world, who had apparently moved away from it all years ago. The fucker whose stupid daughter's speech ruined everything. Kazuma Kiryu.

It was so much easier to hate someone when you knew what they looked like.

**********************************

Kiryu had fought many formidable foes in all his years in (and out) the business. Deadly, dangerous men who were out to get him, monsters who wanted to hurt his family. Yet, none of them hit him as hard as the shitty little TV in his hospital room.

Whenever he was back in his room, when very tired nurses managed to drag him away from Haruka so that he'd try to rest for once, he would turn the bloody thing on. No matter what time it was then, it felt like he always managed to find a channel that talked about the concert.

Even though his various babysitters always tried to turn the TV off, to distract him from it somehow, Kiryu seemed to always come back to it. That thing was hypnotizing. He only stopped when he left the room. Or when a particularly pissed Majima threatened to explode the screen with his baseball bat.

Still, Kiryu watched those programs diligently, listening to all the people who had something to say about this whole mess with all the focus he could muster.

Seeing some of the people who were in the crowd that night talk and listening to their retelling of it left him weirdly numb.

The enemies he had faced before were, well, people. They had names, stories, reasons to act the way they did. They were tangible, something Kiryu could punch. Defeat. Forgive. He could do no such thing with a mob. There was no big guy who had orchestrated the whole disaster, no mastermind who ran things in the shadows. No one he could easily blame, fight, and move on from.

For some reason, this lack of a proper target made him resent everyone else.

Kiryu thought himself to be a pretty forgiving person. Those feelings rearing their ugly heads were definitely new, and he didn't really know what to do with them. He mostly kept them bottled up, though, because that's what he usually did with unknown feelings, but it was starting to get tiring. Blaming everyone only made it clearer than no one was to blame, and that made him somehow angrier.

Still, that's what he did.

He blamed himself, first and foremost, as it was the easiest thing to do. He shouldn't have let Haruka go, shouldn't have left the orphanage, shouldn't have left that Park woman come into their home... Oh, he wanted to blame Park herself, of course, but being dead shielded her from his rage. Mostly.

Thinking about their last discussion, before she chased him from his home, was somehow too much for him to process anyway, so he mostly tried to banish her from his thoughts. Which was not exactly easy because every time he saw Majima, he was reminded of the fact that he didn't find it necessary to warn him about her and her history with him. So, naturally, he blamed Majima for that. Among other things, including faking his own death, forcing Kiryu to come out of hiding.

He blamed Saejima and Akiyama, for pulling their annoying "let's fight together" bullshit again and making him believe this would work. It didn't. So he blamed them and their stupid plan, he blamed-

Kiryu took a deep breath, focusing once more on the TV screen. All this anger was exhausting, and he was feeling dizzy already. Oh, that was another one - he blamed his stupid body for being messed up and forcing him to lay still, when all he wanted was to do something, anything, to get his mind out of it.

The TV, showing no mercy, was still going with various interviews when he saw the crying man.

A big guy, with shaking shoulders and his head down, mumbling something as he shook.

Kiryu felt a bit too ill to really listen to what he said, which didn't matter because he couldn't take his eyes off that man. A small text at the bottom of the screen finally managed to catch his attention, and he felt a heavy lump in his throat as he realized what he was looking at.

That guy's daughter was among the four people who died that night. She was fourteen.

As if he knew Kiryu was watching, the man suddenly looked straight into the camera, and the pain in those eyes hit him hard. As if he had been stung, Kiryu immediately stood up, ignoring his stiff body's complaints and bolted out of the room.

He slammed the door behind him, and, taking the time to appreciate that no one was standing guard to see him completely freak out, decided he would not go to Haruka’s room. On his worst days, Kiryu would blame her, too, looking at her sleeping form with uncontrollable anger. He didn't want to go there when he was already this agitated, so he started limping through the corridors.

He had been allowed recently to use crutches to move around, which were replacing the wheelchair. He was shaking, though, so perhaps that it wasn't such an improvement. Collapsing in the middle of the hospital didn't exactly sound like a good idea. Walking at random in the corridors to escape his TV screen was also not a good idea, but Kiryu was already too deep in thoughts to decide to turn away.

As he kept moving blindly, trying to calm down while not losing his already fragile balance, he was startled by a man inexplicably bowing down as he passed. Kiryu found himself blinking at the guy, dumbfounded, before he noticed the Tojo pin on his lapel, and the small, almost inaudible “Fourth Chairman” he had whispered. Right. Just your average Tojo clan goon, lost in a random hospital hallway.

Well, maybe not that random. There was another man standing at the other end of the corridor, staring at him with wide eyes, and a third in the middle, his arms crossed as he stood near the closed door. Before Kiryu could ask himself why that particular hallway was packed with yakuza, the guy had hurriedly knocked on the door and opened it just as fast, getting inside in an instant.

The man who had bowed down to him straightened up, his voice hesitant as he asked, “Have you come to talk with the Sixth Chairman, Sir?”

Not really, no. In fact, if Kiryu could not speak with anyone for the next 24 hours, that would be great. Still, he frowned. “I thought Daigo’s room was a few floors up.”

“It is, but the chairman is visiting his friend.”

Friend.

Kiryu had a vague memory of Akiyama introducing Shinada as “a friend of Daigo”, something that felt like it had happened in another lifetime. And, now that he was thinking about it, someone (Akiyama again, or Saejima, he wasn’t sure) had told him the man had been admitted here after the mob roughed him up. Having been pretty much trampled by the angry crowd, he had been lucky to make it out with, to Kiryu’s knowledge, only a few broken bones and a ton of bruises. Beaten up, but still alive. Conscious, even.

Unlike Haruka.

Kiryu felt something flick in his mind, and suddenly talking didn’t seem like such a bad idea after all. He had been eating up footage of the incident for days now, listening to all the people who wanted to share what they had lived, and while it surely left an impression on him, the last example having been enough to send him running for the hills, it was not enough anymore.

He started moving again, careful not to fall, feeling heavy already after only having been using the crutches for a couple minutes. Not that he cared what the bodyguards would think if he collapsed in front of them. That would give them something fun to share with their fellow Tojo buddies.

Annoyingly enough, Kiryu had barely made two steps when he was stopped in his tracks again.

“Fourth Chairman.”

It wasn’t like he was surprised to see Daigo come out of the door, greeting him with an uncharacteristic anxious edge to his voice. His bodyguard had more or less already said he was in there, but Kiryu still couldn’t help but think there was something odd about this encounter. Maybe it was the fact that Daigo was still using a wheelchair, making Kiryu tower above him. Maybe it was the way he was looking at him now, his whole body tense as if he was expecting some kind of confrontation. Kiryu hadn’t seen this kind of hostility in Daigo’s eyes in years, but mostly, the man looked tired. Worried, too. Kiryu felt his own anger fade away slightly, as he got closer, wincing when a sharp pain on his left side reminded him not to move so quickly.

“Looks like things aren’t going so well for either of us, Sixth Chairman.” he said, realizing they were not exactly the two yakuza big names they usually were, but just two wounded idiots staring at each other in a hospital hallway. The bodyguards were following the scene, looking nervous. Kiryu wondered if they were worried a fight was going to break out. He didn’t really think that was a possibility. Apart from throwing one of his crutches like a spear, which would certainly make him fall, he didn’t see how he could be a threat, right now.

Kiryu cleared his throat, remembering what he was doing here in the first place. “I came to talk with Shinada.” This wasn’t a question or a request. Maybe he was threatening, after all.

“I don’t think that would be wise.” Daigo’s voice was low, his eyes drifting back to the door. “He’s still pretty shaken up by this whole mess. It’s still too soon.”

“Akiyama told me he was doing better.”

“He is, but… I’m afraid talking about this would be too much. For him… Or for you.”

That was new. Talking to him like that was not like Daigo at all, and Kiryu had to admit he would have been impressed, if he hadn’t been instantly annoyed by this. He resisted the urge to get closer, and instead stayed where he was as he asked, “Are you going to stop me, Daigo?”

“ I’m not sure I can. I guess I could roll on your foot if you take one more step, though.”

Kiryu was about to reply that he would definitely hit him with his crutch if that happened, when a voice he failed to recognize came from inside the room. “Let him in already, will you?”

With a heavy sigh, Daigo turned his chair around, letting just enough space so that Kiryu could get in.

Once he was inside, Kiryu realized something. This room was nearly identical to the one Haruka was in. Which wasn’t so surprising - hospital rooms tended to look alike. What made him tick was the silence in this room. No machines or respirator in here, and somehow, this angered him. He didn’t like the ferocity with which this thought had imposed itself on him, but as he looked at Shinada, able to breathe on his own and even having the gall to be conscious, staring back at him with wide eyes, Kiryu felt furious.

So that’s what he was doing, now. Blaming someone he barely knew for having the audacity to be in a better shape than his daughter. Kiryu supposed his sudden surge of animosity must have been noticeable, because all the certainty Shinada had when he asked him to come inside seemed to have vanished.

Now that he was really looking at the man laying in the bed in front of him, Kiryu had to admit he wasn’t exactly looking his best. He didn’t know Shinada enough to really tell the difference, having only met him once before the concert, but he didn’t remember him looking this exhausted. His face was covered in bruises, and part of it was still slightly swollen. Of course the simple fact that he was awake at all made him look healthier than Haruka, but he had clearly been through a lot. Feeling the anger quiet down for a bit, Kiryu greeted the man with a small nod of his head, unsure of what to say, suddenly.

“Well, let’s get on with it.” Daigo’s voice snapped him out of his thoughts. “It’s late, already. You should both be getting some rest.”

And you’re not? Kiryu wanted to say, glaring at the corner of the room Daigo had retreated in. Kiryu had barely noticed he had gotten inside the room as well. Part of him wished he could have talked with Shinada alone, but he was somehow grateful that it wasn’t the case. He still felt agitated, ready to snap back at the smallest thing, so having some kind of onlooker in there was mildly reassuring. Still, Kiryu did not care much for his tone.

He was at least right on one thing. It was time to talk.

“Can you tell me what happened that night?” No preamble, no “hey how are you?”. Kiryu was not in the mood for small talk.

Shinada blinked, dumbstruck. “Haven’t… Haven’t they told you, already?”

“I want to hear it from someone who was actually there. I want to know how it could have come to this.”

He wasn’t wrong. Kiryu already knew more or less how it went. He had been filled in, and had seen enough from the news to fill in the blanks. He wasn’t sure why he suddenly felt like hearing it from Shinada’s mouth would be different, but he still felt a weird apprehension as he waited for the other man to answer.

It took him a couple of seconds, exchanging a worried look with Daigo from across the room, before he finally started. “I don’t… I don’t actually know how it began. The fight against that Baba guy had been harsh and since everything had gone well so far, I… I stayed behind for a minute. Caught my breath.”

Catching his breath. Losing precious minutes he could have used to grab Haruka before everything went downhill. Kiryu tried to be reasonable, reminding himself that he had never asked Shinada to actually get to Haruka after the concert. He was just supposed to stop the shooter. And he did. There was no real reason to blame him, as he had told himself countless times.

“When I left the Dome that’s when I realized something was up. It had already started then, and I heard the noises. The screams. People don’t make that kind of noise when they’re just leaving a concert, so I ran and-”

Though footage of the stampede no doubt existed, people having probably filmed it with their phones, the TV seemed to only show what happened after or before the mob was formed. Kiryu could only imagine the kind of racket thousands of people panicking and running everywhere would make. He frowned, feeling something boil inside him as he realized somewhere in all that noise, there might have been the voice of the child he swore he would protect.

He missed a sentence, and only came back to himself when Shinada started the next one. “It was crazy. It was like a sea of people, and they were everywhere, screaming and pushing and-”

With a nervous twitch in his eye, Shinada suddenly stopped talking. While he hadn’t talked that much yet, Kiryu noticed he seemed to be really agitated ever since he had started. He was breathing heavily now, eyes lost in some corner of the room.

He waited a few seconds for Shinada to catch his breath before he asked, “If you arrived after it had started, how did you end up caught in it?”

“Oh, uh. I heard some staff member guy yell something about one of their idols being lost in the crowd on his walkie-talkie. So I ran into the crowd.”

Somehow, Kiryu had never thought about all the people who were working there that night. Too busy focusing on Mirei Park and the fact that blaming her now was pointless, he had forgotten to add all the other folks who had worked with her to his now long list of people to blame. It was infuriating to think that between the staff members, the people of Dyna Chair who weren’t gruesomely murdered, the other idols and Shinada, all charged to keep her safe, Haruka had still been caught up in the mob.

“I thought “I’m a big tough guy, I can probably push my way into this” but that was really fucking stupid. There were hundreds of them, and everyone was panicking and running all over the place, I don’t-”

Kiryu knew that, had he been there that night, he would have ran into the angry crowd too, with no hesitation, no matter how stupid jumping right into a angry wave of people was. He wanted to believe he would have been able to fight it, too, to punch his way until he got to Haruka, but hearing the panic weaving its way into Shinada’s voice, his breath getting faster, he wasn’t so sure of it anymore. “I got knocked down pretty fast, and then I-”

There was another pause, and when Shinada talked again, it was with such a low voice Kiryu almost didn’t catch it. “It felt like drowning.”

“Enough.”

Having more or less forgotten that Daigo was in the room, Kiryu almost jumped as his hand landed on his shoulder. Apparently, while Kiryu had been busy focusing on Shinada’s retelling of the events, he had managed to drag himself from his chair, standing on his own though he was slightly hunched over, a hand pressed on his side. Kiryu would have yelled at him to sit back down, knowing that he had already messed up with his stitches at least once, but found that he couldn’t talk.

He was still stuck on Shinada’s last sentence.

It felt like drowning.

Maybe it was the word “drowning”. It was visceral. Unpleasant. Kiryu felt sick as he wondered if that was how it had felt for Haruka, too.

Shinada had managed to find some of his composure back in the few tense seconds he took for Kiryu’s brain to finally start focusing on the scene again. Daigo’s hand was still on his shoulder, though he wasn’t sure if that was to get him to acknowledge him or if he was just leaning on him. Kiryu wanted to tell him to back off and sit down again before he hurt himself, but Shinada was faster, his breathing still somewhat erratic as he said, “It’s okay, Dojima, I can-”

“Kiryu.” Daigo ignored his friend’s attempt to stop him as he tried to straighten up, locking his eyes with Kiryu’s. “What’s the point of this? You’re both still too tired to get upset about this. Let’s give it a rest.”

Upset.

The word sounded ridiculous when Kiryu could feel his anger threatening to overtake him at any moment. He was not “upset”, he was furious.

“You’re right.” He managed to blurt out, feeling somewhat nauseous all of a sudden. Maybe that he too could use some rest, that was the longest he had ever been standing up in days. He took a step back, careful not to lose his balance or make Daigo topple by removing himself from his grip too abruptly, giving Shinada one last look. “Thank you. I’ll let you rest.”

“Wait-” Shinada straightened up in his bed, trying to catch his eye. He was still talking too fast and breathing too hard, his voice cracking slightly as he said, “I’m- I’m so sorry. I wish I could have done something to stop this.”

Kiryu had become something of an expert of empty, reassuring phrases after being fed so many of them in the past few days. He didn’t even look back as he walked out of the room, his voice probably harsher than he intended. “You did what you could. I can’t blame you.”

That was a lie, too. No matter how bad he felt seeing the man almost break down over the mere memory of the events, no matter how much he wanted to sympathize with him, Kiryu still blamed him. Like he blamed everyone. Like he blamed himself.

Feeling utterly sick with himself, he retreated to his room. The TV that he had left on when he ran away seemed to be taunting him, the bleak light it was projecting in the dark giving the room a ominous ambiance.

He punched the screen with such force that he almost broke his hand.

**********************************

Shinada had never been good at holding back his tears.

He had always cried easily, and never thought it useful to try to hide it.

Back in the day, he would cry when his baseball team won. Or when they lost. When he was banned after his first real game, he had wept for days. Some of these tears were also for his family, who had swore they would never talk to him again, but mostly, he was grieving the dream he was sure he had lost forever.

While he found many occasions to cry after that (being homeless for a while, being all alone, having no food for days, those kinds of things), Shinada had managed to more or less hold on for the past decades, and only cried every now and then.

The Dream Line concert had to be some kind of personal record. Shinada cried right after his fight against the shooter, overwhelmed by the adrenaline of it all, seeing the group perform from so far away while he was sitting in the stands, away from the spotlight. He also cried a few minutes later, when Takasugi’s call reminded him some people cared for him back in Nagoya. And, obviously, he cried after the incident, too. Because he was in pain, because he felt stupid and weak and useless. Because he blamed himself for what he was certain he could have prevented, had he been stronger.

Not crying while Kiryu, that man he had only just met and that he had still managed to disappoint, was standing in front of him, though? That was something. He could be proud.

Unfortunately, as soon as the door was closed behind Kiryu, he couldn’t hold it in anymore, and slumped back in his bed, and let out a small sob, knowing fully well he would be bawling his eyes out in a couple of seconds. Trying to delay the inevitable tears, he looked around, and was suddenly all too aware of Dojima still being in the room with him, standing awkwardly in the middle of it, looking at him with his usual stern expression.

It was not like Shinada minded him being here, really. If anything, he was grateful that he stuck around while Kiryu was there, a friendly face in a sea of hostility. As “friendly” as a scowling yakuza could get, at least. He supposed he should also be grateful for the way Dojima had insisted on bringing his interview with Kiryu to an early end. He couldn’t help but wish he could have said more, though. Apologized better. Still, he got him to leave the room right before Shinada hit his limit, so that was pretty great.

“Tatsuo…?”

Not expecting to hear his name hushed with such an hesitant tone, he took a second to wonder why Dojima was now looking at him with a slightly panicked expression.

Oh, right.

He was crying. He had barely noticed he had started to.

The room got more blurry now than actual tears were in his eyes, so much so that he almost missed Dojima dragging himself to his bed, gritting his teeth with each step. It only clicked in his mind that he had moved closer when he spoke again:

“Do you mind if I sit on your bed?”

Shinada shook his head. Sure, why not. The man should be sitting down, anyway, if his shaky steps were anything to go by. He still managed to get on the bed fairly quickly, making it creak under their combined weight.

A few seconds passed, the silence of the room disturbed by Shinada sniffing softly as he kept crying. Dojima said nothing, shifting awkwardly on the bed so that he was facing him, bending his body in a way that was probably not doing any good to his still healing bullet wound.

Shinada wasn’t sure why he suddenly felt overwhelmed by an urgent need for some kind of contact, but next thing he knew he had more or less collapsed in the other man’s arms. He felt Dojima stiffen against him, making him aware that perhaps entering the guy’s personal space like that without warning was a bit uncalled for. The man remained silent, though Shinada heard a very small gasp escape his lips.

Alright, so maybe he was out of line. No matter how shaken up he was, in pain and in tears, Shinada knew he wasn’t supposed to just throw himself at someone he hardly knew. Sure, technically Dojima and him had known each other for years, but they were not exactly friends back in high school. And their reunion had been so sudden that he barely had the time to process it. Vowing to protect each other’s dream meant they had something , that much was certain, but Shinada wasn’t sure that would be the kind of relationship that involved offering a shoulder to cry on. Literally.

He could always stop, put some distance between them again. Apologize and blame it on the perfect blend of morphine and anguish in his body right now, making him a tad emotional. Dojima didn’t give him any time to back off though, wrapping his arms around him slowly. “Eh… Can I- I mean, do you…?”

Shinada wasn’t sure what he was asking. He wasn’t sure Dojima knew, either, with the way he was stammering. Still, he soon felt a hand stroking his back slowly, and that gesture was as soothing as it was unexpected. It was weird to think that last time those hands were on his body, they were in the middle of a full on brawl. The vicious punches he had received on that day suddenly felt very far away, replaced by a softness he would have never thought he’d see from his old classmate. He did look way less intimidating in his hospital gown, he had to admit. Maybe being shot just did that to people. Made them a bit more approachable. Or maybe he looked so pathetic right now that even the most cold-hearted criminal couldn’t resist him. Who knew. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, he simply appreciated the fact he was offering some kind of comforting presence.

He allowed himself a few heartbeats to reposition himself, burying his face in the man’s chest before he returned to the task at hand.

Crying.

He cried because Kiryu blamed him, despite what he told him, he was certain of it. Because he blamed himself, too, obviously. Because he was exhausted, not having had a good night of sleep since the incident, waking up in a cold sweat every time he dozed off, his nightmare haunted by an angry crowd.

“I’m sorry,” Dojima’s voice interrupted his pity party, making him flinch. “I’m so sorry.” He kept repeating that, and Shinada had no idea why he was apologizing all of a sudden. He wanted to say that he was sorry too, sorry to have disappointed anyone who had believed in him when he left for the concert with the mission to protect that girl, but couldn’t make the words come out. So he kept on weeping, while Dojima kept whispering small apologies, pulling him closer.

Between two sobs, Shinada noticed there was something oddly familiar about this situation. It was not like it was a habit of his to break down and grab on to the nearest person to seek solace. Sure, he cried a lot, but he usually did it behind closed doors, alone. He had some dignity left, surely. But being held like this as he wept brought him back to his first night in Nagoya, when he had felt a semblance of reassurance in Milky’s soft embrace. Well, sort of. Dojima was no Milky, he was still pretty stiff and the motion of his hand on Shinada’s back felt a bit awkward, he was clearly not used to this kind of gesture. Still, it felt nice.

It went on for a while, and Shinada felt like he was calming down when- “I need to move.” Just like that, Dojima released him, straightening up a bit too abruptly, shoving Shinada away. “Sorry. Bullet wound.”

Shinada watched him struggle to find a position that wasn’t putting any strain on his wound, before he settled for sitting on the edge of the bed, his feet planted on the floor. Dojima grimaced as he pressed a hand to his side, giving him a look that Shinada assumed was meant to be apologetic, but ended up looking like his usual tired scowl. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to rush you like that, but if I open up those stitches again, I’m afraid my doctor’s going to give up on me.” And, because he clearly hadn’t said that enough in the last five minutes, “Sorry.”

Rubbing his eyes with his hands to chase any surviving tears, and feeling pretty confident he had calmed down enough to attempt to talk, Shinada came to join him, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Why do you keep saying you’re sorry?”

Apparently, Dojima hadn’t expected his question (that he had managed to ask with a not-so-shaky-voice, not bad for a guy who had been crying for the last ten minutes), looking at him with wide eyes. Turned out the guy could somewhat emote, when he wanted to. Shinada would have found it funny if his answer hadn’t come with such a sad, almost choked tone. “You’re only here because of me. I dragged you into this. Had I left you alone, you wouldn’t be…”

“A fucking mess.”

“In pain.” His voice was low, sounding more like the man he had fought on his roof again. “I knew of the dangers and I still let you come here. And now you’re…” He trailed off, frowning even more. “I’m so sorry, Tatsuo.”

Shinada hadn’t really thought of it that way. Dojima waltzing back into his life was what had led to him being stuck here, with nightmares in his head and regrets in his heart, that was true. But when he thought of his home, where he was basically starving and where everyone had been hiding things from him, where he was basically rotting away while clinging on dreams that would never happen… Would he really have been better off if the yakuza never came to find him?

He sighed, realizing he would probably never find a satisfying answer to this question. Instead he settled for shuffling closer to his friend (he had decided that “friend” was an alright word to use, now that the guy had seen him cry and had tried his best to comfort him), resting his chin on his shoulder.

“Well, that’s silly.” Shinada’s voice was still a little hoarse, but he tried his best to sound cheerful. Well, more cheerful than he was a few moments ago, at least. “Remember how you tried to stop me from coming with you? And look, you’re nice enough not to go 'I told you so' about it, too.”

“I should have stopped you.”

“You wish. We fought for it, remember? And I won.”

“You won because I agreed to back down. I shouldn’t have. Should have kept fighting. Better have you stuck at home with a broken leg than here and in anguish.”

Shinada never thought he would hear someone say “I wish I had broken your leg” in a nice way, but here he was. He chuckled, and noticing Dojima looked still rather glum, avoiding to look at him as he stared at one corner of the room, took a deep sigh.

“Well, I don’t blame you, okay?”

He really meant it, too. Dojima remained silent, but Shinada noticed his lip twitching slightly. He wasn’t sure if it was because his wound was still acting up, or because his words had touched him somehow, but hoped it was the latter.

He knew what blaming himself felt like, and wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

#in this part MORE CRYING #i know crazy #mob #yakuza #rgg #rgg5 #yakuza 5 #yakuza fanfiction #stories #fics #weird art of mine

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