#if it were SY centric

[wyyvoren]

SVSSS Easy A au, binghe in either college or highschool, pretends he slept with a girl to impress SY, same as the movie someone overhears, it becomes hot goss. Binghe likes the attention and the way SY looks at him now, but then NYY comes to him and asks if they could… pretend to have sex… for either beard reasons or just like.. to make SHL and LMY jelly lmao. somehow that leads to many closet lesbians telling people they slept together, snowballs beyond comparison, people act as if he’s slept with like 3000 girls?!

SY fits Olive’s characters better but i just really like the idea of the harem being an out of hand rumor in the modern au rather than binghe actually sleeping around. Could also be fun if like… people also push the Bingge personality onto him

somehow his teacher SJ hears about it, tries so so hard to get that MF expelled(and away from his didi!!!)

SY is not rhiannon in this… he’s the love interest, i think he’d think it’s cool, he’d be a little hurt binghe isn’t telling him about all his escapades after that first one! maybe he has some… late night thoughts about how well versed binghe is… (meanwhile, binghe is absolutely still a virgin, and pining so hard at SY)

[ellethespaceunicorn-masterlist]

The Howling in Claw Creek Forest Masterlist

Rating: Explicit, 18+, Minors - DNI

Pairing: Werewolf!Walter Marshall x Reader

Summary: You live in a small town called Claw Creek, surrounded by a deep, dark forest. Since you were a kid, an urban legend of the creature in the woods has been told. If the distant howls at night and mutilated livestock are anything to go by, you fear the stories to be true.

Wolfie-centric Spotify Playlist is here.

Sy-centric Spotify Playlist is here.

Dividers by me

Cover Art by me

Support/Reblog banner by me

Parts: (ongoing)

Prologue: The Legend of the Claw Creek Creature

Chapter One: Hide and Seek

Chapter Two: The Cabin in the Woods

Chapter Three: The Wolf In My Living Room

Chapter Four: Unbridled Instincts

Chapter Five: A Biting Truth

Chapter Six: Of Wolf and Man

Chapter Seven: Marked By The Wolf

Chapter Eight: Every Rose Has Its Thorn

Headcanons:

Beefy College Walter imagine

My Masterlist 

[astracora]

The Cat Curse - MC Edition

Characters: Sylus x gn!mc (poly lads)

Warnings: Heavy hurt|Some comfort, Semi-canon compliant heart condition, Spoilers for current story release (Small mentions of Sylus bond up to 102 and all of Sylus' currently released content).

Word Count: 4170

Written: 23rd December 2024

Notes: New relationship Sylus/MC-centric but poly LADs (this time with group chat), with my personal pov of the game and lil headcanons littered in. Unnamed MC, but using my personal MC's basic appearance and adjusted backstory. I take some liberties with what the game offers me.

Now Playing: Monster, by STARSET

Masterlist

Next ->

You've been responding to his messages, Sylus notes, but something's off. He's been away on some inane business trip, ever since you, the doctor, the fish, the prince and he had visited a new kitty cafe opening. He rarely gets to see you visibly excited, you are worse at showing your feelings on your face than he is. Whenever you're faced with animals, of any kind, even Mephisto, your eyes sparkle and you could easily spend hours upon hours sat with them. Even more so if they let you pet them.

The first time you'd seen the evol kitties, according to the doctor, you'd been unsure. They didn't look like cats. Something off and a little wrong, but they mewed at you and straight away you'd gently stroked their noses. As if unable to hold back.

Since then you would drag any of them along to play kitty cards. You didn't like the game, had no patience for strategy, but you did like petting the cats. Sitting there between every round, barely looking at the board, and tickling small whiskers. Much to the fish's distress.

While Sylus doesn't really care if he wins or loses around you, he's almost assured a win when playing with you because it's simply not something you care about. Distracted and unbothered by the game. He's only relieved that when he sprouted ears and a tail (of the caracal kind), you had been just as enamoured with those. Finally smothering him in affection in the same way, and being distracted by his tail. Though he'd never confess to competing with cats, at this point it's just an everyday occurrence.

He found he enjoyed playing most with the doctor, unlike when the man played with you, he took no soft approach with Sylus, and it was fun to butt heads with him. Stubborn as they both could be. That left you to lean your head on the fish's lap, the prince asleep against your side already, and play with cats, to a backdrop of 'You're cheating', 'I'm simply better at this than you.', 'If you would stop getting distracted-' that you mostly blocked out.

Rounds later, he paid the bill before anyone else got chance to, and picked up some cakes to take back.

Then he'd had his business trip to attend, having moved things around so on your rare day off, you could see everyone. It was never fun to drop you off, Sylus missed you anytime he could not see you, and though he was prideful, he had been honest about not being able to sleep without the sound of your voice. A confession you'd flushed at and tugged at one of the straps of your prosthetic.

He'd watched you waver over how to respond, biting at your lip, and fidgeting, as you fought against your urge to run away from him.

Trying didn't come easy, you'd told him. Honesty and openness, it got even harder when you'd lost your family, it got easier with every day you were given room to breathe by all of them, and every friend you held dear to your 'broken' heart. He didn't want to dig, or poke at old wounds, not now you were trying to live... but he often saw too much of himself in you.

Whether it was because of the way you'd grown up, or his soul inside of you, it made him even more careful and aware of offering you what you offered him.

"I'll miss you too, Sy. Call me, alright?" Your finally settled on, cool metal hand taking his in yours and squeezing. Before he'd left you, reluctant and complaining, he'd pressed kisses over your face, down your neck, and finally pushed you to the wall of your apartment building, to steal all the air from your lungs. Thigh holding you up, as he tangled his hands in your hair.

When he'd tried to pull away, he couldn't quite, leaning back in once, twice, three times, chasing the warmth of your mouth. Over and over.

You'd laughed, pushing him back to breathe, gasping, "It's a week. We'll be fine for a week."

A week... you aren't possessive enough, he thinks, spinning his pen in his hand. Half listening to Luke and Kieran talk. He feels as though he's emptied and lost, missing parts of what makes him who he is, and your messages feel... the same.

He could be reading into it... you're not exactly one to put your heart on your sleeve, or cling. You're independent because you've had to be, and he still hasn't had enough time to get you to lean all of your weight on him.

So he sends a message into the group chat without you, made in order to plan surprises or outings.

🐦‍⬛: Is everything ok back home?

⛄️: Aren't you busy?

🐦‍⬛: I'm taking a break.

They don't have to know he's tuning out his business partners, hoping they'll talk themselves out so he can leave.

🐠: lucky, some of us have r busy

🐠: [Attached photo]

🐦‍⬛: Please tell me that's not paint on my walnut table.

🐠: won't answer u then

⭐️: looks more colourful now

He rubs the space between his eyes, already dreading returning to the mess, and regretting letting the fish use his space for storing work while his studio is being fumigated. The partners at the table tense at his action, but he doesn't bother sparing them a glance, so they relax and resume talking.

🐦‍⬛: Is anyone going to answer my question?

⛄️: Is there a reason you're asking?

He hesitates, it's just a feeling, if he worries everyone, and it's nothing...

No, he didn't get this far by not trusting his instincts.

🐦‍⬛: Kitten's messages have felt off.

Two exclamation reactions are his instant response, the fish and prince. They start to type, then stop, then start again.

🐠: what way?

⭐️: have U called them?

⛄️: Calm down, they took some time off work because of a cold.

🐠: y didn't anyone tell us?

⛄️: I thought they would have asked Tara to contact you, or contacted you themselves?

🐦‍⬛:  They didn't.

⭐️: ive been on mission for a couple of days, i can stop in tomorrow when its over

He puts his phone down too forcefully and looks at the room. He's... irritated. Not like he normally is when it comes to you, a childish way where he can't have enough as he likes from you. Like you're a toy he cannot stop playing with. He's almost angry, but mostly sad.

He's been patient, surely you can at least talk to him if you feel sick?

Sylus is done with this trip, he's bored of listening to people talk nonsense, and he has no need for anything they have to offer. "We're done here, Luke. Kieran."

Waving his hand absently and ignoring protests behind him, he leaves the room, phone in hand.

🐦‍⬛: I'm coming back now.

-------------

Jenna had sent you home, it's not the first time she has. You're terrified one day she'll get bored of having to keep track of your health. Or you'll really let her down, and get you... or more importantly someone else, hurt.

It's probably not a normal mindset to worry so much about what your boss thinks, or to fear disappointing them like they're your parent.

It's not like you have parents to know what's that like... but gran's disappointment every time you got into fights growing up... well it was enough.

Caleb used to cover for you, within reason. He lectured you, told you to pull yourself up and figure it out. That fighting every battle against every jerk you met, reckless and stupid, would get you killed. "Come on pipsqueak, use that energy for something better. Something worthwhile."

So many reasons you didn't want to or couldn't, you wanted to tell him... a hand clenched over your chest.

You were so tired of disappointing them both though, so tired of seeing worn eyes tending to cuts and bruises. Bandaging your back, or fixing the set of your arm.

Being a hunter was that answer. If you used what little life you had in you, unsure when your busted up heart would give out finally, then you could greet Caleb and Gran with pride. Your life was a tool, to make others better.

So every day you weren't working, felt like a day you were failing them... failing to be worth anything other than the core in your chest. A vessel with no purpose or value but to hold something you hated. That could kill you.

It wasn't like you could work like this though... you'd laughed at your partners when they'd sprouted ears and tails. Especially Raffy, he'd been so disgruntled at the fate that had befallen him. This was... probably karma. Pointed, soft ears on top of your head, pinned back against your skull. Pristine white, so they at least blended into your hair.

At your back, a bristled tail, huge and furry... already having picked up some dirt to sully what had been pure white.

It hadn't settled since it had appeared, and you wondered what that said about you...

Fucked up mess. Stupid fool. Useless.

Too loud, everything was too loud. You could hear your neighbours through the walls, all the cars below your apartment, every child crying, dog barking, cat mewling.

It hurts.

You covered your ears with your hand, but noise filtered in through the new set you'd acquired.

Hurts.

You'd grown accustomed to the state of your heart. If you don't pay attention you can miss something, and you care now... perhaps you always did, just too raw like an open wound to let yourself.

It's racing and panicked. You don't need your hunter's watch to know it's too fast. 

Burying yourself into your bed, you cover your head with the duvet, grab at your headphones to shove them into your ears, turning them as loud as they can go, and bury your head under the pillows.

Your phone buzzes at your side, and you don't want to touch it. Scared to leave the cocoon you've built for yourself.

You'd begged Tara to tell Zayne you were sick with a cold, that you would be fine soon. She'd given you a heartbroken look that had made you bristle further, pity. Always pity.

You didn't want pity.

Before your fraying emotions could get the best of you, you'd fled the hunters association, hood up over your head and run home.

You can feel your tail trembling, struggling to swish under the blanket as you struggle to calm down, to at least get some sleep.

Maybe if you sleep it will go away.

Maybe when you wake up you'll feel better.

Useful.

Worth having around.

Not on the cusp of disappearing with nothing to show for yourself.

-----

When you'd woken up, tail still bristled, and newly acquired fangs digging into your bottom lip. Blood staining the bedsheet, you'd finally fished your phone out from your nest.

3am.

The world was quieter for it, and you wondered if this was part of why Sylus preferred the night to day.

You didn't remove your headphones, but you did finally open up your messaging app, seeing messages from everyone.

TaraTara💖: I hope you're ok bestie, if you need anything let me know.

Number One Lumiere Fan: Tara said you were sick, if you have time, I have a few shows you could watch to waste time. Only one is about Lumiere! Promise!

Simone (the one whose guns explode): Hey! Tara said you weren't doing so hot, if you want some company for a movie night, I make the best soup you'll ever have!

Captain: Remember to actually get some rest, take advantage of the break, alright? Everything will be fine here.

🐠cute fishie 🐠: hey cutie, wat do u think?

🐠cute fishie🐠: [Attached Image]

⭐️little star⭐️: missions going well, how are U?

⛄️sweet snowman⛄️: Tara said you're sick, I'll come over to check on you as soon as I can. Make sure you eat and drink.

🐦‍⬛pretty bird🐦‍⬛: Meetings are always more boring without you kitten, I hope you're missing me as much.

Your tail settles, curling against your side, fur flattening and you try really hard not to cry. You wish you'd thanked Tara when you left instead of fleeing, overstimulated and hurting.

Wounded like the cat you're teasingly referred to as. Feral and ready to hiss and scratch. You've spent so many years shutting people out.

Shutting Gran and Caleb out.

Shutting them out you wasted so much time until it was too late.

Why can't you learn?

You force yourself to respond, trying to sound as much yourself as you can... it's unnerving, to wear a mask over a mask. You wonder if you'll ever recognise your reflection.

You hesitate as you go to respond to your partners. You should tell them, reaching up to roughly pull the ears on your head. They'd understand, they've been where you are. Your brain says you should go to the kitty cafe, find out how to fix it this time around... but being out there, in the noise...

Instead you send some version of you're fine, and things are fine, everything is good. You're good.

You're together. You're useful. You're not a burden.

You aren't fragile and sick and useless.

You are worth keeping around, even when your heart picks up speed again, beating so hard against your chest that you fear the core wants to escape its fleshy vessel.

The straps attaching your prosthetic are digging into your skin, rubbing it raw, but you ache to even try to remove it. Fighting with the buckles and biting at the bit. You're still in your uniform, and you're sure by now you need a shower. The idea of water shooting a shot of anxiety straight into your chest, flaring up your tail, and your ears flatten as far as they can.

No water...

Maybe later.

Or you can really fill out how shit you feel with a wet wipe bath.

Caleb would kill you.

You don't want to think about it anymore. You want to let the quiet take over, or reasonably so with the screamo in your ears. Blasting the noise outside into nothing.

So you go back to sleep. Easing the pain in your heart with the only sure fire way.

---------

You can't breathe. You can't breathe.

Bolt upright in bed, hissing through your teeth, chest so tight you can feel your ribs.

You flounder, pulling at where your straps should be, but they're gone, no leather under your fingers. So you move to claw at your chest with one hand, gasping.

Hands grab you, and you struggle and you fight and you hiss. Fangs out, feral and ready to claw your way free. Arms far stronger than you pull you against a warm chest, tilt your head back and pills are placed in your mouth. You try to spit them out but a hand is on your throat, rubbing at your larynx. You swallow and then water follows it.

You splutter and cough, and you wriggle and struggle. Your head is pressed against skin, and you sink your fangs in.

Out. Out. Out.

"It's alright, you're alright, I'm here."

Blood fills your mouth and his scent surrounds you and you shiver. Blinking as your heart medication begins to do its job, easing the fractured organ in your chest. You spit, trying to clear your mouth of the taste of metal, shivering and shaking but your chest isn't constricting you now.

"Sy-" You cry outloud, he holds you, not bothered by the blood tricking down his shoulder. Of course he isn't, he heals it, the pain nothing in comparison to watching you choke on air you can't breathe. "Sorry. Sorry." You mumble against his skin, licking where you bit, crying and shaking. Wrapping your arm around his neck.

He assures you, and he rocks you both in his arms, rubbing your back and running a hand through your hair. Careful around your ears, not going far enough down to touch your bristled tail.

He hums and he rocks, and he squeezes you tight enough to ground you.

It's an hour or two later when you can finally feel any semblance of stable. You can't bring yourself to look at Sylus, he's stroking your cheek and wiping tears from your face, and all you can do is stare at the bed. You can't think of what to say.

You didn't take your medication, you hurt him... it's not the first time, but when this happened with Caleb you didn't have a cats' fangs.

Between you opening up and me prying, I prefer the former. He'd told you, after a terrible day, listing every way he would support you.

With all your sharp edge, you place your hand over his on your cheek, "I'm sorry, Sy."

He huffs, turning you in his arms so you're facing each other, but his one hand grips your hip, sturdy. Solid, strong. He doesn't hurt, but escaping would be hard. You try hard not to.

Though you can feel the... your tail swishing.

He looks at it, at your ears, then at you, red nosed and disheveled.

"Explain."

It's a command, brooking little argument, and though normally you'd refuse to take orders, you duck your head now. Avoiding molten eyes and seeking out something to focus on. The hand that was on your head, stretches out in between you both, palm up, and you take it quickly. Toying with his fingers, squeezing it in your own. Finding connection in your hand on his.

"Jenna sent me home, my evol doesn't work, I can't fight. I... it hurt. Everything's so loud."

You can't see it as he frowns, as your ears prick, then settle, seeking out all the things that hurt them. "I went to sleep, thought it would make this go away, but it didn't."

"Why didn't you tell me?" You hear it then, the pain, like he's biting down on glass. Your eyes dart up and his eyes are glassy, warm red gone dull. "You left your prosthetic on. It was rubbing your skin raw at the angle you were sleeping. There was blood on your sheets." He presses his forehead to yours and breathes you in, "Then this. Why didn't you tell me?" His voice cracks, and you want to be sick.

You twine your fingers with his and choke on the words, "I didn't want to be a bother."

He hisses, his grip on your hand almost hurts, but you probably deserve so much worse. You lied to him, to them, and you hurt him. More than just biting at him.

"You need to tell me. No matter what. No matter what I'm doing, beloved. No matter the issue." He kisses your forehead, over and over and over again. "Promise me."

You nod, and curl your pinky around his, just like you used to with Caleb when he made you promise to come to him with an injury. The words are too stuck in your throat, your voice too sore to use, but you nod. Desperately.

"You're not a burden to be carried, kitten. Ever. Do you understand?"

You don't. You want to, but it's hard. There is no part of you that feels easy or fun, but you do love him. So much. More than you thought yourself capable of. More than you wanted, on borrowed time.

"I'll try." You promise, and it feels like you've cycled back around to the start. Promising to figure things out at home, promising to aim for something. A future you're not sure you're going to ever see.

He takes it in earnest, you do not go back on your word. You are loyal and once you trust, you trust with your heart and your soul. It is yourself you do not trust.

Instead he eases you back into his lap and stands, you flinch and release his hand to grab his neck with your hand. "You need to be cleaned up, I'll help." You go to tell him no because it's water, and you're more a cat than even he teases you for, but you have your head in his neck at this angle, and his scent is so strong. Your tail flattens and begins to flick, lazy and soothed. You hear him chuckle, vibrating through his chest and through yours. "I'm not going anywhere."

-----------

Sylus eases you through steps. He's seen you injured, he's seen you with phantom pains, and he's watched you battle nightmares. Wanderers with swords through your chest, your heart stopping, an explosion you can't stop. He knows what you look like when wounded, he also knows that you fear his reaction when you are.

It takes time to heal wounds, he knows that intimately. You'd never shed your rage or anger, not really. When someone has made mention of gods you'd scoffed, when someone has talked about EVER and their many plans to help humanity, you'd snarled. You trust no king, no god, no corporation to fix the world or the people in it. He knows you're always scared but you keep walking forwards anyway, and he admires and loves you for it.

He just wishes you'd take his hand when that happens.

He has not felt fear like seeing your heart failing you in his arms before, and no matter the violence of your struggle, he would let you rip him to pieces to survive.

He has so much time, and his greatest fear is losing you too soon.

He cleans, and he dries, brushing hair and rubbing lotion to ease the burns on your skin. He helps you dress, finding clothes that don't irritate your tail, because at least he is intimately familiar with that, and then he sits you down on the couch with vegetable soup. Not handmade, though he'd rather have done so. He doesn't want to leave you alone, so he orders what he needs. Sending the twins running around. He's sure you'd like to see them, but he's worried their exuberance will agitate the overstimulation you're combatting.

Watching your ears flick this way and that, picking up too much. As though you don't already struggle with the world's input.

He almost feeds you, wanting to heal you with his own hands, like he's anything like the doctor... he's not. His skills are in bloodshed, and he is as sharp edged as you are.

Except you have made yourself a weapon, to be worth the pain, and he was made a weapon, to survive the pain.

He does not move far away, however, kneeling at your feet, and massaging your calves while you eat. You try to pull your legs away, but he keeps them held, and continues his movements. You have soothed his body before, stitched his wounds, kissed where his scars would be, and he will not have you lacking his own love and affection.

A dragon does not love lightly. Though you don't remember the depths he has gone to for you. This is an easy act of devotion.

"You need to tell them too." He finally speaks, as you clear your bowl. He's relieved to see your ears are no longer flat, your tail is not bristled, you are as relaxed as you can be. You nod, guilt written in your face, and he retrieves your phone for you on black and red mist.

Sitting at your side, he grabs your brush and begins to brush your tail. You almost leap into the air, startled and dropping your phone onto the couch cushions. "Sy!"

"Cat fur can get tangled, especially long fur." He smirks, pulling you closer, and brushing through it with long fingers, "So let me take care of it."

You flinch at the contact, stare at where his hand is in the new found attachment, then keeping your eyes trained on your phone, you nod.

He's content to let you write out what you need to, to be honest with the others, he doesn't want to have that job. It's your mission to step out of your self made cage. So he brushes quietly, the twitching tail in his hands restless, but soon as soft as you can be in your relaxed moments.

Your head hits his shoulder, ears twitching in sleep as all the pent up energy and stress escapes you. Held in long white furs in a small brush. You mutter in your sleep, words he can't understand, and whistle through your nose, little noises that make him laugh.

The best, however, is the purring in the back of your throat, broken up by sleep, and the tail that has found its way around his wrist.

He does not move you, but he retrieves a blanket and holds you against him, cheek pressed to the top of your head, against your fur ears, and keeps watch while you finally find some peace.

⛄️: Are they alright?

🐦‍⬛: They will be.

[rozaceous]

Do you have any SVSSS fic recs? Preferably SY-centric, not the Original SJ lol. I got into the fandom through fics (esama's mostly) so I haven't read the novels (yet) 💀 I remember you highly recced scum villain, but I don't remember if you've written any fics lol, now I gotta check ^^.

I have oodles of sv fics bookmarked on ao3, just filter for fandom! ymmv, etc, but to me, you can't go wrong w feynite's work (i wish you were my husband, good vibrations) and love acernor's stuff (dual cultivation or date is classic imo). but seriously, so much good stuff out there, and my bookmarks is the easiest way for me to rec while you can still decide if something sounds good to you!

[sissytobitch10seconds]

Better Me Than All of Us

Fandom: The Umbrella Academy Summary: Viktor manages to get through to Ben and take the Durango from him. He does the same thing to Jennifer, but then he has the two elements resting entirely inside of his body. The Cleanse doesn't feel like he thought it was based off what his not-brother and acquaintance were going through. Warnings: Temporary character death, heavy angst, POV character death Word Count: 11,404 Ship(s): Viktor Hargreeves-centric

Archive link!

A/N: Let me preface this by saying that I liked s3 and if you came here expecting this to be one of those fics that just shits on it and then moves on, you're going to be sorely disappointed. This is simply a different path that the show could have gone that I would have enjoyed, not a shitting on the original plot. If you're still interested after that then I welcome you to come along this journey with me! Stay sissy and bitchy everyone <3

It was exceedingly rare that all eight of them were present in the same room at the same time, but not completely out of the question. 

They had spread out around the eastern most part of North America after they had arrived in the new universe, as a way to protect themselves. Luther had continued to live in The City and nearby Oblivion Memorial Park so that he could visit the spot where he had lost his wife, having long since given up on being able to find her. Diego and Lila had moved a little further south to the suburbs to that they could raise their family and live with Lila’s parents and brother. Allison had moved to the next biggest city, New York, so that she could try out for some small parts in shoots and perform on Broadway. Klaus had moved in with Allison after recovering from his next lapse back into drug addiction and a near-death experience when he actually knew what it was like to be mortal. Five lived in The City as well, so that he could work for the branch of the CIA that worked there. Viktor was the one that had gone the furthest, moving all the way up to Nova Scotia and opening his bar so that he could reinvent himself without his siblings always reminding him of the world-ending mistake that he had made in partners.

Then they had all come back together for a birthday part, five years after they had ended up in an unfamiliar land where none of them knew the rules or how they were meant to behave. It had been scary and confusing at first, but they had adjusted and were able to be amicable around each other. Then Viktor had been kidnapped and things had spiraled widely out of control after that.

None of them had really believe Sy when he said that his daughter had been brainwashed, so they were on alert when quite literally everyone in that little town pulled a gun on them. On the way back to their home base, Lila and Diego’s house in The City, they had decided that they were going to ask Reginald some questions. They had to figure out the universe on their own and now things were getting weirder by the second, including the Marigold reappearing and giving them their powers back in a very strange and indirect way.

When they had arrived at his house, they were met by something that none of them had really been expecting. A woman with gray hair, kind eyes, and an angelic appearance due to her clothing greeted them with the sound of a violin wafting through the room. She set it down when she noticed the eight of them and then said, “You must be a handful of the children that were created by my Marigold. It’s wonderful to meet you all, please come and join me.”

They all looked at each other and then back to the woman like they weren’t quite sure that they believed her. They had met Jennifer already, and they knew that Reginald had been hiding the poor girl away in the town without an explanation as to why. As Klaus had said, The Truman Show was supposed to be a mind-fuck movie and not something to emulate. Viktor was the one that walked over first, his eyes immediately drawn to the violin that was sitting out on the table. “I think that this was the one that I played back in my universe and timeline. Was it always yours?”

The woman smiled wider and nodded, “I gave it to Reginald when I died and asked him to make sure that it got into the hands of someone that would love it just as much as I had. I believe that was you, from what he’s told me.”

“He remembers the past timeline? I thought that this was the Reginald that raised the Sparrows, not the Umbrellas,” Luther said. He walked over behind his brother and then sat down on one of the white couches. Contrasting to the way that the Academy had looked in both timelines that they had encountered it, the home that Abigail and Reginald had made for themselves was bright white and silver, gold accented in a few places but mostly the two most divine colors one could pick. Viktor was relieved that neither group of kids had grown up here, they would have ruined the aesthetic of the place in an instant.

“He remembers some things, the way that we all do when another version of ourselves within the split timeline dies,” Abigail replied. She sat down on the couch opposite them as she motioned for the rest of the Marigold-holders to follow Luther and Viktor’s example. 

“What are you talking about?” Five asked. In the normal timeline, before they’d had their powers removed and then roofied back into them, he would have jumped to the couch and flopped back down as obnoxiously as possible. Despite Five’s attempts to try and distance himself as far away from Viktor as he could, the smaller of the two men was still able to read him like a book.

“I was the one that synthesized the Marigold. I would have assumed that you would have been told this, Reggie said that you were the ones that powered the machine that reset the universe and allowed me to come back to life,” the woman said as she looked over them all.

They all turned towards Allison. Back during their third apocalypse, she had made a deal with their ‘father’ that got her what she wanted brought back into the new universe. If any one of them was going to know what this new person was talking about, then it was her. She put her hands up defensively and shook her head to reject the implication that they were putting on her. “I have absolutely no idea what she’s talking about,” Allison said with a small shake of her head.

“Reginald didn’t tell you anything?” the woman asked. They all shook their heads and she let out a long huff. “I suppose that I’ll have to do it for him, then. My name is Abigail Hargreeves, I’m Reginald’s Queen. We come from a different planet that he had to evacuate because of an accident that happened due to my experiments. The culture there is very different than what you have on earth, but I suppose that you’ve picked up on that by now. Our civilization was advanced enough that we were experimenting with the synthesis of new materials, such as the Marigold. However, when I created and began testing on my prototype, I noticed that it created something called Durango,” Abigail explained.

Viktor could already feel his brain becoming clogged with more than enough information for one lifetime. During his entire childhood, he had never really questioned why his siblings, and then later himself, had their abilities. He supposed that if he had grown up with exposure to the outside world then it would have been something that came to him much easier, but it hadn’t been so he was completely in the dark about it all. He had learned a decent amount thanks to Harlan, though it seemed that it was going to be an entirely different story from the woman that had made their powers in the first place.

“Did you know that Marigold could do this to living beings when implanted inside of them?” Five asked, leaning forward from where he was standing behind the couch.

“I knew that there was a chance that certain beings could have unexpected side effects when it was gifted to them, but the power trait is unique to human beings. You all have such an interesting way of thinking and creating things around you, the world is entirely different through your eyes than it would be through mine,” Abigail explained. “Anyways, I sadly was not able to survive the after effects of taking the Marigold myself and I passed away. My culture has the women sedating the men through a pheromone that we put off after we are married, so my husband was adamant that he was going to bring me back because I did not have time to tell him not to. I’m afraid that was why he released the Marigold in the first place.”

She shifted on her chair as she continued to explain, ignoring the shocked and overwhelmed looks that everyone else was giving her. “The Marigold was sentient enough that it could look for a proper host, the way that bacteria allows certain beetles on this planet to digest coffee beans in exchange for feasting off the caffeine that otherwise would have killed the insect, the Marigold allows you to interact with the world. It chose you as its hosts and I believe that it gave you this power because the Marigold feasts off of the timeline where it exists, changing the world and consuming pieces of it. Each of you has a unique ability that allows you to alter the universe around you, which was also why the Marigold could be used to fuel the machine that reset this universe and timeline. Does anyone have any questions?”

“Yeah, actually, I do,” Diego said as he began to stand up so that he could address the woman more forcefully. Lila placed her hand on his shoulder from where she was standing beside Five and forced him back down in his chair. There were a lot of things about their marriage that made Viktor viscerally uncomfortable, but he had to admit that Lila was fairly good at making sure that their brother didn’t do anything stupid that might get himself killed.

“What is your question, dear son?” Abigail asked.

That was something that shook Viktor enough that he could barely hear Diego’s question. It made sense that Reginald and Abigail would be considered to be their parents now, since she had created the Marigold that had made their mothers grow them and deliver them in the span of a few seconds and Reginald had released it. They had grown up knowing the woman that had carried them and a robotic nanny as their mothers, though, so it felt like a betrayal to both to think anything else. 

“What was with that town entirely staffed by people that your husband told to shoot us?” Diego asked. “I don’t appreciate being lead on a wild goose chase concerning our fucking creation or place in the world or something so that you can distract us from the matter that we actually came to talk to him about.”

Luther nodded in agreement, “It is really hard to get everyone together and make them actually stay together these days. I have another question after Diego’s finished, though.”

“It might be best if I answer yours first,” Abigail said. Her elegant hands had fallen down into her lap and she was now wringing them. The idea that a woman powerful enough to create a new element in the universe could be nervous about something made Viktor feel very, very afraid. He felt that white hot sun in his chest chirp to life and had to take a deep breath so that he could contain it before the massive chandelier in the entrance hall a few feet from them came crashing down around them.

“I met and married another one of the forty three children that was born due to the Marigold. I know that we all had to take it to get our powers back and we exited from an elevator instead of just being here, but is there a chance that she exists in this universe too?” Luther asked.

There was a groan from the more mission-oriented members of the family. Ben said something incredibly cruel and indecent in Korean while Diego began to scrub his face with both of his hands. “Guys, shut up,” Viktor almost shouted over their arguments. They may have all moved on from their loves and feelings, but Viktor and Luther had both been the ones that were damaged the most by Reginald and got away from him last. He knew the pain that his brother was feeling and he didn’t like them all acting like Luther was annoying for trying to keep hope for his future happiness alive.

Abigail gave them all a bemused smile as she nodded. “Not all of the Marigold has been collected back into the jar that I assume you have, I gave it to Sy for a reason after all. I believe that the other thirty six children that were created from the original release of my element are still somewhere in the world, with their powers laying dormant.”

Viktor turned to the side to see what Luther’s reaction was. Before he had gone up to Nova Scotia so that he could have better health care and a more accepting community than what The City could give him, he had helped Luther look for Sloane. Neither of them had known where she was adopted from before she had ended up in the Sparrow Academy, so it had ended up being a rather futile attempt in the end. Luther’s face was now being pulled into a small, shy smile as he thought about the idea of his wife being somewhere in the world, waiting for him. Viktor wished that he could still have that kind of hope for Sissy, but given his track records with his last couple partners, it wouldn’t have lasted anyway.

“That does bring me to the question that was asked before, however. When I created the Marigold, somewhere else in the universe another element was created. I have been calling it Durango, though I do not know if that is the proper name because there’s very little that I know about it. These two elements mirror each other, one allows the universe to be changed and warped while the other destroys everything that it touches. From what I’ve been able to learn from my husband about what happened during my absence, the Durango created a host much like it created all of you,” she explained.

“What does this have to do with that town?” Diego asked. The reason that he had done so well in the police academy before he began to defy the upper ranking members due to their politics was because he was exceedingly mission driven. It had been a long time since Viktor had seen him act like this and it was almost kind of nostalgic, in a very weird sense of the word.

“I was getting to that, young one,” Abigail replied kindly.

“Yeah, she was getting to that, idiot,” Lila snapped.

Viktor winced. He really did not like what they had turned into, they needed to sort out the relationship they had developed with each other. Couples staying together for their kids had never ended well, it was one of the reasons that he had so many regulars come to his bar.

Abigail continued, “Durango is entirely passive unless it comes in contact with Marigold. It doesn’t want to destroy the universe, it wants to destroy Marigold. Unfortunately, since Marigold has the ability to change the universe and the timelines those two things end up being the same in the end. My husband, in all the timelines I’ve been able to see into, took care of the carrier of the Durango either by killing her or locking her away in the type of town that you stumbled into.”

“Wait a second,” Klaus said, holding both of his bare hands up towards them. It was strange to see him without all of the person protection equipment that he now festooned himself with and sans all of his tattoos. “You said that you send Sy with the Marigold to us, which means that you also sent us to that town. What do you want with us?”

“Jesus Christ, I am so sick of this,” Five muttered into his hands. Five had come to visit Viktor for a little while in the five years that they had been in the new universe and they had finally had a moment to talk about the time that they had spent apart from each other. It had left with Viktor feeling deeply sympathetic for Five, who had been manipulated and coerced into doing all number of things to try and get back to his family or stop the apocalypse. Viktor would be just as tired as he was if he had been through all of that, so he understood the other Umbrella’s reluctance to be in another mess.

“I apologize for the confusion with that, I know that I’m new to this and don’t really know how it works,” Abigail said. “I want you to have the Marigold destroy the Durango. I was going to have you collect Jennifer and then bring her back to me so that I can try and extract the unstable element from her and then the Marigold from you. I was hoping that if it did not have a proper host, then it would simply eat itself and cease existing.”

“Why would you want that?” Lila asked. “And I have a couple of questions about the powers and how they work. Like why I have laser eyes now.”

“I don’t know much about the way that the element reacts when it has created a human host, I wasn’t given the time and resources that I needed for the types of experiments that would have clued me into that,” Abigail explained. “I know that the Marigold will cause a timeline collapse, however. It’s not meant to be played around with and whatever created the universes does not appreciate my arrogance. It was why I died in the first place.”

“Yeah, the little girl on the bicycle really doesn’t like our kind,” Klaus nodded as if they were all supposed to know what that meant.

“Girl on the… we don’t have time for this,” Allison said. She had her arms crossed over her chest so she was able to bring up one of her hands to her face and rub at her eyes. “So you sent us to New Grumptown in the hopes that we would come in contact with the Durango so that the reaction would happen? Wouldn’t that kill us or something?”

“That’s a good point,” Five said. “You mentioned what the elements did when they interacted with each other, but not what they did when they were inside of a host. I don’t particularly feel like dying today.”

“Truthfully, I don’t know what will happen when it’s taken from you. I know that the Durango and the Marigold only really interact with each other when they’re active, which the Marigold is inside of a host or during certain experiments and the Durango is when it comes into contact with active Marigold. However, once the Durango is active it begins to consume all the Marigold that it can find even if it is not active. The only thing that can stop it is extracting all of the Marigold from the Durango so that it becomes inactive again, which was what I did when I discovered the interaction. Unfortunately, I was too late to save my ow world,” Abigail explained.

“Why did you start the reaction again here if that was something that almost destroyed your planet?” Allison shouted. 

Viktor was certain that the rest of them were feeling her anger and just better at hiding it for the moment. It was something that they had gone through before and now they all had lives that they liked pretty well. The universal reset had been the best outcome for all of them when it came to finding a world at the end of an apocalypse, so they didn’t really want to figure out what the higher beings had in store for them next time. With the parents in the group, they also didn’t want to lose their children simply because they weren’t able to pass Marigold on to any of them. 

His head snapped in the other direction as he heard footsteps on the tiled floor. He could see a dark figure walking towards the grand, white entrance of the house. At first he thought that it was just a member of the staff before he realized that they actually hadn’t seen any human hired help since they had arrived and Reginald already had experience creating automatons. He got up from the couch and began to stalk towards the door while pulling on the ends of his jacket so that they were back in place.

“Where do you think that you’re going?” Viktor shouted after Ben, craning his neck so that he could see where his sort-of brother was heading.

“This is all stupid and I’m leaving to go find Jennifer!” Ben called back in reply.

None of the siblings liked that very much. Lila and Five complained in almost the exact same cadence and volume. Diego told him that he was being a coward and to come back. Klaus was shouting several different nicknames that the aforementioned man didn’t seem to like very much. Allison was just groaning loudly. None of the reactions were that out of character for them, but absolutely none of them were helpful whatsoever.

Viktor was the one that sprang off the couch and then chased after Ben. The taller Marigold holder broke out in a run, which made Viktor stop in his tracks. He closed his eyes, took in a deep breath, and then focused on the sound of the ticking clock up the stairs and to the left. He used the sound to channel into orange and white hot energy, which reached out in long tendrils and grabbed hold of Ben. They pulled him back and away from the doorway until he was finally standing with the other siblings.

“I think I saw something on your arm, did you touch Jennifer?” Luther asked as he looked down at Ben’s arm.

None of them had noticed anything strange about the man until they were looking down at it as well. If it had been their Ben, then there was a chance that they would have picked up on the strange obsessive behavior when it came to Jennifer. Unfortunately, he was the Sparrow version of their brother and none of them knew him well enough to identify when something was well and truly wrong.

“It’s nothing! And of course I touched her, what’s so wrong about that?” Ben asked as he snapped his hand back and away from Allison.

“Weren’t you listening, you utter buffoon?” Five asked. “Abigail said that when the Durango, which is inside of Jennifer, and the Marigold, which is inside all of us thanks to you spiking you sake and Klaus almost dying, interact then they start to create a reaction. If you touched her then the reaction is going to start,” Five snapped. He was seething with anger, like he so often had been before when they were dealing with the end of the world. 

“Show me the rash on your arm,” Abigail commanded. Viktor didn’t know if it was her ethereal presence or the fact that she was a special type of matriarchal alien, but he felt compelled to listen to her no matter what she was asking for. 

“Absolutely fucking not, you weirdo,” Ben snarled as he once again tried to get away. Luther wrapped his arms around Ben to prevent him from moving more than he absolutely had to, pressing his stomach to Ben’s back so that the Horror couldn’t get out either. Viktor was momentarily worried that it was going to cause Luther to become infected as well, but there was no reason for them to believe that was how the Durango spread yet.

He stepped forward and reached towards Ben’s sleeve so that he could see if there was a rash or not. If they were going to be stupid about the substance that may or may not destroy them and the world, then he was going to have to do it too. He was sick of his siblings being the one to start something and then dragging him along like he was dead weight. 

His fingers had just barely brushed the material of Ben’s shirt before he felt like two hands had wrapped around his neck and squeezed. All of the air was stolen from his lungs so quickly that it left him lightheaded. His vision danced with black spots as he stumbled backwards and tried to steady himself on the nothingness behind him. When he came back into his mind, when the static had receded enough that he was able to make out some of the voices around him, he realized that he hadn’t even touched anything.

He was hyperventilating as he supported himself on Diego and Klaus, blinking his eyes seriously. “Either that’s some sort of weird timeline shit or you have the Dorando. I have never in my life felt something like that before and I have been subconsciously picking up on Marigold my entire life,” he rasped out. He wondered if he had been screaming, his voice was sore and his uvula was painful when he tried to swallow.

“Yeah, I don’t ever want you to do that again regardless,” Ben said with that closed-mouth, tight-lipped smile. It made Viktor want to sock him across the face like he almost had when they were in the remnants of that universe’s version of the Academy. The only reason that he didn’t was because he felt about as strong as a limp noodle and he didn’t really care to repeat that experience again.

“Hold still, would you?” Allison asked, her tone totally exasperated. She pulled up Ben’s sleeve and then turned his arm around so that she could see his palm and where the Sparrow/Umbrella tattoo would have been had those not been erased during the reset. In place of the dark black markings was a bubbling, boil-like irritation of the skin that pulsed and glowed red with the beat of the man’s heart.

“Oh, that’s not good,” Diego commented as he peaked over his sister’s shoulder at what they had found.

While staring at it, Viktor could feel the rhythm of the substance the way that he could with everything and everyone else in the universe. The Marigold had adapted itself to the way that the person holding it felt, either singing like Allison’s or screaming like Diego’s. Instead, the sound was the loudest static that had ever appeared in his mind. It was like every single particle that made up the substance was vibrating at a different frequency, but they were running together in a way that made them indistinguishable from each other the way that the Kugelblitz had been. It was loud and overwhelming, but he couldn’t look away from it if he tried.

Allison dropped the sleeve of Ben’s coat back down over the rash and then took a panicked step back. Luther refused to let go of him, because he was certain that the other was going to bolt the moment that his hold loosened even a little bit. Viktor blinked as he was tossed from his mind and back to the world of the living that he was supposed to be inhabiting. 

“I think that’s definitely being caused by the Durango, a reaction from when you touched Jennifer. I believe that some of the substance was transferred from her body into yours as it searched for active Marigold,” Abigail explained. “I don’t know what will happen when it continues to move up to where the Marigold is inside of you.”

“It’s in his chest,” Viktor said. “It’s going to continue to move up through his body until it basically gets to his heart, like a poison. I’m guessing that it will destroy the vessel of his body as well,” he said. The rash was his best evidence for it, but the way that he had felt when Harlan had almost dragged some of his Marigold from his body reminded him that they were very intricately locked into their being. It was painful and if it was done incorrectly or by an unconscious substance, then it could very well be their end.

“How do I get this fucking shit out of me, then? I want to go see Jennifer!” Ben shouted as he struggled once again in Lucifer’s strong arms.

“You’re not going anywhere until we figure out how to get that out of you and then maybe out of her,” Lila said. Her fingers danced on the edge of his cuff as she attempted to pull up the fabric so that she could see the rash again, but he managed to get away from Luther just enough to sock her across the face.

“Hey, man! What the fuck?” Diego shouted as he advanced on Ben.

“Stop, he’s not himself right now, and fighting wouldn’t do anything anyway,” Allison said as she stepped between the two of them with her arms outstretched. She had taken the place that Viktor had always occupied when they were children. He hadn’t had powers, or rather he hadn’t known, back then so he had always been the one to stand between them. They wouldn’t attack him because it wasn’t a fair fight and it usually ended with Grace or Reginald telling him to back off and grounding him.

Viktor turned to Abigail just as Five asked, “Do you think that you would be able to contain it like the Marigold if we were able to extract it from Ben and Jennifer?”

She brought one of her long fingers up to her face and tapped her chin as she looked rather pensive. “I’m not sure. I didn’t get the chance to do nearly as much studying done on the Durango as I did the Marigold. I suppose that it would be worth a try. But how would you propose that we get it out of them? The substances have a mind of their own, but it’s not intelligent enough that we could ask if to leave the hosts that it’s fighting inside of.”

“I can do it,” Viktor said quickly. He didn’t even glance back at his siblings because he didn’t want to see them rolling their eyes or underestimating him again. He was the most powerful out of them all, he had caused the end of the world three times and had very active parts in at least two of those, he could remove some particles from his family to save their lives. It wasn’t like he had much going for him in Canada, what with his shit luck and run down bar.

“You can?” Abigail asked.

He nodded. “I have the ability to translate sound into energy, but I can also manipulate that energy when I focus. It allows me to sense and feel the Marigold and Durango in others, which was why I had such a strong reaction when I almost touched Ben. I’ve removed Marigold particles from someone before, I think that I could do it again if I was given the chance.”

She thought about it for a moment before the alien nodded her consent. “I do have a testing facility in this house, so if you would bring Ben with me then we can get started on this.”

Abigail set her violin and bow down in the case instead of next to her on the couch before she rose and began to move through the white and cream halls of the grand mansion. The siblings all looked at each other before Luther picked Ben up and began to follow after her, Viktor walking silently by his side. Allison was the only one that had known how much it took out of Viktor to remove the particles from Harlan and that had been his own Marigold, not even particles that had belonged and created another person. 

“Wait, what about Jennifer and the rest of us?” Lila asked. 

“Reggie?” Abigail called through the hall, towards a grand spiral staircase that was the only dark color in the room.

It took about two seconds before a the sound of footsteps rang through the high ceilinged hall that they were standing in. Reginald’s brow was furrowed and his book was clutched tightly in his hand as he looked over them all. “You eight just will not leave me alone, will you? I’ve already told you that I am not the man you knew in the other timeline, I am just a very good duplicate of him that made similar choices in wards to adopt for my plans. I can’t believe that you would go so far as to kill the people in my town and then come to harass my wife!”

“Reg, that’s enough,” Abigail said and the man immediately snapped his mouth shut. “I sent them to collect Jennifer as part of a poorly thought-through plan, But now they’re here and they’re going to help me rid the universe once and for all of this horrid science experiment. I need you to send your men out to find Jennifer and bring her back here, Viktor is going to remove the substances from all of these fine individuals and Jennifer needs to be included.”

“Who?” Reginald asked as he looked from the eight beings standing next to his wife and then back to the aforementioned woman.

“The girl that was born inside of the squid, the one that you set up the town to protect so that no inactive or active Marigold would ever touch her,” Abigail explained patiently. Viktor wondered if what she had mentioned about the females of their type soothing and controlling them men had gone a little further than she had first implied. It was kind of fun to watch the man that had terrorized them for years be simplified and subdued in such a strong way.

“Right, of course. I will see you in due time, my love!” Reginald chirped. 

“I’m coming with you,” Five snapped.

“I need you here so that I can take your Marigold, Five,” Viktor said. The two of them had grown so far apart since they were children, huddling under the same quilt while reading books that Five had snuck into their home. Viktor knew that part of that was his fault since he had run all the way to Canada so that he could set up a life for himself, but it still hurt to recognize the distance between them.

“You can do it once I get back. My power isn’t quite the same, but I think that I should be able to bring Jennifer back faster than a car,” Five replied.

“You shouldn’t touch her, dear,” Abigail shook her head. “Please, I know that my husband has treated you all poorly in the past but when he’s fulfilling a wish of mine he’ll do exactly what I’ve asked of him. You can trust this, I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“We don’t know that you wouldn’t, we’re trusting you on blind faith,” Allison huffed. She crossed her arms over her chest against as her mouth twisted to show her discomfort, it had been her one singular tell her entire life.

“You could Rumor me if it would make you feel better, my dear,” Abigail replied as she gave her another small smile.

Ben thrashed in Luther’s arms again while the two women were staring at each other, which broke the conversation. “Can we get him restrained or in a jail or something, please?” the largest of the siblings asked.

“Right, right, of course,” Abigail replied. She continued down the hall once she had bid her husband goodbye. They stopped at an ornate shelf full of all kinds of artifacts from every country, and likely a couple of different planets. She reached forward and tugged on one of the vases, which was glued to the shelf beneath it. When she let it fall back down, the entire shelf turned sideways to reveal that it had been attached to the wall as well. Through the opening that had just been made was a dark room that she motioned for Luther to enter through.

While stepping around the bookshelf and into the narrow hallway, Ben thrashed again. His legs kicked out like he was an unruly toddler and hit one of the objects towards the bottom of the shelf, knocking it over so that it shattered on the ground. Luther winced as he turned back to Abigail, “Sorry about that.”

“It’s alright, dear. After all, the Japanese humans have this wonderful method of putting things back together that gives them more meaning. And it will give Reginald a puzzle to do after this whole mess is over,” Abigail replied. She followed after him once he had gotten all the way through the door and then Viktor and the rest of the siblings followed after her.

They walked down the dimly lit hallway until it opened into a much larger space that was pitch black. Abigail clapped her hands together twice and made a clicking noise with her mouth that cemented that she absolutely was an alien similar to their insects on earth. The lights around the room, embedded in the edges of the ceiling so that the walls were entirely illuminated in soft white, flickered to life at her command. Around the edges of the room was a number of workbenches, each of them with a different project. The center of the room had a bed with several large mechanical clamps on it. 

Viktor remembered seeing one of them in the Academy. He knew back then that it had been so that if one of them got hurt they could be restrained and Grace could work on them without fear that they would damage her, allegedly. This one, though, he didn’t know what Abigail and Reginald had been using it for. There weren’t any blood stains on the top of the metal or near the base, so they were either really good at cleaning it or they hadn’t had the chance to use it on someone until the Umbrellas and Ben had arrived.

Luther grunted as he shifted Ben around in his arms to get him down onto the bed. He leaned heavily over his brother, who was halfway supine and still thrashing about. “Do you think I could get a little help here?”

“Shit, sorry, Luther,” Viktor said as he stepped forward to help his brother. 

Before his foot had even hit the ground the rest of his siblings launched forward with a chorus of ‘no’s and ‘wait’s. He put his hands up in a surrender as he stepped away from Ben and towards one of the workbenches. He could hear them all arguing with each other about who had to take which limb and what they were going to do when all of their hands were busy. He was focusing on the desk that he had just approached.

The same silver-gray metal as the rest of the room shone up at him, but the contents on top were unique. On the edge of the desk was a tape measure, glued to the  bottom so that it could be used every time someone cut something. There was a holder with a myriad of pens, pencils, scissors, and everything else someone would typically need on a desk. In the center was the item that had first caught his eye, the one that made Viktor feel a bit like he was drowning again. There was the red, leather bound book that Reginald had made all the notes in when they were children in the Academy.

With a tentative hand, he reached out and flipped the pages open. He glanced over the black words scrawled in his adoptive father’s handwriting but was unable to process any of it. He kept looking for his name or number designation, anything to show that this version of Reginald also knew what had been done to him. He knew that this wasn’t the man that had adopted and abused him, but part of him couldn’t let go of the idea of screaming at Reginald and making him hurt just as bad as Viktor had been.

“Viktor? Are you ready?” Abigail asked.

He snapped his head over to her and let the book fall shut again. “Yeah, I can get started,” he nodded as he walked over to the desk again. “Should I start with Ben or with someone else? I don’t want them to get Durango from me if something goes wrong.”

“I don’t know how it will interact once it has left the first host that it found, but we have him contained so that he cannot return to Jennifer. If you can go quickly, please start with the others,” Abigail said as she gestured one of her elegant hands out to where the others were crowded around a terrarium containing plants they had never seen before.

“Okay, who wants to go first?” Viktor asked loudly as he clapped his hands together to get their attention.

Klaus raised his hand. “I didn’t want this stupid power back anyway and I want you to remove it before it destroys my life like it did every time before,” he said. He shot a look to Allison which made her role her eyes.

Viktor hoped that after the powers were removed that it would become a non-issue for them and they could go back to being just as close as they were before. She had only been trying to save his life and had been pressured into doing it by the rest of them, it wasn’t her fault and she needed the support of her brother. Viktor had tried to be that for her, but it had ended up working against him because the two of them simply had too much damage to see past to the good that their relationship could have been.

Viktor nodded his head and then held his hand out to Klaus so that he could come over. Luther and Diego grabbed two chairs, setting them down on either side of their other brothers. The siblings that weren’t involved in the initial experiment went to stand on the other side of the table that Ben was strapped into. Despite the tense moment filling the room, Viktor couldn’t help but think that it was a good thing that the Horror had changed to come out of his back, based on the way that he was thrashing against his restraints. Abigail gave Viktor a smile of encouragement before she moved to stand with the other Marigold holders.

Viktor sat down on the chair that had been placed behind him and then reached out for Klaus’ hands again. “I think that you need to use your powers at least once so that I can feel the way that the Marigold resonates outside of just you. I don’t want to hurt you or take out your soul or something,” he sai after a moment of tense words.

Klaus’ eyes flicked over to where Ben was laying on the table and Viktor immediately knew what he was thinking. It must have been hard to go from having a constant companion hovering over his shoulder for nearly a decade and a half to it being silent all the time. Perhaps that was why he had moved in with the sibling that was most likely to come down and chat with him in the same way that Ben had when they were kids.

He looked back to Viktor and gave him a strained smile. “You can do this,” Viktor whispered, trying to be encouraging. Klaus nodded his head and then bowed it so that he was staring down at the floor. He rose in his chair so that he was hovering a couple of inches above the surface. 

Viktor leaned back in his own seat and let out a breath as he focused on the sounds around him. The air conditioning vent rattled as it pumped in new oxygen. The breathing of his siblings and Abigail mixed together with their heartbeats and every other sound that their bodies made. Finally, he heard the steady, constant thrum of his own Marigold in his heart. He focused on Klaus and heard the sound of his own soul, what made him, before he signaled out the back and forth pitter patter of the Marigold inside of his chest.

He focused on it as he translated the sound of the Marigold into energy and then began to draw that into his own epicenter. His hands burned while the particles transferred themselves through Klaus’ hands and into his own body. He could feel the way that they were sliding through is veins and settling amongst their brethren in his chest.

When the ordeal was over, he felt as though he had run a marathon again. His body was shaking slightly, like he had just been shocked with a thousand volts. He steadied himself back on the chair and asked, “Can you do the power thing again?”

Klaus nodded and then placed his hands down on his knees. He closed his eyes and hummed as he tried to summon the Marigold back to life so that he could hover. His eyes opened as he stared at Viktor, which was all the confirmation that he needed to know that it had worked. “I could kiss you!” he squealed in excitement.

“Please don’t, I feel like I’m going to be sick,” Viktor shook his head. “Who wants to go next?” he asked as he looked towards the others.

Allison stepped forward just a little bit but then pursed her lips. Klaus grabbed her hand and gave it a soft squeeze, “Ray and Claire will be able to be protected the same way that they were before, you don’t need your power to keep them with you anymore. They love you and will stay because of that.”

“Thank you, Klaus,” Allison whispered. She hugged her brother briefly before she sat down in the chair he had occupied before. Viktor reached his hands out and met hers, like he had so many times before when they were chatting in the sixties.

He let out a low breath as he focused on the same things that he had with Klaus. Her power was drawn straight from her voicebox and mouth, floating through the air before they zapped into him. His mouth went dry instead of damp with saliva and his throat ached with an itch that he was entirely unable to describe. The shaking got a little worse and he felt his skin become clammy with the fever that was developing just below his skin.

Diego was next, his Marigold slipping through the tips of his fingers and his lungs into Viktor’s. It was nice to not have to pant for air anymore, he was already so exhausted from the fight to bring in air that didn’t want to stay with him. He was already getting so tired and every time he thought about the others that he had yet to do, he felt his body shrivel up on itself more than it already had.

Luther made him feel like he was stretched to his max capacity. His body felt like nothing could ever happen to it, no cut would ever bleed and no bruise would ever form. At the same time, it was like he could feel the atoms that made up his human form rattling against each other as they tried to escape the flesh prison that they were contained inside. Luther’s body had shrunken back down to what it had been before he had taken the Marigold and before his accident, which he looked rather happy about.

Lila was a strange one to do. He didn’t feel any different after he took her power into his body but he did feel an itching in the back of his head. The fever had gotten far worse as the buzzing of her Marigold began to interact with the rest that he was currently acting as a vessel for. It was like it was duplicating the sound of every single individual power that was resting inside of him at once which made him want to spew his guts all over the ground.

Five was the last of the siblings not infected with Durango to come and have his power taken away. Before he took Viktor’s hands he said, “You’re not looking too hot.”

“What are you talking about? I am way too hot,” he tried to joke. The smile on his face felt stretched too far. He felt like he was staring into a mirror and the little girl that he had once been was looking back at him, but amplified up to a thousand. There were literally people that were not him rattling around inside of his chest.

“Viktor, are you sure that you should be doing this?” Five asked. He placed his hand down on Viktor’s knee and that tipped him over the edge.

He turned to the side and vomited, spewing out everything that he had ever eaten in his life. His throat ached as the Rumor tried to push itself out of his mouth and his lungs burned despite his lack of need for breath. His body was shaking with the magnitude of power that was inside of him and the lack of an outlet that it had. He needed to get it out, it had to solidify into something else or it was going to kill him.

“I should have remembered. Oh shit, Vik, I’m so sorry,” Allison said.

“What?” Abigail asked, encouraging her to speak on whatever topic she had kept from them about the very dangerous thing that they were doing.

“Viktor has done this once before. He transferred some of his Marigold into a little boy that he cared for to bring him back to life. It was an accident and it had ruined him, so he took it back so that he could live the rest of his life normally,” Allison explained.

“All ten minutes of it,” Viktor griped. He felt bad for doing so when he saw the guilty look that clawed at Allison’s face, but the feeling was immediately taken from him when his body was once more overwhelmed with the feeling of the Marigold rattling around inside of him.

“What happened, Allison?” Luther asked urgently.

“It almost killed him. I had to put a stop to it once or twice because I thought that it would,” she explained. “This isn’t something that we should have rushed him into, we should have taken it slowly or found another way or something!”

The room went very quiet other than the dripping of vomit into the center of the floor where the drain was. Viktor let out a staggering, shaky breath to try and center his body. “It didn’t kill me then, it might not kill me now,”  he explained.

“But it might,” Five said. “Remember, you’re not taking the Marigold out of us and then putting it somewhere else exclusively. You’re also handling Durango while your body is still holding active Marigold.”

“What do you care? What do any of you care?” Viktor asked. He felt the particles come to life in his chest. Wind picked up in the room, swirling around him in circles so that it had partially formed a shield. “None of you have ever cared about me when it doesn’t benefit you. Luther picked me as his best man not because he wanted me as a brother but because Klaus was already officiating and he had issues with Five and Diego. Allison tried to be my friend until I stopped being able to give her what she wanted and then she killed my son. Five was my friend until he moved away and realized how much I sucked and that I had stopped being a way to get back at Dad. Diego fucking abandoned me and humiliated me on stage because he was just humoring his stupid little sister by starting a punk band with her. Lila and Klaus and Sparrow Ben couldn’t give a shit about me if I was the last person on earth with them! So just let me fucking do this so that I can make up for all the lives I’ve ended by blowing up the moon and the FBI building and trying to save the life of a little boy that I owned.”

When he stopped talking, he felt a bit better in his soul and spirit than he had before. It was nice to have those words out in the open, to finally bare the dirty laundry that he was running out of places to hide. Physically, he still felt just as awful as he had before.

The room was entirely silent as he let his power die down so that there was nothing but the clinking of the vents above them. He reached out and took Five’s hands into his, yanking his power out of his entire body and then shoving it into his own. It took everything he had for it to not activate immediately since Five had been on the edge of jumping away before he did it.

“Viktor. I want you to know that I did care about you, I just didn’t know how,” Five whispered. “I’m sorry that you didn’t feel like you were my best friend anymore.”

“Best friends don’t abandon each other in brand new universes for six years,” Viktor replied hoarsely. He stood from his chair and then wavered dramatically. Luther and Diego surged forward so that they could steady him as they brought him over to Abigail.

She removed another one of the containers that they had removed the Marigold from originally and then said, “I want you to remove all six of the powers that you’ve removed so far into this and then work on Ben, so that the reaction doesn’t get bigger.”

Viktor nodded. It sounded logical to him, but when he began to move around the Marigold that he was playing host to, he let out a scream that shattered every piece of glass inside of the room other than what she was holding. “I can’t! I can’t,” he shook his head. It had ripped at the very fiber of who he was, like he was trying to bite off his own finger as hard as he could.

“I didn’t anticipate this,” Abigail hummed. 

“It’s okay, Vik, it’s gonna be okay,” Luther said as he sat his brother down on another one of the chairs. “You’ve done so well, just close your eyes and rest for a second.

Viktor shook his head, “I can’t rest, it all hurts too much. Bring me to Ben, I want this over with.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea? He’s the one that has Durango and Jennifer isn’t back yet,” Lila said as she stepped around Allison so that she was facing him again.

“I can do this. You should go back to your kids. You and Diego have so much shit that you need to talk about. Your relationship with him is worse worse than ours was,” Viktor slurred. It was hard to keep the words inside of him when he felt like this, they all came tumbling from his mouth without him even thinking about it.

Lila shut her mouth and her lips pressed together tightly. She stepped back so that she was standing beside her husband and the two of them began to have a quiet conversation with one another. It was nice to have something to distract them with, so that Viktor could focus on the more important things that he was dealing with in that current moment.

He turned his head towards Luther and then gave a nod. He rose from his feet and walked over to the brother that wasn’t. It was so hard to remember that the Sparrow didn’t know them the way that their Ben had, that he shared none of the same memories and barely loved them at all. Viktor reached down and pressed his hand into Ben’s stomach. He knew where the Horror had been on the other version of him so he knew where he had to draw the Marigold from.

His legs began to shake something fierce as he worked his overtired body further than it was meant to go. He would have crumbled down to the floor if Luther hadn’t been holding him. He felt blood pooling in his mouth and dripping from his nose again. His fingers tingled and his vision went splotchy, but the red and gold particles of both substances removed themselves from Ben and then mixed in with Viktor.

He collapsed down into one of the seats while the others worked to remove Ben from his restraints. He asked, “What the fuck just happened to me and where am I?”

“You touched Jennifer and then went all coo coo bananas for her, Benny,” Klaus explained. “Apparently your attachment to her had to do with the Durango inside of her moving into you, so now that it’s gone she’s gone!”

“You’re so fucking weird,” Ben snarled. He picked himself up off the table and then walked over to one of the desks so that he could play with the shards of broken glass to look nonchalant. 

Viktor didn’t know how long they had to wait before the door down the long hallway opened and Reginald entered with someone else following behind him. She had a round face with pretty brown eyes, long black hair that was slightly curly towards the end, and a flannel wrapped around her waist. She spotted Viktor and then immediately rushed towards him, kissing him furiously.

He hadn’t been anticipating that, but it did make sense given the obsession that Ben had developed when he was containing the Durango. “Viktor, if you don’t take it from her and hold both substances in one vessel then you two are going to turn into a monster. I’ve seen it happen before,” Reginald said loudly. “You can do this, my boy. Save the world.”

Viktor broke the kiss with some amount of effort. He wasn’t sure if he was going to be able to do this, he felt like he was breaking in two already. He panted as he launched himself forward so that Jennifer was pinned down on the metal table that Ben had been on before. He sat back before he placed his hands around her neck and then began to draw her power from there.

The Durango had an entirely different feeling than the Marigold had. He was putting something other and different inside of him, something that very much did not belong. He could hear the tinkling of Ben’s Marigold somewhere inside of her, but he drew that into the mess that resided in his chest as well. He could feel the two substances warring inside of him and his body got even warmer and sicker than it had been before.

A memory flashed to the front of Viktor’s mind once he had grasped all of the Durango and Marigold inside of Jennifer and yanked. It played in his mind as he removed himself from on top of her and then stumbled back into the waiting arms of his childhood best friend. Harlan had mentioned something about not being able to control the power that Viktor had given him because he wasn’t like them. They had been born from the Marigold and the Durango was the antithesis of them. He had taken in a bunch of powers that were no longer meant for him to have and the exact thing that was trying to kill him.

He felt the cool of the floor touch his hair and back behind him. His fingers twitched as he continued to call the rest of the Marigold that was out in the world. The only thing that he was able to get out of his mouth was the location and name of each person that he took the Marigold from. He saw some of their memories from when they had used their powers in other universes flash through his mind. Each time he got another piece of the entirety of the Marigold, it felt like he was being electrocuted and shot at the same time. He felt his entire body seize up with the force of the power that it was pushing into something that couldn’t handle it, before he collapsed back down onto the heated ground.

Eventually, it stopped. Everything had pooled inside of his chest. He knew that his skin was glowing with the force of the Marigold and Durango as it fought against itself inside of him. His skin was so hot that he could smell the hair on his arms burning and his clothing felt like it was stripping back his flesh with every movement that he made.

Viktor let a scream finally tear past his throat as his chest was lifted into the air by the force of the reaction that was coming from him. Red and Golden light poured from him and made the bright, aggressive popping that fireworks did when they were set off in the wrong way. The substances that had caused all the mess that they were involved in was eating itself alive inside of him and pouring out into the space around him. 

The pain that he was in was absolutely indescribable. It radiated through every single part of his body from the skin downwards until it had sunken down into his bones. He was writhing with the force of it but the movement only made it worse. He could barely move his fingers or his hands in general, everything was falling apart. His lungs were struggling to bring in air and that was making him dizzy and sick, the power that he had gotten from Diego working against him to try and shut down his body. He screamed with every single pulse of blood throughout his body because it felt like lava was filling his veins instead of blood. He could feel his back burning with The Horror as the portal opened and closed on the poor creature over and over again, preventing it from coming out like it wanted to. His mouth filled with blood and he just barely managed to spit it out before it choked him, each time it poured out of him. His eyes burned with the effort it took to keep them open and he was sure that his nose was also soaking his front with crimson.

His mind was buzzing with thousands of memories from thousands of versions of himself and his family. He carried them all, all their pain and hurt and power and sorrow.

He felt the last of the reaction go and then there was only his heart.

It thumped steadily and slowly in his chest, the sound filling his ears.

It was soothing, reassuring.

Then it stopped.

---

The tinkling of the bell above the door was what alerted them to the last few members of their party joining them. Luther and Sloane were seated next to each other, with their hands tangled together under the table like they were school children hiding their love from the teacher instead of adults that had been married for years. Diego and Lila were at the end of the table, though they weren’t married anymore since they had decided they would work better separately. Five sat alone at the other end of the table as he toyed with the coffee in his mug, refusing to drink it but still not letting it be cleaned up by the waitress that kept hovering nearby. Allison and Klaus were arguing quietly with each other about what they were going to do about Claire’s grades.

Jennifer was the last to join them, giving a quick kiss to Ben before they split apart so that they could sit across from each other at the table. Across the restaurant, Claire whooped to embarrass them further. She was sitting with the trio of kids that had come from Lila and Diego’s fleeting marriage to babysit them while her mother and uncle talked about boring adult stuff.

“Sorry about being late,” Jennifer said as she sat down.

“We know how it is being newlyweds,” Allison said, soothing them and teasing them at the same time.

“Shut it,” Ben snarled back at her.

“Ben,” Jennifer warned. He rolled his eyes but relaxed back into his seat and gave up on the chase.

“So, we all know why we’re here,” Diego said so that they could start the proper conversation. “Has anyone heard anything from Viktor?”

“No,” they all chorused across the table. Klaus shifted and said, “I haven’t been able to find out anything from Reginald, but Abigail said that they hadn’t heard anything about him since before the timelines all merged together.”

“It might be time for us to stop looking,” Lila said.

“You can stop looking, but I’m not going to,” Five snarled back at her. His eyes held that wild feral attitude that all the Umbrellas recognized from when he had first come back from the apocalypse, which was a bit worrying to see.

“Five, it’s been two years and none of us have heard anything from him. We have proper lives here with people that we love. No paradoxes, no powers, no Marigold at all. We should just be happy that we have this and try to enjoy it,” Allison argued.

“Viktor was right. None of you ever cared about him. He died for you so that you could have these lives and you can’t even keep looking for him,” Five slammed his coffee cup down onto the table and then rose from his chair. He shoved his hands down into the pockets of his chinos as he turned and left the dinner entirely, not carrying who was going to have to pick up his bill. 

This was the way that their yearly meet ups had gone since they had woken up in the full timeline. They were all pieces of what the timelines had been before, a complete version of themselves that were more than the abuse that had been given to them when they were in their versions of the Academy. They had their memories from the main timelines that they had grown up in since they had been so close to Viktor and it was likely something that he was thinking about when he died. At least, that was the theory that they had since none of them could figure out why else they would have two lives rattling around in their heads.

Five walked further and further into The City until he found the park that was where the Academy used to be. He sat down on the bench and ran a hand through his hair, trying to soothe himself. He had meant what he said, he was going to continue to look for Viktor until there was actual physical proof that he wasn’t somewhere out in the world, waiting for them to find him. He had sacrificed everything to make sure that they had a chance at happiness and the least that they could do was make sure that they returned the favor.

He scowled when he heard a dog barking behind him, being led by someone also inhabiting the park. He really wanted to be alone right now, he was still mourning what he should have done to his best friend. The guilt over not being there for him when he was giving the chance and letting Viktor die a horrible, gruesome death while thinking that was eating him alive. He opened his mouth to say something scathing to the person sitting next to him before he looked down and saw Mr. Pennycrumb.

His eyes flicked up and he was met with shaggy brown hair hanging into intense brown eyes, a pale face pulled into a wide smile, and a short frame. “Viktor?”

“Hey Five. Is this seat taken?”

[d20owlbear]

First sentence game

I was tagged a few times, by doomed-spectacles , melibemusca, and crimsonrainseekingflower so i figure I should probably do it XD not for lack of wanting to, but mainly because of bigtime depression :dab:

Rules: share the first lines of ten of your most recent fanfics and tag ten people. If you have written less than ten, don’t be shy and share anyway.

You can see all my fics here as D20Owlbear on AO3, but here’s from the last 10 fics that I wrote (no co-authored, since I prob didn’t write the first sentence lol, and skipping ficlet collection fics)

Shen Qingqiu had been imbibing for a little while now. (from User UV002 has unlocked H Mart! a LQG/SQQ/YQY throuple fic) SVSSS

A shiver ran up Shen Yuan's back and he deliberately didn't look at the figure surely stalking through one of Qing Jing peaks bamboo grove behind him.  (from I Don't Take Insults Lightly  a head disciple!SY/disciple!SJ fic) SVSSS

Away from the sect, up above the mountains where the water turned into blues and greens from the rays of sun penetrating down, Luo Binghe grumbled to himself and adjusted the pack on his back. (from Draw in and out of rocky rifts a Mer AU Bingge/SY fic) SVSSS

Shen Yuan woke up with a headache. (from the bingmeification of bingge via daddy kink a spicy Bingge/TLJ!SY fic with some likely ZZL/TLJ!SY in there also, very DD for obvious ship reasons, check the tags, based of doki’s artwork/au) SVSSS

It took a few moments for his head to clear from the fog of unconsciousness, his disciples' cries of Shizun! Shizun! were like small, jagged ice-picks in his brain. (from Dumbfuck Author, Dumbfuck Worldbuilding in which Immortal Binding Cables are actually a full Hishi Karada rope dress and Luo Binghe’s Spring Awakening comes on the Skinner Demon mission when SQQ gets tied up in one...) SVSSS

The elevator is broken. It's always broken; it's Hell. (from Hellevator, a zine fic about Hell’s elevator) GO

It's Tuesday, and Aziraphale is reading in his armchair by his desk waiting impatiently for Crowley to return home. (from Tuesdays are for Hotpants a zine fic in which Crowley does his best to make Aziraphale jealous enough to rail him senseless... it kinda not really works?) GO

"They were diaspora, dear." (from Good Food, Better Company, a zine fic about food, people, and the culture people pass along set in the South Downs cottage after the world doesn’t end and Crowley and Aziraphale make dinner together) GO

The world was quiet; the soft sounds that came along with nightfall in the mountains were hushed through the insulated walls of the bamboo house. (from Sweetbrier and Bamboo a domestic, soft LiuShen fic in which SQQ attempts to get LQG to do his paperwork, and they cuddle instead) SVSSS

Anathema woke with a groan and a startling realization that waking up was the last thing she ought to be doing. (from More Than Ghosts, Less Than Gods, an Anathema-centric fic about living after death, settling scores with ancestors, figuring out who exactly you are and who you want to be with all that hanging above you and what sort of destiny and fate you’re tied to... all the while coping with things beyond the normal ken) GO

I’m so bad at tagging people, and I know there’d be a lot of overlap from who I saw already tagged in other ppls posts... so please please feel free to tag yourself if you see this

[baoshan-sanren]

Hi, I just finished SV and I Loved it! I have a question though that irks me and I'd love to hear you opinion on it. It's said in the novel that LBH knew no kindness except from his mother and then NYY & SY!SQQ. It seems to me a little like he fell in love with SY's kindness and not really with his personality. He didn't fall in love with NYY's kindness so it could also be an authority thing. My q is, do you think LBH would fall in love w any other Shizun who showed him the slightest kindness?

Okay bear with my nonsense here for a minute because, aside from making fun of everyone and everything, SVSSS is a pretty good study of what happens when reader expectations meet real situations and real flesh and blood people, and just how unrealistic most of them turn out to be. We see PIDW and LBH in SVSSS via mirror of only SY’s perception and his preconceived notions, but we’re also bound to only see SVSSS and SY via mirror of our own perception and with our own preconceived notions (and boy, do a lot of people miss that about SVSSS completely even though SY the judgmental reader and all his baggage are right there). How many chapters does it take for SY to admit that he hasn’t been really viewing LBH as his own person, but a fictional character he had only gotten to know through airplane’s bad writing? I remember how fucking frustrated I kept getting the first time I read SVSSS because SY kept that picture of LBH (the one we never met bc we never read 300+ chapters of airplane’s novel like SY did) firm in his mind despite all evidence that they were not the same person. Who is it that said “compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there, the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones?" SY’s whole issue with PIDW is that the novel sucked. That most of the characters were one-dimensional and unrealistic, and that even his own scum-villain character had no story/background that would justify his attitude or behavior towards LBH. We only get to see SJ as a person with a history, and grievances, and a boatload of unaddressed trauma because SY digs up and improves all those storylines that airplane had left out. But even knowing that, SY still keeps seeing LBH through the lens of his own preconceived notions, and keeps assigning him motivations that LBH clearly doesn’t have. So I guess my thing is, if it took SY nearly a decade of flesh and blood contact with LBH to figure out that all of his expectations were wrong and inaccurate, can we (the readers of SVSSS) ever view LBH accurately? 

Anyway, not to write an essay (too late) but I guess if I were to speculate on the subject via my own subjective interpretations, I would say that airplane wrote a pretty shitty stallion novel for $$ during which LBH fell for NYY for her “kindness” but right off the bat in SVSSS, we see that NYY does very little except managing to make LBH’s life harder. Still, despite being a character that solely consists of bouncy breasts and questionable life choices in PIDW, she does seem to harbor genuine affection for LBH, and PIDW LBH, who has not gotten affection since his adoptive mother passed, is likely to have latched on to any affection, no matter how destructive it turns out to be, for some self-preservation of his self-esteem and self-worth. Obviously not the healthiest way to obtain either, but hardly unexpected (and we see him doing the same thing with literally every female character in PIDW - Freud would have a field day with just a quarter of this novel). Again, we only know PIDW LBH through SY’s perception, and SY is clearly not the most objective witness, but I find it hard to believe that PIDW LBH ever truly loved any one of the 300+ women in his harem. There is no indication (in what we get from airplane’s writing) that he trusts any of them, and it even seems as if all the harem infighting served as a means to keep them from focusing too hard on LBH as anything other than a prize to be obtained. I mean clearly, PIDW was not meant to be that deep, and we don’t get to read it, so there’s no use speculating much. (I’m sure you noticed my theories are all psychology/trauma centric, which is my bread and butter, and subjective as fuck, so there’s half my point made).

As to whether I think LBH would fall in love with a different shizun who showed him kindness? If kindness is the only factor, I don’t think it’s likely. After all, the 300+ women in his harem in PIDW have all probably showed him some kindness at one time or another. In that respect, SY is certainly not special. There are theories about LBH not actually being sexually attracted to women in PIDW at all, extrapolating on the idea that a more supportive and loving environment during his development years has allowed him to grow up without repressing many things he has clearly repressed in PIDW, his sexuality included. That theory, I suppose, could support the idea that LBH could have just as easily fallen in love with a different man in his immediate vicinity who showed him kindness?

Idk how much I buy into any that; like I said, PIDW was never meant to be that deep, and SVSSS is just full of loose threads I love to yank on (always aware I’ll never see where they lead without an access to MXTX’s brain). I think we’re meant to view PIDW for what it is - a poorly written story for $$ with cardboard cutout characters that, once permeated with “real flesh and blood humans,” turns out to be nothing like the story that the reader (SY) expected to find. And since there’s the same degree of separation between PIDW and SVSSS, as there is between SVSSS and us (the readers), speculating on who LBH might attach himself to if SY was someone else, and how his story might go under any other circumstances, is bound to be as accurate as SY’s predictions concerning PIDW LBH, which turned out to be (as we clearly find out in SVSSS), inaccurate as fuck :)

[your--isgayrights]

as a orv and naurto enjoyer i loved every second of reading that au(?) if u want to- what do u think other members of kimcom would fit into this

Literally the first anon before gave me their discord and we were like talking about this nonstop last night.

So like in Naruto you got all these countries that have Ninja villages in them so we decided to have them be equivalent to certain big nebulas in that like Olympus is one ninja village that has two major clans that are on the brink of a civil war and then Eden is a ninja village that's in the same country as the Demon Kingdom based ninja village and they have an intense rivalry etc. Also instead of tailed beasts there are the 4 walls, wall dividing good and evil, wall that decides samsara, wall of impossible communication and the fourth wall, and collecting them all forms the ten-tails equivalent of "the Final Wall"... So Eden and Demon Kingdom fought a lot over the Jinchuriki of the wall dividing good and evil in the past and Jang Hayoung is the Jinchuriki of the wall of impossible communication hiding out in the demon village after defecting from a different country etc.

YSA is a genin planted by Olympus based village in the KDJ/HSY/YJH centric village (which we decided is probably most similar to uzushiogakure actually bc HSY is from a clan of fuinjutsu users and YJH has the rinnegan; also it means we get to make the structure of the academy however we like which is good because I can't for the life of me think of jonin leaders for the trios so i think they just like. Don't have Enough adults for that like its mostly figure it out on your own kids and you might have like one teacher you have to report back to for notes who can be bihyung maybe.) but she's like not really there as a part of any kind of active sabatoge or anything; she's just kind of one pin in an expansive spy network that's there to like passively absorb information and carry out discrete messenger missions from time to time. I think that she becomes One of The Gang around the time YJH leaves you feel me. Then later on she becomes the jinchuriki of the wall that divides samsara.

We talked about LJY/KNW/Na Bori being a group from the younger generation - and then since their adult supervision is very limited this is a group the HSY/YJH/KDJ trio basically raised - but then Na Bori dies while on mission like some Kannabi bridge shit and its like UGH very emotional like one of the things I always loved about Naruto is that it has On Screen funerals, like, deaths really Matter and don't get sort of thrown to the side for the most part...

Then another generation down LGY SYS and YMA are a trio who the main gang has to raise up; like their interactions are sort of like konohamaru's squad with team 7. We decided that LGY def has the aburame bug shit happening but he probably also has contracts with like huge insect demons later on... Then we thought maybe YMA and YJH were living with some kind of Akimichi equivalent for a while so YMA who didn't develop doujutsu has her bottomless stomach and YJH has a reason to be so good at cooking... SYS we were kind of on the fence about but they suggested she should just be from a minor clan with multiple best summons instead of straight up being an inuzuka or something and i kinda agree with that.

In the late game the jinchurikis are KDJ with the 4th wall, YSA with the wall that divides samsara, Jang Hayoung with the wall of impossible communication, and then like in cannon the wall dividing good and evil ends up split between JHW and LGY. Previous Jinchurikis of the wall dividing samsara and the wall dividing good and evil have been like mega murdered by YJH lmao. He's trying to summon the Final Wall (ten tails).

Then most of the constellations are just like adults in their respective nebulas... Like Anna Croft is out there somewhere being next in line to be the Kage of Asgard or something and Uriel is the Jonin leader of JHW's squad (which I guess LHS is also on maybe?) and then also some of them are rogues.

Did I forget anyone...? Hmm idk... Either way if you have more questions feel free to hmu!

[spectres-fulcrum]

I started Lesser Evil today. :( I'm really torn. I cannot wait to see how this story goes and how the exile/"exile/mission and on what terms Thrawn leaves Thalias and Samakro(And Che'ri). And just the politics. And the plot. Oh! And I FINALLY get to meet Thrass. And Borika.I am so excited for Lesser Evil.

But after it ends, it's over. Until Ahsoka, there's no more for any of these characters. No more Thrawn or Ar'alani or Eli or any of the chiss. And deep down...

But how am I supposed to be okay with the Imperial books now that I've seen Thrawn in his element, among his people? Where yes, people are plotting against him, but he's ignorant to it. He has his inner circle of Thalias, Ar'alani, and Samakro on guard against the threats from Csilla and he doesn't have to see it. And then he loses them all-and has to face the xenophobia of Lesser Space. And they don't target him, they can't target him. They go for Eli, his one inner circle protector. And he's powerless to even realize it.

(Short answer: Of course I'm supposed to be okay with it because in the death of everything, he gains Eli)

(This is just a lot of rambles)

That idiot. Of course they used Eli against him. Coruscant didn't realize how much they won. Csilla could never win by using Ar'alani or Thalias or even Samakro against Thrawn but Coruscant did briefly bring lingering anger between Thrawn and Eli.

But like, it's weird. How am I supposed to be okay with watching Thrawn lose everything he knows and start back at the academy when he's had everything on the Springhawk. He has to lose everything to start all over in a human centric military.

But in the death of everything he's ever known, he meets a young man who speaks Sy Bisti. And neither of them know it, but their lives are changed when they realize their two cultures share a past and their futures are entwined, perhaps one day their bodies literally.

How can I be okay seeing Thrawn lose everything? Because once this ends, it begins with Eli and the way they were meant to meet, to struggle until they find comfort in their wavelength. For Thrawn to trust Eli, with his words, then with his projects, and then with the Chiss skywalkers, having to let Eli go as everyone from his inner circle once had to let him go. And Eli had to let go of his preplanned career, follow Thrawn into a crazy life and act content, until one day, finally, he was, and he woke up and realized his entire life was meant to be right here, by Thrawn's side.

As if there was some invisible string connecting them to each other all their lives. And so it's worth losing everything, because Thrawn gains a new everything. (And yes, that invisible string refence is a nod to Invisible String by Taylor Swift. I think it fits Thranto very well)

But I have to finish Lesser Evil before Midnights by Taylor Swift comes out so... I have to read it. No option there.

[tilbageidanmark]

Movies I watched this week #61

First watch: Parade, Jacques Tati’s delightful final film. Set in a small Stockholm circus, it combines jugglers, clowns, mimes, acrobats, cabaret, and simple old-fashioned vaudeville acts. My dad would have loved the fisherman gag (at 25:40). 7+/10.

🍿          

Sing 2, another recommendation from Adora. Fantastic computer animated comedy, one of the few sequels I ever saw and one of the few that I loved. I am going to watch (and re-watch) all 11 of Illumination Studio features - Never saw The Minions series, and I never realized how good their overall output is. Also, I should re-watch Sing2 paying special attention to the characters voices, now that I know who 'played’ them (Bobby Cannavale, Scarlett Johansson, Reese Witherspoon, Bono)...

The logo intro (Above) sold me on the movie as soon as it started.

🍿          

2 women, waiting for the bus, recognize each other. One of them apologizes to the other for something she did years ago, when they were in school. The other one says that she forgives her, and then leaves on foot.

This is one of 56 short, unrelated vignettes, all told quietly as a series of static shots, in Rúnar Rúnarsson‘s meditative Echo. Snippets of stories, with no thematic connections between them, except that they all happen in Iceland during Christmas. Clearly influences by Roy Andersson, (especially his ‘Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence‘) and just as moving.

My precious discovery of the week. The trailer. 10/10.

🍿          

Witch Hunt (Heksejakt) is a low-key Norwegian corporate crime series with a strong female-centric POV. It tells a complex story of a CFO at a hi-end law firm in Oslo who discovers a suspiciously unaccountable €450,000 invoice in her files. Until the very end of the 8-part series, you never know how it will end: Will her whistleblower case succeed, or will the powerful players behind the systemic corruption - who always get their way - be able to silence her too? 6/10.

🍿          

Polanski’s first English language masterpiece, Repulsion, with Catherine Deneuve, then the most beautiful 22-year-old woman in the world. She plays a sexually repressed manicurist, revolted by men, who loses her sanity alone in a tomb-like London flat. This is an example of a film that stayed as fresh as it was in 1965. 9/10.

🍿          

Laurel Canyon X 2:

🎦🎦🎦 In Lisa Cholodenko’s seductive drama Laurel Canyon, Frances McDormand and her son’s fiancé, the sexy Kate Beckinsale, nearly get into a threesome with Frances' young boyfriend stud. It’s steamy, and laid-back and very LA. 6+/10

🎦🎦🎦 Echo in the Canyon is a nostalgia bomb, hosted by Jakob Dylan (who looks so distinguished). A heart-breaking glimpse at the Laurel Canyon music scene of the mid-60s, with some of the players of that time reminiscing, Brian Wilson, Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, Ringo, Clapton, Michelle Phillips, many more (but completely omitting Joni Mitchell!) 9/10.

🍿          

Thursday Appointment, a terrific Iranian short by a 20-year-old Syed Raza Khardmand. Thursday appointment is the Muslim tradition of visiting graveyards and placing flowers on the graves of the departed.

Many more Iranian shorts here. Thanks, Dafna, for the recom!

🍿          

3 More First Watches:

🎦🎦🎦 Arrival, Denis Villeneuve‘s retelling of Ted Chiang’s novella, about language, communication, flash-backs to the future and loss of a child.

🎦🎦🎦 I was never into the music of ‘The Who’, and not much into Ken Russell’s grandiose imagination, so his Rock Opera Tommy did not appeal to me at all. The saga of the blind, deaf, and mute boy who becomes a pinball wizard and who started a religion must have been a favorite of L. Ron Hubbard & Sun Myung Moon. But the score (with the exception of the few ‘hits’) was tedious, and the 70′s aesthetics did not age well. With Jack Nicholson and Ann-Margaret at the heights of their sexiness. 2/10.

🎦🎦🎦 Pontypool, a 2008 Canadian horror indie about a small town radio jock, his producer and assistant who are stuck inside a small studio while the Zombie Apocalypse rages on outside. It is all “tell" and no “show”, and is truly horrible. I was prompted to watch it by this dense Metafilter thread, but hated it all the way. 1/10.

🍿          

A lovely National Geographic short poem about the Catalan tradition of Human Towers (”Castells”). The NatGeo has an online collection of documentaries, which I’ll check out.

🍿          

Seth Rogen X 2:

🎦🎦🎦 I loved Jonathan Levine’s ‘Long Shot’ and I hated his ‘The Night Before’, all with Seth Rogen (who really can only play one obnoxious stoner role). But because Anna Kendrick is in 50/50, I gave it a chance. It’s lovely that they wanted to try a generic comedy about a young guy with cancer, but it was all too slight, sitcom’y and cutesy. His sickness is expressed in a shaved head, that’s it. 2/10. 

🎦🎦🎦 “...Baby, where we’re going, you don’t need teeth...”

Not sure why I always resisted watching Paul. It’s another solid Simon Pegg / Nick Frost comedy about two English sci-fi geeks who "encounter” an edgy, boozy alien on a UFO road trip to the Southwest. With special agent Jason Bateman (“Lorenzo's Oil”, a play on Alonzo Mosely), Jesse Plemons, Sigourney Weaver as "The Big Guy", and a voice cameo of Steven Spielberg as himself. It would have be even better if Edgar Wright was the director. 7+/10.

Bonus: 2 short video-essays: 

The Spielberg Face, by Kevin B. Lee. Re-watch.

Nerdwriter1′s Faces On A Big Screen.

🍿          

Paul Schrader’s Light Sleeper, his Taxi Driver-lite from 1992. But Willem Dafoe is a Manhattan drug dealer, and instead of saving Judy Foster, he kills the killers of his ex-wife. Some unappreciated films by renown directors clearly deserve to be ignored. This is one of them. 3/10.

🍿          

In Dough Jonathan Pryce is an old Jewish baker struggling to keep his little Bakery afloat. I watched it only because his new Muslim apprentice mixes cannabis in the cookie dough, but it was a terribly flat, full of Jewish cliches, Muslim cliches and human cliches. 2/10

🍿      

How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town, a puritanical Canadian sex-comedy that is not sexy and not funny. The absolutely best part of the movie is the title (which got me to watch it). 1/10

🍿      

Meanwhile, I started watching My Brilliant Friend, an Italian adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels. The third season started playing now, and I only saw the first few episodes of Season one. Absolutely magnificent masterpiece so far! Will write more when I finish it. 10/10.

- - - - -

(My complete movie list is here)

[j10kkuno]

Weekly schedule from Rae! I had to cut off her icon with how long her tweet was. Happy to see today's lobby is just the amigops even if it can be up to 6 people(Toast mentioned possibly inviting 2 more people). EDIT: my phone didn’t give me notification so I didn’t see it but Rae replied and added that Lily and Leslie are being added which I am down for, they have good vibes with everyone so it’ll be fun.

Two Among Us lobbies! For Wednesday, they were discussing doing it in character, but I also want some chill rounds to allow the creators some time to get to know each other. Sykkuno said there's more people not in the lobby he wants to play Among Us with so hopefully there's more. This seems like a more Rae-centric lobby, so maybe Sy can make the next one with his GTA friends like the soy gang(speaking of which! X is back in the city! Yuno and Benji will be so happy!), Lenny, Majima, Layla, maybe even Ash, etc.

For Friday, well, they had had a lobby that Rae shared but chat deemed at least two members problematic(Larray and Bella Poarch or something) so they cancelled. But it was meant to be Amigops, Leslie, Bretman, and then Gaten and Noah from Stranger Things. I hope those eight can still be saved and then add some mix of Karl, Brooke, Tina, Jack, etc.

And... Yeah. Also, be kind to Sykkuno today if he's not feeling well on stream/doesn't stream. He mentioned he was scheduled for his first COVID vaccine this morning last night and was worried about side effects with the lobby planned. Of course, he could be fine but there’s a lot of common side effects that could hit hard and yeah. Just respect his boundaries, always, but especially if he’s not feeling well the next couple days. But I’m still excited for tonight and lowkey I’m hoping it’s a short stream so his vod is up by the time I get home and cleaned up after work but with my luck he’ll be feeling fine and stream until the tsunami in GTA.

[touchmycoat]

Can we ask multiple things?

Questions 5, 7, 23 sound really interesting

hell yeah you can!!!

5) character you were most surprised to end up writing

very good question...very good question. Hmm. Maybe He Xuan?? I think my love for him really came out of the blue for me since SQX was my darling from the get-go (and very much one of my Types™). I never hated HX just 'cause he was the antagonist of SQX's arc but I don't think I was expecting to read his stuff further and just fall madly in love with the guy hahahahaha, and now he's my fav 🙏🙏

7) when asked, are you embarrassed or enthusiastic to tell people that you write?

I'm very enthusiastic! All my friends, even non-fandom ones, know I write fic and porn lmao, and if they ask I'll even tell them what the porn is about. My policy is if they end up embarrassed that's their problem nsfndnjfnjdnf

(to be real though, I can't wait for the day I actually have an original fiction project that I can talk about so I don't have to talk circuitously around fic for people I'm not super close to.)

23) any obscure life experiences that you feel have helped your writing?

yeah. Here's what I can remember at a scan:

Song of Achilles fic - my hometown Les Mis greek myth!AU - the classics course I took in undergrad One Piece MAS zoo!AU - volunteered at the zoo/worked at a bio sciences museum songxiao daycare AU - worked in early ed & babysitting We Built Our Own House - the Buddhism course I took songxiao transmigrated mail order bride AU - XXC has my ex-housemate's old job lolol songxiao temple drummer/spanking fics - i did temple drumming ndfjdfjn songxiao erotic acupuncture - i went and got acupunctured literally for this fic i think ksdnfdjfnj songxiao bachelor!AU - stage managing/first ADing/read Strike the Baby and Kill the Blonde songxiao street food!AU - me literally going to 東區 in taiwan and sussing out the food stands Cultivation No. 6 - worked at a plant store; this fic is literally just my customer service adventures songxiao aerial yoga PWP - i went and did aerial yoga SHUT UP songxiao hospital pianist AU - you already know where this is going SV porn!AU - SY's video editing (not the porn part, sadly)

a fic i'm really excited about writing is the post-canon SQX-centric fic I wanna write w freediving, which I am now learning!!

((Get to know your author))

[ghostwriterofthemachine]

Sy Snootles centric, Pirates, Crack Treated Seriously, Fix-It, background Hondo Ohnaka/Obi-Wan Kenobi, Mermaids, Galactic Domination

Sy Snootles: Time Traveling Pirate Queen

She accidently gets sent back in time to pre-clone wars era, because a race of Magic Space Mermaids were so enchanted by her beautiful voice that they granted her heart’s desire-- to be beloved by many-- in the most round-about way possible. 

She proceeds to, equally accidently, become the leader of one of the strongest legions of pirates in the known galaxy. You don’t get that far in show business without some organizational skills. She whips them all into shape. They all love her. They bake her cookies. 

She sends Hondo careening on a course to bump into Young Knight Obi-Wan, with whom he falls in love instantly and proceeds to spend the next 5 years seducing, which Obi-Wan grudgingly (so says he) allows. This causes Obi-Wan and his Padawan to be away from the Inner Rim more often, because they’re on Wacky Pirate Adventures, which slows down Sheev’s plans a ton. 

Anakin meets Pirate Queen Sy and calls her Auntie because I want him to. 

So Sheev goes to Dathomir, right, to meet Mother Talzin and get another Fodder Apprentece, but Sy is already on Dathomir, because Ventress is her girlfriend and co-pirate queen. 

Sy shoots Sheev in the chest, also mostly by accident.

Everyone reads the laws and is shocked to find that Sheev secretly implemented this weird sub-law where anyone who kills him takes over his position, for some reason. 

Empress Sy Snootles. 

The End.  

[politicalprof]

What Politicalprof listens to -- podcast edition

A recent question about a podcast has led me to offer this “answering a question literally no one has asked” post: what Politicalprof listens to, podcast wise. (Hint: it’s mostly history.)

Recent readers will know I do NOT listen to political podcasts. I get enough politics in my life every day. In the car, on a walk, I want to listen and think.

In no particular order:

Hardcore History: Don Carlin’s deep dive into historical events. Long. Well-told. Sometimes I learn a lot. I’ve bought ones that weren’t available for free. He doesn’t need my endorsement. But he gets it anyway.

The Fall of Rome: Patrick Wyman’s breakthrough podcast. Uses modern research techniques to explore under-publicized dimensions of the long fall -- falls -- of the Roman Empire. Completely worth the investment.

Serial: Another ultra-popular podcast. From the people who do This American Life. Seasons 1 (on Adnan Syed) and 3 (on the criminal justice system in East Cleveland, OH), are staggering. Season 2 is less so but so what? Listen and learn. Season 3 will hurt your soul.

Tides of History: Patrick Wyman’s followup to The Fall of Rome. It’s really about the rise of the West -- very much a western-Europe focused podcast. Enjoyable, if not quite as good as The Fall of Rome. Feels padded at times, particularly with interview shows. But I’ve enjoyed it.

The History of English: A long, deep dive into the history of the English language. Want to know why we say church but chapeau and why Americans say “erb” while British people say “herb”? You’ll know if you listen to this. Want to trace English from its Indo-European roots? Listen. There’s a LOT here. It’s a weird language. But by god it’s an interesting one.

30 for 30: If you have any interest in sports stories, particularly in their social/political dimensions, 30 for 30 from ESPN is excellent. I don’t care about all of them. Heck, I’ve skipped any number of them. (God I don’t care about MMA.) But they’re well done, and usually worth a listen.

Bundyville: Interested in the patriot/militia movement? The two seasons of Bundyville are a must. I know a LOT about this stuff ... and this is excellent. Revelatory. Listen.

The History of Rome: Mike Duncan was a college student when he started a fairly straightforward, leader by leader (with a little social history thrown in) accounting of the history of the Roman Empire. It’s not super sophisticated, and it is very leader-centric, but it’s interesting.

Revolutions: Duncan’s follow-up to History of Rome. He’d had some professional education when this started -- and a much more sophisticated podcast rig, with some professional support, too. Tracing the great Revolutions of the modern era, starting with the English Revolution of the 1640s through the American and French Revolutions, and beyond. A nice gimmick.

The City: Really good. First season examined the politics, bias and money involved in an illegal landfill in the North Lawndale area of Chicago, a predominantly African-American district. Second is deep diving into politics, strip clubs, and gentrification in Reno, NV. From USA Today. Excellent.

Land of the Giants: A thorough look at the business, politics and consequences of Amazon. Not “the Amazon.” Just “Amazon.” A behemoth in its own right. Fascinating and thought-provoking. It’s made me appreciate Walmart ... which is quite a thing.

History on Fire: A podcast from an Italian writer/academic, Daniele Bolelli. Long dives into various events. Mixed in quality. Some I like a lot, some fairly unengaging. Broad focus. Has shifted to a pay-site; I don’t find it worth it. But I enjoy the ones I access.

The Theory of Everything: Hard to describe. Still early days with this one. Thought/monologues/contemplations on big issues, with a little reportage along the way. May hold up -- I’ve enjoyed it so far. But it isn’t something I’ve yet committed to.

Friendly Fire: Three friends, at least two of whom are film industry professionals, chat about a randomly selected war movie. Some usual suspects; some surprise examples. Usually some interesting insights about films any war buff almost certainly knows. (But not always.)

Martyrmade: Deep -- DEEP -- dives into the way(s) the world has caused suffering for people, and how that suffering has shaped global life. Interesting project about Jim Jones and the Guyana cult got started before moving to its horrific end. Slow sending out new episodes; DEEP dives. You have to want it. Often worth it.

Against the Rules: Michael Lewis (The Blind Side, The Big Short.) has a podcast. (Just don’t ask him to talk at your university -- his fee is staggering.) This one is about referees: the job, the challenges, the complaining. And not just in sports. Interesting and engaging.

Surviving Y2K: Three seasons, the first of which is about the Y2K “bug” and the controversy around it. I skipped “Looking for Richard Simmons,” but enjoyed a deep dive into the American reality show, “Headlong: Running From ‘Cops.’” (All through Dan Taberski.) Light but interesting.

Spectacular Failures: A podcast about how some businesses went belly up despite the fact that they seemed like they were rolling along. (Blockbuster, anyone.) It’s not super deep, but it’s very accessible. If you want to think about failure, this is a good place to listen.

Cautionary Tales: stories of people screwing up. Examining the psychology of compounding errors. Well worth the time.

Catch and Kill: The podcast version of Ronan Farrow’s work exposing Harvey Weinstein and the architectures of power that enabled him. Interesting on both the issue and journalism as well.

History Impossible: long dives into some of the most uncomfortable, brutal but under-recognized hollows of American history. Very early days for me. Interesting so far.

I Spy: brief stories of real spy missions told by the people who did the operations. Not transformative, but interesting.

Reset: explorations of the roles technology plays in our lives, and of the ways the digital world is remaking the “real” world. The last episode I listened to examined Apple’s decision to remove an app that the protestors in Hong Kong were using to avoid police. Digital ethics in the modern age.

I have listened, at times, to This American Life, which I like on the radio but not as a podcast for some reason. I found American History Tellers wildly over-produced. I can’t listen to the endless array of crime podcasts. But I don’t watch crime TV, either.

[auntarctica]

When it comes to your inspiration for Reboot and Original DMC, what calls to you to help build the world, scenarios and characterizations of Dante and Vergil? And do you intend to write more of both?

Interesting. Thank you so much for dropping me a note! Easy question first: yes, absolutely; I am writing more of both DmC Reboot and DMC classic. I’m primarily an original writer, but this is my one actual fandom, and my one true pairing. I’m definitely an institutionalized lifer in that respect; got in early and I’m never getting out. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Here’s what I’m working on: Reboot-wise, I have the next chapter of Do Not Speak Against the Sun well underway, and there will be at least one more chapter after that, if not three(?). (Haven’t decided whether to save those ideas for a different fic or use them here – I know every writer in the world can relate.)

Classic-wise, I have underway:

- an interstitial, Dante-centric flashback-heavy fic that loosely spans the period post-4 up to V’s appearance in 5 in vignettes, with occasional forays into nostalgia and his past with Vergil, which is called Donec Gratis Eram Tibi (In the Days When I Was Dear to You).

- Confraternity, the post-5 fic that will follow that one.

Both of those are continuations of the Opera Omnia.

(Now I feel weird because whenever someone asks what I’m working on I always want to know what they’re working on but since you are a wild anon I cannot do the requisite social dance and it consternates me…) As for inspirations, like regrets, I have a few. I’m sure that a great deal of my Weltanschuuang is informed by my past as an opera singer (before I quit to write full time), and being a dual citizen of the US and the EU, straddling the Old and New worlds – which is part of why the backdrops of both Classic and Reboot are equally appealing to me.

History, philosophy, psychology, classical mythology, art and human nature are all sort of baked into DMC, no matter the iteration, and I think that those of us who are drawn to it tend to already have those interests; a pre-existing passion for those subjects. In seeking to augment those worlds, it’s only natural to draw on what’s already in the narrative and flower outward from there. The way my mind strains it, DMC Classic is ultimately a classical/gothic fantasy with nods to modernity, and DmC Reboot is ultimately a modern fantasy with nods to gothic classicalism, so that tends to really inform some of the choices, both maximal and subtle, that I make when I go to write in one or the other. For instance, if I had chosen to name a DMC Classic fic Do Not Speak Against the Sun, I would have named it in the original Latin. But Reboot is not as neoclassically or gothically weighted as Classic, (even if we can absolutely assume Vergil’s Ivy League classical education) which is why I feel the translated phrase works better. I really tend to like resonance – self-referentialism, themes that call back to themselves, or reappear like leitmotifs, gaining greater significance as they go, and foremost, this idea that everything in existence is interleaved and cantilevered and nothing is irrelevant. Although Reboot and Classic each have very different approaches, and thematic aspects the other lacks, there are also a lot of themes that they share – and it’s fun to play within both those congruencies and the discrepancies.

One thing I really like is the idea of toying with resonances between the universes - things that might surface in the narrative in both worlds, but in completely different contexts.

For instance, there were a few places in Do Not Speak Against the Sun where I saw a chance to incorporate a turn of phrase or piece of dialogue from my longstanding DMC classic fics - one example would be in Consanguinity where Vergil surveys the overgrown courtyard of the manor and remarks in the narrative that “the topiary [is] growing unchecked”. Reboot Vergil actually says this sentence out loud, but the context is (cough cough) rather different.

So I peppered in quite a few things like that.

I think of them as cryptic little love notes to repeat readers – the ones who maybe know your words even better than you do. It’s a really gratifying interaction when someone picks up on one of the little callbacks, or remarks on the architecture – writing is largely a solitary pursuit by nature, so those interludes of mutuality are all the more valuable.

I ended up doing it with some lines from the games, as well – subverting the infamous “how about a kiss from your little brother” - which also, intriguingly, necessarily changes the speaker of that line, purely because Reboot changed the canon.

Things like that, I think, add to the general idea that both sets of Dantes and Vergils can coexist in the greater Zeitgeist, in parallel, never even knowing when their universes graze up against each other in those odd little moments - and that’s a parity I like, these resonant and recognizable moments - the familiar subverted. It is both new and old, recognizable and surreal.

(Though that’s a fic I’d like to write too, some day - after all, the Yamato is already capable of opening interdimensional portals; canonically it’s not much of a stretch for any of them to wind up in the others’ world - and I’m sure that crossover has been done many, many, many times, but hey, the world can tolerate one more stab at the ol’ canon… ;) ) I think it’s rather to the credit of the developers of Reboot that while they changed the canon significantly, the characters are still recognizable – as they should be, in any good fanfic AU (which, let’s be fair, is basically what Reboot is). While different circumstances have emphasized different aspects of their personalities – and their resultant relationship dynamic and evolution - the core values and motivations of the characters remain intact. In DMC 5, Vergil posits a rhetorical question, addressed to Dante, as he sits beneath the Qliphoth awaiting him – I’m probably badly paraphrasing here, but essentially he says, “If things were reversed that day, would I have your life, and you mine?” It’s an interesting moment, because it seems like an almost wistful musing from him—and yet an uncharacteristically simplistic one. Vergil seems like a guy who believes in multifactorial influences, and not apt to think it could be as simple as “Dante got all the breaks”, so we can surmise that perhaps he summarily mentally answered his own question with a wry, chagrined, “no”. He cannot ultimately let himself believe he is a pawn of fate, and that he had no hand or control in his own destiny—that would be contrary to his entire worldview and self-concept.

And while it would be a convenient and face-saving philosophy to blame fate, or Dante, and he allows himself to entertain the thought, briefly, I believe he rejects it.

What I find interesting is that Reboot actually sort of also answers that question, by having Dante be the one who was disenfranchised and Vergil the one who had all the breaks, and we see that lives are shaped by more than mere circumstances, and that Vergil’s core personality, the parts that remain consistent across universes – curiosity, impulsivity, innovation, creativity, ambition, individualism, idealism – will always lead him through a more dramatic arc than Dante, and subsequently a more resplendent redemption.

There’s a famous Teddy Roosevelt quote that suits what I see as Vergil’s general philosophy, in either universe:

“The credit belongs to those who are actually in the arena, who strive valiantly; who know the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, and spend themselves in a worthy cause; who at best know the triumph of high achievement; and who, at worst, if they fail, fail while daring greatly, so that their place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.” And I think that intuitive consistency across universes is what I rely on most heavily when I go to write either one - the rest is all set-dressing; superficial, and circumstantial. Even if Vergil’s personality is different, or expressed differently, his character is consistent; his theory of mind, his worldview. Same goes for Dante. All that said, I’m not sure I actually addressed what you asked, so if there are more specific questions or things you wanted to know that I completely elided, please feel free to shoot a follow-up. I am at your disposal!

[proofthatihaveaheart]

fic rec list of 2019

Rules: Post links (Ao3, ff.net, etc.); specify fandom/pairing/etc; don’t answer the same fic twice - spread the appreciation; tag other people; you don’t have to answer all the questions, but leave them in the list so the next person can answer if they want.

I saw this going around and thought it might be fun to do so here we go.. This year I read an assorted mix of fandoms so we’ve got a lot of variation in here including The Adventure Zone, Brooklyn Nine Nine, Coco, Dishonored, Good Omens, Life is Strange, Lucifer, Marvel, Steven Universe, Tangled, and The Umbrella Academy. 

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1. Favourite complete fic you’ve read this month (multiple chapters/parts): strings by pathygen (Tangled, Cassandra-centric, s3 canon divergent) which was a beautiful and fascinating exploration of how anger can twist a person into someone else. It’s dark and it builds to one of my favorite moments in any fic I read this year. 

2. Favourite complete fic you’ve read this month (one-shot): dance, dance (we’re falling apart to half-time) by gleesquid (Marvel, Gwen/MJ), I always want more GwenMJ fics and this one delivered on that, with bonus dancing and other Spidey characters showing up. 

3. Favourite WIP you’ve read this month: tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by fishycorvid (The Adventure Zone, Taako-centric). Technically Sy finished it this month but shhhhh it counts, it absolutely counts. This fic is painful, about grief and living on after, about how sometimes things don’t work even when you try hard to make them better. It hurts and it’s beautifully done.  

4. One fic/series you’ve read which you keep coming back to again and again: A lot of fics could fit for this category but I chose Waltz of the Nian by QuickYoke (Steven Universe, Lapis character study with some Lapis/Peridot) because there were several lines that just stuck with me. Whenever I think of the character I think of those lines now. More generally, this is a fantastic character study about trauma and intimacy. 

5. Most underrated fic you’ve read this year: Such a Cunning Disguise by WhenasInSilks (Marvel 616, Carol/Jessica, Secret Invasion AU). Mind the warnings on this fic, it earns them. A beautiful work that deserves more kudos but I imagine the warnings + Carol/Jess being generally underrated keeps people away.  

6. Most underrated fic you’ve read EVER: nothing immediately came to mind and i was too lazy to dig through all my old fic bookmarks so i’m skipping it

7. Favourite whump/angst fic of the year: I got it down to two and then I couldn’t choose which one to rec so you get two recs for the price of one! Both are Marvel. another place, another time by sorrybaby (MCU, Carol/Maria, Carol/Val) because sometimes you love someone but you don’t end up together, very painful, very well-written.  the small rain down can rain by tigrrmilk (Marvel 616, Carol/Jess) which hurts in a different way and isn’t quite as painful but is also very good character work dealing with Jessica’s feelings on Carol’s sacrifice and amnesia. 

8. Favourite hurt/comfort fic of the year: I did not expect to read Life is Strange fic this year but then we got that photo of them in LiS2 and my heart swelled with feelings. I’m fortunate to have landed on this fic to read -  migratory animals by swapcats (Life is Strange, Max/Chloe) is an excellent road trip post-game fic where the healing and comfort goes both ways. It’s the perfect epilogue to their adventure. 

9. Favourite fluff fic of the year: I knew I was going to rec Carol/Maria for this category but it took me time to decide which fic and then I remembered this one existed - jambalaya (please be my baby) by carol_danvers (MCU, Carol/Maria). It’s one of my favorite getting-together fics for them and it’s full of fluffy moments. 

10. Favourite smut fic of the year: nope

11. Favourite gen fic of the year: Try Again by pprfaith (The Umbrella Academy, multi-POV) which is absolutely the type of TUA fic I wanted after finishing the show. There’s lots of hurt/comfort, lots of good sibling dynamics, lots of confronting trauma and healing from it. It’s good. 

12. Favourite fix-it fic of the year/ever: It’s not so much that I think the ending of CM needed fixing in any way, it worked really well and that final shot of Carol looking down on her home before blasting off is superb, but also I really wanted to read fics where she stayed with her family. Also fics that made their relationship romantic. This was my favorite of that type -  Lightning Crash by Monochrome_girl (MCU, Carol/Maria).

13. Favourite crack-fic fic of the year: I didn’t read any

14. Favourite sick-fic this year: I don’t think I read any this year... but I did read fics where people patched injuries up so I’m reccing brave face talk so lightly by lesbiyawn (MCU, Carol/Maria) 

15. Favourite kid-fic this year: With the exception of Captain Marvel fics which featured Monica, I didn’t read any kid-fic and it would be a stretch to call those fics kid-fic because they were more fics that just happened to feature a kid as a character? But then this is also a stretch, it’s pregnancy fic but also is it? and anyway I enjoyed it so it deserves a rec -  oh violets, you did so signify by fruitwhirl (Brooklyn Nine Nine, Jake/Amy)

15. Fic this year which you didn’t expect to love as much as you do: Jasper/Lapis is not a ship I considered reading but I love everything anistar_e writes so I figured why not read her SU fic? And I did and I was blown away by this one in particular - Favor for Your Four-Chambered Heart by anistar_e (Steven Universe, Jasper/Lapis, Never Let Me Go AU) which balances themes of freedom, self-determination, and power in a world where your only purpose is to die for others beautifully. People make mistakes but they’re allowed to grow and become better. I just really love this fic with all my heart.  

16. Fic which convinced you to ship a pairing: in oakland by hupsoonheng (MCU, Erik/Sam) which set Erik/Sam before me, a pairing I had never considered, and wove a story about two hurting teenage boys finding love over the course of a summer. It’s beautifully done. 

17. Favourite AU you’ve read this year: It was between this and the SU Never Let Me Go AU and since that one fit a different category, I decided to put this one here. Choose Your Faces Wisely by Poetry (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley). It’s a Daemon AU with some really neat concepts about the daemons of supernatural beings and some really good character stuff, which are some of my favorite things in daemon fic.  

18. Longest fic/series you’ve read this year:  I read many long fics this year but Work of All Saints by anistar_e (Coco, Imelda-centric with Ernesto/Hector/Imelda, 210k) was by far the longest. And what a masterpiece it was! It’s basically a novel with the amount of world-building and character development it does, a grand epic that is incredibly personal in its scope. Spectacular! 

19. The last fic you’ve read: I got back into playing Dishonored 2 over the break and as a result, I decided to read some fic for it. This one popped up on multiple rec lists and I can see why. tetralogy of fallot by patho (Dishonored, Emily-centric) is short, 10 sections of 100 words each, and still manages to craft a haunting narrative about High Chaos Emily’s reign. 

20. Wildcard fic you haven’t mentioned but deserves a shout-out + why: I was stuck between two fics I really wanted to mention and so I decided to rec both (the more recs, the merrier!): 

And There Was Light by ariaadagio (Lucifer, Lucifer/Chloe, 143k) which branches off from the end of season 2 and spins a long tale of existential angst, love, and navigating human-divine relations.  

Salinity (And Other Measurements of Brackish Water) by drawlight (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley) which is a shorter fic that reads like poetry. 

Tagging @startofamoment, @thinbottomedcauldron, @dmigod, @thornscrowned, and anyone else who wants to do it!