#i saw a post the other day that linked a study I really want to refind

[bittersweetsthff]

read more fics since this last post and i have MORE goodies!! links below the cut :3

between death and damnation by quillifer

rated m. warning for major character death.

“Why are you always busy on Thursdays? You never used to be busy on Thursdays.” “I have a new standing appointment,” Ivan says, declining to elaborate.

Apparently, Ivan is dying. Till does not handle this news well.

reconstructive memory by yamscooper

rated m. post-round till is with the rebellion but everything is still wrong.

“I thought I told you to cheer up,” Ivan says. His hair’s shorter than it was in Till’s last memory of him. Shinier, well-styled. He’s wearing black. He’s lost some muscle, but his grin’s the same. A little showy, a little fake. Definitely condescending. He looks healthy for a ghost. He looks like he wasn’t shot four times. “You’re not a very good listener, are you?” Till’s throat closes up. “Ivan,” he rasps.

Ivan comes back after Round 6, with a few changes.

the knife i turn inside myself by calmthestorms

rated t. my favourite toxic straight couple! warning for major character death.

She’s bent over him, frozen, hardly breathing. Luka takes the opportunity to look at her—really look at her, committing her to memory. He wants to remember her wherever he goes after he dies. If he can’t have her in this life, maybe he can in another. “Don’t let go,” he pleads, soft and fervent as a prayer. “Hold me when I die. Please.” Hyuna turns her face away for a long moment, shoulders shaking as she breathes. Luka knows this motion, long-remembered from childhood. He tugs on a strand of hair, pulls her face back to his. “Don’t cry,” Luka whispers.

When Hyuna comes to kill him, Luka is already waiting.

shadow on the tile by GallifreyanFairytale

rated t. a luka character study (i think he's growing on me)

Hyuna takes his wrist in her hand, fingers circling around it completely, pressing hard enough to bruise. “I’ll break it,” she threatens. Luka laughs. It bubbles up in his throat and spills through his lips without his consent, a stream of giggles, as tears prick at the corners of his eyes. It’s hilarious. Snap his wrist, and he’ll finally have a distraction from the pain splitting his skull. He’ll finally have something else to think about, and an excuse to miss classes for a day, and a good enough reason to have painkillers pumped into his veins until everything is completely, blissfully, numb. “Do it,” he begs. “Hyuna, do it.”

on luka, migraines, and perfection.

a breath of fall by oceans_bluem

rated g. pre-round 6 ivan and a study of ivansua siblings. warning for major character death.

Sua, he thinks. Sua, will it hurt? Ivan is long past the moment for doubt. As soon as he saw his name matched against Till’s for Round Six, he knew what he would have to do. More than that, he’s long outgrown unnecessary questions. But some part of him is still the boy who flinched from pain before he learned to bite his tongue through it and craft his face into an expressionless mask. So he asks the only other person who knows what he is going through: Sua, he thinks again, will it hurt? Sua, of course, does not answer.

Or, Ivan prepares for Round 6.

not even in another eternity will you stop your lovely orbiting by quillifer

rated m. till through several time loops.

“What if I told you that you had a chance to do it all over again? You wouldn’t be able to change much—the fates don’t play fair—but you could settle at least one of your regrets. Would you take it?” Till knows better than to gamble; the risks almost always outweigh the benefits. Still, it sounded like Sua was speaking from experience. “Did you—” “I can’t answer any of your questions,” Sua says, cutting him off with haste. “Yes or no, Till?” Till swallows, staring at her outstretched hand.

déjà vu by quillifer

rated t. reincarnated ivti strangers :)

Truthfully, Ivan thought this kind of disease was the stuff of urban legend. He takes himself to the emergency room, unwilling to risk undue escalation. His vitals are fine. A doctor assures him that his lungs haven’t been taken over. “It would be in your best interests to confess, young man. Heartbreak is temporary. Organ damage is permanent.” There’s only one problem: Ivan isn’t in love with anyone.

thistlewood by quillifer

rated t. modern au till takes in a feral ivan

“You bite me, scarf down my food, then you have the gall to beg for more?” Ivan isn’t familiar enough with tonal nuance to understand that the other boy is being purposefully melodramatic. “Can you talk at all?” He tries a few more questions, none of which beget a response. After a beat, he picks a rock up off the ground. The gesture has Ivan growling, hackles raised, but he hurriedly throws it into the distance. Ivan listens to it rattle until it’s gone. Presumably, the kid can hear just fine. Heaving a sigh, he points to his chest. “I’m Till. Okay? Till. Who are you?” Ivan holds out his wrist. That’s answer enough, Till supposes.

reverse psychology by quinnpriv1

rated e. stalker till.

Till starts jotting down information in a notebook because his brain is scrambled at the best of times. If Ivan ever goes missing thanks to some rabid ex or a girl who’s pissed off because Ivan won’t date her, he needs to know what to tell the authorities. The notebook expands tremendously from humble beginnings. Tall. Dark-haired. Handsome. Broad-shouldered. Uneven smile, morphs into, Six-foot-one, twenty-six years old, something along the lines of a finance specialist, left-handed, Ferragamo moccasins polished to a shine, amongst a dozen other paltry details. He’s aware enough to acknowledge that he has an interest in Ivan—but he wouldn’t consider himself interested, not romantically. Ivan isn’t his type. Greasy corporate bastard with a wicked tongue? Nothing but trouble. And yet.

Hi hello! do you have any alien stage fic recs??

i most definitely do!!!

I've only read ivantill until now (cus the brainrot is real) so that's what I'll share here but once I'm done scouring the mizisua tag, I'll definitely return!

links below the cut <3

from ashes by petitfives

vampire till and vampire ivan. ivan is deranged and till suffers per usual. rating: explicit

"This is the face of the dog who has killed so many of my fledglings,” Urak says, snapping Till out of his reverie. “Remember it. It might be the last thing you see.” Till has never liked Ivan more than he does right now. Good, he thinks, as viciously as he can. He doesn’t think his prayers carry any weight, but he stares hard at the saint wearing Ivan’s face and hopes Ivan puts a stake through Urak’s unbeating heart. Or, Till gets turned by a vampire, and Ivan is a vampire hunter.

the silhouette in my peripherals by Anonymous

till in the aftermath of r6. rating: explicit

Ivan is gone, but he is still there. Or: how to haunt a person.

till death do us part (so why are you before me again?) by Aminori

ivan and till reuniting in the afterlife. <3 rating: teen

When Ivan had held his beloved’s throat, felt the pulse of life as his own ended, he had expected to not see Till again. … He had expected Till to live on. Had selfishly wanted it, in fact. But here his beloved was, in his arms, in a place that they were never meant to be reunited in.

And he wasn’t quite sure what to feel, anymore.

(or: Ivan dies. He didn’t expect to see Till again, but he did.)

break a heart, stitch it right back by yamscooper

till being jealous. rating: teen

If Ivan wants to laugh and giggle and twirl his hair at some girl Till has never met before, that’s none of Till’s fucking business. “I don’t think Ivan’s hair is long enough to twirl,” Mizi says. “It’s a figure of speech,” Till bites out.

a certain ivantill fan's origin story by gustavo

somehow luka becomes the #1 ivantill fan. rating: teen

Over the course of his preparation for the much-anticipated Final Round of the hit dystopian drama, Alien Stage, Luka discovers that he might be a lot more invested in his best friend’s love life than he’d expected himself to be. or: the fic where luka somehow becomes an ivantill truther.

breathe again in the world anew by aerivel

more ivantill reunions after r7. rating: teen

Till and Ivan reunite one more time. - “I can’t say I’m not disappointed.” The sound of a deep, gentle voice cutting through the air startles Till enough to bang his head against the tree behind him. Wincing slightly, he sits up and jerks his head to the slowly approaching man in white. “I thought you would win after all,” the man continues, slowing until he stood a few feet away. The man’s attention is stolen by the fluttering of a crimson flower inches away from his foot. Absently, he shifts his shoe and crushes the petals beneath him. It’s enough to spark something within Till. Ivan. It’s Ivan.

your shadow on the wall of my room by ephemeroptera_insecta

ghost ivan haunts till. rating: teen

Till won Round 6. He had his first kiss. He’s one step closer to winning. He’s also, notably, now being haunted. Or : Ivan comes back as a ghost. Till realizes what Ivan has done for him, and the feelings he buried for him out of fear. They navigate life (and death) as a man and his ghost.

what we’re allowed to do to each other’s faces by fakekniferealketchup

ivan lives and till escapes. rating: teen

When Ivan had died, the lens through which Till saw the world had fractured, rearranged, and stuck that way, like a broken bone that wasn’t set. A bleeding kaleidoscope of the past. A dozen years of memories clamored for fresh attention, to be reexamined, to be cut open so they could show off all the terrible wriggling things that had wormed around inside them and eaten them hollow. He couldn’t think of the garden, anymore; only of how stupid he had been. — - — Ivan lives; Till escapes the arena. There's no elegance in their reunion, but there is spit, and blood, and something close to forgiveness.

[entropyvoid]

Y’know before things went to shit a popular topic amongst jewish users on this site was about cultural Christianity, and a large part of that discussion was pointing out that certain ways of talking/acting/thinking were rooted in Christian culture, and were not culturally neutral, and the expectation of Jews (and people from non-culturally-Christian backgrounds in general) to conform to them was an expectation to assimilate and abandon our own cultural ways of talking/acting/thinking.

And this collective conversation has largely been abandoned as Jews on this platform now have much more loud and blatant forms of antisemitism to worry about

But I can’t really stop thinking about how ostracization, public shaming, guilt, conversational shut-downs, harassment, and throwing ad hominem buzzwords at various people to not have to engage directly with opposing ideas enough to form an actual counterargument have all been a serious issue with how people operate in left-leaning online spaces for a long time now, and how those things are also very common methods of group control in a lot of the more… well, controlling and loudly bigoted sects of American Christianity, with roots in American Puritanism.

And I think a lot of people who want to think of themselves as leftists or even activists should really take a step back and more deeply analyze their methods/praxis of realizing their ideals and how they interact with other people, whether or not they’re actually willing to be constructive about things, etc.

Like is burning bridges, shutting down conversations, refusing to engage intellectually with things you don’t like, callouts, etc… actually helpful and useful? Why is this the method so many default to, and where does it come from?

[excalculus]

I saw some mentions of rabies going around again and have no clue what's set it off this time, but given recent scientific developments I want to revisit the idea of curing symptomatic rabies.

First things first: there is still no practical way to do this. The famous Milwaukee Protocol fails far more frequently than it succeeds, and even the successes are not making it out in anything like a normal state. It's been argued that it should no longer be considered a valid treatment [1] due to these issues; any continued use is because there's literally nothing else on the table.

However. There are now two separate studies showing it's possible to cure rabies in mice after the onset of symptoms. The lengths you have to go to in order to pull this off are drastic, to put it mildly, and couldn't really be adapted to humans even if you wanted to. But proof of concept is now on the board.

long post under the cut, warnings for animal experimentation and animal death. full bibliography at the end and first mention of each source links to paper.

Quick recap - rabies is a viral disease of mammals usually transmitted through the saliva of an infected animal. From a contaminated bite wound, it propagates slowly for anywhere from days to months until it reaches the central nervous system (CNS). Post-exposure vaccination can head it off during this phase, but once it reaches the CNS and neurological symptoms appear it's game over. There will typically be a prodromal phase where the animal doesn't act right - out at the wrong time of day, disoriented, abnormally friendly, etc. This will then progress to the furious (stereotypical "mad dog" disease) and/or paralytic phases, with death eventually caused by either seizures or paralysis of the muscles needed for breathing.

That's the course we're familiar with in larger animals. Mice, though, are fragile little creatures with fast metabolisms.

In the first study's rabies infection model, lab mice show rabies virus in the spinal cord by day 4 after infection and in the brain by day 5. Weight loss and slower movement start by day 7, paralysis starting from the hind limbs from day 8 on, and if not euthanized first they're dead by day 10-13. [2]

This study (fittingly conducted at the Institut Pasteur) had two human monoclonal antibodies, and wanted to see if there was any possibility they could be used to cure rabies after what we think of as the point of no return.

Injecting the antibodies into muscle saved some mice if done at days 2 or 4, and none if done later, even at high doses of 20 milligrams per kilogram of body weight of each. Conclusion: targeting the virus out in the rest of the body is no use if it's already replicating in the CNS.

Getting a drug past the blood-brain barrier is, to use a highly technical term, really fucking hard. It's the sort of problem that even the best-funded labs and biggest companies in the world routinely fail at. And that's for small molecule drugs, which are puny compared to antibodies.

But this isn't drug development for a clinical trial. This is a very, very early proof-of-concept attempt, which means you're willing to ignore practicality to see if this idea is even remotely workable. So you can do things like brute force the issue by cutting through the skull to implant a microinfusion pump, which lets you deliver the antibodies directly into the normally-protected space around the brain. Combine this with the normal injections, and you can treat both the CNS and the rest of the body at the same time. Here's a survival graph of treated mice. X axis is days, Y axis is percentage of mice in that group still alive.

Figure 2A from reference 2, accessed February 2024

The fact that the blue, green, and purple lines did anything other than sink horribly to zero is unheard of. When the combination treatment was started at day 6, 100% of the mice survived. Started at day 7 (prodromal phase), 5 out of 9 mice recovered and survived. Started at day 8 (solidly symptomatic, paralysis already starting to set in), 5 of 15 mice recovered and survived. And when they say "survived", they kept these mice all the way to day 100 to make sure. Some of them had permanent minor paralysis but largely they were back to being normal mice doing normal mouse things. So, success, but by pretty extreme means.

Enter the second paper [3]. This was a different approach using a single human monoclonal antibody against Australian bat lyssavirus (ABLV - closely related to rabies, similar symptoms in humans) to try for a cure without needing to deliver treatments directly into the CNS. They also made a luminescent version of ABLV that let them directly image viral activity, so they could see both where the virus was replicating and how much there was in a live mouse.

Figure 1 from reference 3, accessed February 2024

Mice infected with ABLV start showing symptoms around day 8. You can see in the figure that at day 3 there's viral replication in the foot at the site of infection, which has shifted into the spine and brain by day 10. So what happens if you give one of these doomed mice one single injection of the antibody into the body?

Done at day 3, the virus doesn't make it to the brain until day 14, and while disease does set in after that around 30% of the mice survive. Days 5 and 7 are much more interesting. Those mice still develop symptoms at day 8, but the imaging shows the amount of virus in their spines and brains never gets anywhere near the levels seen in untreated controls, and within days it starts to decrease. Around 80% of day 5 and 100% of day 7 mice survive.

Okay, sure, you can stop another lyssavirus, but technically you did start treatment before symptoms appeared. What about symptomatic rabies?

The rodent-adapted rabies strain CVS-11 starts causing symptoms as early as day 3 after infection, and untreated mice die between days 8 and 11. The same single dose of antibody saved 67% of mice treated on day 5 and 50% of mice treated on day 7. Without making the luminescent version of the virus there's no real-time imaging of the infection, but you can still track symptoms.

Figure 2 from reference 3, accessed February 2024. CVS-11 is the name of the rodent rabies strain and F11 is the name of the antibody.

Disease score is a combination of several metrics including things like whether the mice are behaving normally and whether they show signs of paralysis. In untreated mice it goes up and up, and then they die. If one of those lines starts coming back down and continues past day 10 or so, that's a mouse that recovered. The success rate isn't as good as against ABLV, but again, this is a rabies strain specifically adapted to rodents and treatment wasn't started until it was well-established in the CNS.

So how on earth is this happening? The antibody neutralizes both ABLV and rabies really well in a test tube, but we've already established that there's no way a huge lumbering antibody is making it past the blood-brain barrier without serious help. Something about the immune response is clearly making it in there though. And it turns out that if you start trying this cure in mice missing various parts of their immune systems, mice without CD4+ T cells don't survive even with the treatment. By contrast mice without CD8+ T cells take longer to work through the infection, but they eventually manage it and are immune to reinfection afterwards.

To grossly oversimplify the immune system here, CD4+ are mature helper T cells, which work mostly by activating other immune cells like macrophages (white blood cells) and CD8+ T cells (killer T cells) against a threat.

Normally, T cells are also kept out by the blood-brain barrier, but we know that in certain specific cases including viral infection they can pass it to migrate into the brain. In the brains of the infected mice for which antibody treatment either wasn't given or didn't work, you can find a roughly even mix of CD8+ and CD4+ T cells along with a whole lot of viral RNA. But in the brains of those successfully fighting off the infection, there's less viral RNA and the cells are almost exclusively CD4+. So the antibody doesn't work by neutralizing the virus directly - something about it is activating the animal's own immune system in a way that gives it a fighting chance.

Again, neither of these proof of concept treatments is really workable yet as a real world cure. The first one is almost hilariously overkill and still has a pretty good chance of failure. The second is less invasive but careful sequencing still shows both low-level viral replication and signs of immune response in the brains of the survivors even at day 139, so it may not be truly clearing the virus so much as trading a death sentence for life with a low-level chronic infection. But now we know that 1. curing rabies after symptoms begin is at least theoretically possible, and 2. we have some clues as to mechanisms to investigate further.

Not today. Not tomorrow. But maybe not never, either.

References:

Zeiler, F. A., & Jackson, A. C. (2016). Critical appraisal of the Milwaukee protocol for rabies: this failed approach should be abandoned. Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences, 43(1), 44-51.

de Melo, G. D., Sonthonnax, F., Lepousez, G., Jouvion, G., Minola, A., Zatta, F., ... & Bourhy, H. (2020). A combination of two human monoclonal antibodies cures symptomatic rabies. EMBO molecular medicine, 12(11), e12628.

Mastraccio, K. E., Huaman, C., Coggins, S. A. A., Clouse, C., Rader, M., Yan, L., ... & Schaefer, B. C. (2023). mAb therapy controls CNS‐resident lyssavirus infection via a CD4 T cell‐dependent mechanism. EMBO Molecular Medicine, 15(10), e16394.

[urgardenandmine]

crushes and beats ☊ - m. lee

summary: you have a small adventure in SM's building and meet a cutie genre: fluff pairing: m!reader x mark lee word count: 2.1K

the weather was NOT in your favor on this summer day. well, not just the weather but the whole week itself.

this week was your first week within the SM building after winning what seemed to be a total scam considering you saw the ad to attend a once a year producer group session with a bunch of others from other countries. 

you received the news in your college dorm, while you were aimlessly scrolling on your x feed, just reposting a bunch of mindless posts on what a hippo would look like crossed with a watermelon. as you were scrolling on your phone, you saw the ad plastered in the usual pastel pink they would always use to market their stuff.

"CALLING ALL PRODUCERS!

Want to be a part of SM’s producing session and possibly be chosen to compose a song for our artists? Here’s your chance!

Go to our website and click the form!"

it looked inviting but what if it wasn’t real? (even though you still did it so it was real considering you were now here in their branch in korea.)

while in your dorm, you were procrastinating on your homework. though you had asked for an extension, you were already approaching the extension deadline but i mean everyone deserves a fun small break now and then.

hopping out of bed, you slid into your soft and cozy koala slippers as you took five steps onto your classic off-white rolly chair. opening up your silvery blue laptop, you typed in the link below in the post you had seen earlier. clicking enter, you were taken to a google doc form that was headlined with the official SM logo. the title read “PRODUCER SUBMISSION.” it looked promising but you didn’t have high hopes of getting in. nonetheless, you clicked out the tab and opened up your drive of beats you had made. 

the requirement was the sample be at least a minute long, which was easy considering you had full song lengths of beats. looking at each one you had in your drives, you closed your eyes and clicked on one. opening one eye, you had saw that you clicked it yet the name wasn’t shown (which was somewhat concerning since most of your files were named with the most absurd names like “cocomelon’s rival.”). you shrugged it off, somewhat confident in your skills yet not so cocky you would just automatically book a flight to korea. 

fast forward to a day later, you had received an international call and was told by their marketing team that you won! except you were like literally in the middle of school and like you had to tell your friends, family, pets, the school itself and like whoever else was involved in your life that somewhat needed you nearby. you had received the call during a small passing period between your classes, choking on your apple while surrounded by your friends as you all ate under a tree. you immediately ran to your dorm, your friends close behind as you started to pack for the weekend to get onto the paid flight to another country. 

another fast forward, you were kinda not expecting this rocky ass start in korea where you had to keep up appearances. korea was apparently dealing with a small heatwave this summer, and by small, it was literally 38C (or 101F). you were dressed in long sleeves, not really thinking much on what you packed considering you were packing every ten minutes after every ten minutes of studying last weekend. it wasn’t a good system but you did ace your sociology quiz with a 45/50. 

you were racing through the concrete halls, seeing a bunch of staff walking in the other direction as you had your laptop nestled in one arm, also filled with a binder, papers and your lanyard dangling off your hooked index finger and a single iced sweetened americano in the other hand. in retrospect, you shoulda brought your bag but didn’t want to look like a newbie in front of people who were great composers. 

scanning the glass doors, you read the labels on them except one issue, you struggled to read korean. you squinted your [e/c] eyes, looking at each door as you slowly began to walk passed the doors. one door had said “recording room/(1)녹음실,” which looked familiar since you saw that in the syllabus you were given with your other companions. standing in front of the textured glass door, you took a sharp breath in and let out a relaxed breath out. this should be a piece of cake. you already braved a flight to another country, braved talking to the security guard since you were an hour late and spoke no korean, braved asking for a sweetened americano even though you forgot the word for sugar and ALSO braved wearing a big baggy long sleeve in this weather. 

looking down at your hands, you gently squatted down and placed your cup down at your feet. inching forward with your now one free hand, you turned the handle and turned a small 90 degrees, using your behind to keep the door open. you bent down, grabbing your cup as you then turned back around and pushed your way through the door. it was heavier than you expected but you came for a music workshop, not an actual wood workshop. 

the recording studio was huge, almost the same size as your dorm. to your right, there was an L-shaped black leather sofa. the walls were a soft beige, which differed from the color of the booth as the booth itself was an eggshell white. in front of you was the equipment you had researched beforehand. 

you stepped closer, amazed at all the technical buttons and other mechanics the sound technicians had to work with while the famed idols you have heard of. realizing you were too lost in thought, you shook your head and checked the time on your watch. 1:27 PM. the session should start soon, but it was weird considering you were the only one here but maybe even producers were sometimes a little late.

making your way to the couch, you sat down and placed your equipment in your lap. setting your drink on the carpeted floor, you smiled as you took the whole room as well as the experience. this was real and happening. you were here to show off your talents. 

the door soon slowly opened, causing you to shoot up and look at the one in charge of the session. as you slowly centered your focus, the person you expected wasn’t the one you were met with.

in front of you stood a somewhat lanky and built man, adorned in a grayish tame impala hoodie. he had baggy navy blue sweatpants as well, paired with zebra adidas. as well as that, he had black messy bed hair by the looks of it and rounded frame glasses. 

“(2)아, 안녕하세요.” the man spoke, extending his right arm as he bowed. you looked at him, bowing back and trying to reply with the same greeting he had said to you. standing up straight, the man eyed you as he raised his right eyebrow, smirking.

“you speak english?” he asked, his small laugh making you feel a bit more at ease.

“yes, thank god. i mean-!” you groaned, smacking your head gently as you placed your hand into your palms trying to hide your embarrassment as you spoke before you could even think. hearing a small hearty laugh, you looked up as you saw the man chuckle and hold his stomach.

“nah, no worries! that was me before coming here too.” he said, staring at you, shifting into a more comfortable stance.

“i’m mark, nice to meet ya.” he introduced himself, extending his hand as you reached for a firm shake. the name sounded familiar but it wasn’t so close to ringing a bell. 

“sounds kinda familiar.” you spoke, making him place a hand over his heart, feigning a hurt act.

“wow~, welp, hate to break it to you but i’m kinda known here. i’m in a group called NCT.” he explained, making you nod as you finally realized where he was from. NCT. they sounded familiar but your music taste was all over the place. you solely remembered NCT as the group who basically claimed the color green. you smiled at him, showing him your pearly whites as you chuckled.

“nice to meet you, mark. i’m [y/n].” you introduced yourself, giggling softly as you did a small wave at him. looking at him, a small blush creeped onto his ears as he cleared his threat and looked away. you tilted your head, seeing him blush. you blinked, feeling your own neck get warm as your cheeks were slowly getting more color. turning your head away, you coughed softly. 

mark looked back at you, then seeing beside you your equipment as he pointed. 

“what’s all that?” he asked, walking a bit closer as he stood a foot from you. you turned your head to your laptop and papers, smiling gently as you got closer to them.

“oh! i’m here from winning the SM producer/composer competition.” you explained, looking at him as he scratched the back of his neck. his smile had faded, causing you to look at him and be a bit confused.

“i kinda hate to break it to you but the producing session was at 11:30 AM.” he revealed, causing you to feel your heart break a smidge. looking down at your feet, you could feel your energy shift the mood in the room. you couldn’t believe that you misread the rubric time. how could you have misread “11:30” as “1:30?” granted, you were also trying to do an essay overseas from your college. letting out a somewhat exasperated sigh, you looked up at mark and smiled.

“well, thanks for letting me know! i’ll be on my way.” you forced a small smile onto your face, bending down to slowly grab your things. as you reached down, you felt his hand placed onto yours. looking to your right, your eyes met as he began to smile at you.

“well, i mean you’re already here so why not just show me what you got?” he suggested, causing you to blush harder than ever. mark smiled widely, grabbing you stuff as he placed it onto the table and opened your laptop for you. he sat down on the chair on the left, reaching down to grab a cord and plugged it into your laptop. as he turned his head, he had still saw you standing there, lost in thought. he had patted the chair across from him, signaling you to sit down. 

snapping yourself out of your trance, you shook your head and made you way to the chair. mark had scooted closer to you, causing you to relax from the nerves you felt as you stared into his eyes. you opened your files, searching for one to show him. as his brown eyes read every file, he chuckled and leaned into your personal bubble, pointing a finger at one file.

“can you play this for me?” he asked. your eyes trailed his finger, seeing the file he wanted to be played. you froze, the file being named the absolute most dumbest thing ever. 

“you want me to play this?” you reiterated. you didn’t even remember what this beat/sample sounded like. you were somewhat tipsy when making this (if drinking about almost ten moscow mule during a frat party was “tipsy”). 

“yes. i would like for you to play “daddy won’t lemme see the ice king.”’ he read, laughing between each word. you groaned, smiling as you shrugged it off and clicked on it. shutting your eyes tight, you prayed to god that this file was an actual work of art. to your surprise, it kind of was. the cord mark plugged into your laptop had played the file on the surround sound speakers above you. the sample was one that was more of an r&b vibe. the sample was similar to that of jazmine sullivan or lucky daye. 

looking to your left, mark was beaming. you chuckled, looking at him as he looked towards you. you immediately paused it, now remembering you weren’t sure if you were allowed to be in here. he slowly touched your hand, reassuring you. your eyes met, making you both feel comfortable enough with one another that you could drop each other’s guards. 

“i’ll make you a deal. you and i make a sick song out of this and i won’t tell if you won’t.” he proposed. furrowing your eyebrows, you looked at him a bit confused. he laughed sheepishly.

“i’m not really supposed to be here either.” he said, looking around as if he was a school boy that got caught pranking the teacher. you smirked, leaning forward. taken aback, mark looked at you as you bit your bottom lip.

“i won’t tell if you won’t.”

⋆｡°✩

(1) = 녹음실 = recording room/studio

(2) = 아, 안녕하세요 = ah, hello

i hope this story is good for y'all nctzens! i was a part of the group but not gonna lie, jeno's my favorite but no one heard that from me...

[nawoken]

Ơ v Ơ

Thanks for liking my post guys, I appreciate it. So I will start spreading my mind when I don't have anything better to do from now on then.

Hm, today will be... a reader from Gravity Falls, who got transported into TWST world. Oh, reminds me of those good old days, when we still had a bunch of good-quality cartoons.

(T vT)

You can be a friend of Dipper and Mabel, who joined them on their trip to Gravity Falls. Or the town's resident, who has always known about this place's weirdness but most of the time, when you bring it up, no one actually believes you. You can even be the twins' sibling, or well... Lil Gideon's dogsbody (no one want this right?)... That's your choice.

I want to build a reader who has enough understanding of those mystery creatures so it's better if you have a few links with the main cast :")))

After the defeat of Bill Cipher, a few years went by in peace. Until one day you wake up in a whole different world that has magic. Great, it's cool, you're fine, nothing too bad yet, it can be worse, right? After all, you used to encounter many more strange things than this.

Maybe, after not being able to contact you for a long time, Dipper will realize your disappearance and find a way to help you. Or..., the headmage in front of you can do something like he said.

Nope, you're wrong, he is useless, that's what you realized after staying there for a while. That biscuit doesn't even care about finding a way back for you! So, you have to find another way while facing a bunch of other overblots.

You've never really told anyone else about stuff you used to face back in your world, mystery creatures, monsters, and a Dorito from different dimensions.

Mostly because when they asked why you can face all this "transport to another world" or "fighting some gooey inky monster" things so calmly. Or why did you act so aggressively about making a deal with Octoville Housewarden. You told them how you used to fight this triangle entity from different dimensions, that planned to destroy your world, but they would just brush it off or say that you have a wild imagination.

You feel a bit sad when it happens, but you get it. Some magicless people can fight off a Dream Demon that can control space, matter, and even time? That must be hard to believe. So you just let it be.

~~~

But, out of nowhere, mystery creatures start to appear around the Isle of Sages.

What do you mean you saw Gnomes with a red cap and blue outfit running around in the jungle? And there is a whole island that suddenly appeared overnight?! Some scientists tried to approach it and it arose from the river, appeared to be a freaking giant head?!

It's all too familiar to you. After all, you had gotten into a bunch of trouble with them during your stay at Gravity Falls. It must be that this island has some kind of connection with that town!

Then, you just have to find that connected point to open the dimensional portal, and come home, right? Maybe, the twins with their uncles will get to you before you even have to do all that.

So, you just acting like normal. But your friends don’t want that. Mostly Grim, Aduece, Epel, and Ortho when they took an interest in the mystery thing that recently appeared inside NRC. Jack and Sebek tried to protest, saying that it was stupid but got provoked by “Why? Are you scared?” from the others.

You got dragged in, mainly because you worry for them. Even when they have magic, you still have more experience with this than them. You don't have the Journals with you but you used to spend quite a lot of your time studying and understanding them alongside the Pines twins. So, you’ve memorized most of it, if not all.

~~~~~~

The moment your groups step into this strange part of the forest, with some big red mushrooms with dots and some floating shiny orbs come straight out of a fairytale. You know this is a "Gnome Forest".

Before you can get everyone out of this place to avoid meeting those creepy creatures that have an obsession with finding a Gnome queen. You see Jade, observing and taking note of the mushrooms.

Jade: What a pleasure meeting you guys here.

Deuce: J...Jade-senpai?! What are you doing here?

Ace: Ye, and where is Floyd, is he sneaking also around?!

Jade: Fufu... don't you think it a bit rude to ask questions without stating your reason for being here?

Jade: But, as you can see, I'm studying these delightful mushrooms. And, no, unfortunately, my brother isn't into this kind of thing so there's only me.

Jade: ... Then?

Epel: W...what? Oh, we're here for the mystery creatures that been lurking around.

Jade: Oh, from the rumors?

Epel: *Nod* Yes.

Ace: Hm, you must be here for a while, have you seen anything yet?

Jade: Sadly, no. However, I do hope that I can encounter one of those, Azul might take an interest in them (For business thingy, I guess). Hm,... do you mind if I join you guys?

Deuce: Uh, no...

Jade: Great! ^v^

(Okay, that is, I'm out of brain juice for that conversation. Hope that is not too Ooc (XvX))

You stood aside, looking around worriedly while Ace bickered with Deuce due to letting Jade join. Jack felt your restlessness, mistaken that you're scared so he tried to comfort you. Sebek saw it and loudly said something about how weak humans are.

That's when some shadows dash by, Jade, Jack, Ortho, and Sebek become more alert while the others are a bit startled. Grim screaming something about not wanting to be eaten and clinging onto Ace's face though.

Looking back and forth a few times just for you guys turned to Epel, and saw a Gnome right next to him with a flower in hand. You know that shoot, Jeff! And! seeing his action, you also realized what come next.

Epel: ...For me?

Jeff: Yes, for you, my... future queen! (I can't, this is too much, I'm dying)

Gotta say, your friends have a good laugh except for Epel, who looks about to explode and Jade has this amused smile. If not for how bad the situation actually is, you might laugh as well.

Y/N: Guys, we should go.

Jeff: WAIT!!! Let me introduce myself first, I'm Jeff, Gnomes' leader. And, we are looking for a new queen...blah blah... (sorry)

At some point, Epel blew up, and he started throwing spells and that's when they knew what Jeff meant by them. 1000 Gnomes running out from God know where merged into a huge Gnome then chased them after their fail attempt of fighting it.

Ace: WTF is that?!

Deuce: How can we fight it if it keep merging?!

Grim: Wroahhhh, It's so fast!

Ace: You should just accept their marriage proposal!

Epel: WHAT DID YOU SAID?!

Jack: Why did I agree with this...

Sebek: I KNOW THAT I SHOULDN'T LISTEN TO YOU GUYS!

Ortho: This is quite fun, isn't it?

Others: NO!

You are tired of running, Jade has already gone out of sight the moment that thing compiling. You tried to reach inside your backpack, you were prepared for this after all! Your dog whistles. You just need to find it from the pile of things you quickly stuffed into your bag.

Finally! You quickly told everyone to cover their ears, mostly for Jack and Sebek due to their sharp hearing, and blew the whistle. That giant Gnome started to fall apart, and those Gnomes quickly ran away, far from the noise that hurt their ears.

Ace: Uh... What was that?!

Epel: Prefect, h..how can you do it?!

Grim: Haha, good job my henchman, I know you can do it.

Y/N: Gnomes, they have enhanced hearing so they can't bear high-pitch noise.

Deuce: But, how did you know that? Did you read about it somewhere?

Ortho: I don't think so, I've scanned them and I don't find any research about those creatures. So, prefect, where do you study about it?

Jade: I also want to know. (^v^)

Sebek: Where are you coming from?!

Y/N: Guys, just calm down. About those creatures, of course, I know about them. It's from my world after all.

Others (minus Jade): What?!

Jade: Oh... that's really interesting.

Deuce: Why have you never told us this story?!

Y/N: *stared back at him unamused*

Ortho: Hm... I do remember they used to say something about fighting supernatural entities.

Ace: But, I thought that just some jokes!

Y/N: Well, now you know it not.

Epel: Wait, so you did fight those?!

Y/N: Yes.

Sebek: Hm, maybe you're not as weak as I think, human.

Jack: Is that why you're worrying then entire time?

Y/N: Yes, I just don't know how to warn you guys since you're not gonna believe me.

Others: Sorry...

It can be said that everything ends happily. You guys talked to Crowley and he has to start doing some research about your theory of the connection between Isle of Sages and Gravity Falls (Ramshakle dorm).

You become a storyteller for the first-year gang, Jade (he wants to know all the information), and you might not know but also Rook, who observed your groups from afar the day of the exploration. Telling them about those creatures that you've faced, the journals, the Pine twins, their uncles,... and even about Bill Cipher.

You tell them, they tell the others. The famous magicless Prefect used to fight paranormal and supernatural entities that have been lurking around lately?! Only your friends actually believe in it, but that's enough for you.

Until they started to find you for more information, so Ortho helped you create a blog to spread some, not every single of them though. Should start some business by solving mysterious things. Talked to Azul and he might help you, you used to help him so he wouldn't trick you with his deal,... right?

Well, who knows? You know quite clearly the consequence of making a deal without thinking right?

______

EBIIL LIA COFBKA

JFPP JB?

Why is it this long?! I just want to type something fun and spread some idea but then it turns into a whole ass rambling :')

I still have more for it, but I'm lazy, my brain might or might not die at this point and I can hear light, see noises... I should sleep but I'm hungry. :'))))

English is my second language so there might be some confusing things in my wording, let me know if you feel there is anything that needs to be corrected, thank you.

I also haven't had a chance to finish Gravity Falls' series and it also has been a while since the last time I saw it. I've tried my best to gain more information about it when wrote this but if I am wrong about something, please tell me.

Anyway, I might do part 2 for this if I'm in the mood. See ya!

Oh, Also, Idia found this CD. It's old, yes. But it's an old game CD! Might be worth a ton this day. But, most importantly, he wouldn't say no to ancient games. An otome game about dating a pink-haired high-school girl... (I changed her ending a bit I guess).

[mirroredmemoriez]

With my other poll coming to an end in a day, I thought I’d make another because I may even implement these into a one of my character study type posts!

One thing I’ll state first is that there isn’t really a correct way to handle grief. The way people deal with it and show it can differ from person to person! However wording that for a poll is quite long winded…. I also want it to be a bit open so there is room for discussions.

Moving on- I think that Lynn may be the one to sweep this poll. But at some points I believe this is due to the fact that people will only be looking at these characters through the lens of what happened during their run in with Jigsaw.

Which I don't think really is where people should hone in on, because it's imbalanced. Lynn does not have to come face to face with her grief within her test like Jeff does. We have no real basis to know how she'd handle that besides assumptions based off of her as a character. Other things to remember is the fact that Jeff actually WITNESSED Dylan get hit by the car. This isn’t to say his grief is more powerful than Lynn’s, but it is a factor to dwell on! Witnessing your own child’s death right in front of your eyes is a very heavy thing to deal with.

Moving on! Here’s some snips off their Saw Wiki’s…. I'll get it out of the way that both neglect Corbett and one another.

As individuals? Jeff has depression and an obsession with vengeance in regards to those involved and linked to his son's death. We see him drunk and threatening himself with a gun, picturing his reflection to be Timothy Young- But we also get to see how he let's this grief impact his daughter and the disregard for Corbett's own feelings.... At the end of the day she did lose a sibling, yet Jeff's focus is on a plush pig being missing from Dylan's room. On to Lynn. She also has depression and is constantly taking anti-depressants to try and stabilise herself. Lynn is having an affair with a man named Chris and her job performance is slipping, which in her line of work can mean life or death for a patient. We never get to see her interact with Corbett.

Anyway, I’ll stop the rambling here… Below are some of my previous little Denlon studies.

[weirdkpopgirl]

Belong | Mark Imagine #5

Title: Belong

Genre: Fluff

Warnings: nothing really

Word Count: 610

Author's Note: This is part two of the previous Mark story I posted a while ago. It's unnecessary to read the first part to understand this one, but I'll still link the story below if you want to check it out. But yeah, I'm happy to be posting more for Mark since I don't very often. Hope you guys like it and thank you for reading ^ ^

part one

°♪°•°∞°•°♪°•°∞°•°♪°•°∞°•°♪°•°∞°•°♪°•°∞°•°♪°•°∞°•°♪°∞°•°♪°∞°

In the cozy warmth of Mark’s living room, the vanilla scented candles you had bought him a while ago were neatly arranged on the coffee table, casting a gentle glow that added a layer of intimacy to the atmosphere. Following a day of long classes and the subsequent hours dedicated to studying, you both lounged comfortably on his couch, nestled in each other’s embrace.

Throughout the year, you had fallen into a routine of driving back to his apartment after school to study. Unlike some people, the two of you managed to get a decent amount of work done, if not completely most of the time. But once the two-hour mark was reached, cuddling sessions became inevitable.

Mark always tried to savor these moments with you. Lying on the couch with you, one arm wrapped around your waist, while your head rested on his steadily rising chest. He couldn't help but reflect on how far the two of you had come since that cold day in the parking lot. At first, you weren’t completely ready to let him. But through patient conversations and shared insecurities, you gradually opened up to him fully. Slowly, you found yourself becoming happier with him by your side.

With a playful glint in his eyes, he fondly reminisced about that day and couldn’t resist bringing it up to you. “You know,” he began, the corners of his lips upturned into a teasing smile. “I was just thinking about the first time we officially talked.”

Your cheeks flushed as the memory resurfaced in your mind. That was definitely not your best moment, and you had hoped Mark had forgotten about it. Unfortunately, much to your dismay, he hadn’t.

Instinctively, you buried your face further into his chest. “Ugh, please don’t remind me. I must’ve looked like a crazy person.”

Mark chuckled softly, his fingers running through your hair. “Crazy isn’t the word I’d use to describe you. I’d say you were more breathtaking, even in tears.”

“You’re just saying that to make me feel better,” you cringed in embarrassment. 

He pressed a kiss to the top of your head. “No, I mean it. In fact, I fell in love with you that day.”

“Oh... really?” You glanced up at him in slight surprise. 

About a month after that fateful day, Mark officially asked you to be his girlfriend. However, even during that interim period as just friends, both of you knew that your relationship was bound to change. You believed that you were the first to fall, as his emotional support that day had made you grow attached to him over time. So, discovering that he fell for you first came as news to you.

Mark nodded, his eyes soft and filled with affection. “Yeah, I saw strength in your vulnerability and it drew me in. Seeing you made me want to become someone you could lean on.”

Blushing once more, you subconsciously played with his fingers. “Well, I'm grateful you didn't turn away from the girl crying on the street. I don’t know what I did to deserve someone as sweet and kind as you.”

“You didn’t have to do anything to deserve it. Sometimes, you just meet someone, and everything falls into place,” Mark replied, simply. “I’m lucky that happened to us.”

The two of you locked eyes for a moment before he tenderly cupped your face and leaned in for a kiss. Your lips met in a gentle dance, a silent acknowledgment of the love that had blossomed between you. Cradled in each other's embrace, both of you came to the profound realization that you had discovered where you truly belonged.

°♪°•°∞°•°♪°•°∞°•°♪°•°∞°•°♪°•°∞°•°♪°•°∞°•°♪°•°∞°•°♪°∞°•°♪°∞°

[letomills]

The "requests are paused until I'm done with the current ones" thing was wishful thinking (a bit like the closing statements in my last yt video 🤓) and I am once again thoroughly overwhelmed with everything.

Requests are firmly closed until further notice. I said yes to the FtM hairs for anon and the Tiggerypum tunics & iamliz13 alpha dresses for children & toddlers for the other anon (I did get the links you sent to the meshes), so I still intend to complete both.

A novel's worth of life updates under the cut (content warning for struggle with bipolar type 2, including questionable choices which should not be taken as advice).

Well over a year ago I shared that my mother was going through a really bad bipolar type 2 depression episode (looking back, mention of it in that post was very euphemistic, I must have been hopeful). The reason why I didn't give any updates after a while is that there is no satisfactory narrative that I could easily spin into words. She's not all better, she hasn't died or lost her mind for good, things have just been evolving at a snail's pace through a whole spectrum of very bleak colors. She's not fully hospitalized anymore, she lives at home with my brother and me, with day hospitalisation activities several times a week. The myriad psychiatrists that she's seen have not been able to find the "right" treatment for her, but hey, after lithium sent her into such a state of confusion that we thought she might stay mentally disabled for the rest of her life, at least now we know that's not an option. A couple days ago her psychiatrist prescribed a new antipsychotic to replace the one she'd been taking. She started the transition, and today confusion started showing its terrifying face again so she's not taking that pill tonight, or to be honest ever again unless her psychiatrist somehow manages to convince us otherwise (she'll report her symptoms and get counsel at the hospital tomorrow). Her cognition is already impaired, her short-term memory and ability to focus especially. She can't live alone, I keep and manage her pillboxes, make sure she's eating right and the stove is off, that sort of stuff. But at least, until the introduction of this new drug, she'd made considerable gains compared to when she was at her worst last winter. No way we're going back to that again.

On a more positive note, about a month and a half ago I started work at a grocery delivery place just up the street (yes that's what I'm doing with my degree in Mandarin and my master's in English-French translation studies). It's intense physically, kinda stressful, and not very well paid, but I think I like it and the people are very nice. What scares me is that my trial period ends in about 2 weeks and I'm not entirely sure that they'll want to keep me, considering I've made several mistakes and they don't seem to think that I work quite fast enough (I know I said the people were very nice, they are, that's just the job). They keep saying the work load is gonna get crazier starting in September. The way they're saying it may suggest that they do envision me as still working there in September, but maybe they're trying to push me to work faster now and if I can't prove that I'm able to they won't keep me? Well I'm already doing my best, even if sometimes I end up finding myself crying over clients' items because my brain isn't able to focus anymore and I'm messing up and wasting time.

Emotional control has been harder because I unilaterally made the decision to taper off my antidepressant. Now before you facepalm, let me flood you with all of my best questionable arguments: • I do have an appointment with my psychiatrist, the earliest date I could get was October 1st (and I may have to postpone, depending on my work hours that day which I don't know yet). • I was already on the lowest dose that you can be on. • I tapered off very slowly. • I recently talked about it with the nurse that I saw for the mandatory medical visit I had to go to because I got the new job (idk if you have that outside of France). Naturally she was alarmed that I'd been weaning myself off on my own and she convinced me to see my GP asap and not change my medication without at least his input (which yes, I know). • the reasons I did it despite knowing that it's inadvisable are: 1) obviously I haven't been feeling depressed for a while or I wouldn't have done it, 2) the amount of endorphin-producing physical exercise I get from the new job felt like it could maybe do the trick so it was worth a try, 3) seeing how much my mom's medication has messed up her cognition over the years is scary. She's been taking way higher doses of antidepressants than me, along with other stuff, over a way longer period of time, but still. I don't want to be on it if it's not strictly necessary, so I wanted to try off. • I'm still taking my antipsychotic religiously and have no intention to stop that (I can't anyway or I won't be able to sleep and I'll definitely lose the job).

My plan with the antidepressant was to space out the doses and eventually get off it entirely for several weeks before reassessing, but after seeing that nurse, I started upping again to one dose every other day. I will admit, I was having suicidal thoughts after several days off, and now it's gone. Maybe I should find having suicidal thoughts more alarming than I do, the nurse's phrasing when she asked if I did - something that could translate to "no suicidals thoughts, riiight?" - was a good reminder that suicidal thoughts are really bad to have oh no. Of course I said no, why would I want her to interfere (leave me to make decisions for my own self thank you). Anyway, the appointment with my GP is in two days. He's gonna be useless on psych stuff but I guess getting his unqualified, predictable input is the responsible thing to do in polite society. More relevantly, the nurse also told me to go see him because my blood pressure is a bit low, or at least it was at 9/6 when she saw me, so I need to have it retaken and see what's up with that if anything.

And so yes, I have a ton of CC plans as always, I am positively drowning. Beside the two requests I mentioned above the cut, one of which I need to do a lot of learning for, I picked up work on Celestialspritz's beta Vincent skins and started converting afbodykimono for the usual roaster of breasted body shapes, like I did with afbodyqipao here and would like to do with more Happy Holiday Stuff outfits in the future. Although I told myself that I would stick to the body shapes that I've already done stuff for, I now also want to make a set of clothes for Lady Apple. I also have an idea about a set of scrawny body shapes for TU-EU inspired by Mrs Crumplebottom's body shape. I know Melodie9's slim family exists but to be honest those shapes creep me out and I want to see if I can do something less uncanny (it may end up looking too similar to the Androgyny body shapes, or to Faerie Gal, or it may not pan out at all, so don't hold your breath). I also want to do a ton of hairs in FakeBlood's palette + Naberius (tbh I'm still not 100% sure if I like Timebomb or Naberius more for my aliens, I need to figure that out once and for all). And of course I want to do more FtM & MtF hair conversions once I know how to do it well enough. There's a billion smaller projects I'd like to insert in between those, outfit conversions for one or a couple body shapes, repurposing of older meshes, a set of nude "outfits" for all the body shapes I do, etc.

[factcheckingmclennon]

hey! making a pinned that will for now hold some basic info/disclaimers & may in the future have a read more with a guide to deep dives

navigation

james/lorraine, they/he/she, 24. BA in religious studies/history, going back for a MA in history in january (that's relevant okay that's my CREDENTIALS for this silly blog)

my main is @menlove

I am indeed a shipper! no hate is meant at all by this blog existing, I'm just a historian that is going crazy trying to sort out fact & fiction in this fandom. there's a lot of both and I think a blog like this could be useful

and in that vein, I will never, ever directly come after or @ anyone who shared that misinformation. if you send me a request and start it with "I saw so and so post x, is this real?" I'll make a post without your ask in it. I don't want to send hate anyone's way. if it's an older post, i'll probably link the source of the misinformation for the sake of clarity, but if it's a blog that's still active i won't & i'll just screenshot. (maccaswife1978 is not a real person btw dgshdhshs. as far as I know! sorry if anyone's ever had that username)

I'm always open to correction. I have 0 way of knowing or finding everything, so if you have a credible, reliable source that I didn't find in my deep dive of something I rated fake/neutral, please let me know! I'd love for some of these to be real

I also take requests! feel free to ask me about anything that you want fact checked. just know sometimes I might not be able to find an answer or I might be bogged down & not be able to answer just then. I'll do my best to get to everyone, but inevitably my mental health and life Will come first so......

rating system

fake- this is a source that, from everything I can find, only loops back to other mclennon blogs/forums. again, I'll take correction on these.

neutral- this is a source that is fake in some way but real in others. maybe it's a quote taken wildly out of context, or the quote passed around is fake but the content really did happen & has a more grounded source. or maybe it was written in a biography that didn't use citations and I have no idea where that author got that information, so you should take it with a grain of salt. or maybe it's something that isn't necessarily fake, but there's not enough evidence to definitively prove it one way or another (i.e. did anything happen in india?) whatever the case, this source has ended up neutral in the grand scheme of mclennon.

real- happy day for us all, these are for ones that turn out to be real! these are ones that are backed up by one or more reliable source & have hard evidence

source reliability

what do I mean by "reliable source"?

for me to count a source as "reliable" and count it towards a fact/quote being real, it has to be one of these things: first-hand (interviews, auto biographies, etc), recorded (video/photographic evidence, basically), or a well-sourced/respected biographer.

sources that fall into the in between category and might still earn a "real" rating but should be taken with a grain of salt are things like: second-hand sources (& who they are is important in determining how big that grain of salt should be), biographers who are allergic to sourcing, and things like lyrics/poetry/short stories which rely heavily on interpretation unless explained by either john or paul themselves. none of these automatically mean a "neutral" or "fake" rating, but they're taken into account.

and sources that will earn a fake rating once they're found to be the original source: tumblr blogs, deviantART pages, fan forums, gossip columns, etc. basically, if all I can find is someone writing out "slash beatles quotes" on a page in 2011, it's getting chucked in the bullshit pile unless someone else can find a source that predates it.

[jacobsbadwig]

I saw your tags on the other post and pls rant about Jessica Stanley being the main character. Kthankbye ✌🏻

I was trying to find a post on my blog that imagined Jessica as the Main character Twilight.

But frankly it all boils down to Smeyer using Bella as a self insert. Now a lot of people hate that criticism, but it’s not a criticism rather than a statement of fact. Her crime isn’t basing a character on herself (or a young version of herself) it’s refusing to kill her darlings. Bella’s book description is the same description of Stephenie Meyer. (See @panlight or @fuckmeyer for more information)

As for Jessica, it’s hard to figure out what Bellas (and Stephenies) beef with Jessica as a character. I would argue because we don’t get an inkling of how Bella’s friend group was in Arizona (or if she had many friends) that Jessica is another character foil how girls shouldn’t (I will link that post here) act. Of course this is a subconscious point that the narrative makes.

Jessica is this determined high schooler who likes boys (as far as we know) who is focused on her grades but is a bit of a gossip. At least from Bella’s prespective. Also, Bella is an unreliable narrator although the narrative and the author don’t treat her as such.

I think Jessica Stanley makes more sense as the main character mostly because she has more to lose than Bella, a character who doesn’t want to make connections and is only in town because of her self sacrificing mindset. (I will not go into Bella’s mother mostly because my interpretation is that she (her mother) only got worse because the narrative needed her to and then it didn’t really matter because she got to keep her family around anyway). (Also mini rant- It’s strange that a girl who was born in that town and spent summers there until she was 13 Doesn’t know any other teenagers before moving back there especially being the Chief’s daughter. I would assume she would know everyone since she wouldn’t have been left home alone. Whatever Steph)

Jessica has a family. She’s grown up in the town. She has worked so hard for her grades. It would be interesting to see all of that come crashing down because of her involvement with vampires.

@humans4vampires just made a post pointing out the adrenaline caused by Edward’s presence and its masking via Bella’s attraction to Edward. Who’s to say that couldn’t happen to Jessica in their initial meeting.

The narrative would be the Cullens moving to Forks. Jessica gets rejected by Edward. Yes, she’s heartbroken by it, but that’s the new boys problem she’s on a mission to get all A’s. Her tight knit friend group keeps her distracted. Then one day, she’s walking around in the woods taking a break from her studies or just for some quiet time and comes across Edward hunting and covered in blood.

Edward, of course, hearing her thoughts, panics. They just moved to Forks. He can’t just let her get away, but she’s well known in the town. It’s small. He can’t kill her. So (like a dingus), he runs off.

Jessica having seen something so frightening rushes home to calm down, and she plays sick for the next week.

Anyway, I just think Jessica has more to lose, and it will be real push and pull of narrative as she is not only protecting this secret from the rest of her friends. She has to get through high school without dying until she realizes that she won’t be able to live her dreams because she will be a vampire or be killed.

[fdelopera]

reading your response to the ask about Elohim, i found it so fascinating and really wanted to learn more about jewish history. but im kinda scared to try and dive into googling it because like, for obvious reasons there is a lot of antisemitic misinformation out there. where's a good place to start learning about it all from a historical standpoint, aside from taking a college course? i hope this is okay to ask, i really don't want to stumble upon/consume revisionist history out of ignorance

Hi Anon. Thank you for your kind message. I really appreciate it.

I'm glad that you enjoyed my post about the origin of Elohim as one of the names of G-d in Judaism. Studying Jewish history and Jewish religious practice gives profound understanding and context to Abrahamic religions, as well as to the last 3500+ years of history, since at least the Late Bronze Age.

And thank you for wanting to learn more about Jewish history, and for reaching out to a Jewish person to ask about it.

My answer to your Ask is based on this answer about Jewish history, which I posted a few days ago. Not a lot of people saw it, so I feel okay about posting these links here again.

This past month especially has made me realize just how little most gentiles (non-Jews) know about Jewish history. It's been eye-opening, for sure.

And ... you're right, unfortunately. I've seen a metric shit ton of Jew-hatred going around. And so many antisemitic conspiracy theories that originated with the Neo-Nazis and the KKK.

Some people have been spreading this Neo-Nazi rhetoric intentionally, but many others have been spreading it because they don't have the context to understand that they are repeating Nazi dogwhistles.

In talking to gentiles, I often find that their knowledge of Jewish history extends to a few facts about the Holocaust. Some gentiles who have studied European history and political science may also have a general understanding of Hitler’s rise to power.

But that’s only the past several decades of Jewish history! And it's limited almost entirely to Europe!

Jews are a Levantine people. We are indigenous to Judea (the area currently called Israel/Palestine), and our history goes back thousands of years to the Late Bronze Age.

For a good overview of Jewish history, from the Late Bronze Age to the present, I would recommend two YouTube channels. That’s a good place to start. There are many history books on the subject, but a lot of them are quite dense, and the videos from these two historians will give you a good general overview if you want to learn more.

Sam Aronow:

Sam Aronow covers the span of Jewish history, from the Late Bronze Age to modern times. It is an ongoing Jewish history project that he’s been producing for the past three years, and it is in chronological order. He is currently in the early 1900s, and he comes out with a new video every month or so (he's just released a new video this month).

Click here to go to Sam’s YouTube channel, and then you can scroll back to watch his videos from the beginning, or you can decide what time period of Jewish history you’re most interested in learning about first.

Useful Charts:

Matt Baker, PhD runs the YouTube channel "Useful Charts," and he often works with Sam Aronow's channel. He has a PhD in education and religion. Matt has a very interesting story. He converted to Judaism as an adult; when he was a young man, he escaped a Christian doomsday cult, which he was born into. This gives him a unique understanding of Jewish history, especially how the "Old Testament" is often weaponized by Evangelical Christians to advance specific right-wing agendas. (As I explain below, the Old Testament is NOT the Hebrew bible. It is a chopped up, reordered, edited, and mistranslated version of the Hebrew bible.) Matt's videos on the history of Judaism are well-researched, and he breaks down different aspects of Jewish history into easy-to-follow segments.

I) Jewish History series:

Which Bible Characters are Historical.

Kings of Israel & Judah Family Tree.

Maccabees & King Herod Family Tree. (by Sam Aronow)

Classical Rabbis Family Tree.

Judaism and Jewish Denominations Explained.

Jewish Streams (Denominations) Re-Explained. (by Sam Aronow)

II) Who Wrote the Tanakh and the New Testament series:

NOTE: The Tanakh (the Hebrew bible) is an acronym that stands for Torah (Instruction), Nevi'im (Prophets), Ketuvim (Writings). It is NOT the same as the "Old Testament" in the Christian bible. The Christian editors of the "Old Testament" cut up the Tanakh and reordered it in a way that doesn't make any sense for Jewish practice. Many Christian bibles (such as the King James Version) also intentionally mistranslate the Old Testament to advance specific religious, political, and social ideologies of their time.

Who Wrote the Torah.

Who Wrote the Prophets.

Who Wrote the Writings.

I am including links to Matt's series on who wrote the New Testament, because many people who were raised Christian were never given a historical context for the people who wrote the books of the New Testament.

Who Wrote the Apocrypha. (The Apocrypha are later-written Jewish books that are not included in the Tanakh, but do appear in some Christian bibles, like the Catholic bible)

Who Wrote the Epistles. (Paul's Epistles were written before the Gospels, which is why the Epistles are linked first.)

Who Wrote the Gospels and Acts. (The Gospels were all written long AFTER Jesus' lifetime, and AFTER the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD. They were NOT written by the people they are attributed to.)

Who Wrote Daniel, and Who Wrote Revelation. (Matt includes Daniel from the Nevi'im [Prophets] as well as Revelation from the New Testament in this video to discuss apocalypticism in Jewish and early Christian tradition.)

[fearecia]

Putting this in a pinned post to make it easy to find/share. We all know how Tumblr is about things (and to be fair, I'm terrible and inconsistent as hell with tags).

Link to the "shoulder release" document:

Notes about this guide:

This is a WIP, and still very much in the rough draft phase. Please forgive typos/errors. I literally haven't done a single edit yet.

The document focuses on releasing shoulders as a way to treat neck tension and migraines. Seriously, just trust me. It helps.

Carpal tunnel? Tennis elbow? Golfer's elbow? AC (acromioclavicular) joint injury? Rotator cuff problems? Tight upper back? Sporadic numbness in your arm? Seriously, just try the muscles already listed. You'll likely find at least some relief. Like, if it involves the upper body, release your shoulders.

I've done my best to make this able to be understood by people without massage training. So if it seems like it's covering really "obvious" info, that's intentional. Just skip the section if you already know things.

A lot of massage therapists may balk at me telling you to dig around in your own armpit. We're taught in school to avoid the area. Why? Because there's a crap ton of nerves and blood vessels there. *Which is precisely why releasing this area is so powerful.* There's also a ton of muscle (on yes, basically everybody) here that will protect all those structures. It's honestly really safe so long as you stick to "In pain, refrain!" And read the other rules too.

90% of the time, the culprit is one of the four muscles listed (or any combination of them). If you are someone who exercises a lot/does yoga/is otherwise pretty physically active, you are more likely to fall into the 10% of people who will have their issue somewhere else/it will just be really hard to find. So bear that in mind.

Sadly, this sort of thing will probably never be a "one and done" type of deal. Most of the things we do every day steadily build up to cause problems, and you have to constantly work to undo that entropy. So save these notes for future you.

And just in case you want to know what the hell qualifies me to make this sort of document, here are my "quals."

My first career attempt was nursing. While this did not go well (doctors don't really appreciate autistic students willing to question their authority) I learned a shit ton about the body. I became a student teacher for the anatomy and physiology class because I was so good at it (and that professor used to teach the pre-med students). A&P is now literally one of my special interests.

8 years as a licensed massage therapist focused exclusively on injury therapy. I studied Rolfing techniques, and primarily used trigger point therapy, structural integration, and myofascial release as my tools. Clients liked to joke that going to see me was like seeing the physical therapist (they weren't wrong).

Some of the stuff I share is literally self taught through "following the tension" in clients bodies. Like, I developed some of my protocols. And then practiced and refined them over 100s of bodies. The goal was always the most efficient and least painful way to achieve lasting release.

I eventually destroyed my shoulder doing massage (which was injured long before this career due to an AC joint sprain gotten when I was 20). Bonus, this means I'm *very* practiced at releasing my own shoulders.

I'm now a mechanical engineer, which just means I now have the engineering knowledge to understand to the force transferrence patterns I saw in clients all the time. Kinesiology is the same thing as statics and dynamics.

Hopefully that helps put perspective into things. I'll update this post as new versions of the document come out. I have a ton on my plate right now (who am I joking; I always have a ton on my plate), so please be patient waiting for updates.

[spaceless-vacuum]

It's the same anon that send in the previous royal! Reader ask with reader being betrothed. I saw that your requests were open and I wanted to see if you could write headcanons regarding that same topic. I didn't want to put it in the previous ask because it got a bit too long.

The whole royalty reader idea gets more interesting depending on which zelda/link you're with. 

Give me a duo who had an arranged marriage with you before the calamity. Spending so much time with their sweet bride and refusing to let you even think about helping out in the war. You can try to fight them about how you're capable and able to do more to defend their country and cry you might but they refuse to let you do anything about it. To them you're so much better suited to waiting the war out while they take care of it. Zelda often takes you to the springs with her, just knowing you're there while she prays alleviates her anxiety. The goddess has to hear her cries when youre by her side. Who could ignore such a sweet soul?

Link likes this as well. Being able to watch both of you helps him relax. Having you away from him not knowing if any yiga rats might hurt you tears him apart. It is his duty to protect you and his princess. Keeping you close by is the best way to make sure you're safe. Even if the lack of privacy may hurt your feelings it is absolutely necessary. Tying the knot between you and Zelda helped with relations between your two nations. The extra help with the war was sweet but having you as her prize was the real victory- even if no one ever heard how badly she wanted to just have you.

Zelda loves it when you help with the guardians. She can't spend all of her time studying them so having you do it and talking about it over tea and while travelling really makes her happy. Listening to your sweet voice go over the numbers and talk about how her plans are going along well just sounds so much sweeter when coming from your lips. The extra help with her other more mundane tasks like hair braiding and just the slow sweet domestic moments are her greatest pleasure. The way you help with domestic affairs was the whole point of the marriage after all.

Link feels a bit off while witnessing those moments but the way Zelda smiles when she looks at you makes up for all of it. He loves seeing the two of you being so happy. He smiles and finds that even your aura is enough to bring out the best in him. It's hard for him to keep such a cold demeanour when you're breaking down all of his walls.

. . .

Post calamity these two would be a handful. For multiple reasons. I didn't mention it much before but you are always at Zelda’s side or in a location they are ok with you being at, such as the castle. After the calamity it's hard to keep you pent up in one house all the time and even travelling with them isn't safe. Plus it's been one hundred years and they're not the same people they once were.

Flora lost you once and was convinced as she sent Link to the shrine of resurrection and as the two of you were separated that you were dead. She used the memory of who she was fighting for to help fuel her energy in the fight against holding the calamity back. Fighting the years away she awoke and found the most beautiful sight waiting to greet her. Her heart was so over flowing it felt like everything that happened up to this point was all worth it. Losing you was too much to remember most days. Yet here you were. Wild taking up the mantle of guardian you again. 

The new hero is certainly different. That much is easy to tell. He doesn't really remember you and his tendencies to always have to keep you in his line of sight are gone the first time you meet. He truly doesn't remember you. After such a long time, who can blame him but it still hurts you a bit. All Wild can recall is that you were a visiting royal who stayed at the castle. How you managed to live for so long, you explained it was all simple luck (magic, being put in the shrine of resurrection with link, Purahs anti aging device, idk maybe love or the calamity did it in hopes you would fall to the malice but you never did).

You spent your time adventuring and travelling with Wild. Hoping to rescue the princess and put an end to the calamity that you witnessed destroy everything ages ago. The dynamic changes a lot. You and Wild have spent a lot of time together and even after rescuing Flora he isn't willing to let go of you. The Link who died had to stand by because he couldn't mess with the royal wedding but there's no need to keep himself away anymore.

There was a time seeing the two of you being so close would have made her jealous, now however? She found seeing the two of you quite calming. Wild's yandere tendencies make her feel secure. She doesn't have to worry about your safety as Wild has obviously gotten ground rules set down that you follow. They're both so overprotective of you but it's clear to see why. Flora can get a bit jealous of the two of you; but who wouldn't be after seeing the way you smile? The jealousy never lingers but it does make her feel sorry about what happened. The life she promised you, the kingdom she was going to rule with you, and all of the plans for the future. It's all gone. She can no longer give you what she once was going to.

As the two of you spend more time together and rekindle what was there it only fuels her love for you. It cements the fact that you married her for her. Not for her title, not for the kingdom, not any of it. For her. You want her. You went so far as to help Wild save her. All for love. She considers the two of you still married and would love to redo your vows.

. . .

Age of calamity Fauna and Calamity. This link is far more stern. There's a literal war going on. He can't spend his time always on the lookout for you. He needs you to stay put as far away from the front line as possible. Fauna lets Calamity do the stern talking but she gets in on it as well when you start to pull the royalty card to try and regain some of your freedom. It's not like you're going far, but it's still so dangerous and they can't bear to lose you. Once Fauna unlocks her powers she gets an aura around her, in truth though she couldn't care less about unlocking her powers. All she wants is for this war to be over a day sooner. She can't wait until this war is behind her so she can just live a normal life with you.

Keeping you by her side all the time and spending her days in the castle while you share stories with her is all she truly wants. Calamity’s goal is the same. He just wants to put this all behind him so he can finally figure out who he is without all of this hero business. Fauna has no issues with sharing you between the two as they have spent so much time together that there's really nothing he can hide from her, and her from him. Your life after the war is much like it was before just with two very needy yanderes who have to have your attention at all times.

. . .

Time would love for nothing more than to take you away. He loves to have you visit him at work when hes with the knights or at the farm. Seeing your down to earth and kind personality as a royal makes him feel secure in the kingdom's future. Due to this part of the timeline being the one where he was sent back to a kid before Ganon betrayed Hyrule. The hero wasn't needed and Zelda never let Ganon into the sacred realm so he feels… sort of odd. He enjoys your company and adores being able to talk about being a hero around you without feeling strange about the whole ordeal. You're so hypnotising he's always at such a loss for words around you. In a sense he knows he's the one who should be treating you like royalty but there is one small issue. You Are to be wed to Lullaby.  He knows you're more than friends but he can't just take you away because to do so would upset your marriage; and he can't stretch the truth to Malon and say he kidnapped the princess. That's what Ganon did; but he can't live in this fantasy world while wishing you were his. He lets this eat him up inside until he eventually talks to his Zelda about it but it's a hard topic.

Lullaby seems loyal and regal and in royal gossip there is this air of her being holier than thou but it's all air. An aura. She doesn't do anything like that at all. In fact part of what drew you to her was how down to earth she is. She's a very multilayered person. She works day and night both as princes but mostly as a sheikah warrior. While exposing Ganon as a traitor she can't be sure his influence is fully gone. She needs stability and power and she has about ten different jobs to get down and they all need to be done by now. She needs someone all the time. Someone who can help her. To comfort her when she cries, to rub her back when she's sick, to be there with her when she prays, she needs a friend and ally and someone to help her spar. She sees how willing you are to help and she latches onto that. The love of her life just showed up out of the blue and now everything feels so much easier. The problems fade away as the hours pass when you're by her side.

Once you've started to help her she's already planning to get her claws in you and never let go. Deals and money exchanges hands all the time and if she gets her own a bit dirty who can prove it was really her and not Sheik? Lullaby is the type to not realise how far gone she is in her obsession with you until she's already planning on how others might need to die and realises “oh, this wasn't on my schedule yesterday.” and she snaps out of it for a moment and it hits her like a ton of bricks. She LOVES loves you. It hits her how much she can't stand to lose you. The light of her life is not even the gods could keep her from you now. As long as you're married your bond will be eternal but she can't help but want more to do with you. She lets Time in to help protect you and watch over you, and to keep you busy when she's not around- but she has to come first in the relationship. She can share but not when she wants you, only when she can't be there right now. She’ll let him in when she's not there and sees it as thanks for keeping you safe but Lullaby can't bear to see how close you are if you two haven't done something together yet. She can't stand to feel like second best.

. . .

Artemis is a troublemaker. Not because she is by heart but because she wants a domestic life but she just cant afford it. She is wealthy enough, but her kingdom just suffered from a war. Your marriage was chosen just as much for political gain as it was her hope for a loving partner. She is a hopeless romantic and often vents to Link and Impa and has them weigh in on who they think would be a good choice. She is very picky and settles on you after a few tests and invites you over only to realise you have such a good heart. You don't act like those other nobles and you care a lot for the people. Is it meant to try and test you by setting up scenarios to fall into your hands? Even as she does so she watches from the corner as a spy does it for her and she just prays seeing you prove yourself time and time again.

Although Artemis wants the picture perfect life nothing in her Hyrule is picture perfect right now. No matter how hard she works there is always something else that needs to be done. TWhen she meets you she's caught off guard. It all seems too soon for the perfect person ever to walk in while she's still trying to recover. She built up her walls so much that when she meets you and you're perfect she realises she's now a major red flag. More so as she starts to plan on how to trap you into marrying her. Suddenly she's nervous and wiping sweat off of her hands and trying so hard to act casual but she cant be after seeing how your eyes look and you're so gorgeous, is it too soon to take a bite out of you? Handling her is handling seven different bombs that are all going to go off at different times and cause six different sized explosions. A lot of fun for people who enjoy that type of chaos but unfortunately she makes peace with the fact that you two will never have a picture perfect relationship on the inside. She craves you too badly to play nice.

Warrior is just as bad as Artemis is sometimes. He has seen far too much war to feel ok and the thoughts and feelings of everything he saw and went through weigh heavy on him. He needs comfort and finds so much of it in you. When on his late night walks he finds himself at your door. Having walked to you without even realising it. Artemis is jealous of him at first but she softens as soon as she sees the way he relaxes around you. She can't be mad at him; she just can't stand to see the two of you alone. As long as she's there to comfort him as well she doesn't mind, although Link would like some alone time he can't push her on this. The two of them both want you but can't stand to let the other just have you without a fight, and neither of them are up for anymore fighting.

. . .

Ok that's all the ones I have for now, I wish I could have written more because there so many small details that I think would really shine in a long form writing or a one shot but I don't have the time for that my lunch break is almost over... I loved this so much I hope it makes sense. I focused more on how the dynamic plays between the two rather than them both sharing you, but that's because I think its so much more interesting! I would love to write more about this soon

[bokettochild]

came back wrong sounds like a very wild thing

and maybe twi could have obedience? something about wolfie and training could be angsty.

If no one suggested that one for Wild, I wanted to do it anyways LOL

Since I already posted Day 4 elsewhere, I'll give you Day 16 personally <3

Rating: Teen

Wordcount: 8,047

Summary: Coming back changed the Hero of the Wilds, and he's known it for a while. he's not sure how much changed, although he's happy to let Zelda and Purah try and find out. He does know though that there's a certain sort of power that lurks under his skin now, one capable of many things, but it comes with one great disadvantage: he doesn't know how to make it stop once he's started to employ it.

(This is set in the Inner Hero AU, so there are references to the other fics of that series, so consider this your warning!)

-

  It’s no great secret to anyone in Hyrule that there’s something Wrong with their hero. Since the shrine of resurrection, he isn’t what those who once knew him remember, and even those who’d never met the him from Before can sense that their hero isn’t exactly like the rest of them. Most of them accept that oddness as just another quirk or some such, just something intrinsic to Link, the weird kid who wanders the kingdom and somehow is also the hero that defeated the Calamity. 

  The Zora accepted it as a change brought by time, much as their own selves have all become altered in the hundred years since last they saw him. Maybe they know too; maybe they’re just too polite to say, but they never fuss about it. 

  Zelda knows though. She’s told him plainly that she knows he’s not what he used to be. He’s still him, she assures, because she knows the smile he spares for his mounts and recognizes the little habits he’d never have suspected she’d caught before the Calamity occurred. He’s still him, she says, but he’s More now too. 

  He came back different. 

  Purah and Zelda have looked into it, with his permission. He's sat and watched his girls sit with their head’s together over tests and papers and results as they try to understand how he’d changed. It’s nice, in a way. He's not very involved and, in many ways, he feels as though they forget at times that he’s able to hear them and the clinical way they refer to their study of him, but it’s not with any ill intent that they do so. In fact, it’s sort of nice to slip into the background of their minds and watch them at their most natural, see their bright smiles and hear them talk over each other and cut each other off in their excitement as they come to similar conclusions 

  He treasures the time spent up at the tower above Hateno, He treasures the time where he can simply exist as he is beside those he cares about, watching them bustle about doing what they love while he can finally rest in peace, knowing that his work is done, that nothing calls him out and that he can linger there as long as he pleases, without guilt. He can see what he was denied; Zelda’s joy, her eagerness, her freedom, and enjoy his own as well. 

  It’s good. 

  Returning to the rest of the world though, he’s always reminded again of how illy he fits among them. Magic has faded from the land of Hyrule, but he is steeped in it. Those around him walk with only the slightest bit of the power of heaven in their veins, yet his body overflows with magic that seeps out of the cracks left by his death. Zelda has compared him to the broken pottery he leaves across the kingdom, cracked and damaged by his adventure, and from those cracks, the power that twisted up with his own to bring him back from the brink now ekes out into the world, twisting and strange. Hylians aren’t meant to understand the feeling of Death’s touch, she says, eyes solemn and wary, lip pulled between her teeth as she’ll scan his face for signs of pain or sadness at her words. He knows she means well to do so, but he understands, and there’s really no need to be sad over such a thing. 

 He’s not normal, but it’s not their fault, and as they still accept him, still treat him with kindness, he feels little hurt for the changes that occurred to bring him to their sides. It’s a sacrifice he’d make again, even knowing what it will do. Watching Hyrule flourish in the wake of the Calamity, watching their victory paint the world anew in life and prosperity for their people, it’s worth dying and being pieced together again for, even if what holds his once drifting soul to his broken body is a magic no one can explain to him. 

  Life is good as long as he learns to hold back the worst of the magic, keep it tamed and keep his temper in check, which is hardly any struggle around most people. There are a few, certain people who drive him crazy and make him want very much to do things a hero ought not, but he holds himself back, and when Zelda really wants him to test himself, to see how much he can restrain the twisting Thing that has become part of him, she’ll challenge him to deal with those people. Really, they make it a game, so even if those people do drive him mad, seeing Zelda beam and mumble to herself at what they’ve learned from such encounters makes it worth it. 

  For her, he’d do anything. After all, he’s already died for her, what worse is there? 

  Well, as it would seem, leaving her behind for the sake of undertaking a new journey is worse. She’s happy in Hateno, capable of defending herself with both her magic and the archery her family is renowned for across the ages. She’s not as good as he is with a bow, but it’s a near thing, and he has no doubt that one more trip to Rito village, one more study session with Tulin and Teba, is all it will take before his princess can out-do him with his own preferred weapon.  

  Even knowing she can handle herself just fine doesn’t make leaving her behind any easier though. He’s still not sure how he’d managed, but he had. He had and he’d stumbled across the other heroes, joining them in their quest. It’s not perfect, not by any means, they’ve found peace in their new team. While there’s still some settling and sifting to be done before they click together like a real team, they are getting there. 

  He may have thrown a wrench in that process though. 

  See, since meeting the heroes, his magic has been rather well behaved. None of them rub him the wrong way, and while he isn’t exactly friendly with them all, they’re not the sort of people who push his boundaries or upset him either. He can co-exist beside them, and in many ways they remind him of the champions. He’s not sure how Time would feel knowing that in many ways he makes the cook think of Chief Urbosa, but he thinks Twilight might get a laugh out of being compared to Daruk. Of course, not everyone has similarities to the champions; Warriors isn’t like anyone he’s met before and he doubts he’ll ever meet anyone like him again, but it’s there for the rest. It's mostly just small things; they are, after all, their own persons, but finding something familiar to define them with makes approaching and working beside them easier. Four possesses the same quiet strength as Riju, Legend the certainty and experience of Teba, and Sidon’s wit and charm peeks through the traveler’s smile at times. Using what he knows about other people, about those he knew before, he can navigate the group with some decency. There's hiccups and there’s snags, but fortunately, they rarely if ever involve him, and never his magic. 

  Until now. 

  He sits back and tries to learn when he finally realizes that the others have magic spilling out from their cracks as well. Warriors is fire and Twilight is rich earth, Somehow, Legend is the force that quiets both, and despite a harsh outwards demeanor, the man holds a surprising amount of sway over the group as a whole. 

  In many ways, Legend reminds him of the Zelda from Before. There’s a potential for something bright and warm and rambling, something that would flourish if left alone and free to its own will, but like his princess, the vet restrains it for some reason or another. Duty drove Zelda, and he thinks something similar leads the vet, because no other factor has yet appeared. It’s there though, that warmth and light, mixed with a strength that is regarded and respected even if it isn’t followed. Legend is no leader, but his word has power, and they all listen to what he has to say in regards to what it is that they face. Not only that, but the vet’s magic is a twisting, free thing that is embraced and clung to by those in their gathering. 

  Warriors and Twilight seek its peace, and Sky urges it forwards with bright smiles and open arms as he somehow slips past the thorns of trailing magic to get at the hidden blossoms beneath. Time, in his own way, accepts it, although he does little with it. Wind seeks it, and Hyrule, whether the traveler seems to realize it or not, has tuned himself to it.  

  Wild may be clueless as to how people work normally, but he can understand magic. He can see how Hyrule’s flickering and dancing light embraces the magic of the veteran, and while he doesn’t grasp where the older ones do, he does linger and bask in it. 

  Wild doesn’t blame him. Legend’s magic feels like safety, like the goddess statues across Hyrule, the ones that quiet his soul and the twisting of his mind to grant him peace and rest even when he’s at his worst. Hylia, they say, is a goddess of Life, so it’s natural that her light would ease or even erase the darkness of Death. He's not sure how Legend’s magic echos that of the goddess, like the moon reflecting the suns rays even once the bright star has faded from view, but he welcomes that warmth and light all the same. 

 Losing that light affects them all. They are, after all, all beings of light, so losing the source that travels with them, having it snuffed out or hidden, leaves all antsy and ill at ease, and he doesn’t blame them. He still doesn’t appreciate Hyrule’s approach to fixing it though. 

  They’d talked, and maybe he'd let his own worries and insecurities spill over. Maybe he’d not correctly portrayed what he thinks he’d seen in the face of their brother when the vet had had Claims explained to him, but what really bothers him is how quickly his words were cast aside, how quickly Hyrule had returned to twining his magic with Legend’s own, laughing and chatting like nothing had happened and he hadn’t tried to tie down a ray of light itself. 

  He’s seen people try to tame light, bend it to their will and force it to linger rather than shine over the world as intended. His princess was never meant to stay locked in a castle, hidden in dark rooms to pray for power she wasn’t allowed to seek on her own terms; to find within herself what had always been. Seeing her free now, riding where she will and doing what she wants, he sees that light realized, knows the same could be found if Legend is allowed to do the same, as he’s expressed wanting. Light doesn’t belong to anyone after all, but to everyone, although they can’t hold it or keep it. Legend feels the same, at least with their group, and he wishes Hyrule would understand that. 

  The problem is, he’s not sure how to talk to vet about it. 

  Twilight, Warriors, Sky and Hyrule all feel free to approach, but Wild has never had anything with which to connect himself to the vet, no foundation for a friendship. They're such different people, and he’s not so blind as to have missed how the vet recoils when his own magic flares and hisses along the edges of the others in camp. His magic, the twisting, festering, darkness of it, entwines with Zelda’s like second nature, both dimming each other to the point of being null. In contrast, he lacks the familiarity with the vet to do the same, and instead, Life’s light flickers and hides when he loses control of the darkness of Death. 

  He wishes it wasn’t so, but it is. 

  How does fire that burns and earth that tends to smother have such a way to twist up with light, yet the un-named otherness of his own soul can’t find a harmony of its own? 

  “Wild, hey, focus.” 

  He shakes himself, staring up at Twilight where the other is standing next to him with a worried look on his face. “Huh?” 

  “You good?” The rancher asks, “you drifted out again.” 

  It wasn’t a memory, but it strikes him that he has, in fact, been sitting here unmoving for the last twenty minutes or so, and that’s probably just a bit worrying to the others. “Yeah, just lost in my head.” 

 The man frowns, settling himself down slowly on the loam underfoot so he’s sitting at Wild’s side, dark stare searching over him as though for an injury of some kind. “Anything on your mind?” 

  Does he tell? He can’t help the way his eyes drift to where the vet and captain sit back to back by the fire, Hyrule so close his knees are almost touching the vet’s as they face each other and chat, busy at work with their sewing and magic even as the captain writes what’s probably a report to his princess. They look at peace, somehow already over the latest hiccup of their group and already resettling into place as though it never happened, as though the subject of Claims never came up at all. How can do they do it? 

  He shakes his head. “Just thinking is all.” The doubt on the face of the other is soothed with a smile, dark gaze softening at the sight of flashing teeth. “Not memories or anything, I promise.” 

  “If you’re sure...” 

  “I am,” he says again, chuckling slightly for extra good measure. “At worst, I’m a bit homesick, at best, just confused, and considering this is me,” he laughs again, watches the face of his brother relax into one of those easy smiles they are al so used to, “I’m pretty sure that’s just normal.” 

  A heavy hand claps down on his shoulder, squeezing slightly, and despite the lingering concern in the rancher’s face, he is smiling. “If you’re sure. Remember though, pup, I’m here if ya need me.” 

  “I know.” He smiles in return, but beneath, his magic seethes just a bit. Twilight is great, Twilight is amazing, Twilight is there if he needs something and always offers a shoulder to lean on, and he’s incredibly thankful for that. But the rancher is also against the idea of using most magics, and despite the fact that he knows Twilight would never resent them for their own use of the stuff, his choice being personal preference rather than a hard belief about it in general, it does still mean he’s rather...ignorant, at least when it comes to magic. He can’t help here, and he probably wouldn’t even understand half of what Wild would need to explain. No, because unlike certain people, he doesn’t have a mastery for teaching. Good grief, he wishes Zelda was here, or even Purah, they could explain this mess to him, and maybe help him find a solution. He’s good at fighting and exploring and making things, not magic. He’s not qualified for all of this! 

  At the other side of camp, he sees Wind sit up abruptly, eyes scanning the world around him, wary. He's not the only one either, for Warriors is grabbing his sword as he scans the trees, Legend’s ears are flicking about, seeking something. He doesn’t feel or see or hear anything though, and it’s only when he sees the fiery glow of Hyrule’s gaze on him that he realizes he’s lost control again. 

  His magic really doesn’t do any of them any favors, does it? 

  He needs to gather it up again and tuck it away in a neat little box, watch guards relax again as the heroes puzzle at the sudden disappearance of whatever they’d felt or thought they’d sensed. Warriors gets up and starts patrolling the camp, leaving his own magic twisting here and there, like a spider casting a web, but predictably, he finds nothing to indicate that they are in any danger, even after he and Twilight have checked the forest around them. 

  Honestly, the longer they look, the more he wants to shrink in on himself and just... bang his head against a tree or something. 

  He feels like a threat to those he cares about, and they have no idea, because they don’t know it’s him that makes them jump to an alert and drop what they’re doing to instead prepare for a fight. 

  It’s worse in a fight though. 

  The next time they’re on a battlefield, Warriors leading the charge with Time and Sky, Legend and Four covering their asses and darting around the field to take out the threats that creep up upon the others, it slips loose. The problem is that it’s his monsters they’re fighting, recognizable by the fact that they’re not nearly as horrific to look at as the creatures from nearly all the others’ eras. He knows them, and they know him, and its sort of his habit when fighting in his own world, where the likelihood of other people being around is basically null, to just... let go. 

  Magic surges around him, a twisting, snapping thing that creeps and twists and twines over and around the enemies, driving them into a state of frenzy at the threat of something, something that their senses can’t pick up, but their souls can feel all the same; feel creeping over them, ready to snatch, to grab, to destroy. Death is scary to the creatures that aren’t familiar with its touch, and even those that act as it’s messengers tremble when the focus of Death is turned from their prey and onto themselves. The bokoblins run about attacking anything that moves, including each other, and it makes sweeping in and slaying them so much easier than if he was just fighting like the others do. 

  It helps that the monsters have come to know to associate the creeping presence of Death with his face, and they know, even before his sword slips across their throats or through their chests, exactly what’s coming. The ones that have met him before, brought back by red moons and dark malice, only fear it more with experience, and it’s sort of...satisfying, unleashing it all and watching the enemy panic, half knowing what’s coming to them and the other half unaware but just as panicked. 

  Once they’ve all fallen though, there’s always one little problem, one he’d sort of forgotten about. 

  “What the heck is this?” It’s Legend calling out, eyes wide, stance wide, sword gripped in one hand and fire rod in the other as his gaze flicks across the field; searching, looking.  Similarly, Warriors is staring about with that glinting look in his eyes, teeth bared, and ears pricked back, a dragon ready to surge out and rip something apart the moment it reveals itself. All the heroes are still looking about for the final threat, and Wild- 

  Wild can’t control the magic. 

  It happens, sometimes. If he leans into his magic, he can’t tame it so easily. It’s like a particularly eager stallion; plunging ahead no matter how he leans back in the saddle or tries to turn the creature off course, turn it, slow it, circle until its energy dies and it listens to him again. Magic isn’t an animal he can slow down though, and despite their efforts, neither he nor Zelda have found a way for him to get it under control by himself. They just have to wait until it calms of its own accord, for now. Purah said she’d try and help him find a way to control it, since it’s his, it's part of him, so reasonably he should be able to control it, just like a limb, a muscle, another part of himself physically. Zelda says it’s because it’s still new, still unfamiliar, still something he’s adapting to, so he’s still learning how it’s part of him, like a pup discovering its own wagging tail, although far less innocent because puppy tails don’t have everyone around you preparing to fend off a death blow. 

    Warriors snarls something he can’t make out, something that has the twisting darkness around them surging back in kind.  

  Wild isn’t trying to threaten, he swears. If anything, there’s something in the magic, in himself, that hears the dragon’s threat and eagerly bounces forwards in response. Now is not a good time though, in fact, it’s probably the worst of times. 

  Hyrule’s eyes are turned on him, harsh and just slightly scared, like they had been in the inn room. Still, the other hero darts to his side and, under his breath, unable to be heard by the others past their own panic, the traveler hisses at him. “Can it, champ.” 

  “I can’t,” he hisses back. He’s trying, but he’s fighting against a part of himself that he still can’t understand, and he’s not sure how to bind it back when it’s strong, only when it’s just beginning to peak out and is just the slightest of strains. Now it’s a howling force he can’t keep back, and all attempts are failing badly. 

  “Are you trying?” The embers in those eyes are flickering, but Hyrule’s voice isn’t harsh so much as straining, worried. The gaze of the traveler is trailing over the rest of their group, aware of their panic and doing his best to try and quell the source, but unwilling, Wild realizes, to reveal it. Hyrule has no interest in exposing him, just making him turn it off. 

  The problem though it he can’t. “Yes! It’s not working!” 

  Some very harsh words slip from the tongue of the other, but it’s not hylian. It’s not fae either, which he’d recognize, but something smoother and less lilting. Legend would know it, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t suppose it matters either. 

  Flames rise against his darkness, a raging force that shrieks and screams. Hyrule’s ears are pricked back as far as they can go, too many teeth glinting in the fading light of the setting sun, light that sets his face aglow as magic surges in a silent battle around them, one that has Warriors tensing, Twilight balking. Wild can feel the wings of the dragon flaring, the lash of the tail, can almost see the rise of the wolf’s hackles. There’s a crackling energy around their chosen hero, a surge of light from their vet, shields rising against the unseen threat, but Hyrule’s magic surging against his own, lashing and licking along the darkness in a roaring flame that reaches to consume and destroy, has his full attention. 

  He doesn’t try and fight it. Hyrule is pushing back what he can’t handle himself, but the boundaries thrown up around his own power, boxing it in and forcing it back, won’t last, and he knows it. The strain is clear on his brother. He’s not sure how strong his own magic is, but the color is draining out of the traveler’s face, his breath quickening as the whipping and shrieking of the fae’s magic pushes back against the hiss and shadow of Death, steadily pushing it back and bottling it up within some confines the traveler must have forged himself, because it’s not just tucked back into the spot within him that he usually pulls it from. The hand on Hyrule’s sword is turning white with the effort of actions unseen, but he sees the guards of the others lower, sees the strain flow out of their shoulders as, at long last, the magic is bottled up and away, still writhing and twitching, but unable to break free. 

  Honestly, it’s terrifying. He didn’t know Hyrule could do that. 

  The traveler sags beside him, breathing hard as he stumbles, but when he reaches out to catch his brother, Hyrule stumbles back. “No, just....” dark lashes flutter and Hyrule’s lips are slightly grey, “Don’t.” 

  So, he doesn’t. 

  Not too far away, Legend is creeping up into the space of their captain, voice low and wary, like he’s approaching a spooked animal, and like any other time in the past, the moment clarity returns to eyes the color of holy flame, Warriors is dropping his sword and grabbing ahold of his brother, hunching over him as Legend sighs and let’s himself be clutched close, huffing words the rest can’t hear but which have short little ears twitching slightly out of their pricked back position. 

  Similarly, Twilight is checking in with the rest, reaching to touch, to self-assure. Clapping Wind’s shoulder and brushing against Four. Time reaches out to the rancher first, but the touch lingers, both comforting each other and themselves before turning to Sky, who’s sheathing the Master Sword and happily accepts the worry of the others, assuring with a smile and a light nudge to Twilight’s shoulder, eyes bleeding warmth that Wild envies. None of them approach the captain, but Legend calls something to them, huffing and half laughing past the arms wrapped around him, an promise that all is well as his magic soothes twisting scales and quells flames. 

  The warmth of Life surges, like a balm, around all of them. Legend’s reach touching the rest even despite the fact that they seem as blind to his efforts as they had been to the source of their previous fear. 

  “You alright, boys?” Time asks, Twilight at his side as the both move to the sides of their wildlings. Their leader’s eyes linger on Hyrule, and when he reaches out, the traveler lets himself sag against the man’s touch. 

  Hyrule doesn’t like touch, Wild reminds himself, trying to excuse the denial he’d faced at a similar offer. Only Time seems exempt from that rule, and it’s probably only because of the fairy magic that lingers faintly over the other, the remains of an old Claim resting about the edges of his magic to mark him as something not quite fae, but treasured by them all the same. If the traveler reaches for that magic, he doesn’t say anything, and Time doesn’t seem to notice either. 

  “I’m okay,” he answers honestly. The worst effect his own magic had had on him was fear at not being able to control it; not the overwhelming terror that seemed to grip the others that they would fall victim to it. 

  Twilight’s eyes linger on him shortly, but drift away after, apparently accepting his words as truth and determining that the others, still shaken and, in Hyrule’s case, trembling with exhaustion, require his attention more. Still, the rancher grips his shoulder briefly in passing, assuring himself and offering brief comfort to the champion in the process. 

  It’s nice, but as he moves away, leaving their leader and his mentor to tend to the exhausted half-fae, he can’t help but watch the others. Specifically, his gaze trails to where Warriors is sagging against their vet, making the smaller man stumble with a cut off laugh as he pats broad shoulders, magic still twisting and entwining with flames as easily as though they’re naught but harmless air. 

  Life pours across the group of them, a heavy weight that settles across their shoulders with the grace and warmth of a cat climbing up to greet it’s master, its presence a comfort that he wants so bad to catch ahold of and nestle into, like he once had curled at the base of goddess statues when his own power wouldn’t quiet, letting the power of Hylia soothe him when he couldn’t do it himself. He wishes there was a goddess stature here too, because as much as Legend reflects that same power, his arms are rather full of their captain, and the hold of gloved hands in red fabric says that he won’t be free for at least a while more. Not that Wild could ask anyways. He and Legend aren’t close to begin with, asking for the same welcome as is granted to the dragon that has slowly been tamed to his brother’s presence isn’t realistic by any means. Still, it’s easier to hide the writhing presence bottled up by force when he’s slinking closer to the source of comfort in their camp, so if he settles closer to the vet and captain than he normally would that evening, after finishing with making dinner, well, Hyrule’s the only one who really seems to take notice. Warriors is distracted with teasing their sailor, and while Legend’s dark gaze lifts to greet him as he moves over, the man says nothing at his choice of seat, just keeps eating his dinner quietly. 

  Hyrule is staring, a warning look in those eyes when they’re on him, but worry when they turn to the veteran. He doesn’t say anything from where he’s slumped against Time though, across the fire and picking at his food. The traveler is exhausted, and reasonably so. The others don’t know why, so it’s natural that they’re worrying, and the cave dweller hasn’t elected to explain himself either, so they probably will continue to do so for a good while. 

  Despite the camp-fire between them, Hyrule’s magic, weak and tired, has still managed to entwine with the vet’s. Legend answers back with flickers of his own power to the embers that scatter themselves at his feet, assuring and fond, even if there’s confusion in the flicker of his ears, the twitch of his hands and the gaze of starlit violet that turns from time to time to meet faintly glowing embers. 

  Wild doesn’t dare try and sneak his own flickering, snapping power out to try and reach, knowing far too well what the reaction would be, but also wary of the escape of the still writhing power that surges against the wall of flames raised around it. 

  How Hyrule bottled back his strength, he doesn’t know, but it feels dangerously like a weak seal; like golden power meant to keep back evil. He isn’t sure of a lot right now, but the idea of that makes him uneasy and definitely bothers him. He’s not a monster or demon that needs restraining by holy power, but the fact that he’d failed to hold himself back enough that Hyrule would feel the need to take such measures at all is just as pressing a pain to his pride and soul as the action itself. 

  The magic holds though. His soul doesn’t creep and screech against that of the others after that. Doesn’t even surge when his emotions run hot. If anything, it thrashes within its confines, but it doesn’t escape to twist like a net around those he considers friends and brothers. Unfortunately, that also means that it doesn’t emerge when faced with enemies either. 

  The next time they’re in battle, this time against something Legend calls a ‘gleeok’ and which he desperately hopes will never appear in his own world, he somehow can’t summon his own magic at all. It’s there, he can feel it, but trying to bring it out, even just the smallest amount, proves to have no results. Every prod, every call, every little hiss of his soul to push and pull and just get his magic to respond, has it only thrashing more, wild within its confines but not breaking past them. 

  His sword plunges and stabs, and the heroes around him do the same. Warriors is a whirlwind of power and ferocity as he charges in head on, the vet’s magic raising in a shield and Hyrule’s own likewise surging across the field in strikes that leave their foe howling and screaming in anger, flames licking across the ground in response, but his own power can only beat at the bounds created around it. He can’t break them, but he’s trying. He’s trying and surging, biting his lip with focus to the point he knows there’s blood trailing across his face from his own efforts and not any wound dealt by the dragon like monster they’re pitted against, but it isn’t working. 

  He hisses as a tail rises up to thrash at him, drops and rolls to avoid the impact of it hitting him, all the time pushing at the seal on his own magic in a valiant attempt to summon it, only to still be met with no results. He could ask Hyrule, if the other wasn’t on the other side of the enemy and currently absorbed with trying to stop the head firing at him with flames that surge and lick around a magic shield thrown up at only the last of moments. Still, with the amount of effort it took to raise the seal on his power, he doesn’t know if the traveler could even summon the strength to undo that same work, not when he’s so busy currently trying to avoid getting killed. 

  It’s driving Wild mad though. 

  Before, he was the knight of the princess who had the power to topple an army of lynels. He'd lost some of that to Death, but in return had been granted something he’s used like second nature since, letting it ruin and destroy and tear apart and terrorize anything and everything that dared rise before him as he’d worked across the kingdom in an effort to rescue the one who’d called him back out of Death’s hold. He can’t control it once it’s free, but he’d at least been able to employ it before, and being without it in the first time in his memory has a fear he hates bubbling up from within, anger surging at the bonds of magic to snap and hiss and cry with a wildness he hadn’t known he possessed. 

  He wants free. He wants to unleash the wildness he’d been named for and let it at the very least leave their foe cowing, if only slightly, as the imminence of its own fate is made clear to it. 

  He can’t. 

  He can’t because Hyrule bottled it, and he hates that. 

  Not Hyrule. He doesn’t hate Hyrule. The traveler had done him a favor by rendering him tolerable for the others to be around again without leaving them straining themselves to understand the threat they’d felt slipping about them. What he hates is the bounds of the seal closing in around him like the walls of the shrine he’d woken within time and again, aching pains all over from half healed wounds that had been strained over and over by efforts to push free from a prison of stone. The shrine had felt as though it was closing in on him and keeping him sealed, leaving him only to awake and fight and pass out, water filling his lungs and straining his body as he’d tried to escape from his confines only to fail yet again.. He’d healed long before he’d escaped, and since letting on the truth to Purah (but not Zelda, he could never tell her about that), she’d started looking into why it had kept him so much longer, but so far, they have had no results. Still, the feeling of being trapped, sealed, shut off from his own strength, it drives him mad. There’s a writhing and snapping, a hiss and a scream, a howling of something in his soul as it tears at the bonds. 

  Slowly, they give way. 

  It’s like a dam breaking. Just a crack, then a hole, then the rest comes crumbling down and, from the other side of the battlefield, he hears Hyrule’s breath shudder, catches ember eyes rising, wide and terrified. And then he’s free. 

  His magic sweeps like a fierce current, a mighty wave, a shadow that plunges over the field and has the gleeok before them screaming, turning its heads for a source of the threat it feels, and thus missing the approach of the captain who’s own surging flames rise beside the shadows, a pulsing, pounding force as the man severs a head and sends it falling towards their waiting leader, who dispatches the thing before the creature can do more than cry out in pain. Writhing darkness twists, twining and trapping and sharing the feelings that only moments before had overwhelmed him; now wrapping themselves around their foe and leaving it frenzied and panicked as the rest of the heroes, despite their own obvious awareness of the new presence, surge forwards. 

  In a strange way, he thinks the flames and scales of the captain are surging stronger as well, pushing back with a hiss against his own magic, one he can’t help but respect, power surging away to let the older man take charge and wreak havoc on their foe while he focuses instead on keeping it on edge. The captain’s magic isn’t stronger than his, but it’s not something he has a wish to reckon with either, and like so many times before, he finds that even the twisting of Death finds something to admire in the lashing of the war hero’s own power. 

  Their foe falls quickly after that. 

  Once the gleeok lies dead, dissipating into black and purple smoke and leaving only the barest remains, he feels able to breathe again.  

  The others though, are not. Wariness marks their features, save Hyrule who looks so, so tired; desperate and weary as though the idea of trying to push back the force of their brother yet again, especially after it had somehow broken through his last attempt, is a far worse fight than the creature they’d just felled. In a way, Wild thinks it must be, because trying to push it down himself is far more a struggle than simply felling something tangible and mortal that fears it. 

  This time though, there’s a surge of another magic, a familiar one, one that pulses and creeps, seeking, against his own. It recoils, as if by instinct, but still presses back against his magic, not pushing so much as following, and light against crypt like darkness which has him looking up in time to catch the gaze of indigo eyes that have lifted to focus on him, sharp and piercing. 

  Legend’s breath shudders, lips pursing. He knows now. 

  Wild tries, tries so hard, to make his face do something, say anything to indicate that he’s sorry, he’s trying, he really isn’t doing this on purpose. It’s hard though when something warm curls up inside of him. It's not his magic, not the cold death touch he knows and has learned to view as an extension of himself. It’s a steady gleam of warmth, not harsh and burning like Hyrule’s, not fierce and violent like Warriors’, but a gleam of light rather than heat, one that curls around some innermost part of him, like it’s wrapping around his very heart. 

  Legend’s eyes glint curiously, stars blazing within. 

  The vet’s feet step towards him. 

  Hyrule whips around to stare, something on his lips and magic surging, throwing up walls and shields and warnings- protective, wary, guarded, begging. The urgency that flings itself at their vet has the other stumbling slightly, but not stopping. Their traveler looks like he wants to scream, ember gaze trailing between them, panicked, worried, wary. 

  Wild tries not to let it bother him. Hyrule is just worried for their vet, their light, his friend. If Zelda trailed into something he felt was a risk, something that made his senses recoil as violently as his power makes the others do, he’d feel the same way, he knows it. Still, the wariness of his brother isn’t helping anybody right now. 

  “Wild,” the same low, even tone that the man uses to ease Warriors own of his own head rises to play in his ears, “what’s going on?” 

  He opens his mouth to answer, but no words come to mind, just a panic, a wish to assure, to apologize. 

  The warmth curled around his core flickers. Light, pure, unaltered by death-touched power, presses around him. The vet steps closer and then, like stepping before a goddess statue, he feels the surge of his own magic quiet. The rest of the heroes ease, looking about in confusion for the threat they’d felt a moment before but there’s nothing there. Nothing that isn’t twisting and twining, muted by light that itself is dimmed to their senses in an echo of his own quieted power. 

  Hyrule is gaping. 

  Legend is just looking utterly confused, stopping only a pace or so away, ears flicking between a curious forwards tilt and a wary press back against his skull. Violet eyes search his own, flickering golden with power that’s familiar, that’s safe, that’s Hylia’s hand in a gentle caress to quiet his own soul and tame the Wrongness that came back binding him to the body that ought to have perished a hundred years ago. 

  The vet sighs, eyes slipping closed and shoulders sagging with the motion. “The heck, champ...” He doesn’t say anything more though, just raises dark eyes to stare, something crooked in the smile that’s offered to him, tired and weary but bright like the magic that pulls his own inwards again and eases it back where it belongs; nestled beside his heart and twining and twisting, crackling at the edges but not in ire as before. No, he reaches, and despite the twitch of the vet’s brows, the warmth of holy magic answers with a press that his own grasps and clings to. 

  He shouldn’t grab, try to grasp, shouldn’t set off the same ire that Warriors has triggered before, but with the alternate option being to scare the wits out of his brothers, he thinks Legend might understand. 

  “You good?” 

  He nods, and this time he actually means it. “Yeah.” 

  “Good,” Legend shakes his head, that weary little smile still on his face. “Honestly, you guys...” 

  “Sorry.” 

  “I should have seen it coming,” violet glimmer, twinkling oddly as they catch his own, the glow of the shrine still lingering in wild blue. “Just don’t make Wars and Twi lose their shit, ‘kay? I’m not keen on dealing with that again.” 

  He promises he won’t.  

  He doesn’t either. Yes, he trails after the vet as the other moves back to the rest of their group, but he’s wary of leaving the immediate presence of the power that quiets his own. Still, he doesn’t get in the way of their usual post battle arrangement. Doesn’t get in the way when Warriors drapes himself over the smaller hero with a huff, soul still seeking the presence it had felt before but finding naught of the force that surged alongside his own. He doesn’t deny Twilight’s wary check over as the man seeks injury among their group, or Time’s verbal call for them to report on their condition. 

  Injuries are treated, and camp is made. Hyrule’s eyes are burning into the back of his head, gaze confused and magic seeking, pushing, looking for that presence he’d strained so much to contain before, yet finding silence in it’s place. 

  He doesn’t stray far from Legend for the rest of the evening, but by morning, he’s got the courage to risk it, and it’s like he’d never released the terrible creature within to begin with. 

 Even so, all this doesn’t mean that, next time that they make camp, Legend doesn’t have questions. Ringed fingers catching his arm and the vet’s steady voice calling to Time that the two of them will do a quick round of the area to check for threats are his only warning before being dragged out of earshot of their brothers and having an answer demanded of him. Legend has questions, and while he doesn’t have answers for all of them, he does his best to give them. He owes that much after the trouble he’s caused. 

  The vet’s pinch of his brows, tired sigh and sinking shoulders are becoming quite familiar. “So, your magic is death-touched, and you scare the shit out of others with it.” 

  “Yeah.” 

  There’s something between a scoff and a laugh that puffs out from the chest of the other. “Dragons, wolves, fairies, now Death herself, good grief.” 

  “I’m sorry.” He’s not sure why, but he feels he ought to say it. 

  There’s the smile again, Legend’s shoulders shaking and pink hair swishing as he shakes his head once more. “Not your fault, champ. Magic’s screwy, and if there’s anything I'm learning with y’all, controlling it’s always a pain in the arse.” 

  Still, he feels awful for adding to the mess that the vet is already caught in. 

  “Okay,” a clap of the hands and a lifting of glittering stars to focus their light on him, “here’s the deal. Your magic quiets around holy magic. I have holy magic. You need it to shut up, you can come to me, but for the love of all holy, please, I am begging, do not mess with the captain, and whatever your beef with Hyrule is, don’t get me involved, deal?” 

  He blinks. “Deal. I wasn’t...I-” it takes a moment, but the vet waits, although his foot taps the ground as he does, nervous maybe, or just impatient. He can’t tell. “I know better than to mess with the captain,” he finally manages. “Hyrule... we’re working on it.” 

  “Good,” Legend sounds, “but again, I don’t want a part of it. Whatever tiff you two have, settle it yourselves. If you need help with your magic, I’m here, but I don’t stand for funny business, comprendo?” 

  He blinks. 

  The vet rolls his eyes, sighing. “Do you understand?”  

  “Understood.” He wishes people would just speak Hylian to him instead of switching mid conversation. 

  “Good. Now, anything else I should know?” And it’s not harsh, it’s not cold, its’s said with the tilt of the head in a way that almost reminds him of Wolfie in their early days, that same half-amused look in dark eyes as the one that had followed him as he’d acquainted himself with a new world, freshly brought back into it. There’s nothing more to share though. Not for now, but he promises to tell if there’s anything he thinks of. Legend accepts that answer too, nodding and setting out again to continue their patrol. 

  He doesn’t get it, but he supposes that’s not the point. How the vet handles the nonsense they throw at him, he can’t fathom, but that he does at all is a blessing. They may laugh and jest about sharp tongues and scathing remarks, but the vet has the patience of a priestess to handle all of them, and he’s thankful for that. 

  He came back wrong, twisted and death-touched and terrifying to those who don’t understand why he is the way he is. It's not fun to explain and it’s tricky to live with, but at least he has a way to control it, even if it does mean asking for help. Still, he doesn’t hate it. His magic is a tool to terrify and harm the enemy, and he values that tool. He doesn’t cherish it, doesn’t adore how it affects those he cares about, but he’s glad he has it. He's glad he has it and he’s working to understand it, to control it.  

  Maybe having someone who understand these things, who knows magic because he’s steeped in it and has lived with it forever- not just unlocked it in a moment of desperation and without proper guidance to master it- will help. Who knows, maybe he can learn something from the vet, maybe even something help Zelda! That would be nice! Being able to return to her and teach her even just the smallest bit about her own power- help her in the way she’d begged the goddesses for, the way he’d wished he could for all the time he’d spent at her side unable to offer more than protection- it’d be nice. 

  Magic is weird, but maybe, maybe, he can get a handle on his Weirdness. 

  At the very least, he can make it shut up now when he needs to. So that’s a start! 

[morgan-angel]

Day 26 of my art challenge. ⚔️

#morgan challenge

The un-zoomed version :

Twenty-sixth day of september (September theme's is finding my art style. I've got a lot of references for this theme, I want to be confident with an art style. So here am I !). 🌱

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Okay so, late post right here. I did continue this piece today but I'm counting it for yesterday only. Today I'm starting the "big illustration" and I'll not share anything until I finished it. Like a big surprise for us !

So, I will describe everything like it was today's drawing. Btw, go check my others drawings/posts if you want to and have the time ! Thanks y'all ❤️

Sooo, you saw the first steps of the process last post ; here is the final illustration. It was not supposed to be an illustration at first but here you go. Today's was about digital painting, color studies, anatomy, and art-style. I know it's a bit "static" and not anatomically correct but y'all... I'm actually in love. The vibe and the coloring, the HAIR ? That's it. That's my style. It's a very good end to this month, before the big illustration (see the ping post in my profile for context).

Like I said, no post 'til end of the month with the big finale drawing. I hope y'all will like it, I'm currently working on it. Thanks for all of the support during this month. I love y'all sm ❤️

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Go see the pin post on my profile if you need some context :)

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Working on opening a lil shop on Kofi tho. I really want to do some commissions. If you want to just follow me, here is the link : https://ko-fi.com/eishi_h

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Also, if you want some better quality photo or just want to see more of my art, go on my insta : https://www.instagram.com/eishihashimoto1?igsh=N2MycDh6NnE4cDMw :)

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See y'all in 3 days !

⚔️

[tagthescullion]

Feelings I Once Had

Fandom(s): Percy Jackson & the Olympians

Summary: After years of not even an Iris Message, Percy catches up with Nico in one of his sporadic visits to the US. They've come a long way from who they once were, but have they really changed that much?

Based on @yonemurishiroku's post!

Rating: T

AO3 link

It was ironic, Percy thought as he saw Nico play with his cat, Moncho. He’d spent years thinking of him as his young, troubled, weird cousin. He had no right to appear out of the blue, after years of almost no contact, looking strikingly handsome in a dark blue sweater and jeans.

His face had got longer, but it suited him well, together with his straight nose, he looked like a Roman emperor. Level-headed, powerful, and just a slight trace of irony in his barely quirked lips.

He was alone. He’d brought nobody back with him. A detail Percy was surprised to have noticed, and even more surprisingly, it had given him a weird sense of satisfaction.

“It’s been a while,” he told the boy –man now, Nico was in his mid-twenties, he’d come far from the antisocial 14-year-old Percy remembered—. “Where have you been?”

Nico, who had shrugged after his first remark, smiled. “Italy. I went back to my family’s home in Veneto.”

Percy had heard about that. “Annabeth mentioned you were making it a home for demigod children across the Atlantic.”

“I already have!” He grinned then, a cheerful expression he couldn’t remember in his cousin after Westover Hall, ages ago. “The structural work was finished a couple of years back, and now I’ve seven children living there already!” His face turned serious after a second. “I’m sorry about you and Annabeth, I only found out the other day. Hazel told me.”

Percy gave him a rueful smile. “It’s okay. We loved each other, but we’ve changed a lot. She’s still fun to hang out with, anyway.”

“Yeah, I don’t doubt that.” Nico nodded. “She helped me out with some of the remodelling. She couldn’t stay long, though, she was doing that doctorate-master’s-whatever-it-is…”

“Harvard loves her,” Percy agreed. Still, he didn’t want to talk to Nico about his ex. He put a hand on his shoulder lightly, ready to let go if Nico reacted badly, but he didn’t seem to mind. “So, what brought you back to the US?”

“I was visiting,” Nico said. “It’s been a while since I saw Hazel. Her little girl’s grown so much!”

Percy studied his face while he talked. He looked proud, Percy knew he loved his niece to hell and back. He’d spoiled her rotten back while he lived in the country, and he didn’t doubt Nico had brought a suitcase full of presents for her, now that he’d returned.

He squeezed Nico’s shoulder, then let go.

Nico looked around Percy’s apartment. “Nice place you’ve got here.”

Percy gave him a half-smile. “The landlady certainly thinks so, she’s charging me rent as if this was Hudson Yards.”

Nico scoffed. “Landlords are shit.”

“ You are a landlord,” Percy reminded him.

He frowened. “No, I’m not.” Then his expression relaxed. “A bit, but I don’t really rent out my family’s properties. There are tenants –who, by the way, live there for free—, and they mind the place, that’s all.”

Percy didn’t know whether that was reliable information or not, he knew Nico was adept at twisting the truth to his benefit, but for whatever reason, him speaking about tenants in that way gave Percy an impression of what Nico could’ve looked like in the past. An earl, perhaps, or one of those rich fancy people in his mom’s shows who were called ‘my lord’, and ‘your grace’.

For an embarrassingly long moment, Percy had a very vivid daydream of calling Nico ‘my lord’ as he pushed him against a wall and kissed him hard.

He waved that thought aside.

What the hell was happening to him? Since when did he want to make out with Nico di Angelo of all people?

Nico must’ve realised Percy was staring at him strangely because he looked uncomfortable.

“Sorry,” Percy said. “You just reminded me of that guy in Downton Abbey.”

Nico rolled his eyes, but seemed relieved.

Percy made a conscious effort not to frown. It wasn’t that he usually enjoyed being observed with intension , and to be very, very honest, he was still a little bit bemused about this sudden attraction he was feeling, but Nico had had a crush on him for a while, was Percy’s interest really that unwelcome?

Percy shook that train of thought away. He was overthinking things. Nico had no idea what had crossed his mind. While he had many talents, mind reading was not one of them.

“Let’s go get something to eat,” Percy suggested. “I’m starving.”

“It’s like half past six,” Nico pointed at a clock in the wall. “You can’t be hungry already.”

“It’s dinner time,” Percy argued.

“If you insist.” Nico shrugged. “But let’s go somewhere they serve coffee, I don’t feel like having a real meal yet.”

o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o

In the end, they decided to go to a little sandwich place that had takeaway coffee and some pastries left from the afternoon.

They must’ve looked like strangers forced to share a table, Percy with a gigantic kebab sandwich with fries, and Nico with a monumental cup of coffee and two caramel croissants.

They chatted about what they’d missed, straying from the topic of Annabeth, which Percy was glad for.

Nico had wandered around his childhood neighbourhood, and his grandparents’ estate. He’d learned a bunch about his family, he’d got their affairs in order –made easier by Hades, who, despite being a sociopathic bastard, appeared to have kept things running smoothly on the di Angelo estate —.

He was happy, Percy thought. Not at all upset about being single, or so Percy guessed, since Nico hadn’t mentioned a boyfriend at all. He wondered whether being alone bothered him because he’d got used to having Annabeth beside him for everything, or if he really wanted a partner.

Regardless, his hope that his fantasy had been a passing fancy hadn’t been heeded by fate.

Every time Nico talked, Percy’s mind got caught in the slightly raspy undertone of his voice. When he spoke of things that made him happy, Percy felt as if the sun through the window melted the brown in his eyes into a puddle of warm joy. At one point, he’d sucked caramel off his thumb, and Percy had felt himself blush.

Blush. He was a 31-year-old man! Men didn’t blush.

Nico had caught his expression then, and had blushed himself.

“Sorry,” he’d said. “Not very elegant, I know. But this croissant is surprisingly good, considering the place.”

Percy would’ve defended Santi’s Sandwiches with his life, but the way Nico had pronounced ‘croissant’ had brought forward the kissing scene in his mind, so he’d let it drop.

The worst part was that it wasn’t just a physical pull.

Nico had turned his life around. He’d taken all that hurt and despair, and grown strong from it. Strong and kind. He wasn’t resented, or jealous about people having it easier than he had. He was fighting to make that happen! To have children be spared the atrocities he himself had faced. 

Percy asked, at some point, whether it bothered him to keep helping the gods, when they’d done, frankly, so little to deserve it.

Nico had shrugged.

“It’s not for them,” he’d explained. “It’s for their children. It’s hard being like us. They need a place to call home, where they can be understood and looked after. Away from the streets, and all that emptiness one feels when you think nobody cares.”

Percy couldn’t believe this was the same boy who’d wanted to exchange Dedalus’ soul for his sister’s. To him, Nico had turned from spiteful goblin into a Disney princess, full of hope and optimism. 

Although, thinking about it as Nico kept telling him or his wards, Percy couldn’t recall a time when Nico had been purposefully cruel. He’d lied, omitted the truth, manipulated, but he’d never had bad intentions. 

Even as a child, Nico had cared about fairness, despite having had very little of it himself. 

They were walking back to his place now, but Nico said he wanted to walk.

“Let’s go to Central Park,” he decided. “I’ve never been a tourist here, I deserve it.”

Percy would rather eat his own shit than pretend to be a tourist in his own city, but he could always pretend to be a kind stranger taking a photo for a nice Italian young man, so he accepted the detour.

“It’s so pretty when there’s not a war going on,” Nico said. “And huge. How can there be such a big park in the middle of one of the biggest cities in the world?”

“Lots of people come here to exercise,” he replied, unsure of Central Park’s history.

“Can you talk to the fish in the lagoons?”

“It’s a lake,” Percy corrected him. “I’ve never tried to talk to the fish.”

“There’s ponds at my grandparents’ place,” Nico said. “You should visit them someday, see if you can talk to those .”

He’d spoken in a good-humoured way, with the beginning of a smile that Percy couldn’t help but appreciate. But there was a trace of sheepishness in his posture too, as if he wasn’t sure of what he was suggesting.

“I’d love to go,” Percy told him honestly.

“Do you think the fish would talk in English or Venetian?”

Percy rolled his eyes. “Sea creatures don’t talk in English , or any other language, Nico. They… I don’t know, they communicate, I guess.”

“Che figo!” Nico said. “I wish I could communicate with Cerberus, he’s such a nice dog.”

Percy wasn’t all that sure. Yes, the dog had tried to play with a rubber ball, but it was also a line of defence in the Underworld, and Grover had said it had wanted to kill all three of them, back in their first quest.

There wasn’t much to say until Nico decided to take a selfie.

Percy couldn’t believe he even knew what a cellphone was, much less how to use one.

“I’m so not taking a photo in Central Park,” he said.

“Come on,” Nico insisted. “It’s just for Cleo, she wanted to come to visit Brooklyn House, but she was dealing with some people trying to rob a tomb, or something of the sort.”

“No,” Percy repeated. “It’s not dignified for locals.”

As he spoke, a couple of runners crossed their path, going the other way. They slowed down so they wouldn’t run them over.

“They could’ve seen me,” Percy said, once they’d gone out of sight. “What if they heard me speak, knew I was a New Yorker, and saw me take a picture?”

Nico pushed him lightly with his shoulder and muttered, “You’re so dramatic.”

“You wouldn’t go around taking photos if I strolled around Venice with you, would you?” Percy asked, turning to return to their path.

Nico thought for a second. “Depends.”

“On…?”

“Not in the Canałaso,” he admitted. “That would be undignified. But anywhere else? Yeah, why not? It’s a beautiful city, Venice. It’d be a waste not to take photos of its prettiest spots.”

Percy thought the real waste was not having visited Nico in Venice yet. He wondered if he’d be more relaxed there, in his childhood city. Percy guessed he would. He liked visiting other places, he’d even lived in New Rome for a memorable term and a half, but there was something so nostalgically comforting about coming back home. 

“Your grandparents’ house isn’t in Venice, though, is it?” Percy asked when the silence had gone on for a while. 

Nico shook his head. “It’s a small town North of the city. Not too far, specially for somebody used to American distances. Around half an hour by car.”

“If I were to visit you,” Percy decided. “I’d have to see that town, too.”

“Of course!” Nico grinned. “That’d be fun. There’s not much to do, if you like a social nightlife, but the children would love to meet another demigod! They’ve heard a lot about you already.”

“You told them about me?” Percy was surprised. 

Nico gave him a perplexed look, “Of course, I did.” Then he blushed. “I mean, you’re one of the most powerful demigods alive. You’ve gone through so much, and yet here you are, living your adult life: a university degree, a stable job, father to Moncho, the most unstable cat I’ve ever met. It’s motivating.”

His words were candid. The awe in his voice filled Percy with pride, as if owning New York’s most fuzzy cat was a feat on its own. But Nico looked embarrassed, so Percy thought of something to say to put him at ease.

“I was worried you had warned them about me,” he told Nico. “But it seems you’ve sold me better than I’ve ever managed to do so myself. You should write my CVs!”

It had the desired effect, Nico rolled his eyes with a rueful smirk. 

“I’m rather good at bullshitting,” he said. “I could write exquisite CVs if I needed a job.”

“I keep forgetting you’re a trustfund child,” Percy said. “Even after a whole afternoon talking about your grandfather the marquess and your inherited properties.”

Nico pushed him with his shoulder again. “Let’s go back to your place, I’m getting dinner hungry now.”

Percy laughed. “You should’ve had a real sandwich.”

“Unfortunately,” Nico replied grimly. “You might be right.”

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Percy didn’t have much to offer at his apartment.

At least, not something that counted as a real dinner, so he made Nico a couple of pre-made meat patties, and a lettuce and tomato salad.

“My compliments to the cheff,” Nico said. “For this gourmet cuisine.”

Instead of replying, Percy laid the salt and pepper shakers in front of him with a little more force than necessary.

“Bon apetit,” he told Nico. “If you want me to cook for you, you should warn me of your arrival more than three hours in advance.”

Nico shrugged. 

“My bad,” he said between bites of vegetables. “I wasn’t sure I was going to make it today. The babysitter didn’t arrive until a couple of days ago.”

Percy raised an eyebrow, sitting in front of Nico, with a plate of patties of his own.

“Oh, Will was going to get some days off,” Nico explained. “From the clinic, you know. But human resources took ages to get back to him, and he had to get the plane tickets to get there… and not everybody’s made to withstand the highs and lows of Trenitalia.”

The mention of Will Solace felt like a slap to Percy. 

Nico and Will hadn’t been together in ages. That is to say, Percy had heard some rumours about them sleeping together a couple of times shortly after they’d broken up, but nothing serious. The fact that Nico trusted his wards to Will meant they’d stayed in contact much better than Percy had.

“Highs and lows of Trenitalia?” He asked to keep the stab of jealousy at bay.

Nico waved a hand dismissively. “They’re not the best trains, I guess. But Will’s been there before, he should know that already!”

Had he? 

Percy thought of a subtle way to ask, but couldn’t come up with something quickly enough.

“Are you two a thing again?”

Nico frowned. “Jesus, no.”

“No need to sound so defensive!”

Nico sighed. “No, sorry. It took me by surprise, that’s all. Will and I haven’t been anything in years. He’s seeing an intern in the clinic he works in.”

“Right, yeah…”

“You look relieved.”

Percy blushed. “I’d hate to be the only one whose teenage relationship didn’t work.”

Nico smiled. He looked so sympathetic it made Percy guilty about lying.

“That’s fair,” Nico told him, putting a hand over his reassuringly across the table. “But if you ask me, it’s way more common to grow in separate ways than to have a happily ever after with the person you were dating at sixteen.”

Percy nodded, hoping he didn’t look too enthusiastic about Nico’s cool hand over his. He gave it a light squeeze, as if thanking him.

Luckily for Percy, the topics strayed away from exes and other lovers. Nico asked about his mom and Paul, and was glad to hear Paul had been made viceprincipal, and his mom was on her way to publish her third book.

“I read her mystery novel,” he told him cheerfully. “Absolutely incredible. I didn’t know who the murdered was until way past half the book! But when you read it again, it’s plain obvious!”

He told Percy whatever gossip he knew about their friends. About Reyna’s travels, and Piper’s art. 

When it was time for him to go, Percy felt a sudden sense of loss. 

“You could stay, you know,” he told Nico.

“That’s all right,” Nico said, patting his arm. “I’ve a hotel booked already. I’m only staying today, then Camp for a couple of days, and then back to Italy.”

Percy took a deep breath.

“I don’t want you to go.”

Nico frowned. “You’ve lived without me for years, I’m sure you’ll be fine once I’m gone.”

His tone was light, but Percy could see the puzzlement in his eyes.

“I—” How could he possibly put it in words? He hated talking about feelings. “I like guys now. Not now. Always? I mean, I’ve realised I like guys too.”

Nico gave him a funny look. “No offence, but people have known this for quite a while.”

“What?”

“That is to say,” Nico backtracked. “You once described Luke as ‘the handsomest fucker I ever had to fight’, that wasn’t very straight.”

“Yeah, no, I see…”

Nico’s face softened. “I know it’s confusing. Trust me, I know well. But it’s okay,” he put a hand on Percy’s arm. “If you need to talk, I’m an IM away. Or a WhatsApp, they’re less trouble.”

Percy put his hand over Nico’s. “Thank you. But that’s not— Urgh, that’s not what I wanted to say.”

“No, it’s fine,” Nico said. “Sorry I ruined your coming out moment, I really thought we knew this collectively. I really need to stop speaking over people when they have important information.”

“That’s okay,” Percy started, but Nico was on a roll.

“Remember when Hazel was pregnant?” He shuddered. “Gods, it was embarrassing, I mean what kind of brother says, ‘Yeah, I know, you’ve been craving rhubarb and you hate rhubarb’? If God doesn’t send me to Hell over that one…”

“Nico…”

“But at least I didn’t ruin Reyna’s moment,” Nico continued. “I had no idea asexuality had a name although—”

“I like you ,” Percy blurted. “I mean, I think? I just…”

He wasn’t particularly articulated in his speech today, but at least it had shut up Nico.

Then again, not only had he become silent, Nico’s expression had closed off, too.

“What?”

“I don’t know!” Percy said. “I didn’t know you’d become hot, when did this happen?”

Nico blushed. “Listen, Perce, I’m flattered and all, but…”

“But what?” Percy said. “But you can’t because you’ve got some secret sexy Italian waiting for you at home? Because it’d be way too weird after our past? Because—?”

“Because I don’t feel that way about you anymore.”

Right, well… that didn’t go as planned. Which was just fine because there hadn’t been a plan to begin with.

“It’s too late,” Percy said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

Nico’s face —far from looking stoic, as Percy expected, or repulsed, as he’d feared— was anguished.

“It’s been almost fifteen years,” Nico said. “I don’t— I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I don’t know how to feel as I once did.”

Percy could accept that. Had to accept that.

“It’s okay,” he said, although he felt anything but. “I’m sorry I threw that at you out of the blue.”

Nico still looked upset. “I wish I could say something different.”

“You don’t have to feel guilty,” Percy assured him, hoping he’d make a joke about Catholic guilt and leave it at that.

But Nico shrugged.

“You’re the person I admire the most,” he stated. “Always have and always will. You’re so many things to me, Percy. But… I don’t— I don’t think I can ever love you again.”

Love you again.  

There was a bitter taste to those words. 

Again.

Percy felt as if he’d been told a joke and only caught the punchline a decade and a half later. 

“It’ll be all right,” Nico told him, his eyes clear with honesty. “It hurts at first. But then… then you see there’s a whole lot to the world than just one person.”

Percy nodded. There wasn’t much else he could do. For the first time that evening he wanted to be alone. 

Nico nodded back, but avoided touching him, which Percy appreciated.

“I’m sorry,” Nico repeated in a low voice. “I really am.”

With a last scratch behind Moncho’s ears —silly cat had appeared just to witness Percy’s embarrassing confession—, Nico was gone.