#idk some of this stuff has probably been analyzed before by people more knowledgable and eloquent than lil ol' me

[kachimera]

🌻 >:3c

Ok ok so, I've had this thought for a while on the tv tropes page for Magus and how it said that he got away w his shit way too easily. And while yea one can partially agree (if you're from 600 ad Guardia lmao), most ppl don't realize how his time as the prophet must've been the Torment Nexus.

After decades of plotting his revenge (and having it conveniently sabotaged) he gets thrown back into the exact period where his life went to shit. He's still extremely focused on his goal and so he decides to fight lavos as he appears in this time period, but that means letting the ocean palace be built and put Zeal at risk, instead of using his skill and knowledge to stop the Queen's madness.

And not only that, he ends up making things worse for the few ppl that were kind to him in his past life (and himself, lol) by imprisoning the Gurus, and placing extra pressure on the already exhausted Schala (as in, now that the gurus are gone she's the only one that can run the mammon machine, etc)

But none of this matters since he's gonna kill the damm tick (and as a bonus, Zeal and his sister will be alright) right?

Except he fails. Not only gets KO'd by Lavos and has to see history repeat itself, but it drains him of his magic, the power he's despised and embraced ( long story methinks he has a very complicated relationship w his own magic), and then he has to see Schala, his dear sister who's he's been a jerk with, save him at her own expense. He had his single "second chance" to make things right and he lost it forever.

All im saying is that there is a reason Magus tries to pick a fight with the chrono gang while he's weakened, when he knows they can defeat him at full strength :)

(And this is also why the route of sparing him w Glenn makes me chew on wires. Tfw u see your enemy you've sworn to kill at his absolute lowest bc of his own revenge spiral and decide to spare him bc what's the point :) )

*And i could go on about the dream devourer ending and chrono cross (including the new extra ending). Ah yes fates worse than death and self inflicted amnesia haha

[tamatojam]

An Analysis of some of the weird stuff from Wilbur and Tommy’s Afterlife Conversation

Let’s first review what we were told in the 4 minutes that they spoke:

Okay right off the bat something is strange. Tommy says “Am I... Am I dead?”

Now this is odd because later in the conversation we learn that Tommy’s been in the void for a while. Why would he ask this question now, after already being there for over “two months”?

Wilbur greets Tommy and Tommy sighs as if he’s annoyed by something. When Wilbur asks if he’s alright Tommy shoots back that he’s “better than ever” in a hostile voice.

Tommy then asks “How long is left?” And Wilbur goes to check. Tommy tells him to hurry up and Wilbur says to chill and that he doesn’t have it on hand, while a LOT of paper seems to get moved around in the background (so there’s way more info than what we was read out.)

Wilbur says “[How long] for the universe to end, right?”

Tommy says “No, I obviously didn’t-“ but cuts himself off and tells Wilbur to go on. They argue for a bit, then Wilbur says that there’s a couple eons until the universe ends.

But what did Tommy really want to know?

Tommy says “You like your facts, you’re always telling me your facts.”

Wilbur says “I’m answering your question-“

Tommy interupts and says “Because that’s what I meant by that question.” Very sarcastically.

We still DON’T get the info that Tommy was actually asking about.

Wilbur asks if Tommy wants to play Competitive Solitaire again. AGAIN. So they had been getting along okay enough to compete and have a card game at the very least.

Wilbur even says “because it’s fun and we have a good time?” when Tommy asks him why he wants to play again. (Tommy does mock him for it but still.)

Tommy says “You are so lonely.”

And Wilbur says “What do you mean? We have Schlatt and Mexican Dream.”

Notice how he said “we” and not “I”. He’s including Tommy.

Tommy also denies having Mexican Dream come over to talk with them.

(Wilbur also says Schlatt’s been asleep “3 months” but Tommy says later that Schlatt was making them count despite the fact that he was only dead for “2 months.”

Idk what this could mean but it feels worth mentioning)

Now Wilbur says “I’m really happy you’re here.” And calls back to the Disc Finale when he said a space was opening for Tommy. Tommy tells him to stop talking about it, but Wilbur continues to say “Me and you were never good for that server.”

Tommy hyperventilates a bit and Wilbur mentions it, but doesn’t seem to understand why it’s happening or what it means.

Wilbur says “I know for a fact that if I come back, or if I’m brought back to life in some way, it’s definitely gonna... go to shit again.”

Tommy immediately tells him to fuck off.

Wilbur then says that after a few more months of “work” they could build a solitaire arena.

Tommy tunes out and starts to complain, but then realizes Wilbur has stopped speaking, and calls out for him before finally waking up alive.

That’s where the conversation stopped, so here’s my analysis.

Why was Tommy asking if he was dead? What was his real question? How much does Wilbur really know?

What happened the rest of the 2 months in the afterlife that we didn’t see?

Personally I think that Tommy and Wilbur were expecting Tommy to be revived.

It seems like Tommy was checking if he was still dead, and upon hearing Wilbur’s voice was pissed to know that he wasn’t alive yet.

Tommy also asked “How long is left?”

Personally I think he was asking how long was left until he was revived. Wilbur seems like he has a lot of knowledge of time (hence the large amounts of paper.) He could possibly know the future timeline of the server.

It seems to me like Tommy and Wilbur have a plan, and were waiting for Tommy to get revived.

Wilbur and Tommy, despite apparently not liking each other, were talking a lot, playing card games multiple times, and actively excluding Mexican Dream from their conversation, despite Tommy getting along really well with MD. It wouldn’t be out of the question for them to have thought up a plan.

Wilbur seems pretty set on staying dead though, and maybe all his talk of being glad that they’re both in the afterlife was him trying to also convince Tommy that being dead wasn’t too bad. Tommy wasn’t having any of it though.

But either way, Wilbur has said many times that he DOESN’T want to come back.

So it’s interesting that Tommy begs Dream to not bring Wilbur back because apparently Wilbur has “horrible plans for when he’s revived.” But why have plans in the first place if he never intends on returning?

We also never hear any of these horrible plans, just Wilbur mentioning that things would “go to shit” if he came back. (But let’s be real, that’s pretty fucking vague to say when it comes to the Dream SMP plot. Things go to shit over a shovel getting stolen.)

NOT TO MENTION that Tommy doesn’t mention Dream wanting to revive Wilbur to ANYONE. Not many people like Wilbur or Dream, so why wouldn’t he warn them? But the closest Tommy got to mentioning it was with Jack, but then he stopped and said “No, you’d probably just get in the way.” ...Get in the way of WHAT, Tommy???

Tommy and Wilbur probably didn’t get along great, obviously, but there’s definitely way more to what they were talking about. I think there’s a plan we aren’t aware of yet, and we’re gonna have to wait to find out what it is along with the rest of the characters.

DISCLAIMER:

I am in deep denial and I’m well aware that there’s a 99.9999% chance that absolutely none of this is true

This was just for fun and bc I was bored and wanted to analyze something, so don’t take it too seriously :D Hope you enjoyed!

[maybe-homestuck-now-or-something]

I really wanna talk about homestuck in relation to this post but like, idk if I wanna add to it because it might be a total derailment of the topic but homestuck is such a weird apocalypse narrative.

like... the way it handles it is so odd because earth itself is not very well characterized before the characters leave it. the characters themselves are massively well characterized, and that takes up the bulk of the narrative, but like... we never even hear them talk about school? or much of anything more than their shared interests and what's immediately happening to them. and in a way, that is kind of authentic. because when kids get together to hang out, the last thing they ever wanna talk about is dry, boring stuff about their mundane lives. they'll mostly just yell memes at each other, talk about anime, play video games... it's possible to simultaneously know nothing about your friends, but feel closer to them than ever, because you're mostly around for the parts of their life that they want to experience when they're having the most fun. you see them as they are when they have the most agency to choose that. and that might be totally divorced from the reality of how their day-to-day life unfolds.

in this way, homestuck presents these characters as people who have shed that mundane portion of their lives. they are now left with only the part that they typically share with their friends. and in reality, if a SBURB type apocalypse were to literally happen to you, it'd be traumatic as hell. but this is the place where homestuck chooses to ask you to suspend your disbelief. let's just believe that John didn't have any other friends or family to think about when the world ended. let's pretend they left zero people of any interest whatsoever behind. all they are shaking off is the society that they were obligated to participate in so mundanely. they no longer have to make any compromises with anyone... they get to fully center themselves.

okay, so that's obviously not entirely true... playing SBURB is a cooperative experience, and being friends with someone doesn't always mean that your relationship is easy. but homestuck allows the narrative to become self centered. it's about one individual and the tiny sphere of influence they have, among solely the people they've developed meaningful bonds with. it allows them to become a case study.

so when the world ends, the world is not necessarily what matters. what matters is the identities of a few specific individuals who we spend a lot of time cultivating our own connections with as a reader.

and that all becomes incredibly interesting when you consider classes and aspects.

basically, in terms of the post linked above, classes and aspects are the harry potter houses, the factions, the "what bender are you" or MBTI type... they're not the only way you could categorize the characters, but they're the most universally applicable to all of the characters that are important in the narrative. and what's interesting is just like... what classes are for, and how complicated it actually is to know what aspects are, or what they mean.

starting with classes, these are basically a series of archetypes that are specialized so that everyone has a role to play that makes them uniquely valuable to a collective. if we're considering this in terms of DnD, you can think of what classes might make for a balanced party, and how having a balanced party makes it satisfying to play the game. no one player could handle everything on their own, and at the same time, everyone feels needed. nobody is useless.

this already seems fundamentally different from some of the means of categorization that I listed above. a lot of these systems are meant to divvy up the characters into societally recognized in-groups and out-groups... people who can be identified as allies or enemies. even if the groups are ascribed certain archetypal skills, the goal is rarely so explicitly for the archetypes to work together, or cover each other's weaknesses. Avatar is probably what comes the closest to this idea, with its underlying endeavor to find harmony between the elements, but homestuck uses classes both as a way to communicate unique specialization, and as a way to unify the characters by their need for support.

and that's a little weird isn't it? these characters just shed all of their obligations to a broader society, and we're taking that as a freeing event... right? but there is a difference between society and community, and while homestuck might use the destruction of society as a catalyst for adventure, it uses the formation of community as the driving force behind the story's progression. the characters are all motivated to work together and help each other... and that doesn't always mean that it works. even within a community, one person's drive to center themselves and their own personal growth can trample others who were trying to do the same thing. perhaps not everyone in the community consents to being cooperative. perhaps the difference in archetype could drive someone to become competitive instead. and these are all value-neutral observations... no archetype is specifically acknowledged as being evil, even when they have friction with one another.

basically... this is character writing. and I find it funny that these broad categories that kids like to identify themselves with are seen as ways of flattening characterization into broad strokes like "the brave one" or "the sneaky one" or what have you, because in the case of classes, the characterization becomes deeper. and I think that's because the categories are used well... the characters all have specific relationships with the stereotypes they're ascribed by others, and the archetypes they're told they must fulfill. the classes don't define them, but they do give them something to contend with. can they fulfill their role? can they live up to their purpose? is there a place in the story for someone with an archetype like theirs? do they want to be this?

aspects get even trickier, and for this I might just link to a video I really love that covers a lot of the thoughts I've been having. it's kind of front loaded with a lot of technical talk about computer science and philosophy, and tbh I love that homestuck does actually link up those concepts with so much of it's presentation, but the main bit that intrigues me is the way the video talks about aspects as irreducible components of thought. like the periodic table of elements, but for ideas.

this drastically elevates the importance of each character's assigned category, and makes it function so much better as a tool for characterization. because, like, the aspects are actually really abstract. when someone says their aspect is "wind" or "light" you could take that 100% literally if you wanted to... but by the time you've read enough of homestuck to connect those to John and Rose, you probably understand that it's not that simple. and other concepts, such as astrology, have taught you that this is the sort of system that you're supposed to interpret, right? what is a capricorn if not a loose collection of traits that give you a certain vibe? that's what we're working with when it comes to aspects. otherwise, how would you know what void, or doom, or mind are? tbh it's actually pretty genius that astrology was worked into the comic as an aesthetic element, just so we'd all be mentally primed to do this kind of categorical interpretation... hell, even the actual signs themselves constitute a framework with which you could analyze the characters, like, how does Nepeta display typical leo traits, or how is Vriska a stereotypical scorpio... it all still works, even as you understand that each individual is more complex than the traits which support that interpretation.

in this way, the aspects are never really explained exhaustively verbatim, and are almost solely defined by the traits you've observed from individual characters, who act as representatives for what these categories actually are. or at least how they function in this instance, which is what's relevant. it's not just superpowers, and it's not just archetypes... it's both at the same time, and you come at them from a character-first perspective when you're trying to figure out what they mean. the characters inform your knowledge of the categories, and the categories act as a framework for analyzing the characters. and I love how homestuck tricks you into assuming that it has a lot of little rigid categories for the characters to slot into, and how quickly it becomes apparent that everything is way more abstract than it first appears. and yet, it all still means something. and it's really interesting to, say, compare two different time players to try to piece together what is typical for that archetype, while also accounting for their class, and trying to understand how that changes the roles they play and the ways they behave. and then you have the trolls' caste system on top of that, and the astrology angle I mentioned earlier, and there are honestly so many overlapping ways to think about it all, and I think that's the point.

[astralsweetness]

Set my soul on fire (make me wild) || Hui/Reader (M)

➣ I was originally going to write a LOT more smut (I had so much planned that I never got to!!! ugh).. Maybe I’ll have to do a part 2 or something 👀 the amount of time i spent looking at pics of his studio just so that one scene would be accurate is insane Title from the song ‘Queen of Disaster’. Very briefly proof-read, so please feel free to inform me of typos!

➣ Hui/Reader | Hui drunkenly kisses the reader without explicit consent but owns up to it bcs I’m tired of every other fic that includes this trope just glossing over it | Smut warnings include: masturbation, fingering, hair-pulling (implied), biting (mostly implied), oral + snowballing, slight pain/masochism (implied), some humiliation/degradation + some praise, referenced submissive headspace, and all of them apply to Hui lmao. Also it’s mentioned that Hui isn’t strictly heterosexual and if that bothers you then idk what to tell you

➣ “He is hanging off your every word and you suddenly feel like you have a choice to make - it’s one you don’t think about for more than a second, because you realize that you don’t need to.”

Hui knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that you had completely ruined his life just by existing in it.

It wasn’t a bad thing, necessarily. The feeling he got whenever you smiled at him, for example, was definitely not a bad thing. The way his skin tingled whenever you brushed against him was.. bothersome, but not a bad thing. The way his heart sped up and beat almost painfully hard whenever he indulged in his regular skinship with you wasn’t particularly bad, but he’d stopped doing that recently just as a preservation strategy so he didn’t die in the next year from a heart attack. (He was a naturally touchy person, and he wasn’t completely sure how he felt at having to stop that with you specifically.)

The way his mind constantly drifted to thoughts of you was starting to become an issue though, as was how he tensed up whenever you got even moderately close to him. You’d started to notice, and he had no idea how to tell you that it was happening because of that one time the rest of the boys had ‘accidentally’ forced the two of you to be pressed against one another in an elevator, and that just the knowledge that your breasts were pressing against his arm had him fighting to not get hard like some sort of teenager. He wasn’t totally sure how successful he’d be the next time if something similar happened.

Still, you were, as far as he was concerned, completely unattainable, and that in itself was a problem. He’d experienced his fair share of heartaches and heartbreaks before, but this was.. different. At least in those circumstances he’d gotten a definitive answer.

With you though, he couldn’t even bring himself to ask, had resigned himself to pining over you like a kid with a crush.

If you hadn’t ruined his life then you sure as hell had made it harder.

.｡..｡.

When Hui gets a knock on his studio door around six pm he’s not particularly surprised – lately his members had taken to dropping in to make sure he had eaten something that day. (Usually he had not.)

He is surprised to see you standing alongside Yuto when he opens the door, so he glances at the maknae suspiciously – Yuto seems perfectly innocent, but Hui wasn’t exactly sure how much of that was an act.

��Hyung, did you eat today?” The younger boy holds up a bag as an offering – it doesn’t look like the regular convenience store food the boys would usually grab for him, so Hui accepts it hesitantly.

“I was originally just going to bring food for Hyunggu, since he was apparently starving in his studio or something, but then he mentioned that you never ate either, so..” You’re looking at him like you’re vaguely disappointed, and it makes a funny feeling tighten in his chest so he pretends to be completely absorbed with looking through the bag. He’s not sure where you got the food from, but it was mostly stuff that he actually liked. “I went to a place Hyunggu wanted, but he told me what he thought you’d like from there – I hope he was right.”

“This – you didn’t have to do this.” It’s nice not being the one buying things for once, he has to admit that to himself, but he still felt a bit bad that you’d felt the need to bring him anything at all. “Thank you, though.”

“You’re right, I didn’t have to. I wanted to – just like I wanted to bring Yuto food too when Hyunggu told me he was also here.” You’ve perched on the edge of his small leather couch and he wonders if you’d ever been in here before – he honestly can’t remember, though with how hyper-aware he was of you it was pretty safe to assume you hadn’t been. Yuto’s lingering near the door quietly, watching you and he interact, and he feels like the younger is analyzing what was happening.

“Thank you for it – I should go eat it now, while it’s still warm.” Yuto’s gentle bass of a voice is almost soothing, but Hui shoots him a look anyway because he suddenly knew what was happening. His maknaes were downright masterminds when it came to plans like this, and he can’t think of any way to get Yuto to stay before you bid him a cheerful goodbye as the Japanese boy smiles at the both of you as he carefully closes the door.

“Should I go too? I don’t want to distract you or be a bother or anything.” Your question is so sincere that he just looks at you for a few moments, tries to figure out a way to say ‘Yes, you do distract me and bother me, but definitely not in the way you’re thinking’. He finally settles on a single head shake, clearing a small portion of one of his desks to place the food on.

“Did you already eat?”

“No, but I’m fine.” Your answer is quiet, and he glances over to see you gazing around his studio – he feels vaguely embarrassed, though he’s not particularly sure why. His studio is remarkably small, it’s true, but he’s not actually ashamed of anything in it.

“You’ve never been in here before?” He’s pretty sure you haven’t, but there’s no harm in confirming it. You’d been focused intently on reading the names on his soccer jerseys, but once he speaks you turn all that intense concentration on to him and his mouth goes dry.

“Nope. Not that I remember, anyway, and I’m pretty sure I’d remember that.” You’re smiling at him and he doesn’t know why that’s something you’d remember, but your smile makes him not really care about the particulars. “Now eat, Hui.”

He raises his eyebrows at the parental tone you’ve adopted but says nothing, knowing there was no way he could get out of it now – and honestly, he didn’t really want to. He was really fucking hungry, and the meat you’d brought him smelled delicious.

It’s only as he’s taking his first bite (which is excellent by the way, Hyunggu apparently had a very good taste in restaurants) that he remembers what you said about not eating and makes a stupid split-second decision. (He’s never been one to think about things like this too much before blindly doing them, which was probably a problem, come to think of it.)

“Here –“ He holds the strip of bulgogi out towards you, one hand underneath, the sound of his heartbeat a constant background theme song. “Say ‘ah’~” And it’s so easy to pretend, to act like he’s just being friendly, to tinge everything he says with a bit of aegyo – you roll your eyes at him but accept the food anyway.

It’s not easy to ignore the intimacy of an act like this, to ignore the way he’s hit with a sudden yearning deep in his chest to be able to feed you food whenever, like a real significant other could.

“Thank you, but no more! This food is for you.”

“Okay, okay.”

The silence that slips back afterwards is mostly comfortable – you seem determined to make sure he eats, so while he does so you go back to gazing around his studio. Hui feels like there really wasn’t that much to look at, but you hadn’t looked bored yet, taking in the contents of his desk and then computer monitor. He realizes belatedly that he still had the windows open for some of their unreleased tracks, but when he glances at you again you’ve already moved on from them, so he leaves them where they are.

“Are you still seeing that one guy?” It’s easy conversation, light and carefree even if the topic makes him feel a bit bitter – as much as the knowledge of you seeing other people ate away at him he knows it would bother him more if you didn’t feel comfortable talking with him about it at all. Being able to be a close friend you confided in was something he cared more about than not feeling jealous.

“Oh – no, I’m not.” Your tone is carefully disinterested, but he can see through it well enough by now. Still, he doesn’t say anything, just turns so he’s fully facing you, focused and listening. “We just had a – confliction of interests I guess you could say.” You laugh softly at your wording and he laughs too, even if he doesn’t totally understand what you mean.

“And that means, what, exactly?”

“He thought women should be submissive during sex, and I disagreed.” ..Oh. Hui’s gaze darts away as he tries to process that – it wasn’t that you talking about sex was surprising. He was used to talking with you about intimately private things like this, though that was before this annoying infatuation with you had manifested into the tiresome nuisance it was now. Still, you’d never exactly stated your.. affinities towards any one thing.

“Ah.. is that so?” He sounds much hoarser than he’d meant to, like he’d choked on something – he still can’t look at you, because suddenly all he can think about is what that meant, if it meant leather and pain or lace and sweetness, if it meant scathing words or saccharine praises.

“Are you blushing?” You’re leaning forward off his couch, grinning and trying to get a look at his face, one of your hands on his knee to keep him from turning away from you - and he realizes that yes, he is fucking blushing, and the place you were touching him felt like it was blistering with heat. “Well, at least you’re not getting all upset with me for injuring your masculine pride or whatever by being a woman who doesn’t like to –“

“Okay! Okay okay, please take mercy on me!” His slightly exaggerated whining is met with your laughter, and his face feels like it’s on fucking fire, but he can’t look away from you now that he’d accidentally met your gaze.

“Sorry – you’re just so cute when you’re flustered!” And he knows he shouldn’t take this as anything more than friendly teasing, just like whenever Hyunggu would call him ‘cute’ whenever he got scared of something, but your words still make something short-circuit in his brain and he swears to everything that you will be the death of him.

“I’m – sorry things didn’t work out with him, but you’re really going to kill me if you keep this up.” And it’s not even a lie – he is ninety-eight percent sure that if you keep talking like this without giving him time to recuperate then he was just going to over-heat and pass out.

“I should go anyway, I’ve distracted you long enough – I didn’t go too far, did I?” You’ve stood up now and are looking down at him with a worried smile, so he just shakes his head because he’s pretty sure if he tried to talk he’d say something stupid like ‘No, I definitely didn’t mind hearing you say that, and while you’re at it please tell me some more’. “I’ll talk to you later, okay? Make sure you eat it all!”

He manages a “goodbye” that sounds sort of like he wasn’t dying, waving to you until you leave and his studio door beeps to signify that it was locked again.

“For fuck’s sake..” Hui forces himself to breathe deep, tries to will some of the heat to leave his face. He really didn’t know why he was getting so flustered over something like this – he wasn’t usually the type. Was it just because it was you? Because he definitely wouldn’t mind if you preferred to be dominant?

Hui curses again, a quiet ‘fuck’ that doesn’t really encompass everything he’s feeling but seems to be the best he can manage. Fuck indeed. He was so fucked.

.｡..｡.

The next time Hui’s in his studio he does his best to forget about the conversation the two of you had had last in there, tries to forget the way his entire body had lit up when you touched his leg, tries to forget the way you’d smiled so sweetly when he fed you.

It doesn’t go well.

To be honest, he didn’t do things like this often – he was busy most of the time, and if he was in his studio then he usually had something he needed to work on instead. But being in this room less than twenty-four hours after you had off-handedly mentioned that you liked to take a more dominant approach in the bedroom had him unable to concentrate on anything else, though he had made a valiant effort for an upwards of fifteen minutes.

With an agitated huff he’s pushing his chair back from his desk with more force than necessary, moving to make sure his studio’s door was locked before taking a seat on the edge of his couch. For a moment he contemplates if he’s really going to do this, runs an aggressive hand through his dyed silver hair and then curses the tingling pain it brings that he doesn’t quite hate as much as he should in the moment.

There’s a lingering feeling of shame and a much stronger feeling of embarrassment covering his body when he reaches for himself, though it only lasts for a few moments until the feeling of the rough friction of his palm through his jeans overpowers anything else.

Hui tips his head back with a soft moan before he remembers he needs to keep quiet, bites his lip when he unzips himself so he can wrap his fingers around his cock more easily. He’s rough, impatient, wants to finish fast but also likes the slight bit of pain – he full body shudders when he finally tugs the waistband of his briefs down and feels the cold air hit him, falling back onto his forearm. He knows, for a fact, that there’s a small bottle of lube in one of his drawers somewhere, but he doesn’t bother looking for it – he’s slick enough as is, and the slight pain keeps him grounded, keeps him from getting into it enough that he wouldn’t be able to monitor his volume.

There’s a slight urgency surrounding it all that is always there when doing something like this in a semi-public place, and he gives into it this time and allows it to urge him on quicker, fucking into his fist like he was going to get caught at any second.

He wants to drag this out, wants to get this over with, wants to think about anything else or feel the need to pull up some dirty video on his phone to finish, but all he can think about is you, you, you – he wonders what it would be like if you were the one stroking him instead, if you’d take pity on him or would be ruthless, if you’d whisper sweet compliments into his skin or humiliate him with biting words, if you’d bite at his neck, he really wanted you to bite at his neck and mark him up –

He orgasms with a choked off cry, hastily shoves the back of his wrist against his teeth to try to keep quiet as his hips buck sloppily into the loose circle of his fingers. He’s never been particularly quiet, and another wave of arousal washes over him as he imagines you telling him to keep it down, warning him that you’d have to gag him otherwise. He whimpers pitifully at the thought and tries to shut his mind down, feeling overstimulated both physically and mentally.

His fingers are sticky, the warmth quickly drying on his skin, and he feels much too hot, a thin sheen of sweat clinging to his skin alongside a layer of shame. He’s not totally sure why but he feels like he’s just made everything worse, like somehow he’d crossed a line and now being around you was going to be ten times harder.

He also feels like this was inevitable though, that his attraction to you had been building for so long that if he hadn’t found a release for it somewhere then he would have gone insane.

Or maybe he’s insane now, now that he’d done something this dirty and depraved. He really didn’t know, gaze still just a bit glassy and unfocused.

What he did know was that he was completely and utterly fucked at this point, collapses onto his back and lets his aching forearm finally take a break as his eyes slide shut in defeat.

.｡..｡.

“You’re not serious.”

“Of course we are, hyung – why, do you have a problem with it?”

Hongseok is taunting him, like he always does, and Hui would usually play along and tease him back but he feels completely thrown off guard and does nothing more than blink at all of them incredulously. His lack of a playful reaction in return has Hongseok softening a bit at the edges, but Hyunggu isn’t nearly as merciful.

“What’s the problem with it? You’ve been wanting us to do something bonding like this for a while, and now we have a time to do it, a reason to do it, and someone to make sure we don’t screw it all up by doing something stupid when we’re drunk.”

“We didn’t force her, hyung, she offered when we asked.” Yuto’s trying to alleviate Hui’s concerns, but he’s way off base – still, he’s trying, so Hui manages what he hopes is more smile than it is grimace in the Japanese boy’s direction.

“We want to drink, she doesn’t like drinking, and we have a few days off because Road to Kingdom ended – what are you so worried about?” Changgu asks him, kind and sincere as always – Hui doesn’t trust him for a minute, but he can’t fight the natural urge to tell everyone what his issue was anyway. God, he hated them sometimes. (They were his family, and he supposed sometimes you just had to hate your family.)

“You all know my – my problem with her.”

“Yeah, we know you want to –“

“Date her.” Wooseok cuts Shinwon off at the last second, modifying whatever it was his hyung had been about to say – Shinwon looks both annoyed and scandalized that Wooseok had thought he was going to say anything else. Hui does his best to ignore them.

“You really thought I’d be okay with her being the one watching over us while we drank? Knowing that none of us can drink well?” He swore he could literally feel his stress levels rising – it wasn’t like he was an embarrassing drunk or anything, but he knew he had an incredibly low tolerance for it, and he also knew that if the entire group was drinking then they were just going to end up egging one another on until everyone was truly smashed.

“Well, you’re going to have to be okay with it, hyung.” Hyunggu, always the hard-ass, insists forcefully – he doesn’t say it unkindly, but he says it in a tone that brooks no room for disagreement. It’s more Kino’s voice than it is Hyunggu’s, scarily similar to when they’re in the practice room.

Hui knows he could override it with hyung or leader seniority, knows Hyunggu is watching him carefully to see if it’s actually something the elder couldn’t deal with.

He ultimately says nothing, just sighs in a way that lets everyone else know he’s acquiesced – the resulting cheer brings a small smile to his face, even if he still feels uneasy about how the planned drinking night would go. He knew that when it came to both his members and you in one building with alcohol involved there was no way he wasn’t royally fucked.

.｡..｡.

The night goes exactly as you expected it to – none of the Pentagon members could hold their liquor particularly well, which meant that after an hour and a half they were all at their limits. (It was honestly kind of funny to watch. They were all so intent on getting one another drunk that they weren’t really even paying attention to the way everyone was sabotaging each other by constantly keeping the cups full.)

Still, that meant you were mostly trying to make sure they didn’t kill or injure themselves somehow. It wasn’t too hard of a task, though you did have to threaten both Wooseok and Hyunggu to keep them from climbing on top of the only coffee table Dorm A had. You were pretty sure the glass would just shatter under their combined weight. Hyunggu had targeted you with an impressive pout after that, but he’d lost interest pretty quickly when Yuto had fallen asleep - not that you blamed him, the rapper was sort of adorable when he slept.

It also meant that when Hui got up to get water – he swore that’s what he was getting, at least – you followed him. The man was a menace in the kitchen when he was sober, you were almost afraid to imagine what he’d manage to do when he was drunk. Just his presence alone might cause the stove to burst into flames or something. He was seriously cursed.

“Why are you following me?” His question is just a bit slurred together, almost sounding more like he was incredibly sleepy instead of drunk – you figure it’s because he hadn’t had as much to drink, but you weren’t really sure. You hadn’t been monitoring how much any person drank, more concerned with keeping them alive. (They could manage to injure themselves sitting on the floor sober, so being drunk just made your job several times harder.)

“Just checking.” You murmur – he raises his eyebrows at your comment but doesn’t say anything else, turning to grab a glass from one of the cupboards. You watch him for four whole seconds before you decide he’s about to knock several of them to the floor, stepping forward to reach for it instead. Maybe you’d been wrong about how much he had drank.

“I could have gotten it..” His petulance makes you smile, doing your best not to laugh at the little “hmph” he gives you when you inform him that no, he probably could not have.

“Just let me take care of you, you big baby. At least this way I can make sure you’re getting only water.”

“That is all I was getting..” He’s still sulking when you hand it to him, face flushed from the culmination of everything he’d drank tonight. You force your gaze away when he begins to drink – even drunk off his ass he was still an infuriatingly confusing mix of handsome and cute, and you resolutely did not want to watch his throat when he swallowed.

The sound of glass hitting a bit too hard on a solid surface startles you – Hui’s set his glass down incredibly close to your hand, depth perception just a bit fucked. You want to open your mouth to scold him for the close call, but his body heat is incredibly distracting, and he’s raising one of his hands and your breath catches in your throat.

He cages you in against the dorm’s sink, one hand on the side of your neck – to angle the kiss better or to steady himself you weren’t sure – with the other bracing himself as he presses his lips to yours. He’s so ultra-hot against your body, tastes of the same fruity drink Shinwon had been pressing into his hand all evening, the metal of his belt buckle biting into your stomach.

It’s not until he gives a soft breathy moan into your mouth that you realize you’ve been kissing him back for the past thirty seconds in his own kitchen, heedless of the rest of his members in the adjoining room or the fact that he was drunk enough he could barely stand without assistance. You press at his shoulders with minimal force, missing the pressure of his lips when he instantly moves away.

“What..?” He looks immensely confused, and you feel awful for kissing him back when you weren’t totally sure he was even aware of what he was doing. “Why’d you push me away?“

“Hui –“

“You kissed me back, so why’d y –“

“I just don’t want you to do something you’re going to regret later, Hwitaek.” You hope the use of his full name will get through to him – it seems it does, in some regard, because while he chokes out a half-disbelieving and half-tormented laugh he still pauses and blinks at you slowly like he was trying to carefully choose his next words.

“You act like I haven’t wanted to do this since the first time I met you.” And oh, his voice is just a bit huskier, a bit slurred on the syllables, but he says them carefully and you know that, at the very least, Drunk Hui meant them.

The problem was that you didn’t know if Sober Hui would agree.

“You should go to bed, Hui.” You say this instead of saying all the other things crowding the tip of your tongue, instead of grabbing him by the collar and kissing him again – alcohol took away a person’s consent, and you weren’t about to take a chance to pressure Hui into doing something you weren’t sure he wanted in the first place.

“No one else has gone to bed yet..” Now he’s sulking – but this is normal, this you can deal with. You can pretend like your lips didn’t still tingle where his had been touching, can pretend like you weren’t already addicted to the feeling.

“That’s not really a valid argument considering Yuto’s fallen asleep twice already.” You counter, watching the way he bites at his bottom lip in frustration – you know it for what it is, and it still seems coy to you instead, like he’s trying to seduce you.

God, what was wrong with you? He was just pouting now, brow furrowed, and you feel absolutely pathetic for seeing his current actions as anything other than what they really were.

It didn’t matter how attractive or desirable you found him, you couldn’t in good conscience do anything while he was so inebriated.

“Come on, Hui – let’s get you to bed so I can get back to the other boys to make sure they haven’t done something stupid, like coercing Hongseok into wrestling Changgu shirtless. Again.”

“It wasn’t that stupid –“

“They literally broke a bookshelf with their bodies, be quiet.” The banter comes easily, is normal and comfortable – it’s easy to pretend like he hadn’t just been kissing you, like you hadn’t just been fantasizing about him seducing you of his own free will. His skin is warm underneath your fingertips, flushed from the alcohol, as you direct him by the bicep down the hall and to his room.

You’re rarely in here – he’s rarely in here, actually, considering how much time he spends at his studio, how often he sleeps there. Because of that his room is sparsely decorated, an incredibly faint lingering smell of the cologne he occasionally wore clinging to the edges of some of the surfaces. It’s a heady scent that you do your absolute best to ignore, because it brings to mind images of him whenever he bothered to get extra dressed up, devastatingly handsome.

He lets you guide him over to his bed with zero fuss but turns back towards you when his knees hit the edge of it, one hand coming up to caress your cheek. It’s a deceptively gentle action, and you know you should really stop him, but you don’t move when he leans in to kiss you again. Underneath the flavor of alcohol there’s a distinctive taste that is purely him, and you know if you weren’t addicted to kissing him before then you definitely were now.

When you nip at his bottom lip and he lets out a shuddering moan you realize what you’re doing, try to pull away as fast as you can – this wasn’t fair to him, when he wasn’t in his right mind – but he catches you with a hand frantically landing on your waist, dropping his head to litter kisses along your jaw and then throat. You try to ignore the way your legs go weak at the feeling.

“Please –“ It’s more of a whine than a plea, but you feel it against the skin of your neck all the same, the words dragged along your pulse-point like a searing flame. “If we don’t now, then I don’t think –“

“You need to sleep.” It takes every ounce of willpower inside of you to ignore the wetness pooling between your legs, the insistent hard press of his cock against your thigh, the way his whimper when you push at his chest vibrates along the skin of your shoulder where he presses one last desperate kiss. “We can – we’ll talk about it in the morning.” You continue to push him gently back until he’s sitting on the edge of his bed, gazing up at you through his eyelashes, flushed and looking five different kinds of wrecked. Your entire nervous system threatens to shut down at the sight and you’re not sure that you can keep your promise about talking about it tomorrow.

He’s apparently not sure of it either, expression pinched and distraught when you press him insistently by the shoulders back onto his bed. His hair is ruffled and his eyes are glazed (from the alcohol or lust, you weren’t sure), his lips slick and kiss-bruised –

You tear your gaze away and force yourself to breathe again. When you look back Hui’s thrown a forearm over his eyes, bottom lip snagged between his teeth, breathing labored.

It takes ten seconds before you’re out of the room, clicking the door shut as quietly as you can, trying to erase the imagery of tears staining his face.

.｡..｡.

When Hui wakes up it’s to a pounding head and the vaguely disgusting feeling you get when you sleep in your clothes on top of your covers. His entire body hurts and he makes the same promise he always does when he wakes up like this, the same one he’s never kept – he’ll never drink again. Or, at the very least, he’ll never drink that much again.

His whole room spins when he pushes himself up, groaning softly at the way he feels like the world tilts dangerously on its axis as he slides his legs off the edge of his mattress. It’s only because of this world-shifting that he notices Wooseok asleep on the other side of his bed, all his long limbs drawn in as close as possible, his brow furrowed in his sleep.

He wonders when the maknae had ended up here and how they’d decided on rooms while he goes to the pain-staking process of draping one of his extra blankets over the tall boy. The world is still too bright (even with his blinds shut) and every step he takes feels a bit like walking through mud, but when he sees the way Wooseok slightly relaxes after being covered it all feels worth it.

The trek from his room to the kitchen feels like it takes much longer than it should, but at the very least the suspiciously long stretch of the dorm gives ample time for his headache to shift from excruciating to manageable. He was going to find the bottle of Aspirin, take all of them, and then go the fuck back to sleep. (Okay, maybe one of those was an exaggeration, but it sure felt like he could use that many painkillers.)

“Good morning.” He almost chokes when he hears your voice, a sudden onslaught of memories causing his face to heat up – you weren’t even looking at him, busying yourself with the small skillet Hongseok kept religiously cleaned. Hui wasn’t sure if his nausea was due to the smell of food or the way all he could think about was how he had – stupidly, why the fuck had he done that – kissed you and then tried to get you into bed with him.

“..Morning.” He hopes you take his lackluster response as a product of his hangover, sliding into one of the chairs at the kitchen table so he can bury his head in his hands.

“That bad, huh? You’re going to have to learn to tell Shinwon ‘no’ when he offers you drinks, you know.” He looks up to see you placing what he assumes is an Aspirin down on the table in front of him, already turned back to grab him water. He’s not sure if he’s glad you mistook his suffering as the results of a hangover or not.

“Thanks.” He waits until you hand him the glass before he takes the medicine, downing the rest of the contents when he realizes just how thirsty he was. He can feel the weight of your gaze still on him and it makes the blood in his veins feel like ice, knowing you had to remember the exact same things he (suddenly) did.

“If it makes you feel any better, Hongseok is way worse off than you right now. I honestly can’t believe he’s such a lightweight sometimes…” Your tone is sympathetic, but all Hui feels is a slight smug happiness at there being someone else who was, at the very least, suffering more than he currently was. At least Hongseok hadn’t had the chance to do anything stupid with someone he liked last night, like Hui had. “Honestly, it’s sort of impressive.”

“Huh?” He’d stopped listening to you by pure accident, forces himself to refocus on you – which just causes his eyes to instantly lock on to your lips, face heating up because not only does he remember kissing them, he remembers what they felt like and tasted like and he has to fight to tear his gaze away. God he was so fucked.

“How many lightweights you have in your band. In a group of nine you’d think it’d be more even, but, like.. almost all of you can’t hold your liquor. It’s kind of impressive.” You’re back to focusing on whatever it is you’re cooking – he only just now notices you also have ramen boiling in their small stove to the side, the dull bubbling of the water having blended into background noise long before he’d realized it had been there.

“Are they okay?” He’s sure they are, but there’s some deeply ingrained part of him that feels required to check – the soft smile you give him in response makes him feel like he’s in high school again whenever his crush would focus on him and him alone, and he isn’t sure what to do with that feeling now that he’s twenty eight years old, so he looks down at his empty cup instead.

“They’ll be okay. Wooseokkie ended up in your room – I’m sure you noticed him.” You wait for him to glance at you and nod before continuing. “Hongseok and Changgu ended up in the same room together, which worked out well considering Changgu’s probably the only one who could sleep through Hongseok’s pitiful whining about his hangover anyway. Hyunggu and Yuto shared a room, I think – which I guess means Shinwon ended up alone. Any guess on whether he’ll be happy or upset about that?”

“It could be either.” He responds, mostly because it’s true (Shinwon’s moods were hard to predict sometimes) but partly because talking about his members was something he could easily do, something that felt familiar and normal. It felt safe and far away from the topic he didn’t want to think about. (But he was thinking about it anyway, could remember your warmth when your body was pressed against his, could remember the way you kissed him back bruisingly and made him want nothing more than for you to wreck him every day of his life.)

“Oh, right – Yanan’s in China, by the way, and Jinho’s in the military.”

“Thanks.” His response is a dry remark at the way you were trying to tease him – like he didn’t know where Yanan was and wasn’t constantly in contact with the soon-to-be actor, like he didn’t think about Jinho every single day and wonder if he was doing well. “What would I do without your incredibly timely information.”

You just roll your eyes at him and turn to the ramen – he wonders who you’re making it for before realizing it was probably for whoever woke up hungry. That realization makes a certain spot in his chest warm, and he tries to ignore it because for fuck’s sake, not now.

“I knew it was going to go badly..” He mutters to himself – you hum questioningly and he blinks, surprised you heard him and instantly trying to reach for a half-truth that you’d believe. “Drinking so much, I mean.” Not totally a lie, which meant he could say it and have it sound mostly believable. To his relief you seem to take it at face value.

A silence stretches out between the two of you – it seems comfortable for you, but he feels like his skin is crawling, waiting for the moment you spring the dreaded conversation on him. He can’t think of any more topics to bring up to stall it.

“Hwitaek.” The tone of your voice makes his heart drop into his stomach and freezes over any warmth he’d been feeling because he knows the conversation that is now seconds away from happening is going to be one he didn’t ever want to have. “I think we should talk about what happened last night.”

“What happened?” He tries to brush it off like he didn’t remember, but his voice wavers just a bit and he can’t meet your gaze and he knows that you don’t buy it for a second.

“We have to.” Your voice is soft, gentle, and he hates it because he feels like you’re trying to be as kind as possible, and that didn’t bode well for how the conversation was going to go. “Did you do what you did because you were drunk, or because you were drunk and wanted to?”

Your gaze has him pinned to the seat, his own eyes wide and brain trying to stutter through any excuse he could think of, and when that didn’t work, trying to think of some way he could play it all off as a joke, or as him just being an overly friendly drunk.

You won’t believe anything but the truth, he can tell, and he was a shit liar even when he wasn’t hungover and panicked.

“I –“ He doesn’t know what he’s going to say, probably something stupid like ‘I love you, and I don’t know when I knew that but I’ve always wanted to kiss you, I was drunk but it let me do what I always wanted to do’ but he’s saved by Hyunggu walking into the kitchen, rubbing at his eyes and looking a bit less like hell than Hui felt.

“I think I’m dying..” The maknae grumbles, and your attention shifts to him and getting him something to help his headache. Hui tries to feel relieved that the conversation had been dropped, but the look you send him once over Hyunggu’s shoulder says, ‘We’re not done talking about this’ and he feels sick all over again. He was so fucked.

.｡..｡.

It isn’t until he escapes to his studio later that day, having basically inhaled an entire cup of coffee to try to fight off both his hangover and his exhaustion, that he realizes that aside from all his personal problems with how the night before had went he had essentially pushed himself on you and then not allowed you an avenue to talk to him about it.

And that makes him feel even more sick, because there had been a chance you’d just wanted closure of some kind considering he had basically drunkenly assaulted you, and all he’d done was avoid the issue entirely when you tried to talk to him about it.

Fuck. Fuck, he was the worst.

He’d been so worried about rejection that he hadn’t even thought about the fact that you’d never consented to being kissed – or, fuck, being propositioned for sex – in the first place.

He runs both hands through his hair aggressively, ruffling it in the slightly painful way he usually did whenever he did something he wasn’t happy with – he feels anxiety sitting cold in his stomach, fear that not only would you hate him but that he’d ended up hurting you or breaking your trust in him all because he’d gotten stupidly drunk.

Pushing down the steadily rising nausea, he reaches for his phone and almost calls you, deciding at the last moment to text you a simple ‘You’re right, we need to talk’ instead. He’d already fucked up once, he didn’t want to force you into the conversation by calling you unexpectedly. As an afterthought he adds a quickly typed ‘I’m sorry I tried to avoid it before’, because despite how nervous the thought makes him, he is genuinely sorry. (Sorry for everything, in fact.)

He tries to busy himself with unfinished tracks while waiting for you to respond, listens to the same snippet of some demo Yuto had sent him six times without really ever hearing the notes, does his absolute best to ignore how one of the last times he was in here he’d ended up touching himself to the thought of you. With everything that had happened since he feels fucking disgusting at the thought of it.

When his phone vibrates he essentially lunges for it – it wasn’t like he’d been making progress on anything anyway – heart hammering in his throat as he opens your messages.

‘It’s okay. In person or by a call?’

He wants to fucking cry at how nice you’re being, at giving him the option to choose a less personal route – but he knows that you were the one who’d taken the brunt of the incident, that all he was really worried about was rejection and being embarrassed. His fingers tap out ‘I’m embarrassed, but it’s up to you’ before deleting the first part before sending. He didn’t want you to feel like he was trying to pressure you into one choice or the other at this point.

‘Knowing you, and seeing how you reacted this morning, I think you’d die if we did it in person lol I’ll call you’

He tries to fight the weak smile your text causes – you always make him smile, and this is no different, but he can’t tell if you’re genuinely okay or not through text and it worries him. You’d seemed fine this morning, almost painfully nonchalant – too nonchalant? He wasn’t sure if he was overthinking things now or not – but he’d been hungover and tired.

You don’t call right away, and he resigns himself to waiting out another five or so minutes in this sickening state of anxiety, selecting and re-selecting the exact same clip of audio over and over just so he can pretend he’s doing something, so he can try to occupy his brain.

When his phone does ring he slams his knee into the table in surprise, high-strung and nervous. He barely even feels the tingling pain.

“I’m so sorry.” He blurts out the instant he answers, muttering a soft fuck under his breath afterwards. He’d wanted to give you time to speak, but he was buzzing with an anxious and guilty energy that had him speaking before he even realized he was.

“What?” Your question sounds more surprised than legitimately confused, like you hadn’t expected him to just start talking immediately. He rakes a hand through his hair again and then keeps it there, fisted, trying to ground himself with the tiny bit of pain as his breathing speeds up.

“About last night – I’m so sorry, I just – I was drunk, and that’s no excuse for what I did, I wasn’t thinking and I’m so fucking sorry. Are – are you okay? Am I allowed to ask that?” He feels like he’s right on the verge of panicking and he hates it, because you were the victim here, not him.

“I –“ You only pause to collect your thoughts for a heartbeat, but he feels the moment stretch on endlessly, sees ninety different scenarios play out and discards every positive one immediately. “Hui, you’re – god you’re so sweet.”

“What?” It’s more of an exhale than a word, because you didn’t sound angry, or hurt, you just sounded slightly amused and grateful, and he doesn’t want to get his hopes up but you didn’t sound upset.

“You’re right, what you did was wrong and shitty, and you suck for doing it.” You pause to breathe, and it reminds him he needs to breathe, his gaze darting along one of his computer monitors without really seeing anything. “But it’s sweet of you to apologize. You should, but most people wouldn’t.”

“I should have this morning.” He murmurs quietly, fingers gripping his phone so tightly they’ve begun to ache. “I was selfish and didn’t even think about it. I really am so fucking sorry.”

“I know, Hui. I believe you. You suck at lying anyway, if you weren’t sorry then I’d be able to tell.” You’re laughing again, and he tries to join you, but it sounds weak. His entire body feels like it’s melted into nothing – he didn’t even care if you rejected him at this point, you didn’t hate him and that was good enough. “But I kissed you back, Hui. Multiple times, actually.”

“…..what?” He can’t think of anything else to say – he had remembered you kissing him back, of course he did, but it all sort of blurred together at one point and he wasn’t sure that any of it had definitively happened. “I – I know – I mean, I thought you did, but you could have just, I don’t know, been trying.. to.. get me to go away by not resisting..?” Some drunks became irate when told ‘no’, and while he knew he wasn’t one of them – and he had a feeling you did too – that didn’t mean you hadn’t just been trying to protect yourself.

“God you’re sweet.” Your sudden, repeated statement is quiet, almost like you hadn’t meant him to hear it – he doesn’t say anything, doing his best to just breathe, doing his best to act his fucking age and not like some kid who needed instant reassurance. You were the one who deserved reassurance in this situation. “I kissed you because I wanted to, Hui. It’s very kind of you to be so concerned, but you’re about the least threatening drunk I’ve ever encountered. I could have probably pushed you off me with one hand – actually, I did push you off me with one hand, when we were in the kitchen.”

“I – you – you wanted to.” It’s a statement because he’s stuck trying to process this new information, because this wasn’t a rejection (he thinks it’s not, at least), because you didn’t hate him, because the way all the anxiety induced adrenaline had leeched out of his body was leaving him feeling even more exhausted than before.

“I actually wanted to tell you that I was sorry – since I kissed you back and all, but you were drunk so it wasn’t really like you were –“

“I wanted to – I wanted you to.” He says the words too fast, trips over them, but he knows you understood by the way you went silent on the other end. He appreciated the apology, really, he did, but not only did he not think it was needed, he also couldn’t stand listening to you apologize for kissing him back when he had been dreaming about this moment for way too fucking long.

And he wants to tell you that, but you’re still silent and he’s beginning to wonder if he somehow read this entire situation wrong.

“..I don’t know what to say now.” You admit softly, and he lets out a silent exhale when he realizes you’re just being shy. He wasn’t used to that side of you, but already he knew he found it adorable, just like the rest of you.

“You can’t be more embarrassed than me, if you are then neither of us will be able to talk.” He’s laughing quietly now, feeling.. not quite comfortable yet, but definitely on the way there. You hadn’t really made any declaration of love for him, but you had reciprocated his kiss, at the very least.

“Oh, you need me to be confident?” There’s a teasing tone in your voice that is more commonplace than the shy one from before, and he already knew just by the sound of it that whatever you’re going to say next is going to affect him in some way.

“It’d be helpful.”

“Then I’d say we need to try that whole kissing thing again, but without the alcohol. It really ruined the experience last time, don’t you think?” He suddenly can’t breathe again, mouth opening and then closing at your statement – not that you care about his lack of a response, since you continue without him saying anything. “It could have led to so many fun places if you hadn’t been drunk.” A pause, where his heartbeat pounds in his head and his mouth has gone dry. When you speak again he can tell you’re doing your best to keep up your confident façade. “..Is that okay with you?”

“Yes.” He says this on a relieved breath, face still hot but body covered in excited, adrenaline filled tingles. You were really putting him through an emotional workout this morning, but at this point he wouldn’t dare complain. “Please. I’ve wanted –“

He cuts himself off before he can say anything more embarrassing, about how long he’s wanted to do something like that, to hear you say something like that, how he’s fantasized and day-dreamed about it for way too long. He flushes even more when he can hear your gentle laughter on the other line.

“You mentioned something like that last night. I wanted to ask about it actually –“

“Oh, wow, I am super busy right now doing leader things, just.. so busy. I couldn’t possibly talk to you anymore, I’m just so extremely busy.”

“Jerk.” This time when you laugh he laughs with you, a real laugh instead of the weak one he’d offered you earlier. “Okay, fine, go do your suddenly important work – but I’m definitely interrogating you about that later, it’s just too interesting to pass up. Bye Hwitaek.”

“Bye.”

It’s so like you to cut the conversation short whenever he mentioned his work – you never wanted to genuinely distract him, and it was one of the things he liked about you.

Loved about you.

Fuck. Fuck.

He can’t contain his laugh of disbelief and giddiness, setting his phone down on his desk so he can cover his face with both of his hands, running them through his hair and pushing it back away from his eyes.

You said you’d wanted to kiss him. You had kissed him. He hadn’t imagined it.

You’d said you wanted to kiss him again.

His phone vibrates and he lowers his hands to glance at it, sees it’s a text from you, and already he can feel that warm, lightweight feeling in his chest just at the sight of it.

God, he was so fucked – but with how this had turned out, he really couldn’t complain at all, nor did he want to.

.｡..｡.

Trying the ‘kissing thing’ again, as you had put it to him on the phone, turned out to be a nebulous concept – not that Hui really expected anything else, but it was a bit disappointing to finally get an answer (a positive one at that) only to be unable to meet up with you again. Not that getting to text you often wasn’t wonderful – it was, and he felt the need to make that abundantly clear (though he was pretty sure you knew that, considering he actually paid attention to his phone now just so he could respond to you) – it was just a bit frustrating to finally have permission to do the things he’d been dreaming about, like kissing you, and then be barred from doing it by forces outside of his control.

As it was, it was nearing the end of the second week since the ’confession’ had happened, and he was only just now finding time to head over to your place after working all day. It was late (nearing four am, he noticed with a groan) and his muscles ached from practice and his eyes ached from composing all day but he would be damned if he’d let another chance to spend time with you slip by him without leaping for it.

“You look so attractive.” It’s the first thing out of your mouth when you see him at your door – Hui laughs the soft sort of laugh he does when he’s a bit nervous, bending to unlace his shoes. It’s not rare of you to compliment him – in fact, you usually did, because it was true and he deserved all the kind words you could heap on him – but something about the circumstances makes it feel different this time, charges the air with a sort of excited, nervous tension.

“Really? I came over right after practice, I can’t look that good..” He trails off, shy, and you look him over again. It’s true that he looks a bit tired and run down, but the dim low lighting of your entryway paints his skin golden and throws his profile into a mix of soft shadows and gentle lines, illuminates his silver hair into a gradient of golden blonde to dusky gray.

“You look good, trust me.” It’s all you can say – everything else gets stuck in your head, muddling itself before it can get to your tongue. You hope to one day be able to properly put into words just how beautiful he is to you, but you’re in no rush to do it now, you have time. “Are you sure you’re going to be okay tomorrow?”

“If I passed up on this chance then I might legitimately die.” He says it so seriously that you laugh, and the way his expression smooths out into a warm smile has your heart beating erratically. God, he didn’t play fair at all.

“Well, if you’re sure..” You take the chance to step closer to him during the slight lull in conversation – he blinks at you once, still smiling, but the smile freezes on his face when you nonchalantly place your arms around his neck. You can feel the way he’s tensed at the new, intimate position, and it’s absolutely adorable how he clearly wants to reciprocate in some way but resolutely keeps his arms at his sides. “You –“

“Can I kiss you?” He says it all in one breath, interrupting you, rushed and embarrassed but also like he craves it, like he might die if he didn’t get your permission to do so. It’s the cutest thing in the world and a surge of heat floods your bloodstream at the tone of his voice, the look in his eyes. “Please.” He tacks it on at the end, a quiet whisper, so fucking good and sweet and perfect.

“Of course, baby.” The words are barely out of your mouth before he’s surging forward to connect your lips, his hands landing on your waist and a soft sound of pleasure escaping him as a sigh. The pet-name of ‘baby’ is one you learned that he liked recently, and while it had been deliciously fun to tease him with it through text and over the phone it was something else entirely to see the way he responded to it in person, the rich sunset color of his eyes softening into something more gentle and pliant.

The way Hui kisses now is slightly different than when he’d been drunk – it’s more assured, more precise, and while it still holds that level of desperation from before there’s something a bit less rushed about it, something more confident and not as nervous as before.

There's something infinitely better about doing it this way, Hui thinks, better than anything he'd fantasized about or hazily remembered from when he'd been drunk. Every single one of his senses is attuned to you and you alone, and nothing exists outside of the two of you kissing, the weight of your arms on his shoulders, the feeling of your nails lightly scraping at the nape of his neck, the rough feeling of your clothing beneath the pads of his fingers at your hips. Your lips press and slide against his constantly before parting for a few brief seconds, and he chases the faint swipe of your tongue against his bottom lip with his own, whining when you don't instantly give in to his demands.

By the time you nip at his lip he's completely given up on leading the kiss, opens his mouth and moans high and sweet when your tongue leaves a blazing trail of pure fire in its wake. His lips are kiss-bruised and tingling, the sensation imprinting on him that this was real, you were really kissing him, he wasn't going to suddenly wake up and realize it was all a dream.

When you pull away from him he follows you for a moment, stopping only when you cup his cheek in one hand and slide your thumb across his bottom lip. His gaze is glazed and he looks so thoroughly wrecked from simply getting kissed that you feel another surge of heat flood your system.

"Good?" Your whispered question barely makes it through to him, but when it does he blinks a few times to force the haze from his mind and nods, grip on your waist tightening, grounding him. You’ve never seen someone look more adorable.

“Yeah.” His voice is slightly hoarse and you give in to the urge to kiss his throat tenderly – when he tilts his head back with a sigh you trail your lips up to his jaw. “Yeah, it’s – great.”

You can feel the heat of his skin against your face, leave open-mouthed kisses from the spot under his ear (which makes him shiver in a way that you immediately catalogue in your mind) in a line down to the collar of the light-weight hoodie he’d worn for practice.

“I wish I could mark you up here..” Your lamentations are met with a literal fucking whine from Hui, one of his hands coming up to grip unsteadily at the crook of your arm like the mere comment had made him unsteady. “Oh? Is that something you’d want? For me to bruise you up so prettily that there’d be no way you could cover it?”

He nods, not trusting his own voice, head full of fantasies where you could do that, where you’d be able to sink your teeth into him, suck dark marks into his skin that wouldn’t fade and that his members would tease him about. (But even in his fantasies his members are there, a constant, and he knows that there’s no other timeline better than the one he’s currently living in.)

“Hwitaek.” You say his name softly, wrap a hand around the back of his neck to make him look at you – his gaze is disconnected, lingers on your lips before your silence registers as he meets your eyes. “I think we should talk about what we both want out of tonight.”

“Yeah – okay, okay.” Fondly, you watch as he takes a small step back and forces himself to become more present, a bit of clarity re-entering his eyes. You notice that he hadn’t stepped far enough away that either of you had to stop touching one another though, and it makes a part of your heart warm with affection. “That’s probably a good idea.”

He lets you lead him further into your house, glances around in interest but doesn’t stop you – he thinks (hopes) he’ll have more time later to become acquainted with this place.

“So, Hui –“ He perks up at you speaking to him, and it’s so cute that you have to stop just to recollect your thoughts. He peers around your room with thinly veiled interest but keeps glancing back at you like you’re the most interesting thing in existence. It’s flattering and adorable. “Considering we’ve talked about it before you know that I prefer to be more dominant, and you –“

“Find it incredibly hot?” He finishes your sentence for you, a happy little smirk on his face at your surprised expression as he darts in to kiss you once, quick and chaste and filled with delight.

“I – I was going to say, ‘you’re okay with it’, but what you said was so much better.” You’re smiling now too, still a bit shell-shocked – really, what sort of luck did you have for an incredibly attractive and sweet guy to also be down for being submissive for you? – but definitely not complaining. You cup his face in your hands and draw him towards you again for a sweet kiss – it lingers just on the side of ‘too passionate’, but neither one of you have enough self-control to reign it back in. You can feel his flush underneath your fingertips. “How did I ever get this lucky?”

“Should I say the cliché thing about thinking the same thing?” His voice is soft, one of his hands coming up to slip underneath your own, fingers curling around your palm. “Because I was.”

“You really are a hopeless romantic sometimes, you know that?” You couple your rhetorical question with another kiss – you were one hundred percent addicted to them now, you knew that for a fact. “We should really talk about what you’re comfortable with happening tonight, Hui.”

He must not be thinking clearly (he’s not, all he can think about is you and how you keep kissing him and how it’s all he’s ever wanted in his entire life) because he says “anything” in a strained whisper, breathless and needy before anything has even happened.

“Anything?” You can’t hide the surprise in your voice, though you try to soften it at the last second – he flinches anyway, like he was embarrassed with how eager he had come across, his gaze somewhere at your hip now. “’Anything’ is a dangerous thing to say, Hwitaek. What if all I wanted to do was finger-fuck you?”

He knows you were joking – he can hear it in your voice, the way you’ve tried to lighten the mood to make him more comfortable. He appreciates it, but it does absolutely nothing for him considering the effect your words had on him. “…I wouldn’t mind that.”

“Really?” Again you’re surprised, but this time you seem slightly eager – he raises his gaze to assess the situation, and yes, you did look interested. The excited, nervous little fire burning in his core feels a bit stronger suddenly. All he can do is nod, mute in the face of your presence, your power, your effortless aura that has him sinking down gratefully onto your bed at the slightest push of your hand against his chest.

Your fingers press at him, hard, and he feels breathless when they slide underneath his hoodie and t-shirt both in one go, hitch it up to above his navel. He thinks about all the marks you could leave on him there, hidden under clothing between promotions, and the sly grin you share with him when your fingernails rake a teasingly shuddering line down his side makes him think you have the exact same ideas he does.

Those two articles of clothing are lost quickly, dropped somewhere over the side of your bed as you kneel between his legs and kiss him until he can’t breathe, a wonderful feeling that has him drifting along in hazy bliss until he realizes what you’re doing.

“You’re a bit more dressed than I am, suddenly..” He tries to make it teasing but it comes out as something soft and reverent, and your lips when they smile at him are a slash of color that he can’t tear his eyes away from. He can feel your curious fingers dipping under the waistband of his athletic joggers and he does his best not to lose his fucking mind at the connotations of it.

“That’ll come. Later. Let me focus on you first, Hwitaek.” And how could he even argue with that? Why would he argue that? He’d have time to see your body later – and to be completely honest, he was perfectly happy with seeing however much of you that you were comfortable showing him.

(Still, he thinks, as you gently push him to lie down on your bed, he hoped you weren’t too uncomfortable with showing your body. As you drag the fabric of his briefs slowly down his legs he thinks about how much he really wants to eat you out, and what a shame it’d be if you weren’t comfortable with that. Regardless, he’d find some way to pay his respects to you and your body, even if his regular go-to’s turned out to not be an option.)

“You’ve done this before?” He doesn’t sound nervous, just questioning, having slung a  forearm across his eyes. You let him leave it there for now, knowing he must feel a bit vulnerable in his current position.

“Mhm, I have – and you?” It’s almost laughable how casually the two of you are speaking, like you hadn’t just been feeling him up and wasn’t currently in the middle of warming lube on your fingers. When he nods you hum and use your clean hand to grip him under the knee, pulling it up high enough you can place a kiss on the inside of it. An amused laugh leaves him in the form of a surprised exhale at the surprisingly tender action.

“I have – don’t worry, I’m not new to all of this.” You can’t see his eyes but you can see the rest of his face, see that he’s still smiling – you keep a close eye on his expression as you circle his rim teasingly, watching with rapt attention the way the smile disappears as he tenses with a soft sound that’s not quite a gasp before forcing himself to relax again.

“With women or men?” You keep it casual, careful to keep your voice unaffected, and he laughs again but it’s more disbelieving this time, pulls his legs up so his knees bracket you on either side.

“Yes.” Hui simply answers, and it’s your turn to laugh, your free hand smoothing soothing circles into his bare hip. You think he looks absolutely beautiful like this, spread out just for you and you alone, a small notch in his brow from the way his expression has twisted as you carefully slip your first finger in.

“You’re really cute like this, all vulnerable and naked for me.” You’re teasing him, testing the waters – from the way he flushes though, the little hitch upwards that his hips make, you think you might have just discovered something fun. “Hui, do you like me talking to you like that?”

He doesn’t answer you right away, moves his arm so he can look down at you between his legs. Something about it must get to him, because he just looks at you for a moment or two, like he was trying to imprint the visual in his mind.

“You can add another.” He says instead, all breathy and soft like you’d already ruined him, wrecked him into pieces. It’s incredibly endearing, you think, dropping your gaze to where his cock sits red and shiny and untouched against his lower stomach, a small mess of pre-cum already smeared onto his skin. That was also endearing.

“I’ve barely even stretched you yet..” Your disbelieving murmur is clearly heard by him, and you raise your gaze to meet his as you test the waters with a second finger. It’s definitely tight (tighter than you would have preferred, if only for his own safety), but Hui just moans and shifts his hips more towards you, digging into your pillow as he tips his head back. “Oh – Hui the size queen, huh? Is that it?”

He laughs, but it tapers off into a sound closer to a moan than anything else. “I don’t think I’ve ever been called that before.”

“Does it suit you?” You keep one hand splayed flat on one of his hips – he’s doing a wonderful job at not moving overly much, but by doing this you can feel every small tremor that goes through his body, can feel his muscles tense each time he forces himself to stay still. “If I end up fucking you one day am I going to have to make sure it’s sized big enough to totally wreck you?” Your question is coupled with an inquisitive upwards quirk of your fingers, and he nearly kicks you in surprise at the liquid arousal that floods through his body at the feeling. (You teasingly bite at his lower calf for it, and the soft sound he makes as you press your teeth into him is definitely something you file away for later.)

“I know you’re just teasing me, but -“ He licks his lips, tries to gather his focus again as you add a third finger. It burns in such an exquisite way that it’s hard to concentrate on anything else except for the current points of contact between you and him.

“Do you want me to stop?” A pause. “Hui, look at me.”

He obeys, meets your analyzing gaze and offers a slightly strained smile as he thinks about your question – though he doesn’t think for very long, a burst of wonderful, embarrassed heat curling across his chest and through his stomach when he lets his upper body drop back down to the bed, shaking his head ‘no’.

“Oh, Hwitaek..” You sound vaguely pitying, and he hates it, but he loves it. “You’re just a little boy who likes to be teased and humiliated, is that it?”

He feels so small with you talking to him like that, like his body was three sizes too big for his skin and he was burning up from the inside out – whenever the heat becomes too much all he has to do is open his eyes and see you looking at him (you’re always looking at him, and it takes his breath away because the way you watch him makes him feel like he’s something special, something that should be treasured) and suddenly everything was okay again. It was like you were the one stoking the flames of his desire, but you could also cause that blistering heat to ebb away whenever it became too much.

He realizes he hasn’t answered you yet and frantically nods, heart threatening to dissolve into something sticky and sweet at the way your expression softens.

“Well, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but we’re not going to delve too deep into that tonight without talking about it in more detail later.” He nods, because he really does understand (despite the slight burst of disappointment) and he appreciates that you want to talk out what his limits are first. “Besides, how am I supposed to talk to you like that when you’ve been so good for me this entire time? So pretty and vocal.”

He can’t help the whine that tears itself from his throat at your phrasing – it didn’t matter what you were saying to him anymore, every single word embedded itself into his skin and worked its way through his body like an electric shock.

“Oh? Sweet boy - are you an adorable whore for both degradation and praise?” He doesn’t even bother saying anything this time, just shuts his eyes tight - he knows you already know the answer, can read him so well it’s almost like his desires were written out on his skin in black ink. “That’s so cute. You’re just so responsive to everything, aren’t you? I love that - anything I say or do I’ll get a direct response to, won’t I, Hwitaek?” You wait until he nods, his eyes still shut, before taking the opportunity given to you. Your lips press a teasing kiss into the line of his pelvis, giggling softly against his skin when he gasps above you. “Yeah, just like that. So beautiful, Hui, and all for me.”

Yes, all for you he thinks, and even his thoughts are getting mixed up and hazy now because you’ve wrapped your fingers around him loosely and he is so slick already, the feeling of your thumb swiping across the head of his cock, tracing the lines of precum down the shaft to where they’ve collected on his skin causing his entire body to twitch in a mess of stimulation.

“Oh, baby, you’re so wet for me already.” He can’t focus on anything, can’t think of anything, hears your voice through the haze like it’s faraway and he’s drifting underwater. He tries to force himself to be more present, tries to physically drag himself out of those depths, but you’re cooing at him sweetly and running your fingers over his cock softly, and any amount of shame he might have felt at having fallen so far into this headspace is eradicated by the sugar-laced kisses you press into his side.

“You really can’t keep quiet, can you?” Your voice is sweet but laced with amusement, and you can feel the way he throbs in your hand at the slightly degrading comment. “You sound like you’re going to cum just from three of my fingers – are you, baby? You going to make a mess of yourself before we even get to do anything?”

“Fuck..” Hui’s entire body feels like it’s on fucking fire, and when you duck your head to suck a bruise onto the inside of his thigh it’s all he can do to keep from crying out even louder. You were right, he couldn’t keep quiet, his head swimming and his fingers curled so tightly into your sheets that he could barely feel them anymore. “I’m –  you’re –“ He can’t concentrate, can barely speak, and he knows his words come out more as whines anyway.

“Do you think it’ll be okay if you cum now?” You’ve stopped moving entirely and his whole body feels like it’s buzzing, his hips trying to rock back onto your fingers or up into your hand with no real success as the haze slowly recedes from his mind enough for him to be able to form full sentences

“Y-yeah.” He pushes himself up onto his forearms to be able to look down at you, groan catching in his throat when he sees the way you’re peering at him openly, watching him with beautiful eyes and a graceful flush on your face, one of your hands slick with his pre-cum and the other still wickedly deep. He’d never been more sure of the fact that he loved you than this exact moment. “If – if you give me a little bit afterwards, it’ll be fine.” He knows he sounds breathless and wrecked already, but you smile so sweetly at him anyway, like he was something precious to you, and he feels like the ground and the bed he was lying on had just suddenly disappeared at the sight.

And then you’re lowering your head and wrapping your lips around him and it’s all he can do to keep his eyes open – you hadn’t eased him into it, hadn’t given him any indication of your plans at all. One moment you were asking him about his refractory period and the next you were doing things with your tongue and mouth that he couldn’t even begin to fathom, your fingers once again brushing against that spot deep inside of him that has him keening.

He’s not going to last much longer; he knows that with a sudden certainty that has him trying to warn you but is more disjointed pleas for you to not stop than they are anything else.

One of his hands grasps for your shoulder blindly when he hits his peak, fingers curling into your skin as he spills himself onto your tongue. It’s blindingly hot and you can see the way he fights to keep his eyes open to watch, brow furrowed and mouth open almost like he was in some sort of pained ecstasy as you continue to finger-fuck him through it until he’s trembling.

When you stick your tongue out at him tauntingly and show him the mess he made Hui groans from deep within his chest like you’re torturing him, sits up abruptly and crashes his mouth into yours. It’s messy and dirty and he licks into your mouth aggressively, chasing all essence of himself off your tongue and onto his own with a moan that rattles your bones. You do your best to withdraw your fingers as gently as possible but he whimpers at the feeling anyway, drops his head to begin kissing a sloppy trail from your jaw down to your neck.

“You’re so dirty..” Your head is spinning and you feel short of breath - each time you inhale his chest knocks against yours as he heaves his own breaths, though he refuses to pull away from your skin for long enough for him to be able to recover as quickly. You think you feel him murmur a soft sound of agreement to your statement against your collarbone.

As soon as you can wrest a big enough part of yourself back under control you lean back, holding him securely away with your thumb and forefinger gripping his chin. Hui looks at you with an expression of wrecked reverence, the perfect picture of debauchery, and you know that right here, right now, at five something am in your bedroom, he would do literally anything you asked – that at this point in time it was no longer your room, with the window showing glimpses of the outside world, the sounds of cars going past. This place, this moment in time, it was now something disconnected and intangible, where he had given you explicit trust (perhaps foolishly, considering how inchoate your relationship was) to control and lead him. To take care of him in whatever way you see fit.

And you know that right here, right now, in this nebulous place that the two of you occupied, you would strive to make sure he never regretted giving you that permission.

“Hwitaek.” Your voice is breathier than you expected – you sounded like you’d been kissed hard. You sounded like you were in love. “Hwitaek, you are messy and crude – you are such a dirty boy, and you’ve hidden that from me for years.” He is hanging off your every word and you suddenly feel like you have a choice to make.

It’s one you don’t think about for more than a second, because you realize that you don’t need to.

“And, Hwitaek – you are so perfect for me.”

.｡..｡. .｡..｡.

“You know something?” Hui says it casually, out of nowhere, hand still rubbing nonsense patterns into the skin of your lower back after having crept underneath your shirt some twenty minutes ago just for the skin to skin contact. He’s not focused on anything else but relaxing in his bed at the dorm with you, thoughts about producing and writing lyrics and being a leader far from his mind.

“Hmm?” Your head rests on his chest, listening to his heartbeat – it’s a comforting sound, if not slightly faster than average, and when you close your eyes you can hear it mix with the soft (and sometimes not so soft) sound of some of his boys arguing or laughing or just living somewhere else in the dorm, outside his shut door.

He still hasn’t spoken so you lift your head and gaze at him, admire his features as he looks back at you with an expression so tender you’re almost afraid to have the weight of it on you. His hair is back to brown now, cut a bit shorter than before, and you stretch an arm out to run your fingers through it lazily, watch as he leans into it but keeps looking at you.

“I think you’re perfect for me, too.” His voice is warm, probably what sunshine would sound like if it was an auditory thing, and you blink at him in confusion for a few moments before you understand what he’s referencing, press your smile into his until it turns into a gentle, surging kiss.

It’s not quite an I love you, something adjacent to it, almost there but not exactly.

And neither of you say those words yet, just smile and look at each other and press kiss after sugared kiss into each other’s skin, interlace your fingers and marvel at the way affection seems to blossom for one another in both your ribcages at the simplest of actions.

The two of you weren’t in any rush. You had time.

[mikeshanlon]

iwwv anon and PHEW OK. I def did not expect that essay and now I feel bad cause I KNOW my thots r not gonna be articulate or right. nonetheless! i think Oliver does qualify as an unreliable narrator cause hes. very oblivious but not like... Richard papen (who is a whole ass clown don't get me started on tsh) but not like addy from dare me(I will support till the day I die that dare me is da like I WILL die on this hill) who sees what she wants to see. 1/?

i think he just... thinks that his friends r diff ppl than they actually r? that doesnt rly make sense but yea. what I mean is that everything the characters do is coated in that empathetic view Oliver has which is usually wrong? so we don't get an objective look into the characters. meredith is my girl like I love the hot popular girl trope deconstruction but at the end of the book she's not at a great place like she's w someone that doesn't love her like she needs to be loved... 2/

I guess the most probable ending is that James never meets Oliver again and that everyone is kinda stuck on what happened but that's soo sad and I really don't want to think abt it. ngl iwwv wasn't like my fave book ever and I really don't understand why people are so obsessed with dark academia sometimes but what i rly liked abt the book is that despite how fucked up everyone is and how toxic they r to each other they do at heart care abt one another...3/

like I rly liked that esp cause at that point the only other da book (other than dare me!) that I had read was tsh and godd every character is so fuckinh annoying and they all hate each other. i was super confused by it till I saw someone saying that it's satire and I felt my mind explode. I feel like this is so long but I didnt rly properly answer all you wrote sorry! I think its a pretty good book tho it has some crazy quotes like hold awn Im gonna look at the highlighted stuff on my copy.. 4/

Were you in love with him?” “Yes,” [...]Yes, I was.” It’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I’m in love with him still. LIKEEE PHEWW OK OK OK. WE OUT HERE. that line literally made me go crazy. I'm so sorry for any spelling mistakes or like general mistakes I made here English isn't my first language, it's 1am and I wrote this in the notes app w/o looking it over. so like.. NOT a professional review lemme tell you. 5/5

 Ahh im so sorry I did not see this before I yeeted for a month!!!

Oooh okay first of all dare me as a DA… I’ve only watched the show but like yeah I see the Elements for sure.

Also yeah I can understand what you mean abt Oliver being an unreliable narrator now… Ig my view of unreliable was more like they are purposefully twisting the truth or omitting facts or just literally don’t know shit but I get how personal bias can make the narrator unreliable. I do think the assertion that Oliver thinks his friends are different than they actually are makes sense. He sees James in a very positive light and though I like James a lot and think he is better than, like, Richard, he definitely has darker moments and manipulates Oliver at times (again I’d like to think it’s not the most nefarious thing in the world but like him just being shitty bc he’s in a dark place and he one, wants to do anything he can so Oliver doesn’t figure out he fought Richard so Oliver still thinks of him the same way/bc he knows Oliver would do something stupid like get himself arrested for James; and two, is very jealous that Oliver is with Meredith after Richard dies and has sort of a somewhat positive outcome from Richard’s death versus James being riddled with guilt and anger). And yeah, the probable ending is they never meet but I refuse to acknowledge that so LGNRG. Also that line makes me go CRAZZZZZZZZZZY!!! There are so many great lines, both using Shakespeare and on their own and its like okay give me a moment im going bonkers…

Personally, I haven’t read that many dark academia novels yet (bc for some reason i can barely finish a book rn sigh) but the concept interests me. I think what’s compelling is the setting/atmosphere of like ~mysterious college vibes~, and the idea of a sort of niche, obsessive bond and pursuit of knowledge with a tight knit group of friends (and the like inherent homoeroticism in every single DA elrngenrg). Like Dead Poet’s Society (the film I haven’t read the book) isn’t Dark in the same way most other dark academia is by like, obsession and death and manipulation (though of course there are dark elements with Neil’s storyline), but I think the other building blocks of academia are present there in a more wholesome way and you can see why people are drawn to that idea. As for the more Dark aspects I think it’s interesting to analyze things like group psyche, obsession, manipulation, etc, like what went wrong for everything to take such a dark turn???

 But, like everything else, it really has to be done well or else its just like okay….… I’ve tried to read TSH twice and I may try again but from the 100+ ish pages I read I totally get what you mean. IWWV is so interesting to me bc the characters are all very compelling and multifaceted and I like that they are a close friendship, we come in after 4 years of them spending all the time together and to me that is apparent. Like you said, we can see fissures and problems especially as the novel continues but there is care there between them. That also makes the decision to let Richard die much more interesting and sinister imo, as well as how all of them interact with each other after he dies, and how the roles of the group change without their “leader” so to speak. Also, maybe it’s just bc I like Shakespeare, but I think the academia part of IWWV is so much more accessible compared to TSH. Like I don’t know every Shakespeare play or anything so I didn’t understand every nuance or was like immediately like oh this is from Cymbeline or whatever the fuck, but you could understand the gist of things and it made sense that they spoke in Shakespeare lines bc that’s all they’ve been doing for four years and also theatre kids are Like That. Their pretention also provided any Layers to the story, like the parallels between the characters they play and their own arcs, how some of the lines echoed their own thots, foreshadowed, or they were able to say things through Shakespeare (I’m thinking of like, Oliver realized he loved James during Romeo and Juliet, the foreshadowing that James was going to ruin Richard’s life and that he dislikes Meredith/Richard when he quotes Mercutio at the start “A plague o’ both your houses”, the exchange Oliver and James had onstage and had that kiss during King Lear before Oliver was arrested,etc.) (Also I think the structure of some of the dialogue being formatted like a play really helped make it feel more realistic and immersive). Versus TSH which is just so pedantic and dense and hard to follow at times im like I get they are smart but what??? And maybe that’s part of the satire aspect (or maybe im dumb) but like donna I read TGF I know you are pretentious and info dump abt random obscure shit anyways so erglknerg. Like to me there was a Point to all of the academic Shakespeare stuff in IWWV and it was the soul of the book, and M.L. Rio made it very interesting—like the way that the directors reimagined the plays and had Julius Caesar be like a modern political play, the cool mirror shit in King Lear, the Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet performances where they did them at events and interacted with their environments (which were one of my favorite parts of the books bc I just think that concept is so interesting), etc. For TSH the shit they did literally just felt like “okay look at them they’re smart see you can’t even keep up!” like okay… I felt lost a lot and only like snapped into reality whenever Henry (?) was like oh… murder….. and even then I was like idk what this dude is saying but like he’s being darksided LMAO. And I also agree that it’s just like… Richard being thrown in the middle of this group could lend itself to some cool ideas but its hard to believe that he fits into the friendship group and hes just like hell yeah I love Greek so much and lets go kill this guy other than like okay ur gay and stupid and just want to impress Henry or whatever his name was (which he was but I digress). It’s just not as impactful to me as this close friend group falling apart. Ik TSH fans might be angry if they see this (and of course I haven’t finished the book so my perception may be warped but I also kno many ppl felt that way u did) bc I’ve seen ppl say IWWV is just like TSH but “lackluster” or whatever and while I can see some parallels (mostly b/w Richard and Henry and Alexander and Francis), I really think M.L. Rio expanded upon common DA tropes and the interesting parts of TSH but made it her own and interesting and oh yeah there are actually multiple compelling female characters and LGBT characters (and no incest)!!!

[kendrixtermina]

You seem like pretty knowable about Edelgard lore and motivation, so I've been meaning to ask. What exactly was the catalyst that made Edelgard hate the Church of Seiros so much? I know they've done a ton of shitty stuff in general, but what made Edelgard dislike them personally? I looked on the wiki and it either wasn't on there yet or I just didn't understand it. (I want to be able to eventually explain it to my sister who so far thinks Edelgard is evil, she hasn't finished the AM route yet).

IDK if this is something one can be “knowledgeable” about I just played the same game everyone else did, I’m no authority I just like analyzing fictional works for fun.

And whoever added that recent lengthy edit to the wiki article… let’s just say their opinions are discernible.  But they might say the same about me. 

Good vs Sympathetic

First there are some interesting premises hidden in this question - why would a personal motivation be more convincing that a net negative impact on the world at large? It’s the latter a much better reason? 

Like there’s a big difference between saying “they had legit reasons for their feelings/actions” (you could say this even about rhea) and saying that someone’s a force for good. Being understandable and consistent isn’t goodness; IT’s just good writing, and “they can’t help it, of course they acted like this, look at what happened to them” is more an argument for someone being sympathetic/understandable than good. Murder or manslaughter? How much can we blame them for their bad deeds. 

You might have very good personal reasons to hate someone or something, and pursuing that hate at the expense of others could still be a very selfish thing. There are your feelings, and then there’s how you act on them. There are many ways to act on the same feeling. 

Conversely, it is possible to be repulsed by evil or mismanagement just because of its own wrongness/stupidity. If you read about how some evil deed happened to total strangers in a foreign country, you would still be angry and you might even vote, sign petitions or attent protests so it doesn’t keep happening. 

If the Church of Seiros is doing objectively bad stuff, is that not enough to oppose it? Not only does Seiros/Rhea rule everything from the shadows, she’s accountable to no one, and she’s doing a bad job at it. TWSITD are her enemies too but they’re running rampant under her nose and in the recent past, deposed the Emperor and assasinated the king of faerghus to install their own agents.

Rhea may not have intended to let xenophobia, inequality, corruption, obsession with crests and instability to fester but that’s still what happened - and people can’t file complaints because she’s ruling in secret and anyone who complaints in branded a heretic. Almost everyone in the cast has been affected by those issues - the “peace” at the start of the story is illusory. Also, this whole shadow war between Seiros and Agartha is being carried out on the backs of the ordinary people who have no say in anything. At least if you know who the king/lord is you know who to rebel against if there’s no bread.

It’s no good. And as the heir to the largest territory, Edelgard is one of the few people who have a chance to stop it. It’s not easy for her either, given that the empire is thoroughly infiltrated by TWSID agents who would never have let her butt touch the throne if she didn’t play ball, or at least not without a bloody fight that might well end with the empire in splinter factions, aafter all, her father had already been reduced to a puppet ruler (see what happens to Dimitri when he returns to faerghus - Arundel is said to mantain his own personal army)

And since it was one of her ancestors who sold out Fodlan to seiros for power, she might feel that it’s her responsibility to put it right.

The real power isn’t with the people or even the nobles and the rulers of the three factions - it’s with Rhea and TWSITD. They keep burning up people without end for their own causes that have nothing to do with the people themselves, they both see humans as “beasts”… Shouldn’t that be stopped? 

To stop evil is a much better motivation than petty personal grudges.

Edelgard’s thinking

The first thing to understand with Edelgard is that she’s a big picture thinker through and through. For better or for worse she looks at and decides everything based on how it will look in a history book a few centuries down the line. (For prime examples of evidence look at the Dorothea support or some of her lines after fighting Dimitri)

This isn’t to say that she doesn’t have bias or personal influences like everyone else, but she values and strives for objectivity. That means questioning herself alot (something you wouldn’t see that much on routes other than her own as she keeps the tough leader face on in public), it means putting what yields the best results over what she wants or likes, and it means looking at the greater whole. 

She doesn’t just want to get revenge on the specific people who wronged her; She wants to ensue that it never happens to anyone else. She wants to undo the whole situation that allowed for it to happen - even if that means postponing her own revenge and working with those she hates the most. This is very much her putting efficiency and the end result above her own feelings. 

It may well have been Thales and his henchmen who cut her open, but they couldn’t have done it without the cooperation of the corrupt imperial nobles. (likewise, they worked with xenophobic kingdom nobles who didn’t like Dimitri’s dad making peace with the foreigners to orchestrate the Duscur nonsense)

Why were they in power? How were they convinced to allow for such a thing and give Thales the ressources he wanted/needed? Because of the social system that Seiros set up so that crests are equated with power.  

There will always be assholes and evil people, but how much damage they cause depends on wether the system they operate in lets them get away with it.

Also, even when you look just at TWSITD’s involvement, Edelgard’s siblings were butchered to make her a mighty tool for the shadow conflict. Just as Rhea in turn did her own experiments to revive sothis and “regain all that she lost”

So even on the most direct level, what happened was a result of the shadow conflict. 

And it is instrumental to keep in mind that Edelgard wants to remove both shadow factions. 

Her beef’s strictly with them - she knew that the Kingdom and Alliance would probably fight her if she went against the church and was fully prepared to pay that price, but that’s a side effect of going where the enemy is - she handed out letters and pamphlets informing ppl of the church’s evils and asking them to choose sides. 

TWSITD have fearsome power and have infiltrated the empire, but they’re few. The Church got its claws in most local governments. Why not throw the power of the former at the latter, to take down the stronger enemy, and then take out the Agarthans when your power’s consolidated? It’s a decision not about whom to fight, but about whom to fight first. 

Also because of her big-picture thinking she looks at the absolute numbers. In her own words, she’s going for the path of least casualties. 

PPl tend to judge harm caused by action stronger than harm caused by inaction but actually the harm is the same. Acting to remove the two shadow factions will have a cost (the war) but not acting also has a cost - that the dysfuction goes on and on forever. 

She doesn’t particularly want power if it were up to her she’d have chosen a normal ordinary life and she says so on many occasions. But she can stop it, stop the endless sacrifice and dysfunction, so she can’t just let it continue and do nothing. 

Of course with that sorta logic you always have to consider how each action impacts the end result so you don’t destroy all you want to protect because you tell yourself that it will pay off later, after all ‘the many’ are just an abstraction for a lot of individuals. But Edelgard’s not really losing sight of that, she keeps looking to minimize the casualties where she can, she offers people a chance to surrender, you get some lecture questions where she’s genuinely considering what do with rhea if she DOES surrender. 

It’s worth noting that on her route, the war ends the quickest and only the Kingdom lands get significantly wrecked (and the Kingdom always gets wrecked even if it gets rebuild afterwards, it was already in a lot of chaos before the war even started). You have to fight the peeps you don’t recruit but that’s no different in the other routes. Claude manages to seize control of the Church without going through the knights so he manages to pull off an at least equivalent end result (both shadow factions removed, society permanently changed) while offing fewer of the named characters, and lets not fail to give him credit for that,  but he might not have, if Edelgard hadn’t conveniently removed Rhea and just generally blazed a convenient trail for him to, in his own words, “finish the job for her”. Taking in the church with Rhea still in place didn’t work out too well for poor Dimitri, I seem to recall that she used the poor man as a meatshield and set his capital on fire - which is why Claude wisely didn’t touch that hot potato in any route where he doesn’t have Byleth as a bargaining chip. 

Of course that said, going too hard on the comparison would seem to miss the point. While Claude’s and Edelgard’s routes are about their respective grand visions for the future and their badassery as great inspiring leaders, the Church and Kingdom routes are more about people coming together to weather difficult circumstances. Dimitri isn’t really cut out to be a good ruler; but the beauty of his story is how he eventually does his best to become one anyways through the aid of his loyal friends. It’s an underdog story. 

If your sister prefers that sort of story (or just Dimitri himself, as a more emotional, relatable type of hero and a well-crafted, compelling and memorable character) that’s just her personal taste/ good right. 

Edelgard’s personal biases

She surely has a bit of “broken pedestal syndrome” going on, the very human tendency to absolutely reject things you once idealized once they’re proven to be flawed, to assume that if you were lied to often enough, then everything must be a lie… she sure reads what she learns of Seiros’ past actions in a bad light and assumed that Seteth & the others are guiltier/ more complicit than they actually are. 

The problem with Rhea is that she’s selfish, not that she’s a dragon. But if she were the only example you know for what a dragon is like? You might not be too fond of dragons. It’s not like she protests if Byleth spares Flayn and Seteth. 

She doesn’t really know Rhea’s motivation so she has to judge her by her actions and the results of those, and her actions, for all that they come from fear and loneliness, are indistinguishable from power lust by the time that Rhea’s subjugated 30 generations of humans for something their remote ancestors did 1000 years ago. Would she ever have let them go? 

So it doesn’t matter that she only got the partial story on the relics, it’s not the relics she took issue with, but the current state of the world. also Rhea is the one who erased the true records. So the 10 elites totally had it comming, fine - but Rhea’s the one who disseminated the myth that they were heroes in the first place. 

Claude only gets the truth by squeezing it out of Rhea and even then only at the very end, ppl who say that Edelgard “acted on false information” act like Claude just stumbled across the truth with minimal effort. That’s actually more unfair to Claude than to Edelgard if you ask me.... he’s a man who has gathering info as his top priority 24/7

Edelgard’s certainly more steeped in the perspective of her home country where the church is awarded significance and if it turns out to not be good then it’s utterly vile.  Claude has the sort of more detached perspective that he has because he happened to come from another country. Edelgard’s aiming for detachment but that’s only possible to a certain extent when something ruined the lives of nearly everyone you know

At the same time whatever her personal sentiments may be (and im not gonna deny that she does hate the Seiros religion), as far as her actions and decisions go, the engage conversation she has when you have her fight Rhea at the battle:

Rhea:

No matter your reasons, I cannot permit you to go on living any longer!

Edelgard:

The feeling is mutual. I must put a stop to your reign of tyranny!

Rhea:

You must know what a fool you are. The greatest of sins is to make an enemy of the goddess herself!

Edelgard:

I have only made an enemy of the church, not of the faith.

She says in several supports that she personally considers relying on the goddess to be an overly dependent attitude that doesn’t do people good, but that’s just her opinion, she’s not stopping anyone from praying in the privacy of their homes cause thats none of her business and she’s not a tyrant (see what happens if you recruit Marianne or Mercedes, her support with Manuela or the Marianne/Ferdinand support on the CF route, which reveals that he’s actually a believer.)

She just wants the Church, and Rhea specifically, out of politics… exactly what we have in any modern-day country that isn’t Saudi Arabia or the Vatican. 

Megalomania seems the most likely or politically expedient thing to claim but in the end her beef’s not with Rhea’s reasons but the results of her actions which is stagnation, mismanagement and repression. 

Your Actual Question/ Personal Reasons and Catalysts

Honestly? If we’re talking on a strictly emotional/personal level? (As much as that’s an incomplete picture with such a reason-driven character)

She probably bawled for the goddess to save her and her family down in the dungeons, again and again, and no one answered. 

She spent much of her early life just being dragged around, first being kidnapped by Arundel and held captive in the kingdom, then she was thrown in a filthy dungeon where she endured relentless pain and could do nothing but watch as her siblings died one by one. 

She was utterly helpless, a passive plaything of destiny - and then she decided she was done being passive and letting the universe kick her around. She was going to be proactive and do all she could to be in control of her own fate. 

See also the inspiring speeches that she gives to Petra and Lysithea at various points - “Don’t surrender yourself to your fate!” 

Blind reliance on the faith, to her, represents that very surrender, so she rejects it. 

This fear and rejection of being helpless and having zero control is also one of the reasons why she consistently chooses death on her own terms over life on someone elses’. 

That would still not be a valid justification if she wanted to, like, stop everyone from praying, but that’s not what she’s doing. 

[lucalicatteart]

People of the realm: Yymy

Some sketches of a Verrucalt scholar/adventurer named Yymy (ee-yee-mee), who is somewhat known (only in small groups of course as most people don’t know of the existence of her species) as the rarest of her kind, given that she is  both one of the only few biologically  "female" Verrucalt** and also the only surviving Verrucalt to have the rare genetic mutation that causes somewhat reverse coloring (where most Verrucalt would have  dark stripes, spots, hair, etc. hers instead gets lighter in an opposite pattern). 

She is currently traveling alone, but previously was raised in the cave group of Verrucalt (the ones who live in that elaborate cave system and have an obsession with the stars and sky and etc.), so she still mostly sports their typical clothing and follows some of their traditions, despite being separate from them for almost 40 years now. 

Her main reason for leaving was out of a need for exploration, and her goals to discover the true nature of magic.  She generally felt that despite their reverence for and overall acceptance of their magical abilities, her native group really was not harnessing any new ideas or delving as deep into exploring to concept of magic itself as they could be. So she wasn’t kicked out, but more left out of her own motivations. She thought that other Verrucalt (given their rare abilities) would be a perfect group to work together with on research of magic, however as she was unable to recruit others of her kind who were willing to help her labor to answer her questions, she simply left to find the answers herself... (more info under read more) 

----

 Which isn't really that they were unsupportive or anything like that, but just that her family and friends from the cave group weren't interested in the same ideas as her. They never shunned her or called her research foolish, they just kind of.. were too lazy to want to go out traveling with her or explore ancient ruins with her or etc. lol. So after a long time of begging her sibling to go on expeditions with her or trying to talk to other people in the group about magical investigations and etc (always to pretty lukewarm or unenthusiastic reception), she finally just left to go do all that stuff on her own, whether anyone else wanted to come with her or not.   

 She still has a positive relationship with her family and the other Verrucalt in the cave group, and she checks in on them from time to time to visit her home, but she just thinks they spend way too much time daydreaming and making stories and using reality magic to create their own little realms and etc. and not enough time actually out exploring the main reality and asking questions about the broader world.   

- 

 Part of her curiosity about magic stems from her discovery of differences in perception while being indirectly influenced by certain magical elements. Seemingly due to the same genetic mutation that reverses her coloring, she also has color blindness that causes her to only be able to see in black and white, however one day she noticed that in certain pocket realms (smaller separate usually isolated pockets of fabricated realities stemming off from actual main reality created by magic beings and usually only accessible by them/ through their own means, etc.), this is no longer the case and she can see in full color (despite that not being the purpose of the realm at all and it just being being a seemingly unintentional side effect of,, some mysterious factor), so she is especially curious about the nature of magic and the effects it has on the physical world, particularly what exactly magical properties are, how they differ, and the exact definition of the literal physical nature of magic and magical forces.   

Despite evidence that advanced humanoid magic capable beings have been around for seemingly millions of years,  and thus the study of magic has probably been occurring for at least that long, magic is still largely mysterious and raises many questions in how it operates (magic sometimes seems to be a physical property, sometimes not.. may have something to do with blood, may also not.. may also have something to do with souls, but sometimes not. what are souls? why is magic so hard to control and harmful to physical health? why do species trend towards being less magical as they evolve? what dictates inherent magical energy level? etc.). 

 This fact combined with the knowledge of the Big Informational Gap (where all recorded history seemingly just starts at a precise point 2-miilion years ago despite knowledge that advanced civilizations existed before then, as if all information was wiped and everyone got mass memory loss or something and then resumed everything at the same point the day after (but now with absolutely no records of the past)), leads certain groups to kind of get the idea that  Hidden Secrets of magic may lie in the times before recorded history, prior the 2 million year mysterious record wipe, and without the foundations of the past we'll never be able to understand magic in the present.   

Due to this it can kind of be common for there to be scattered groups who dedicate a lot of their time looking for ancient texts and studying magical civilizations and their information, particularly on techniques of magic that may have been lost and especially knowledge about the nature of magic.  As it is still widely thought to be mysterious, and as with anything mysterious, people like to make myths and theories about the unknown,  so there are a lot of people who believe things like, that maybe some ancient civilizations or groups had a better understanding of magic, or that magic used to be different and was changed, or etc. etc. Which sometimes is reasonable, but some groups still tend to veer into the like, wild conspiracy theory territory, and end up making actual historians and scholars cringe lol.   

But anyway, this is why some people invest so much time into  visiting ancient ruins and hunting down copies of old books and etc. Like rather than looking forward into ways to advance techniques for understanding and analyzing magic in the future, they take the approach that it was perhaps likely that these things were already known in the past, and were lost during the Odd Information Gap, therefore the best course of action is instead to look backwards to uncovering the lost knowledge of ancient civilizations until we can learn from them and better understand what they  knew.   

 so idk, Yymy’s pursuit is somewhat common? Like this is a well known about category of scholar/adventurer. There are even a few scattered collectives and groups for people who subscribe to this view and dedicate their life to researching the ancient, so that as a group they can share knowledge with each other and etc.. Though it’s still kind of rare (being a historian or studying history is not uncommon, the part that makes it rare is the specific focus on the search for ancient secrets and lost understanding of magic, which actually a lot of scholars and historians don’t think is true or a worthwhile pursuit). 

 Yymy is not really a part of any groups, aside from like, occasionally wanting to trade knowledge with them. She prefers to work alone as she kind of also has a thing about being The First Person To Discover The True Physical Nature Of Magic or etc. which can lead her to be more competitive and secretive, even in the already tiny communities of people who are researching some of the same things she is lol. She wouldn't want to share her secrets with anyone or join a collective of adventurers since she wants all the notoriety when she finally unravels the mysteries of magic lol. Which she isn't really a fame focused person and generally cares more about practicality than achievements or recognition (so her focus on being the first to know something is out of character-ish), but it's just because it's SO important to her and she's dedicated SO much time and energy to it, she would be really disappointed if someone else were to finally figure things out before she did. 

  -

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 **(The differences between sexes in Verrucalt anatomy are very very minor and they really do not conceptualize their sex or gender in a similar way as we would, but there are 3 main biological variations in anatomy that could count as different sexes, two of them being mostly split 50/50 among the population and one being incredibly rare, which is also the only one capable of bearing children with the other two. Thus like some scholars could  consider it “female” (due to the connotation of “female” being the one that gives birth).. But they’re all so physically alike (all three variations have essentially the same genitalia, there are just a few functional differences where it can be used in 3 different ways) that the "female" really could easily be considered just a variation of “male” that happens to be able to carry children. Or even better, would be considered something different entirely, as for the most part, how sexes are conceptualized is dependent on the culture of Verrucalt* and it would be up to them to define it, rather than up to the gross scientists who like, inhumanely tested on them and partially genetically engineered them for years. 

 Though depending on where you are in the supernatural realm, there will be completely different assumptions or cultural implications of gender/sex everywhere you go, still a good 80% of cultures make the distinction of male and female in terms of biological sex, and 55% do in terms of gender (to varying degrees (like many include other genders besides just those two, etc) with wildly varying meanings depending on culture and area). Thus it is around in at least some form and, depending on the language of the area, is still culturally common as a way to refer to ones self and others (‘she’ or 'he’, etc.)).  

 So as a lone Verrucalt that is traveling, Yymy typically refers to herself as female within groups outside the Verrucalt, and recognizes that many scholars would typically refer to her rare space within verrucalt biology as 'female’  as well. Despite her culture's differing concepts of gender, she still mostly identifies that way which is why I refer to her as  female even if there’s a bit more context than that and it’s not biologically or culturally the same as most human female conceptualization would be. 

 * (Lone traveling verrucalt: Usually conform or adapt to refer to themselves as whatever is the closest match to the culture around them whilst they travel (as is the case for Yymy). This is something seen in many smaller or rare species who have differing concepts of gender than much of the world. Like for example, traveling Ythrili similarly will also usually go by whatever gendered terms people refer to them as when outside in the broader world, despite their own culture not really possessing the same biological or cultural ideas, just because it's usually easier for them to adapt to whatever outside culture they're in at the time, rather than have to explain themselves to everyone along travel routes and various cities (meaning in one city they may go by 'she' , in another city with varying norms they may be considered a 'he' , and in another city they'd be referred to as 'they' or something else entirely that's custom to the area). So anyway, adapting gender terms depending on location is common for travelers due to how widely varied the realm can be.   

Beach dwelling  verrucalt : Do not make a distinction in terms of physical sex at all and simply consider basically every verrucalt to be completely the same, it’s just that some of them have been ‘gifted an extra ability’ from the ‘good energies of the universe’ to help the species by bearing children.     

They do have a few sex related terms, but they're fairly literal and don't have much other implications. Like, they’re not attached to personal identity or any particular social or cultural connotations or outward appearance or etc. It's really just a way to refer to people who can have children, when in conversations about having children.  Also because 'gifted with the positive energy of the pleased nature spirits to be able to bear children' is the only standard they separate people with, this group doesn't even acknowledge the other biological variation they have, even though they could technically classify three, they only really see two since it's just 'same gender but with special powers' or 'no special powers' .      

Though they do actually seem to use some gendered speech, it's not meaningful in reference to anything and is thought to be more of a result of the language of ‘whatever species the Verrucalt originally were prior to modification and experimentation’ (which is currently unknown, and may never be known since all documents were burned and they are no longer very genetically similar to any known species), and then maybe a little of  them adapting their speaking labels and taking some things from the scientists’ language in an effort to better communicate with them while being held at the facility.  Analyzing how they use it in daily speech, it just seems like more of a leftover linguistic thing from the original Verrucalt who settled in the beach area, rather than something they actually developed or placed value on themselves. So it’s kind of more like, they have gendered language but not necessarily any meaningful concept of gender itself, especially not one rooted in ideas of biological sex, as they culturally consider everyone to be exactly the same in that regard.   

 It's kind of like if the words 'he' and 'she' became arbitrary in English and were used depending on the tone and mood of the sentence rather than the assumed gender/sex of the person you're speaking about. So the words are technically still There, as a leftover function, but don't have the same meaning. Like 'He went to the store' and 'she went to the store' would have exactly the same implication except maybe the first sentence marks a more relaxed tone and the second sentence implies more urgency or something.   

 Cave dwelling  group of the verrucalt: do have a distinction between all three biological variations, but find it only medically significant, as it has no bearing on one’s ability to do magic, and most personal identity in the cave group is heavily reliant on who you are as a magic user rather than physical traits. Though they are much more appearance oriented than the beach group and have makeup and ornaments and fancy clothes and etc., those are not seen as tied to or exclusive to biological traits and have more to do with your skin/hair color or stripe pattern (like in terms of what colors would suit you or what jewels would frame your facial features the best, etc.) (not that the different sexes really have hardly any physical variation anyway so even if their beauty standards varied across sex traits they would still be… like… basically the same lol)).    

So unlike the beach group, they do recognize three separate sexes, but as for gender, still have no real cultural concept of it as relating to or even vaguely based in concepts of sex, so they pretty much lack that as well. The most similar thing they have to how we use gender would probably be categorization of individual by their magical preferences, as in their particular variation of their language people in the group are referred to differently depending on what type of magic they do (similar to gendered pronouns but based in a few common ‘types’ of magic users) but this isn’t really tied to sex and they don’t have really any personal identifiers related to sex other than like, having words to describe the physical variations when necessary.   

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Some of this may have to do with them being artificially engineered and entirely removed from whatever their native culture (or cultures, since the scientists were thought to have mixed some other species genes in also)  was,  as they were kind of stripped of their background in the facility and after multiple evolutions and generations being killed off and created and etc, they basically were in a state where they were kind of a blank slate. Those that were able to get out of the facility really had no background of foundations to go off of, and as they all look almost identical and were treated identically in the facility (like just as a herd of animals or something, of course with nice activities to do and good clothes and food, but still in a pretty 'all of these test subjects are the same to us, interchangeable beings' type of way), it's understandable for them to have started their new societies with the base notion of "we're all the same, basically, fairly interchangeable", as there wasn't much in their past experiences to imply otherwise.   

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 anyway theres som…. rambles about the concepts of gender and sex in verrucalt communities  and additional random info on , the idea of people who seek lost magic I guess ??? idk lol I was just thinking about ,, like,, other related things and thought vague elaboration would add, More Explanation, despite it probably being unnecessary