#heck i might come back and draw this or write further

[aftg-random-fun]

Kevin, Neil, and Andrew are told by the girls to dress up as the Hex Girls for Halloween, but all fight over who gets to be who in the arrangement. In the end Neil is Thorn, Kevin is Dusk, and Andrew is Luna. Mind you because Neil is a little shit (affectionate) he buys real instruments for their costumes. After they get asked to play multiple times they ruin everyone’s ears with their tone deaf playing.

[astarionfixation]

Chapter 10: *there's no need to hold back anymore*

Part of "Am I Fu**ing Insane !?!" A multi chapter adventure in Astarion’s mind

Rating: EXPLICIT SEX (fellatio, PIV intercourse) Continuous Consent Check-ins

CW: vague mentions of previous trauma

Word count count: 3.6k

Pairings: Astarion X OFC Tav

AO3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/54356776/chapters/139817542

I have a quite serious praise kink. Which also means compliments in the forms of tags and/or comments might very well spur me to write and post more

** Thoughts "" Dialogue - - Remarks ++ Quotes / Memories

SUMMARY: They take it really really REALLY slow, but sex. And mutual pining but how the heck can they be in bed naked together and still not get into their heads they want each other? Because trauma is a bitch, that's why.

The bedroom feels fragrant with the scent of her. Every part of her. Her naked body still traversed by the sudden tremble and jolts that are slowly fading. Every kiss his lips leave around her face, her forehead, her collarbones, her neck, still rewards him with a low guttural murmur he can feel from her throat.

*So languid and soft, so malleable…*

And it's all his doing. 

His half clothed body still lying halfway on top of her, an overdressed leg between her naked ones but as she is coming down from her orgasm, looking utterly blissful and spent the corner of his eye is caught by the copper bathtub as the morning sun rays reflect upon it next to the window. And fine… frustratingly, maybe what she needs now after sharing such a vulnerable moment with him is… care.

A part of his mind kicks him with a moment of discomfort much as his own nether regions felt strangled up against the fabric of his trousers until only a few moment ago, but at the same time the vague memory of a feeling, rather than actual events, comes to the surface, even though it carries almost none of the torment usually linked to anything related to… the last two centuries…

And that is the desire, need and gratitude he would have held for a moment of rest after a night of seduction. The peace it would have brought him to close his eyes and let the nights be washed off his skin, if not his soul, by simply being submerged in hot, clean, perfumed water.

He knows she relished in the pleasure he brought her to, her body if not her entire being yet, but there will be time to work and lead her towards complete perdition. 

His lips trace from her shoulder down to her arm whilst his body slowly peels away from hers and after planting a final, lingering kiss on the inside of her wrist, he’s now standing.

Her body is a painting, lying on her back and her dark locks splayed around with her eyes still closed and such a glowing expression painting her delicate features.

He's about to turn around to swiftly cover the few steps that separate the bed from the bathtub when a soft growl of protest raises from her lips and the hand he just left a kiss upon reaches to him, and as her fingers find the waistband of his breeches she hooks them in, preventing him from moving further

“Astarion, please don't leave… ”

He barely has the time to register the fact she's fully awake and aware when she has lifted herself up and in a moment she's kneeling on the bed.

Just in front of him.

Still beautifully, gloriously bare.

And now she's looking up at him, her dark eyes pleading and his mind cannot remember for the life of him any plan he had set himself upon. Her fingers still dancing and now *pulling!?* at his waistband that makes him…

“would you… if you want to…”

*You'll be the end of me sweet thing…*

His hand reaches up to hers, softly demanding her attention and moving her away from his clothing, he pulls it to his lips once more.

“There will be time darling, let me draw you a bath for now”

After all, he's trying to remind himself that, after feeding on her last night and the *glorious* morning of unexpected activities, she needs rest, much as keeping long term benefits in mind is proving an unreal feat of his will when she's looking up at him with pleading eyes that seems to just be begging him to take her

“Wait, is it because…”

She trails off and suddenly pulls back from him, searching for the bedsheet as if she just became aware of her nudity. She pulls the fabric to hide her magnificent body from him and a tinge of disappointment rises on his mind, though he knows

*it's alright, she needs to rest, she needs care, I need to stop…*

“I know I'm not… the way I look… I'm sorry… you said it… I just didn't think… I'm so sorry… you didn't have to…. I'm sorry”

His own memories from the first night he fed on her rush back and his own damned words he spat at her with the bile and anger of what he thought was the loss of her are suddenly vivid in his mind

+looking at you darling… I thought it was fairly obvious: she doesn't have to be pretty”.+

The shame and disgust for his own self, for the absurd lie packaged perfectly only to hurt her in that moment when he felt like a caged animal, drown him. 

He should disappear. 

He should run away and live with the pain of the loss of her and all the ways in which she had brought him anything positive because all he knows is how to lunge and destroy when all he has of himself is already in pieces.

Her feeble voice brings him back before his mind can plunge in that dark abyss

“I don't know why I thought you wanted me too… you were just so kind, I'm sorry… I misread everything… you didn't have to… I'm so sorry Astarion…”

*She really believes that!?! That's what stuck with her!?! Not the dozens of nights spent holding her until I lost all my fucking blood and hers to my strained cock… that!?!? She thinks that!?!?*

He might have considered the masochism of depriving himself of her but for her to believe he doesn't want her?! 

“Fuck… do you really not know?!??”

The sound of his own voice surprises them both, her eyes widen and that's what makes him realise how his voice must seem… angry? Dangerous. His long delicate fingers thread across his own hair, almost pulling because of the rage, the frustration, because the only creature he ever cared for is naked in front of him and yet sad, thinking he has barely done her a favour by finally holding and tasting her body, as if he hasn't felt every reverberation of her moans directly onto his twitching cock whilst her body convulsed around his fingers.

“You must know all the ways in which your simple presence intoxicates me… you must have felt how my body reacts every time you let me touch you, how your skin torments me and how I have dreamt of sinking into you from the very beginning… Why do you think I said those things?”

*What the fuck am I doing?!??!!!!*

His hands pull at his soft curls and his eyes have to close because he can't stand this, he can't see her, looking at him while his own traitorous tongue lines all the ammunition that could ever be necessary to destroy him. After a long unnecessary breath the words pour out against the will of a large part of himself and push past the pressure around his throat 

“You never knew I was just terrified!? Being so close to having you and yet that night you rejected me, I was mad! I was just… hurt and wanted to hurt you for it but I never… gods look at you… you really thought anyone could hold a candle to you in claiming my attention!?!”

*Fuck it… she might as well…*

“Every inch of your body, your breath, your scent, your hair… I taste you and yet I always feel like a starved man because I can't… you didn't even want to…”

His arms fall to his side, his head shakes to try and push away all the words and images and incredibly the grasp at his throat held tight but not enough to prevent that pathetic confession. His eye peek to look at the certainly disgusted expression on her face when he sees her and

*How did I not feel the warmth getting closer!?!! Where the fuck did my mind go!?!?*

She's left the cover of the sheet and she's now sunk into her knees.

Directly in front of him.

The tip of her nose so close to his navel that all he can focus on is to keep his legs straight not to fall at that vision and vicinity.

Her tapered, delicate fingers are about to reach for his breeches again but this time he has exhausted words and thoughts to dissuade her

“Astarion, can I take these off of you?”

His mouth must have fallen open because he realises after a few moments he's in need to swallow around nothing, his head barely nodding of its own volition and when she smiles at him and nods herself as her hands reach down his waistband to pull down, he finds a part of himself grateful for the fact she hasn't thrown back at him his own demands for vocal consent.

Her hands guide his trousers down past his hips and a deep sigh escapes his throat when finally his semi hard cock is freed, followed by a hiss as it immediately meets her warm breath as she moves down, low on her knees. His legs move of their own volition to discard the last piece of clothing and he finds himself standing naked in front of her.

Her eyes raise to meet his and before he can think he feels something reaching, touching his hand and a moment later he realises her own fingers have interlaced with his. She looks at him so… softly? 

“Please… can I touch it? I want to make you feel as good as you did me…”

“Sweetling… You don't have to…”

Her voice lowers

“I want to taste you too”

His head nods before he can follow what's happening… the last thing he hears is her voice saying something about beauty but that’s the moment he feels her fingers delicately wrapping around his shaft followed in a flash by the soft, warm, wet sensation of her mouth taking him in.

He draws in a sharp breath as the scent of mulled wine, flowers, pomegranate and just need and desire make his head spin. The softness of her mouth is the most delicate sensation he can remember ever feeling in a context such as this. Though his sensitivity is likely due to the fact that he does not remember the last time anyone cared to ask, cared to do something for him, something so completely focused on his own pleasure rather than everything he could do and give and…

“F…fuck”

His head is falling back, she feels so soft and caring. Her hot, wet mouth, her tongue moving slowly and delicately from one sensitive spot to the other. As she begins to follow the ridge of his tip he realises the animalistic growl he hears it's actually coming from his own throat. The moment her lips lock and she softly starts to suck him in, a shock of electricity traverses his body, cock to spine and then the back of his brain when something gets poked the wrong way and all he can hear now are screams.

His teeth clench as his hand reaches for her check, forcing himself to be as sweet and delicate as she has been but pleading her to stop. She pulls away and looks up at him

“Am I doing something wrong?”

His hand keeps caressing her cheek softly, his head shakes and without the overwhelming sensation of her mouth around him the scream in his head subsides. This is not the time to wonder what must have gone wrong at some point for such a wonderful gift from her to feel like a threat. 

His cock twitches, those soft, sweet kisses have already brought him back to full, strained hardness

“You are perfect, I promise you, absolutely divine. I just… just… can you lie back for me, my sweet?”

Nodding sagely, granting him the grace and understanding he certainly does not deserve she immediately does as asked. After disentangling herself from the caress on her check with a reassuring kiss on the palm of his hand, and even something that simple and sweet sends shivers down his spine. He follows her and his own naked form is crawling between her legs as she opens them to let him climb her body. The warmth of every bit of her skin, from her ankles to her thighs, stomach and breast is engulfing him and once he feels the tip of his cock brush along her folds his hand reaches down to caress her sex softly and

*Fuck she’s still so wet and warm…*

A delicious mewl leaves her lips and it’s just so inviting, a summer flower blooming just for him, her body arching slightly and her hips raising so that he can feel her press herself to his shaft and there’s no point, no reason anymore to deny himself. His hand goes to position the tip just at her entrance and he concedes one last time, one last layer of safety before he just lets his desire to possess her run wild

“Are you sure you want this, my sweet?”

Her head moves in small quick nods under his and when her voice comes next she sounds like she’s begging, absolutely enraptured, maybe just like he is, in these last few months of anticipation

“Please Astarion I need you… but only if you want me too…”

*there's no need to hold back anymore*

The thought leaves his mind as his hips begin to slowly push and broken breaths leave his chest as the inner warmth of her sex envelops his ingress. He has to steady himself and slow down, carefully measuring every movement to savour the moment she’s finally becoming… his. The filter that usually occludes the path between his mind and his lips isn’t found anywhere around his throat anymore as all he can feel is just her soft, tight wetness, slowly engulfs him.

“You have no idea… I’ve needed this… I’ve needed this… I’ve dreamt of this since the beginning…”

Doubts around that, in hindsight, crucial rule of hers are swiftly dissolved as her hand grabs the back of his neck so he can finally bury his quick tongue in her mouth. He feels her involuntarily clench and tight around him and he’s not sure whether his words or his cock are to blame for that. A deep, guttural moan resonates from her throat to her lips, separating them from his as her head tilts slightly back, subconsciously offering access to the delicate skin of her neck to him

“Your blood, your scent… your skin… I've conjured thousands of ways to bring you pleasure in my mind, I wanted you to be as obsessed with me and I was with you…”

He can feel her getting used to his size and relax her walls around him so that he deliberately pushes himself further inside of her

“Yet I swear, I would have been happy to never lay a finger on you if that was what you wanted, I would have followed you like a dog to the end of the world and my life, just to be near you, I couldn’t even kiss you in my dreams because you didn’t give me permission… I had made my peace with it…”

Just because the words are coming out it doesn’t mean they are not hard confessions to concede, he has to hide his face in the crook of her neck as once again he stills inside of her to let her adjust once more to his size

“But you feel… Gods… please… please don’t ever leave me and I’ll be your ever willing slave…”

The words get muffled and confused with his mouth now pressing against her neck to try and stop that terrifying cascade of truths. He pushes his hips and he feels her all around him, filling her inch by inch and once he’s finally flush against her, buried to the hilt in her soft, wet sex, he stills completely. He can feel her heartbeat pushing all around his cock that can recognise every small increment of pressure she involuntarily causes around him. Her walls stretched so tight around him he's sure, the same grip on his neck would undoubtedly kill him, and this is not far from that

“A… Astarion… I… I’m yours”

He doesn't have time to register the full meaning and implication of her words because suddenly all he can feel are her hips, gently swaying underneath him, her silky walls caressing his length as his eyes roll back in his skull and his entire body seems to exist only in the places it touches hers. He’s about to begin moving his own hips to meet her movement when he catches it. Likely imperceptible and completely unbeknownst to her but he can feel, he can hear the strain of her body to accommodate him. She’s trying to work through it but she’s in pain, and he cannot allow that. His hand reaches between them and presses on her stomach to try and still her. He leaves a kiss on her neck and despite parts of his brain screaming murder to him he stops the steady motion that had brought him such ecstasy so far.

“What.. What did I do? I’m sorry… Astarion please… no… I need you…” her hips make several desperate delicate movements up to meet him begging him to bury himself in her once more. 

“You're wonderful sweetling, there’s nothing to worry about… I just want to try… something different… Do you trust me?”

With an agile movement he unsheaths himself, now lying next to her, catching her hand with his, his thumb caressing hers in slow circular motions

Her brows are still furrowed in a concerned expression but her head nods slightly and so with the hand he’s holding he pulls her to him until her body is now on top of his, One soft, warm thigh on each side of his pale, bony hips. Her warm sex finds his own, strained once again immediately as if they’re calling to each other. He can feel her moist lips and her clit swollen from unrealised desire pressing against his shaft, He pulls in a sharp breath just as he hears her hiss at the contact as well and that’s how he knows, if he needed to, that she might actually need him as much as he needs her. He rests both his cold hands on her hips that seem designed by sin itself to drive him insane

“Why don’t you move these enchanting hips of yours, just so we can feel each other for a moment?”

Her head moves in the same rhythmic, soft movement he can now feel directly on his cock. 

“Like… like this?”

Her slick, wet folds dragging on his length, pressing just right until he can feel her tumescent bundle of nerves pressing just against his tip, before her hips move again and he can feel every texture of her sex drawn directly onto his cock. She’s driving him mad and he’s sure every single drop of blood in his body has now rushed between his legs leaving little for his mind to grasp onto

“You’re… you’re doing amazing darling… we can… we can take our time… you’re just… wonderful…”

His words might be doing something to her because at that, he feels her press herself just a bit harder against his hips, indulging in the contact, grinding her warm sex against his. He can still feel her heartbeat through every blood vessel engorging her centre and he’s sure he might just die like this if he doesn’t get to be inside her. She throws her head back, the intoxicating scent of her thrown around by the luscious locks that are now gathered at her back, slightly tickling his thighs, he can tell his plan is working not only because of the renewed amount of  slick wetness from her that’s now coating his cock but also through the muffled moans she’s trying to hold back. She brings her head back and her eyes open just enough to find his

“This is… something new… for me… but it feels… nice… very…”

The implications of that sentence hit him like a ton of bricks.

*Of course she’s never been on top, never given this control… like I never let any of them…*

“Our first time shouldn't hurt, my sweet, you were so accommodating trying to push through it, it's only fair I offer you the same grace… and this way it will be easier for you to come again”

It takes a moment for his words to reach her but the moment they do he can see something change in her dark eyes. Her body moves so that the tip of his cock is now positioned right at her soft, wet entrance. She looks at him, her voice almost an imploration

“Please… can I?”

The words die on her mouth as she’s biting her bottom lip in anticipation. He dips his fingers in her hips just a bit further to encourage her

“When you ask so sweetly I can’t deny you anything my darling…”

His hands guide her and finally he can feel her wetness beginning to envelop him again, much more resolute than he did moments ago and she doesn’t stop until he’s fully, completely buried inside of her, and with the last of it, she gives him no reprieve and her hips begin moving against him, her soft walls so tight around him dragging along his length and 

*Fuck…*

[velvetwyrme]

Ever wondered what the fictional protagonists of Distilling Destiny might look like? Well, here's my interpretation ;>!!

If you don't know what Distilling Destiny is, I suggest you go read Flipping Fate- the fanfic I'm co-writing :>! It's a fake book that exists within the world of FF- written by the one and only Stretch! (or, in real life: @collegecomics18 ;D)

(Additional notes and thoughts under the cut!)

There's no "canon" design for these characters, but I thought it'd be fun to try come up with some concepts :>! I actually drew these months ago with a gap between finishing each, so they all look slightly different stylistically lol

First off! Each design is associated with a playing card suit; the Knight is associated with HEARTS (♥️) , the Soothsayer with DIAMONDS (♦️) , and the Bard with CLUBS (♣). Not only can this be seen in small details, but also in their overall poses/shapes!

The shapes also correlate very neatly into the idea that all the characters are from different kingdoms- I would have tried to differentiate each kingdom's clothing style a bit more buuuuut that's... a lot of work, and we only really see a couple characters from each kingdom, so I just stuck with making each character feel distinct.

One thing I also tried to go for was making all of them "faceless" in various ways, since the characters in Distilling Destiny are embodied by their roles in a way that effectively strips them of any further identity; during the book club, the DD!characters are referred to as they are in the book- they HAVE no names, and are only referred to by their titles. They are also meant to correlate to/reflect the characters of Flipping Fate in a not-very subtle way, on account of Stretch being the author (and... [REDACTED]).

The Knight's armour references a LOT of things. Obviously, OG Papyrus' battle body (even his little blue shorts ;>), but the red plume on his helmet is meant to call back to Undyne, and some of the golden bits (e.g on the back of his gauntlets) are not only "heart" shaped, but are also reminiscent of tridents and thus Asgore and the Royal Guard.

The Soothsayer's clothes are patterned with diamonds and coins- they are both a connection to the reader/MC, but also!!! In tarot the "matching" suite for diamonds would be coins/pentacles :]!! The Bard's pipe is a fantasy equivalent of his FF counterpart's bad habits, and his blue accents are meant to be a small nod toward his brother LOL.

Anyway, this is already long as heck so why not make it longer! So here are the sketches that I did back in….. SEPTEMBER 2022?? kjdhfkjsf

You can see the original sketch for the Bard is much smaller than the other two since I did it while I was at work LMAO (plus the initial idea for the Knight I had, which ended up getting changed.)

Thank you for reading! If you got all the way down here, you probably deserve a little treat ;)!

So!! I mentioned at the beginning that each of the characters correspond to a card suit... which of course, means there is a spade as well.

(The only reason he's not in this lineup is because I haven't finished drawing him yet kjhfjgkjgkjfhgdskjg,,)

[timecma]

2 things! 1-Do you play HSR (Honkai Star Rail) and 2-No pressure or anything but when is your story coming back?

I played a bit of HSR but I’m nowhere near as far along in it or as active on it as I am in Genshin. The last character I got was Boothill lol (I live laugh love Boothill).

It still astounds me that people actually enjoyed reading my story haha. I know it’s been a while, but with school and everything it’s been hard to even find time to write. I think I mentioned before that I’m kind of revamping literally everything—so I also have to find the time to draw the chapter art. So many characters are being scrapped/added/changed to help facilitate the storyline a bit better without me having to be so long-winded with it. The problem I was having was I would just write and write and write without really taking the story anywhere. I want to have a bit more structure to it so that it’s easier for me to get chapters published and easier to read as a whole. But, I won’t be able to do anything until school gives me a break 😭

It takes a bit of time to plan out a story lol. I also don’t wanna be like Chris Colfer and have inaccurate timelines and stuff 😔

I promise it won’t be away forever, but since you’ve been so patient, I’ll give you a couple things you can expect in the new version:

1. Further fleshed out backstory lore for Aurelia (and her mother 😒) along with her and Cyrus’s father (people who know about him seem to like him a lot don’t worry)! But why does Aurelia have light skin and gold hair if her biological father has dark skin and blue hair?? Something’s going on there…

2. More Negative content in general since he seems to be a fan-favorite. He also gets a new underling/sidekick! And when I say more Negative content, I also mean his role in other worlds and what that has to do with his identity and his overall plan. OoooOoOoOoOooOo….

3. Actual Demon King stuff (and he’s updated too) 👀

4. Cyrus’s home world is almost fully fleshed out so seeing some of that too! Probably a lot of that too… I might include a small fetch quest there to give you all a tour. I plan on making a completely separate story for that world (that does not have Cyrus as a main character), but that’s A LONG WAYS AWAY and not fanfiction so 😔

5. Some new characters who are projected to be fan-favorites too. Such as Vincent. Y’all might know who Vincent is, but, if you don’t, trust me you will. We will also be exploring more of my fanon backstory for the Demon King and how it connects to Xanthous as his reincarnation. The Demon King himself WILL be an added character (I’m so excited to actually do a art piece of his new design)! This is gonna be fun.

Here’s some questions that hint at lore drops:

What the heck is going on with Aurelia and why does her mother scare me?? Why does Indicum work with her but seem to be on Cyrus’s side?? Is it maybe because Aurelia’s true intentions are not what we think they are??? 😦

What is Negative’s secret ambition that makes him side with Aurelia? Why do his hands always hurt?? Why does he also have the ability to travel between worlds?????

Xanthous has got some insane lore! What’s going on with his underworld (and what’s going on in the aboveworld??) Why is he so secretive about the demons?

Where is Elrik? Where did he go?? Somebody must know! (Somebody does indeed)

Why is Cyrus’s scepter starting to talk to him?????

What does the design on the back of Cyrus’s neck mean? Is it a continuation of his tattoo?? Doesn’t seem like it. Why does he have such a bad reaction when that mark is hit??? And why can hear a voice in his head reacting to it too?

And finally, does the Inamoratos Grimoire actually exist? If so, who has it? Who made it? Why? What does it have to do with Xanthous and Cyrus specifically???

Well there you have it: Some fun things that are in the works! Thank you again for being so patient.

[maenecoon]

so like

remember how i used to be a phayurain blog -

@alittlebitofrainbyyourside inspired me, a few months ago, to write something about vampires and biting.

soo i'm thinking about sire phayu who's fangs are aching. it flares up occasionally because of his improper vampire development phase (long story short, phayu was neglected as a fledgling and thus has some "defective" vampire traits).

when phayu's fangs ache, they ache like a bitch, bc of Vampire Urges, he needs to sink his teeth into something. hard. preferably repeatedly. he'd use to teeth on wood, but it's not the most comfortable thing to chew, not to mention it doesn't taste great (phayu, having the rare vampire phenomenon of having functioning taste buds).

enter fledgling rain, who is eager to help his sire. a bit too eager. when rain's teeth ache, phayu offers him his thigh/neck to fang warm, so it's only right that rain returns the favour. he offers himself as a chew toy, baring his pale neck and blinking up at phayu innocently. waiting for phayu to use him and bite him.

phayu who might be a bit hesitant initially because he's afraid of overwhelming and hurting rain. he's extra careful with the pain control, making sure rain feels as little as possible, making sure his bite stings as less as he can make them. making careful little bites in the fat of his shoulder.

and then rain who, very rudely, grabs phayu by the hair, pulling him away from his neck. phayu who overlooks the insubordination and is just about to apologise when rain whines because phayu isn't biting hard enough!

phayu is a bit confused, but honestly, he should've seen it coming bc rain is a pain slut and he knows. i think he's just so used to being Too Much for his other partners that he treats rain the same way by default - like he's glass. (honestly phayus fault for corrupting rain tho ngl)

anyways. phayu who starts to play down the numbing effects of his bites. waiting for rain to have one of his mouthy little rants before phayu bites him down hard. rain letting out a wobbly yelp of surprise. phayu deciding he loves the way rain sounds when he cries, so pretty and wrecked. having to bite him again and again and again.

next time he won't use his aching fangs as an excuse. next time he'll bite so hard that it draws up blood, blood warm from rain's previous feed (basically, phayu's own "blood", lmao). no longer showing any inhibition when digging his fangs into rain. in fact, using his sire control to further disable rain's pain control, making the sensation of the bite feel further heightened.

(i think it'd make rain cum on the spot. phayu continuing regardless, praising rain for taking his bites so well, praising rain for being so pretty when he cries, his voice so beautiful when he screams from pain and over sensitivity.)

just! biting! biting biting biting! clearly i am missing the og vampire boys a little bit :,))

tbh,, it was thinking about vampkimchay that had me thinking back to vampphayurain (love bites au) and how i just completely stopped writing them because i couldn't get past the courting stage. the story needed to continue with phayu trying to court rain. i thought smut was the hard part to write but i didn't consider ✨feelings✨ would be the scarier thing. let's not get into how that reflects on me personally LOL but anyways!

if you're still here, thanks for listening to my rambles. the first installment of this au is linked below. i've written five parts of vampphayurain being cute/horny/trying to navigate their relationship as sire and childe, so if that interests you then maybe you could check it out 🦇

[shubaka]

3 and 17? 👀

3. Describe the creative process of writing a chapter/fic.

I usually just start with a general idea -- sometimes it's just a concept and sometimes there's a specific scene I want to explore. Then I'll try to find one major thing I want to tell in the story.

Next ... I just... start writing lmao. As i write more ideas come to me, and when they do I will add notes to an outline or in the same document as place holders so I can go back and flesh them out later.

I do a lot of "yes, and..." while I'm writing so a lot of the time I'm just like "oh, okay, I guess we're going here. Okay." So I dont get too bogged down with outlines. It changes every time I sit down to write, but there are obviously a few essential scenes that I am actively writing towards, even if hey end up changing in some way because of the new, unexpected things that pop up while writing. I'm basically just winging it 70% of the time, but that's part of the fun.

With multi-chaptered fics, it's essebtially the same but I try to keep better notes, especially if I realise something may affect a future plot point or character's understanding/motice/etc. And I'll end a chapter whenever it feels right. I dont really go into the chapter with a specific plan, just a general idea of what I want to accomplish and then wing it lmao. Does this sound stressful??? (This is also why I could never give an estimate on the total words or chapters for a fic) Anyway, I find being less rigid and more open to playing around with it keeps things more fun and motivating for me as a writer.

17. What do you do when writing becomes difficult? (maybe a lack of inspiration or writers block)

Hmm, sometimes the best thing for me to do is just stop and take a break from it. But if I am really set to work on that particular fic then I might reread some past scenes I wrote, to see if there's something i can pull from and explore further.

Sometimes I'll think of what kind of scene I want to write next and just come up with one line of dialogue or one descriptive line. It can be the beginning, middle, or end of that scene. Write that one line. Edit it. Reword it. How do those nuances change the feeling of it? Think of what emotions I want to draw from it, or what emotions I want it to lead the character (or the reader) to. How do I get there? Maybe if x happens right before/after? And just kind of build off of that line by line. I don't know if I'm explaining myself very well, but I hope that makes at least a bit of sense!

Some other things I might do:

Work on another wip

Do some fic prompts

Rewatch a bit of the show (or movie or read a bit of the book) -- sometimes seeing the characters and their mannerisms and hearing their voice will kickstart something in my brain

Go make myself something to eat -- something that takes a while to prepare and kind of makes you slow down while you do it? So either you get to give your brain a break and then refuel or your brain wanders and you suddenly get a new idea (plus you get food)

Go for a walk or heck go take a shower. There's something about those moments when I'm relaxed and just letting my mind wander to whatever it wants, that I'll get hit with a fleeting idea that I want to run with.

Just stop and accept it's not a good writing time/day for me. And that's okay! There will be other days to write.

Thanks for the ask! 💕💕💕

[generalluxun]

This is an interesting read. My gut reaction was 'First Time meme here'. 🤣 (but I didn't stop with gut reaction or I wouldn't post!)

It's probably a mix of Age+interests but I've seen this sort of wave happen several times. Take videogames. No, I don't mean the recent expansion and gamergate drama. No, I'm talking way back when consoles 'happened'. (Xbox Era, I know they existed before PCs but the death of Atari killed them off for a while) suddenly dudebros were everywhere, CoD and Madden and all sorts of people who had *beat up the people who played videogames* sprawling all over our corner of the world. These guys had never sent an entire computer lab of C64's into If-then loops when a teacher walked out! They were just using our beloved section of the world to facilitate their own mainstream 'masculine' fantasies in new ways. They ate up budgets that could have gone to other games! There was no internet-fandom like there is now then, but they ate up print-media space. They demanded the platform cater to their needs.

Just one example of many. RPGs, Anime, scads of niche hobbies pried open so that the 'normies' can lay all over it and tell us how it should be changed to better suit them. This isn't a rant against these things, it's just an observation that it's not very new, even when not looking at the equality struggle elements.

So what's my point? Well first let me say what's it's not. This isn't a wagging finger and admonition about how you should or should not feel shamed or utilize your own content. It's more a 'food for thought' I'm not drawing a line here, I'm just trying to add more ideas in for people to utilize when drawing their own lines.

-And aha I have come up with a coherent conclusion, so this won't JUST be a ramble by the end.

Bad actors are always a thing. If someone wants to steal content, making an account is no barrier. Weaseling in to find 'good' content to steal is probably even more efficient in the long run. If someone wants to be awful they will too. As someone who at one point years ago had someone using multiple accounts to accuse me of things I not only didn't do, but was physically incapable of doing... trust me. 😅 The idea is advanced that Lurkers are a good thing, and I would go one step further to say they are essential. Stagnation is the bane of all creative spaces. Closed ecosystems stagnate. Lurkers who decide to step in are your fresh infusions over time. How many will turn away if they must pass muster before they can even digest the content? I'll even go one step further. Tourists are essential now too. Why? Because as has been stated, everyone is online. Tourists are everywhere. Lurker is no longer the first step. A tourist who hangs about ends up being a lurker. That lurker over time might become a creator. They might not. Heck, lots won't. And yes some are going to be very 'Touristy' this is our new pipeline though.

If we start closing gates and locking doors as a fandom, we stymie that flow and the fandom will suffer in the long run.

So I think there's a better question than 'Should we as a fandom, gatekeep?' I think the answer to that is just 'no.' It's not healthy in the long run. That's setting aside the concept of slippery slopes, fracturing, etc. etc.

Now what *IS* an extremely important and valid question is 'Should I, personally, gatekeep for my mental well being?' THAT is something only you can answer, and the answer to which may even change and change back over time. No one should fault you for it. At the end of the day it's your stuff and your heart/head. I've got comment moderation on for my fics because I've had people post some things I felt were completely unnecessary, beyond the one-time personal attacks. (Character spite, etc) Anyone can look, and anyone can write something I see, but the *fandom* space I will try to keep clean. That's my personal 'line'. It's no more or less valid than anyone else's personal line for their work.

There's a tendency to universalize our experiences. It's perfectly normal. No one wants to be the 'odd one out' no one wants to be the person locking their gate when others leave them wide. I think though this is a case where we need to recognize what is healthy for the individual and what is healthy for the collective can diverge. They can diverge but they can also coexist.

Fandom can do a little gatekeeping. As a treat.

So I finally decided to archive-lock my fics on AO3 last night. I’ve been considering it since the AI scrape last year, but the tipping point was this whole lore.fm debacle, coupled with some thoughts I’ve been thinking regarding Fandom These Days in general and Fandom As A Community in particular. So I wanna explain why I waited so long, why I locked my stuff up now, and why I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a-okay with making it harder for people to see my stories.

Lurkers really are great, tho

I’m a chronic lurker, and have been since I started hanging out on the internet as a teen in the 00s. These days it’s just cuz I don’t feel a need to socialize very often, but back then it was because I was shy and knew I was socially awkward. Even if I made an account, I’d spend months lurking on message boards or forums or Livejournals, watching other people interact and getting a feel for that particular community’s culture and etiquette before I finally started interacting myself. And y’know, that approach saved me a lot of embarrassment. Over the course of my lurking on any site, there was always some other person who’d clearly joined up five minutes after learning the place existed, barged in without a care for their behavior, and committed so many social faux pas that all the other users were immediately annoyed with them at best. I learned a lot observing those incidents. Lurk More is Rule 33 of the internet for very good reason.

Lurking isn’t bad or weird or creepy. It’s perfectly normal. I love lurking. It’s hard for me to not lurk - socializing takes a lot of energy out of me, even via text. (Heck it took 12 hours for me to write this post, I wish I was kidding--) Occasionally I’ll manage longer bouts of interaction - a few weeks posting here, almost a year chatting in a discord there - but I’m always gonna end up going radio silent for months at some point. I used to feel bad about it, but I’ve long since made peace with the fact that it’s just the way my brain works. I’m a chronic lurker, and in the long term nothing is going to change that.

The thing with being a chronic lurker is that you have to accept that you are not actually seen as part of the community you are lurking in. That’s not to say that lurkers are unimportant - lurkers actually are important, and they make up a large proportion of any online community - but it’s simple cause and effect. You may think of it as “your community”, but if you’ve never said a word, how is the community supposed to know you exist? If I lurked on someone’s LJ, and then that person suddenly friendslocked their blog, I knew that I had two choices: Either accept that I would never be able to read their posts again, or reach out to them and ask if I could be added to their friends list with the full understanding that I was a rando they might not decide to trust. I usually went with the first option, because my invisibility as a lurker was more important to me than talking to strangers on the internet.

Lurking is like sitting on a park bench, quietly people-watching and eavesdropping on the conversations other people are having around you. You’re in the park, but you’re not actively participating in anything happening there. You can see and hear things that you become very interested in! But if you don’t introduce yourself and become part of the conversation, you won’t be able to keep listening to it when those people walk away. When fandom migrated away from Livejournal, people moved to new platforms alongside their friends, but lurkers were often left behind. No one knew they existed, so they weren’t told where everyone else was going. To be seen as part of a fandom community, you need to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known, etc. etc.

There’s nothing wrong with lurking. There can actually be benefits to lurking, both for the lurkers and the communities they lurk in. It’s just another way to be in a fandom. But if that is how you exist in fandom--and remember, I say this as someone who often does exist that way in fandom--you need to remember that you’re on the outside looking in, and the curtains can always close.

I’ve always been super sympathetic to lurkers, because I am one. I know there’s a lot of people like me who just don’t socialize often. I know there’s plenty of reasons why someone might not make an account on the internet - maybe they’re nervous, maybe they’re young and their parents don’t allow them to, maybe they’re in a bad situation where someone is monitoring their activity, maybe they can only access the internet from public computer terminals. Heck, I’ve never even logged into AO3 on my phone--if I’m away from my computer I just read what’s publicly available. 

I know I have people lurking on my fics. I know my fics probably mean a lot to someone I don’t even know exists. I know this because there are plenty of fics I love whose writers don’t know I exist.

I love my commenters personally; I love my lurkers as an abstract concept. I know they’re there and I wish them well, and if they ever de-lurk I love them all the more.

So up until last year I never considered archive-locking my fic, because I get it. The AI scraping was upsetting, but I still hesitated because I was thinking of lurkers and guests and remembering what it felt like to be 15 and wondering if it’d be worth letting a stranger on the internet know I existed and asking to be added to their friends list just so I could reread a funny post they made once.

But the internet has changed a lot since the 00s, and fandom has changed with it. I’ve read some things and been doing some thinking about fandom-as-community over the last few years, and reading through the lore.fm drama made me decide that it’s time for me to set some boundaries.

I still love my lurkers, and I feel bad about leaving any guest commenters behind, especially if they’re in a situation where they can’t make an account for some reason. But from here on out, even my lurkers are going to have to do the bare minimum to read my fics--make an AO3 account.

Should we gatekeep fandom?

I’ve seen a few people ask this question, usually rhetorically, sometimes as a joke, always with a bit of seriousness. And I think…yeah, maybe we should. Except wait, no, not like that--

A decade ago, when people talked about fandom gatekeeping and why it was bad to do, it intersected with a lot of other things, mainly feminism and classism. The prevalent image of fandom gatekeeping was, like, a man learning that a woman likes Star Wars and haughtily demanding, “Oh, yeah? Well if you’re REALLY a fan, name ten EU novels” to belittle and dismiss her, expecting that a “real fan” would have the money and time to be familiar with the EU, and ignoring the fact that male movie-only fans were still considered fans. The thing being gatekept was the very definition of “being a fan” and people’s right to describe themselves as one.

That’s not what I mean when I say maybe fandom should gatekeep more. Anyone can call themselves a fan if they like something, that’s fine. But when it comes to the ability to enjoy the fanworks produced by the fandom community…that might be something worth gatekeeping.

See, back in the 00s, it was perfectly common for people to just…not go on the internet. Surfing the web was a thing, but it was just, like, a fun pastime. Not everyone did it. It wasn’t until the rise of social media that going online became a thing everyone and their grandmother did every day. Back then, going on the internet was just…a hobby.

So one of the first gates online fandom ever had was the simple fact that the entire world wasn’t here yet.

The entire world is here now. That gate has been demolished.

And it’s a lot easier to find us now. Even scattered across platforms, fandom is so centralized these days. It isn’t a network of dedicated webshrines and forums that you can only find via webrings anymore, it’s right there on all the big social media sites. AO3 didn’t set out to be the main fanfic website, but that’s definitely what it’s become. It’s easy for people to find us--and that includes people who don’t care about the community, and just want “content.”

Transformative fandom doesn’t like it when people see our fanworks as “content”. “Content” is a pretty broad term, but when fandom uses it we’re usually referring to creative works that are churned out by content creators to be consumed by an audience as quickly as possible as often as possible so that the content creator can generate revenue. This not-so-new normal has caused a massive shift in how people who are new to fandom view fanworks--instead of seeing fic or art as something a fellow fan made and shared with you, they see fanworks as products to be consumed.

Transformative fandom has, in general, always been a gift economy. We put time and effort into creating fanworks that we share with our fellow fans for free. We do this so we don’t get sued, but fandom as a whole actually gets a lot out of the gift economy. Offer your community a story, and in return you can get comments, build friendships, or inspire other people to write things that you might want to read. Readers are given the gift of free stories to read and enjoy, and while lurking is fine, they have the choice to engage with the writer and other readers by leaving comments or making reclists to help build the community.

And look, don’t get me wrong. People have never engaged with fanfic as much as fan writers wish they would. There has always been “no one comments anymore” wank. There have always been people who only comment to say “MORE!” or otherwise demand or guilt trip writers into posting the next chapter. But fandom has always agreed that those commenters are rude and annoying, and as those commenters navigate fandom they have the chance to learn proper community etiquette.

However, now it seems that a lot of the people who are consuming fanworks aren’t actually in the community. 

I won’t say “they aren’t real fans” because that’s silly; there’s lots of ways to be a fan. But there seem to be a lot of fans now who have no interest in fandom as a community, or in adhering to community etiquette, or in respecting the gift economy. They consume our fics, but they don’t appreciate fan labor. They want our “content”, but they don’t respect our control over our creations.

And even worse--they see us as a resource. We share our work for free, as a gift, but all they see is an open-source content farm waiting to be tapped into. We shared it for free, so clearly they can do whatever they want with it. Why should we care if they feed our work into AI training datasets, or copy/paste our unfinished stories into ChatGPT to get an ending, or charge people for an unnecessary third-party AO3 app, or sell fanbindings on etsy for a profit without the author’s permission, or turn our stories into poor imitations of podfics to be posted on other platforms without giving us credit or asking our consent, while also using it to lure in people they can datascrape for their Forbes 30 Under 30 company? 

And sure, people have been doing shady things with other people’s fanworks since forever. Art theft and reposting has always been a big problem. Fanfic is harder to flat-out repost, but I’ve heard of unauthorized fic translations getting posted without crediting the original author. Once in…I think the 2010s? I read a post by a woman who had gone to some sort of local bookselling event, only to find that the man selling “his” novel had actually self-published her fanfic. (Wish I could find that one again, I don’t even remember where I read it.)

But aside from that third example, the thing is…as awful as fanart/writing theft is, back in the day, the main thing a thief would gain from it was clout. Clout that should rightfully go to the creators who gifted their work in the first place, yeah, but still. Just clout. People will do a lot of hurtful things for clout, but fandom clout means nothing outside of fandom. Fandom clout is not enough to incentivize the sort of wide-scale pillaging we’re seeing from community outsiders today.

Money, on the other hand… Well, fandom’s just a giant, untapped content farm, isn’t it? Think of how much revenue all that content could generate.

Lurkers are a normal and even beneficial part of any online community. Maybe one day they’ll de-lurk and easily slide into place beside their fellow fans because they already know the etiquette. Maybe they’re active in another community, and they can spread information from the community they lurk in to the community they’re active in. At the very least, they silently observe, and even if they’re not active community members, they understand the community.

Fans who see fanworks as “content” don’t belong in the same category as lurkers. They’re tourists. 

While reading through the initial Reddit thread on the lore.fm situation, I found this comment:

[ID: Reddit User Cabbitowo says: ... So in anime fandoms we have a word called tourist and essentially it means a fan of a few anime and doesn't care about anime tropes and actively criticizes them. This is kind of how fandoms on tiktok feel. They're touring fanfics and fanart and actively criticizes tropes that have been in the fandom since the 60s. They want to be in a fandom but they don't want to engage in fandom 

OP totallymandy responds: Just entered back into Reddit after a long day to see this most recent reply. And as a fellow anime fan this making me laugh so much since it’s true! But it sorta hurts too when the reality sets in. Modern fandom is so entitled and bratty and you’d think it’s the minors only but that’s not even true, my age-mates and older seem to be like that. They want to eat their cake and complain all whilst bringing nothing to the potluck… :/ END ID]

-

“Tourist” is an apt name for this sort of fan. They don’t want to be part of our community, and they don’t have to be in order to come into our spaces and consume our work. Even if they don’t steal our work themselves, they feel so entitled to it that they’re fine with ignoring our wishes and letting other people take it to make AI “podfics” for them to listen to (there are a lot of comments on lore.fm’s shutdown announcement video from people telling them to just ignore the writers and do it anyway). They’ll use AI to generate an ending to an unfinished fic because they don’t care about seeing “the ending this writer would have given to the story they were telling”, they just want “an ending”. For these tourist fans, the ends justify the means, and their end goal is content for them to consume, with no care for the community that created it for them in the first place.

I don’t think this is confined to a specific age group. This isn’t “13-year-olds on Wattpad” or “Zoomers on TikTok” or whatever pointless generation war we’re in now. This is coming from people who are new to fandom, whose main experience with creative works on the internet is this new content culture and who don’t understand fandom as a community. That description can be true of someone from any age group.

It’s so easy to find fandom these days. It is, in fact, too easy. Newcomers face no hurdles or challenges that would encourage them to lurk and observe a bit before engaging, and it’s easy for people who would otherwise move on and leave us alone to start making trouble. From tourist fans to content entrepreneurs to random people who just want to gawk, it’s so easy for people who don’t care about the fandom community to reap all of its fruits. 

So when I say maybe fandom should start gatekeeping a bit, I’m referring to the fact that we barely even have a gate anymore. Everyone is on the internet now; the entire world can find us, and they don’t need to bother learning community etiquette when they do. Before, we were protected by the fact that fandom was considered weird and most people didn’t look at it twice. Now, fandom is pretty mainstream. People who never would’ve bothered with it before are now comfortable strolling in like they own the place. They have no regard for the fandom community, they don’t understand it, and they don’t want to. They want to treat it just like the rest of the content they consume online.

And then they’re surprised when those of us who understand fandom culture get upset. Fanworks have existed far longer than the algorithmic internet’s content. Fanworks existed long before the internet. We’ve lived like this for ages and we like it.

So if someone can’t be bothered to respect fandom as a community, I don’t see why I should give them easy access to my fics.

Think of it like a garden gate

When I interact with commenters on my fic, I have this sense of hospitality.

The comment section is my front porch. The fic is my garden. I created my garden because I really wanted to, and I’m proud of it, and I’m happy to share it with other people. 

Lots of people enjoy looking at my garden. Many walk through without saying anything. Some stop to leave kudos. Some recommend my garden to their friends. And some people take the time to stop by my front porch and let me know what a beautiful garden it is and how much they’ve enjoyed it. 

Any fic writer can tell you that getting comments is an incredible feeling. I always try to answer all my comments. I don’t always manage it, but my fics’ comment sections are the one place that I manage to consistently socialize in fandom. When I respond to a comment, it feels like I’m pouring out a glass of lemonade to share with this lovely commenter on my front porch, a thank you for their thank you. We take a moment to admire my garden together, and then I see them out. The next time they drop by, I recognize them and am happy to pour another glass of lemonade.

My garden has always been open and easy to access. No fences, no walls. You just have to know where to find it. Fandom in general was once protected by its own obscurity, an out-of-the-way town that showed up on maps but was usually ignored.

But now there’s a highway that makes it easy to get to, and we have all these out-of-towner tourists coming in to gawk and steal our lawn ornaments and wonder if they can use the place to make themselves some money.

I don’t care to have those types trampling over my garden and eating all my vegetables and digging up my flowers to repot and sell, so I’ve put up a wall. It has a gate that visitors can get through if they just take the time to open it.

Admittedly, it’s a small obstacle. But when I share my fics, I share them as a gift with my fellow fans, the ones who understand that fandom is a community, even if they’re lurkers. As for tourist fans and entrepreneurs who see fic as content, who have no qualms ignoring the writer’s wishes, who refuse to respect or understand the fandom community…well, they’re not the people I mean to share my fic with, so I have no issues locking them out. If they want access to my stories, they’ll have to do the bare minimum to become a community member and join the AO3 invite queue.

And y’know, I’ve said a lot about fandom and community here, and I just want to say, I hope it’s not intimidating. When I was younger, talk about The Fandom Community made me feel insecure, and I didn’t think I’d ever manage to be active enough in fandom spaces to be counted as A Member Of The Community. But you don’t have to be a social butterfly to participate in fandom. I’ll always and forever be a chronic lurker, I reblog more than I post, I rarely manage to comment on fic, and I go radio silent for months at a time--but I write and post fanfiction. That’s my contribution.

Do you write, draw, vid, gif, or otherwise create? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you leave comments? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you curate reclists? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you maintain a fandom blog or fuckyeah blog? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you provide a space for other fans to convene in? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you regularly send asks (off anon so people know who you are)? Congrats, you're a community member.

Do you have fandom friends who you interact with? Congrats, you're a community member.

There’s lots of ways to be a fan. Just make sure to respect and appreciate your fellow fans and the work they put in for you to enjoy and the gift economy fandom culture that keeps this community going.

[pyrrhicraven]

Can we see more ideas for your fics? ☺️ Maybe some sneak-peeks, drawings or headcannons?

Okay, I'm still hyper-fixated on The Devil's Trap so I'm sharing for that again. SOooo kind of spoilers? and I wrote a lot again!

This pic above(I found it online no clue who made it as I can't read their signature in the corner) inspired a few things for the story.

I've realized the further I write The Devil's Trap how OP Luigi is about to get 😂

With what I've written so far Luigi will have King Boo wrapped around his finger, it might take them a moment to get to that point but it's there.

Luigi and his folks get an adorable (but concerning) chapter before Luigi goes off the rails, ah in a good way? Still working that one out and all I can say without major spoilers is Luigi + Beer = whatever the hell it was I wrote 😂

I wrote the chapter and looked at work and went why the fuck? I mean I know why I wrote it because it amused me to put that to paper but what the actual fuck Luigi??? Mario is going to say that to him I've just decided. Because no one can believe Luigi even himself!

We find out that Luigi is allergic to Pine Nuts! Boy was that a doozy to plan and write! Not the allergy part but rather what facilitates you the reader in learning that fact.

I'd say trust me it's a fun chapter but don't trust your local cryptid writer they lie🤣.

I am bad at writing action. No matter what story that is. This one is no different. Why the heck do I keep doing this to myself??? At least Luigi and Mario have a good rumble at least once in this fic :)

The villain of the story was a literal pain in my ass. I sat on them as I have a Lego figure, it hurt pointy bastard. (And No it's not Bowser that was my first thought now he's not even in the fic 🤣)

Luigi has been such a joy to write to be honest and I love the vibes he's giving me right now because I'm getting so much for him. My poor little string bean is getting put through the emotional wringer and coming out fed up and just done with everybody's shit. Knocking back a beer or ya know five and giving King Boo the Bird.

I think that's the best part actually. I write a fairly wimpy Luigi in my opinion and this is going to be different. He starts off wimpy but that sure changes real quick.

Fun fact for research, found a Super Mario World theory that I put into practice for the first time here. So a lot of new elements for me writing-wise!

[intheticklecloset]

Middle Seat (My Hero Academia)

Primary Universe

This idea was sooo cute and so much fun to write about! Thank you so much for the suggestion and your incredible patience, as this is the FINAL PROMPT I had to fill! I'm all caught up as of this fic! Thank you again, and enjoy! ^^

~

“Move it, nerd!” Bakugou shouted over his shoulder at Deku, who was hurrying to catch up. The bus that was going to take them to their off-campus training grounds for the day was about to leave, and they were the last two to leave the dorms. Everyone else had already boarded.

“I’m coming, I’m coming!” Deku panted, sprinting the last few steps to the doors, nearly bowling his friend over in the process.

Bakugou turned around and punched his arm. “Get a hold of yourself, idiot.”

“S-Sorry, Kacchan.”

Once on the bus, the two stood awkwardly for a moment, trying to find a place to sit. Most of the seats had been filled already – all but one in the back. Bakugou strode toward it and plopped himself down next to Todoroki, who had claimed the window. Deku wandered toward the back as well, hoping to find another open spot, but no such luck.

The bus started moving, making him lose his footing and nearly fall in the middle of the aisle.

Todoroki poked his head around Bakugou. “You can sit with us, Midoriya.”

“Like heck he can,” the blonde snapped. “You and I barely fit as it is.”

“Because you’re taking up so much room. Just move over.”

“I’m not getting all buddy-buddy with that loser.”

Todoroki huffed out a sigh. “Fine, then you take the window seat and I’ll sit next to him.”

Deku was about to suggest that he could just stay standing, but then he remembered this bus ride was supposed to be almost half an hour, and he didn’t want to stand up for that long. He also didn’t want to sit in the aisle. So he waited quietly while his two friends swapped places, Todoroki scooting over enough for Deku to mostly be able to share the seat.

“Thanks, Todoroki,” he murmured gratefully, offering a smile.

“Of course.”

Bakugou grunted, shoving an elbow into Todoroki’s side. “You’re squishing me, icy-hot.”

Todoroki grunted right back. “Deal with it.”

“Don’t tell me to deal with it.” The blonde grabbed onto his side with intention then, digging deep, forcing the half-and-half hero to let out a surprised squeal and jerk away from him, sending Midoirya into the aisle once more.

“Boys!” Aizawa snapped from the front of the bus. “You’d better not be fighting back there.”

“W-We’re not, Mr. Aizawa,” Deku called back. “We promise!”

“Move over,” Torodoki hissed, moving back to his previous position to allow Deku back onto the small bus seat with them. “It’s only a half an hour. Next time get onto the bus faster so you have a better seat.”

“You think I wanted to be late? This nerd is the reason I was running behind.”

“Why’s it my fault?” Deku protested.

“Guys, don’t do this now,” Todoroki grumbled, getting irritated with them both, “or this is going to be a long ride. Just try to get along, okay?”

Deku was content to do as Todoroki asked, but of course, Bakugou was not. He pinched the icy-hot’s side again. “I don’t take orders from you.”

Todoroki bit his lip to keep from squealing again, but he couldn’t help the smile on his face. “Stop doing that. You know it tickles.”

“Yeah? Well, if it gets you to move over…” The blonde pinched him again.

Deku was nearly toppled into the aisle once more, but desperate not to fall out of his seat and incur Aizawa’s wrath, he did the only thing he could think of instead. He pinched Todoroki’s other side. “Kacchan, please just try to deal with it. I don’t want to get in trouble.”

Bakugou jabbed his ribs. “And I don’t want to get flattened against the window.”

“The seat’s only so big.” Deku mirrored his friend’s actions. “We’ll just have to live with it.”

“G-Guys,” Todoroki huffed, giggling quietly into the palm of his hand. “S-Stop, that tickles!”

“Does it, now?” Bakugou smirked, seeking out his side with renewed purpose and vigor. “Guess it sucks you volunteered to sit in the middle then, huh?”

“Nohohoho!” Todoroki pleaded, giggles growing louder. He slapped his other hand over top of his first one. “Dohohohon’t!”

Deku smiled. This scene had quickly gone from frustrating to advantageous, and he was enjoying every second of it. “I’ve heard you’re really ticklish, Todoroki. Is that true?” He also drilled a bit harder now, aiming for his friend’s ribs.

Todoroki tried to fold himself over in an attempt to escape, having nowhere else he could really go. His giggling was becoming frantic. “Y-Yehehehes, it’s true! P-Plehehease don’t—”

Enjoying himself as well, Bakugou found the hollow of Todoroki’s underarm and scribbled, smirking when the half-and-half hero threw himself against the back of the seat, one hand trying to push him away while the other stayed clamped firmly over his mouth. Even so, his laughter was unmistakable.

“Wow, you really are ticklish!” Deku giggled, squeezing at his hip while aiming for his other underarm at the same time.

Todoroki was frantically stomping his feet on the floor now. “Plehehehehease dohohohohohon’t!” he cried, doing his best to keep his voice down and failing miserably. “Nohohohoho! It t-tihihihihihickles!”

“Heh. This may not be such a bad arrangement after all,” Bakugou observed, grabbing the hand that was covering Todoroki’s mouth and pulling it away, holding onto the wrist firmly. “Go on, let it out. Let the whole bus hear how ticklish you are.”

Todoroki let out a distressed whine. “No, plehehehehease, I’ll do ahahahanything! Just stohohop!”

Deku grabbed onto his other wrist and moved even further down to squeeze at his thigh, grinning all the while. Todoroki tossed his head back and squeezed his eyes shut, clenching his teeth desperately against the flood of laughter that threatened to burst forth. He shook his head, struggling against his captors.

“Nohohohohoho, no – AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!” Finally, he couldn’t hold back anymore, his hysterics unleashed in a wild screech of laughter, drawing the attention of everyone on the bus. “NO MOHOHOHOHOHOHORE!! PLEHEHEHEHEHEHEASE STAHAHAHAHAP!!”

Several of their classmates cooed at him playfully.

“Aww, he’s ticklish!” said one of the girls.

One of the guys added, “Listen to that laugh! Dude, I’ve never seen him smiling so big.”

Todoroki was flushed with embarrassment, but he couldn’t stop laughing. “PLEHEHEHEHEHEHEASE STAHAHAHAHAHAP!! MEHEHEHEHERCY!! GUHUHUHUYS!!”

“Get him, guys!” someone shouted.

“Tickle him good! He’s always so serious.”

“You could take it a little easier though, maybe?”

Deku observed Todoroki carefully, worried he might be distressed about this situation. To his surprise, he found that his friend actually seemed to be enjoying himself, despite the dark red blush on his cheeks.

“Well, would you listen to that?” Bakugou teased, lifting his arm above his head. “They want more laughter!”

“Tickle, tickle,” Deku dared to tease, blushing a little himself.

“GAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! STAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAP!!” Todoroki begged, shaking his head, kicking the floor. “PLEHEHEHEHEHEASE, I CAHAHAHAHAN’T!! IT TIHIHIHIHICKLES!! MEHEHEHEHEHERCY!!”

“Tch, whatever, icy-hot.” At last Bakugou let him be, and Deku followed his lead. “Just be thankful we can’t reach your feet like this.”

Another chorus of coos went up from their classmates, along with some scattered applause and general shouts of encouragement.

Todoroki groaned and sank down in his seat, blushing furiously but still smiling wide.

“You okay?” Deku asked him.

He nodded. “Yeah. Thanks.” Then, with an added giggle, he covered up his face. “I’m so ticklish. It’s almost unfair.”

Bakugou scoffed. “At least you like it.”

Deku and Todoroki both looked at him. “But…don’t you like it, too?”

“Shut up!”

[beepboop358]

How Time Moves in the Upside Down

I've had this theory for awhile now but with all the increasing clock imagery in promos and since we know time is going to be a big theme in s4, I think it might finally be discussed**

I think the time theme in s4 could have 2 components:

The time theme will probably mainly be about the clocks representing memories and the characters will experience "time travel flashbacks", where they are essentially transported back to the time of the memory through the powers of the void/upside down.

** I think Time moves faster in the upside down, than it does in our dimension.

In s2, right before Will sees the shadow monster/mindflayer outside his front door, the camera pans over some things in his house.

The dining room, a dripping water faucet, and then a zoom in on the drips (water has significant in the show relating to the upside down/El's powers-maybe Will's too), and a clock, which is ticking abnormally fast.

Here's the clip: (sorry for the terrible quality I had to record my laptop screen with my phone because Netflix doesn't let you screen record)

When the front door of his house opens, Will sees a storm in the upside down. The camera focuses in on the goosebumps on the back of Will's neck, and he always gets goosebumps on the back his neck (and touches it) whenever the mindflayer is close in s3.

This is one of Will's seeing into the upside down dimension/splitting two worlds moments, like a "view master caught between two slides".  Will is able to split between both our dimension and the upside down and inhabit both through his powers, and what everyone else calls " at first believes are "episodes" he is having, before they realize it's all real and not just in his head. Will isn't just having a vision of the upside down, he's really there (confirmed by the goosebumps on his neck and the vines on his house - and we also find out later in the season), which is how we know the clock in his house moving abnormally fast is a reference to how time moves in the upside down.

To confirm that the clock is actually moving faster, I timed the clip and estimated how fast the clock was moving to compare.

The clock clip begins with the secondhand just past 12, and ends with the secondhand in between 2 and 3:

Analog clocks like this one have 5 SECONDS between each hour-marking number. Here, the second hand moves through the 12 section, past the 1, past the 2, and on is way to 3, which is roughly 9-12 seconds, but the actual clip is only about 6.5 SECONDS long.

I tried to get a fairly accurate estimate of how many seconds pass in this clip by making second marks (but badly lol) and it looks like the clock's secondhand starts between the 1st and 2nd second (it's really hard to tell if it should be on the 1st or 2nd second because my lines are not 100% accurate so I'm saying its in the middle to be safe lol). The clip ends in the second image between the 1st and 2nd second, but it looks like it is almost on the 2nd second, so I'm going with that.

This estimate would put it at 10.5 seconds long, definitely faster than the real time clip length of 6.5 seconds. Will is in the upside down, splitting dimensions during this scene, so this proves time moves faster in the upside down.

And then because I'm insane I also tried to calculate the ratio to determine exactly how much faster time moves in the upside down than in our dimension to find out how long Will really was in the upside down in the way he experienced it. 10.5 divided by 6.5 comes out to 1.61538462. The ratio can also be calculated as 21:13, but still comes out to the same 1.61538462.

In conclusion, time moves 1.61538462 times faster in the upside down than it does in our dimension. (roughly)

Will was in the upside down for 7 days (a week) in our dimension’s time, but for Will he experienced that time as 11 days, because thats how much time passed in the dimension he was in. (7/11 reference)

Because time moves faster in the upside down, more time actually passes, not less. Like in the clock clip; 10.5 seconds pass in the upside down while 6.5 seconds pass in our dimension. Think interstellar vibes. The perception of time varies between worlds/dimensions. I haven't seen this concept explicitly in any 80's movies so please let me know if you have!

I won’t bore you all by just writing out math problems and conversions BUT if we apply this ratio to our time:

24 hours our time is actually 38 hours upside down time.

A week in the upside down is actually 11.20 days, compared to our week of 7 days.

One hour in upside down time is 1.615384619444 hours in our time.

So, Will was actually in the upside in the upside down for around 11 days.

Which further raises the question, how the heck did he survive 11 DAYS seemingly with no food or water, running from a supernatural monster in a dimension where the atmosphere is toxic, and everyone else who was taken died pretty much immediately after?! Idk I think the only possible solution for this is that Will has supernatural powers of some kind, or he is extremely special in some way.

All of those calculations are assuming that my 10.5 to 6.5 ratio is actually correct - I could have been off by half a second or so in estimating with the clock drawings, so the actual numbers could be slightly different, but the principle still stands.

Then I started thinking maybe the ratio isn't constant or fixed. We really don't know anything about the upside down and how it works or what it even is really, so maybe time there doesn't run at a constant speed, maybe its faster or slower in certain places, I have no idea, just something to think about. Personally, I kind of hope it is a fixed rate.

[h2bakugou]

hello! May I please have a Dabi x fem reader in the lov who likes to draw? I think she finds his scars and stuff to be a work of art in itself and is like (oh heck I gotta sketch this). He glances at what she’s drawing and she gets all flustered! Maybe he even takes his shirt off at one point which can lead to some other things~ (I like smut but if you think fluff fits the prompt better that’s alright with me!) Thank you and I love your writing!

a/n: hii! of course love! this is super sweet omg i love dabi, i feel like i dont capture his character very well but imma try like hell😩😩this is probably ooc for him but it’s sappy and i love it

summary: dabi’s hard to read, but that doesn’t stop you from sketching him. you find beauty in his flaws, entranced by his scars, so much so that dabi can’t help but be interested in you.

key: (y/n) - your name / (f/n) - first name / (l/n) - last name / (e/c) - eye color / (h/c) - hair color / (y/q) - your quirk

warnings: swearing, fluff, sappy romance bc i love this man, some spicy themes, one mention of a slight(possible? idrk what counts) manga spoiler (e.g. dabi’s past/history) (manga spoilers in tags!!)

wordcount: 2k

;cut due to suggestive themes;

»»————-　★　————-««

»»————-　★　————-««

It’s never been a really big secret that you liked drawing. But when it comes to working for the league, specifically, the League of Villains, your line of work doesn’t allow for very much downtime unless you’re in the midst of planning some sort of attack or rebellion.

Whether or not the league keeps hopping from rendezvous spot to rendezvous spot isn’t up to you, but you never fail to get a little used to the eerily calming silence that falls upon the league during the first twenty-four hours of the new four walls that seem to keep you safe for the time being.

With a barely sharpened pencil in your hand, a small drawing pad in the other, you’re staring at Dabi as you sketch him.

It started as a bit of a joke, maybe just teasing him since he liked to tease you about being into him since you were the only one he was really super close, if you could call being the first one he spoke to every time he saw you or the one you sought out to be paired up with during missions, ‘super close.’

But now, it was something you enjoyed.

Dabi was one among the very interesting members of the league. Something about his scars just seemed to entrance you. Pulling you in further and further down a rabbit hole of questions that you had but never let leave past your lips.

It felt wrong to ask, not that it was a bad thing to be curious, but because Dabi was just so mysterious. No one knew anything about him, or about who he was, his past, even his real name was a mystery. 

It felt wrong to disturb the unnerving peace that was Dabi. The resting expression on his features balancing on a thin cable between anger and poor personal resilience.

Dabi’s scars were the highlight of your sketches, always standing out. What the others may have thought to be ugly, or unattractive, you thought were beautiful, and emotional.

There was a story behind them, one you wanted to know, one you wanted to uncover and read, page by page, line by line, and word for word, discovering just how truly deep Dabi’s past was. But only Dabi could show you that, only Dabi could open that book for you. And you were willing to wait. You’d wait an eternity if you had too.

His rough raven hair is messy and strewn about as you scribble down his facial features, the groggy lighting making it just a tad difficult to see as you lead the pencil over the warm white paper littered with graphite covered fingerprints.

His arms are positioned on a counter, the art work resembling how he was sitting sloped against the kitchen table, elbows pressed against the dark mahogany wood, hands resting by his mouth as his cerulean eyes peer off at the cracked cement wall in front of him, occasionally glancing back at you.

The other members of the league were scattered about but it didn’t bother you. Toga asked you a couple of questions, wondering what you were doing, if you were excited about the new plans and such.

You replied quietly as to not disturb the peace.

But soon some of the members left, going off to go eat or find something to do. And soon you were among the few left behind, along with Dabi, Shigaraki and Mr. Compress.

Having almost finally finished your current sketch, you were stopped by a pair of hands picking up your drawing pad. Rough and calloused fingers drew your pad away and your attention away.

“Hey I’m not finished.” You glanced up at Dabi. Dabi just admired the talent poured into the sketch. Dabi couldn’t wrap his head around why you drew him so often, but he didn’t mind. It was kind of touching in a way.

“Is that really what I look like?” Dabi joked, handing you back your sketch pad.

“You have looked in a mirror once before, right?” You titled your head to the side, adding a bit more detail to his scars as you began to draw again. 

“A few times. But I’d rather look at you, doll.” Dabi’s hands reached down again, this time pulling at your hands. Leading you out of the room where the other two members sat, finding a way to entertain themselves, Dabi lead you up some stairs in questionable condition.

Picking a random room, he sat down on the rickety bed and waited for you to sit down.

“Why’s that?” You tease, returning to drawing, looking up at him every few seconds to reference. And to admire him.

“You’re easy on the eyes, beautiful and-”

“Are you saying you’re not beautiful, Dabi?” You stopped him, not pausing to look at him.

“I’m not beautiful, I’m gorgeous.” Dabi chuckled, shaking his head jokingly as he laid back against the bed, his head dangling off the opposite end.

“You are.” You confirm. Finally finishing up your sketch. You get up and walk over to him, handing him the finished sketch. 

“You add so much detail to my scars. They’re just scars.” The tips of Dabi’s ears flush as heat floods to his face. He’s flustered but he won’t admit it. He can’t understand why you think he’s so beautiful.

You don’t speak. For the first time, you’re speechless. You sit down beside Dabi, and now that he’s sitting up, he faces you.

You reach your hands out and gently lift one of his arms, holding one of his hands in your own. You run your fingers across the scarred flesh, gently caressing his skin. 

His hands are cold compared to your warm fingers. He’s getting chills all down his spine as you touch him. It’s not meant to be anything out of the ordinary, but he’s still shocked that he’s letting you touch him.

“Your scars are beautiful. I’m sure there’s a story, something about them that might make you hate them, but I love them, and I think they make you that much more beautiful. You are a masterpiece, every scar a carefully calculated brushstroke on a beautiful canvas.” Your words finally come out, overflowing with love. You can’t sit quietly anymore.

“Dabi you are beautiful.” Your eyes lock with his, and you can tell he’s unsure of what to do. 

Dabi no longer felt he had the ability to cry, but if he’d let himself, he would’ve done it in that moment. Being so open and vulnerable around you just happened. It came too easily, and he hated it, but he loved you.

Pulling his arm away form your warm touch, he tossed his jacket off and to the side before tearing his shirt away from his body, allowing you to see his chest, and more of his scar covered skin.

Sitting quietly with a faint blush on your cheeks, you couldn’t look away. trying to avoid staring directly at his toned chest and his nipples, you raised your hand and allowed your fingers to sink down across his sternum.

Soon your fingers were met with his abs, which the heat on your face noticed far too well. 

“Say it again.” Dabi mumbled. You lifted your head to look into his eyes again, your hand still resting against his chest.

“You are beautiful-” The moment the words left your lips, Dabi’s own lips were pressed against yours. Kissing you roughly, more than he intended too, his hands mangled into yours, pushing your arms over your head.

His heart was pounding and it felt like it was going to beat right out of his chest onto yours. Pulling away for a few seconds, Dabi’s hair covered his eyes as he looked down, finding interest in the collar of your shirt.

“I want you.” Dabi’s words were simple, but they didn’t have to be complex. You knew what he meant, and you knew what he wanted. You wanted it too. A chance to see him in a different light, with deeper meaning.

A chance to connect with him, one on one. 

“Then take me.” Your fingers intertwined with his, your arms still resting above your head. It didn’t take long for his lips to magnetize back to yours, sticking to them like glue.

When Dabi thought about sex, he didn’t come anywhere close to making love. There wasn’t that sort of option when it came to him. He didn’t think he was at all capable of love, let alone a relationship that was going to have any sort of emotional connection strong enough to make him feel stable.

But you, you were so vastly different from anyone he’d ever fucked. So different from an excuse to get his dick wet, to get his mind off of league business or heaven forbid, his past.

But you, you were what he needed, what he wanted. It was far from therapy, but it’d work. Having you around was like a drug, addicting, and he’d be going through withdrawals if he couldn’t have you.

Feeling you, touching you, fucking you, kissing you, it was fuel to his fire. He was damaged goods, broken and shattered, impossible to put together, but you were doing your best, working on the smallest parts, exercising precautions, and opening your heart to him.

Hearing his name in the form of your moans as he rutted into you, your legs wrapped tightly around his hips drove him wild, much like the way your hands tangled into his hair, forcing his head into your chest where he kissed and sucked on your skin, leaving marks.

Your moans and his own grunts of pleasure were spewing from the locked room. Dabi didn’t care if the others heard, he was enjoying the moment.

Every part of it. Every part of you, every part of your body, your words, your love. And before he knew, Dabi was at his highest, his face flush against your naked chest, breathing heavily as he inhaled your scent.

Still inside you, he didn’t move, allowing the two of you to catch your breath. It was in this moment, if Dabi allowed himself to cry, he would’ve cried a second time. He was so infatuated with you, so attached.

“I love you.” Your words scared him, causing his cerulean eyes to peak at you through locks of his noir hair.

“That’s stupid.” Dabi kissed your sternum, kissing up your chest, stopping at your neck to leave a little mark, only to meet at your lips in the end.

“How?” You ask softly, your hands massaging his scalp as his lips hover over yours.

“I can’t explain it, it just is.” Dabi frowned, trying to understand what your eyes were saying as they clouded with emotion.

“Love is complex, and I think that maybe you’ve never really had good experiences with it. If you’d let me, I could show you just how beautiful it can be.” You offer, a small smile on your lips.

“If you feel the need-”

“I do. I love you, and I want you to know love.” You kissed his forehead. Dabi eventually pulled out, not minding the mess, he’d clean up later. 

“I want you to know why I love you.” You whispered, hugging him closer to you.

“Why I love your scars, your hands, your strength, the rasp in your voice, all of it. I love.” Dabi’s arms are strung over your waist as he lays, face nuzzled in your neck. It’s a bit of a stretch for him, and he feels out of place, but it’s oddly comfortable.

The next couple of times you draw Dabi, you ask to see him shirtless again. And with every new sketch, there’s something new to be learned, for Dabi. He’s learning about love, and loving you. 

He finds that you still draw him incredibly cute, and though he won’t admit it, he loves when you draw him. He’ll pose for you if you ever ask, and you always tease him a little about how it was like he was born to be a model.

It’s a long road ahead of you, but it’s one you’re willing to take, to show Dabi just how important love is.

»»————-　★　————-««

masterlist

[delldarling]

Hiatus

This is a re-post of what I've sent to my patrons, but I'm posting here for further reach.

My sincerest apologies for the lack of contact, and before I get into the woes of life:

I paused billing for April at the end of March, and I've just paused billing for May - this means that you haven't been, and won't be, charged for those months.

If you're new to signing up, you will be charged up front, or if you've cancelled and want to re-subscribe, there will be a new charge. 

If things are left as is, you will retain access to all the works on patreon at no current cost. I will not unpause billing until I have a 2 week assurance of content and stability to give you all.

Onto the nitty gritty - and please take care of yourself - I won't go into vivid detail, but there will be mentions of abuse and major stress in the following paragraphs.

Even so… idk that I really want to talk much about it. The fact that I'm actually referring to it as abuse still feels mind boggling, and I feel like people will accuse me of lying or. Idek. 

I've been fairly open about taking care of my sibling (she's 10 years younger than me, but we're both adults), and that it's been a struggle with her meds and care. Things got so much worse. Verbal abuse has been the worst of it, but it got physical too, and like. Fuck, man. Really idk if that last sentence even is true, reading it back, because it doesn't matter what there was more of, it all still happened and I still feel sick over it. 

I've lost 35 lbs over the past two+ months, and heck. I feel like I really only want simple things, you know? To take care of my loved ones, to have basic necessities, to do things I enjoy like drawing or writing without.. the stress of all the other stuff. 

Anyway. I'm emotionally a mess, lol. Her psychiatrist actually believes me now, and she's being treated properly and it's hard to keep up hope, but the last week on new meds has me very cautiously optimistic that I might be able to do literally anything for myself. 

(Meds are not the only endeavor we are using for care, and please believe that I'm not assuming they will "fix" anything - I sure as heck can't forget - and I have other fam members telling me not to forgive and it's all just messed up, you know? I love her and she needs help, and I'm not happy that I've suffered in getting her there, but I can't just give up? Maybe I'm being stupid. Idk.)

If you've already canceled your pledge, please know I am so thankful you were here in the first place. I hope you enjoyed my works while you were here, and I wish you all the best! If you ever come back, know that I always feel a little burst of !?! 🥰 every time I see someone return. 

For those here on tumblr:

While I'm going to try and pop in a bit more frequently, I can't make any solid promises. I'm so tired. That's really all I can say. I want to go back to having.. to just having fun, and even that feels just out of reach.

[stillness-in-green]

MVA In Memoriam (4/5)

The Comprehensive Account of the Butchering of My Villain Academia

(Introduction and Part One, Episode 108: My Villain Academia) (Part Two, Episode 109: Revival Party) (Part Three, Episode 110: Sad Man's Parade)

Part Four, Episode 111: Origin: Shimura Tenko

Chapter 233 – Bright Future

• Twice clearly having arranged a Skeptic puppet to where its arm can be used as a pillow for Toga’s neck. A cute little character detail while also being kind of disturbing? Very on-brand for the League! A not-immediately-plot-crucial visual of a member of the League demonstrating obvious care for another member? The guillotine awaits!

• A little explanation about how clones’ physicality and memories work relative to the last time Twice saw the people the clones are based on. This is a very useful little nod of explanation to something that remained unclear from the dialogue of Mr. Clone-press last chapter. Twice’s quirk is pretty arcane in its ins and outs, frankly, and the clearer those details are, the fewer plot holes you’re leaving for later.

• The scene of Skeptic being right on the verge of confronting Twice. Skeptic has, oh, about five moments where he’s obviously a big tense neurotic who’s unpleasant to be around if things aren’t going his way, and the anime deleted or downplayed all but two of them. As ever, it’s obscenely damaging to the characterization of the MLA cast, who we have little enough time with as it is. Further, it was a particularly weird choice to make with Skeptic, who is as of this writing the only major MLA character who’ll emerge still free and active from the War Arc. Why shaft the characterization of the one of new characters who’s going to be getting the most attention out of any of them in the next arc, with yet more scenes yet to come after?[1]

• A full page’s-worth of Spinner’s rationalizations on targeting Trumpet and ordering the Twice doubles to do the same. This lays out the details on why targeting Trumpet stands to relieve some of the load on Shigaraki. It isn’t because Trumpet’s quirk makes the crowds more dangerous, though that is true. Spinner targets Trumpet because he’s seen enough to know that attacking the MLA’s leaders gets them crazy riled up; he knows that if he makes himself a threat to Trumpet, then all Trumpet’s followers’ attention will shift focus to Spinner, leaving Shigaraki with less to deal with.           Spinner also knows that that is ludicrously dangerous to him personally, given his weak quirk, but he actively makes that choice anyway, because that’s how much he’s devoted himself to Shigaraki without (yet) quite articulating the nature and reasons for that devotion. Targeting Trumpet without any of that reasoning made for a perfectly sound tactical decision, but it missed the regard Spinner shows the unnamed mobs of the MLA, and it really missed the probable savage beatdown and even possible death that Spinner consciously chooses to risk for Shigaraki’s sake.           Of course, a chunk of what the episode deleted is flashbacks to scenes the anime also cut, so they couldn’t figure into Anime!Spinner’s reasoning. This does not excuse yet more cuts to Spinner’s arc and characterization; it only adds to how badly the anime maimed him.           Also, on a less salty but still confused note, deleting all the Twice clones from the beginning of the scene and just having Spinner running along a wall past mobs of people instead of laboriously fighting his way through the street to the van was really dumb. Why did all those MLA people just stand there and let him run by? Where did all the Twice clones that just helped save Spinner from a huge flurry of long-distance attacks disappear to? Come on.

• Trumpet’s thought that using Sevens Loud will draw every bit of strength from their warriors, but that it’s necessary. Setting aside that it looks far less necessary when there hasn’t been a crowd of Twice clones fighting Trumpet’s people this whole time, just Spinner by his lonesome, we still lost quite a bit to this cut. Firstly, a nuance on the trade-off Incite gives—that its stat-boost is temporary, and that it’s borrowing from the future to pay for the present, a stock that is limited and a bill that will come due when the effect wears off.           Secondly, it’s another demonstration that the MLA leaders aren’t just thoughtlessly wasting their followers’ lives; they’re very consciously doing cost/benefit analysis on how much danger their people are in versus what stands to be gained by the potential exertion or outright deaths those people will suffer. It’s cold reasoning, yes, but that’s how the Liberation Army operates: not for the personal gain or lackadaisical ease of the people on top—Trumpet would just have been in the tower speaking through city-wide loudspeakers, if that were the case—but for the advancement of the group’s ideals.           It also just grants Trumpet some interiority, but of course the anime can’t have that.

• The note in Trumpet’s meta-ability explanation that the more his voice causes the air to vibrate, the stronger Incite’s effect. This is—good god, it is literally the entire design mentality behind Sevens Loud! Sevens Loud purpose isn't to make his voice louder so more people can hear him (which I would think is the most logical assumption an anime-only person would make as to why he puts it on); it’s to make himself louder because being louder enhances the boost. It’s about the quality of the effect, not the quantity of targets. This is why Trumpet has the thought about how using Sevens Loud will drain the strength reserves of his people. There’d be no correlation there if Sevens Loud were only about boosting his range.

• When Spinner got porcupined in the anime, they did a close-up on his face, possibly to avoid the gore of showing the spines piercing through his forearm. That’s fine, but they also emphasized the reaction by having him lose his grip on the huge fuck-off knife he had clutched in his teeth. In the manga, sure, he yells in pain, but he doesn’t lose the knife. Indeed, he gets the guy off him by slashing at him with it—a shot the anime dropped. So Spinner doesn’t even get to keep displays of his pain tolerance, a trait he doubtless improved during those six weeks against Machia. Why does the anime hate Spinner so much, you guys? Why did it go out of its way to make him look lamer, when Dabi and Toga were out there getting anime-original flourishes to make them look cooler?

• Spinner’s thoughts, “When I get inspired to act, I don’t know what the heck I’m doing! I’m just a loser jumping on a bandwagon. Or at least that’s what it looks like.” A humorous bit of self-awareness from Spinner here. The anime got at the self-awareness. The humor, as we’ll see, not so much.

• Spinner’s thoughts, “Look at me. Look at me!! With all that prejudice in your eyes!” Hah hah, laughed BNHA the anime nervously, what prejudice are you talking about, Spinner? No idea what you could possibly be referring to there! This one’s particularly annoying because, while one might think that the anime was just dodging the heteromorphobia angle it eradicated all references to back at the beginning of the arc, the prejudice line isn’t even about heteromorphobia, not really.           See, the Japanese line there literally translates to, “With those colored glasses!”—to see with colored glasses being a Japanese idiom for seeing something from a biased viewpoint. So aside from being a wordplay jab at Trumpet’s choice in eyewear, it’s also about Trumpet’s expressed view that Spinner, having been a shut-in with a weak quirk who decided to take his resentment out on the world, can’t possibly amount to anything much. So, what, did the people in charge of making those cuts think Trumpet was right? Why even keep the line where he disparages Spinner if you’re not going to let Spinner call it what it is? He’s not calling out fantasy racism there, anime! He’s calling out the bias against weak quirks that even the good guys in this world sometimes partake in!           Possibly it’s because non-villains in the world[2] sometimes use reasoning that leads logically to quirk supremacism that the anime got gunshy with it, or it was more reluctance to give the villains—and the Too-Real Iguchi Shuuichi especially—moral ground for accusations against their society that get too close to real life. Whatever the motivation, it’s a bullshit cut.

• Shigaraki calling RD “Detnerat,” presumably because he neither knows RD’s real name nor cares to dignify him by using his code name. The anime, again, made neither the connection nor Shigaraki’s recognition explicit, so it lost the specificity and pettiness of that little snub.

• A little exchange between Giran and a Twice clone as they flee. It doesn’t give you much you wouldn’t assume just from seeing them flee, but it always feels more immediate and empathetic when the characters talk and you can see their expressions, instead of just a quick shot of them from behind as they run away in complete silence. Heck, running away in complete silence is actively out of character for Twice!

• Because the anime has some kind of aversion/restriction on showing hand-related violence, it radically changed how Shigaraki lost his fingers,[3] resulting in the loss of several important shots. To the best of my parsing, in the manga, when Re-Destro makes that first big jump to avoid Shigaraki’s decay wave, he comes back down specifically aiming for Shigaraki’s outstretched left hand, spread wide and flat on the ground. Shigaraki tries to evade (you can see the blur of his left arm in the panel where RD lands), but either RD does manage to clip the hand or he simply hits the ground with so much force that the sheer explosive burst of rock shreds Shigaraki’s hand and part of his coat sleeve. Being so much larger, RD then simply snags Shigaraki by the wrist before he can get out of range. It’s very fast, a burst of speed and violence, and very different (read: cooler) from Shigaraki flipping end over end in slow motion in a way that seemed to imply visually that he was thrown well out of RD’s grabbing range.           As to the shots we lost? I counted three. First, Hana’s hand crumpling amidst all the flying debris. Second, that big dramatic panel of Shigaraki’s maimed hand ribboning blood into the air as the narration box finally drops Re-Destro’s identity and code name. Third, the shot of him catching Shigaraki, almost delicately, between one thumb and forefinger and delivering the, “Was it this hand that committed such evil acts?” line—a clear threat to what of that hand Shigaraki has remaining—as we find out what his meta-ability is.           This is all hugely dramatic in the manga, because, of course, readers always assumed Shigaraki needed all five fingers to activate his quirk, and here Re-Destro nigh-effortlessly robs him of fully half his capacity to use it. It’s a shocking turn-around and instantly ups RD’s threat level by allowing him to permanently maim Shigaraki in a way that no one, hero or villain, has done before or since. Robbing Re-Destro of the immediacy of that seemingly devastating blow—inflicted within moments of meeting the real Shigaraki—did immeasurable damage to his credibility as an arc boss.           The shot in the manga is also just arresting visually, with RD finally getting to properly loom over Shigaraki. Most of the shots up to this point have been framed such that, while RD is obviously bigger, he and Shigaraki have still been moving and fighting in a pretty level way. This is the first place where the viewer is situated so squarely behind Shigaraki that they can really feel how massive RD is in comparison. It’s certainly a more impressive visual than this mess—thanks, anime; thanks, whatever broadcasting standards forced overworked and uninspired animators to undertake a redraw of RD’s quirk reveal panel when every other member of the MLA brass had theirs carried over directly from the manga.

• A chapter-ending cliffhanger of Slidin’ Go helping direct traffic on the outskirts of Deika and the warning rumble as Gigantomachia approaches. Aside from being a nice little tension boost—Will Gigantomachia roll up just in time to see Re-Destro making a mess of Shigaraki? Who will he target? Will Shigaraki ever be able to win him over if he sees a scene like that?—it’s good foreshadowing for what the news reports will eventually be saying. Remember, the claim is that a bunch of villains lured Deika’s heroes away and then attacked the city while it was defenseless; that’s why we never see any of the MLA’s heroes involved with the fight once it starts. And now, here, we find out where they’ve been the whole time: making sure no outsiders get in who might be able to undermine that narrative.

Framing Shifts

• Once again had an MLA member using their Detnerat item say its name out loud, when it’s clear in the manga that they’re just thinking the names internally. Once again, it was kind of silly.

• When Spinner flashes back to watching Stain on TV and being inspired, the manga uses a shot of Stain’s face, snarling and defiant. The anime used—a shot of Stain from behind, only visible from the shoulders to the knees, hunched so that his lower back and ass were towards the camera. Bones… What exactly were you implying lit Spinner’s fire there? Or did you just not have the time or budget to go pull Stain’s reference sheets for drawing his face?

• A tone issue, but a major one: Spinner should be grinning, face alight with accusatory challenge, as he hurls his accusations of the MLA/Trumpet being the same bandwagon-jumping nobodies that he is. This is the moment in the manga where we see Spinner truly throw his hesitations and his doubts to the wind and embrace Shigaraki’s nihilistic fervor and the beauty, value and profundity of emptiness. So what if I’m empty? So what if he wants emptiness? Who cares about other peoples’ ideals if their ideals leave no room for me? It’s not a heroic triumph, but it’s a triumph all the same, and losing Spinner’s smile made the moment far too bitter.

• Meanwhile, in exactly the opposite problem, Shigaraki by this point is not smiling. In fact, he’s barely on his feet, swaying violently in place with accompanying sound effects. While his words are openly mocking, he seems to wholly lack the energy to back them up with his usual verve. The anime didn’t have him smiling, admittedly, but the whole time the ‘camera’ wasn’t directly on his face, his voice actor was reading the lines with an uneven, chuckling cadence that suggested Shigaraki was seconds away from breaking into howls of laughter. He was also, of course, impossibly clean, at a point at which his manga counterpart is muddy, bloody and tattered from the horrifically extended combat he’s been living for six weeks. It’s stuff like this that made it so impossible to take the Army or even Machia as much of a threat in the anime, when, other than the red cords on his hands being broken, Shigaraki looked absolutely no different than usual.

Additions

• Gave Spinner a tiny bit of new animation when he got mobbed by people hopped up on Incite. It was nice, but if they were going to give him a flourish, I’d rather it have come when he swipes Porcupine Dude off him with a combat knife. Or, you know, just kept the bit of him telling the Twices to attack and his reasoning on why.

• Cut inside briefly to show a ballerina girl dancing through a darkened apartment right before she sliced a neat circle out of the wall. I love it, A+, exactly the kind of expansion on the action of the manga I wanted to see. My only complaint is that her manga self looked more like Pearl from Steven Universe.[4] XD

• A quick new shot of RD when Shigaraki was hounding him about his feelings. His teeth were visibly gritted, the corners of his mouth pulled down. It stands out because there’s only one shot of RD there in the manga, and in it, he’s smiling, close-mouthed and calm. The anime copied said shot, smile and all, then cut away, and when it cut back, Re-Destro had a totally different expression on his face. Baffling. Anime!RD having a dour scowl everywhere manga!RD is smiling in a tight, controlled way was all over the fight scene, and it detracted from the sense of RD’s menace every time.

Chapter 234 – Destruction Sense

• The illustration(s) accompanying Re-Destro’s, “Let’s not judge people by their quirks,” line. The pictures are cute, but the real loss there was the note informing us that they’re excerpts from a children’s book published by Shoowaysha—Curious’s outfit—called Quirks and Us. That’s a very concrete illustration of the kinds of things the MLA is getting up to in the world, and an equally concrete thing an anime-only viewer lost. Of course, that viewer never even found out Curious was in publishing, so it wouldn’t have meant anything on that front, but there is one other thing I think is notable: the way that book implies that the only people explicitly pushing a “don’t judge other people by their quirks” message are the radical Liberationists.           See, the rest of the story touches on the virtues of a nonjudgmental attitude here and there, but actually finding people willing to say it out loud is—unprecedented, I think. Deku comes across situations where he could say something like that multiple times and he never, ever does—not to Shouto, nor to Shinsou, nor to Eri, nor to the giant fox lady. And that’s not even touching on Shouji’s mask, or the discrimination Spinner faced, or the CRC “losing support” without being declared illegal. I think the manga itself is against judging people by their quirks, but it’s interesting that it doesn’t make its characters into mouthpieces to say as much. This is because its characters are thoroughly enmeshed in a society that very much does judge people by their quirks, regardless of whether or not it will say that doing so is bad or rude or prejudiced.           Re-Destro and the MLA aren’t immune, of course—Re-Destro himself says that quirks are linked to personality—but they adhere to a different set of values than the larger society does. While Hero Society talks about quirks in terms of being heroic and/or useful versus villainous and/or useless, the MLA spectrums instead emphasize how capable a person’s quirk is of helping them exert their will and how ambitious the quirk’s bearer is in that exertion. That is, their ethics are less about morality and utility-to-society than they are about aspiration and utility-to-self.[5] Both worldviews have their pros and cons, but that, I think, is what the children’s book is getting at when it says not to “judge”—don’t assign an arbitrary moral value to a quirk; judge a person by their actions.           And isn’t it interesting, that the only explicit verbal statement of that value comes from the leader of a radical cult descended from a famous insurrectionist quoting a children’s book published by a member of selfsame radical cult? The value is not ever stated by a member of the heroic cast, so are we to assume that the heroes don't actually believe it? Do people profess to believe it but everyone knows it’s only for courtesy’s sake, with only the MLA willing to breach that wall of “things we don’t talk about in polite society” to actually talk about it in anything other than platitudes? Obviously, you lose this entire line of discussion when the "don't judge people by their quirks" value is just never mentioned at all.

• The phrase, “In that case,” from RD’s, “You will never measure up to me.” It establishes continuity to what RD was saying before. He’s not taking breaks from talking while Shigaraki has flashbacks; the two are happening concurrently.

• RD’s, “Cracking apart…?” reaction to his Decayed fingertip, and the dripping blood from the injury. I’m not hugely fussed about the former, but I like the latter as indicative of what Re-Destro’s Stress powers actually do. That is to say, he isn’t covering himself in a thick shell of Stress power or something; his Stress powers make him physically larger, infusing his body and swelling his size. That’s why he bleeds when Shigaraki touches his fingertip.           Admittedly, the size distinction was more obvious in the anime, where the audience watched RD’s shoulders inflate like balloons last episode, compared to the manga, where you don’t get in-between animation. Still, given that RD still has that wound even when he goes back down to normal size, and is still wearing bandages for his speech a week later,[6] it’d be nice to mark the severity of the wound with a bit of blood. Oddly, the anime did keep the wound for the crater scene, visible red slices opened in the flesh along the length of his finger, very obviously the sort of injury that would have bled upon being first sustained. Maybe RD ran afoul of whatever the studio mandate is on when Decay has a dust effect and when it leaves gore? (More of that later.)

• Shigaraki’s, “Mother!” for the first panel we see of her. It’s obvious enough who she probably is, but odd that we got a whole bunch of narration for Hana, and likewise an acknowledgment of his grandparents, but not even a single word for Nao.

• Very significantly drops the grandfather’s, “Eating yummy things helps make the sadness go away.” Grandpa’s not just randomly handing Tenko his favorite snack in that memory—he’s trying to treat some kind of grief or wrong without actually addressing the wrong, opting to just put a flavorful band-aid on it. That could be fine if it were something outside Grandpa’s control, but we’ve already gotten some early hints from Hana’s phrasing that things are not okay in the household, and thus the grandfather’s attempt to bribe Tenko with sweets is just as ominous a sign of what’s to come as the grandmother’s attempt to guilt him into not crying lest he make her cry too.

• A little shot of Shigaraki stirring in the rubble when RD answers the phone. It’s a nice demonstration of their size difference, especially comparing both of them to Machia, who we just saw tearing through buildings like the kaiju his theme music declares him to be.

Framing Shifts

• When Shigaraki narrates that Hana always took him by the hand when he got weepy, she actually does take his hand in the manga, her fingers wrapped around his, his clasped over hers. It emphasizes that this is what he can’t do anymore, simply hold hands with people, the innocence lost aspect, and it suggests the closeness he once had with his sister.           In the anime, she reached out a hand but wound up taking him by the wrist instead, his hand splayed open beneath hers. This suggested, albeit very implicitly, that maybe that innocence was something he never had from the beginning; it also suggested less reciprocity in his relationship with Hana. Even though Tomura said in narration that their hands were joined, what we saw was that Hana just pulled him where she wanted him and he didn’t fight her on it, not that he held her hand in return.           Alternatively, the anime could have been drawing a parallel to how her hand would eventually be gripping his wrist in a much different context (a more necrotic one, for starters) later in life, though if that's what they were going for, they could have stood to tweak the dialogue so it actually matched the onscreen action. (Credit to @robotlesbianjavert and @aysall respectively for these two theories!)

• Shigaraki still having his fingers when Re-Destro squeezed his hand made RD look like a real moron. I assume the intention was that he assumed he’d done enough damage—broken bones, torn ligaments, etc—to prevent Shigaraki from being able to move his hand in more than spastic twitches, but like, if all it takes is a hard enough spasmodic clench to dust you, you are playing much riskier games than the MLA is generally portrayed as favoring. (Not that the anime kept many of the scenes that demonstrated all the planning and prep that the MLA did as groundwork for their attack, as I have complained about at length.)           In the same sequence, Anime!RD turned and bodily hurled Shigaraki away from him, while Manga!RD threw him a similar distance with nothing more than a flick of a finger. Anime, why you gotta make Re-Destro look so lame all the time?

Additions

• Just one episode prior, the anime managed to turn in an entirely reasonable assemblage of swiping and dodging between Shigaraki and Re-Destro while RD was rambling on about the Mother of Quirks. What the hell was the excuse for this episode’s ridiculous shot of Shigaraki literally running circles—big, broad circles—around RD multiple times in the time it took RD to finish one (1) thought? For heaven’s sake, if you don’t have the budget for flashy, just use slow motion or more flashback animation or something. I know there’s more leeway for long thoughts in manga, where the reader understands that thoughts are moving far faster than action, and that it can be hard to bridge that gap for anime, where motion is motion but voice acting still has to rattle its way to the end of a sentence. I understand that measures have to be taken to account for that. Still, I promise, something that just looks a bit padded is much preferable to something that looks outright dumb.

• I admit to having found huge Stress monster RD pulling out a teeeeeny-tiny cellphone very funny—even more so the distinct cracking sound it made when Skeptic reported in bad news and RD’s fingers tightened infinitesimally—but the manga suggests fairly strongly that RD’s just answering on some kind of earpiece or micro-receiver, the same kind of thing Ujiko hands out and that Skeptic is associated with on multiple occasions. It’d be nice if RD could have kept more of the jokes he actually makes, the ones that stem from his native good humor, rather than the anime making up new ones based entirely in the contrast of Re-Destro and the viewer’s expectations of Re-Destro.

Chapter 235 – Shimura Tenko: Origin

• The man at the door, whom Nao is apologizing to at the beginning of the Tenko flashback and the apparent reason Tenko got busted for playing hero. I don’t love the way deleting this obscured that Tenko, in some fashion, troubled someone to lead to Kotarou dragging him down the hall (the anime also dropped Kotarou’s subsequent line, “Causing trouble?!” that’s supposed to supplement his, “Playing hero again?”), but it’s not like the manga doesn’t imply that the same thing would happen for any hero-based rules infraction, regardless of whether it troubled strangers or not. No, the much, much funnier thing to me is how it just fuckin’ torpedoed the most obvious thing people point to when they posit that All For One gave Tenko Decay, kicking off the entire tragedy: the man at the door with the conspicuously shadowed face and the even more conspicuously AFO-like suit and dress shirt with the top button unfastened.           Listen, I hate that theory and what it would do to the narrative of Shigaraki Tomura/Shimura Tenko as Hero Society’s long-overdue reckoning, the villain they can’t put down and the victim they can’t silence, so watching the anime summarily cut out the scene that really kicked the theory into overdrive was very validating! Conversely, I still can't deny that it's a plausible theory, so if it does turn out to be true, that means the anime shot itself in the foot on the most obvious bit of foreshadowing this side of AFO addressing Tenko by name when he finds him in the alley. The schadenfreude of that would also be very funny. Really, unlike every other cut this season, I regard this one as win-win for my personal experience with the anime.           Incidentally, I was very prepared to complain about the anime dropping all the changes of clothes the Shimura family goes through over the course of the flashback—I regard the timelapse as one of the major points against the AFO Gave Tenko Decay theory, since it’s never taken a quirk bestowed by AFO multiple days, maybe even multiple weeks, to kick in before—but it turns out I’m a lot less bothered about them not taking the time to change the side characters’ clothes when the anime also deletes the dude at the door who is the only reason I care about clarity re: how much time the flashback covers! But just for the record, while they had more outfits than I was expecting them to, the family did go through fewer changes of clothes in the anime than in the manga.

• The full echo of the line about kids being sneaky and simple in favor of Narrator!Shigaraki just letting out this exhausted, rueful, “Ahhh, kids are…” I actually rather like it. It’s a clear reference back to the earlier line without having to restate the whole thing, and Uchiyama Kouki’s delivery is really excellent.

• Kotaro’s first slap of Tenko, the only one directly portrayed on-panel, and Mon-chan’s barking in response. On the one hand, I think there’s an argument to be made for the scene flowing a bit better like this—why wouldn’t Grandpa try to stop him from going for that second slap; why wouldn’t Nao pass Hana off to Grandma and do something instead of just standing there yelling for the entire scene? It makes a bit more sense if they’re hesitant to intervene because Kotarou has “only” grabbed at Tenko’s collar and they don’t yet know how that it’s going to escalate to naked physical violence in a way that it never has before.           On the other hand, that first slap is so visceral and shocking. Nowhere else in the manga is domestic violence portrayed more sharply and directly, in greater detail or more cruelly generous panel space than in this moment. It’s in the difference in size between Kotarou and Tenko, the force behind the hit that’s enough to knock Tenko clear off his feet, the pages upon pages of gut-churning lead-up to this moment and what we know will be following soon after.           Also too, it makes the family’s failure to help Tenko much worse that no one else acts when Kotarou pulls back for a second hit. The first one, you could almost excuse because no one saw it coming; the second throws those justifications out the window and spits on them afterward. Two hits are important—not only for what they tell Tenko in the moment about his family's inaction, but because two hits speak in ways one hit doesn't to how wildly uneven the power balance is in the house, that Nao and her parents could witness something like that and not only fail to intercede, but then take who knows how long to work up the courage to confront Kotarou afterwards.           I understand very well the fear of showing this in a family TV timeslot—the violence is so much more real than any big fantasy beat-‘em-up could ever be—but it’s the kind of thing that really drives home what Tenko needed to be saved from even back then, a social issue that heroes as they currently exist were in no position to address. Far from demonstrating that heroes aren't at fault for what happened to Tenko, though, what this scene truly does is vividly illustrate the flaws in All Might's social contract, in which his power and smile seem to promise that he can save absolutely everyone, only to leave children like Tenko out in the cold with no explanation as to why. It's brutal because it has to be, and the anime shying away from depicting Kotarou's physical abuse undercut that.

Framing Shifts

• There was a bizarre, nonsensical change to the scene at the beginning of the chapter where RD is figuring out how Shigaraki survived/got back up after taking a Burden attack head-on. The manga’s explanation is that Shigaraki didn’t actually take a full force hit because he was Decaying it even as it was blowing him back. This is somewhat silly, given that even a reduced-strength Burden is still strong enough to put him through multiple buildings. It is, however, less silly than the anime’s take, in which Shigaraki touched Re-Destro rather than the corporealized Stress of Burden. How Re-Destro survived a full-fingered touch from Shigaraki’s completely uninjured right hand[7] went totally unexplained; the problem was then compounded by Re-Destro delivering manga-accurate lines about Burden not being an evadable attack despite “evasion” having nothing to do with Shigaraki’s actions.           Anime!Shigaraki didn’t dodge the Burden attack any more than Manga!Shigaraki did; unlike Manga!Shigaraki, however, Anime!Shigaraki also did nothing to reduce the impact of the attack. So not only was how Shigaraki survived the Burden attack not explained, the change to the material also opened up the plot hole of how Re-Destro survived a direct touch attack that Shigaraki in the manga never lands.

• There was also an extremely weird decision made to give Tenko dark, gray-blue eyes, obviously reminiscent of Nana’s, and suggest that they became red at the same time as his hair was changing to white. But in the manga, other than the size, there’s no difference between young Tenko’s eyes and how Shigaraki’s eyes have always been drawn—an unshaded iris with a visible pupil and a relatively thick line delineating the iris from the white of the sclera. Tenko’s eyes never matched those of anyone else in his family, least of all his dark-eyed grandmother. His hair changed color because of a trauma response,[8] but his eyes were always red.

• Relocated Shigaraki’s first, “Little kids…are sneakier than you’d expect. And simpler,” to underscore Hana showing him Nana’s picture in the study, squarely centering the line on her. And like, yes, that line does get its bitter echo later when Hana panics in the face of her father’s fury and throws the blame onto Tenko—but that line isn’t just about her; it’s also about what Tenko wanted to hear from the other adults in his life. It didn’t matter that his father didn’t approve; if he could get at least one adult to say he could be a hero, to take his side, then he could feel vindicated.           It’s a child’s sneaky, simple reasoning: if an adult’s words are absolute, you just have to get one (1) adult to agree with you. It’s asking Dad if you can do something you don’t think Mom will agree to, and then going to Mom with Dad’s permission held defensively in-hand. Laying the line over Hana obscures that it’s as much about Tenko’s craving for external validation as it is Hana’s (entirely understandable) deceitful streak.

• After half a season full of internal monologue being voiced aloud even when it made little sense to do so, the anime decided to render clearly talk-bubbled dialogue—Tenko’s chatting at Mon about how he feels like he could take on the world—as internal monologue instead. Who talks to their animals in their heads when they could be talking at them directly like pet owners the world over?

Additions

• Added a few extra stills of Kotarou rebuking Tenko and dragging him around. I don’t think they’re inaccurate to the situation, though I wonder if it really needed to be underlined two more times than the manga did. Maybe they were trying to make up in advance for deleting the first slap?

• Added a few new stills of Nana and child!Kotarou. They hurt my soul and I love them without reservation.

Chapter 236 – Shimura Tenko: Origin, Part 2

• Hana’s second apology. What needs to get across was communicated with her first apology, but I do think the second one adds some naturalism to the dialogue. It feels very normal for a child feeling extremely guilty to apologize multiple times, like the more times they say it, the more true/convincing it will become.

• A bit of Tenko’s internal monologue—thinking Hana’s name, and Mon’s, and that he can’t talk. The anime slipped some attempts at verbalizing “Mon” into the dialogue, and it was painfully obvious just from listening to him gag and choke that he was too horror-struck to get words out, in ways that would be a little harder to convey on the page. Also, he thinks again that he can’t talk just as Hana runs away, so it gets across regardless. No real complaints here.

• Some thoughts about how he’s itchy, which, given what his itch represents (or at least what he thinks it does), they probably should have kept for continuity’s sake.

• Tenko’s last, “Hana-chan!” just as he grabs for her. I can imagine it having just that little bit more desperate impact, especially given Sekine Arisa’s great delivery of the first “Hana-chan!” but his delivery of the first one was great—weeks later, I can still remember it clearly—so it’s not a snip I’m inclined to doomsay about.

• Hana’s verbalization as the Decay hits her. Given that they kept Mon-chan’s last whimper, it’s kind of inconsistent not to keep this. It’s grueling, sure, but no more so than the rest of the horror show shortly to follow.

• An echo of Nao’s defense of Kotarou’s anti-hero stance. Frankly, I think anime already over-indulges in echoing dialogue we’ve heard not ten minutes prior, so I don’t mind losing this—in the manga, the moments would have fallen in different chapters, so it makes more sense to squeeze in the little reminder, but that wasn’t necessary for the anime, in which the original moment and the callback happened barely more than five minutes apart. It was obvious what the mental image was meant to draw attention to, since Tomura was narrating about exactly what his grievance was, and the image was followed by the two equivalent moments with the grandparents. (Admittedly, it hurt that correlation a bit that Grandpa’s line about the ohagi being intended to make the sadness go away got cut, but the sentiment was pretty clear from the man’s expression of nervy, abashed guilt regardless.)

• The line of Decay that splits Nao’s eye, one of the more vividly horrific little grace notes in the chapter. It undercut the grotesquerie just the tiniest bit, but the scene’s grotesque as-is, so I can understand that slight edit for TV standards. The discrepancy between Decay-to-dust and Decay-to-gore, discussed below in Framing Shifts, was much more damaging.

• A shot of Kotarou just after he hits Tenko with the tree pruning shears in which he looks, briefly, incredibly distraught, like he’s just realized what a monster he’s become. The anime didn’t make the slightest of attempts to keep that spasm of horror, grief, and regret, and thus lost that last moment of sympathy for a man deeply traumatized by a heroic character’s actions. It’s my only complaint about Anime!Kotarou, who I was otherwise far more pleased with than I was afraid might be the case, but it’s a complaint I must register nonetheless.

• A bit of inarticulate yelling before Tenko screams, “You... Die!!” It helps get across Tenko’s rage overflowing, to have that wordless garble before he can actually wrap words around it. He was still having trouble talking, too, so it makes sense that his first vocalization would just be a long, incomprehensible screech. That said, with the music there to supplement the mood in a way the manga would lack, I don’t think the anime’s rendition of the scene suffered overmuch from its absence.

Framing Shifts

• The anime, of course, has always gone the dust route for Decay because Decay is a little too gruesome for family hour TV, and anyway, when Tomura gets as fast with Decay as he is in Deika, he really is just insta-dusting people, such that not even blood remains. But he wasn’t that fast or that thorough as a child, hence why it’s all so much gorier—and it needs to be, because it’s hard to imagine Hana freaking out like she does if all she sees is a pile of dust instead of, well, dog gobbets. (Also, if his family had gone the dust route, it would have been very hard to convince the audience that Tomura’s hands are his family hands and not fakes provided to AFO by Ujiko.)           This obviously put the anime in a difficult spot, but apparently the decision they settled on was—to not decide? Everyone we saw in the active process of decaying decayed into dust as usual, but then once they were done decaying, once that transition from person to ruin was complete, there were all these heaps of gore everywhere. It was a very strange and distracting inconsistency that hurt the scene much more than any of the nearly invisible cuts, and I hope the blu-rays will change it.

• Added Grandpa catching Grandma as she staggered at the sight of things in the yard. Since his body language in the manga (the only non-Decayed shot of him in the sequence) has him leaned more forward, like he’s still halfway through running towards the kids, I thought this was a nice little touch on why he stopped, for reasons other than just the obvious.

                                                         ---

Episode 111 was about half of a really strong episode. Most of my complaints about the Shimura Family flashback are very minor, and most of the ones that are less minor are still easy to overlook when the rest of the presentation was so strong. Unfortunately, the non-flashback half of the episode had as many problems as ever, and those aren't over yet.

Come back next time for Part Five, Episode 112: Origin: Shigaraki Tomura. Assuming my complaining about the finalized gutting of Spinner's arc doesn't get too out of hand—which it may; if so, I'll tack on one final part to wrap things up—I'll also be running down a quick overview of the Paranormal Liberation Front scenes in the Endeavor Agency arc and some various odds & ends.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Yes, I know the Skeptic Confronts Twice scene goes nowhere, but maybe, instead of deleting it, they could have patched it up by showing Skeptic turning away from the confrontation when the tower went down? You know, actually made an effort to improve on the material?

[2] Bakugou, of course, but also Inko, Kotarou, and, very prominently, even All Might. Deku circa MVA has an entire arc lying in wait for him about how much he’s internalized All Might’s paternalism re: having the strongest quirk.

[3] Indeed, as of the scene in the crater, he still hadn’t lost them at all! He had his prosthetic by the time of the speech, so I guess we’re meant to assume that Ujiko or some MLA doctor declared them past saving and amputated them. I hope I don’t need to tell you how unbelievably lame it is to have a shounen manga character sustain a permanent injury like that off-panel.

[4] It’s the pointy nose.

[5] That, at least, is the best way I’ve found to reconcile all the related-but-distinct values professed by the various members of the MLA brass, from Re-Destro’s focus on liberation and purpose, what exactly Trumpet chooses to cite when he’s talking about Spinner not “amounting” to anything much, Geten’s open extolling of quirk supremacy, and so on.

[6] In the first big double-page spread. Oddly, no bandaging is visible in the other panel that has a good shot of that hand, possibly because Horikoshi was more focused on drawing RD’s empty pant leg. The anime kept the obvious wound during the crater scene, but not the bandages during the speech.

[7] I assume, anyway, that Re-Destro only survives Shigaraki’s first touch because it’s a weaker Decay, coming as it does from only from two fingers rather than five.

[8] The fabled Marie Antoinette Syndrome. Never been scientifically documented as such (hair can whiten because of extreme stress, but not overnight) but it endures in fiction because it’s pleasingly dramatic. Trauma-based eye-color changes, not so much.

[hisoknen]

kinktober day 3: predatory prey pairing: shindou x fem!reader warnings: noncon, vampire au, blood, gore? (you get bitten) wc: 2.1k

a/n: i was imagining of kol from vampire diaries while writing this oop. thank you @tomurasprincess and @10millionyearsdungeon for both beta reading and feeding me your thoughts. i am so fortunate to be in your webs. the running scene was fun and challenging as heck to write i hope you enjoy reading friends!!

You stumble against a bed of rocks at the forests entrance, quickly twisting your neck around to make sure you still have distance between you and your assailant. The crunch of leaves under your feet and shallow breathing is filling the air, hand pressed against the leaking wound spilling out at your neck. 

You were out walking, the time had escaped you and the weather was beautiful. The fall air was chilly, and leaves were scattered about. Taking a deep breath, you could smell the earth heavy in the air, the breeze crisp and flooding your senses. 

There was a feeling of unease that settled in the pit of your stomach the second you saw the man. His skin was pale and soft, eyes piercing and dark. The smile he gave you as he glided toward you made you feel weightless. His voice was deep and commanding, pulling you into him. 

You looked around and noticed that you’d gone too far out this time. There were no houses around you, no people in sight except for him. You were drawn in, and he inhaled softly against your neck, his nose trailing the sensitive flesh, licking a line to your pulse point before biting down. 

The searing pain that jolted through your body quickly melted into pleasure, your mind fluttering as you leaned into his touch. The sound of a crow cawing broke you out of your trance, and in your pained confusion, you pushed him away from you and began running. 

The blood was steadily dripping down your neck, covering your collarbones and soaking through your shirt. You didn’t believe in a god, but that didn’t stop you from frantically mumbling prayers under your breath in hopes that something, anything would save you. Your lips tremble, and adrenaline spiking through your body as you trip over roots and stumble across the uneven ground.

“You have fast legs, little thing,” his gravelly yet cheerful voice seemed to echo all around you. You stop cold in your tracks, turning your head to search for the direction he was coming from. 

Your throat burns and tastes like blood. Heart is pounding against your eardrums, beating so fast it feels like it’s about to burst out of your chest. 

Crouching down you try to take breaths, willing yourself to take air into your lungs. Blood seeping through your fingers, dripping everywhere. No matter how much pressure you applied, it just wouldn’t stop. There was a soft dripping against the leaves below you like raindrops lazily falling from the sky.

"Wow, you’re really quick. I might have to take this serious huh," shooting up from your spot, you begin sprinting blindly ahead, scrambling over large rocks and jumping over fallen trees. A branch catches your arm, tearing into it, legs cut from the tall grass and weeds you'd pass. Your clothes are tattered from the falls and catches on sharp edges around you. 

The further you go into the forest, the foggier it becomes—your anxiety spikes when you slip on mud. The crows scattering from the trees as if they, too, are trying to escape the presence that is following you. You can no longer feel the sting of the branches hitting your face, only the shaking of your numb limbs desperately trying to stay upright on the uneven landscape. 

"It's really too bad that you're leaking blood everywhere," his voice whips around you like the air rushing past your face. Your legs are jelly, only running on adrenaline to push you forward out of harm's way. Your vision was becoming spotty and tilted. Each breath you take threatens to send you to the ground. 

“You can’t run forever, little thing. Aren’t you getting tired?” A dark sadistic chuckle encases the space surrounding you. You lurch forward, your foot tangled in a tree root. You’re wheezing as you grab onto a tree to hold yourself up. 

Where were you running to? If anything, you were running even further into the forest, where no one would hear your pleas and screams. But what other choice did you have? You had to get away from that thing.

“I do have to say, you’re making this fun.” Your knees buckle below you, chest rising and falling quickly as you try to draw in ragged breaths. You had to take a break before you could keep going, but there wasn’t time. 

The moment you relaxed, your head swam with dizziness. You had to get out of here before he found you. The forest was silent, only the crow's sound cawing in the distance with the sun beginning to fall out of sight entirely.

“Hey, there, little thing.” You let out a shrill scream, throwing your body to the side. He was looming over you, crouched down where you once sat. He was right behind you, and you hadn’t even heard him coming.

“You smell amazing, you know that?” His attention is focused on the runny handprint on the tree, his fingers gathering up the blood as he brings it close to his face. He dips his tongue out to pull in his finger, closing his eyes and sighing as he tastes the crimson stain.

“So sweet, leaving a trail behind for me to follow,” the taste of copper begins to crawl up your throat, your hand losing its strength and falling to your side, blood spurting from the wound he left behind. A raged sob escaping from your trembling lips, you try with all your might to scoot away from him. 

He stares at you like an eagle watching its prey struggle in vain, studying its movements for the right time to attack. Elbow on his knee and his chin in his hand, head cocked to the side. He smiles at you, sharp pointy fangs catching your eyes. There is no longer much in light, only the sun setting behind his form. 

“While hide and seek was fun, I think I’m done playing for now,” He reaches out, squeezing your leg and tugging your body toward his. With such little effort, he’d swiftly pulled you away from your safety. 

He climbs onto you, grabbing your hands as you try to slam weak fists against his chest. Pushing them over your head, he bends over, running his tongue across your jaw and inhaling deeply.

“Plea-” you sputter out, blood leaking from your lips.

“What’s the matter, little thing?” his hand reaches behind you to tug the shorts down to your knees. Your breath comes and goes in small whimpers as he traces your bundle of nerves through flimsy panties. Wincing when you hear the fabric tear and a cold breeze catch your skin. He stares deep into your eyes, gauging your reactions as he begins to probe your cunt, running his fingers over your slit. 

“It looks like you enjoyed the chase too.” He’s not asking you a question as he pulls his soaked fingers up for you to see. Warmth spreads across your belly as he picks up the speed, rubbing and tapping at your clit while you let out garbled gasps. His finger teases your hole, a vibration coursing through his fingertips snaps you out of the lust-driven trance.

“I didn’t,” You try to look at him through tear-filled eyes, chest rising and falling as you wait for his reply. 

"No?" You cry out as he thrusts a cold finger into your tight hole, curving his fingers up and rubbing lightly at your gooey insides. There was only gruff moaning above you as he coaxes your insides, searching for the places that will make your head spin. 

Your cunt opens wide for him, sucking the digits in. There seems to be something inside of you that pulls you against his fingers in rhythmic pulses like a desperate whore seeking her release.

He retracts his fingers moving down your body. You try to move, but your body is overcome with the chase's exhaustion, not a single muscle moving no matter how much you beg your body. He pulls your numb legs apart, running his fingers along your dribbling cunt absentmindedly. He sinks his fangs into your inner thigh. You let out a silent scream laced with a moan as his tears into your flesh. 

The bleeding at your neck has clotted, caked dried heavily against the skin. Each time he bit into you, it felt like your mind was being pumped full of aphrodisiacs. Unwilling to comprehend the fear you were feeling, turning hot and sensitive as he fed on your body. His tongue lapped at the skin in his mouth, sucking in your life force bit by bit while you writhed in pleasure underneath him.

He flips your limp body over with ease, you taste the dirt and leaves mixing with the lingering copper setting in your mouth. He rubs his cock against your glistening hole, gathering your arousal before plunging into you. His cock slowly sliding into your unwilling core, bottoming out impossibly deep. 

You try to buck against him to get him off of you, helplessly clawing at the dirt. With each struggle and bite, your energy is sucked away from you. Forcing you to only feel what he’s doing to you.

“You really hate this that much, little thing?” He holds your hips tight, pushing them against the damp ground as he grinds against you. The motion has your head spinning despite your desire to escape. In some twisted way, your body is responding to each of his movements. Bile rising in your throat at how strongly your cunt is tugging him in for more.

“So how about this? If you don’t cum I’ll let you go.” His hips grind against your clit, his tongue trailing across the back of your shoulder. “But If you do cum, I’ll go ahead and kill you since you hate this so much.” He purrs, trailing his fingers across your exposed skin.

“Fair enough?” He ruts against you, his ice-cold skin almost burning against you, a cold chill running up your spine. You were just a toy to him—a thing to play with. You shudder, taking a sharp inhale through your nose to slow your breathing. 

He was using you against your will. He was going to kill you either way, yet you couldn’t stop letting out pathetic mewls each time his hips snapped against you, cunt to be drooling onto his balls.

He tugs your hips off the ground forcing an arch in your back. Hands finding yours and pulling them behind your back. He uses them to drag you onto him with each thrust. His cock begins to shake inside of you, rattling against your walls uncontrollably. You bring your thighs together, trying not to focus on the pleasure riddling your veins. 

The coil inside of you begins to tighten. If you came from this, he would kill you. Thick tears run down your cheeks as you play his words on repeat in hopes that something in your body would obey you and stop responding. You start to feel cold, your vision spotty from the blood loss, arms numb being tugged relentlessly behind you. 

“You were such a good thing to play with,” His voice rings in your ears. “But I don’t think you’re going to last much longer.” He chuckles darkly, tugging on your arms and arching your back against his chest. 

You let out a whimper as his cock grazes your cervix. The intensity of the vibrations pick up as he latches onto the other side of your neck, the breath from his nose tickling your skin as he feeds from you.

There is a weight building up inside of you. The small pulses of your cunt on his cock turn into a wave of pulses as you pull him in further. The coil in the hollow of your belly snaps weak, whines rippling past your lips as he stills against you,  letting you swallow his cock.

“Fuck little thing,” he slowly thrusts in and out of your sopping pussy, your quivering walls hypersensitive to the veins on his cock. The agonizing pain you felt before begins to fade into numbness, your body growing cold.

This was it. This was how you died. Pathetically wrapped around a stranger's cock, begging him for more while he bled you dry. Your eyes feel heavy as the soft numb overtakes you.

Shindou looks down at your abused body. He pulls up his pants, scooping you into his arms. He pauses, looking down at your closed eyes, and sickly completion. Biting into his wrist he holds it over your mouth. The blood trickling in rapidly, his wound healing almost immediately. 

The color starts to return to your face. Your breathing not as shallow. Your bites begin to slowly close, only the crimson stains remaining caked on.

"I think I'll keep you around just a little longer, little thing." He quietly hums to himself as he carries you further into the forest.

—

kinktober masterlist

tags <3 @linestrider​ @pleasantanathema​ @idratherliveinbooks​ @mx-minxx​ @kenmasmyvibe​ @leeswritingworld​ @katsukis-sad-angel​ @trafalgar-temptress​ @dabis-kitten​ @stainedglass-wings​ @thirsthourdemon​ @zyrielwolf​

[4aloysius-porteu]

i am your ally || tsukishima kei.

pairing; tsukishima kei x f! reader

genre: oneshot, drama, flangst, a little comedy

word count: 5.6k

details: 3rd year Tsukishima, artist reader

warnings: reader going missing, verbal abuse, crushing of dreams, lots of sadness, heavy parental argument, everything that happens here hits home

synopsis: tsukishima didnt know what is the right thing to say after he heard of (y/n)’s situation, but the words that stumbled out from his mouth were a surprise, yet it blossomed to a meaningful talk that happens once in a blue moon.

(a/n): wrote in the middle of my depressing days to find a little comfort from this character that I love with all my heart. inspired by true situations irl; if you, my friend, is feeling down today, i hope reading this work of mine can help. i might make this into a full story if this got enough attention tho.

(Y/N) was nowhere to be found. 

It wasn't Tsukishima's habit to eavesdrop on other people's conversation, but he couldn't help but listen when he heard her name from her classmates. She was a consistent top student that will never neglect her studies, so it was unusual to know that she was absent today. He thought that maybe she got sick or she decided to go crazy and skip school. If it was the latter, he hoped that she knows what she's doing, because midterms are coming in 3 days, and he's not going to listen to her whines and begs to help her study for the tests.

And now he just happened to overhear that she was missing. 

He saw her parents walk out of the campus after talking to the vice-principal and to the teachers. Gossip filled the corridors and rooms. Tsukishima went back to his room, clearly annoyed with the unnecessary noise.

He listened to the lectures of each subject and continued to write down important points, but the thought of (Y/N) lingered in his head. What could've happened that led to her disappearance? Was she kidnapped? No, he just walked her home last night and she'll never leave her place past midnight. Kidnappers won't dare to make a move in daylight because of the town's high authority visibility. There's no way she'll be lost in an area she's very familiar with. 

She ran away from home. That is the only logical possibility he could come up with, but he couldn't think of an idea as to why. (Y/N), who loves to be cooped up in her room with music blaring in her earphones while drawing, left her home without a trace. Tsukishima was a little worried, but he won't let his face show whatever the hell he's feeling. 

His plays and blocks aren't exactly bad, but Yamaguchi could sense that Tsukishima was thinking of something other than the volleyball practice. He approached his friend who was resting on the floor, his long arms covering his curled up legs. 

"Tsukki, what's with that expression? Did you get a failing score in a quiz?" Yamaguchi started, in an attempt to lighten up the atmosphere. 

The blonde's eyes darted to him, "Like hell, I'm going to let that happen. What do you want?"

He shrugged, "Nothing, I just noticed that you were a little quieter and more passive today. Normally, you would've chewed the first years out with their simple blocking errors, but you didn't say a thing. You're scarier in their eyes when you're silent."

"I was tired. I'll only waste my voice pointing out something I did a million times." A sigh escaped his lips 

"Right..." Yamaguchi paused, "So, I assume you have heard?"

"Heard of what?"

"That (Y/N) is missing."

"Oh," A frown fell on his features. It wasn't his usual frown. People who really know him would notice that his eyes are full of worry. 

He sat beside Tsukishima before he spoke again. "I know you have ideas on places (Y/N) could've gone to."

"I do not know what you're talking about."

The latter chuckled, "Oh, humor me, Tsukki. If you're that worried, I can excuse you for today's practice. No problem."

"Does that mean that you aren't concerned?"

"I am concerned. I want to look for her as well, but I have to whip the other players into shape. I'm sorry if I couldn't accompany you right away."

Tsukishima stood up and sighed again, "You will excuse me, you said?"

"Yeah."

There were silence and the background noise of balls and shoes colliding on the floor. He wiped the sweat off his face before replying, "I'll be leaving the gym in a few minutes."

He changed his clothes and packed his things up, causing the team to exchange glances.

"Tsukki!" Yamaguchi called, throwing his friend's large jacket to him, which the other caught. "Take care! I hope you find (Y/N) and get her home safe."

"I wish. Then, I'll leave it to you, Captain."

The green-haired middle blocker's eyes teared up and sparkled as he beamed a smile back, "I got it!"

Tsukishima started to look for (Y/N) at the places she liked to go to; the art store, the Central Park, the kid's playground, the museum, and the prefectural library. But there was no sign of her anywhere. He looked at the nearby places to no avail. He walked on while dialing her number, but her phone is out of coverage area. He spent 3 more hours finding the girl and soon received a message from Yamaguchi, telling him that (Y/N) hasn't been found yet and that he joined the authorities to help them find her. 

He walked back to the direction of his home, panting softly. He had failed to find (Y/N), yet his brain won't stop thinking about her possible whereabouts. The cool breeze of winter hit Tsukishima's face and shivered at the contact. He had hoped again that she is inside of an establishment, safe from such cold weather.

Tsukishima's home has its lights out. Her mother was invited into her colleagues' reunion as said in her text, and both his father and brother are busy at work. He reached for his key in his pocket and was opening the door, not until he heard a loud sob from somewhere. Tsukishima looked around the place as the sobbing continued. He searched for the source and ended up in their backyard. He caught the sight of a small figure behind the bushes and went closer to confirm.

It was a cat. It had scurried away once he got close to it. Oh, how stupid he is to get his hopes up only to find a scared animal. But he was certain he heard a sob somewhere near. And cats aren't capable of making a sound like that. Or maybe he was only hearing things?

He dragged his feet to the main door to unlock it, but this time, there was a loud noise of scrubbing on the roof. What is it this time? He moved back and looked upon where it came from. 

To his surprise, it wasn't another cat but a person. Their legs were curled up, arms covered around them, with their chin on their knees. Tsukishima turned on his phone's flashlight and there she was. 

It was (Y/N). Her shoulders shook, either from the cold or trying her best not to cry out loud. 

"H-Help me."

He stared at the girl, confused and fighting back laughter because of how scared (Y/N) looked. "How the heck did you get in there?"

"I climbed that tree and jumped off to break in and hide in your room. Turned out that the windows are locked. I don't know how to jump back and I-I was too high from the ground. You know I'm scared of heights! Why did you lock the window?! Stupid!"

"Of course, I would lock the window for the security. And wow, aren't you the stupid one for knowing how to climb and jump up to my window and not knowing how to get down? Why did you climb if you are scared of heights? Such an idiot."

"Fine, fine. I am an idiot. Now, can you help me get off this roof?"

He crossed his arms and smirked, "No."

"Ugh! Please, Kei. I've been trapped here for hours. I am begging you to help me get down. Please?"

He sighed in defeat and raised his arms. "Here. Jump."

For seconds, (Y/N) didn't respond as she was having second thoughts about jumping.

"What? Do you expect me to get a ladder? I'm sorry, but it's in the basement, broken." He said in a mocking tone. "Don't you want to come down?"

"Can you catch me properly? Are your arms stable? Won't you fall on your ass?" (Y/N) interrogated.

Tsukishima rolled his eyes, "Alright, stay there and freeze to death."

"No, wait! I was just asking! Come back! Don't leave meeee!"

The blonde looked up to her and raised his arms again, "Don't think. Trust me, I will catch you properly and you won't crash to the ground. You weigh like nothing anyway."

"Are you talking about yourself?" She retorted, pertaining to his weight.

"Can you please just jump?"

(Y/N) inhaled and went to the edge of the roof. It was a scary view for her, just looking down makes her dizzy, and want to throw up.  She thought he would have the largest frown on his face because of how irritatingly slow she was, but there was Tsukishima waiting for her with the calmest expression. She smiled a little.

"Here I go..."

She took off, closing her eyes, and swallowing her fears. The gravity pulled her feet down shortly after, and Tsukishima readied himself for the impact as he reached her waist. He held on to her lower torso while (Y/N) placed her arms around his shoulders tightly and legs on his waist. The athlete's balance slightly went off, so he took a step back to support both their weights. It was now steady. 

"I'm surprised you didn't lose your balance. Where's the weak boned beanpole 3 years ago?"

"I did for a second."

"Doesn't matter. You caught me. Thank you."

They had stayed in that way for a moment until Tsukishima spoke, "Do you plan to get off?"

"No. I'm tired."

"I am too." Yet she refused to let go.

He exhaled, carrying (Y/N) to the main entrance and finally unlocking the door. Her hoodie was cold and some parts are wet, but it didn't rain on that day. He took her in and placed her on the couch. Tsukishima went to his room, changed clothes, and brought a spare sweatshirt, handkerchief, and a towel. He went down but didn't find (Y/N) where he left her, so he walked to the kitchen counter and found the girl on the corner, shivering like a pup.

He tossed the clothing at her without further words. There was a note from her mom beside the curry in the table, saying she had eaten and she left rolls in the refrigerator. He was about to turn on the stove to reheat the food his mother left, but his eyes landed on (Y/N) who sat quietly, hugging the sweatshirt instead of wearing it. Her hair was disheveled, the sleeves and neck part of her hoodie was damp, her nose was red and her puffy, bloodshot eyes implied that she has been crying for who knows how long. He set the pan down to get her a glass of water. 

"Everyone was looking for you." Said Tsukishima.

"No one was really looking for me." (Y/N) replied, clearing her nose. 

"I didn't spend the last 3 hours tiring myself to scan the whole town for no reason." He sat beside her, handing the glass. "Care to spill the tea?"

(Y/N) drank first before speaking weakly, "I hate them. So much."

The male remained quiet, waiting for her to continue her dilemma.

"Remember when I told you and the class that I will be the most successful doctor in Japan after I finished my studies? It was a lie. It wasn't my dream to stay in a hospital and treat ill people, I only wanted to draw and paint. I didn't care if it never made them or anyone happy, I am happy doing it. And they are taking it away from me."

He knew from the start that her dream job as a doctor wasn't true. For years she stayed close to him as a friend or more, she won't blabber anything of the medical topic. She was terrified of syringes. He saw her reading an article about surgeries and like, but her focus was easily taken away.

She will get a pencil then start scribbling and drawing. Something that Tsukishima always sees her doing whenever she has a pen and paper, but she insists that it was a mere hobby. Her notebooks are well designed and organized, but the back is always full of artistic doodles instead of algebra solutions. She only has very few art materials yet she can make a portrait with only her fingers to shade. She makes digital art without a stylus. She would drag him to the museum after class to view some western and eastern paintings or any work of art while he admires the dinosaur fossils. For times she's watching an art tutorial and talk about art, draw and paint, she has those stupid sparkles in her eyes and a huge smile on her face. 

"You know Tsukishima, after I finish studying and became a doctor, I'll become an artist and if the time let's it, I'll open my own art gallery. That's my ultimate dream." She looked alive and delighted.

Very much the opposite of what she looks like right now. 

Even though she was a slave of art, as Tsukishima was a slave of his own interests, (Y/N) prioritized her studies so much. He understood why when he went to her house and met her parents before their study sessions. He had noticed everything but chose to stay quiet. 

"I-I was drawing last night. Dad entered my room but I didn't notice so he ripped the music away from my ears and yelled. He said that I would always lock myself in my room and draw every night. It was never-ending and irritates the shit out of him. He asked why would I do something so useless that isn't even connected to any academic subject. He was looking down on my art like he was looking at a piece of crap. He told me to stop and threatened me if I didn't. Why would I get punished for drawing? I couldn't get myself to stay silent so I retorted. If he doesn't want to see me drawing, then he shouldn't enter my room at all. He should stop meddling with my hobbies. His anger only went up."

(Y/N) stopped for a while to wipe her tears and snot with her sleeves but Tsukishima placed a handkerchief on her hands. She muttered her thanks and blew her nose and soon followed with a sneeze.

"Soon, it became a full-blown argument. He said that he was checking out if I was doing my projects, but oh he was so disappointed only to find his daughter drawing for nothing. What the heck? I gave them the best grades I could get, and part of it was because of you, Tsukishima, but they still aren't satisfied? I balanced drawing and academics, but they made it seem that all I was doing was my hobby, completely ignoring my efforts at school. I finished the school activities and I reviewed for midterms and all I want is to be left alone and draw. What, they want me to go crazy by studying every hour with things I won't even apply in real life?"

Her fake laughter echoed in the kitchen for seconds before her depressed tone took over again.

"Mom heard all the shouting and joined the argument. Of course, she sided with dad without listening to my feelings and there they ridiculed their youngest child's interests and talent. They told me that everything I do is bullshit and wrong, that I was useless, that I was the huge opposite of their expectations, and... and how come God gave them a joke. She said they raised me so that I could help them, not to do such useless things. It hurts to shout back but I did to explain why I'm so passionate about art in hopes that they will listen and understand but, I was so wrong. I was suddenly slapped..." She placed her hand to her left cheek, her lips quivered a little. 

"I-It stung so much. Mom complained about how the Internet generation is so rebellious and won't listen to the elders. They didn't raise and teach me to talk back at them, but here is their child being a bitch. They started comparing me to my elder siblings or relatives who focused on their studies and who are at the door of success. I know they only want me to achieve the best, but my success isn't up to them! It's on me!! And I've invested a lot for that! They shouted at me as mom pulled my hair. It was so loud I thought I was going deaf. Dad blamed the gadget's influence and my drawings. I have only drawn decent fanarts of fictional characters, people, and sceneries, but they believed that because of these, I turned into a mannerless bastard. So mom decided to get my phone and lessen my allowance so that I wouldn't buy any art materials that are a waste of fortune--"

She bit her lower lip that is trembling uncontrollably and her eyesight blurred as her fat tears got in the way.

"and... D-Dad... he... he... he tore m-my sketch pad apart..."

Tsukishima's eyes widened. (Y/N) brought that thing with her almost everywhere she went and it was filled with good drawings and art plans. She has a lot of them though, but Tsukishima could only imagine how she felt when her efforts were trampled over by someone important to her. 

(Y/N) broke down, bawled her eyes out, and shrieked hysterically. He looked at her with a heavy heart. He had seen her crying sometimes, be it because of a sad movie or empathy, but never like this. A depressed, emotional wreck. Her eyes were sore enough after a lot of hours, but she won't stop crying. It was heartbreaking to see and hear his significant other in this state, yet Tsukishima didn't know what is the right thing to say. 

But maybe there was no need to say anything at all.

Kei wrapped his arms around her weeping figure and pulled her towards him. Cry it out, pipsqueak. (Y/N) didn't expect this action, nonetheless cried in his shoulder He didn't care anymore if this meant he gets his clothes drenched in her snot and tears as long as she felt a little less lonely. He rubbed her back and hair in an attempt to comfort his lover. (Y/N)'s airways hurt, but she screamed the pain out, in hopes that the pain in her heart would vanish. Her weeping went on for long minutes until she choked in her own sobs that Tsukishima had to get her another glass of water.

"Tell me, Kei." She began, wiping her eyes, "Is there... something wrong with me? Is my dream really that insignificant?"

"There's nothing wrong with you. You followed your ideals. Anyone including me would've done the same." He answered beside her.

"I-It's realistic, right?"

"It is."

"Then... why did it turn out like this?" Her voice was cracking.

Tsukishima looked down, "The society is just very cruel."

"Yeah. It sure is. Such a cruel society to live with." 

(Y/N) let out a dejected sigh and leaned on Tsukki's shoulder. "I couldn't look at them without such overwhelming fear and hate anymore. I wonder if... they knew that I was doing this for them. I'd like to make them smile with something I've made myself. Once, I made each of them a portrait. A realistic one made from a pencil. I couldn't afford a material set that can be used to paint realistically, but I tried my best to impress them with a charcoal one. Oh, if only you saw their faces when I gave them the portraits. They returned a half-hearted smile. It wasn't the same kind of joy I see whenever I give them perfect scores on tests. I didn't spend 3 sleepless nights just to see their half happy, half unpleased reaction. I wish they could feel more proud of their daughter who worked hard for them... I wonder if they threw it away as he did on my sketch pad..." 

They let silence engulf the atmosphere for a while. (Y/N) had calmed down a little, despite shedding smaller tears from the side of her eyes. Tsukishima held the sweatshirt he gave her earlier to make her wear it on the top of her hoodie to lessen her shivering. He stared at her, while the other gazed down on the floor with dead eyes.

Tsukishima asked, "So, what are you going to do now?"

"What am I going to do now huh..." (Y/N) repeated. "I'll probably... put everything to an end."

"You know I won't let you."

"I'm not talking about my life, silly. I might stop drawing and all. I've lost it."

"Isn't your life and drawing one and the same? And I'm pretty sure you have that immense talent to continue."

"No... Besides, talent isn't a talent if it doesn't make anyone happy."

The blonde mentally scoffed. She just said that it makes her happy in the beginning.

"Oh? Fine, stop doing that one thing you put everything into. What would that girl you received a commission from would feel if she were to hear you though?"

(Y/N) was stunned. She had completely forgotten about the whole commission thing she opened in her social media accounts. Tsukishima accompanied (Y/N) on giving the commissioned charcoal portrait to a girl last 3 weeks ago. It was (Y/N)'s first commission for years she's making art. Someone liked her work for the first time and paid for it, and her client looks very contented and glad. The words she said filled her thoughts with inspiration.

"Wow, this is awesome! I'm so happy!! Thank you for making this, it was exactly what I've pictured on my mind! You're amazing! All the excitement I've bottled up for this day is so worth it," The girl, probably a little older than them paused and admired the painting she received from (Y/N).

"Would you ignore those words she said?"

 'Please don't stop drawing, I'll be looking forward to your future works!' 

A pang of guilt hit her chest. She wants to pursue art, but there are these shackles and chains on her limbs and around her neck that made it hard for her to move forward. She couldn't breathe. What happened yesterday night was too much. Her parents went overboard. 

"B-But—"

A monotone voice interrupted her, "Don't. Never stop striving for something you have been building for years. You might be defeated now, but surely, you will win some time. There's no way you'll stay in the lowest level of the ladder after I saw how hard you worked. You will go to nationals again, and I will continue to support you. I'll cheer for you and stay by your side! So please, do not stop! Let me see those beautiful blocks that you execute in the game once more! And I will watch you reach the top! Doesn't matter how many times, I'll never get weary of watching you do amazing things!"

She was silenced by that statement. She had definitely heard those before, but couldn't quite remember where. 

"Does the sentiment seem familiar to you? Those are the same words that came from your mouth when I was planning to quit volleyball after our huge loss to Date Tech last year. I am returning them back to you."

"Huh?" She replied with a meek voice.

"That time, you really did a good job meddling with my decisions. It annoyed me first, but what you had stated held a weight that I couldn't disregard. You gave me the small push I didn't know I needed. In the end, I'd like to pay you back." Tsukishima stated with a far away look in his eyes.

(Y/N) listened with watery eyes. This Tsukishima's side isn't definitely the one she gets to see every day so she couldn't feel anything but the warm, fuzzy feeling that is healing her heart. 

"It's probably selfish for me to say this but, don't you dare give up. I didn't stop. No matter how long and hard the game is, no matter how tired and discouraged I get, and no matter how many pessimistic thoughts clouded my head, I didn't stop chasing after a falling ball and thinking of another tactic to counter the enemy. I kept your words with me in court. It was you who told me not to in the first place, and I'm not going to forgive you if you ever dropped everything. I won't let the stupid, starry-eyed (Y/N) die today."

The girl beside her started sobbing. "But you told me once that my drawing are ugly."

"Oh. That. I... kind of remember that. I'm not sorry about what I said because I did it to provoke and rile you up. It was a lie though. As someone who always sees you drawing, I can't call your work ugly at all. Your art is... astounding. You make it look like it's so easy to do. I think you forgot next sentence after I told you that."

"What was the sentence after?"

Tsukishima sighed, "I told you to keep doing it, right?"

The sound of (Y/N) crying engulfed the kitchen, "Oh gosh, why did I forget that... I'm sorry, I'm so idiotic..."

The blonde brought her back to his arms, "Will you stop crying, you've been too hard on yourself today,"

(Y/N) hid her face on his chest, muffling her speech, "c-couldn't help it... my mind is such a mess... I do not know..." She paused, coughing. "It's no use if m-my parents don't acknowledge me..."

"Hundreds, or perhaps thousands of people who follow you on social media account recognize you. People in school recognizes you. I recognize you. I am your ally. Isn't that enough reason for you to get back on your feet? I will support you just like how you supported me. You have a lot of people who admire you, but I only have a few people and you. Yet your words are enough. I'm certain that soon, you will reach your parents' standards and get them to acknowledge you. It's not impossible."

(Y/N) fixed her tear-stained face before looking up to him, "You know what? Who are you? Is a good spirit possessing your body? The Kei I know will either stay quiet or laugh at me for being pathetic."

"I was trying to be nice for once and this is what I get?" He frowned.

(Y/N) chuckled and hugged Tsukishima, "I'm sorry. Everything you said meant the world to me. Thank you very much."

She relaxed against his lean body, "I have a question though..."

"What?"

"You literally had no business in my art, it was my own problem. Why are you doing this?"

"Why don't you ask yourself after you argued with me that night? Why did you have to butt in with my choices?"

"Because you like volleyball! You might look like that someone stole your dinosaur collection when you're at practice, but you're good at it and have a future in it! It is a part of you, and you're deciding to throw it away? Your potential is too big to be wasted and I refuse to let that happen." Her voice is a little louder now, but hoarse.

"There's your answer, little gremlin."

"How is that— Oh."

"But I'd like to add something."

"What is it?"

"You look better doing what you really like. It makes you look less like a hag."

It was silent after that. (Y/N) punched his arm. Tsukishima didn't even wince but asked, "What was that for?"

"The last statement was unnecessary, and the first one is sweet yet cringey." She criticized. 

"C'mon, I'm just a teenager. Aren't you the cringey one most of the times?"

She used the handkerchief to sniffle her runny nose away, "Why do you have a knack of returning everything I said to me?"

"I won't do it if it's not appropriate." Tsukishima placed his hands on her back and to her hair, "So, what are you going to do now, (Y/N)?"

"I'll think things through. My brain is still slightly messy, but I'll be fine, thanks to you. But Kei..."

He hummed as a response. "I don't want to go home. I want to run away."

"Not possible. You can't survive on your own. You're almost 18 and until now, you don't understand how a washing machine works with all your perfect scores in exams."

"This is just a thought. I didn't say I'll be alone. I'm taking you with me."

"I refuse."

"Why?"

"Couldn't you wait for more months until we graduate?"

(Y/N)'s eyebrows raised, "So basically, you're agreeing, but not this time?"

"No, but you'll be free of your parents' suffocating control. Who knows how huge is your potential by that time."

"How considerate of you." The girl smiled.

"Only this time. And no, we won't live in the same place in college. Not yet. Not until we finish our studies, have secured jobs, and get important things done." 

"Will you be playing volleyball at college?"

He lazily replied, "Probably."

"Don't give me such an ambiguous answer!"

"Probably yes." 

"Hmm. Fine by me. I'll continue to draw, then." (Y/N) rested her head near Tsukishima's neck. 

He smiled a little at her answer, "Another thing though. I don't think... you should leave things with your parents like that. There'll be a time where you have to face it."

"Yes, that sucks... I don't want to think about it but I'll have to go back eventually... When that confrontation happens, I'll try to calmly talk it out with them. I will never be certain if it will end well. But my hate and fear of them won't change."

"You can always run back here if it didn't end well."

"Kei, don't want to see their faces just yet. Can I stay here for a while?"

"You even bother to ask. You are welcome anytime in this household. Just enter the house in the front door, not in my window."

"Right... thank you."

"Oh, now it's my turn to ask. How did you get in there?"

(Y/N) sighed, "It was on 4:30pm. I was on the loose and I looked for a store where anyone can't recognize me so I can eat for lunch. But there's this creep who kept on following me—"

"Did he hurt you?" He abruptly questioned.

"No. I ran as fast as I could before he could even get close to me, but in the next block, there were the town authorities with my mom, and I knew they were looking for me, so I blended into the people with my hoodie on and made my way. I climbed the tree in panic that they'll find me and hid there. It took me hours to notice that your house is just next to it, so I decided to climb to your window. However, the window was locked, and I was stuck."

Tsukishima sighed in relief. "It was a miracle that a klutz like you didn't fell off the tree and surprisingly, no one found you."

"I was high in adrenaline when I climbed the tree. My blending and hiding skills are in ninja-tier now, I beat you."

"Whatever. What did you have for breakfast?"

"...a melon bread."

"Just that?"

"Just that." 

Tsukishima kissed her forehead before lifting her up with him. "Go change. Borrow any of my clothes. I'll reheat the food."

(Y/N) kissed his cheek, slowly got off him and went upstairs. Tsukishima opened his phone to text Yamaguchi about her situation and proceeded to reheat the spicy curry. 

"Wait, Kei! Is it okay for me to eat?" She shouted from upstairs.

"What kind of question is that? Of course you can." He shouted back.

"Your mom left that for you, for your dad and for your brother. I'd feel bad."

"My brother and dad will come home late and I'm sure they've eaten already. So is mom."

"Are you sure? I can replace the food." She said while going down the stairs.

"Oh, you can cook? I'm afraid you'll burn the whole kitchen." He mocked.

"At least not the whole house." (Y/N) laughed, "Just kidding, I have a tiny knowledge in cooking."

"You don't have to, I told you they already ate. I'll bring out the sushi mom made if you still want to eat."

"Alright. Thank you for the food."

Few hours later, Tsukishima's mom came home and took off her shoes. "I'm home."

As she was about to enter the living room, Akiteru greeted her and placed his finger in front of his lips, indicating her to keep quiet. She wondered what was going on and saw her youngest son and his girlfriend leaning on his shoulder, asleep on the couch in front of the TV. He signaled her to read the note Kei left on the table. 

To mom, dad, and brother,

Earlier in the morning, (Y/N) went missing and her parents and town authorities were looking for her. I found her on the way home, but it turns out that she ran away from her home because of an intense argument between her parents, and doesn't want to be found yet. Please let her stay here for a while. I'll do most of the household chores or any favor you ask me in return. 

Mom, I shared the curry and sushi rolls with her. I left for some for dad and brother. (Y/N) said it was very delicious. 

Love, 

Kei.

She smiled after reading the note and looked at the sleeping kids. She took notice of (Y/N)'s eyes and quickly understood the situation. Before she left to rest in her room, she looked for a spare blanket and laid it atop them to keep them warm. 

(Y/N) snuggled further to Tsukishima's arms, satisfied on how this night will end well, unlike yesterday's.

©4aloysius.porteu.2021. please do not repost, copy, or edit. plagiarism is punishable by law.

[sugarmaplewings-fics]

Not All Treasure is Silver and Gold (Part One)

Pairing: Pirate!Bakugou x mermaid!reader

Warnings: Ehh, this portion is gender neutral but from here on out the reader is referred to as female. This does work as a stand alone story, though. Otherwise no warnings from this one.

{Pt. 1} {Pt. 2} {Pt. 3} {Pt. 4}

Author's Note:

Sooo, I know I said I probably wouldn't have this out for another while, buuuttt, I didn't have anything for today and this one was just staring at me 🥺. I don't quite have a concrete plan for the full thing, and there's no guarantees for when part two is going to come out. Also I might draw something like last time to use as a banner. The one that's down there is a placeholder.

Anyhoo, I hope you enjoy this! I've been wanting to write this story for almost a year now, and I finally have the chance! If you'd like to be part of the taglist for this story, please message me!

I think that's it. Love you!!

-Sugar

⊱ ──── 《∘🕱∘》 ──── ⊰

⊱ ──── 《∘🕱∘》 ──── ⊰

A shadow slid across the ocean floor.

Basking in the warmth of the sun, it truly made for an unwelcome interruption. You'd been partaking in a nap only moments prior, mind slowly shifting through half-baked thoughts as the sun shone down onto the sand beneath you. Prompted by the change of brightness and temperature, you blinked your eyes open, rolling over to your back with a lethargic stretch of your arms. Squinting, you frowned up at the surface rippling a considerable distance above you.

There you saw it, some strange shape making its way over the water above. It seemed to be some kind of brownish color, wide and tapered to a point at each end.

Your annoyance faded as curiosity struck you. You didn’t think you’d ever seen anything like it before. You studied it from your vantage point on the ocean floor even as the sunlight reappeared on your relaxed body. It wasn’t as though you were doing anything important right now, you figured. Maybe it was something worth investigating, at least for a short time.

Rousing yourself from the sand, you flicked your tail to propel yourself up in the direction of the object.

You poked your head out of the water, body bobbing up and down with the motions of the waves. You blinked, bringing a hand out of the water in an attempt to shield your vision from the blinding sun. How did anything live up here? It felt as though your eyes were going to dry up and incinerate to nothing.

There it was, the strange object that had cast such a shadow. It was even bigger above water. Mahogany planks shaped it into that odd form, making it float on the ocean, cutting through waves as though they were nothing. Large masts seemed to sprout up from the center like kelp in a forest, sporting billowing white cloths rippling in the air currents.

Ah, yes, it was a boat, and an impressive one at that. You suddenly remembered seeing the ones just like this that couldn’t float anymore, having swum past the ruined, swollen wood during your time in this part of the sea. They were ominous, sitting still on the ocean floor, carrying a dark, somber aura about them as they laid dead where they’d never move again.

But this ship was every meaning of the word alive, shining in the midday sun and skimming dutifully over the bright blue water. Its size might have looked intimidating, but the thing itself was also very intriguing.

Naturally, you swam closer.

The thing was fast, but luckily, so were you. You dived back down, your powerful tail bringing you a few body lengths up to the submerged bottom of the ship. Popping out of the water again, you looked all the way up its side.

Now that you were closer, you thought you heard something. The sounds were new to you, similar to whalesong. But this was deeper, choppier, and somehow harsher. You frowned in the direction of the noises. What was on this boat?

You circled it underwater—careful not to get too close—coming back up a few times to get another look from a different angle.

You had to admit, it carried an odd beauty about it. Something like this must have been built, but the craftsmanship was so intricate, and it was massive . . . .

You sprung up above water again some ways away from it. Perhaps this thing wasn’t as exciting as you’d initially thought. It was a pain to keep up with and the noises coming from it kept hurting your ears.

Just as you turned to leave, a movement caught your eye. There it was, a flash of gold just at the side of the ship. It looked vaguely . . . familiar.

You went closer again to get a better look, and it was then that you met a pair of golden eyes, looking much like those of your people of the sea.

The figure startled as soon as he saw you, blinking and squinting in your direction. He made more of those strange chattering sounds you’d kept hearing, looking behind him and frantically pointing at you with his outstretched hand.

Rude, you thought, but what was a merman doing all the way up there?

A second head appeared next to the first, this one with vibrant, spiky red hair. You experimentally waved at them in greeting, wondering why you couldn’t understand them. Maybe they were from a different ocean you'd never seen.

They both leaned over the side. It looked like they were trying to communicate something to you, but whatever it was, you didn’t get it.

The red haired one turned and left, but was quick to come back with a weird circular object. It was attached to a rope and had an open circle in the middle, just big enough to put the top third of your body through.

To your mild surprise, he tossed it over the side at you, and it landed with surprising accuracy only a tail length away. You swam over to it, picking it up out of the water. It was oddly light—which probably explained why it floated so easily on the waves—and was made out of some strange material.

You glanced dubiously back up at the faces on the side of the ship. They were looking at you with . . . distress? What was this thing? Was it some kind of gift? What were you supposed to do with it? You couldn’t hold it down under the waves, so how were you supposed to bring it back underwater with you?

Either way, you thought it would be rude to decline. You grabbed the rope that was tied to it. It looked as though they were still holding on to the other end. You really wouldn’t be able to take it anywhere if it was still attached to the ship.

You grabbed the rope and tugged. They held onto it. Frustrated, you tugged again. Looking up at their faces, you matched their expressions of confusion. What were you missing here?

Perhaps they were only trying to show it to you. You decided to follow through with your initial idea of putting it around the upper portion of your body. You lifted it over your head—you fit through it okay, at least—and soon it reached the submerged base of your tail.

You floated there for a second. Was this all it was good for? Kind of useless if you asked yourself. Again, you made up your mind to leave. You had better things to do than play silly games with the weirdos in the sky.

Before you could slip back out under the object, you felt yourself being pulled closer to the boat. Now what were they doing?

You frowned up the side again, but this time you couldn’t really see them. They must have stepped back further onto the boat. Intrigued, you let them pull you along with them. You got closer and closer to the side, and finally the rope connecting you to the other end slanted completely vertical. You adjusted yourself so you wouldn’t slide out. Perhaps they were trying to bring you up so they could meet you. You weren’t sure what they’d gain by that, seeing as you couldn’t understand them. Heck, they probably wouldn’t be able to understand you either. But you were still curious. What did the boat look like from up there? It wasn’t all that interesting from the underside, but maybe if you were able to see it from the top . . . .

The two strangers began to haul you out of the water. It was a little scary, you had to admit. Slowly, your body was extracted from the water. Waves slapped against your tail ever lower, and eventually you were fully suspended in midair. You clung tightly to the rope. Glancing back at the sea below, you realized it was a long way down, and the higher you went, the less you were comfortable with the idea of falling.

You'd never been all the way out of the water like this, and it almost felt as though you were flying like those seabirds you'd see living on islands. Except this wasn't as fun. You were meant to swim in the water, not get dragged through the air.

Finally you saw the rim of the ship, and you picked up on the grunting and labored breaths from the two weirdlings you’d seen earlier. You reached up and grabbed onto the side, hoisting your body up. Then you saw them.

These weren’t quite the mermen you were used to. The things that were pulling you up had legs.

You stared at them for a moment, watching fascinated as they walked towards you. Tearing your eyes away from their tailless, split bodies, you glanced back at their faces. Why did they look so concerned? Did they always look like that?

The blond one was the first to reach you. He was quick to grab your hand to help you over the railing, chattering something at you. You let him pull your body up a little higher, and then he froze. To your surprise, he let go of your hand, dropping your bodyweight and causing you to pitch forward. You slid gracelessly to the dry floor of the ship like some kind of overgrown eel, fins and tail meeting the floor of the boat with a wet thud.

You spluttered, annoyed, curling your scaled appendage closer into yourself. “What is this?!” you finally asked.

The blond one had run back to the redhead, pointing frantically and clearly panicked. The red haired one also looked shaken, but otherwise seemed somewhat more collected as he studied you.

“Whatever,” you mumbled, sliding the flotation object off of yourself. “I don’t want this thing anyway.”

You glanced around, taking in the ship up close. It was pretty cool, but in hindsight, it probably wasn’t worth the whole fiasco you’d gone through to get here. The floor was mostly bare, give or take a few stacked boxes here and there. You recognized a net hanging from a pole, one of which you’d seen countless before. Was this where they came from?

“Those things are dangerous,” you said, pointing at it. “I’ve had to cut a lot of animals out of them.”

It was then that the red haired one stepped closer to you. You drew back just a bit, suspicious.

Examining him, you took in the mismatched rings that adorned his ears, and the billowy off-white covering he wore over his chest. The front was open, exposing the tanned skin of his torso. Darker brown fabric covered his lower half, tucked into clunky coverings at the very bottom. Another strip of cloth was tied around his head, making his vibrant hair stick up in odd directions.

He crouched down so you wouldn’t have to crane your neck up to look at him. He tried to say something to you again, but this time his voice wasn’t so loud. It was still foreign to your ears, but it was low and smooth.

You gave him an apologetic expression. “Listen,” you said. “This was fun and all, but I should probably get going.”

You turned and tried to slide yourself closer to the side you’d come from. Much to your annoyance, your tail hindered your movements. You were used to the grace of the water, but now you felt heavy and clunky. Scowling, you tried to pull yourself to the railing with your arms, but nothing was cooperating with you. The boat swayed with the motion of the waves down below, and as soon as you figured you’d made progress, you’d have to fight even harder against the force pulling you back.

You felt something touch your tail, and you whipped around with a threatening hiss, baring your teeth. It was the redhead again, and apparently he’d been the first to notice the rope that had gotten tangled around the fins and scales of your tail. Maybe he was trying to help, but he was touching your tail. You could do it yourself.

Jerking the lower portion of your appendage, you were able to smack him away with your fins. Feelings hurt, he stepped back.

You grabbed at the rope, cursing the fact that you’d ever gotten up from your nap in the first place as you struggled to untangle yourself from the device that had brought you up here. You wondered how you had gotten stuck so bad as you tugged at the coarse material. Seriously, you were so done with this today. You vowed to never go up to another boat again in your life if you could only get off this one—

And then you saw him.

The blond must have left a while ago but now you saw who he’d come back with. It was another being like the other two. He was blond like the first one, but his hair was shorter, spikier, and reminded you of the pale yellow of the sun. He was bigger than the other blond, but smaller than the redhead. You didn’t think you’d ever seen a face so handsome, even among the mermen back where you lived. He bore a scowl on his face, similar to the one you’d been sporting seconds earlier. Strength and authority rolled off him in waves, not only in the way he carried himself but also in the respect he garnered from the others around him.

He was tall, he was hot, and now you were just staring.

The sexy weirdling grumbled something, and you honestly weren’t sure to whom it was intended for until he stepped forward. You were slower to pull away as he approached, almost drawn to him in a strange way.

He knelt in front of you, pulling out a sharp object from a hidden pouch on his hip. Your heart fluttered in momentary fear as he brought it closer to your tail, but soon you saw the way he reached for the rope. Without scarcely touching your scales, he pulled on the material and sliced through it, cutting you free in a few fluid motions. You were caught up in watching him work, silently in awe as his rough hands delicately moved over your body.

Soon, you were able to move again, but before you could, he straightened and lifted your body from the floor. You gasped, clutching at his broad shoulders as you were once again suspended in midair. But this time you felt secure; his arms supporting the weight of your body. He met your eyes for a split second, and you became lost in the pools of orangey-red. They were deep, and bright, and you felt as though you could gaze into them forever.

Then you were hauled above the railing and tossed over the side.

Weightless, you fell back to the sea from which you came. It was surreal, watching his pale face grow smaller and smaller as wind rushed around you and gravity pulled you further away.

No, you thought, still in a daze. You wanted to stay with him, to keep looking at him, to know his name—

But all too quick, your back hit the cold water of the sea, skin stinging from the impact. With an impressive splash, you sank down again to the place you called home.

You didn’t know how to feel now, watching from below as the ship surged on without you. You were astonished and confused, lost and frozen in the deep blue world that surrounded you.

It was then that you vowed to see him again, no matter what.

You were warm—a little giddy—and you were determined.

You were in love.

…

To be continued . . . .

[Part Two]

⊱ ──── 《∘🕱∘》 ──── ⊰

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