#lets say hypothetically... he has some of the plates :) for a little extra flavor

[volot]

@arucrea​ ┊it’s the beginning of the end.

wintry, austere... surely, this land bears some resemblance to the hisui of old.

fresh snowfall crunches beneath the press of his boots -- so new and yet still so worn with age -- as he proceeds down the powdered path. the freezing chill threatens to nip at his skin, slip beneath the layers he’d adorned and bathe him blue with winter’s kiss: but the fire burning within the deepest parts of him, untamed at his core, presses him on to endure, endure, endure.

( his desire, even now, cannot be contained: even when rejected by the god he seeks so desperately, he has persevered. knocked from the highest point towards heaven, his crawl back skyward has resumed for a hundred years. fingers rent and raw, teeth grit, refusing to give in: bitterness denies it, ambition destroys it, the divine mission and curiosity pumping the arrhythmic beat of his heart; the blood of the ancient sinnohans burns within his veins, demanding no rest until he has finished what he started. until he, chosen, will witness his ideals fully realized. until a world this cruel is born anew. until god answers for all it has denied him in silence, and bends to his whims. )

a lift, a vault, a leap; he lands, with some minor stumbling, over the fallen tree in front of the split-mouth road he’s hounded. the trail through the undiscovered territory between johto and sinnoh had been a tricky one, maps unreliable and the people scarce; a spit of land that preserves the past so clearly, that if it hadn’t been for the sparse pickings of homes and small settlements on the blurring horizon, perhaps he would have wagered it was a photograph of hisui. untouched by time. not so unlike himself.

but it hadn’t been an impossible task. word with kind strangers had given him a lead and an inch to work with, and when paid in the information he sought, he charged forward with reckless abandon. he was so close, so close -- the sinjoh ruins, the last remaining structure of his people, a holy site long forgotten, a place of calling for arceus, was only a finger’s brush away--

now, it was right over his palm, the lines of it -- his destiny -- matching over where the temple resided. when he rises from his full height and takes in the sight before him, he’s not sure what leaves his chest tighter: the sudden influx of air, or the unforgiving temperature.

had it been the latter, it hadn’t mattered. his heart skips a beat, then begins again: faster now, hammering away in his chest. excitement thunders in his neck, his wrist, in-between his ribs: his mouth trembles, a shuddering breath lost on the cloud of cold that expels from his chapped lips. teeth shine in his smile, wolfish and with unwarranted glee, awe and accomplishment burning in his wide-eyed gaze.

finally. finally.

“the sinjoh ruins... at last, at long last...!”  the words fall from his lips in disbelief, to a party of no one other than himself, voice riding on a tremor as a laugh creeps out. his eyes crinkle, head tipping towards the dreary sky above. snowflakes stick to his reddening skin and cling to his eyelashes as he turns a sneer towards the heaven again, as if god will finally peer from its haven and witness its chosen one, scorned, after all this time.

“almighty arceus...” he breathes, ravenous and rancorous, a prayer and a curse, his sneer gone into a sardonic. with only the wilderness to hear his plea, he demands from the heavens again: “so, this is your altar, is it...? hidden away from humanity, where the birth of a new world begins... the final riddle i’ve been looking for! surely, you must have brought me here, haven’t you?”

silence. nothing. the world yawns and stretches on, suffocatingly quiet. the eye behind his curtain of his hair twitches, its gift long since taken from him. ( why, if god had any heart within it, would it rob him so?! why would it steal its blessing from him, and leave him to be cursed?! ) bitterness coats the back of his tongue, turning his smile sour, as he whispers a promise: “no... of course you have, of course. for a century, i’ve searched, solving every mystery... and now, you will heed my call.”

forward, volo charges -- towards history, to unravel the final mystery of the universe, and turn the cosmos on an axis.

[owletstarlet]

Relationship Asks: “Who’s the first to blame themselves?” (tanunatsu)

@5amidare​ requested #30 from the angsty relationship ask meme, and it so happens I had a lot to say on the matter–

30: Who’s the first to blame themselves?

Contains non-spoiler references to chapters 97-98.

So clearly this would very much depend on the situation, but I think in general they’re both all too prone to being hard on themselves, albeit for different reasons. We get a crystal-clear example in canon of how each of their respective self-blame functions when they’re both involved in a youkai situation that’s gone to absolute shit, within the Omibashira arc— for Natsume, it’s a matter of “Bad things follow me anywhere I go, I should’ve known better than to think it would be different here, and now someone precious to me is hurt because of it,” in addition to the instinctual long-ingrained fear that now that someone’s been hurt he’ll be forced to move on to some other home in some other town, when he’s got so much more to lose now by doing so. And that part may not specifically have to do with Tanuma but it just exacerbates every Bad Thing going through his head in that moment. For Tanuma, he very clearly states it at the end of the arc, that his ineptitude/bad decisions/lack of power made it so that Natsume had to rescue him instead of the other way around, and just made everything a lot more difficult and dangerous for Natsume. And I think he’s carried that with him into the canon present, because in his arc in chapter 97-98 he’s so reticent to tell Natsume anything at all that’s not confirmed to absolutely be a youkai situation that he can’t handle on his own; obviously in part because of his self-esteem being in the negatives, but also because he never ever wants any kind of repeat performance of Omibashira.

I think as time goes on they’d both get better about it, in large part owing to one another, but that’s not to say either of them wouldn’t have a really difficult time not reflexively beating themselves up for it if the other got hurt. It’d be an exercise in beating back the endless mental loop of I should’ve stopped this, what should I have done differently, even if there was literally nothing they could’ve done. The only thing that’d pull them out of it would be the realization that in the present moment that’s not a productive mode of thinking, and they need to be there for the other person (read: squish it down and deal with it later when there’s not an audience).

As to self-blame tendencies lessening over time, I think it would happen somewhat quicker for Natsume than it would for Tanuma, and that’s because of the key difference in where those tendencies originate. For Natsume, it’s come from outside himself, years’ and years’ worth of being conditioned to believe that every bad thing that happens is somehow his fault, and until moving in with the Fujiwaras he never had any evidence to the contrary, so of course he internalized it. It’d take work, and a lot of unlearning and fighting his own very real fears and insecurities caused by past traumas, but he’s got the best support system anyone could ask for to help him heal, and it’s arduous process when there’s so much to heal from but I think he’d eventually realize not every Terrible Thing is his own fault. With Tanuma, though, it’d take…longer…given that that voice telling him that he’s making a mess of everything is coming from inside himself, and always has been, because anxiety disorders are a bitch like that. And Natsume obviously can’t be the one to fix that because that’s not how psychiatric issues work, but I think it would help for him to realize how much Natsume values him (case in point, at the end of chapter 98 when Natsume essentially says “You need to tell me things because we’re friends and I care,” right on the heels of a situation where Natsume had to intervene because Tanuma did in fact mess up and endanger himself by withholding important information…the look on Tanuma’s face is Very Important To Me, gah.)

This is an interesting question to consider if you remove the youkai element from it, and just imagine that they’re having a more or less regular argument while in an established relationship, in which they’re both a little bit in the wrong, because they’re both really stubborn. But I still think Tanuma would be the one who’d back off first and try to apologize for everything even when he has a valid reason to be upset, which doesn’t really resolve anything. Because the second he hears Natsume go in with “Well you did [this this and this],” his Anxiety-Brain would be all but insidious about it when he’s still trying to convince himself on a semi-regular basis that Natsume wouldn’t just be better off without him. Which would make Natsume crazy, I think, like why will you not just GET MAD at me, I fucked up too, you’re supposed to be mad at me, but it’d take a lot of patience and attentiveness and practice at communication for them to be able to have a healthy resolution to their serious arguments because of that.

[Incidentally, I was trying to imagine a hypothetical situation for this kind of half-aborted argument, and the best I could come up with would be some time in the future circa university or shortly thereafter when they’re living on their own together…Natsume happens to be neck-deep in about five different complicated and irritating Youkai Situations, and even though Sensei’s assuring Tanuma it’s nothing he needs to worry about and that Natsume’s got it more or less under control, Natsume’s coming home every night dead-on-his-feet and fairly uncommunicative about any of the specifics of what’s going on because he just goes right to sleep. Meanwhile, over the span of what I’d guess is about a month, they’ve gotten in the mail a rent hike notice, some late bill notification, and to top it off, the annual formal and vaguely blackmail-flavored clan invitation letter from the Matobas (because when it rains it pours; why not all three of those shitty things at once). And he doesn’t say a thing about any of this to Natsume, figuring he’s got too much on his plate already, and just surreptitiously picking up extra work shifts to deal with it on his own until he literally makes himself sick from exhaustion/stress/overwork. And Natsume’s probably fairly pissed that Tanuma had lied by omission at the expense of his health, but also fully aware and guilty over the fact that he himself didn’t notice there was a problem or really ask how he was doing, or tell Tanuma much about any of the messes he’s been dealing with himself. And of course Tanuma doesn’t bring any of that up, even if he was going to it’s cut short by Natsume’s pissed-because-he’s-worried outburst of “why would you not just SAY something,” then the backwards little voice in the back of his head takes over telling him that if Natsume’s upset because of something he did then he has no real right to be mad in turn. It more or less ends with “You really need to let yourself get angry when someone’s hurt you.” “…I’m not…angry, though?” *sigh* “Yeah, I know. You should get some sleep now, okay?” Lord help them both.]