#in a way my brains are all 'you don't need to go if it makes you uncomfortable!!! you can just stay home!!! that would be sooo comfy!!!'

[raichukfm]

It's a fascinating question and the answer doesn't speak to it at all. We're talking about swapping perceptions, you know, the hypothetical thing that could answer those "What if my blue is your red?" ponderings. Were that the case and you were to swap, you would start seeing everything red as blue and vice versa, but you would be able to tell this. That's a controversial point, but we aren't proposing a full qualia inversion here; your internal concepts of red and blue haven't changed, just the way that your brain maps sensory stimuli to your qualia has. You can imagine red, and it's red as you have always imagined it, you just look at a red delicious apple and you see it as blue. (Actually a fascinating question whether people would agree with this assessment, and has me wondering about people with aphantasia specifically about if they think their 'red as they have always imagined it' can be separated from the way things with that color look to them. I'm getting off track.)

But this swap is different. Semiotics refers to the meanings that things have; for instance, the way you are looking at these squiggles or hearing these sound waves and taking them as a message. I am intending a meaning now as I type these words out, and you are taking away a meaning as you perceive them, and though it won't quite be the same meaning it is related. There's a question of where exactly the meaning you perceive is; is it in the message itself? Is it just contained in the context around it? Was it put there by me? Is it only there when you read or hear it?

And now specifically we're talking about abstract objects, things which aren't concrete; for instance, words as words, not images or sounds but the thing that those patterns invoke. Things where it is already an interesting philosophical question about how exactly it is that they exist. (For those with the bent to ponder it and not just go 'Uh, they just do, duh' because yeah that's fair.) And that's just one example of an abstract object. It's not all messages. There are numbers. There are complex mathematical objects, like groups and rings and fields. Are things like "peace" abstract objects?

If we do this swap of perceptions, so you perceive the meaning of an abstract thing to be the meaning that I perceive... What are you perceiving, exactly? Is it the thing anymore? Is this even truly a swap of perceptions or is it rather a swap of thoughts? If you took one piece of my mental model of the world and swapped it out with one of yours, how would it fit in? Would it fit in at all? It's fascinating.

The world isn't shrouded in darkness. There's not some blinding fog that has settled over everything. You can observe the world, make sense of parts of it, peer into its mysteries and try to think of answers. Yeah, it's confusing and a lot of pieces of it are out of reach but that's just because the world is so fucking big and complicated and so many parts we simply lack the faculties to possess. This question is that lovely kind of philosophical pondering that is fundamentally unresolvable and by all rights has no practical purpose... But we can still talk about it, and in talking about it, we can share ideas and work through how it is we think of things. If nothing else, we can enjoy ourselves. And that's as practical a purpose as anything else.

Don't see something you can't think of how to answer and decide that it cannot be answered and that now is a time to shrink away to safe thoughts that can be trusted. Ponder whatever bullshit that strikes your fancy, and try to think about what the answers would be. Even if you can fundamentally never find out if you're right or wrong, the thinking itself is a worthwhile exercise. Encourage other people to do it too, though don't try to force it; different people have their own sorts of funtime questioning. I've got things like this, some people have how much prep time Batman would need to defeat Shrek in a fight.

equally confounded and obsessed by this quora question and response that i just stumbled onto

[sapphiresandferrari]

Sweet encounters

Pairing: Eddie Munson x oc!reader

Summary: Eddie meets the new student, and he inevitably falls for her

Warnings: none, pure fluff and slightly simp Eddie

A/N: hi, I finally wrote a new fic, about Eddie Munson this time.

I hope you will like it and, as always, comments, likes and reblogs are highly appreciated, let me know your thoughts, please, it helps me improve

Also English is not my first language, so I'm sorry if I made some mistakes or typos

Enjoy 🫶🏻

Eddie hated early mornings, he absolutely hated them.

The only occasions he woke up early without a groan and a big instinct to kill the first person in front of him, were when he had to drive to go to a concert or to shop for new records and band shirts.

Other than that, he utterly disliked waking up early, his brain doesn’t start to function until 11 am.

However, this year Eddie was focused and determined: he wanted to graduate, so he could finally leave this town for good and try to make it to the music scene.

He knew his band was good enough to make it, sure they need way more practice, and definitely a bigger crowd than the 5 drunks at the Hideout, but they could make it, he knew it in his bones.

In order to graduate tho, he had to put lots of effort this year, so that means waking up on time and actually show up for classes even if they were boring, do all the assignments (possibly on time too) and most importantly, try to get at least all D.

That's why every morning he woke up with a living will up to 0 but he was stubborn: he wanted to graduate and he will.

After drinking the biggest cup if coffee known to mankind, he hopped on his van and drove to school.

He checked his schedule and headed to the chemistry lab.

He arrived surprisingly early, so he could sit alone and doodle in peace, until he heard the chair beside him moving.

He turned his head and saw a girl, curly hair, all pink and laces, never seen before, she looked at him, her eyes wide, scared "is this seat taken? Can i sit here?".

He couldn't belive his ears, was she aware of his reputation? Did she know anything, honestly?

He couldn't tell, so he simply told her that yes, the seat was free and she could stay there, turning back to his doodles.

"Oh thank you, I'm new you know? Ao i don't know anyone and everyone here seems to be pretty close to each other and i saw you alone so i thought i could sit here but then I thought it was better to ask cause what if you were waiting for someone, and...maybe is better if i shut up"

Jeez she talked a lot, but Eddie found it somehow cute, she looked like a lost kitty, he didn't know if he should try to be friendly or keep staying silent and let her go.

She didn't seem to have things in common with him so he didn't see the point into trying to be friends, but she also looked scared and he could help her, at least at the beginning.

"Hey calm down, is fine, i wasn't waiting for anyone, the seat is all yours", she nodded at his words but he could see in her eyes that she was worried, on edge.

He felt bad for her, maybe he sounded too harsh than he wanted to, the poor thing was already scared to death, he definitely didn't make it better

He decided to try again "so first day...you must be nervous" she looked at him, breathing heavy "I'm more than nervous, I'm terrified, i was actually excited to start school even if I don't know anyone here, and yes, Hawkins isn't Chicago, but i thought maybe i could make some new friends but then as soon as i entered school everyone looked at me like i have three heads and...I'm rambling again, I'm sorry, I talk a lot when I'm nervous...but also when I'm not nervous...to be honest i just talk a lot, 'm sorry"

Eddie definitely never met someone like her, she was the cutest thing he even seen.

He smiled, she was so different from the other girls in Hawkins, he wondered if they had anything in common "is okay really, i get it, i moved to Hawkins too, few years ago, so i know how you're feeling, I'mEddie by the way" he could see her eyes glowing at his words, her breath steadying "yeah being the new student sucks, but it seems i already made a friend, I'm y/n, nice to meet you Eddie" she smiled back at him, before focusing on Mr Ripley, ready to start his chemistry lesson.

Eddie didn't see her for the rest of the day after first period, so he couldn't wait to see her during lunch break, he hoped to spot her so he could invite her to his table

She didn't show up at the cafeteria, leaving him disappointed, wondering where she was.

He met her again for Mrs O'donnell class, during last period, she was sit alone writing on her notebook.

Eddie immediately sat besides her, he couldn't believe that they were together for this class.

"Hi, i didn't see you all day, you disappeared or something?" She jumped when she heard his voice "oh hiiii, I'm so happy to see you again, I was hoping we could share more classes together but i didn't see you in history and spanish, oh and then i got lost on my way to the cafeteria and ended up in the library so i ate there instead while i read my book" Eddie laughed, her excitement over literally everything made his heart flutter "sweetie i'm sorry you got lost and I'm sorry i couldn't help you, did you ask anyone for help?" Hearing this, her smile faded a little "i did actually, i met a small group and asked them where the cafeteria was, but the indications they gave me were for the library"

Eddie couldn't believe it, it was her first day, why were they this mean with her already? He can't wait to graduate and stop seeing these jocks faces again "oh sweetheart, those are idiots, gimme your schedule, i will walk you to every classes from now on"

Y/N tried to tell him it wasn't necessary but he didn't want to listen to it, he decided in that moment that he wanted to protect her, no matter what.

And Eddie kept his words, he would walk her to every class the next morning and for lunch he straightly led her to his table.

He couldn't wait to introduce her to the hellfire and maybe, if he was lucky, she would want to know more about DnD.

But his sweet, sweet Y/N surprised him once more: turned out that not only she knew DnD, but she used to play with her friends back in Chicago, she had a character of high class and level.

"I'm so excited that you guys play too, i was worried i had to stop playing but I'm so happy i found you, can i join the next session? If you're okay with that of course, i don't want to intrude, you know...if you're already far along on your campaign" everyone at the table started shouting "if we are okay? You must join us, our fair maid, is been a while since a cutie like you joined us and to be fair, I'm tired of always do the female voices" Gareth reassured Y/N and Eddie didn't like his flirty tone.

He knew he just wanted to make her feel comfortable, and he also knew that if he told him about his interest for y/n, Gareth would back off immediately, but Eddie still couldn't help but feel jealous at their small interaction.

He quickly noticed how she nice she was to everyone, so he wasn't surprised that she got along with the Hellfire club as soon as she sat down on their table.

"I really can't wait for you to join our sadistic campaign, but I'm afraid we might have to postpone this Friday, the drama club needs the room, so I will keep you posted on this guys, milady" Eddie informed his little sheep

"Oh well if you have an issue with that, we might do the session at my place, both my parents work the night shift so is just me and Pluto at home" Eddie grinned at her words "Aw sweetie, that's nice of you to offer you castle for our session, and Pluto? You named your dog after Mickey's dog?"

"Dog? Pluto isn't a dog, is my black cat, I named him after the Poe's short story, especially since my baby is also missing one eye, like in the story"

"That's sick baby, you have a one eyed cat? And I didn't think you liked Poe, I thought you were more of a Austen girl"

Y/N giggled, she was totally expecting this reaction "yes Austen is amazing but I love Poe's work a lot, I try to not stick to one genre only but to keep my books collection varied, currently I'm reading Salem's lot and The hobbit"

"The hobbit? Girl, please, you have to stop, or I'll fall for you more than I'm already doing"

Y/N blushed, she wasn't used to men flirting with her, and whenever it happened, she just got embarrassed and they gave up in the end, but Eddie seemed to be obsessed with her since they met and she couldn't help but wonder if he was actually interested or if he was having pity of the new girl.

Either way y/n couldn't believe she found new friends so early and that also played DnD, she was so excited.

Friday evening couldn't come sooner, y/m spent the afternoon baking brownies amd cookies, she wanted to make them feel comfortable and what's better than something sweet to fuel the brain?

Besides all these boys definitely were hungry.

Eddie's mouth watered at the sight, he doesn't remember the last time he ate something sweet that weren't candies or chocolate bars, and definitely didn't remember the last time he ate something homemade.

The session went incredibly well, they all had fun and y/n was a big addiction to Eddie's club, he felt truly happy after a long time.

He finally found a girl who wasn't afraid to be herself, and mostly, that seemed to like him a lot and wasn't afraid to show it.

He couldn't wait more, he needed to tell her that he liked her back, he needed to show her how much.

That's why he stayed after the session, he said he wanted to help her clean everything, when he actually wanted to be alone with her.

"So, how did you find everything? I hope you will join us for the next session" Eddie asked her while he was taking the plates away

"Oh, I thought I was part of the club already, of course I will join you for the next session, I had so much fun, you're an amazing dungeon master, Eddie the banished" and with that Eddie couldn't help himself anymore "do you want to go on a date with me? Tomorrow or whenever you want?" He blurted out, he planned to ask her in a smoother way but he genuinely couldn't wait anymore

Y/N blushed at the question, she thought he would never ask, and she answered with way too much eagerness "oh yes, I would love to, we could go to the drive in or the movies or the arcade, whatever you want really, I like everything and I know I will have fun because I love spending time with you, sorry I didn't mean love I meant like, yes I like..."

Eddie loved listening to her rambling, she was so cute when she was nervous like this, so he decided to put her out of her misery and simply do what he thought was the best way to calm her nerves: he leaned and gently pressed his lips on hers.

When they separate, y/n whispered "you kissed me" still in shock "yeah, sorry maybe I should've ask is you were okay with that or wait for our first date" Eddie replied

Hearing this, y/n chuckled and kissed him again, this time with more confidence, and in that moment, Eddie understood that she wasn't planning to go anywhere, and neither did he.

[sleepynoons]

hi op feel free to ignore everything under - all you need to know is i love your writing *shakes head vigorously*

there are several things i think were immaculately done, but that'd require me to churn out an entire research paper, which i don't have the brain cells for anymore post-finals. so here are some scattered thoughts yep and yap

-

i don't gravitate towards mysterious or reserved characters because my personality simply doesn't mesh well with them. in fact, when i was watching wbk, i was always so wary of suo, and felt lowkey a lil uncomfortable with him LMFAO

but strangely enough, i think this discomfort became a very integral and driving force throughout my reading experience. of course, this was already the case due to the violent and dark nature of yakuzas, underground sex work, etc., but emphasizing suo's yandere-ness and how he doesn't shy away from it really completed the tone of the story. also, i feel like i came to terms with suo's character, which i rarely ever experience in general. really, this is all to say that it makes total logical sense in my brain to imagine a route where suo evolves into a yandere, and part of me strongly believes his real background in the wbk manga/anime won't be too happy-go-lucky either (otherwise the alternative would be like him wearing an eyepatch for the shtick bc he's a chuuni??? idrk????).

anyway, the reoccurring theme of redirection in suo's tactics really sealed the deal for me, and i think it was a good way to tie in references to his relationship to his master, the martial arts that we know he's especially good at, and how all of these things he's kinda exploited and sullied to "become a worse person for you." suo being very knowing and intentional is so snakey and creepy but also, i get a lil fucked up when it comes to men who are obsessed, so also incredibly erotic LMFAO i also just want someone to buy me a luxury penthouse out of concern for my safety *sad fist bump*

one thing i did find unexpected is suo's leadership within the yakuza. yes, necessary for the plot, otherwise he wouldn't be able to pull any strings. but because source material heavily emphasizes leaders as individuals like umemiya or sakura or even hiiragi, it's interesting to place suo in juxtaposition with them. not sure if it's bc i don't find suo particularly reliable in general, but i think this fic made me realize that he's still wise beyond his years and very, very ruthless. it's def very telling that, throughout the story, suo resorts to fear to assert power. anyway, i j think it was a particularly interesting detail to add in his role in the succession conflict.

btw, i do like how suo's change and transition isn't fully told or revealed. it's not a story meant for us, as it's a truth really for suo and reader. but even reader can't really keep up with him at times, and i find that dynamic really charming, as sadistic as that sounds. i like that reader is so vulnerable. i like that reader is not afraid to be vulnerable around him in the ways that matter, even when she's aware that he's fucking insane. and i really like that reader is aware of how much it takes to be vulnerable, so she doesn't push him. i think reader restrains herself (un)knowingly, and that's her way of loving him. obv less romantic in real life lol (don't try to fix anyone, been there, done that, lost myself, and still finding myself), but i do like how reader is suo's salvation :,,, even if she doesn't think she's particularly patient, she really is - like girl, Fuck Him Already!!!!!!

(could go on and on about how juicy the friction and tension is between suo and reader but that's for pt 2 hehehe)

this is kinda my half-assed transition into talking about reader, and honestly, my thoughts from earlier encapsulate the general thesis i have about her: she's really a lot like suo, way more than she thinks. i think she operates in very similar ways, just goes about it differently.

i think reader is way more reckless. she's very self-sacrificing. she's very good at putting up a front, even when she's internally low in confidence and self-respect. i think she just wants to be happy with suo, and hopefully, with their other friends as well.

and truly, i think suo has very similar end goals. i just think, with how things turned out, suo made the very calculated yet risky (also aggressive?) decision to do the things that he did. making their underlying principals and values and reactions so oddly similar, from my perspective, is sooooo neat, and it adds more depth to why they go so well together.

also, reader is so brilliantly the comedic relief in this whole thing. usually, in storytelling, it's someone else and is used as fodder. i really like how reader is a lil awkward and bad with timing and everything else, cause it makes the reading experience flow so much better. really helped with the pacing of the story, gave it the character + breathing space needed to process everything. i also just like my readers a little fucking hilarious.

anyway, op, so beautifully written - see you in pt 2 gg

TOKYO VICE | part 1

You knew that if you agreed to move in with Suo, you'd be setting yourself up for a life without autonomy. You also knew that these alarming behaviours were all signs that he desperately needed therapy to process his master’s untimely death. Living with a man in constant grief, who refused to talk about his trauma unless he was making up a lie related to the nation of China, was probably not a good decision. Doubly so when this man was clearly paranoid about losing you, and triply so when he was a high-ranking member of a violent syndicate. Unfortunately for you, you rarely made good decisions. (Or: After joining the yakuza, Suo develops the concerning habit of controlling every facet of your life. This is somehow less worrying to you than your uncontrollable lust around him.)

8.7k words. suo x fem reader. deeply unserious yakuza au. yandere suo (not abusive and reader is into it), dark comedy, a little angst, smut. warnings: borderline sex work, off-screen criminal violence. nsft – no actual smut in this chapter, but there are still graphic discussions of sex. mdni. thank you to @sleepyqinfei for beta reading and to @/cafekitsune for the banner!

sequel to sincerity and this sakura/reader wip

part 2 here

You’re not exactly sure why you and Suo have never fucked.

It’s certainly strange, given that you're pretty sure that Suo has expressed at least passing interest in you over the years, and you have felt a lot of interest in him. (By ‘interest’, you mean that you feel an insatiable lust around him that you fight to ignore on a daily basis.) You can't exactly pinpoint why nothing has ever happened despite this mutual attraction, especially given your profession and indifferent feelings toward casual sex.

You can think of a number of probable reasons, which are separate from those you classify as stupid reasons. The latter class comprises silly concerns like a fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, fear of not being pretty enough, fear of not being good enough, et cetera. All very juvenile feelings—insecurities that you had in your teenage years, the days in which Suo ran around Makochi as a delinquent while you worked an honest job at a bar. (It was a girls’ bar in the red light district, but that's neither here nor there.) Your circumstances have since changed, and those anxieties have since faded. None of them have any material consequence for your current life, so you don't see any point in thinking about them.

The stupid reasons, then, definitely don't have anything to do with why you've never fucked Suo. But you can think of a few, more concrete reasons that may explain it. For one, Suo has been your friend since childhood and it’s generally a bad idea to have sex with your long-time friends. He was also your roommate for a while and it’s an even messier idea to have sex with your roommates. And now, in your adulthood, he’s your landlord in addition to being your boss, which makes him the worst possible person you could have sex with. You could lose both your home and your livelihood if things go south—both severe, material consequences that should theoretically keep your lust at bay.

Also, he's also a member of the yakuza.

Now, strictly speaking—you're not really opposed to having sex with violent criminals. It’s definitely not a good idea, but you don't usually have good ideas anyway. But for the past several years, you’ve been pissed at Suo for joining the yakuza in the first place, which actually does keep your blatant attraction to him in check. You simply dry up when you think too hard about all the feelings of betrayal.

When Suo was on the cusp of graduating from Furin and thinking about his future, you’d grabbed him by the collar and made him promise not to join the yakuza. They constantly tried to recruit from Bofurin, and they especially wanted Sakura, Suo, and Sugishita. You were adamant about chasing them off from Suo and Sakura whenever they approached—you had no need to worry about Sugishita, as Umemiya had already said he shouldn't talk to them, so there was no chance he was going to—and you begged Suo over and over not to join. Delinquency was fine, but a crime syndicate was something else altogether.

Suo seemed serious about it when he said he'd listen to you. He even applied to colleges, talked about maybe becoming a teacher and eventually supporting you so you could stop working in the mizu shobai industry. Back then, he often teased you by saying that you should marry him and be his housewife (or he could be your trophy husband, if you so wished). You thought he was joking, but with the way he always talked about his life after his degree, you wondered if he would seriously suggest it.

Of course, it was most likely just teasing, and you were fine with that. You were simply excited that he'd found a career that would make him happy. Nirei had also been accepted to university at that point, and even Sakura had an honest job lined up on Keisei Street. The future had looked bright for everyone.

Then Suo’s master died, and he lost his fucking mind.

The two of you buried Suo’s master in a Chinese funeral. He had never had children of his own, having satisfied his paternal instincts by picking up strays, and he didn't have much in the way of family in Japan either, so you and Suo performed the shou ling yourselves. One person kept a constant vigil over his body while the other searched on Google for what arrangements should be made next. After all, while Suo’s master had immersed his foremost disciple in his culture, he had never taught Suo any funerary customs. He hadn't thought there would be a need.

Suo didn't cry nearly as much as you, but he was probably in more pain. Your master had trained you a little bit when you were a kid, and he'd taken you in for a while after your parents kicked you out, so of course you were gutted. But he had practically raised Suo, so it was naturally worse for him. More shattering.

You often think about the first night you decided you'd sleep with him in the same futon because he was crying so much. He insisted he was fine, but he didn't complain when you got under the sheets with him and started thumbing away his tears. When you took off his eyepatch, you found, to your astonishment, that he was crying from his missing eye as well. Both of you thought the tear ducts had been destroyed in either the accident or the enucleation, but it appeared that not even that prior trauma could mask his grief over this one.

Nevertheless, by the time of the funeral procession, Suo had stopped crying.

“Master supported us and taught us to stand on our own two feet,” he said as the joss paper burned. He took your hand in his and smiled. “So it'll be fine. We’ll be okay on our own. I'll make sure of it.”

At the time, you had found this very comforting. You didn’t think too much of it, as you had a bad habit of relying on Suo for your emotional stability. His master had raised him to be an emotionally intelligent person, so it had been fine, even though you had a track record of reckless decisions. He’d still exercised endless patience with you. He never once got angry with you, nor did he ever force you to do what he felt was the right thing. Instead, he gently redirected your self-damaging behaviours—not so different from the martial art that he practised.

He disapproved of the run-down and lonely conditions of your apartment, so he spent a great deal of time there and helped make it into a proper home. He didn't like how dangerous your job at the girls’ bar was, so he walked you to and from work every night until you never left without him. He worried when you started having sex with your customers, especially when you began having nervous breakdowns over it (you were, after all, still a teenager and really only interested in having romantic vanilla sex with Suo), so he staged an intervention with Nirei and Sakura. In this way, Suo convinced you that you were loved and protected and didn't need to do something you hated so much. They would get you out if you felt trapped. And you didn't feel trapped, per se, so you left on your own—but it was still only because of them. You promised them afterwards that you'd never do it again.

This was Suo’s brand of kindness as a teenager. He always taught people, guided them away from harm rather than steering them—a behaviour he’d mimicked from your master. Your master, in general, had defined all of Suo’s values and his way of living, which was honest and gentle and conscientious. It was one where he used his abilities to protect the weak and care for his friends. He even kept his spiteful and alarmingly violent tendencies under control, though sometimes he slipped when fighting genuine assholes. But he still tried. He tried because he strived to be as kind as his master—who represented everything that Suo wanted to be in his adult life.

Thus, the death of Suo’s master meant the death of his principles. It changed the kind of man that Suo wanted to be. You don't want to say that he became a worse person, but he absolutely became a worse person.

He especially became a worse person with you.

As it turned out, Suo’s idea of making sure that the two of you would be fine on your own was, well, not really fine. It wasn’t that he became cruel to you, per se. It was more that whenever he saw a problem with your behaviour, his approaches to redirecting it became—put as nicely as possible—heavy-handed.

After your master’s death, you got a job at a high end, yakuza-owned club. Two weeks later, Suo broke his promise to you and joined the yakuza. So I can stay close to you, he explained gently, wiping away your tears as you cried hysterically, but you're convinced to this day that he did it partly out of spite. So a few years later, when you started having sex with your customers again and he tried to stop you, you decided to spite him back. I need to stay on top of the rankings, you'd explained dispassionately. The mamasan said it's fine, and the manager doesn't care. He even thinks it's good for business.

Suo’s response was to simply become the owner of your club.

This move was very extreme, but also very effective. Any customer who so much as brushed against you on the premises was instantly thrown out, and the mamasan started watching you like a hawk to make sure you weren’t going to any love hotels after work. Douhan were off-limits. For the first time since your teens, you became completely celibate—not only because of your new workplace circumstances, but because you simply didn't want to find out what Suo would do if you got together with a man he despised (and he despised every man you dated).

His most absurd play was when he became concerned about your living conditions again. Your latest apartment was too plain, too small, and the area was too dangerous. It didn't even have a shower, and the other tenants behaved concerningly toward you when you went to the bathhouse at night. But the rent was cheap, and it was still an upgrade from your last place, so you shrugged it off when Suo suggested that you move. Even when someone tried to accost you at night, you were nonchalant about it. You kicked the shit out of them in a fight and continued your routine unbothered.

The next month, Suo bought a luxury penthouse and suggested you move in with him.

His offer (command) came with conditions. One of the bigger ones was that you'd let him accompany you out at night if you ever needed to run errands in dangerous places. Or—nevermind, actually. He should really just accompany you everywhere at night. Maybe during the day too. And—ah, there was no way you'd be going to work alone, nor coming back by yourself—you were now always to be driven by someone in his organisation, if he wasn't available himself. Rent was a point of contention, when you asked about it: you wanted to pay at market rate, and he insisted that there was no need to pay at all. He ended up proposing a highly discounted price, which would give you ample financial freedom, but questionable financial independence.

These were insane terms. You knew that if you agreed, you'd be setting yourself up for a life without autonomy. You also knew that these behaviours were all signs that Suo desperately needed therapy to process his master’s untimely death. Living with a man in constant grief, who refused to talk about his trauma unless he was making up a lie related to the nation of China, was probably not a good idea. Doubly so when this man was clearly paranoid about losing you, and triply so when he was a high-ranking member of a violent syndicate. Case in point—he was likely connected to the brutal accident that later befell the man who tried to assault you.

“I'm not sure what you're implying, but at least he didn't die,” Suo said cheerfully when you confronted him about it. Which really meant: At least I decided not to kill him. This was a flag bigger and redder than any other you've ever known, and you consider yourself an expert in red flags. You knew you should run in the other direction.

So naturally, you put your arms around him, tenderly said, I'm sorry I've been worrying you, and then you moved in the next day.

While Suo treats you with endless patience, you have personal limits to the patience that you exercise with him. Specifically, your patience with how he treats you.

You don't mind the lack of social freedom, nor the lack of personal freedom, nor the lack of freedom of movement. You also don't mind living with a man full of intractable trauma surrounding the death of every parental figure in his life; in fact, you'd rather be by his side than not, if he needs to cope with something so painful. And anyway, your friendship is otherwise unchanged if you ignore the heavy restrictions he's imposed on every facet of your life. So that's all fine.

But the celibate lifestyle that he's cornered you into? You simply aren't built for it. Holy shit, do you need to get laid.

Nearly two years without sex has brought you close to another nervous breakdown (there have been few better sources of entertainment or validation in your life), and worst of all, it has made your profound lust for Suo incredibly hard to ignore. Waking up every morning to him in a towel, his hair still wet from the shower and his broad silhouette exposed, tests the absolute limits of your self-control. The contours of his lean and muscled form are distracting enough; coupled with the vivid colours and lines of his irezumi, the sight of him becomes maddening. It is a horrible thing to be exposed to when you haven't gotten any dick nor strap in over a year. It gives you thoughts about him that are overtly sexual, which is bad, as you have materially consequential reasons for not wanting to fuck Suo.

Things with him must absolutely stay platonic. But with sexual frustration like yours, being platonic with him means that you need to get erotic with someone else. A boyfriend or girlfriend is out of the question; you don't want to be responsible for yet another brutal accident. So you instead decide to quit your job at his club and start working on Keisei Street. At least this way, you can start fucking your customers again.

It’s a perfect plan. Suo’s oyabun is very indulgent toward him, and everyone else in the family respects him too. He consequently has a tight grip on his organisation and the territory they control, despite his relatively young age. Not a single person is ever to touch Keisei Street—largely because Sakura is part of Roppo-Ichiza, and Suo is nearly as weird about Sakura as he is about you. Plus, many of his other fellow Furin alumni are in the gang as well. If Suo’s men ever started fucking with people on Keisei Street, it would not only have grave implications for gang relations—it would be personally upsetting for Suo. This means you can fuck all the Keisei Street customers you want, and not get a single one of them threatened or killed.

A pretty brilliant idea, if you do say so yourself.

Suo’s expression doesn't change when you break the news to him. He delicately places his teacup—custom-made from Yixing, just like the matching clay teapot—down on the mahogany tabletop, and he looks at you with a calm smile.

“Come again?”

“I'm quitting my job at Red Dragon,” you repeat. “I already gave the mamasan my resignation.”

“And she accepted it?” Suo asks, in a tone that is so carefully nonchalant that you know it means he is actually furious with her. “How interesting,” he muses. “What brought this on?”

“I've found a better paying opportunity on Keisei Street.”

“I'll give you a raise,” he says easily.

“A raise?” You cock a brow. “The pay is mostly commission-based at Red Dragon. You know that.”

“Then it would be unwise to leave. You have a loyal customer base at Red Dragon. All very rich, and”—his smile grows sharp—“very polite.”

Polite. An interesting word. It actually means: None of them will ever proposition or harass you because they know they'll be maimed if they do. An easy thought to use to your advantage.

“It's loyal but it's small. Everyone who's anyone in this part of town thinks that we’re married. Do you know how hard it is to pull new customers in when they're scared shitless of my yakuza husband? And anyway”—you frown, trying to look as pathetic as possible—“I'm lonely.”

Suo stares. He looks surprised, possibly because you absorb every minute of his free time with silly conversation, new restaurants, and skiing trips. (He likes snow, so you ask for these trips more for him to relax than anything else.) You also text him frequently on days he's working, and he very diligently replies, even if he's in the middle of something like a raid or a hit or brokering a massive deal. Suo still very strictly keeps to his rule of never touching his phone when in conversation with other people—unless he needs to text you.

So his suspicion is fair. Suo is very attentive and doesn't allow you much opportunity for loneliness. In turn, you’ve always been very happy spending time with him, even when it's only him.

“Lonely?” he repeats. “Are you, now?”

“Yes. You work so much,” you complain, which is not a lie, “and I don't have any friends to spend time with when you're gone.”

“You have friends from work.”

“No, I have competition at work. The hostesses are so cutthroat about rankings, they hate me. And each other.”

“You like Shuuhei and Hanzo,” he points out, referring to his men who most frequently chauffeur you.

“Yeah, they're friendly, and they're very funny. I like them, but I can't be their friend.” Suo stares at you, nonplussed, so you spell it out: “They're too scared of you to get close to me. What if it looks like they're trying to fuck the boss’ wife?”

“Hm…” Suo studies you, looking thoughtful. Perhaps for the first time, he's contemplating the consequences of restricting your freedoms and marking you as his. That is to say—maybe he's finally realising that you have no friends and no life.

The beads of his earrings glimmer as he tilts his head at you and frowns. Suo almost looks innocent with that confused face of his. “And how would working on Keisei Street help?” he asks.

“Because all our old friends are there!” you exclaim. “Sakura’s in Roppo-Ichiza now so he’ll definitely be coming by all the clubs. Tsubaki too. And Nirei and Kiryu visit them quite often—and even Tsugeura does sometimes, even though clubbing isn't one of his virtues.” You grab onto his arm, pull yourself close, and give him your most disarming, pleading expression. “Please, Suo?”

“Hm.” He strokes your cheek and looks at you fondly, in the way that one would do with an adorable and slightly annoying kitten. “I don’t think so. It’s not very safe there.”

He isn't wrong. Not only are you untouchable on his turf because of your association to him, Suo has also just crushed all the han-gure and petty criminals in his territory with brutal efficiency. His part of the red light district is, quite ironically, one of the safest places in the city, and certainly safer than Keisei Street.

But undeterred, you point out, “Shuuhei and Hanzo can still drive me there and back if you want. But I don't think it's necessary. Do you really think Sakura would let anything happen to me?”

This is the true brilliance of your plan: capitalising on the fact that Suo is as nearly as weird about Sakura as he is about you. He pauses as soon as you bring up the point, and you can practically see the gears turning. “Well, if it's him…”

“I even texted him about it. Look—here!” You whip out your phone, receipts ready. The corner of Suo's mouth lifts at your obviously rehearsed pitch. “He says he'd make sure I'm taken care of. And he says it'd be nice because he misses seeing us. Can you believe it—Sakura actually admitted that he misses us! Typed it with his own two hands and pressed send! I bet he was super embarrassed about it.”

“Huh. He even used a sticker. I've never seen him do that.” Suo smiles as he reads through the chat. He looks like his old self. You suddenly feel a little wistful, and also a lot bad. This started as a ploy to get laid, but it’s made you realise that you really do miss your friends—and Suo probably does too.

“If I worked on Keisei Street, then you would have plenty of reason to visit,” you point out, feeling somewhat tender.

“I guess that's true,” Suo says. Your heart aches a little bit at the look he gives you. It's a platonic ache, of course. Or at the very least, it isn't an erotic one. It doesn't really make you want to have sex with him anyway. But if you could lean forward and press your lips to his—platonically—then you definitely would.

Suo's civilian friendships are complicated by his double life. Quite unusually for yakuza, Suo’s syndicate insists on using pseudonyms and false histories to avoid anti-yakuza laws, on the off-chance that the police decide to do their jobs and actually enforce those laws someday. Lying for comedy is one of Suo’s greatest passions, so he was happy to manufacture an absurd backstory: his name is Yanzhao, and he learned kung fu in a Shaolin Temple before moving to Hong Kong and working for the triads. He wears the eyepatch because he lost his eye in an altercation with the cops, which he won. By the way, you're his criminally beautiful wife who he met in Macau. The two of you had to leave for Japan since he killed a police officer and now he's wanted by the governments of both China and Hong Kong. Also, he's a very devoted husband, so if anyone lays a hand on you, he’ll kill them too.

Somehow, everyone has bought into this story. Every criminal organisation in the red light district now fears a high-ranking yakuza known as Yanzhao, who is easily recognizable by his eyepatch and tassel earrings, and who is also homicidally obsessed with his beautiful wife.

In some ways, his infamy is convenient. No one wants to fuck with Suo, or with you by extension. But it also poses some issues: Suo has to keep a low profile in areas controlled by rival organisations, or else he might be ambushed. It also means he cannot easily go out and see his old friends. Even though he always masquerades as a civvie when he does, wearing stud earrings and a glass eye, it's still a little risky—especially since he likes to visit the strongest member of Roppo-Ichiza. While Roppo-Ichiza aren’t yakuza, they're still han-gure, so some of its more criminally entangled members might recognize him anyway.

But Sakura himself, bless him, has not put two and two together and figured out that Suo Hayato and Gui Yanzhao are the same person. This is partly because Suo lies very convincingly about his fictional career in the tea industry, but you think it's also because Sakura is so gullible it's endearing.

I use the glass eye now because it's better for networking, Suo had explained before Sakura could interrogate him too much, his voice too smooth and too quick for the other man to get in a word edgewise. My business partners find the eyepatch too silly. The tassel earrings too. By the way, would you like some Baimudan tea? I thought of you when I smelled it—I know you like fragrant things—so I picked some up for you on my last visit to China. I was there for business a couple of weeks ago.

He, of course, neglected to mention that said business involved meeting with the 14K triad.

Despite the enormity of Suo's omission (lie), Sakura is none the wiser whenever he meets with you. He thinks you're just a regular hostess who has freedom of movement and various other human rights, and that Suo’s just a regular guy who isn’t homicidally obsessed with you (a detail of Suo's fabricated life story that is unfortunately grounded in reality). All this to say, Sakura doesn't think twice about mentioning the fact that you have a routine of going to love hotels after work.

Suo, as always, remains calm in the face of unsettling information. He sets down his tea (just tea, without shochu), and politely says, “Pardon?” He's once again using the nonchalant kind of tone that suggests mortal danger.

“She's always going to love hotels after her shifts.” Sakura is frowning at you, pink but scowling. “I thought you said you were done with that stuff. You promised us you wouldn't do it anymore. Suo—are you really okay with this?”

On the one hand, you find it exceptionally sweet that Sakura, after all this time, remembers your promise and wishes to hold you to it. He was so worried about you when you started having those nervous breakdowns as a teenager, and he probably still is. On the other hand, you're shitting bricks at the fact that Suo is now aware of your activities. Because sure, he likely won't fuck with Keisei Street—but you realise, as he stares at you, that you can't be certain of this. After all, your fake yakuza husband has very real homicidal urges.

“Um,” you say. “It's just business.”

“Business,” Suo repeats.

“You don't have to do that stuff to keep good business,” Sakura grouses, unaware of Suo’s carefully suppressed rage. “You're real popular already.”

“Are you?” Suo asks, looking right at you.

“I mean—I told you the pay would be better, right?” you reply, voice oddly high and nervous, and this is when Sakura notices that something is wrong.

“Oh,” Sakura says, looking between the two of you. “Suo, you didn't know?”

“I didn't,” he says. “Actually, she told me specifically that she wasn't going to do that if she worked here.” He turns to you, still smiling. “That's the only reason why I allowed this at all, remember?”

A chill travels down your spine. You did, in fact, commit to a perpetually sexless lifestyle in order to be granted some semblance of freedom: Of course I won't sleep with any customers, you'd said. You know I don't really like doing that anyway. I promise I'll behave! I’ll be out of the clubs and right back home. Sakura said he’d make sure I’ll get to a cab safely after the bar closes and everything!

“Um,” you say again, but this time you have no follow-up.

“Wait,” Sakura demands, “what do you mean by ‘allowed her’? What, do you need to give her permission to work now or something?”

Suo smiles disarmingly at Sakura. Without missing a beat, he says, “Generally no. But we’re dating now, which complicates what she’s allowed to do with other men at her job.”

Sakura spits out his drink. You choke on your spit.

“I… um?!” Sakura’s staring at you, so you quickly recover. This is a mortifying lie, but it's better than Sakura finding out just how batshit Suo has become since his school days. “I thought we were going to keep that a secret, dear?”

“Ah, you're right. Sorry, I got too excited.” Suo gives you an endeared look before turning to Sakura. “We were going to keep it to ourselves unless we got serious about it. But we've been talking about marriage lately, so I thought it was fine to mention.”

“...”

You’re going to have an aneurysm. Why does every cover that Suo comes up with involve a marital relationship between the two of you?!

“Oh… holy shit.” Sakura’s expression is complicated—somehow, more complicated than yours, even though you’re the one getting cornered into a fake engagement. It's unbelievable how shy he still is about this kind of thing. Maybe it’s just particularly embarrassing since he's known you two for so long, you reason. Regardless, he remembers his social cues enough to say, “Congrats, guys. That's great. That's really great.”

Suo gazes fondly at you across the table. “We were thinking you could be our best man,” he adds, and you consider violently kicking his leg.

“O-oh. Uh, yeah! Sure! But what about Nirei?”

“Rather than having a maid of honour,” you say reflexively, used to lying through your teeth for Suo, “we’d like him to be our best man as well.”

“Oh. That makes sense.” Thrown off guard, Sakura completely forgets about the love hotel business. He whips out his phone. “When were you thinking of having your wedding? I'll put it in my calendar.”

“I’m not sure.” Suo turns to you. “What were we thinking again, dear?”

You're going to die. You're going to die and it's a good thing because if you survive this embarrassment, your future will be bleak. As soon as Nirei finds out about this, he’ll want to start helping you with wedding planning, and then it would just be too awkward to cancel things. You’ll have to enter a fake marriage with Suo, which will be completely sexless, because even with a vow of everlasting love, there are still too many concrete and materially consequential reasons for not sleeping with him.

Condemning yourself to a lifetime of sexual frustration, you reply, “I think we were talking about a summer wedding.”

The drive home is awkward.

Hanzo and Shuuhei pick the two of you up. Suo mentioned that he wanted to talk to you and you alone, so they bring the Rolls Royce with the privacy suite. The two of them are entirely cut off from you thanks to the soundproofing, which traps you with Suo, who’s drinking a bottle of oolong tea as the two of you sit in complete silence. You think he's waiting for you to squirm—which you do.

You stay like that for five, agonising minutes before Suo finally says, “So you're sleeping with your customers.”

You swallow. “Yes.”

“For business?”

“Yes.”

“How much do you make?”

You blink. “Huh?”

“How much do you get paid for a single night of work, including gifts that your customers give you in exchange for sleeping with them?”

You're halfway through citing your earnings when you realise where he's going with this.

“So you make less than you did at Red Dragon,” Suo concludes, “and you're very smart with your money, so I know you know that, and you probably went into this knowing that you'd end up at a net loss.” He turns to you, gives you a look so sharp that it almost scares you. All made worse by his civilian disguise, which makes him feel unfamiliar. His glass eye shines strangely in the light, and his scar tissue is hidden by the makeup you helped apply. You wish he'd taken it all off before having this conversation.

“So,” he says, “what’s the real reason you changed jobs?”

Already knowing that he’ll figure you out sooner or later, you admit, “I just wanted to start having sex again.”

Suo blinks. “You… what?”

“I wanted to have sex with people,” you repeat. “I hadn't been touched for nearly two years, okay? I needed to get laid or else I'd go insane.” You cross your arms and look away, suddenly feeling petulant. “I'm sure you've noticed that our arrangement makes it impossible for me to see people.”

He doesn't answer, because of course he's noticed. He’d designed his house rules with precisely this intent. If he accompanies you everywhere you go, then you can't exactly go on dates, and you definitely can't meet people for sex. Not unless you feel like having Suo watch as some anonymous guy fucks you, and you don't. As hot as the idea is, it’s definitely not platonic behaviour, and it would probably trigger the whole homicidal obsession thing.

“Do you like it?” Suo asks, startling you. You look at him, confused.

“What?”

“Do you enjoy having sex with your customers?” he asks. His voice and gaze are even. Unrelenting. “Does it make you happy?”

You stare at him, a deer caught in headlights. You didn't expect Suo to actually care about whether you enjoyed it or not, and you didn't really expect to care yourself either. But truthfully, you hated it. You simply weren't feeling it with most of your customers and avoided intercourse with all but one. Then in that one case you let someone earnestly fuck you, it was a complete letdown. Possibly the worst sex you'd ever had. You spent the whole time watching the clock, wondering how long it would take, and it turned out that your hookup had remarkable stamina but absolutely no technique. To pass the time, and in an attempt to feel something, you tried to imagine it was someone else who was inside you. You cycled through a whole list of people, including all of your exes, a few of your past customers, every single member of BTS, and then—finally, inevitably—your long-time friend, roommate, and landlord.

To your complete horror, when you imagined that it was Suo who had you folded in half, his cock so deep inside you that you could feel it in your throat, you came so hard that you drenched the sheets.

You lay there afterward as your customer showered, alone in the bed. Normally you'd be getting dressed at that point, but you were too distracted. You kept thinking about what it would feel like to be held by Suo after having your guts rearranged by him—embraced tenderly like you know he would do with you, kissing him platonically like you've always wanted to do with him—and you realised that you didn’t actually want to have sex with anyone else. Despite all your life experience, sexual experience, and job experience—in that moment, you felt like a lonely nineteen year old girl who wanted nothing more than to have romantic, vanilla sex with her best friend, but who was instead having impersonal, disappointing sex with various salarymen.

This was a feeling so disgusting that you’ve decided to never tell anyone at any cost.

“Yeah, it's fine. I guess I like it.” You pretend to study your nails. “Sometimes I cum, which is all I really want.”

Suo keeps staring at you. “That’s it?” he asks, voice measured and careful. You raise a brow, playing dumb.

“What do you mean?”

“That's all you want? Just to get off?”

You gaze out the window, trying not to look at his lips.

“Yes, that's all.”

No matter how batshit Suo gets, he always maintains a certain kindness and maturity in how he handles conflict with you. It's a lesson that he learned from his master, which has perhaps been distorted over time, but remains important to him nevertheless.

If you do something upsetting, Suo is never forceful about getting you to act differently. Sure, he has fucked up ways of either getting you to behave or making you understand the consequences of your actions, and perhaps he has his manipulative moments. It was probably not a good thing that he coaxed you into indefinite house arrest, for instance. But he never threatens you, and he never hits you, and he never disrespects you. In fact, more than anything, he makes it a point to never let you feel like you aren't loved.

So when Suo abandons you after that conversation in the Rolls Royce, you lose your fucking mind.

Suo doesn’t come home in the days following that evening, without any note nor explanation. For the first time in years, he stops replying to your texts. Your immediate thought is that he's been gravely injured or perhaps even killed, which sends you into a panicked spiral. But every one of his men who's come by to check on you has implied otherwise—but I'm not allowed to tell you anything else, anesan, I’m sorry, they all say. And when you realise that Suo is actually fine and he's just playing a fucked up mind game with you, one that makes you feel distinctly unloved, you feel simultaneously heartbroken and apoplectic. The man is not allowed to corner you into de facto imprisonment and then just fucking leave. In fact, if he tries, you might imprison him.

You spend a few days sitting at home and crying over this, as well as torturing yourself by thinking about useless things (fear of rejection, fear of abandonment, et cetera). But eventually, you get tired of wallowing in self-inflicted misery, and you decide to just track your fake husband down. His men have been adamant about not letting you out of their sight—presumably so you don’t fuck any more of your customers, because Suo can be spiteful like that—so you have to be strategic about your plan to find him.

You decide to do it during work. You tap out in the middle of a shift, feigning illness, so nobody bats an eye when you put on the most shapeless hoodie you own and throw on a face mask. Your chauffeurs (handlers) don't notice as you sneak off—and for the first time in years, you walk through the red light district all alone.

It feels strange not to be protected, and even stranger not to be surveilled. You marvel at the unfamiliar experience of complete freedom, and at the possibility of being able to run off and disappear if you so wished. But you don't, of course. Not only do you care too deeply for Suo to abandon him, you're also pretty sure he has your driver’s licence and ID card locked up somewhere. At least you haven't been able to find them, and Suo was oddly evasive about it when you asked. (I haven't seen them, he'd said, but I don't think you’d need either of those things immediately, anyway, do you? And you nodded in response, because it was true that you liked being his passenger princess too much to care about your licence.)

So rather than bolting for the subway, you head straight to your old workplace. The gleaming doors of Red Dragon welcome you as you cross its threshold, and you're greeted immediately by the scent of luxury colognes and expensive cigars—both evoking a strange nostalgia in you. Even the click of your heels against the marble floor feels familiar. You realise that you've missed the place despite its cutthroat culture and its owner’s authoritarian control over you, which you suppose isn't surprising. This club was more or less your home for years and, thanks to said owner, was the safest place you've ever worked.

And being that you feel you've returned to your very safe home, you don't expect it when you're abruptly stopped by the bouncer.

“Can I help you?” he asks, his arm in your way. You don't recognize him, but you see the edges of his irezumi peeking out from the rolled-up cuffs of his shirt.

“Yeah, actually,” you say. “I'm looking for Gui Yanzhao. Is he here right now?”

The bouncer—or chinpira, you guess—bristles.

“You're looking for who?”

“Yanzhao?” you say impatiently. “Eyepatch, tassel earrings? Owner of the club? Probably your boss?”

The bouncer steps forward and reaches for something in his pocket, which makes you suddenly nervous, and also makes you realise that in a hoodie and a face mask, you ordinarily wouldn't be allowed in this club, let alone into the room of its yakuza owner. You're so used to VIP treatment here that you simply forgot.

You take a step back. “Um. I think there's been a misunderstanding.” You lower your face mask, which doesn't help as you've never met this man, and he must be new. You’ll need to complain to Suo about his onboarding process later, if you aren't killed before you can find him.

It turns out that this yakuza rookie has a knife in his pocket, which is not the worst thing he could have been carrying, but is also not the best. You're getting ready to run in the other direction when a more senior member of the gang comes by. He gives you a startled look, which then turns alarmed when he sees his younger brother’s knife.

“Anesan!” he yells hurriedly, and he snatches the chinpira’s knife straight from his hand. His lunge for the weapon turns into a hurried bow. He pulls his colleague—whose face has turned very white in a very short amount of time—into an even deeper one. They look on the verge of prostrating.

“Oh, Yamashita. Hi! Is this guy new?”

“Yes! My sincerest apologies for my younger brother’s idiocy, and his insolence in raising a weapon at you.” There's a sheen of sweat on the back of his neck. “If you would like him to atone, then he would be more than happy to—”

“No, that's fine. I'd really like him to keep all his fingers.” If you have to see a rookie cut off his pinkie today, you think you might actually change your mind on running away. Fuck your documents—Suo can keep them. Surely life without proof of identity can't be that hard. “By the way,” you say, trying to change the topic before Yamashita can suggest alternative acts of atonement, “have you seen my husband?”

Yamashita hesitates at your question, looks conflicted. You feel a little bad for him, and for every other gang member who needs to worry about accidentally offending Suo. You watch him sweat for a full ten seconds before he says, “You can follow me. But anesan, you might find it unpleasant upstairs. I can find someone to drive you home instead, if you'd like.”

You give him a funny look. This was your workplace for a very long time—you can’t think of many things that would happen here that might seriously upset you. “What, is he cheating on me?” you guess.

“What? No! Aniki would never!” Yamashita seems genuinely shocked at the suggestion. “He's crazy about you!”

“Then I'm sure he’ll be happy to see me,” you say, although given that he's ignored your texts for four days straight, you aren't so sure. Regardless, this seems to be good enough reasoning for Yamashita, and you’re taken to the top floor of Red Dragon. You ponder the whole time, on the elevator ride up, just what exactly Suo’s been up to that's made Yamashita this nervous about letting you see him.

Then the door opens, and you’re given your answer in the form of several body bags—all cleanly zipped up and conscientiously laid out in front of the elevators in a single, neat row. A sight that is significantly worse than a rookie cutting off his pinkie finger.

“Oh,” you say faintly. You try not to throw up. “So this is why he hasn't been home.”

“Exactly!” Yamashita replies, beaming. “See, anesan, I told you. He'd never cheat on you!”

Suo is in the lounge of the top floor, which has been cleared of both civilians and corpses for the night. He's sitting on one of the couches, leaning back with his one eye closed, as if asleep. The golden tassels of his earrings are draped over the expensive leather of his seat, intertwined with his dark hair. A cup of tea sits in front of him, steaming. Even this far away, you recognize it by the scent alone: jasmine, probably from Longjing. One of the most expensive blends he has, and that which he saves for days he’s stressed, though he never admits it when he is.

The sight of him would almost look tranquil, except for all the blood on his knuckles and his cuffs.

Off to the side, two of his younger brothers are chatting away. One is pouring cups of some doubtlessly expensive liquor, and the other is smoking a cigar. There's karaage on the table too. You recognize all of this as part of a ritual that some of the guys like to do after a hit or a shootout, not dissimilar to getting ramen or McDonald’s after going to a club.

You catch a bit of their conversation as you approach. One of them holds up the liquor bottle (Isojiman sake, you now recognise from your girls’ bar days, one of the rarer bottles costing around nine million yen) and asks Suo if he wants to join. “No thanks,” he says predictably, “I'm on a diet.” Then he turns and looks right at you—startling you, because you had thought you were being fairly quiet—and gives you a smile so genuine that it reminds you of his Furin days. “Would my beautiful wife like to drink for me, though?”

“No thanks,” you reply, “but your beautiful wife would like to talk to you.”

The two guys clear out to give you some privacy. You’re left alone with Suo, feeling awkward after several days of resenting him for no reason. (You’d rather die than go to therapy, but the whole fear of abandonment thing is probably something you should start addressing.) You don't even know where you want to sit. Eventually, you settle for placing yourself next to him, which is a decision that Suo quickly overturns by pulling you into his lap.

A flutter erupts in your stomach as he settles you on top of him. This physiological reaction is absurd, as not even ten minutes ago, you were trying not to throw up at the line of corpses in front of the elevator. It should also scare you somewhat that Suo’s hands—delicately adjusting your body—are still covered in blood. But truthfully, you can't help but be happy when he makes you feel so loved.

You take one of the napkins on the table and start wiping at his knuckles. Tenderly, in case they're bruised or skinned.

“You didn't call or come home,” you start.

“I thought it would be too dangerous.”

You frown, thinking of all the bodies outside. “Was this a rival organisation?”

“No. They were ours.” He sighs. “A succession conflict. There are a few people who don't like how I'll run things if I take over.”

You nod. Suo is very old-fashioned in his ideals about the yakuza, which you think is an imprint of his master’s influence, and something that appeals to his current ‘father’. He values chivalry. He likes protecting the weak. His filial devotion to his deceased master has now extended to every member of his yakuza family, especially his oyassan. He’s almost certainly the top candidate for taking over after the oyabun dies, but being that part of his old-fashioned principles excludes lucrative projects such as sex trafficking, you suppose it’s natural that some people in his organisation would prefer him dead rather than in charge.

“You’ve never ghosted me during violent conflicts before though,” you say. “I was worried that something happened to you. Or that you were upset with me.”

Suo’s hand drops to your waist, pulling you a little closer.

“They knew where we live. They tried to get to you, you know.” Your eyes widen in alarm, so he cups your face with a palm. His thumb glides along your cheek, and your response is almost Pavlovian: your heart rate immediately slows at the comfort of his touch. “It’s fine. They won't bother you ever again.” The cheerful smile returns. “And if anyone else ever does, I'll handle them too.”

Your heart swells. Enthusiastic pledges of murder are not a healthy sign of affection, but after so much loneliness—whether from the past several days, or the years before that, you aren't sure—you can't find it in yourself to be disturbed. You feel and sound painfully fond when you reply, “I know.”

Suo’s expression dims a little then. “I thought you'd like the space anyway.”

“What?” You give him a confused look. You have never once given him any indication that you want even an inch of space from him. You'd crawl into his ribcage if you could. “Why would you think that?”

“I thought you felt suffocated. You left my club just so you could have sex with other people.” You blink, lingering on his wording. Other people. He continues before you can ask about it, sighing, “You didn't even ask me who I'd give permission to touch you. You just went ahead and decided on your own.”

“...”

You try not to look disturbed. Suo’s apparent wish to control your sexual decisions is news to you, and somehow more alarming than the murder pledge. And even worse—you immediately clench in response to his words. The thought of Suo dictating who does and doesn't get to touch your cunt is… well, your mind is heading in a distinctly non-platonic direction.

Trying to ignore the heat in between your thighs (but at the same time encouraging it), you ask: “Who would you have been, um, okay with touching me?”

“Sakura or Nirei,” he says immediately. “Though only Sakura would be interested.”

“What.” You gape at him, all arousal forgotten. “Bullshit. He would never.”

“Yes, he would.” Suo tilts his head. “Haven't you noticed?”

“I don't think there's anything to notice? And also—he’s so shy, I don't think he'd ever agree even if he were interested!” You give him a bewildered look. “He couldn't even look at us when we said we were getting married, he was so embarrassed!”

“Embarrassed?” Suo stares at you, an amused glint in his eye. “Is that what you thought was going on?”

“Was there anything else?”

He studies you for a moment, clearly entertained but not explaining why. “Well—it’s fine,” he says. “It doesn't matter for now. Especially since he's helping us plan a wedding and all.”

You make a face. “I still can't believe that's the cover you went for.”

“Are you upset with it?” he asks smoothly, and you huff and say yes, but from his sly look, you think he knows it's a lie.

Naturally, you deflect before he can further interrogate you. “So, given that you are now my fiancé, am I no longer allowed to work on Keisei Street and see customers after my shifts?”

You don’t expect it when Suo says, “No, you can.”

You stare. “What?”

“You can keep seeing customers if you'd like. You said it makes you happy, so why would I stop you?” Suo’s brow furrows, his usual calm replaced with concern. “Do you really think I do the things I do to make you miserable?”

Guilt gnaws at your heart. He looks so disappointed. “No,” you tell him. “I just thought it'd make you miserable that I was sleeping with people without your permission.” It is partly why you hid it from him in the first place, after all. You don't like to see him sad—you’re still haunted by the deep grief he was in, after your master died—and also, his misery tends to bring bodily harm to other people these days.

Cognizant of both concerns, you ask, “You’re really okay with me sleeping with my customers? I can stop, if you want.”

“No, it’s fine. I still don't like it, but you can continue for now if you want.”

Suo’s mouth curls—not in a gentle way, as has been his expression since seeing you walk in, but in a way that sets off your flight or fight response.

“I'm sure we’ll reach a mutual understanding soon enough.”

END PART 1

thank you genuinely if you read all that because this is a deranged au and I still can't believe I wrote it sldfkjsldfkj. please do let me know if you enjoyed my yandere suo delusions. sorry there was no smut in this chapter. I promise there is a ton in the next one (probably too much... lol. it's a 10k chapter and literally half of those words are about orgasm denial sldfkjalskdjdf). it's completely written and I hope to edit and have it up by next week!

also here is glossary of terms and world building notes if you are interested!

tagging @kweenkatsuki-fics !! <3

[sbcdh]

"You saw it?"

"For a second. Yeah. I saw one."

"Start at the beginning."

"Hoo. Okay. Uhhh... It was 77. I think. I was air force. Or, hypnoengineering support staff contracted to help out around St. Louis."

"That's how you came into your supply of JVH-1"

"It was JVH-11 actually, and yeah, the fuckin, uh- the requisitions officer at Scott was an old buddy of mine. We used to fuck around in college before I, you know-"

"Yes I understand."

"I worked records for Sears-Roebuck, I had all the accounting expertise, as well as a ready supply of LSD."

"How did you start?"

"Oh it was easy at first. Really just selling off phials of the new experimental stuff to finance guys. They'd go nuts for the stuff, pay top dollar for it too. Hell, I could get 100$ for a milliliter. Made it easy to keep my contacts bought in and re-invested. Honestly I don't think the req office would even know that we were skimming if they weren't in on it.

But, you know how it is with hypnoregulation. Transchronological market data is worth it's weight in diamond. It started with the odd photo of a 2q-week readout, then biometric data, then, uh- then. Well, we decided to try it ourselves."

"You attempted full sub-finantial emmanation?"

"No no god no, what're you nuts? No, see. We figured if one person can meld their brain with the market, we just had to get as close as we could to that guy, and mark the twain, hypnologically speaking."

"Mark the twain?"

"Yeah, see, okay. A plutophant in full emmanation isn't like us. We exist at a single point in time, an R1 rational market actor. But they exist in multiple points in time, back in 77, I think the government could hit R6 with that analogue tech. Most people can hit R2 with a single hit of JVH-1, with practice you can hit R3, but anything higher than R3 takes a pretty serious support team. But here's the thing, I had a whole cadre of co-implicated members of a military grade hypnoengineering support team. All we needed was the space."

"The warehouse. Schaeffer Marble and Tile was it?"

"Bingo. See here's the thing. You know why the government had to start building those special regulation temples? It's not just for security. Once you crack the R6 barrier, Plutophants start leaving what's called a wake. You know, like a fuckin, uh, like a boat. They're imperceptible to normal people, but if you have sensitive enough instruments or, say, a person in the edge of sub-market emmanation.

See the government didn't know at the time, but if you balanced the drugs just right, and kept someone right on the edge of R4, you could actually read the plutophant's interpretations by their wake rather than their direct neurofeedback. It's not nearly as precise, but if you have a good team and you know what to look for, you can get some really, really valuable market data that way."

"And your co-worker?"

"You mean Mills? Fuck. Yeah...Mills. Right."

"Take your time."

"No, no I'm good. It's... It's uh, It's dangerous. Brains aren't meant to take that much JVH-11 all at once. We could stay on R4, but what we didn't have was a recovery team, or a medical team, or recon team. It was me, Mills, Israel, Connaught, and Marsh. The five of us were the only ones in the soup. Bruso was running the machines and Lasker was monitoring the readout."

"Can you tell us what happened?"

"Yeah. Yeah. It was a normal intrusion. Hypnogrid emmanation is pretty simple with our tech and support. Sedation was all green, hypnoinduction was green. Smooth as silk. Landed about 40 minutes from our work location. We had the codes from the IRSAW people that morning, all we had to do was maintain hypnoinduction for 40 minutes while traversing the colon and we'd be able to-"

"I'm sorry, colon?"

"Oh come on. Colon. Collective Unconscious. Col-Un. Colon."

"I- of course. Continue."

"Hey, have you ever been on a dive before?"

"Can we focus on your statement?"

"It's important. I need to know if this next bit is gonna make sense to you or not."

"I've undergone basic anti-intrusion training standard for IRS investigation task force officers."

"So you've done safe dives. White room? Castle training? Putting up the wall? All that jazz?"

"That's correct."

"Did they ever tell you why it's dangerous to perform off-site hypnoincursion in meta-unstsble hypnospace?"

"They did."

"Well they're lying...don't look at me like that. I'm not bullshitting you. They're lying...there's...there's shit out there okay? There's things out there."

"Mills?"

"Yeah. Mills. Uh..."

"Take your time."

"Yeah yeah. Quit interruptin me. Mills... Uh, yeah so we were T-Plus 30 into the dive. Bruso gives us a heads up that some hypnoflora is headed our way, but can't get a read on mass. Says we should steer clear, but we are so close. Israel had handled some hypnoflora before, so we weren't worried. But it was... I dunno. I can't explain."

"Do your best."

"Like. Okay. Meta-unstsble dives are fucked. They're acid trips. The St. Louis hypnoscape already doesn't look normal, but Scott Base looked like some kinda bastard lovechild of a medieval castle and a seashell, all twisting up into itself. The streets were a chessboard, and all the streetlights we're these tall kinda mannequin lookin' things holding a tiny sun in their hand. Everything is fucked, it's all topsy turvy. But it's okay, because it's meta-unstable hypnospace, its not SUPPOSED to be normal. And then there was a Red Sock."

"Like for the feet?"

"No. Like. In the middle of this fucked up dreamscape, there's suddenly a batter for the Boston Red Sox. He's standing there, maybe 50 feet away. He's got a bat in one hand and a mitt in the other, and he's just kinda walking towards us. Nobody really knew what to do. It didn't look dangerous, but something wasn't right. It didn't fit. We just kinda stood there, looking at the thing. Israel starts talking to Bruso, asking him what to do. Suddenly, Bruso is screaming at us, telling us to book it. He's screaming into the com, telling us to prepare for de-emmanation. Nobody knows what's happening. Israel is suddenly standing between Mills and the Red Sock, and..."

"Any information you can recall could be of use."

"It's...it's mostly feeling at this point. You ever been having a normal dream? Like, a good, normal dream? And suddenly you realize that something is really, really wrong? There's signs. For me? It's that the lights go out. Suddenly day turns to night, and something about this batter just makes me want to curl up and hide. Suddenly, moving through the world is like trying to swim through molasses. I try to run, but nothing moves, and everything is dark. The world is shifting. There's shadows under the bathroom door that can't be happening. A man who looks like Jesus. An old and terrible house and an old man with no name whose face I can't remember. The batter swings at Mills and she just...vanishes. Shes gone. Bruso pulls us out a second later."

"So this, batter killed Ms. Mills?"

"No."

"No?"

"No. We get out, she's comatose. Whatever that thing did to her, she was still in hypnospace. I gave her a hot shot of barbiturates. Her brain activity slowed to R0 after about 90 seconds."

[holymolyfizzie]

i don't wanna derail @kityana's post about stolas's pill popping, so i'm making a separate one. but something kityana said finally made me think about something: "i'm still not sure if those pills are actually helping him or if they were just given to him to numb him to how shitty his life is"

I've wondered something related to this a lot myself. but Stolas takes his antidepressants with alcohol (and in the aftermath of alcohol, like at the end of The Circus), which is a depressant. taking antidepressants + alcohol at best just cancels out your antidepressants so they don't actually do anything. but both at once, at worst, makes your depression symptoms a lot worse. taking them together is the sort of stuff that college girls get yelled at for, but i guess no one told stolas. i wouldn't be surprised if he's been popping them like candy and upping his dosage because he was told they would help him…and then they don't because of the rampant alcoholism. which is to say that we don't know if the meds even worked for him at all (i'd argue strongly they didn't, considering his alcoholism only ever got worse and he kept taking more and more pills, like they never worked enough) or if they were a placebo while he was taking them

and this might be a bit too nuanced for such a show, but as someone who has suddenly gotten off antidepressants that didn't work at all, the withdrawal symptoms don't always affect mood that much (they did nothing for it to begin with) and they sure as hell don't last a full month after getting off. in fact, going cold turkey off of meds that do work for you shouldn't have withdrawal symptoms that last a full month (if you do, it's a Talk to Your Doctor moment). i just really wonder if Stolas noticed the lack of antidepressants after the first few days beyond the old habit of taking them, and if we really can contribute much of his mental breakdown to getting off antidepressants

but you know what he was taking religiously, that did affect him for sure, and that we haven't seen him touch in a month now? the alcohol. he was drinking during Mastermind, but he clearly hasn't touched it since the trial. Blitz doesn't seem to have alcohol around, and Stolas wouldn't ask for the extra expense -- he's being forced to quit. he passes up Loona's beelzejuice at the Sinsmas party, noticeably. the beelzejuice is brought in, and Stolas immediately goes outside for a smoke instead. he's not drinking anymore. and quitting alcohol cold turkey is an insane process, esp at his level of hard liquor. we're talking about disastrous health consequences and a whole host of withdrawal symptoms -- anxiety, depression, irritability, fatigue, loss of appetite, brain fog, hallucinations, and much worse stuff (in humans, seizures). it's impossible to underestimate the severe damage alcoholism does to your brain and body longterm. and a lot of those withdrawal symptoms stay weeks after stopping cold turkey

like, i don't want to detract from him going off of antidepressants; he needs and obviously wants working antidepressants, he's desperate for them. but i'm gonna be so for real, i've had my experiences going off ineffective antidepressants, and i've watched family members try to quit alcohol. an alcoholic quitting is a brutal, drawn out process that shakes me to my core. there are reasons a person still says "i am an alcoholic" even a decade after quitting. that shit's insidious in a way that antidepressants aren't, and it was affecting stolas noticeably more, surely enough to render his meds useless. if you want him back on antidepressants, then you need a sober Stolas first, and this is what he's FINALLY working on

so i think more emphasis needs to be placed on Stolas's recovery from alcoholism when discussing his mental breakdown, irritability, etc. the fact that he's doing this without rehab or other interventions is miraculous, nearly impossible. i don't want his impressive recovery (so far) from alcoholism to end up getting buried under the antidepressant talk ngl, especially when his getting off of alcohol now means that his antidepressants may actually work in the future and help him. this is something to be so so proud of!!

[cjlouwho]

Twelve Christmases

chapter tags: discussions of a burn victim (nothing graphic), discussions of suicide and mental health, very brief mentions of things that happened in past chapters (Tommy's mom, military, red handkerchief, implied noncon), anxiety, depression, background character death, Tommy calls the crisis hotline

read below or on ao3

Day 10: 2022

“I'm calling Roberts in early, you can go home.”

“Captain Marks-”

“No, Kinard! What you did out there was careless. You could've gotten yourself killed.”

“And if I'd done nothing, that man would be dead.”

“He's gonna wish he were dead if he ever wakes up! He's got third degree burns on over seventy percent of his body! I don't mean to be harsh, Tommy, but you risked your life for a dead man walking!”

“So?” 

Marks took a deep breath, sitting back in his chair. “I'm gonna pretend I didn't just hear you say that. I know emotions are high right now, but you know as well as I do I can't have a pilot that isn't concerned about whether they live or die.”

“That's not-”

“Stop talking, Kinard,” Marks warned. “You're on the ground for five shifts, I'll reevaluate things myself after that. If I have any hesitation, for even a moment, about your intentions here, you're getting a psych eval. That'll put you on the ground forever. You understand me?”

Tommy pursed his lips, nodding his head. “I understand.”

“Good. Now, go home, enjoy the rest of your Christmas, come back next shift with a clear head.”

*****

By the time Tommy got home, it was nearing ten o'clock at night. His brain was a jumbled mess. It didn't seem to matter how many times he hit the punching bag in his garage, it was never enough.

After a quick shower, he thought about laying down.

But even the idea of that made him want to crawl out of his skin.

So, he began to pace.

He paced, and paced, and paced, with his hands on his hips. From the living room, to the kitchen, down the hall, and back again.

It all felt like too much. He wasn't just thinking about today. He was thinking about his mom. He was thinking about the military. He was thinking about the red handkerchief. He was thinking about waking up in a stranger's apartment with no clue what happened the night before.

He was thinking, thinking, thinking, pacing, pacing, pacing, and he needed it all to stop.

Just stop!

So he did something he never thought he'd do.

He wasn't even sure what made him do it.

All he remembered was pulling his phone out of his pocket and dialing the number.

988.

“988 crisis lifeline, this is Penny. How can I help you today?”

He froze.

“Hello? Is anyone there?”

He swallowed. Closed his eyes.

“I'm here.”

“Oh, good. May I ask who I'm speaking with?”

“Tommy,” no attempt to try for a fake name.

“Hi, Tommy! I'm Penny. I know I said it before, but I like to make sure the people I speak to heard me. Tommy, ca-”

“I'm not... I don't wanna kill myself,” Tommy interrupted, needing to make it clear. “I just needed someone to talk to.”

“Okay.” Her voice was soothing, familiar almost. A voice that Tommy hadn't heard in years. “That's what I'm here for, Tommy. What's on your mind?”

He tried to think of what to say. Tried to figure out the perfect way to start the conversation.

He was usually so put together.

But everything felt off.

“I hate Christmas.”

He wasn't sure why that was the first thing that popped into his brain at this moment, but it was out there now.

“A lot of people have complex feelings about holidays. It can be tough sometimes, no doubt about it.”

The tiny admission seemed to open a floodgate for Tommy. “My mom was thirty-eight when she died, and I'm thirty-eight now,” he explained. He was sure the words coming out of his mouth were just as jumbled as the thoughts in his head. “And she- she didn't die around Christmas. She actually died in June, so I don't know why I keep thinking about her today of all days, but I do. Not just her; I'm thinking about a lot of things. But it all sort of leads back to her at the end, I guess.”

“Was Christmas important to her?” Penny asked.

“She loved it when I was really little. Always liked looking at the lights and taking me to the mall to pick out things I wanted. I think my dad ruined Christmas for her though.”

“He wasn't big on the holiday?”

“He wasn't big on family. Looking back, I can see how being with him changed her. I didn't recognize it back then.”

“You were young. She probably didn't want you to recognize it.”

Tommy sighed, giving himself a moment to gather his thoughts. “She didn't get thirty-nine Christmases, you know? And that doesn't really seem fair. Because I'm here for my thirty-ninth Christmas and I don't even like the damn day. She deserved more. She deserved better.”

“It's never easy to understand why the people we love get taken from us too soon. It can be especially difficult when we lose them as a child.”

Tommy let out a humorless laugh. “She didn't get taken from me,” he bit out, “she left me.”

There was a pause on the line, then, “I'm sorry?”

“Yeah, she uh, she made that choice to leave herself. Stuck me with my dad, who never really gave a crap about me in the first place, and she... she was just gone.”

“I'm sorry about that, Tommy. That's a lot to have to deal with as a kid.”

“I don't ever talk about it, about her. I don't really have anyone to talk about it with. My dad never cared for emotions, so I just plaster a smile on my face and put my shoulders back and keep going.” Tommy shook his head, clearing his throat and wiping away the tears that were pooling in his eyes. “That's not why I called though. Not because of her.”

“Okay,” Penny replied. “Tell me why you called, Tommy.”

Tommy rolled his shoulders, trying to rid himself of some of the tension running through his body. “I did something stupid at work today, and I knew better. I just didn't care.”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“I work for the fire department. I'm a firefighter pilot, but today I was on the ground. We were called to a fire at this house- well, more like a mansion- and we thought we had the place cleared. Then the daughter started yelling for her dad. I headed back inside and found him, um,” Tommy paused, taking in a shaky breath.

“It's okay, Tommy. Take your time.”

“He- He was at the source of the fire. A fairly large space heater exploded and the fire had spread quickly. The house was about to collapse, and I was being told to get out, but I stayed. Long story short, I was able to get the man out right before the structure collapsed. He was severely burned though. If he makes it, and it's a big if, he's going to wish he hadn't. My captain won't let me fly for a while now. Sent me home early.” He let out a humorless laugh. “I wasn't even supposed to work today. I took the shift because I hate this damn holiday.”

“You've mentioned that three times now,” Penny noted.

“What?”

“How much you dislike Christmas. Tommy, do you think that maybe the risk you took today had something to do with the fact it's Christmas? Emotions were already high, making you take risks you wouldn't usually take?”

“Hm,” Tommy hummed. “Maybe? I don't really know though, because I feel like I'm ready to take those same risks any day, anytime. I said it before, and I meant it, I'm not trying to die. I just... I don't think I care if I do. It didn't matter to me if I didn't make it out. We're all gonna die someday, you know? That's what I always figure. What's it matter if it's now?”

“I think it would matter to the people who love you. The people who care about you.”

“I don't think I know anyone well enough for them to be affected by my death.”

“Well, it would matter to me,” Penny replied matter-of-factly, and Tommy couldn't help but let out a laugh.

“I dunno, I can be kind of a bitch sometimes.”

“Thank God for that, I'd hate it if you were too perfect.”

“Well, I never said I wasn't perfect. Perfect and bitch can go together, right?”

“I think it's a great pairing.”

A smile lingered on Tommy's face. He couldn't remember the last time he spoke to someone so openly. “Penny?”

“I'm here.”

“Would you stay on the phone with me until Christmas is over?”

“Honey,” she answered, Tommy softening at the name, “I can honestly say there's nowhere else I'd rather be.”

Penny stayed on the phone with him until 12:01. She was willing to stay on the line longer, but by the time Tommy had watched the clock strike midnight, he was ready to go to bed.

He felt better. A little lighter than he had in a while.

He'd been in bed for about fifteen minutes, and was just dozing off when his phone buzzed.

It was Captain Marks.

The man from the house fire died on the operating table.

I know you wanted to save him, Tommy.

Unfortunately we can't save them all.

Tommy stared at the texts for a good ten minutes before switching over to the phone app and dialing 988 again.

[watarfallar]

Is it bad that when I was walking down the street one day and saw a poppy growing out of a patch of weeds, my brain short circuited? Is that bad? Oh well, have some crumbs for your troubles.

Grian: It’s quick, it’s easy, and it’s free: pouring river water in your socks! Scar: Why would I do that? Grian: It’s quick, it’s easy, and it’s free!

Scar, texting Grian: Text me when you’re home safely. Grian: I’m home dangerously. Scar: Stop it. Grian: I’m home lethally.

Scar, trying their first ever cup of coffee: I am ENERGY! Grian, an avid coffee drinker, on their twelfth cup of the day: Someone slap me awake or I am literally going to fall into a coma in ten seconds.

Scar: Ugh, there’s always that weak bitch in the group who isn’t down with murder. Scar: glares at Grian Grian: Well, sorry I have morals!

Grian: I'm gonna need a human skull but you can't ask why. Scar: Only if you also don't ask why. Scar: pulls four pristine human skulls out of their bag Grian: … Grian, grabbing a skull: This one will do.

Grian: What is the one thing I told you not to do? Scar: Burn the house down. Grian: And what did you do? Scar: I made dinner. Grian: Scar: Grian: Scar: And burnt the house down.

Grian: Love makes people do stupid things. Scar: I love everything! Grian: That explains a lot.

Scar: What am I supposed to do? Grian: If I were you? I’d try and make peace with whatever deity, pantheon, or Divine Other you believe in. Scar: I’m an atheist. Grian: Then just get ready to die I guess.

Grian: You know what your problem is? Scar: I only have one?

Scar: Present your best argument for eating bacon. Grian: If animals don’t want to be eaten, then why are they made of food?

Scar: Isn’t it a bit dangerous? Grian: Scar, please. We’ve in a lot of unexpected predicaments before and we always escape unhurt. Scar: … Grian: Okay, we sometimes escape unhurt. Scar: … Grian: Alright, we escaped unhurt once… Then we hurt ourselves on the way home.

Scar: Hey, Grian, when you wake up you're legally obligated to agree with me. Grian: But I don't….. Scar: I don't see why that should be my problem??

Grian: There’s no “I” in team, but there is one in pizza. Scar: So, you’re not going to share? Grian: I’m not going to share.

Scar: I'm trash. Grian: As someone who's environmentally conscious, it's my duty to pick you up. Does 7 work for you? Scar: Scar: You smooth motherfucker. Scar: And yes it does.

Grian: on the phone Just snap his kneecaps and he’ll talk, I’m at a parent teacher conference. Grian: Anyways, you said Scar is enjoying finger painting! That's great.

Scar: A-are you sure this is safe?! Grian: Oh, quit being such a baby. It’s perfectly safe! …For me!

Grian: I’m Grian. I’m an accountant. Scar: I’m Scar. I have a knife.

Scar: I can’t do this, it’s against my moral compass. Grian: YOUR MORAL COMPASS IS A ROULETTE WHEEL! Scar: …Your point?

Grian: Scar, no. Scar: Scar, yes.

Scar: Do you have ANY idea what’s going on outside?! Grian: Judging by your outrage, I’d guess someone’s having fun?

Scar: Shut up, you’re messing with my train of thought! Grian: I thought you didn’t have a brain and now you say you have thoughts?

Scar: Two wrongs don’t make a right. Grian: sighs That’s true… Grian: But to negatives make a positive!!!

Grian: Have I ever told you that I love you with my whole heart? Scar: For the love of all that is holy, I am not taking you to McDonalds. It’s 2am! Grian: Mean.

Grian: Hey, about that love letter you sent me- Scar: blushes What are your thoughts? Grian: The fourth sentence- Scar: Yeah, that’s where I got really emotional and I- Grian: It’s “you’re” not “your”.

[campbell-rose]

Helluva Mess

Now, Sinmas was just... Something.

Alright, now for some reason Blitz and the others hesitate to kill their target? So all of the sudden because it's gay it's an issue, when they did the exact same job in the first episode with no qualms? This show is so obnoxious.

I also hate how spoiled Stolas is, because it's not really funny. I think if I didn't hate him so much, i'd actually find some of his antics humorous, but... uh, nope. I just hate his guts. I hate how he's just some woobie at this point. The narrative is acting like he's done all these things to earn all the sympathy in the world, but he hasn't. Am I supposed to like him because of Mastermind? Well, that's not happening.

Millie being pregnant is fine, I don't care. At all. Which is just more proof of how little character she has to the point that I was just meh to the reveal. Now, the reaction to this development is more interesting than the actual plot point - Why in the name of god do people think it's SALLIE'S??? It makes my brain melt out of my ears just thinking about it.

Loona's hellhound form is just a wolf with a furry face and I hate it. She should've looked actually cool, but that's more of a subjective opinion rather than an actual criticism.

Now, the main point I want to rant about: Stella and Octavia.

First off. The way Octavia is treated as some sort of villain or in the wrong for cutting Stolas out of her life after he repeatedly hurt and chose Blitzo after her, her after the many chances she gave him to do better is just terrible. She's completely within her rights to cut him out, speaking from someone with similar experience with cutting out terrible family. Stolas is in the wrong, no matter how much the narrative tries to say otherwise or tries to act like he's taking responsibility. Her rant at Stolas is one hundred percent correct, she was absolutely in the right, Stolas is a selfish asshole and he chose Blitzo over her. She doesn't need to listen to him, she doesn't owe him anything. And I know the narrative is going to make her 'come around' like Blitzo said, but I really wish she wouldn't.

Second. Stella, sweet, poor Stella god why have they done this to you? She's so one dimensional and has no relationship with Octavia. Are Viv and the crew just allergic to Stella having any potential redeeming qualities? I think if she genuinely cared about Octavia and was irritated by Andrealphus taking her divorce and using it to further his agenda, then that would instantly give her the tiniest bit of depth. But we can't have good things in the Hellaverse.

In my rewrite, Stella's scorned and just wants to take her daughter and be happy and hates Stolas and her brother in equal measure. Enjoy a drawing I did of my rewrite versions.

[the-guppy-fish]

HC - Simon "Ghost" Riley

Types of relationships - Friends

...I have some thoughts...about our boy Simon...there are not many...but more will come...

(definitely have to make a part two🤭)

No warnings, yet. (Slightly proofread)

Simons eyes are always on you. No matter where in the room you are, his eyes always find their way to you. Both consciously and unconsciously. He just likes knowing where you are.

He has made it a habit to rest his hand on your shoulder whenever he stands behind you. (He just likes touching you..and not in a weird way)

Purposefully steals you hairties and hides them in his pockets. Whenever you leave something (jackets, shoes, ...your phone) within his reach, he loves to just hide it from you. Nothing vile. He just loves to see the confusion on your face when you mutter:"Where the f..Simon! Give back my xx"

Somehow, he knows when you get hungry. If you're ever out together, whether that be on an OP or just out with friends, it doesn't matter. Right before your mood turns snappy and you can't concentrate, he hands you some sort of snack.

He has the lamest, most dry fucking jokes ever. But you find them hilarious. Each and every single one of them. Because he has become a master at delivering those jokes.

- while walking in a desert somewhere on an op.

- Simon picks something up off the ground.

"Here, take this."

- he hands you something small. Dropping it into your gloved hand.

"What is it, Lieutenant?"

- while walking away he answers lowly.

"It's for rock music."

- you look down at a thumbnail-sized, triangular and flat rock.

🙄

"Eat." Was all he would tell you.

Tries to shepherd you if you're in crowded places. But you got a will of your own and a gene for getting distracted, so it's quite the struggle for him sometimes. He'd place a gentle hand between your shoulderblades, guiding you to wherever you need to go.

"Stay close, love."

He texts you out of the blue. And it's usually something weird. Something he's spent a good amount of time pondering over....or no time at all. Sometimes, it's something silly, and others he's thought about something deep and very emotional.

'Do you think I should get a pet for when i retire?'

'How about a dog?'

'No'

'Maybe a turtle'

'I want a turtle'

'Would you help me pick one?'

'Do you ever think about what would happen if I didn't come home from an op?'

'Shit. Sorry'

'I did it again :'( '

'Sorry love'

'You busy?'

'Oi'

'Answer me'

'Please'

'I just need your opinion on something'

Si👻 sent a picture

'Don't laugh. Just tell me if you like the sweater or not'

Simon is definitely someone who texts sporadically.

And speaking of texting. He loves to send you random pictures of animals he finds. No explanation. He just wants you to see the cute cat/dog/squirrel he encountered on a walk around town.

Simon is the kind of friend who you just click with. You don't have to talk much. You just get one another. But still. You yap his ears off every time you spend time together. And he just listens. Oh, Simon loves to hear you yap. He knows it brings some quietness to your, sometimes, racing brain. And he knows. The day he needs to talk, you'll be all ears.

Whenever he leaves for an op (without you), you use your chat, more or less, like a diary. You know he has no access to any kind of network what so ever, while he's away. So, all the messages you send... will only be read once he comes back to base. And even though it's not much, and usually only silly and funny things you send him, he loves every bit of it.

(Even when you use your chat to keep grocery lists in)

When things get rough. Because they will. Life sucks sometimes. You're there for one another. You have an ongoing list of times where you helped each other out because no one else could. (And you wanted no one else to help you)

The time you had the nastiest cold. Like snot everywhere. Coughing your lungs up. Fever. Headaches. Everything. He took some days off from work to help you feel better. He stocked your fridge with vegetable soup and made you like a hundred cuppas until you finally felt like yourself again. All while laughing at you whenever you sneezed without a tissue because you just couldn't keep the snot in.

The time Simons apartment flooded because his upstairs neighbour had busted a pipe, and water began running down Simons walls. In no time, you had helped him collect the few possessions he had at home and brought them to your place. For a few weeks, he occupied your couch while his apartment got fixed.

One time, your bank card had been stolen, and all your accounts were frozen until the card had been deactivated. With no real money to your name at that moment, Simon had lent you at least a month's worth of rent, utilities, and groceries until your bank had settled everything.

Simon once went out to drink with the task force. He had somehow convinced them that he was sober enough to walk home by himself. (He was not.) On the way home, he had managed to trip over his large feet and stumble down the pavement and almost face plant on the empty road. In his drunken state, he had managed to call you and ask for help. Even though it was late, you had gone out for him. Helped him home and into his bathroom. You had helped him clean the scrapes and cuts on his hands, knees, and chin. Brushed his teeth and made him drink some water before you sent him to bed. The next morning, you woke on his couch, the sound of Simons hangover reaching you from the bathroom. He sounded like he was dying. But at least he was up.

When you were working together, your friendship looked a little different. Your work relationship made it hard for him to express his care for you in the way we'd like. So he found other ways. Both of you had to dial down the banter and long yap sessions. So Ghost found discrete ways to be there for you. He made sure your canteen was always filled with water. When he was assigning guard shifts, he would usually put you two on the same shift to ensure you had at least some hours in each others company. Sometimes, he even saved the tiny piece of chocolate from the field rations you ate so he could give it to you whenever you had a shitty day.

When you're on leave, he loves to ask you to go hiking with him. Simon loves to spend time in nature, and he loves to spend time with you. So why not combine it? You spent hours together, both talking about almost everything between heaven and earth, but also in silence, just enjoying the comfort of being around one another.

Also, Simon loves to tease you. Not to be cruel or try to embarrass you. No. He just loves to see you squirm a little. (But he also loves it when you set your foot down. That fire behind your eyes when you tell him to "fucking quit it." He feels proud to see you stand up for yourself. Even if he was the cause of your irritation.)

[xoxo-sarah]

Okay here is another idea because I love spamming you with them! It’s for our Stevie boy! Okay so basically neither Steve or the reader have had good role models for relationships. So because of this they kinda have a bad relationship, but know this so they sit down and talk and make a promise not to yell or storm out. So they fight and the reader is like whatever and leaves but Steve yells. It’s just their way of showing they care(the reader doesn’t like to fight so they leave to cool off and Steve needs to talk it out). Again this one is really just for me because I’ve never had a good relationship and my one relationship I had I dipped when things got semi hard 🤦🏼‍♀️ but like she tries that after they had their talk and Stevie won’t let her blah blah happy ending please because I need happy endings

Promises Between Us

(The headers have nothing to do with the fic but I didn't know what else to put)

↝a/n: quick fic. thank you for requesting! Enjoy 🩷 ily 💋

↝pairing:Steve Harrington x fem!reader

↝warning: relationship problems, bad family issues, parent issues/ arguing, Steve's parents mentioned, crying, not proofread & rushed

|| Disclaimer: I do not own Steve Harrington, or any character from Stranger Things. I only own y/n and any characters I create with my own brain. ||

↝⎙ 12.23.24

Steve was terrible at relationships.

He had never been good at them and would let you know if you were to ask him.

Growing up, he didn't have the best examples to follow. His parents were always away, and when they were home, they barely spoke to each other. Out in public, they had the "white picket fence and happy couple" fecade perfected. Honestly, it irritated how fake his parents were. They were the perfect couple to anyone who looked their way.

You, on the other hand, had your own set of issues. Your parents fought constantly, and you learned early on that sometimes it was better to just walk away. All the grief you felt as a child, stuck with you through your children, teenage years, and the start of your adulthood. It probably always will.

When Steve and the you started dating, you both knew it wouldn't be easy. You both cared deeply for each other, and tried to make it work with everything in your being.

But the past made it hard to navigate the complexities of a relationship, some days. You had your fair share of arguments, and more often than not, they ended with you storming out and Steve yelling after you. You always came back, and Steve always apologized. He made sure to make it up to you. You spent more time together, talking, asking each other about the other's day. Anything to erase what was said in the heat of the moment.

Today was one of those days where it was all too much. Steve came home from work, pissed. You simply woke up in a mood. Those two didn't mix well together. After one small comment, it all unravelled.

"You're not listening!" The words echoed through the house, yet seemingly not making their way to Steve, who stood heaving in fury.

"I don't want to deal with this right now- i shouldn't have to!" Steve scrubbed his jaw, feeling it clench.

You two stood across from each other, tired, yet too stubborn to see it from the other perspective.

Closing your eyes, you sighed, "Whatever, Steve." And walked to the bedroom, already getting ready for bed at 5 P.M. Steve stayed in the living room, grabbing something to drink. You both needed to cool off, and that's exactly what you were going to do.

Steve tiptoed his way to the bedroom, with night having already fallen. He stood in the door way, watching as you read a book while leaning against the bedframe. His chest fell.

"I'm sorry."

When you looked up, Steve immediately wanted to kick himself. Around your eyes was red, along with under your nose. The tissue box on the bedside table didn't help extinguish his assumption. You had been crying.

"I'm really sorry. I shouldn't have brought it home and taken it out on you." He moved forward, toward you. Putting the book down, you sniffled, before nodding.

"Yeah, and I should've been more understanding." You watched as he sat beside you on the bed, before he grabbed your hand.

" I don't like arguing."

So, you both made the promise: no more yelling, no more storming out. You would talk things through, no matter how hard it got.

But promises are easier made than kept.

A few weeks later, you found themselves in the middle of another argument. This time, it was about something trivial, but it quickly escalated. You felt the familiar urge to leave, to cool off before things got worse. The living door invited you more and more as the argument escalated. Air, and quiet. That's all you wanted in the moment.

"Whatever, Steve," you said, turning towards the door.

"Wait," Steve's voice broke, desperate. His dark eyes were pleading, any hint of anger long gone. "We promised, remember?"

You stopped, hand on the doorknob. "I just need some space."

"No," he said, stepping closer. "We need to talk this out. I can't lose you."

Tears welled up in your eyes. "I don't want to fight." The air that had become thick from the tension, released. Vulnerability aired out the living room, nipping at your fingertips like the cold weather in December.

"Neither do I," he said softly, taking your hand. "But leaving won't solve anything. Please, stay."

Looking into his eyes, you saw the sincerity there. Slowly, you nodded. "Okay."

You sat back down, and for the first time, you both really talked. You shared your fears, your insecurities, and your hopes for the future. It wasn't easy, but it was a start.

By the end of the night, you were both exhausted, but there was a new understanding between you two. You knew it wouldn't be perfect, but you were willing to try.

Steve pulled you into his arms, holding you close. "I'm not going anywhere," he whispered.

"Me neither," you replied, resting your head against his chest.

•2021-2024 by xoxo-sarah on Tumblr•

•My work is not to be translated, copied, modified, and/or reposted on any other site without my permission. [I don't give permission!]

[swimmingenthusiasty]

Woah. That phrase is nostalgic of school. Fucking stationary. Pencil case.

Every surface is fucking smooth. and flat. The tables the floors the board the field the court the path the brains.

The girls like steaming compost heaps inside uniform. Sterile, kept from dirt and dust, yet somehow gross. Warm and fixed in place behind a desk like the zits and pustules on their face. Insecure eyes darting side to side and only finding each other, other girls to judge. Like some type of layer in hell.

Loosing their shit over 'guys' who are all mummy's boys at that age. Yelling over their egos, mum flavoured cries for approval. Repeating mum's script. The asian one talking about a 'gud future' it was just what mum said. The stickler worried about safety was just mum's script. Literal fucking babies. With egos. Because those are the two things that mums make. Babies and egos. It's like full circle for the girls looking because nothing less conceited would have sufficed.

There's no patriarchy. Guys stop moving without egos. Without someone to hype them up. If guys want to function without girls, they will invent women amongst themselves to hype them up. If you want dad to keep going to work and mum does a shit job of hyping him up, you better find a way fast. Either you become like a girl and hype or you get used to making your own home. If she insists that you just can't do that and you can't say no because you're still a mommy's boy and her script overrides yours. Then I hope you like lacey stuff. There was one more thing. Oh, this is when I knew it was him. Women created guys like this because of the way they are with eachother. The way they compete and stuff but always indirectly, through a middle thing. That's why they made men.

This is brother's air. Before he leaves for work is when he has the most to give and he only gives when he sees something in my messages. Doesn't make it less true. I mean i don't know if it is fully correct. I'm like a windchime at this point. Anyone you put me near, I'll make a noise to their presence, to their movements, to the air they displace. Guys usually make writing happen though. Girls will make something actually happen.

If I really wanted I can take with me this feeling about -not being a guy's hype prop by releasing my concern for finances and a place to sleep, for stability. Not stability itself but my concern over it.

She wanted me to replace him in her life, to earn for her in his place and she'd go gut whatever he'd had left without holding back. Mistakes me for him often like it already happened in her mind. Like there was no need to ask. She put me between them when I was little and said I should defend when they fought. I think she also liked cucking when they were good. I think she's a bit gay the way she talks about little girls and women's thighs. I don't know if that means I got it from her, like passed down or if I reacted to how gross she was being. Anyway. All that to say that the next time I'll say 'okay burn the house down if you like' when she tries to make herself your problem (her moods and emotions are hers) or her lifestyle your fault (her lack of lasting friendships does not make you a mandatory friend forever, you're no different to all the other people who wouldn't want to stay) or insists her decisons are your decisons (all those times you say something and get ignored, it wasn't hard to hear what you said, she didn't forget that quick. It's up to you to decide how much respect you want) but then that's no way to practice having a house and any fight or playing up will get a crowd. It's hard to affirm without resorting to disrespect when someone is actually dismisive and disrespectful. I can see how their conversations always went the same. She got what she gave. Then that carries over into other conversations. Or you just feel a bit sad and resentful at real kindess, and i've seen it on my father's face. Like he's thinking oh I have to get used to this now? Where were you this whole time. You're only temporary, it's her shit that I'm used to, we'll be back in the shit and you'll be gone, so just be gone early as a favor. It's not just her. He attracted her from a lifetime of the same shits. It made him more than rough around the edges as a consequence and I've gone through all that's like and I wouldn't want to repeat what he felt or how he became. Input output. Change his input, don't have the same shit he had.

All this sympathy towards him. Told you it was the brother. He misunderstands that's why he thinks I need to think this stuff. I need these people to take back their issues. Him you can't tell him anything other than you're hurt, you need to work on yourself. You're allowed to tell someone enough and they should leave. You don't need a million and one ways to push people away. Some are really hurtful. She was at fault when you said enough and she just smirked that you reacted and looked a fool infront of your house. Now for her, you really can't tell her anything. That's why it's taken so long to peel her off. But being here is because he failed me. I went to him, to be my lifeline IF I needed the van sold. End of story. He betrayed himself so often that he just wanted someone else to take the shit. That's why he called her seconds after he hung up and promised me he wouldn't. That's not exactly why though. There's something severly damaged about him from that last disrespect. She went to his last respectable friendship source, the guy she couldn't dis, undisputed source of respectability amongst both of them and the guy called and shamed him. It's like how the guy at the end of 1984 broke. He will just do anything after that. To appease his opressor. My father had a right to a boundary that she could not cross. He is helping by staying away. He is preventing himself from further betrayal. He is of no use to either of us in this fight. Let me finish and if I betray myself it won't be his influence. Don't fuck bears next time pa pap.

Think of leaving and that's how I know brother's air is wrapping up. It always shows up at the end as what he wants. So stressed to see the car parked, room taken up. Doesn't make it the wrong decision necessarily. Im pretty sure i could sneak guys around in the morning. To help line her up. So they want the same thing. I couldn't get him to line up with her though. I can ask for more stuff, room back, more space in the garden, hang around the house a lot. Though I still think he'd stay and get more sabotagey. It's what he's practiced. More foreign for him to get a place. More familiar to ruin something that's around. I get nothing from a fight. I don't want to have the house, I don't like to be here all the time. I can visualise him moving out. Like he does. But again, for what? I would gladly exchange the feelings for them for something good towards myself. It's just that the best way to do that is not clear cut. Everyone did the best they could with what they had. You can't choose them. If however she chose you to be her backup financial plan that's something but not at all uncommon. If she fought hard to hold you back so she wouldn't be alone then that is also not unheard of in love.

It's about learning about these behaviours from others and knowing better and also, unfortunately, it's about undoing hangups they might have caused. If they weren't undoable, many unfortunate consequences are permanent. It becomes a question of acceptance and if you accept will it also define your direction? Will you do something with it, every. single. day.

Early bird gets the moon

Lake Elkhorn, Maryland.

📷: @zalman_waihaus

[housederiva]

so now that veilguard is out and digested, what would you say the best place for a complete newcomer to get into dragon age is? does origins still hold up as a fun opening game fifteen years later?

Dear listener my advice is to play Veilguard before the first 3 installments. I genuinely believe that it would be enjoyed more if you don't know what has been lost/what has been taken from you cut beforehand. The only thing from the first 3 installments that matter in Veilguard is one possible choice your Inquisitor makes, romancing Solas (If you don't have a previous inquisitor I highly recommend making her a Lavellan who was/is in love with him in Veilguard's cc, they have a beautiful story)

While Veilguard is a good RPG, it is not a good Dragon Age game. If you know what shoulders it's standing on, the luster will wear off very quickly. I love it for what it is and I will mourn it for what it is not - and that's okay in a sad, almost bitter way. Inquisition was game of the year for a reason and subsequently Veilguard wasn't mentioned at all for another

On the flip side though (and please keep in mind I'm saying this as someone who played origins in 2009) Origins, Awakening, 2, Inquisition, and most of their DLC's are a branching, beautiful story that will leave a permanent mark on your heart And you can choose what those marks are because your actions in origins ripple out into Inquisition (some more so than others). It will echo out through any other media you love in the future and depending on how old you are it will rewire bits of your brain because let me tell you playing Inquisition at 15 did something to me. Yes, the combat mechanics aren't the greatest in Origins and 2 is a little annoying to play on PC but their stories are wonderful...

What is it like to be thrust into a position of importance and did it stem from choice or survival? Is conscription liberating or a chain of resentment? What is it like to lose your home only to slowly build another that you love and cherish just to watch it crumble away? To know that no matter what you do, it was for nothing? What does it mean when you are suddenly a beacon of hope for a people that possibly are not even your own? What does it feel like to be held in such a regard that you are seen as the voice of a god and no longer a person? Are you afraid that your name will be erased - your culture will be erased, and you will just remain your title just like the one that came before you?

If you have no prior experience with Dragon Age play Veilguard first. That way you won't be upset about what has happened to [redacted's] character or the fact that tranquility is never mentioned and several other things that I don't need to go into here. But without playing the others first, you won't understand the severity of the Blight, your tether Varric won't be as strong, the injustice done to the elves and dalish will go unnoticed. You won't know what it means to be a mage in southern Thedas. You won't know what it means to be castless or saarebas, you won't know what vallaslin is.

If Veilguard is the first experience you have with Dragon Age then you won't know the teeth the series used to have, you'll only have what they're passing off as a growl and you'll be satisfied with that

[brella-boi]

Okay guys this is becoming a tradition of me seeing films recently so heres a

Sonic 3 review from a technical standpoint

Look im no film critic or anything, but i AM an animator and theres a lot of. Things. I see whether I want to or not. Its just how my brain is wired because of my profession lol

(This is full of spoilers btw so now's your time to fast scroll away)

Anyway lets begin!

The movie is great. Cool even. I liked it! But theres a lot of direction decision that I am just. Baffled by I guess?

First of all- the models are different. (Httyd ass moment) And the way they sculpted the characters lips absolutely destroys anything theyre trying to emote. It looks like theyre CONSTANTLY pursing their lips. Like they ate a lemon. Do you understand? Sonic also has much more pronounced brows which makes him look more pissed off constantly LOL

[Sonic 1 model vs sonic 3 models, pay attention to the lips]

Eggman and Dr Stone had possibly the best interactions in the entire movie. Their dynamic was fantastic, and I would argue they kinda carried the movie. Unfortunately! The ending left their issues unresolved. And Dr Stone looked entirely unbothered by the possible death of Eggman.

This brings me to some writing choices that I feel may be due to... Either infantalising or time cuts. The storyboarding of this film was just. God how do I even describe this. It feels like a lot of crucial scenes where cherry picked to be deleted between shots. Thats not good at all- and while character continuity WAS there, it really did feel like something crucial was missing in some scenes. This is especially evident in the Chao Garden scenes. Specifically when the general dies (WHY DOES HE DIE LIKE THAT. WE DIDNT EVEN SEE THE RUBBLE GO ANYWHERE OR PIN ANYONE DOWN OR SEE MASS PANIC FOR PEOPLE TO DIE?) The characters COMPLETELY gloss over his death- a death that feels like its out of a show for 8 year olds Im not going to lie to you. He just flops, delivers a line, and thats it.

It feels like the two halves of the movie were written by two different writers.

The first half is weak. The jokes are stale. And the storybeats almost feel off. The actions scenes- while there's nothing particularly offendish about them- don't *hit*. If you're an animator or writer you understand that important beats need to pack a punch. It was severely lacking in packing punches in the first half.

I also wanna speak to the animators. Are you okay? Was this made on tight deadlines? Where is the fun and whimsy? Did you outsource this? Did you give your workers a good environment or were they crunching and hating life? Or did you hire younger animators with no senior feedback because they're cheaper to hire?

Look, the animation is good. Just that. Its good. Its TV show standard, not movie standard. Its lacking a good push to the poses, its using slow keyframing between poses instead of it being snappy, with good silhouettes, with good visual gags. Instead were left with this.. subpar passable animation for every character instead of something energetic and snappy like Sonics personality. I think this is where I take the most issue with because guys come on. You didnt push the models to their limits at ALL. And Sonics speedy running is... Well read my previous points. Where are the fundamentals of animation about exaggeration? Not in Sonics run cycle.

The second half of the movie carried the first half on its back thanks to Eggman. I am SO GLAD to see giant spaceships and mechs and whatnot. Thats great! Loved to see the lovely mech models and once again- interactions between Eggman and Dr Stone. Id go as far as say they should be gay tbh (hello? The scene where theyre tied up?)

I didn't bring up Shadow entirely so far. And honestly Ive no notes about him. All my notes are entirely about just the animation and not hitting the beats well. His characterisation was great- it actually explains his aggression pretty well and then redemption. Genuinely the last arc of the movie was fantastic. And finally we got to hear a rock score to go with it. Maria was fun, the flashbacks were fun, the scientific exploration was fun. All in the second half of the movie of course!

My overall score is 6/10.

To untrained eyes the movie is going to be extremely fun- if a little more childish in some parts than others. I'm glad they took some risky moments, I'm glad the characterisation is well written. I just wish other aspects were tightened down, mainly animation and storyboarding.

6/10 but I never thought Id leave the cinema with the thoughts "I could storyboard some of these scenes in a lot more meaningful way, and Im not even a storyboarder."

I recommend a watch! Its not a bad movie. Its not a rock-it-out-of-the-park movie either though. I feel like maybe all the anticipation and high expectations maybe made it not as gut punching for me as it couldve been. Overall, all I can gleam from it is theres a lot of things to improve on! But nothing that really destroys it or makes it bad. Just a lot of room for improvement.

Thanks for reading!

[distractedvoid]

remember those sonamy for sonic 4 ideas? here they are i couldnt wait

So, now that Amy is definitely confirmed, based on the after credits scene in Sonic 3, I have some silly thoughts about how Sonic and Amy's relationship could unfold in Sonic 4.

So, first, I think their general dynamic would definitely change. In pretty much every other form of Sonic media, while it has changed a bit recently, Amy is shown as constantly chasing after Sonic despite him avoiding most of her advances anyway.

Now, movie Sonic is definitely not as mature as the Sonics in other medias. A huge part of his continuous character arc is that he's still a kid, a kid that doesn't really know what he's doing.

And here, we have Amy, which, from the very small amount of her character that we've seen, at least seems like less of a damsel in distress. (It reminds me of how they changed Princess Peach's character in the Mario Movie.) In contrast to the story of Sonic CD, we see Amy saving Sonic from the many copies of Metal Sonic.

Now how exactly does this make their dynamic different? Well, if you take an immature Sonic, and put him in the same room as an Amy that needs less saving than the usual, the firsthand difference is undeniable. Thus why I think their dynamic would be reversed in a way, at least, that's what I want to happen.

I have a feeling Sonic would be "chasing" after Amy, but more so in the way that he's constantly trying to impress her. He'd probably get into some unsavory situations due to his most likely failed attempts at this, prompting Amy to have to make sure he doesn't keep doing stupid things.

Amy herself wouldn't understand why Sonic kept getting himself into trouble like that, much less that he did it for her, until she sought out some third-party information.

Speaking of (I never really mentioned anything related but just go with it), I haven't talked much about Amy's own feelings yet.

So we know about a possible tiny fraction of her character, and while that's not a lot to go off of, I don't see any harm in forming early ideas based off it.

When Amy, presumably, met Sonic by saving him from the Metal Sonic copies, I don't think she would really think too much of him at first. As soon as he actually started talking, though, she'd find interest- I wouldn't wanna take away the part of her that probably falls in love way too easily.

Unlike the usual Amy we're probably all used to, she wouldn't show her feelings that much. She'd have the occasional giggle at Sonic's attempts at impressing her, even if she didn't know that was why he did it. For all she knows, that's just what he's usually like! Until she inquires with Tails- she learns that she's somewhat special to the blue blur.

I might just be projecting, with the weird way my own feelings work, but I think Amy's little crush on Sonic would skyrocket at that information. Sonic, the guy she only really had a small crush on, was trying that hard to win her over? Admittedly, that was pretty cute in her eyes.

After that Amy would definitely be more forward with Sonic, causing the latter to be a little confused and wonder if a certain two-tailed fox said anything...Guess you can't even trust your best friend with secret crushes anymore, sigh.

If they ended up together, if we were to ever get so lucky, I don't think either would really change how they act around each other, other than holding hands occasionally and maybe a few kisses here and there. Sonic is still adventure focused, though how much he likes Amy is sometimes painfully obvious. He'd gain a little confidence boost if they became official, but overall, if they went on any dates, they'd be dates to kick Eggman's ass for the thousandth time.

That's all I have for now, I'm gonna let the brain worms rest LOL. Thanks to anyone who actually went and read my yapping session

[lilianalovespink]

CW- reader is asleep whilst most of this happens!!!, Non-con, unprotected p-in v sex, (slight) degradation, defloration, size difference, Simon is drunk

The bird's been bothering Simon all evening.

She's not his type, she's way too pushy and most importantly, she keeps on sending nasty looks to the captains daughter, simply because you had the audacity to smile and wave at Simon, which was enough to make him have to readjust himself in his pants.

"You know what- Simon you're an ass-!"

Well, that's his bird gone. In tears of upset, she leaves him at the bar and not two seconds later, you go out after her. 'God' the man thinks to himself 'if you're that nice to people who glare at you all evening, how nice are you to folks that are nice back?'

After you come back in there's a slight frown on your face as you invite him to sit with you, your father and the rest of the team.

"Don't you think you could apologize to Meredith?She's a nice woman and you made her cry-" Simon sees his captains hand squeeze your thigh, and you shut yourself up, though not without a confused look towards your father.

"But she is right; I'm sure if you we're nicer to your birds, they'd stay longer." This time, it's your father speaking. Simon doesn't believe that.

After all, he's never seen Kyle been more than a little nice to you, and you're still all over him.

He wonders if you and your little unofficial boyfriend have already had sex, or if he has more tact than Simon and will wait until your father's gone out somewhere?

Pretty little captain's daughter, always all dolled up and sweet and caring, he can't help it that his cock chubs up at that. After all, you're even nice to him. Even though he adjusts his cock in front of you and keeps eye contact during that.

What can he say? You're the sweetest girl he knows.

«────── « ⋅ʚ♡ɞ⋅ » ──────»

Later when they've all gone to bed in the inn, he gets up to take a piss at night. 'Geez, maybe you should stop drinking so much?' Yeah right, the blonde thinks to himself.

Maybe.

Stumbling back to his room in complete darkness whilst still inebriated is...difficult, but he can manage. Though he doesn't remember his room smelling like vanilla and strawberries, the door was agape and he's left his like that too.

He wants nothing more than to stumble into bed, get one out into his fist to the though of his captain's girl, and go to sweet, sweet nightmare land, but even while drunk, he can tell there's someone already under the covers.

Ah. So that's why it smells so sweet. Didn't he send his bird away? Well, if she snuck into his bed, he'd give her what she was hoping for and send her off once he's turned her brain to mush.

"Pathetic' Slag. Acting all huffy at dinner and then sneaking into my bed?"

She stirred. Was she asleep? Well, that didn't matter. Pressing her head into the pillows and pulling her ass up, he had to choke back a mean laugh at her nightwear.

"The hell you wearing pyjamas for? Trying to hide that you're a whore?"

No matter, these could come off just like a night gown. It seems like she finally woke up when he yanked her pants off, considering the body beneath him started fussing and thrashing slightly.

"Can't put it in 'less you stay still."

He grunted,rubbing his cock along her- fuck where those just regular cotton panties? Shouldn't she be wearing a thong?

"What, didn't feel the need to pretty yourself up for me even a little bit?" He buffs as he slaps her ass and yanks down her underwear just enough to expose her holes.

In the dark, it was kind of difficult to find the right entrance, but when he felt her folds, he also found the proper hole (or at least the one he wouldn't be yelled at for using), nudging his blunt, thick head against it and pushed in.

"Fucking- tight like a goddamm virgin-!" The scarred man grunted, having to force in inch after inch.

"S-STOP-" the voice in the pillow muffled, so he pressed her face down harder. Shouldn't have snuck into his bed expecting anything but this. He'd make sure she'd learn that, despite her thrashing and muffled crying.

Strange though, that that voice sounded sweet like the doll's voice. He smirked when he thought of her; after all, wasn't he doing a great job making it up to his bird?

Heavy as he knew he was, he still put all his weight into the thrusts that made the bed creak as it bounced against the wall, halfway leaned over the soft body beneath him, his chest completely covering the entirety of the back who's muscles flexed and relaxed the entire time.

He buried his face in her neck, allowing him to hear the moaning and the whimpering and the crying so much better. Huh. Strange. His bird was really starting to sound like the sweet girl probably fast asleep in her father's arms.

Maybe that was just the alcohol. Letting him hear what he wanted but couldn't have. Mocking him since a mutt like him couldn't get sweet girls like her. No, the sweet and caring girls were for boys like Kyle who'd at least pretend to be soft and gentle.

Not for Simon. Never ever for Simon.

The speed and power behind his thrusts intensified until he felt himself clench up, placing a hand on her belly as he shot his seed into her.

Fuck the bulge he felt temporarily mis-shaping her warm belly could make him go at least two more rounds.

She was probably on birth control, yeah?

Finally, since he got his peak, he pulled back out to find her leaking with his cum and her arousal, though the latter was awfully thin in texture.

And then the scent hit him. That was blood.

His eyes widened as he let go of her head, already cursing slightly as she sobbed and then-

"H-HELP....!"

In all of 20 seconds the light in the room turned on, making Simon huff until his eyes widened for a second time in two minutes, since the person who had turned the lights on was no other than his captain, and the little thing sobbing into her hands and leaking his spend was no other than-

"GET OFF OF MY DAUGHTER!"

[pseudowho]

all the time you spend writing your shit drabbles and you could have put all that energy into another big one instead of acting like you don't have the time to write big ones. happy to finally see something good from you with the clockmaker nanami one.

Getting the mean Ask out of the way first 🫠

The Polite Answer: Let's put the insults aside for a moment, and focus on the core of this: you clearly don't understand the different requirements for writing bite size pieces, Vs longer pieces.

Bitesizes pieces usually contain a single theme and a short scenario; character development and relationship development is minimal. It's an amuse bouche; it's a morsel; it does not need to linger in the brain for long. There is a single thread and little effort needs to be taken to prevent it from getting tangled.

Longer pieces usually contain multiple themes in a longer scenario; one must convey not only the passing of time, gradual character and relationship development, and thematic exploration, but one must also hold the reader by the hand to guide them through this. It's a walk through woodland, for which a writer lays a trail. There are multiple threads, and we work slowly so as not to tangle them.

As you can see...the headspace taken for these is grossly different. I'm sure I speak for many writers when I say, that a drabble pours, while a long piece trickles.

The Rude Answer: The next time I want some jumped up little coward insulting my writing, I'll find a local group of GRRM-loving neckbeard incels to read my shit. Quite frankly, it's none of your business how I spend my time, and honestly, when you let ignorance become your main character trait, that's when you spiral into true stupidity.

So go away, tosspot, and abuse someone else. Also, I'm disgusted that you read The Watchmaker, and you can take your backhanded, dirty little compliments elsewhere, you mouth breather.

And learn how to insult someone properly. You make being inept look so easy.

Good talk, baby,

-- Haitch xxx