#him and his bestie getting teary eyed at the end was so on brand

[gunsatthaphan]

episode 6 affected him :( (same)

[illuminiscentboba]

HQ CHARAS DURING RAMADAN AS MUSLIMS !!

feat: shoyo, kiyoko, nishinoya, tanaka, kageyama, sugawara & smaller hcs with kuroo & kenma & omi & motoya

a/n: thought it might be fun to do some hcs on things hq charas would do if they were Muslim & I included meanings to words so that nonmuslims could understand things too :)) they’re all fun and chaotic and I’m glad to contribute to the moderately dead tag “Muslim hcs”

HINATA gets hungry quick into the day but is very determined and tries to hide it, even after his stomach grumbles in class sometimes 💀- he's also super eager to get rewards (improve himself) and keeps a pocket-sized Kitab (Quran) on him and reads it on his breaks and whenever he can. he gets so soft when people wish him "Ramadan Mubarak!" (teary-eyed, genuinely touched) & argues with people who question another person's faith.

KIYOKO would highkey keep a tisbah/tusbah on her and reciting dhikr under her breath as she does classwork/lunch or independent work one of those really pretty ones (a pic of it the pics above with the beads) & she has a prayer mat that she keeps in the storage room in the gym so she can pray before practice, i feel like no one would even notice that she's fasting until days into Ramadan where they're going home and Daichi offers her some meatbuns and she goes "Oh, I'm fasting." but take it home to break her fast with later. her henna always looks amazing every year and she does it herself with a henna stencil at home, though when yachi and her became friends, yachi comes over and they do it together.

SUGAWARA says dhikr before serving like a quick “subhanallah, alhamdulkilah, or astaghfirallh,” and celebrates when he does a good toss/serve after saying it. Suga also tells those scary jinn stories and terrify the rest of karasuno w them LMAOO Suga who can also read people like a book and asks the team to say wallah when he thinks their lying (this has caught noya & tanaka a few times ngl) can't hide anything from suga & he watches those eating channels/mukbang videos

  Naurrr bc I feel like NOYA would b so heartbroken to find out that the brand of jellybeans he was eating acc had gelatin and is haram and feel like a fake muslim and tanaka would comfort him like “Issok at least u said bismillah” 😭😭 but also ask for forgiveness w him and for noya bc he is kind like that- oh and noya is someone I think would be like admired by youngsters for keeping up with prayers, getting good deeds, etc. and he always pushes himself to do more prayers every Ramadan for Tarawih and can actually do a lot without breaking a sweat. Noya is also an early bird and so I can see him vid calling the others to tell them to wake up,,,more than an hour before the eating period ends 💀

I feel like TANAKA sometimes makes late-night prayers for everyone in his life like esp after those movies where he’s hooked and his fav chara dies and he wonders what would happen if his besties die and then starts praying for the entire world tho pretends to b asleep when saeko checks on him

  KAGEYAMA would also be really eager to get in good deeds and competes with hinata about it LMAO, I also feel like kags would b more ahead of Hinata in the Quran and would be glowing when daichi asks him to lead the prayer (hinata is so jealous but turns the jealousy into determination so that he’ll get asked to lead the prayer too 🥺✨) He tries to hold back on going off on Hinata when he messes up during Ramadan and its the funniest thing ever, imagine him trying his best to hold it and hina does one more dumb thing and the man collapses- I feel like hina is so smug too, waiting for him to get bullied but just wait until eid. hinatas days are numbered. oh and sometimes he forgets he’s fasting and buys a milk carton & then gives it to an intimidated first year who is afraid of this tall, looming figure offering them milk-

I’m convinced that KUROO and KENMA'S moms get their sons to drop off some iftar food (food to break their fast with when the fast ends) at each other’s houses often and that suhoor/sehri kenma (basically early morning Kenma) is not to be messed with, Kenma is either half asleep or pondering murder with little to no in-between

  MOTOYA and OMI being mosque besties and also regulars. omi would highkey be anxious sitting by himself and off to the side, looking super awkward until he sees motoya who plops beside him & chats animatedly catching up with him and all even tho he saw him just a few days ago. Motoya is a social butterfly and all the other kids know him and even some parents.

I have more w mattsun, oiks & a few others, would y’all b interested in a part 2? 💛

[sending-the-message]

A Lesson in Hexes by Ilunibi

Since I guess I’m going to keep telling these stories, I guess it’s time I properly introduced myself. It never really occurred to me that I haven’t even told you guys my name. All I’ve really told you is that I grew up poor, I’m a woman, and I think I mentioned being a ginger. So, because it’s actually relevant to this story, I guess I can go ahead and get a little more personal with you.

My name is Alexandria. You can call me Seymour.

Seymour is my last name, but there were about five kids in my neighborhood and probably ten in my grade who were named “Alex,” and it would be a cold day in hell before I let anyone call me Alexandria or by my dreaded middle name. I got fed up with being “Alex S.” sometime in second grade because there were two in my class and I never had a clue which one of us the teacher was speaking to. I told her to just call me by my surname so I’d stop embarrassing myself answering questions not meant for me. Thus, I’ve spent the majority of my life being a girl named Seymour, which Dead Coyote always found awkward, hence his need to call me “princess” all the time.

And he’s not the only one who found it odd. When I was a little kid, people didn’t really care much because it was just a name--my name--and everyone adapted to it. Nobody really attached any gender to it because it wasn’t a big jump to go from Alex Seymour to just Seymour. As I got older and weaseled my way into middle school, though, things began to change. My classmates were suddenly more socially conscious and a lot more cruel, and combined with my other oddities, it just served to make me the butt of a lot of jokes.

“Seymour sounds like an old man’s name” doesn’t seem like a huge insult looking back on it, but at the time? Oh, man, it was devastating. Nobody wants to be friends with a girl who sounds like she’s an old man, which sucked because I could count my friends in elementary school on one hand anyway. Come sixth grade, my social circle collapsed to one sole individual who had graduated high school when I was in kindergarten.

But, I didn’t want to cave and go back to being Alex S. Eleven-year-old me was a stubborn creature made of pure drive and competitiveness, and going back to my lame first name would just be conceding that the bullies had won. Besides, Dead Coyote and his lessons had left one hell of an impact on me. I can’t say that the mean girls ever made me cry, but they sure as hell pissed me off and by the end of my first semester of sixth grade, I was walking on glass and ready to punch somebody in the face.

“Nah, princess. That’s messed up,” Dead Coyote told me when I confessed that I wanted to rip every strand of hair out of Jessica Schneider’s fucking skull. She was a grade higher than me and sat at the cool girls’ table, twelve years old and sauntering around like she was twenty-two. All of her clothes were pastel and name-brand, her hair was practically spun gold, and she never seemed to miss an opportunity to insert herself into any good time I was having to remind anyone who dared talk to me that I was, in fact, a dweeb. Cue the jokes about my name, and the then-omnipresent nickname of “Grandpa.”

“You could just go by Alex.”

I glared at Dead Coyote and he let out a defeated sigh.

“You really don’t like her, do you?”

No, I didn’t. I wanted her to know what it felt like to be hurt and bullied and imperfect. I wanted to watch her writhe and sob as her friends turned on her like a pack of rabid dogs and took digs at the way she dressed. I wanted her crush to ask her out and get her hopes up and then stand her up at the school dance and tell everyone it was a joke. I wanted people to call her “Grandma” and I wanted her to eat worms and fall in a mud puddle and have to live in a shitty apartment with an absentee father and a mother who’s never home and no friends to play with or have sleepovers with or money to have a decent meal.

By the end, I may have been crying. The realization of how alone I was hit me like a truck, mixing in with the overwhelming anger that just pulsed in my body like drugs in Dead Coyote. I looked at him, teary-eyed, as he inhaled deeply and bit his lip. Judging from the syringe and bottle he was juggling in his hands and the uncertainty in his eyes, I had made him change his plans for the evening.

“You want her to understand where you’re comin’ from, is that it? You want to bring her down to your level? Knock her off her pedestal?”

I nodded enthusiastically. Dead Coyote sighed and sat his stuff down, though his eyes drifted back to it once or twice.

“A’ight, princess. I’ll help you out, but you’re still studyin’, so when I get done doin’ the work, you gotta do exactly what I say. Consider this a hands-off lesson in hexes.”

Between tears and sniffles, I managed a smile.

“Also. What was that about not gettin’ a decent meal? I feed you.”

“But it’s gas station food,” I protested.

He nodded in sage-like understanding.

We went to Taco Bell that night. It was cheap and slightly closer than McDonald’s. And when we got back to his apartment, after we scarfed down enough soft-shell tacos and cinnamon twists to kill a small horse, he pulled me to his kitchen and started laying out his plan. He opened his bone drawer (yes, he had a bone drawer) and dug out a teeny, tiny, delicate little piece from inside a Ziploc bag. He tossed it to me and I barely caught it.

“Breathe on this.”

“Why?”

“To give it your essence, ‘cause I’m gonna be doin’ the work, but it’s your hex.”

It was a raccoon finger bone, he said. Bone worked best for hexes because necromantic energy tended to be easier to focus and a lot more malicious since there’s a lot of residual regret and shock and pain tied to the remains of something that was once a thinking, breathing being. Animal bones are easier to get and less of a gamble, though, because the trace energies tied to them are a lot more neutral. Humans could swing either ferociously angry and murderous to completely benign and ineffective depending on how they understood and accepted their death, but a raccoon doesn’t understand dying. It’s not malicious or super righteous.

It’s just a raccoon.

He sat at his kitchen table with an ultra fine-tipped Sharpie, a bottle of nail polish remover, and a magnifying glass, shaking from his lack of a fix and cursing angrily every time he made a mark where a mark shouldn’t have been. After about half an hour, he excused himself, grabbed his heroin off the coffee table on his way to his bedroom, and was gone for a good forty-five minutes. I wound up watching the Twilight Zone until he came stumbling back down the stairs, kind of floppy but with a steadier hand.

He finished the talisman, covered it in clear nail polish to keep my sweaty child hands from rubbing off his marker-scribbled curse, and handed it to me with a triumphant sigh and a not-all-there smile.

“Here. Small enough to slip in her desk or bag or whatever, and she won’t find it for a bit. Maybe.”

“What kind of hex is it?” I asked.

“Eh, whatever you want it to be. Generic stuff, princess. Just say what you want to happen, and the spirits make it happen. But be careful, ‘cause spirits are pretty literal. Man, if I had a dollar--”

He trailed off, squinted his eyes, shook his head, and came back to earth. Slowly, he stood up from the table and snorted a tired laugh.

“I think I need a nap. Call 911 if I stop breathing.”

And that was that. Dead Coyote passed out on his couch, I moved his legs so I could finish watching the Twilight Zone, and I scampered home as soon as I heard mom’s car turn the corner. She asked me about my day, I asked her why they didn’t make Twilight Zone anymore, and she sent me to bed after making sure that I had eaten that day. I stuffed my talisman into the pocket of the jeans I had picked out for the next day so I wouldn’t forget and I felt so smug as I drifted off to sleep. My dreams praised me for taking a stand against Jessica Schneider and her stupid mean-girl antics.

The next day, I tried to beat Jessica to school. I failed, but I tried. I bolted off the bus, ran toward her locker, and was stunned to see that she was already there with her hair done in beautiful waves and her make-up carefully applied like it was normal for a twelve-year-old to wear make-up. All of her cheerleader friends were clustered around her, grinning and laughing when they saw little Grandpa come skidding into the hall, wide-eyed and horrified when I realized that, yeah, maybe kids whose parents were actually around to take them to school would swing in a bit earlier than the bus crowd.

Cue the teasing. One of them asked if I was so stupid that I thought her locker was mine. Another made a comment about the oversized jacket I was wearing, which was actually Dead Coyote’s. Jessica’s bestie waved her hands in front of her face and said, in a faux-British accent, that I reeked of poverty. Jessica cackled before adding the icing on the cake: Grandpa this, Grandpa that, Grandpa the other thing. She then tossed a cherry on top by knocking my books out of my hand and telling me that nobody liked me and I was going to end up dying of an overdose like my “boyfriend” eventually would.

As I stooped down to pick up my books, Jessica turned back to her friends. They badmouthed my mom, my incarcerated dad, and most of all, Dead Coyote. As though any of them had the right to talk about any of the people in my life, as though they understood why they were the way they were or why they did what they did or just how hard it was trying to stay alive when you live a life where shit like peanut butter is a luxury. They were distracted and Jessica’s bag was right next to me. I reached into my pocket, grabbed my talisman, and breathed on it one more time for good measure.

“I wish Jessica Schneider was dead,” I growled as I slid it into a side pocket I figured she’d never check. They didn’t hear me or even notice as I grabbed my things and slithered off.

I didn’t regret it at first. I was resolute in my belief that Jessica was a lost cause and I hated her and I wanted her to die. It wasn’t that I was cruel more than it was that I was an angry, lonely kid who didn’t fully believe that my bad thoughts would have any repercussions, hex or no hex. I just sat bitterly in class as the days went by, wondering why she was still walking the halls like she owned the school and nothing had happened to keep her big, stupid mouth shut. I almost chalked up the ritual as a bust that I could blame on Dead Coyote because he was high as a kite when he wrote out the curse.

Then, Jessica stopped showing up to school. Completely. No more laughter in the hallway, no more interrupting me when I talked to people in the lunchroom, no more Grandpa. It was glorious at first but then? Then people started talking, rumors and whispers that were eventually confirmed when the PA system hissed to life after months of silence and announced, quite grimly, that there would be a candlelit vigil at the high school football stadium for Jessica Schneider to pray for a swift recovery.

She was sick. With what? Nobody knew. Doctors were puzzled. Her friends were grief-stricken. My stomach sank. All that I could think about was that raccoon bone and Dead Coyote’s hex and what I had said when I was so mad, so very mad, and now I couldn’t take it back. Could I?

In my mind, playing hookey is acceptable if you’re doing so to try to keep somebody alive. I excused myself from class to go to the restroom and vanished out a side door, cutting across the parking lot and disappearing through rows and rows of suburban houses. It took me a full two hours to get past the good neighborhoods to what was familiar, and another ten minutes of banging on Dead Coyote’s door to wake him up. He was, understandably, surprised to see me. Briefly scared that some other neighborhood miscreant had tried to get in my pants, though he calmed down as soon as I started frantically cry-screaming that I had killed somebody.

Or was in the process of killing somebody.

“I fucked up!” I howled, and Dead Coyote stood there blinking for a moment. His eyes were bloodshot. He’d apparently been out cold after taking a hit or two of something or the other and his brain was operating on one hell of a delay.

“Okay, so. First of all, princess? Language,” he cautioned, before slumping on his couch. “Second of all, who did you kill?”

I fell on the other end of the couch, gesturing wildly as I told him about Jessica and what she’d said about my mom and dad and him and me, and how she knocked the books out of my hand and called me Grandpa and stupid and told me nobody liked me and she thought I was a drug addict who’d die of an overdose. I told him how I told the talisman that I wanted her dead, but it didn’t seem like a big deal because she seemed fine after that. I sobbed as I told him she was in the hospital and there was a candle vigil at school because nobody could figure out what was wrong and I needed him to fix it. I desperately needed him to make Jessica okay again.

“She’s an awful person, but maybe she won’t be someday,” I whined, and I watched Dead Coyote’s lips twitch up into something like a smile. Maybe he was proud of me, or maybe watching a pre-teen girl shrieking that she just killed her schoolyard bully with a raccoon bone was amusing. He was high as fuck, so it was hard to tell.

“Yeah. I can fix it,” he said at long last. “My car’s runnin’ again so we can go by the school this evenin’ or somethin’. Her bag still at school?”

I told him I didn’t know.

“Eh, we’ll find out then.”

My face grew pale as the implication slowly dawned on me.

“Hey, DC? A-are we going to break into the school?”

“Yeah. How else we gonna get that talisman back?”

“But what if we get in trouble?”

“What if we do? I ‘unno, princess. It’s up to you. You think you’re more scared of the police than Jessica is of dying?”

No. I wasn’t.

That night, I stood at the doors of the county middle school beneath the flickering street lights, feeling lost and exposed as I huddled next to Dead Coyote’s car, the lone vehicle in the entire lot. He told me that it wouldn’t be his first break-in and that, if the alarm rang, I should run to avoid being caught with him but, thankfully, he was a lot more skillful than I thought. That, or some lucky spirit was on our side and divinely inspired the faculty to not turn on the security system before they left for the day. He popped the lock, the door swung open, and he grimaced as he walked back to his Grand Am and threw his makeshift lockpick into the floorboards.

“She left her bag here,” he stated matter-of-factly. The news was a relief for only a second. Then, I started to wonder how he knew that, how powerful this thing was if he could feel it as soon as the door opened. I watched, curious, as he began to draw a magic triangle on the blacktop directly in front of the door with a piece of cement that had chipped from the building, a crude and crooked image he had to keep going over again and again to make it visible enough to be useful. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I knew if he was having to bring sigils into the mess that I had to have done worse than originally thought.

“Oh. I really fucked up, didn’t I?” I asked.

“Language!” he hissed at me, though the anger immediately melted away. “Also, yes. You did.”

I had simple instructions. With the last few marks of the triangle, he told me to run in as quick as I could, find Jessica’s locker, get her bag, and get the talisman. I had to snap it in two and run like hell back to the magic triangle, where I had to stand and act as bait until whatever spirit attached itself to the talisman got trapped inside. He told me it was like a cage, one he usually used for demons associated with a certain unholy deer, but it would be suitable for an exorcism.

And that’s what we had to do. We had to cast out the thing my hate had summoned to kill Jessica.

“What if I can’t get the locker open?” I asked.

Dead Coyote handed me a screwdriver out of his hoodie pocket.

“What if I can’t break it?”

He shrugged, nudged me inside, and off I went into the school.

Have you ever been inside a school after hours? It’s terrifying. It’s a place you usually associate with daylight and noise and movement, but everything is so dark and frighteningly still and you can’t help but feel like you could turn a corner at any moment and walk straight into a ghoul or a serial killer. As much as I wanted to run to Jessica’s locker to get it over with quickly, the most I could manage was a shuffling, silent jog as I clutched the screwdriver to my chest like a weapon and hoped that the sound of my footsteps wouldn’t attract whatever fiends were lurking in the dark corners of the halls whose ends I couldn’t see.

When I reached Jessica’s locker after what felt like an eternity, I was relieved to find that public school lockers are probably the easiest thing in the world to break into. Even a weak little nobody like me could manage it; just slipping the screwdriver into the crack popped it open just as well as if I put in the combination. The noise it made, though, made me freeze for a solid minute as I waited for the echo to die and for the footsteps of a murderer to start. Once I was satisfied that Jason Voorhees wasn’t about to come dragging his ass out of the gym to cut me to ribbons, I began to tear through Jessica’s stuff.

Boyband posters on the locker door. Photos of her friends stuck to the sides with magnets. Stacks of papers she hadn’t turned in for world history class. Hidden behind a pile of textbooks with beaten covers and ripped pages was what I was looking for, and right in the pocket where I remember slipping it was that goddamned raccoon bone talisman.

I pulled it out and hesitated. I didn’t want Jessica to die, but Dead Coyote to said to break it and run, which would imply that something bad would happen if I released whatever evil lived inside. I bounced back and forth on the balls of my feet, trying to figure out how fast I should run, if I could even outrun a spirit, wondering if it was a demon and, if so, which one. If it was a demon on a horse, I knew I couldn’t outrun a horse.

Still, I thought of what Dead Coyote had said to get me out there in the first place. If a spirit caught me, at least I had somebody who knew what to do in the situation. Jessica was completely alone in this fight. Was I more afraid of my own mistake than she was of dying?

I wasn’t.

Raccoon bones break easily. I snapped it in half after a couple of tries, hands shaking as I let the pieces fall to the floor and sprinted back the way I came. I heard a dull roar, like the ocean, rise up behind me. I felt a cold, hard pressure against my back that was more chilly than the December air rushing into the school. Fliers on the wall fluttered and waved like flags in a windstorm, lockers flew open and their contents spewed across the ground. My legs pumped harder and harder as I slipped and slid my way down the tile halls, stumbling and fumbling over my schoolmates’ book bags and pencil cases.

And behind me, whatever it was that was chasing me began to speak. It was like listening to a room full of people reciting the same lines, voices ranging from old to young to everything in between, man and woman and some things that were inhuman. Part of it was furious, part of it was curious, and part of it was begging me to let me finish the job. The hallways rang with Jessica’s voice and every foul thing she’d ever said to me, though my brain couldn’t even register it as insulting anymore.

Everything she said was so petty. I could barely understand why I had let myself be hurt by it in the first place. That made me feel all the worse, guilt cold in my veins as my mind raced from saving my own hide to the fact that I was in this situation because I had tried to kill a pre-teen girl for just being a pre-teen girl. Tears pooled in my eyes and sobs burned in my chest as I struggled to breathe around the growing lump in my throat.

I was slowing down. It was getting closer. I glanced over my shoulder to see a dark fog barreling toward me, constantly morphing and shifting, the most prominent of its faces being more beastly than human though its smoky, ethereal arm looked like just an extension of my own shadow. I nearly collapsed, bawling and exhausted, right as its fingers brushed against my shoulder.

I stumbled over my own feet.

Then I heard Dead Coyote. He skidded around the corner like a cartoon character, a container held high above his head like an Aztec sacrifice, eyes wide and bloodshot and teeth bore in a snarl. As I collapsed to the ground and rolled into his feet (after rolling through a pile of three-ring binders all ring-side up), I glanced up at his weapon of choice and decided that this was probably going to be the end of us both. A Morton’s canister didn’t seem particularly frightening.

Despite speaking no real Spanish, I still remember his battle cry because I tease him mercilessly about it to this day.

“Come sal, hijo de puta!”

Eat salt, you son of a bitch.

Then, he flung it, as hard as he could, a stream of salt zig-zagging through the air like he was a goddamn ribbon dancer. I watched through a haze of tears as the thing that had been chasing me let out a screech like an emergency broadcast, its body splitting wherever the salt had touched it. The parts that looked like parts flailed and writhed like piles of ghostly bodies struggling to escape, the bits that had a mouth screamed and cursed, and Jessica’s insults died in the ether as it vanished from view like a fading mirage. I whimpered as Dead Coyote urged me to my feet, frantic, and shoved me back outside while chanting “go, go, go” like it would make my legs hurt less and my body move faster. He didn’t talk for a while after he threw me in the car and he left a skidmark in the parking lot as he peeled away, leaving the door hanging open and the lockers a mess.

Good thing the security cameras mysteriously malfunctioned that night. I’m telling you, spirits of luck.

Halfway back to his apartment and after a few cigarettes, he apologized. He shouldn’t have sent me in alone, he said, but he wanted to teach me a lesson about taking responsibility for what I did with the magic he was teaching me. He didn’t think that a little kid could have so much hatred in her heart for a person that she produced a poltergeist quite like I did, and that’s exactly what it was that had been hunting me down those halls. A poltergeist, something that my concentrated negativity and anxiety and anger had bred when combined with Dead Coyote’s hex.

“I just thought your target was just sick,” he said grimly. “But you wasn’t jokin’, princess. That ain’t no exaggeration. You wanted her dead. Might’ve just been a second, but goddamn, you wanted her destroyed.”

I was ashamed, but Dead Coyote told me not to dwell on it. Every kid says things they don’t mean because they mean it in the moment and, honestly, I had the right to be so angry. My life was kind of shit. I was lonely and neglected and Jessica wasn’t making it easier. He said I needed to consider it a learning experience, to not bottle it up and dwell on it and let it dissuade me, but to use it as a lesson about power and purpose and exerting care.

“It’ll be okay, Seymour. All’s well that end’s well, yeah?”

And it did end well. Though the Christian moms at the school like to tout that the candlelight vigil brought down Jesus’ favor like a focused laser, I took quiet pride in our work when Jessica came waltzing back into school after Christmas vacation with renewed swagger, bragging that she had cheated death itself. While the janitors certainly had their work cut out for them when they swung back in in January and saw that the school looked like a hurricane had hit it, nobody pinned it on Dead Coyote or me. They saw the salt flung all over everything and magic triangle near-permanently carved in their lot and whispers started that some kind of petty cult had tried to break in for ritual purposes, though nobody knew what that purpose was. My classmates liked to build up on that that somebody had been sacrificed over our break and the school was haunted and, well, maybe it was.

Maybe we never got rid of all of it. We never did get it to the magic triangle outside, after all. Maybe it was just sitting there, that poltergeist I bred, watching and seething and wondering why I wasn’t feeding it anymore.

And on the way home from our impromptu, not-quite-perfect exorcism, Dead Coyote remembered how I’d complained about never getting a decent meal. The McDonald’s drive-thru was open 24-7, and he treated me to ice cream and the biggest burger on their menu.

And he told me, with a half-dazed smile, that he never wanted to hear me say I had no friends ever again.