#like a crayon but infinitely worse

[kata-the-bee]

I drew @eliza-forget 's AMAZING Shamura design because I love her Shamura design so much-

[ckret2]

Chapter 53 of human Bill Cipher not properly appreciating the fact that Mabel is his only friend on Earth:

Mabel has read a book about Bill's home dimension and is prepared to interrogate him all about where he comes from.

Bill is willing to do anything to avoid being interrogated.

(Featuring SEVEN illustrations, provided by 🌈 MABEL 💖)

####

Flatworld, from what Mabel had read, was probably literally the worst place to ever exist. 

The book was a hundred pages of an old-fashioned formal-sounding super boring guy rambling on about the most egregiously evil society Mabel had ever had the horror of reading about.

Society consisted of a bunch of geometric shapes—which in concept sounded half nerdy and half adorable—but they'd made a brutally oppressive government organized by quantity of sides, with infinite-sided circles at the top and three-sided triangles at the bottom, and one-sided lines—women—oppressed into near silence. Career options, educational opportunities, who you could love, were all determined by your sides. Irregular shapes—quadrilaterals that weren't squares, triangles that weren't equilateral, anyone with a side too long or too short—were presumed from birth to be criminally insane. Each generation had sons with one more side than their father—and they had to, because having higher-ranked sons was the only way families could climb out of poverty. When babies were born with too few or irregular sides, poor families abandoned them—or worse—and rich families put them through oft-fatal bone-snapping surgeries to regularize or increase their sides. Knowledge of the third dimension was considered heretical, and anybody claiming it was real was locked in an insane asylum.

There was a lot of mathy stuff in the book about a square meeting a magical sphere and going on educational adventures to the higher and lower dimensions; but most of it passed by her in a blur. When she'd finished reading last night, Mabel had lay in bed for an hour, staring at the ceiling, trying not to think about dead baby shapes and fighting the urge to wake Bill up just so she could hug him; until she'd finally drifted off and woken up in her own bed.

At least, thank goodness, the bit about banning colors so lower shapes couldn't contour themselves to look like higher shapes was false. But she was sure that at least part of the story was true. And it had happened to somebody she knew. It was a lot to process.

So she processed it the way she usually did the stories that weighed on her: by creating a self-insert and pulling out her art supplies.

####

"You're drawing fan art of Flatworld?" Bill asked warily.

"I wouldn't call it fan art. I'd say it's more of a... thoughtful artistic critique. I don't think I'm a 'fan' of the second dimension," Mabel said. "No offense."

"Sure."

Mabel had designed a shapesona of herself: a pink heart with a rainbow-colored outline, a big sparkly eye, and skinny black stick limbs like Bill's. If, as Bill had said, colors weren't illegal, she didn't see any reason she couldn't be rainbow. The heart shape was maybe unconventional, but Bill hadn't said she couldn't be a heart yet, so she was sticking with it for now.

She'd honestly expected Bill to come over and interrogate her about her creation long before now. Usually, when she was doing art and he was unoccupied, he was hovering right by her, examining her work and dropping hints—some more subtle than others—that she should draw him next. But she hadn't immediately noticed when he'd silently drifted into the room, and she wasn't sure how long he'd been there before speaking up. He was still leaning on the wall, arms crossed, watching askance from halfway across the living room as Mabel worked with her crayons, as if she were playing with a chemistry set and he was trying to figure out if she was building a bomb.

"Is Flatworld really about your world?" Mabel asked. "Did you tell Edward Bishop Bishop all that stuff? With the circles and all the laws about shapes and stuff?"

Bill mulled over the question, staring into space. Mabel had never seen his face look so inexpressive before—at least, not since his first night as a captive, after he'd gotten all the screaming out and had looked too exhausted to feel. "We talked," he conceded. "I'm surprised you got your hands on it. I suppose Stanford brought it up."

Something in the back of her mind pricked up defensively—what was that supposed to mean, he was surprised she got her hands on it?—but she pushed it back down. "Yeah, he told me and Dipper about it when you guys got home yesterday," Mabel said. "But you brought it up to me first!"

"No I didn't. When?"

"A few weeks ago? You mentioned Edward Bishop Bishop."

"I don't remember that," Bill muttered. "I probably didn't think you'd make sense of it."

"Hey!"

"You didn't make sense of it! Ford had to tell you about it."

"Yeah, but—mean!" She shoved aside her drawing and started on another one, grumbling, "I could've made sense of it if I'd looked it up."

What was up with Bill today? He wasn't usually this much of a jerk. To her. Lately. Plus, she thought they'd really had a moment yesterday! But Bill had had a rough couple days. Maybe he was just tired and cranky. 

A wiser person might just leave well enough alone. But a wiser person wasn't exploding in their brain with curiosity about just how bad Bill's life had really been. There was something itching at the back of her head, had been itching since she'd woken up—something about Bill, something important, she was sure of it—but she couldn't quite put together what it was. She just needed to talk to Bill long enough to figure it out.

"So..." She glanced up from filling in a shape yellow, "were lines really executed if they didn't make noises all the time so everyone always knew where they were and they couldn't sneak up and stab anyone?"

Bill scoffed, rolling his eyes, as if the very idea was stupid. "It wasn't that extreme. Making a peace cry is like a human saying 'coming through' when they're trying to squeeze past somebody. Lines are just taught to do it in public because it's easier not to see a line, that's all."

"If they didn't, were they executed...?"

"No. They were just rude."

That was a relief. Mabel had been worried for her fellow ladies. She was plenty noisy, but she didn't think she could remember to make constant sound any time she was around other people. She turned back to coloring her newest drawing, but watched Bill out of the corner of her eye. "Is it true that rich people killed almost all of their babies by giving them surgery to break their sides?"

The corner of Bill's mouth curled in a sneer. "Do I look like a pediatric surgeon?"

"Um." Not a welcome question. She tried to backtrack to something softer. "So, in the second dimension, the outside of your body is just your outline and your guts are everything inside the outline, right?"

He gave her a wary look. "Yeah."

"So your bow tie is basically in your stomach."

Bill sucked in a deep breath; but quickly caved in to the need to be the most correct person in the room. "More like around my esophagus, but. Sure."

"So, where did you wear it when you were back in the second dimension? Was it on your side? Did you have to wear two so people could see them from both sides—"

"I didn't need a bow tie then."

Mabel stared at him. "What do you mean, you didn't 'need' it? What do you need it for now?"

Bill ignored the question. "You know, I didn't think Flatworld was an interesting enough book to deserve this much attention! Especially not from you. You like fun stories." It felt oddly like he was criticizing her for having read it.

"Well—yeah, but it's about your home! That makes it fun!"

Bill raised his brows.

"Right? Doesn't it?"

"Kid." Bill laughed condescendingly. "Don't give me that. You read an entire book. In the summer. About math. With a downer ending where the narrator goes insane and gets locked up. That's some people's idea of a fun time, but I know it's not yours."

Maybe "fun" was the wrong word—but it was still important. She was glad she'd read it. She'd cared about it. She'd cared enough to know Bill was describing it wrong. "That's not what happened. The square got locked up because he kept telling everybody the third dimension's real."

"Like I said! He went insane!"

"But he's not insane. Everyone says he is, but he's right about the third dimension! It's everyone else who's stupid!"

"So what," Bill said. "The things he knows mean he'll never be able to see the world the way other shapes do, and no matter what he does he'll never be happy with his home. If that's not insanity, what is?"

Last year, she'd heard Bill agree when Gideon called him insane. She'd always wondered. "Is that why you're insane?"

Bill shot Mabel a furious look. That was the wrong thing to say. "Shooting Star—"

(Oh no, she thought, he's using my full name.)

"—what's with the third degree." Bill crossed the room to lean on the other side of the table. He gave her the guarded glare of a guilty suspect facing down a cop in an interrogation room—and trying to figure out whether he could kill the cop before he was stopped. "What do you think you're trying to dig up?"

"I'm not trying to 'dig up' anything," Mabel said. "I just want to learn more about you!"

"Oh yeah, I'm sure you do! Who doesn't wanna know all about me! And right after I trusted you yesterday! Do you think you're the first person to start digging into my history? 'Hey, does anyone know what made Bill Cipher so crazy'?" Bill laughed bitterly. " You're not even the first Pines to try it. Not even the second."

"That's not what I'm trying to do!" said Mabel, right before it dawned on her that that was exactly what she was trying to do.

"Right. I'm sure whatever you learn will make a nice two-page spread in Journal 5. Another secret you and Fordsy can add to your Mysteries, huh? Think he'll draw the dead babies?"

She thought back to Portland—to asking Ford what had made Bill so awful. I think if anyone’s ever had a chance of finding out what made him like he is, it might be you. Mabel shook her head. No. She didn't want to be that. "I'm not Grunkle Ford's spy, I'm your friend. I just—I just want to understand you—"

"Yeah, and the 'friends' who understand you are the most dangerous kind." Bill laughed harshly. "Your uncle and brother couldn't figure me out! And Sixer's been trying for years! So what makes you think YOU can?"

He was calling her stupid. He'd been calling her stupid all day. That was why he was so surprised she'd read the book.

"You—shut up!" She wadded up her latest drawing and flung it in Bill's face. (He snatched out of midair.) "All I did was read a book I thought was important to you, you jerk! I thought you'd like that!"

She hadn't meant for that waver to enter her voice. But she was exhausted from too little sleep and worrying about dead baby shapes and worrying about Bill's fear of death and worrying about what Ford had said about not giving Bill a second chance, and now Bill was being a jerk, and maybe he was just exhausted and upset too, but he was treating her like she was stupid—and there was that pathetic little waver.

But it made Bill pause in his onslaught; for a moment, he averted his gaze. Still, he said, "Maybe if you'd thought to ask—"

"You were asleep! I was being nice! And letting you sleep! In my bed!"

"But—"

"Just go away!" She pointed at the doorway.

Bill's face hardened again. "Fine!" He flung his hands in the air and stomped from the room. "Who wants to hang out with you when you're in such a bad mood, anyway."

Mabel glared at her stupid drawings so she didn't have to watch Bill's stupid back as he left.

Why had she bothered?

When Bill was out of sight, she dropped back onto her chair, pulled her sweater over her face, crossed her arms on the table, and buried her head in them.

####

Bill didn't think to smooth out the paper Mabel had flung at him until he was out of the room.

On one side she'd drawn Bill—properly triangular—with an expression that he thought was supposed to be fear and on the other side several angry-looking shapes, pentagons and hexagons, colored gray and black, being led by a pale figure shaped like a human skull and wielding a scythe; and between them, a bright pink heart, standing in front of Bill protectively, hands on its "hips," glaring down the would-be assailants.

The corners of Bill's mouth sagged down.

####

The bell rang and the shapes began filing out of class, muttering to each other about how they thought they'd done on the test. As the triangle cheerfully left the room, the teacher caught him by the arm again to pull him over. "Just a minute," she said. "I want a word with you."

Oh, he bet she did. Breezily, he said, "Sure thing! What is it?"

"Who was the first triangular president?"

"Wh— Th—" He spluttered indignantly. "There's been like—seven of them."

"Nine. And I'm only asking about the first one."

"How should I know!"

"You knew an hour ago."

He sputtered again. "That was— That was a multiple choice test! And it was an hour closer to when I'd studied! And I can focus better in the classroom! You can't expect me to remember anything in the hallway. You're using intimidation tactics. How could anyone focus under these conditions—"

"I don't know what you're doing," the teacher said, "or how you're doing it. Maybe I never will. But..." She sighed, and the anger seemed to leak out of her, and that only made him more nervous. "But whatever you're doing—you won't be able to do it forever. What will you do when you're out in the real world and you didn't learn anything in school?"

Her pity was worse than being hated had been. At least when he was hated, he knew she only looked down on him because she had something against him. What did he do with pity? With concerned warnings about the "real world"? He'd never heard anybody use the phrase "the real world" as anything but a threat. He hoped he was never out in the real world.

"Who cares! I'll never need any of this!" He should have shut up there. He didn't: "You're just jealous that me and my family make a million times more lying to everyone than you'll ever get trying to teach them the truth!"

His teacher gasped in shock; but before she could say anything, he was halfway down the hall with no intention of slowing down.

The next day, he stayed home, and his mom visited the principal. The day after that, he had a new teacher.

####

He was stupid. He knew that. He didn't know when he'd gotten stupid—if it was because he'd started touring so much and missing classes, or if he'd always been dumb and just didn't notice it before he registered just how often he was using his all-seeing eye to pick up answers that other kids couldn't see. It had crept up on him. But there it was. He was stupid, and he was too stupid to figure out what to do about it.

There was a big difference between being able to see everything, and actually knowing anything. And he might be all-seeing, but an idiot like him would never be all-knowing.

####

A trillion years later, he still didn't remember the name of the first triangular president. And look how far he'd gotten without it.

Lunch was toast and peanut butter. The toaster was the only source of heat he could use without having to ask his captors for access; and peanut butter and bread were the most nutritious foods he could reach without asking his captors to open a cabinet or fridge. He was sick of toast and peanut butter.

He wasn't about to ask Mabel to help him get lunch.

Well. He'd succeeded. He'd known just the right thing to say to get Mabel to lay off and drop the topic. Did he feel accomplished?

He stared out the window as he ate—there were hazy gray clouds on the horizon, beyond the trees, slowly inching closer—and he tried not to look at the picture Mabel had flung at him.

####

Mabel felt dumb about being upset that Bill thought she was dumb.

Because of course he did. Sure, he liked her art and he liked dance music and games without rules; sure, he was a willing student when it came to stuff like making friendship bracelets or artistically mixing sprinkles; sure, he was a weirdo fun guy; but he was also a Smarty McSmartypants, just like Dipper or Ford. And Mabel was the Girl Dipper who brought home C's. And even a weirdo fun Smarty wouldn't want to hang out for long with someone who couldn't keep up with nerd talk. He probably just... put up with her for as long as he could stand pretending he took her seriously, but he'd finally lost his patience...

And shown his true, jerky colors again.

Maybe Ford and Dipper were right about him; maybe he couldn't really change.

Except... there was something he'd said. And right after I trusted you yesterday. When he'd cried in front of her. When he'd told her about his fear of death.

He was being a jerk because he thought she'd betrayed him. But by reading a book?! Why couldn't he ever just explain himself? Did he think whatever was bothering him was obvious, and she was stupid for not figuring it out?

Something she almost but didn't quite remember thudded like a drum inside her brain. Dum-dum-dum. Dum-dum-dome.

From the entryway, Bill called, "Hey, star girl. I—"

He stopped in the doorway. Mabel had taped 28 pieces of paper together, drawn on a door knob, written "DOOR" at the top, and taped it across the doorway into the living room. Irritably, Bill said, "It doesn't work like that. This is obviously paper."

"Bill," Mabel grumbled. "Go away."

"No. I'm gonna say something to you."

He didn't phrase that like he was giving her a choice in the matter; but all the same, she said, "I don't wanna hear it."

"You know that horror story about a bride with a velvet ribbon tied around her neck, and her head falls off and rolls down the stairs when her husband unties it?"

She did. She and Dipper had read a book of scary stories to each other on Halloween a few years ago while waiting for it to be late enough to go trick-or-treating. In spite of herself, he'd piqued her curiosity. She reluctantly turned to look at him. "Yeah? So?"

Bill was leaning in the doorway, head tilted against the doorframe so he could see Mabel around the paper door curtain. "That's why I wear a bow tie."

Mabel blinked. "Wait—if you didn't, your head would fall off? What part of you is your head? How did it come off? Were you decapitated? Did you get decapitated for knowing about the third dimension—?"

"It doesn't keep my head on; it keeps my skin on."

Mabel's nose wrinkled. "Gross! How?"

"Remember how you said my outline is my skin and all my organs are inside the outline," Bill said. "That didn't change when we left the second dimension! We had to get exoskeletons on our top and bottom sides so solids like you can't stick you fingers in our guts. My bow tie keeps it tied in place."

"Whoa." So that was why they hadn't seen Bill's organs before. "Do you ever take it off?"

"Mostly when I'm eating!" He knocked on the doorframe. "So can I come in now?"

Of course. He'd been using information to buy his way back into her good graces. (No—that was what somebody who didn't think Bill deserved a second chance would think. He was making up for earlier by answering one of her questions about him.)

She took a deep breath, turned to face Bill, and said, "You didn't talk to me like a friend earlier."

"I—" Bill grimaced, looked at the ceiling for help, and conceded, "I mean—It's how I talk to my friends, but all right, I know you're not used to that—"

"Nobody should be used to that!" Mabel said. "What would Love Bunny say?"

"Wh—?! I— Th— You—" His voice cracked as it jumped higher, "What do I care what a cartoon rabbit thinks about—"

"What. Would. She. Say."

Bill's face screwed up in agony. He crossed his arms. "Ugh."

"Biiill?"

Eyes squeezed shut, Bill said, "She'd say my breath smells like I've been eating mean beans."

"Aaand?"

"I'm not going to say it. I won't say it."

"And you need to eat your nice rice!"

Bill let out a long, slow sigh.

"Say it!"

"This is my penance," Bill muttered toward his feet. "This is my penance. This is fair." He took a breath. "And... I need to eat my nice rice."

Mabel nodded. He'd confessed his sins.

"I think we're out of nice rice," Bill said, "but I've had the peanut butter of kindness and the toast of remorse. Good enough?"

She considered it. "Yeah. You can come in."

Bill batted aside the paper door curtain and ducked into the room. 

He sat across the table from Mabel and set down the paper she'd chucked at him amongst her others. Mabel glanced at the drawing, embarrassed of it now; but Bill didn't say anything about it.

He just propped his cheek against his hand and started looking over her other art.

Mabel sat there with her hands under her legs, watching his spotlight eyes rove over the table, feeling like she was waiting for a teacher to grade a poster she'd made for class. He saw a stop sign red octagon in sunglasses that was labeled "Bill's parole officer" and snorted. She wasn't sure if it was an amused snort or a derogatory snort. His gaze stopped on her attempt to figure out how Flatworlder anatomy worked, and didn't move farther. She'd probably gotten everything wrong, hadn't she?

She couldn't stand waiting for him to pass judgment on her art. "You think they look dumb, don't you."

Bill took a moment to reply. He didn't look up from her drawings. "I don't think you're dumb, Shooting Star."

"You think I'm dumber than Dipper and Grunkle Ford."

Bill winced. "I don't." At her dubious look, Bill amended, "Only Stanford! And that barely counts, all humans are dumber than Stanford. It doesn't mean I think you're dumb-dumb"

"Could've fooled me," Mabel muttered.

"You bet! I'm good at fooling people. All I have to do is say things I don't mean that make people feel the way I want." His voice was flat and matter-of-fact. "I wanted you to feel like the conversation wasn't worth it. That's all."

She stared at him. "By letting me know you think I'm stupid?!" She chucked a crayon at his face. "You could have just told me you didn't want to talk about Flatworld!" Her voice was getting that stupid waver again. "If I'd known, I would have dropped it! I didn't want to upset you!"

"I wasn't upset, it's just a stupid thing to complain about! It's just a dumb book! It'd—it'd take a real loser to be bothered by talking about a dumb book! I'm not..." He sighed harshly. "I know you weren't trying to get on my nerves, kid. It'd mess up your sticker chart." (Mabel hadn't even realized he knew about her sticker chart.) Almost inaudibly, he added, "M'sorry."

She'd never heard him apologize before.

She let out a slow breath. "Biiill. I don't think you're a loser."

He muttered something she couldn't make out as he flipped his hood on and pulled it down over his burning face. "Forget it. Move on. It's in the past!"

"If you're so embarrassed—"

"Not embarrassed!"

She chucked another crayon at his chest. "Then why are you telling me this now?"

Bill shut his eyes; took a deep breath; and, with a look of solemn dignity, and no small amount of pain, he said, "Because. Teddy Tender says. Our friends can't help us feel better if we don't tell them why we feel bad." He almost, almost managed to say it without sounding sarcastic.

Mabel burst out laughing. Bill pulled his hood lower.

Bill didn't even like Teddy Tender—he thought he was the stick in the mud of the Color Critters—and he certainly wasn't actually trying to follow Teddy's friendship lessons. He was just... saying something he didn't mean to make Mabel feel the way he wanted. And he wanted her to feel better.

No matter what anyone else said, he could change. And he was changing.

"Apology accepted," Mabel said. "Gold star!" She peeled one off a nearby sticker sheet and held it out.

Bill eyed it, like a man so hungry he was too nauseous to eat eyeing a pizza; and then snatched it from her and stuck it in the middle of his hoodie.

Mabel said, "And... I guess I'm sorry for getting all diggy about your home world." Even if she hadn't known it was bothering him, she probably should've guessed, shouldn't she? With how crabby he'd gotten. "I just got all excited and curious and... kinda worried about you after reading that book?" She sighed. "I understand if you don't wanna talk about it. You probably hated your dimension."

"What? He lurched forward with the vehemence of his denial—"Of course I don't hate my dimension!" Mabel leaned away at the sudden rage that had flared up in his eyes; but it died just as quickly and Bill immediately reeled himself back in, sitting back, crossing his arms: "I mean, come on, kid, use your head: you read a book about a culture. We're talking about an entire dimension. Would you hold a grudge against Jupiter if an ant bit you on Earth?"

Even as casually as he played it off, Mabel was sure he hadn't meant anything as calm and measured as claiming it was technically irrational to hate an entire dimension. He meant—emphatically, with his whole heart behind it—that he didn't hate his home dimension, at all.

Then why didn't he want to talk about it? (Then why had he destroyed it? Or was not hating it just another fiction he'd made up because he'd prefer that reality? Or was the destruction itself a lie? He hadn't mentioned it once since they'd started talking about Flatworld. Or did he think she didn't know about that and didn't want her to know? Or...)

Something had been churning in her subconscious since she woke up, and now—watching Bill ball up around himself as he squirmed around the things he didn't want to say—it finally dawned on her. Two words. Another piece of the Axolotl's poem. She tried to hold the words in her head until she could write them down, repeating them over and over—Misses home. Misses home.

Quietly, she asked, "Then... don't you want to remember it?"

His face spasmed, like it was nearly cracking in two—and then smoothed out. His face was blank. He didn't answer for a moment. "The last time I told a human more than two sentences about where I'm from... he gave me the universe's most depressing geometry textbook."

Oh. Maybe Bill was following Teddy Tender's friendship advice. "That's because you were talking to a boring old-timey math teacher, duh."

He laughed wryly. "You may have a point!"

If Bill assumed anybody prying into his history was either looking for the reason something was wrong with him, or publishing a whole book about the super bad parts... No wonder he hadn't wanted to talk to her. "So you didn't dislike Flatworld? You just dislike the book?"

Bill grimaced. "Did you read Eddie's biography?"

"No?"

####

As soon as he'd buckled himself into his seat for the drive to Northwest Manor, Dipper read the summary on the back cover of Flatworld, and then the paragraph-long author biography underneath it:

Edward B. Bishop, born in 1838 in England, was an accomplished mathematician, writer, theologian, and closet occultist, as well as a professor at the esteemed University of Fancyton. He published twelve books, the last of which was Flatworld in 1884. After sentencing his square protagonist to a two-dimensional asylum for preaching of the existence of the third dimension, he himself succumbed to an ironically similar fate: three months after publication, he was committed to an asylum for insisting that two-dimensional alien invaders intended to conquer the Earth and were persecuting him for revealing their existence, a delusion he maintained until his death from sleep deprivation in 1886. His most enduring legacy is inventing the margarita glass, which he claimed came to him in a dream. 

Dipper hissed between his teeth. "Ouch."

####

"Never mind, don't worry about it," Bill said. "But no. I didn't like the book."

"You poor thing! All this time you've been homesick for the second dimension, but the only things humans talk about is the bad stuff!"

"Don't call me that."

"Do you want to talk about the non-depressy stuff instead? Like..." Mabel wracked her brain for something nice she'd read in the book. She winced. "Uh... I'm sure there's something. You could choose the topic?"

Bill didn't look directly at her. He just looked over all her drawings again. "Tell me why you want to know so badly."

It was basically the same question he'd asked earlier—what's with the third degree—but his tone was different. Mabel swallowed hard and repeated, "Because... I'm your friend. It's crazy that we've been friends for like a month and I barely know a-ny-thing about who you are or how you grew up! By now, I'd usually know about a friend's family, favorite subject, favorite animal, opinion on glitter, and biggest life dream! Plus all the stuff humans have in common—like, 'do you breathe?'"

This time, Bill didn't argue with her answer. (He could have called her a liar. A month ago, she had just been trying to find out what was wrong with him. But this version of the truth she'd made up was better.) "You already know I'm pro-glitter in all contexts and my life's work is to throw an eternal party. What else really matters?"

"Those are the two most important questions," Mabel said seriously. Tentatively, she asked, "Did you have glitter in the second dimension?" He'd already reassured her that they'd had color, but it was hard to imagine glitter in such a bleak world.

"Sure."

Mabel heaved a sigh of relief. "Oh, thank goodness."

She looked around at the morning's art production, pulled over the first drawing she'd done of her shapesona, and grabbed a bottle of glue to draw a thin line around the heart.

Bill watched as Mabel carefully sprinkled several separate colors of glitter on the line of glue, like a master chef adding a precise amount of spice to a gourmet recipe, to create a glitter rainbow gradient; and then he slowly sat up and leaned toward the table again. "So, who's this freak?"

Mabel gave him an exasperated look. She decided he'd meant "freak" neutrally; but she'd clearly labeled the heart "ME IN FLATWORLD," she thought it was pretty obvious who this freak was.

But Bill cheerfully went on, "He's the most hideously disfigured shape I've ever seen."

"Hey!"

"I'm not joking, it hurts to look at this guy. At least he's symmetrical, but woof."

"She's not a guy! She's supposed to be me in Flatworld," Mabel insisted. "She's a powerful lady and I think she's beautiful." She paused. "Can a heart be a girl?" Lines looked boring, but Flatworld said that girls were all lines and all other shapes were boys. (Or were they? When they'd talked at the mall, Bill had been very clear that he considered himself a triangle instead of male or female, which scuttled the "all polygons are male" concept. Maybe Edward Bishop Bishop had made that part up?)

"She can be anything she wants," Bill said firmly. "I don't see any gender cops around here, do you?"

Good point. "And when there's no cops around, anything's legal."

Bill laughed. "Hey, I like that."

"Grunkle Stan says it!"

"Wise man." Bill leaned forward further across the table and tapped a finger on the deep cleft at the top of the heart. "Personally, I'm more worried about that agonizing-looking birth defect. I'm surprised she survived past infancy!"

Mabel glared at him, but she supposed she couldn't argue. A heart was a pretty irregular shape. And according to Flatworld, almost all irregular shapes were executed in childhood or else imprisoned in adulthood, since they thought irregular shapes would grow up to be depraved, imbecilic criminals—

"Wait," Mabel said. "Wait. Last year, when I called you an isosceles freak—"

Bill cut in, "It was 'monster,' but go on!"

"Was that, like..." Mabel's voice dropped to a whisper, "a slur on Flatworld?"

Bill fought to keep his face straight as he decided how to respond. He went for the funniest answer. "Yes."

Mabel clapped her hands over her mouth and squeaked, "Nooo!"

"It's actually pretty impressive a human managed to come up with it!"

"I'M SORRYYY, augh I didn't know!"

Over her anguished whines, Bill went on, "It's just a good thing you didn't say 'scalene'! I would've had to wash your mouth out with drain cleaner!"

Mabel had pulled the collar of her sweater over her face. From within Sweater Town, she asked, "Was that the first thing I ever said to you?"

Bill choked back a laugh. "Yeah, it was."

She squealed in embarrassment and slid under the table.

"Heck of a first impression, star girl!"

"i'm sorryyy."

Bill reached under the table to pat the top of her head. "Ahhh, it was funny. Get up here." 

As she climbed back into her seat, Bill added, "I'm getting back at you now, I'm not done making fun of your medical miracle yet. You know what she'd look like as a human? A headless, neckless body with an eyeball shoved six inches down her esophagus." He paused thoughtfully. "Actually... that sounds kinda cute."

"Eww, Bill."

"It is, it's cute. Like a clumsy puppy with a neurological disorder! I guess that's how the hideous Miss Heart here must look to humans!"

Mabel looked over her art again, wondering if she should change her shapesona, considering Bill's reaction to it. 

So, maybe she was creating a freak. She didn't see any shape cops around here. She kept drawing. "I'd be fine," she said. "You like weird freaks! You'd keep me safe."

A stricken look crossed his face. He was momentarily silent as he watched Mabel start another picture. And then, as though he were only considering it for the first time, he said, "Yeah. I guess I would."

His gaze drifted to the wrinkled picture of Mabel's shapesona standing protectively in front of Bill. "Freaks can't afford to tear each other down."

####

(THIS is the chapter that's been giving me hell the last few weeks. Months. Last few months. I'm so glad to finally have it out, and I hope y'all enjoyed!! This chapter probably brings up a lot more questions than it actually answers—and completely different questions based on whether or not you've read Flatland lol—so I can't wait to hear what y'all think.)

[randomthefox]

I random came across your posts about the Sonic movies and honestly I had originally thought the first two were passible but not great. But I was *so* disappointed by the third one and I feel insane everytime someone talks about it because it feels like everyone on earth thinks this movie is gods gift to man and its???? Not good???

It is a relief to see im not the only one and glancing through i didn't realize how inconsistent the movies were(my memory is trash though so it's not surprising I didn't realize).

I just feel like a crazy/broken person who feels like I'm missing something if this movie is apparently so amazing but its??? A mess???

Not to mention I was already disappointed going in because of knowing Amy wasn't in it. She's one of my favs and she's SO important to Shadow's story but everyone keeps acting like it's no big deal. NONE of the adaptations of SA2 HAS HER DOING HER PART??? IM SO TIRED OF THEM REPLACING HER.

But yeah!!! I'm glad to see some words that finally describe exactly what was wrong with the movie because I struggle with explaining why it's not good myself.

It's so hard to take anybodies stated enjoyment of the movie seriously, because nothing they say they like about it comes off as sincere. It either sounds disingenuous and hypocritical, because they're excusing or even praising things about the movie that they'd complain about when it comes to anything else (The Sonic Double Standard). Or it's completely shallow surface level praise, as if they're literally toddlers giggling and clapping over a set of keys being jingled in their face and actively get upset when you suggest one should USE THEIR BRAIN when watching a film. Or they're just transparently hating on the video games, and their proclaimed enjoyment of the movies is just an outlet for them to complain about how bad the video games are.

None of them ever have anything to say about why the movie's is supposedly good that actually sounds genuine. When they discuss the movie I do not feel the passion of someone who has a sincere enthusiasm for something. The way they talk about liking the movie feels fucking fake. That or they're shoving crayons up their nose as they watch this, the Michael Bay Transformers of video game films.

The movies are so fundamentally SYSTEMATICALLY BROKEN as films it defies belief. Everytime I even think about this stupid fucking movie I remember or discover something NEW about how bad it is and how much it doesn't fucking wrong. Jimbotniks death scene starts with him going "this will be my final live stream" BUT JIMBOTNIK NEVER DID ANY LIVE STREAMS AT ANY POINT IN THE MOVIE BEFORE THAT. I THOUGHT it was just Jim Carrey ad libbing something unfunny or something, but it turns out THERE ARE DELETED SCENES OF JIMBOTNIK LIVE STREAMING IN PREVIOUS POINTS IN THE MOVIE AND THEY CUT THOSE FROM THE FILM. But they KEPT the "this is my final live stream" line. HOW THE FUCK CAN A MOVIE BE THIS FUCKING INCOMPETENT? It's like an infinite onion that has endless layers of sheer parasite infested dogshit.

Sonic 1 was bad because it was literally just Generic CGI Character On A Road Trip With A Live Action Human Movie #828649296 and it was so fucking boring that it did not improve upon the experience of staring at a blank wall for the same amount of time. Sonic 2 was a MILD improvement in relative terms but was still an absolute fucking chore to sit through particularly because of that completely asinine wedding plot. But Sonic 3 is legitimately one of the worst most unwatchably bad "big budget, popular, widely praised" movies I have seen in a long fucking time. It is worse than Dr. Strange and the Multi Verse of Madness. It is worse than ANY of the Sequel Trilogy Star Wars movies. I would happily sit down and watch all three Star Wars Sequel movies rather than endure sitting through Sonic 3 again.

I'm sorry to sound like a hipster, but people are fucking sheep. Following the herd off the cliff. That's the only explanation for why everyone is insisting on this movie being anything more than what I've said about it. There is no other explanation. They want to be part of the crowd, whether it's a feedback loop of people proclaiming the movie to be good and they wanna be part of the In Crowd, or because they hate the video games and propping up the movies seems like a trendy way of expressing that hatred. Or because they are the kind of people who would genuinely go watch the major motion picture Ass

[novelconcepts]

omg can you do a print of damie in canon just interacting with flora bc i would love that

She’s lost Flora. 

There is, Dani thinks with the forced calm of one already beginning to spiral, little cause to panic. The house is big, but it’s not that big--and Flora is a good kid. She’s not exactly prone to just wandering off. She certainly wouldn’t, say, vanish from sight and reappear somewhere unexpected, suddenly acting like she didn’t entirely remember the time in between.

That doesn’t sound like Flora at all.

She isn’t running, per se, from room to room. Running would suggest there is a problem to be handled, and if she starts thinking along those lines--if she starts obsessing about Flora’s distinctly off-putting way of gazing over her shoulder, of saying things just a little too odd to be hand-waved away, of looking at Dani as though she can see straight through her to the unease thrumming under the surface--well. That way lies nothing useful. Nothing at all.

“Have you seen Flora?” The kitchen had seemed a good bet. Here, after all, is Owen, puttering away over the ingredients for the evening’s meal, his mood somber as he uses the manor to avoid reflecting on his mother’s upcoming funeral. Here is Hannah, dutifully rearranging the china, pretending not to steal glances at Owen’s lanky frame every few seconds. That spot at the table is made for Flora, little legs hanging off the chair, brimming with questions--

But Flora isn’t there, and Owen is shaking his head. 

“Not since lunch. Lost her, have you?”

No, she almost snaps. A count of three, a long-held breath; she smiles tightly, reminding herself that this is not Owen’s fault, nor Owen’s job. The children will be your responsibility alone, after all. 

“She’s quick,” she says instead. Hannah purses her lips.

“Perhaps upstairs with Miles?”

She isn’t. Miles, bent over a book with a solemn expression, blinks up at her as though she’s dragged him by the shirt collar out of the actual wardrobe to Narnia. 

“She asked me to color--what time is it?”

“Two,” Dani says, sparing the briefest glance for her watch. He shrugs. 

“An hour ago, I think? I told her to ask Hannah.” A flash of concern crosses his face, a too-adult creasing of brow. “Was that wrong? I just wanted to finish my book--”

“It’s fine,” Dani assures him, ruffling his hair. Too-adult, his expression may be, but this is the most kid she’s seen Miles in days. The last thing she wants is to dissuade him from reading, or from the loose sprawl of his posture. 

An hour, though. In the days since coming to Bly, Dani can’t remember twenty minutes passing without Flora turning up underfoot. 

Outside, she thinks with another swell of barely-restrained panic. She’s outside. By the lake, probably, where Flora can so often be found keeping company with dolls and talismans and snatches of ethereal song. 

It isn’t exactly a reassuring thought, particularly with summer rain sluicing down the windows, scattering over the roof like pellets. A storm, it isn’t, but an eight-year-old girl has no business wandering in weather like this. 

You'd have loved it, at her age, Dani reminds herself. There’s nothing at all wrong with a little girl puddle-jumping for the sheer joy of it. Flora probably got bored, cooped up with a bunch of busy adults and her brother uninterested in playing games. She’s fine. She’s almost certainly fine.

An umbrella is waiting beside the door, still damp from Owen’s trip in before breakfast. Dani takes a breath, pops it open, steels herself for the brisk wind. 

The grounds are gray, the puddles turning the grass to a squelchy mess beneath her shoes. She keeps her head up, her eyes carefully turned away from the puddles which sit like recklessly-dropped mirrors at every turn; if she so much as glances down and spots a flash of glasses, she’s not sure she’ll be able to keep her composure. 

Flora is not by the lake, as it turns out. Nor the statue gardens. Nor the rose bushes. Flora is nowhere, she’s starting to think, and her mind is finally turning toward the worst--toward the depth of that lake, how easily a small girl might slip off the embankment and tumble headlong into its hungry waves without notice--when she remembers the greenhouse.

Jamie will help. The thought rises without warning, a solid patch of sunlight at the center of the storm. Jamie will help--because Jamie knows every corner of these grounds as well as her own hands. Jamie, who maybe doesn’t know Dani all that well, but didn’t seem to mind offering gentle reassurance, exchanging unexpectedly deep conversation on the couch...or Dani taking her hand in the dark. Jamie, who had said, Who the hell knew? Jamie, who had worn an expression a little like awe.

They haven’t had time to talk about it since, but even so. Even so, for Flora, Jamie is sure to--

She hesitates at the door, fist raised to knock. It feels foolish, rapping on the entry to a greenhouse like it’s Jamie’s own bedroom--but this is, she reasons, as close to Jamie’s home as she’s ever likely to get. 

“Jamie, are you...”

“Here,” her voice comes from somewhere just out of sight. Dani takes a cautious step in out of the rain, jostling the umbrella and pulling it hastily shut. Best not to invite bad luck--she’s certainly already had her share. 

“I’m looking for Flora,” she calls, feeling a bit silly. There’s so much going on in this room--plants and tables, pots and a variety of outdoor furniture draped with old blankets. Normally, Jamie is easy to spot amid the riot of greens and pinks, her hands busy coaxing seedlings to life. Today, Dani feels as though she’s tripped and fallen into a game of hide and seek. 

“Don’t have to look far,” Jamie’s voice comes again--from behind the sofa, Dani thinks. “C’mere.”

“Miss Clayton!” Flora pipes up, and Dani feels the tension leave her body in a violent rush. Her hand grips the nearest table for support, her eyes closing in relief. “Come color with us”

“Come--sorry?” She can’t have heard right. Jamie? Jamie the gardener, putting aside work and temper to waste an afternoon on crayons?

Yes--yes, that appears to be exactly what Jamie is doing. Sprawled on her stomach, still dressed in her coveralls, she’s got a blue crayon in hand and a green one tucked behind her ear. She glances up as Dani steps nearer, a smile lighting her face. 

“Kid came stumbling in out of the rain an hour ago. Expect she didn’t think to warn you in advance?”

“Sorry.” Flora offers a sheepish smile, sitting up quickly. “Are you very cross?”

“No, of course not.” Just going to need a minute to purge the image of finding you facedown in the goddamned lake, is all. “Next time, though, you’ll have to tell me you’re leaving the house alone. I need to know where you are at all times, Flora.”

She expects Jamie to scoff at this--to say, Ah, she was with me, she’s fine. Instead, Jamie stretches over to land a sharp flick on Flora’s upper arm. 

“Rude to make Poppins worry. Look, she’s gone all pink.” She looks up at Dani, grinning. “Not a bad look, if we’re in the market for honesty.”

Dani suspects pink is the lightest shade she can manage, with Jamie gazing at her that way. It’s too easy, all of a sudden, to remember an unexpectedly soft hand under her own fingers, Jamie turning reflexively at the wrist to hold her back. 

“I’m terribly sorry,” Flora says, a phrase Dani is starting to think is more Flora than even perfectly splendid. “Here--I was just about to do one of you!”

Jamie gestures with the blue crayon, a silent suggestion for Dani to sit beside her. “Might as well. Rain doesn’t look like it’s letting up anytime soon.” She lowers her voice, eyes fixed on Flora’s determined rummage through the crayon box. “Sorry about that, Poppins. Know she’s been unpredictable lately, didn’t like the idea of her stumping around in the cold. If I’d known you were worried--”

“It’s all right.” In truth, she’s glad Flora made her way out here. Growing more pleased by the moment with this development, really, as Jamie slides a blank sheet of paper in front of her and presses a purple crayon into her hand. 

“Join us. We’re doing portraiture.”

“I can see that,” Dani laughs. Jamie’s handiwork speaks of a distinct lack of care for detail--each sketch on her page is, at best, a stick figure with a single defining feature. “How does Owen hold up his head, carrying a mustache the size of his torso?”

“With minimal decorum,” Jamie says, grinning. “And she’s right, it’s your turn.”

Dani suspects she’s going less pink, more a volatile shade of maroon, with both parties squinting at her face, their papers, her face again. Flora is doing her very best work, taking several minutes just to select the closest shades of blue, yellow, pink. Jamie makes an enormous production of holding up a crayon, closing one eye, gauging proportions--and then, cheerfully, scrawling a figure identical to the other four already on the page. 

“I’m taller than Hannah?” Dani asks, unable to resist a giggle. Jamie frowns.

“Ah, you’re...standin’ on a crate.” She adds a box beneath Dani’s non-existent feet with a flourish, nodding. “There. It’s symbolic.”

“Of what?”

“I’ve ranked you all on how much I like you. Takin’ into account, of course, certain accusations pointed my way regarding mud and shiny floorboards.” Jamie winks. Dani finds herself gripping her crayon almost hard enough to hurt. 

“You’re not drawing, Miss Clayton!” Flora observes. Dani glances away from Jamie’s smile--a difficult act only a few days ago, nearly impossible now--and clears her throat. 

“Well. Maybe just until the rain stops.”

There are, she thinks as a comfortable quiet settles over the greenhouse, infinitely worse ways to spend her afternoon. 

[fireteam-valor]

Wilhelm: *shredding through Hive with Sweet Business and Actium War Rig, laughing like a maniac, because of the new ammo synthesis* (infinite primary ammo)

Mai: I think he might have too much fun with this…

Volk: Nah… I bet he‘s fiiinnee

Wilhelm: *continuing to laugh maniacally*

Mai: Are you sure?

Volk: Yeeeaaahh… he just needs to let out his Headbut-Titan side once in a while. Not crayon-Titan though, that‘s *clears throat* not nice and an overused joke, nearly even slang against a certain group of people, which, as we have seen several times in our history, is never a good thing. But please understand that I don’t want to directly compre this to anything that you moght be thinking of. Every one of these events which I am referring to now, in regards to what you might think I had referred to, were way worse and shouldn’t even be compared amogst each other. Each is it’s own case and all of them where so horrific that no one has its equal and shouldn’t be downplayed by comparing it to a situation like this. Nevertheless, even though some might be fine with this phrase and play along for a while it get‘s really annoying, or worse, especially if it is used in ill intent towards that group of people.

Mai: That was… surprisingly well thought out.

Volk: Thanks.

Wilhelm: *off in the background* RIP AND TEAR!!!!

Sergeant: *E1M1 can be heard through static on the comms coming from sergeant*

Wilhelm: *still laughing*

Volk: But maybe we should make an appointment with a therapist on his behalf somewhere down the line…

Mai: That would be a good idea…

[yespolkadotkitty]

Tinderbox, pt 6

Part V here

Fuck. He’d left his jumper behind.

“Sweater, Dad,” Faye would remind him. Thank Christ she wasn’t here to see him leaving a relative stranger’s apartment at seven-thirty a.m after some steaming hot sex. He hadn’t been inside Rosie and yet, last night and this morning had blown his mind.

One of the hardest things he’d ever done was leave her standing there, skin still half-damp and warm from their shower, hair waving around her face, looking infinitely kissable.

It was cold outside, Winter hanging onto New York by its teeth, not quite done eating. Marshall walked briskly to his precinct, ignoring the subway. He needed the exercise, needed to get the sexy brunette out of his system before the team update in an hour’s time.

He still couldn’t believe how well he’d slept beside her on that lumpy futon. At some point he’d woken in the wee hours to her curled up next to him, the curve of her ass snuggled into him, trustingly. He’d breathed in the scent of her hair and drifted back into sleep, content. That was mostly unknown to him - he rarely fell back asleep if he woke from a restless dream.

No dreams when he’d slept beside Rosie.

His chirping phone had been a message from the precinct. They had a sketch of the infamous “Whiskers” - so dubbed because he’d left a crayon drawing of a simplistic cat’s face with whiskers at each crime scene.

Marshall huffed angrily as he thought it over. The media could be his best tool and worst enemy - often multiple times in a single day. But when they got a hold of something, they gnawed it like a dog with a favourite bone, and Whiskers was the current media favourite.

For a change, he - or she - wasn’t the usual flavour of criminal the media favoured. Whiskers had only burgled houses and apartments so far. Not that burglary could be ignored, but Marshall far preferred it to having the evidence techs scrape the remains of someone off the cold, bloody pavement.

Apparently one of the beat officers had gotten lucky, meeting someone who claimed to have seen a white man, mid-thirties, leaving the building where later, missing items and a cat doodle had been reported.

Marshall quickened his pace, wanting to find out more, and feeling the cold due to having left his jumper behind.

He wished he’d swallowed his pride and asked Rosie for her number. Both to get the garment back and to see her again.

Unbidden, an image of her naked save for his jumper, which would swallow her, pushed itself to the front of his mind. It’d smell of her, bergamot and sugar; addictive and heady.

And deep down he’d been afraid that if he’d allowed himself one more taste, he might have tumbled back into bed with her and prayed never to surface.

He swung angrily into the precinct, hoping he didn’t look like hell or smell too much like women’s shower gel. His colleagues would have a field day.

****

Rosie left for work earlier than usual and stopped by Police Plaza, Marshall’s cosy, moss green sweater in a bag. Had she considered keeping it, sleeping in it, stuffing her pillow inside it and cuddling it all day so she smelled like him?

Yeah. Multiple times.

She’d dithered over what to do for a whole half hour, before getting sick of herself. Grow up, Rosie, she’d chastised herself. She’d scrabbled around in a draw, finally finding a napkin from her deli. She’d scribbled you forgot this, R x on the napkin and stuffed it inside the garment, refusing to think about it further.

She scooped her hair into a bun, fussed over Salami and fed him half a can of tuna, his favourite treat, then caught the subway. The air knived into her lungs, icy cold. The ride was crowded, people in suits jostling with the rhythm of the carriage. She was hot and bothered by the time the train stopped where she needed to go. Checking her watch, she climbed the steps and pushed through the doors.

The Plaza was the only place she could think of to return the sweater. She didn’t know which precinct Marshall worked at, and she didn’t know if asking for that information over the phone was allowed.

And she also didn’t want to turn up at his precinct like a stalker, or a weirdo who didn’t understand that him leaving without her number probably meant that he didn’t want to see her again. It splintered her heart, thinking that, but it was what it was. I am a big girl, she told herself. I’ve survived much worse than this.

The officer on duty at the reception desk smiled as Rosie approached with the bag.

“Morning ma’am, how can I help you?”

Rosie smiled back, trying to fight the instinct to hold on to a piece of the man who’d rocked her world last night, and again this morning.

“I, ah, have this sweater that belongs to Detective Walter Marshall. I’m… not sure which precinct he works out of, so I thought I’d, er, drop it here.”

The officer worked to keep her face bland, but Rosie caught the tamped down amusement in her voice when she replied, “Sure, ma’am, I’ll make sure he gets it.” She held her hands out for the bag.

Rosie hesitated for a split second. Should she take out the napkin? He’d know it was from her.

But she couldn’t bring herself to remove it. He’d see it and think of her, and after what they’d shared, was it wrong for her to want him to remember her, now and then, perhaps during a quiet moment at the end of a long day?

She let the bag go, thanked the officer, and walked out of Police Plaza and out of Detective Walter Marshall’s life.

*****

Work passed slowly. Had he collected the sweater? Would they even deliver it today?

Rosie blew out a breath as she delivered sandwiches to customers in the deli, half missing Marshall terribly, and half wishing she’d never invited him in.

It was a relief when Rachael walked in. An FBI profiler who often worked with the NYPD, Rachael had become a regular in the two months Rosie had worked at the deli. She always ordered two sandwiches; one chopped cheese and one roast beef on rye, extra tomatoes. Over the weeks, she’d stay, have a coffee while the sandwiches were made. If her visits coincided with Rosie’s break, they’d occasionally chat.

Having a female friend was nice. Rosie missed her sister, but Dahlia would never leave their small home town. She was a home bird through and through, but phone calls only did so much. She’d missed the company of her sister and Midwestern friends when she’d upped sticks and left Dylan.

Without knowing it, Rachael was one of the high points of her day, so she was glad of a little lull when the gorgeous brunette came in, wearing a sharp suit and smelling floral.

“Hey, Rosie.”

“Rachael!”

Rosie moved out from behind the counter to greet the other woman. Rachael always looked so put together, razor sharp in her well cut blazer and high ponytail. “How’re things?”

Rachael shrugged. “A million miles a minute, as usual. But, can’t complain. Profiling keeps things interesting, you know? Get to work different cases.”

“I bet it is interesting,” Rosie replied, genuinely wanting to know more.

Rachael tilted her head to one side. Rosie knew that look. Rachael had been an NYPD therapist in a past life and it showed. “Something’s different about you.”

Panic scrambled up Rosie’s spine. “Really?”

“For sure. You look sort of… glowy. You feeling all right?”

Rosie smoothed a hand down her apron. “Had an eventful evening,” she managed, hoping the vagueness wasn’t indicative of the fact she’d had the best orgasms of her life to date.

“Wanna talk about it?”

God, did she ever. “Um…. maybe later?”

“Sure.” Concern creased Rachael’s face. Fortunately, at that moment a few men pushed through the doors, and Rosie went back to business.

“Your usual?”

Rachael smiled, recognising that she wasn’t going to get anything out of Rosie right now. “Sure, thanks. And a coffee while you make it? No hurry.” She tugged a smooth, square-edge business card from her pocket and pressed it into Rosie’s hand. “If you want to talk. About anything.”

Thanks to my beta, lovely @ly–canthrope​ 

Tagging: @brokenthelovely​ @mary-ann84​ @pinkzsugar​ @boiled-onionrings​ @dr-kayleigh-dh​ @leapingoveroblivion​

[ununniliad]

Burst Beetle Tweseveny #9: “2007: The Umpire's Call and the Last Rung's Fall!“

The figure lands lightly on her feet, wearing insectoid armor in shining black and white! She snaps her fingers, pointing at Tweseveny, then whips her head around and points the finger at M-Plot!

"And I think it needs a referee! Someone like... Burst Beetle XOX!" The camera zooms around XOX and she poses, showing off her cool armor!

Her chest plate has a diagonal checkerboard pattern with white Xes on the black squares and black Os on the white squares. Hanging from her neck is an enormous crimson whistle. Her arms and legs are vertically striped in black and white, and she wears black gloves and boots with white trim. At her crimson belt is a buckle with two chess clocks on them, one with Tweseveny's armored face on it, the other with M-Plot. Her face is a criss-cross tic-tac-toe board, and her eyes are black, circular lenses, one with a raised white letter X in it, the other with a raised white letter O. At her neck is a black bowtie with a ruby at the center, and on her forehead is a ruby chess clock, with white numbers and a black hand!

Tweseveny shakes her head. "Burst Beetle... Zocks?"

"Right, but you spell it capital ecks capital oh capital ecks."

"What is this!?" M-Plot stalks forward. "Who sent you? What are you!?"

XOX holds out a hand and presses it to M-Plot's chest plate. "Babe, I'm not a player in this game. I'm just here to make sure it's fair."

M-Plot pulls back angrily. "This isn't a game."

"Yeah, and if it was, we'd be winning!" Mother Time holds up the Hourglass of wReamThermodynamics and blasts a seething stream of temporal rays at XOX!

Who holds up a single hand and lets the stream splash uselessly against it! "Attacking the ref, that's a penalty!" She reaches down and grabs the whistle, holding it up in the air. She presses a button on it, and as a shrill noise rings out, the Hourglass vanishes - and appears in Time-Waster Lad's hands!

"Hey, what--" He juggles the item of power-- manages to grab it, but drops the Rung of Revamp!

"GOT IT--" Mother Time leaps forward--

And the Time Crapper is there, between her and XOX, M-Plot just to the side.

"STOP."

he speaks in a voice that vibrates thru the bones of all present.

And they do.

He looks up at XOX. "What are the rules of your game?"

XOX nods cheerfully, putting one hand on her hip and pointing the other at him. "You, you get it." She looks back and forth. "It'll seem pretty familiar. Two teams, three of you versus two of you--" She points at Tweseveny. "Transform, please."

Tweseveny lets out a breath - given what happened to the Hourglass, she wasn't sure what would happen if she'd tried. "With pleasure." She presses the pink gem on her buckle, and sheets of printer paper wrap around her, bursting into her armor.

"There we go," says XOX. "And if you can get the Rung and the Hourglass both on one side, you win."

"So," says M-Plot, evenly, fists clenched. "What's the catch?"

"We're moving to a bit of a different playing field. Goes something like..." She looks at Tweseveny and pushes down the button on her Tweseveny clock, holding it down. "You play!" She looks at M-Plot and pushes her M-Plot button, holding it down. "We play!" She looks up in the air. "Let's play!"

She releases both buttons at once, and the corridors of LNHQ shake wildly, knocking everyone off their feet! The roof seems to open up, and suddenly, Tweseveny is being carried up on some kind of white, blocky platform, rising high into a sunny blue sky!

Below, she can see the corridors growing and twisting, forming a maze! At the center of the maze is the Plot Device Room, and she can see Time-Waster Lad running out of it, carrying the Hourglass - and Mother Time giving chase!

All around her, platforms like something out of a video game are rising up - and spelling out words! In fact, they're spelling out "Infinite Leadership Cry.sig"!

This is really weird!! But Tweseveny feels alive! She sees a staircase running down from the 'g', into the LNHQ, a way to help-- and she sees M-Plot standing in front of it, brandishing a blade forged from a clock hand!

"Well," says M-Plot, widening her stance. "Two powerful net.villains against one of the weakest members of the LNH. Perhaps she was on my side after all." She swings the blade around in her hand. "Tweseveny... time to meet the boss of this level!"

She charges forward, and the two clash!

Far below, the Time Crapper picks up the Rung. "Tamela, we've got what we wanted..." He watches her run down the corridor, and sighs, walking after.

Mother Time fires temporal blasts from her scythe, ranting and screaming. "You didn't mean anything you said, did you?! It was all just a trick to get me to lower my guard!"

Time-Waster Lad ducks and dodges. "I really did, tho!" He looks over his shoulder for a moment, then eeps and darts to the side, out of the way of a burst of energy that turns a original painted cel of Manga Girl into crayon art on construction paper. "I like helping! It's good!!"

"Fuck that!!" She slices thru a decorative armoire in her rage. "I don't need anything except what's mine, and that's everything! That's me and my boy! We're strong enough to stand together against the whole universe!!"

Tweseveny dances in tight combat with M-Plot! She can hold her own, but she can't push forward - can't get past to help Time-Waster Lad!

"Hear that, Tweseveny?" says M-Plot, a smirk in her voice as she thrusts, narrowly missing Tweseveny's midsection. "You couldn't make them better! They're just as bad as before! You've failed, utterly!"

Tweseveny grits her teeth. It's true, and it stabs at her, but her head is clear, for the moment, of despair, and she's thinking...

M-Plot is nothing if not smart, and... yes, she's right. The Time Crapper and Mother Time - they're beyond Tweseveny's ability to fix, and, from what he'd said, beyond any hero's. They just need to break up...

...no, not just break up. They'd already tried to push off from each other, time after time. But they're too caught in each other's orbit, helplessly spinning back together. They need to be broken up - forcefully pushed out of each other's lives, too fast and hard to come back together. And maybe they'd end up being toxic in somebody else's direction - but at least there would be a chance!

And then, a second realization - yes, she can hear that! Somehow, she can hear what's going on far down below with perfect clarity. Which means...

Tweseveny throws herself into an aggressive attack, one which M-Plot will have to focus all her skills on dodging! And she raises her voice so all can hear! "Time-Waster Lad!"

Time-Waster Lad skids around a corner, panting as he runs as fast as he can. "Y-yeah?"

"Remember!" Tweseveny shouts. "Flame Wars II!" And then she has to dodge M-Plot's counterattack with all her might!

"Flame Wars II, what--" His eyes go wide, and he glances down at the Hourglass in his hands. "They can't win if..." He smiles the smile of someone with a plan!

He takes a turn, and a turn, and another turn-- and he's back in the lobby of the LNHQ. He runs behind the desk, where he can see the whole room.

Mother Time runs in, stops short. She glares at him, scythe burning with energies, eyes flicking around, trying to figure out why he stopped.

The Time Crapper walks in behind her, one hand seething with entropy, the other holding the Rung. "Give it up, boy. We've already won."

"Yeah!" Mother Time points the scythe at him. "You're just wasting time!"

Time-Waster Lad grins wide. "Yep!" He holds the Hourglass up in the air, and focuses. Once, he was able to waste millions, billions of years. Twenty-four hours should be a piece of cake!

"What..." The Time Crapper turns, looks out the window-- sees the angle of the light shifting, shadows moving, sun lowering towards the horizon-- "No!"

"GRAH!" Mother Time tries to blast him, but the energy skitters off the surface of the Hourglass! The sun sets, the moon rises--

The Time Crapper runs forward, heedless, hoping he's in time--

Time-Waster Lad looks up in the air and waves. "Bye, Tweseveny! Thanks!"

Somewhere far away, a clock strikes midnight, and Time-Waster Lad vanishes, Hourglass of wReamThermodynamics and all.

"No..." says the Time Crapper, inches from where he'd been. He turns, and sees Tamela-- "NO!"

"I don't..." Tamela looks confused, looking off into space, seeing something else, some other existence. Around her, figures appear for a brief moment, figures of herself, a cloud of selves singing, laughing, yelling, dying, living. She looks up at the Time Crapper, eyes wide, guileless. "I don't... remember you..."

The Time Crapper grabs her hand, pulling her away from herselves, but her hand comes apart in his, dissolving into a cloud, as brief a moment as all those others; and as her existence comes apart, she, and her selves, disappear from LNHQ, and from this moment altogether.

The Time Crapper falls to his knees, hand still extended, hidden gaze staring off at where she had been.

High above, the platforms rumble and come apart, separating Tweseveny and M-Plot, as LNHQ draws back together, seeming like a building again, instead of a dizzying labyrinth.

M-Plot's platform settles down next to the Time Crapper. He stares off, in a terrible freefall as the bottom drops out of his life. Then he looks up at M-Plot, voice helpless, beseeching. "What do I do now?"

M-Plot puts her hand on his shoulder, and speaks, not unkindly. "The only thing left for you to do. The thing you've needed to do for a long time. Move on."

The Time Crapper looks down, down into the depths of the universe, and nods, once. "To the past..." He sighs. "Always to the past." He holds out the Rung of Revamp, and M-Plot takes it.

Tweseveny's platform settles across from him. "Time Crapper, wait a second..."

He looks up at her. The bitterness is gone from his vacant gaze, but so too is the hope. "Yes, Burst Beetle Tweseveny?"

"I..." She still feels the shame, but... it'd be worse if she didn't say it. "I meant what I said. You should figure out what you really want, now that... now that this is all over."

The Time Crapper nods. "Thank you. Truly. But..." He looks off into the distance. "I am afraid I have but two choices. One, to separate entirely from humanity - to become fully cosmic, and take part in that great dance. It sounds beautiful... but I'm afraid I'm too weak to choose something so noble." He shakes his head, great sadness hanging off of him. "Thus, I will take the other choice - to stay a net.villain, and seek even greater power. I..."

He hesitates. "Somewhere out there, now, she has resumed her life, with nothing left of me in it..." He shakes his head. I will not seek to bring her back to me. Thank you for teaching me that. But..."

The Time Crapper draws himself up. The shadows within his robe seem to become deeper, and Tweseveny has a strange sensation of vertigo, like she's looking into the depths of space, beyond galaxies and clusters. "In her memory, I will find the greatest powers of this cosmos, and I will take them for my own. And I will force this Looniverse to become what I need it to be." His robe blows in an unseen wind, and the lights of the lobby dim. "And the LNH will battle me, and perhaps one of them will finally, finally, tell me what I need to be. That, Tweseveny, is what I desire."

Gazing into that awful deep darkness, Tweseveny sees one more awful truth. This man isn't the Time Crapper yet. Not the one from the Cosmic Plot Device Caper, from Cry.sig, from Retcon Hour. And he was going to go back, and carry out all those awful plans, and--

"Wait, please, let's..." The words die on her lips.

"Talk about it?" The Time Crapper nods, as one by one, the lights of the lobby wink out. "No, thank you. One day, we shall talk, one last time. But for now... goodbye, Tweseveny. I hope the path you walk is better than mine."

And for a brief moment, all is dark; and when light returns, he is gone.

For a moment, Tweseveny is silent. She turns to M-Plot, and says but one word: "Why?"

M-Plot folds her arms. "Because he's going to save the world." Unlike before, she is not happy, she is not gleeful, she is simply... carrying out a duty.

"Save the world!?" Tweseveny gestures wildly. "He's going to cause so much destruction! We could have stopped it!"

M-Plot shakes her head. "He will provide a valuable counterbalance. If not for his greed, if not for his desire, the Crossover Queen would have taken this world when it was weak."

"But--" Tweseveny clenches her fist. "There could have, must have been--"

"Better women than you have TRIED." M-Plot slams her fist into the wall! "WE ARE NOT THE ONES WHO WILL SAVE HIM."

"Enough." Burst Beetle XOX is suddenly there, next to them, her arms crossed, lenses focused on M-Plot. "I know who you are. I know who empowered you. And I know what your mission is."

"..." M-Plot turns away. "Which one?"

"Both of them."

"Er..." Tweseveny raises her hand. "Could I know?"

XOX turns to Tweseveny, and there was a smile in her voice. "Not yet." She looks back at M-Plot. "She'll tell you."

"The hell I will!" M-Plot snarls, still turned away.

"Yes, yes." XOX waves her hand casually, voice lightening. "But why worry about that, when there's still just one more thing for you to take care of?"

"Ah..." M-Plot looks at her hand, still holding the Rung of Revamp. "So there is."

She holds the Rung high in the air. Tweseveny wonders-- is M-Plot going to use it to power up, give herself some new form or weapon to use in their battles?

But no. The Rung begins to glow, but its light does not spread to M-Plot's body; the Rung itself grows brighter, and brighter, and Tweseveny suddenly understands - M-Plot is using the Rung of Revamp on the Rung of Revamp!

"No longer will the Rung of Revamp simply empower!" speaks M-Plot, voice ringing with an echoing thunder. "Once, its purpose was to create a character anew, to rewrite identities! Now, it returns to that purpose! I cast thee back in time - I cast thee to - Jungle Cheesecake!"

From far away, there is a deep BONG, echoing as if reflected between great cilffs, valleys and mountains; and with each echo, the Rung's light, and the Rung itself, fades, until it is gone.

M-Plot dusts off her hands. "It will have to be found again, ere net.hero or net.villain can use it."

"So..." says Tweseveny, raising an eyebrow. "You're not just here to mess with me."

"Yes," says M-Plot, strained calm in her voice. "I have my own duties to the Looniverses." She looks at Tweseveny, and in her lenses, a resentful glow burns. "And they include ending your playtime, Tweseveny. You are a reckless, irresponsible factor in these histories."

"But--"

XOX steps between them, and looks M-Plot in the face. "Go."

"Fine." The deep BONG sounds again, and M-Plot begins to fade. "You will see me again soon, Tweseveny! Beware! Bewaaaaaare..."

XOX shakes her head. "What a drama queen."

Suddenly, the lobby doors open and net.heroes pour in, fleshy humans and mechanical duplicates alike. They crowd around the Burst Beetles, full of confusion - it seemed that they had returned from their missions during the time that had been wasted, and found themselves outside at just past midnight.

Tweseveny feels light-headed, overwhelmed, and sways on her feet - into XOX's arms. The latter hero holds her close and addresses the crowd: "I promise an explanation, but first - time out!" She presses the ruby on her head, and everything seems to freeze around the two of them.

"Oh," says Tweseveny, trying to stand up. "Very good..." She stumbles again.

"Hey," says XOX, holding her up. "You started net.heroing in the evening after a tiring day of work, and between Carolyn and Time-Waster Lad, you've spent a whole 'nother day doing things. I'm not going to say you need some sleep... but yes I am. You need some sleep."

"...oh." Tweseveny yaaaaaaaawns, wide and deep, and her armor poofs away, leaving her in that same beige skirt and sensible blouse. "Sleep... it's a weird thing for a net.hero to do..."

XOX shakes her head. "We all do it, I promise. Just, usually off-panel." She guides Tweseveny down the corridors. "I don't think Time-Waster Lad will mind you using his room."

"Heh... no, I guess not..." She stumbles along, and it doesn't seem to take them much time at all to reach the door, for XOX to open it, and help her to the bed. She kicks off her shoes, and looks up to see XOX turning to go. "Hey, wait..."

XOX turns back. "Yes?"

"Is..." She rubs at her eye. "Is this... really happening? Am I really Burst Beetle Tweseveny, or is Glenda Gwynnych just pretending to be something more?"

XOX kneels down, takes her by the shoulders, and looks into her eyes, mask to face. "You are... yourself. I can't tell you what that is, but I know this. If you want to be Tweseveny, you don't have to be On all the time. You can have human needs, human flaws, and yet be far more than what they think a human is. That's what this place, this world, is about."

Tweseveny smiles. "Yes... thank you." She reaches up to stroke the mask. "And when will you be Off?"

The smile in XOX's voice is clear thru her mask. "At the end of the game." She stands up, turns away, opening the door to leave; but lingers in the doorway, helmet turning just so, a glance back at Tweseveny; one that makes Tweseveny oddly warm inside, oddly soft, oddly safe.

"Or perhaps... at halftime."

<<<*>>>

Author's Note: Whew! Finally! @-@v Two years in the making.

So what happens with Tweseveny next? Well, my plan is for a 27-issue series, plus a big "movie" special. I have no idea how long that'll take, of course. X3 And I might change my plans along the way. But I'm not gonna worry too much - I'm just gonna have fun, as much as I can. :>

One more continuity note: I noticed that in Infinite Leadership Crisis-era stories, the Rung of Revamp increased several characters' powers without altering them. I think there might be an interesting story in how that came about, but I figured I'd leave that one open, and just draw a line under the whole deal.

Also, after I talked to confidate Emma McGill about Time-Waster Lad, she came up with a list of potential habits for him:

Hair is always a different color

Has a bunch of tattoos that he did himself (pen & ink)

Chronic Doodler

Nails are often painted with whatever is lying around

Master whittler

Definitely picks at everything

Incredible at video games

Known to just start walking in a random direction with no destination in mind

Pretty good at trick shots, lacks the discipline to go pro.

Chronic thread unraveler

Is annoyed that Criticker only has a 0-100 rating system

Has a serious TV Tropes problem

Middling bass player, mostly just likes to 'jam' in his free time

Hair is either buzzed, or a very uneven shag (he cuts it himself)

People think he's very "zen"; he isnt

Chronic list starter

Owns the most elaborate fidget spinner the world has ever seen.

Never leaves home without a ballpoint pen, Sharpie, gum, some kind of fidget toy, & eyeliner

Can turn nearly any thin, flat surface into an airplane

Can play arbitrary numbers of songs' drum lines on arbitrary surfaces

[terraae]

“Hello, Old Friend.”

an au where Erik is Death. Charles is the only one who can see him. (on ao3)

Charles was six when he first saw him.

He was coloring in his father’s lab, crayons sprawled in front of him while his father and his partner worked. Charles knew he shouldn’t disturb them, he’d been told not to and he was a good boy who listened. Halfway through coloring a page, he discovered he had forgotten to bring his blue marker. So he silently slipped down and ran to fetch it.

As he exited the door and started to make his way to his bedroom, he saw something – or rather someone that made him slow down and eventually stand still. He gazed at the figure curiously. It was a man, or the impression of him. He looked like a man, slightly younger than his father but taller, and he had a beard. But he stood solemnly and so calmly that looking at him made Charles feel a little comforted.

“I’m Charles Xavier, are you here for my daddy?” the boy asked.

The man nodded and waited expectantly, letting the child’s curious eyes drink him in, then Charles pointed to the lab door and said, “He’s just in there, with Mr. Marko.”

He had never seen the man in their house before, nor in the parties that Mother held, but as he stared up at him he could only feel safe, not like when he saw Mr. Marko for the first time. He had felt uneasy Marko had smiled and patted his head.

“Thank you, Charles. Are you going away?” The man said, and his voice was hard to describe. It was serene and yet powerful, quiet yet attention-grabbing. The little boy was entranced.

“Yeah, I forgot my blue crayon. I’ve never seen you before. Are you my daddy’s friend?”

“No.”

Then Charles felt that he should leave. Then, it made sense that he shouldn’t hinder the man further, because even if he wasn’t friends with his father, they must work together. Later, he would know why he had left without more questions.

That day, Brian Xavier died of a chemical explosion that destroyed a significant part of the house and buried him under the rubble. His lab partner, Kurt Marko, survived.

*

Charles saw him again when was thirteen.

Marko married his mother. He had a new brother who liked to pick at him from time to time. He met a girl who was blue and funny and he made his first friend.

At first, Charles didn’t know who he was and assumed he was a friend of Kurt’s, but then he recognized the familiar pattern of thought and remembered the first time he saw him.

“You were dad’s friend. I saw you the day he die,” he said, the last part quieter than he had intended. The man regarded him with patience but when it was clear Charles wasn’t going to say anything further, he said, “I am not your father’s friend, Charles?”

“Who are you?”

The man said nothing, for a while. Then he asked, “Where is Kurt?” Later, Charles would learn that he didn’t need to know where his stepfather know, but he needed to distract him.

Charles wasn’t stupid, however, and a flitting thought made its way to his mind. He would use his newly-discovered abilities to find out who the man was. He concentrated hard, aiming to be as subtle as possible, which by his current standards meant that he was as subtle as a sledgehammer, and delved into the man’s mind.

Except –

There was nothing.

Where the man’s mind should have been was nothing but emptiness, a void that seemed so vast Charles thought he was going to get sucked into. He pulled back, gasping and realized he had fallen to his knees. There was something where the man stood that Charles couldn’t begin to understand, and felt the beginning of a headache as he started to think about.

“How can’t I sense you?” He said, forgetting every rule he had about not discussing his mutation with anyone else except Raven. “It’s like you’re not there – are you a mutant?”

“No,” the man said and made no move to help him up so Charles gathered his pride and stood. “You are clever, Charles. You will figure it out.”

Then the man was walking in the direction of Marko’s study and something in Charles made him move in the opposite direction, going to find Raven.

Kurt Marko died later that day of a heart attack.

*

By the time Charles was nineteen, he was preparing his university thesis and usually stayed on campus during breaks, when he was supposed to be home with Raven. This time, however, his sister insisted they celebrate Christmas together at the mansion as was their tradition.

It wasn’t difficult to understand how his mother’s condition got worse. She still had the housekeeper to keep things running, but as they arrived one day and went to greet her, she barely looked like the woman they had known.

Charles couldn’t remember the last time he had passed by his mother without smelling the sickening stench of alcohol. Some days she saw him in a hallway, paused, called him “Brian” by accident then shook her head and left. She had no recollection of it afterwards.

So when Charles woke one night after midnight to have a glass of water and saw him, he knew.

The telepath wasn’t slow, and ever since he saw the man six years ago followed by Kurt’s death, he’d had a lot of time to figure him out. He knew now that the man was the one who had come minutes before his father’s death, and then Kurt’s, and when Charles had gullibly tried to look into his mind, he had almost blacked out. He was what accompanied the inevitable.

“Hello, Charles,” the man spoke, making no effort to keep his voice down even though the telepath was sure no one could hear him but Charles. The last time Charles saw him, the man had seemed older but now the gap didn’t seem as large. In the dim light, the man’s eyes looked green.

“You know you are not as sneaky as you think you’re being, right?” Charles said, the weight of what was happening settling in. The man wasn’t here for him, he was heading to another room.

“If I did not want you to see me, you would not have.”

“Fair enough,” Charles said, then he had to face the dread that was precipitating in the pit of his stomach. “At least she won’t feel any pain. She’s miserable here.”

The man said nothing, and no matter how much Charles wanted to uncurl his telepathy and delve into the man’s mind again like a caveman reaching towards fire for the first time, he knew that it would be futile.

“I’ve never understood,” said Charles. “Why do I see when you’re not here for me?”

“Frankly, I do not know. There are secrets of the universe that even I don’t know, Charles.”

Hearing his name roll off the man’s lips was the most enthralling experience Charles had ever felt; it was the minutest particles in the cosmos and the vastness of space at the same time, an infinite number of sounds and one. For a moment Charles worried if he were experiencing what his mother would go through in a few minutes, but he knew, it was not his time yet.

“Do you know if she’ll see Father again?” Charles couldn’t help but asking, hearing a childish echo in his voice.

“I cannot give you an answer.”

“At least let me say goodbye to her. Please.” Seeing what could only be interpreted as acquiescent silence, Charles quickly made his way to his mother’s room and pushed the door open. It was the first time he’d been in her room in years and surprisingly, it didn’t reek of alcohol like he had expected. Sharon was asleep, and it was only after he’d sat at the edge of his bed and looked down at her sleeping, frail form that he could see how tired she looked. He leaned down and pressed a gentle kiss to her temple so as not to wake her up. Despite everything, his eyes teared as he reached for her hand, holding it tightly. He didn’t know how long he had sat there for, thinking of stupid matters as a sort of distraction, but when he came to, Raven was screaming and shaking him.

The man was gone.

*

The last time Charles saw him he was ninety-four years old and he was getting ready for bed.

It wasn’t surprising, after all Charles had gotten used to seeing the man throughout the years as he came for people in Charles’ life, people that he had been near him near the end. But there was no confusion as to why came this time.  

He was here for Charles.

“Is it time?” Charles asked as he sat down on his bed. The room was illuminated by the lamplight and it was quiet outside, most of the students having gone to bed and the ones who hadn’t were pretending to have had.

The man nodded and though Charles had been expecting it, he was hesitant.

“I worry of what will become of the students.” They were like his children, all of them, and the teachers were his brothers and sisters. They were a large family, chaotic and dysfunctional but supportive of one another. Charles would miss them. He was afraid.

“Do not worry, Charles. They are in good hands. You have given them a place where they feel safe, a family, and guidance. You have done them well.”

There was it, the powerful voice that Charles had missed. “Yes, well, I know they’re going to be okay. They’ve got good teachers – Kitty, Ororo, Jean, Scott… Logan. I suppose you come for him a lot already, I wonder how it would be if he could see you.”

“I am not sure which of us would find it more unbearable.”

It was the first time he saw the man smile. In theory, it should have been the bleakest thing he witnessed but Charles felt comforted. He lay back and pulled the covers to his chest. They shared a silent moment where they stared at each other, a small smile resting on their faces.

Charles’ mind drifted to the people he had met in his life, the ones that influenced, the ones that influenced him, the ones that had come and gone quickly and the ones that stayed until the end.

Yes, they were going to be okay.

He smiled, “It’s good to see you again, old friend.”

And he greeted death like an old friend. 

[thebestoftimes]

50 QUESTION BOOK TAG FOR WORLD BOOK DAY

By me, Jess. I made this for world book day but then got depressed and didn’t post it on time lmao but here ya go kids be warned though it’s a long one. Also the numbers thing got fucked up and I couldn’t fix it.  I got a lot of these questions from other tags I’ve seen and google so if something sounds familiar... that’s why.

Who or what sparked your love of literature?

Aw my parents fueled my book habit when I was a kid and took me to the bookstore all the time and since then all my teachers have always encouraged me and made me love books even more than I thought possible.

Do you have an ‘odd’ book habit? (page sniffing/never leaving the house with a book)

It’s true that I never go anywhere without a book. I got one in my backpack or purse or reading on my phone but it’s always there.

Do you have a book that you think has changed your life? How?

A lot of books and series have made significant impacts on my life (like I can’t picture elementary school without Percy Jackson being in my life) but like as a person I can’t think of any one book that has changed who I am. It’s been a team effort.

Which book have you reread most frequently?

I think I reread Hush Hush every year lmao idk why

You can meet any author and ask one question. What author would you chose and what question would you ask?

I’d want to meet Shakespeare and ask him if all his characters really were just that gay or if we’re all reading too much into it.

Best book published this year so far?

It’s only March but The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi

Imagine you’ve started a book and don’t like it. Do you see the experience through to the bitter end, or are you able to talk away from it mid story?

I used to always finish what I started but now that I’m in college and have a mountain of a TBR I’ll just stop.

What book is top of your wish list/TBR pile?

Uhh A Winter’s Promise by Christelle Dabos  is on top rn

Favourite place to read?

My bed. Boring but a classic.

If you buy books, do you lend them out? Ever had a bad experience?

Of course. No all my friends respect my stuff and return them promptly.

What fictional character do you ship yourself with?

So many but I think Gansey and I from The Raven Cycle would make the best couple.

Weirdest thing you’ve used as a bookmark

I use whatever near me so I might have done something weirder but lately I’ve been using tissues because I have a tissue box by my bed and never real bookmarks. But I’ve used graded homework, a toy car, a crayon, earbuds, etc.

Favorite quality/qualities in a protagonist and antagonist

Wow this is s hard okay for protag I am a sucker for like stubborn, smartass with a martyr complex. Sad but true. Antags I love a good morally grey character or anti-villain. Tragic backstory but smart as hell. The worst (the best). Characters like the Darkling from The Grisha Trilogy, and Warner from the first Shatter Me book (I know he’s a good guy NOW but back then we all thought he was a sadistic and sexy villain).

Favorite genre and favorite book from that genre.

YA Urban Fantasy babyyy and that’d be City of Bones by Cassandra Clare or Lady Midnight by Cassandra Clare:)

  Best/worst movie adaptation in your eyes

Best: Harry Potter and The Hunger Games | Worst: Percy Jackson

Do you prefer reading your own books, or library books?

My own.

How do you choose your next book to read?

Literally whatever I’m feeling like at the moment.

Your favorite word.

I love many words but I have a soft spot for “lively” and “lilt”.

Book that got you hooked on reading/how you got hooked.

I’ve always been obsessed with reading but The Peter and the Starcatchers Series was like my shift from nicotine to heroine.

Opinion on dog-earing, margin writing, ect.

I only write in the margins of books I have to read for class/textbooks. And that’s for studying and active reading purposes. For any other situation: no.

Top 5 immediate to read in no order

A Winter’s Promise by Christelle Dabos

A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

The Wicker King by K. Ancrum

A Darker Shade of Magic by V.E Schwab

Most underrated book you’ve read

Definitely The Foxhole Court/ All for the Game series. Fairly small fanbase for some of THE most amazing books I’ve ever read. And the memes will have you in stitches.

What is the first book that catches your eye when you look at your bookshelf?

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell because of the exceedingly bright cover/spine haha

How do you arrange your books on your shelves?

LOL I do not have a system at all. I keep series and authors together and that’s it. Everything is placed where there is room.

You have the power to change a book’s ending. Which ending would you change and what would you make happen instead?

I’d change the end to Allegiant and SPOILERS SPOILERS not make Tris fucking die over her shitty ass brother. I know why she did it but like Veronica girl wyd with that. And I’d want the entirety of Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins to be rewritten into a book that just focused on the domestic life of Finnick and Annie and no one dies.

Favourite book cover?

This is SO HARD. Either The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer by Michelle Hodkin or Ignite Me by Tahereh Mafi

Which book from your childhood has had the most impact on you?

My entire personality was shaped by the Maxmimum Ride series by James Patterson. For better and worse.

When reading, what do you value most: writing style, characters, plot, world building, pacing, etc?

Characters. I think all of those things are essential and as I read more and more, the pickier I get, but I find myself leaning towards being a fan of a book when I become obsessed with the characters. Like hey!! New friends!!! For my brain!!!

Do you prefer buying books or borrowing them from a library/friend?

Buying them even though I shouldn’t. It’s a real problem.

What books/sequels that are being published this year are you most excited for?

SO MANY OH MY GOD

Okay some of these already came out because it’s March right now but I’ll include them anyways.

SEQUELS/ SPIN-OFFS AND SHIT

The Wicked King by Holly Black; King of Scars by Leigh Bardugo; Dream by Natalia Jaster; Chain of Gold by Cassandra Clare; The Red Scrolls of Magic by Cassandra Clare; Capturing the Devil by Kerri Maniscalco, Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater; Defy Me by Tahereh Mafi; The Shaw Confessions #3 by Michelle Hodkin

FIRST BOOKS

The Binding by Bridget Collins; Wicked Saints by Emily A. Duncan; The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi; A Curse So Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer; Romanov by Nadine Brandes; The Infinite Noise by Lauren Shippen; The Beautiful by Renee Ahdieh

Which fictional character would you want as a sidekick?

Percy Jackson because he’s my firstborn son and one of my favourite characters of all time. He is talented, smart, hilarious, an amazing friend, and the sweetest of boys (when he isn’t the sassiest of boys).

How many books have you read so far this year?

Only 15 I am so behind :(

What’s been your favourite read so far this year?

Oh man. Gotta be Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo :)

You’re stuck on an island with a suitcase big enough to hold five books. What books are they?

I probably shouldn’t cheat and say How to Build a Boat huh

City of Bones by Cassandra Clare

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

The King’s Men by Nora Sakovic

Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan

If you had to go out to dinner with any character who would it be and why? What would you talk about?

Will Herondale and we’d talk about books

Is there a book you have such a hatred for that you would throw it off of the highest tower knowing that the last copy of it will be destroyed so that not another living soul can read it or would you rather keep it and give it to someone else who might actually enjoy it?

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne or After by Anna Todd

Do you believe books make nice decoration?

I mean. I think they should be read before used as decor but I love showing off my books so I guess both. But I don’t believe in buying books for the purpose of decoration instead of reference or reading lol

Do you listen to music when you read? Or do you need complete silence? 

I need silence or low amount of white noise. I used to read and listen to Taylor Swift when I was a kid but I can’t do it anymore.

Do you have a favorite book? If not are you in the group that believes there are too many great books out there to just choose one?

I tell people it’s City of Bones by Cassandra Clare but in all honesty no I don’t have a favourite.

Do you sleep with books under your pillow.

Nope

Do you go to the library or do you have a book buying addiction or are you one of those lucky people who is able to do both?

I do both. Mostly bookstore though.

Own any book inspired clothing?

Yes. Several items :)

Have you ever read a book in another language?

I read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Tristan and Isolde, and Beauty and the Beast in French. And parts of Les Mis.

Strangest book you’ve ever read?

John Dies at the End by David Wong. Still not sure exactly what was going on. 

Favourite type of non-fiction?

Memoirs babey

Favourite non-fiction?

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

Favourite subject to read about?

History

Favourite book you’ve read in school?

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Favourite work of Shakespeare?

Hamlet

Character you’d love as a mom or dad or guardian?

Hmm Sally Jackson, The Women of 300 Fox Way, or Tessa and Will (they totally count because The Last Hours Series)

I tag literally whoever wants to do this and @fangirl-daydreamer97 @acleeds12 @iviisastrawberry @221bdoom @bicycles-bees-bisexuals @betterthanapit @dippindots126 @vlctorvale

[somewhatcoherentrambles]

Lost His Marbles

Even though he was 67 years old and an accomplished professional, he carried marbles in his pockets and only wrote in crayon.

Scratch that- if the document was really important he used pen. During our break at 3:00 pm on the dot he would quietly play with the marbles by himself, sometimes mumbling something I couldn’t hear. He only wore a suit when he absolutely needed to and if you looked over he’d break into a goofy smile. I mostly tried to avoid him at all costs, but it was hard to since I was an intern. At lunch, he ate weird things, like PB&J’s or pizza rolls. I wondered how someone like him worked his way up the firm.

The accounting firm was small and family-owned, with just a few locations. I’m for sure working my way up in years time. Lord knows how dense my competition is. They couldn’t even get black coffee without somehow messing it up. It was this particular day, as I watched him sit at his desk contently, that I prayed I wouldn’t ever have to work on a project with him; I knew better than to open myself up to karma.

I got a bad feeling in my stomach as we went through the daily briefing. Being an intern usually meant getting the scut work, like filing. Something told me I was in for a change today. The head of my department began describing an upcoming project for us and apparently, we’d be helping prepare local tax returns. I don’t know how we land big jobs as such a small company, but I’ve learned to accept it. This internship is coming to an end soon so it was obvious they were assigning the project to help decide which intern would get the job offer. Senior department members would be partnered with interns and lower department members to fill out the files and create a presentation.

Like a high school teacher dooming some apathetic teens to a group project, my superior read of the list of partners. My hopes for someone competent were dashed as I heard my name: “Jonathan Keys,” and then the name I had been dreading: “Claude Bairn.”

He spotted me down the row and gave me a half wave. I knew then and there I’d have to take over most of the project if I had any chance of winning the job. Half of the time it looked like all the old man could do was make copies of things. I reluctantly approached his desk after the meeting ended. Today he was wearing a blue button-up shirt that was slightly too tight with an uneven collar. His khaki pants had a stain or two on them but he didn’t seem too bothered.

I got straight to the point and told him I’d handle all the math and filing, he just had to put all my work into a presentation. I prayed that at the bare minimum he’d be able to make a powerpoint.

“Wait, Jonathan?” He called out as I walked away.

I turned and nodded.

“You don’t want this promotion as much as you think you do.”

“What?”

But Claude didn’t respond, just went back to playing with his marbles and eating his pop tart.

Delusional I thought.

The rest of the assignment, fortunately, went on without a hitch. I did all the work and Claude stuck it into text boxes and bar graphs. Sometimes he’d furrow his brow or tilt his head in a way that made me suspect he didn’t truly know what we were doing or what it all meant. We usually worked in silent derision, but I began to grow curious.

“What got you into accounting?” I asked.

“I was sort of forced into it.”

He darted his eyes and didn’t say any more on the subject.

Three days later we all had to sit outside the conference room and wait to go in. It struck me as odd that the company thought this was the best way of determining who would get the promotion. It must be one of those “alternative” and “modern” workplace practices.

After fifteen minutes of waiting and preparing, we were called inside.

“Mr. Keys, Mr. Bairn.” Greeted the Chief Financial Officer, Mr. Keres.

The higher-ups sat like a judge's table, each with notebooks and faces of stone-cold indifference. It was a rather short presentation, I started out with the bank reconciliations then moved into the general ledger entries. Claude stood to the side, silent, hunching his shoulders and rocking faintly side to side. They all stared at me with wide eyes, watching my every move.

At the end of the presentation, the panel turned and looked at each other, seemingly communicating in a secret language only they could understand. Mr. Keres opened the floor for up questions.

“Is that your natural hair color?” A man on the panel asked.

I looked to Claude then back up to the man.

“Yes?”

The panel just shook their heads in agreement and continued to scribble down notes.

“Do you have a history of hereditary diseases in your family?”

“Not that I know of,” I said.

Maybe these questions had something to do with the company provided health insurance, which would mean the job is as good as mine. I smiled at the thought.

“Excellent job, excellent job indeed.” Said Mr. Keres after a moment of silence.

“Mr. Bairn you are dismissed,” He said, “Mr. Keys if you wouldn’t mind I’d like to discuss something with you.”

“Of course.”

We walked out of the room while the rest of the panel spoke in hushed murmurs.

“If you would just come right this way…” Mr. Keres said, leading me down the hallway.

“Jonathan wait!” Claude called.

Mr. Keres nostrils were flaring and his eyes were wide but an uncomfortably big smile still sat on his wrinkled face.

“Claude, what is the meaning of this?”

“Jonathan don’t go! You don’t want this! It’s a sham and this place is just a tar baby, a tar baby I tell you!”

I saw Mr. Keres hurriedly gesture for two men to escort Claude away, as his crazy pleas got louder.

“Their evil! Evil, evil, evil! Mommy said to stay away from the bad men, stay away…”

I watched in shock, as Claude’s lips trembled and he was forcefully taken to another room. Blinking, I turned to Mr. Keres, hoping for some sort of explanation. His eyes were entirely fixed on the room Claude had been dragged into.

“It’s a shame,” Mr. Keres said shaking his head, “You see Mr. Bairn is the grandfather to our other financial advisor James Portman.”

It made so much more sense why Claude was apart of the company in the first place.

“His episodes that have only gotten worse with age.” Mr. Keres continued.

“It’s a shame indeed,” I said.

“Well,” Mr. Keres said, clasping his hands, “Shall we proceed?”

Part of me hoped he would be awarding me the promotion then and there. He lead me to the elevator and pressed the second floor. I hadn’t been there, nor did I know what was located there. When the doors opened we faced stark white walls and a hallway that has riddled with thin glass doors.

“You see Jonathan I like to think that we’re more than an accounting firm,” He said as we turned right.

I nodded, unsure of where he was going with this.

“Accounting is more of a side quest. We do important work here. Groundbreaking, life-altering type of work.”

He unlocked a door at the end of the hallway and lead me inside. It was all white as well, with two chairs and a table with all sorts of science equipment. I looked at him skeptically.

“We are trying to help humanity. Do you know what the common man’s greatest plight is Jonathan? What irrefutable struggle has incarcerated all of humanity?”

“No, sir,” I said with hesitance. Maybe Claude wasn’t the only one with a few screws loose.

He chuckled and walked to the cabinet on the other side of the room.

“Water?” Mr. Keres offered. I took it. He sat in the chair at the center of the room and gestured for me to sit.

“It is our mortality,” He stated, “Futile as it may seem we spend our short existence doing nothing but distracting ourselves from the inevitable closing of the curtain.”

Part of me felt like leaving and not turning back, but for some reason I didn’t. I should’ve.

“But someone like you and me, we can see that math, that science holds the answers.”

“Scientists at Harvard University,” He transitioned, “Discovered a protein called GDF11. When it was injected into older mice, their bone and muscle strength changed to resemble their youthful selves.”

He stood up.

“Now. Imagine if this same science were applied to humans.”

“You could...live forever,” I said, wondering what any of this had to do with me or accounting.

“I see something in you, Jonathan. An ambition, the type of ambition we want here.”

I rubbed my hands together, hoping he was granting me the promotion.

“The question is, do you want to change the world? Do you want to do more than accounting?”

“Yes?...”

He chuckled once more.

“Good. We have completed one human trial and hope to do more-”

“Here? At an accounting firm?”

“Why yes. Now the only problem is we had to take the GDF11 protein out of younger mice for it to work.”

“So you need a young candidate for the next human trial?”

“See? I knew you and I thought on the same wavelength.”

“Oh no Mr. Keres I c-couldn’t possibly, I-I would never-”

“This is the future Jonathan. An end to the infinite torment that haunts our lives. You would, would make history! Help liberate the human race!”

My eyes widened as I started to make my way towards the door.

“Don’t bother trying to leave. The drink I gave you should start to take effect.” Mr. Keres said.

He walked over to me as I leaned on the wall.

“It’s a shame. I was hoping you’d cooperate more.” He sneered. “You know the last human trial didn’t go so well. Our first candidate was much too young, following the loss of the protein he aged rapidly. Maybe you’ll do better.”

I was sitting on the floor up against the wall now. I tried yelling for help but no sound could force its way out of my burning lungs. I looked up at him, desperate to keep my eyes open, to no avail.

“After you pass out we’ll start. Congratulations Jonathan.”

[definitelyameatbag]

Alone

Lapis takes in the first day of her new life on a new planet.

Lapis remembered a book that Connie once gave her. She was sure it was still in the Barn somewhere. It talked about something called ‘bacteria’, invisibly tiny organic lifeforms that existed in the uncountable trillions on every single surface on Earth. No matter how harsh and inhospitable the corner of the planet you put under a ‘microscope’, you would find them, thriving.

She felt confident in there not being a single one of these bacteria in the miles and miles of frozen, rocky waste that stretched out in every direction from where she placed the Barn right out to the horizon just about shrouded in mist. The planet did have an atmosphere, and she felt and heard the wind coming in from the nearby shore, but gone were the rustle of trees and grass, the sound of birdsong, the buzz of insects diving in and out and around her home. She had went out for a walk earlier, she didn’t feel like flying, and she couldn’t even find the tiniest spot of moss or algae, not the faintest greening of the water that might betray it was stuffed with life. She was certain she was the only living thing on an entire world, a world that might, possibly, one day, give her some company. If she waited long enough, perhaps a few billion years, then she might see something crawl out of the water. It probably won’t be able to talk to her, but it would be an interesting day.

So she had that to look forward to.

She planted a foot onto the grass surrounding the Barn, grass that was dried, frozen, and nearly obliterated by the journey through space, the powdery remains of blades scattering and ready to lay the brown earth below bare. She paid it no mind as she continued through the door. The Barn did not greet her with the golden glow provided by the Sun. The Sun, that big warm ball of flame she once saw rise every morning, was now just another prick of light in the night sky, one in billions. She wanted to lose it in the infinitely large swarm above her, but she couldn’t. The star she went for was far meeker, even on the cloudiest day on Earth the Sun made it look like a tiny little red ember floating in the sky. Her thinking was that Homeworld would tend to spread to the bigger, short-living stars first, to consume those solar systems quickly before they ended their lives with a brilliant bang. The smallest, longest-living stars were the scraps to be had when there was nothing left to devour. There was no reason for Homeworld to want to come here for a length of time that might as well have been forever.

And when Forever ran out, Lapis thought, she’ll just have to find somewhere else.

She tried to not pay attention to all their meep-morps that had been scattered about the place. She didn’t want to rush herself with the necessary chores, she told herself, noting the things to do could come later. She wondered if she could stretch out that task through one year or two.

She said to herself that she had worked out a wonderfully stable system. Bulletproof, really. There was nothing that could surprise her, no horrible other people to put her into objects or cells, nothing to control her, no war that can take away what she cared about and leave her without them forever just because they were bigger and more powerful than she was.

And this time, there wasn’t even anybody that she could dump her hatred on, there was nobody for her to harm. There was just her.

In the flight through space, she kept on tantalizing herself with the reward of finally finishing that season rewatch. Flying up to the couch with the TV, she ran her hand on the top of the big black box that she had spent so many hours looking at. She stepped back from the box and sat down on her side of the couch.

Her eagerness to finish the season drained away.

Looking down at the ground, she saw a few sheets of blank paper, and a box of crayons. Picking them up, she surveyed the landscape, deciding she’d try to meep-morp taking inspiration from her new...

The paper and crayons dropped from her hands.

Lapis leaned her head back, closing her eyes.

You actually surpassed my expectations, you know.

She bit on her lip, trying to ignore the voice.

I was here expecting you to get captured by Homeworld again, taken away from everything you loved against your will. Somehow, you managed to just get up and throw it all away, all on your own.

“Shut up.”, she spoke.

Did you get addicted to having nothing? A warm blanket and loved company under the stars just couldn’t match the exquisite taste of total, helpless oblivion, could it?

“I’m not in the mirror, I’m not helpless.”, Lapis countered, “I have my body, and I have my home. I don’t exist at anybody’s whim anymore, and nothing I have is under threat. It could be worse. I know ‘Worse’.”

Peridot? Steven? Your little vegetable pet? They’re under threat, are you saying you don’t have them anymore?

“They’re...”, she slumped onto the couch, grabbing at Peridot’s cushion, “They can look after themselves, they’ll be fine.”

Then why did you run away?

“Because I’m...”, Lapis started, then struggled for words.

Selfish? A coward? A monster?

“I don’t want to be hurt again! Is that too much to ask?!”

You’re not the only one that gets hurt. You’ve dealt a lot of hurt yourself, remember. You hurt Steven, you hurt Connie, you hurt Jasper...

“Stop...stop it...” She squeezed tighter on Peridot’s cushion, as if scared it would blow away, or vanish.

Oh yes. You hurt her, too. Little Peridot. You hurt her more than most, it seems. You weren’t even trying to hurt her, you were just you, being as awful as you usually are with her having to take the brunt of it, and she was just too damn good to complain.

“I didn’t know.”, she mewled, “I would’ve helped her, she just needed to tell me and I would’ve helped her...”

I suppose it’s good you took the Barn, then. She’s still got Steven and the others to live with, what would she want with a dump full of bad memories? She’s probably already forgotten you exist. At least, she doesn’t have to pretend to care that you do.

Lapis pushed herself up on the couch. “She’s in danger. They all are. I need to--”

Don’t bother. They haven’t needed you through all your moping, you’d just mess everything up again. Just stay here, keep everything far away from you. And if they die, or they get something far, far worse, then at least you can spend the millennia certain it wasn’t your fault.

She stood up, craning her neck to look right up to find the Sun in the great lake of stars.

What are you afraid of? Being alone? 

“Yes.”, said Lapis, “I’m terrified of it.”

Lapis, that’s the only thing you’re any good at.

[ganymedesclock]

another random poke regarding sonic stuff: any particular thoughts/headcanon about metal sonic?

So for this, I actually wanna talk wholesale about my big personal Sonic reimagining, that being @endlesspossibilityau​.

The longer version is here, while, the short version is, EPAU Sonic is an AI created by Eggman to hunt down the Chaos Emeralds who predictably kinda went rogue- not even necessarily deliberately as much as Eggman accidentally pushed the threshold to full sapience in trying to create an Emerald-compatible robot. Since there’s that whole thing of “power enriched by the heart”, after all- for something to really harness the full potential of Chaos, they need sentience. A will. Eggman doesn’t know about that part.

So the initial conflict in EPAU with Eggman and Sonic is simply enough Eggman ended up creating a person instead of a piece of technology complex enough to effectively simulate a conversation, and his attempting to treat what was actually more of an HR issue as a software issue is what actually created the grudge outside of just Sonic being Sonic and wanting to do his own thing more importantly than fetch magic rocks out of holes in reality.

Trying to reclaim Sonic, with or without the various other people that keep intervening, is about as much of a hassle as you would imagine and it’s not long before Eggman seizes the bright idea of, well, he built this guy, he still has most of the prototype mainframes lying around. He just needs something that can measure up to all the replaceable parts of Sonic’s systems.

And, that’s where Metal comes in.

Given Sonic’s construction, Metal is a bit like a skinned animatronic skeleton- since EPAU Sonic is basically a military grade, incredibly articulated animatronic. It also stands that Sonic is more than a little terrified of Metal, about as much as you would be if what amounted to your childhood skeleton turned up to pursue a personal vendetta with you.

And it is very personal, though, Eggman doesn’t quite cotton on quickly, since this whole issue of sapience means Metal is another self-aware being, and, not an especially happy one since he’s fully aware that his entire identity and life is on borrowed time- he’s both a newer model in mind, and a discarded prototype in body, and either way feels like he can’t measure up to the original product, Sonic- so he both wants to prove superiority by catching Sonic, but, also, is completely aware that if he actually succeeds, he’s going to be decommissioned because his programming being written and loaded into this body in the first place was to catch Eggman’s actual finished product. His mental state just gets worse and worse the longer he clashes against Sonic, and as his attempts get more desperate, and fail regardless, and Eggman has to intervene because he’s not self-preserving, something allegedly hard-coded into him- the good doctor starts to realize what, precisely, went wrong with Sonic and Metal- and that he’s inadvertently a father of two who’s treated both of his “sons” like garbage.

From there, their relationship is… awkward. In part because Eggman’s not entirely sure if he should be trying to shower Metal with fatherly approval or if he’s really better off packing his bags and firmly stepping out of Metal’s life.

It also doesn’t help that Eggman’s revelation about Sonic and Metal came out of an incident directly comparable to Metal’s….. antics in Sonic Heroes. So entirely outside of Metal’s emotional health, there’s the additional concern that Eggman also doesn’t trust Metal at that point.

His solution to both problems at once, is the Doll.

The Doll is Eggman’s third fully sentient AI, and, reflects his completely differentiated approach to trying to make this work- very simple initial programming, more of a framework to grow on, and, treated very much like a child. That it was also an opportunity to test the properties of a self-repairing cloth is just a nice bonus.

So Doll is an indefinitely regenerating and thus slightly-shapeshifting sentient stuffed animal with very limited internal mechanics, the capability to do some truly freaky business, the propensity to communicate exclusively in soundless electronic transmissions and crayon drawings, and the overwhelming disposition of a three-year-old child. They’re assigned to basically serve as Metal’s warden, with a beacon system that prevents him from leaving them anywhere (as they’re much slower than he is, and not flight capable) and it’s Eggman’s hope to be both supportive and less of an overbearing presence by limiting his communication and interventions to Metal that aren’t relayed by telling them to Doll first.

They usually hang onto Metal using some magnets placed in the palm of their hands, basically meaning they look like one of those stuffed animal backpacks. Moody skeleton robot with adorable plushie backpack child. And yes, Doll does hold stuff for him. By… eating it with a spontaneously generated nightmare mouth. 

Incidentally, Doll was not modeled after Tails at all- that cropped up because Doll, in their infinite wisdom, noticed that Sonic is happy and not lonely mostly because he always has Tails with him, and Metal is a Sonic, but not happy, and lonely, and clearly this is because he doesn’t have a Tails. So in their very five-year-old wisdom they rectified this. 

Or at least they’re trying.

[littlelovelymemes]

✰ * º ❛ californication sentence starters. ❜

(   WARNING: THIS IS PROBABLY NOT SAFE FOR WORK DUE TO VERY STRONG LANGUAGE AND SEXUAL CONTENT.   )

‘  i am not a fucking shrink. i don’t give a shit anyway.  ’ ‘  we are not talking! we are not fucking! nothing is happening!  ’ ‘  you know me... the talking and the fucking go hand-in-hand.  ’ ‘  rehab is for quitters.  ’ ‘  you can’t snort a line of coke off a woman’s ass and not wonder about her dreams. it’s not gentlemanly.  ’ ‘  damn you smell good, like home.  ’ ‘  spend the rest of your life with this fool and this fool will spend the rest of his life making sure you don’t regret it.  ’ ‘  there's no easy way to say this so i’ll just say it: i met someone.  ’ ‘  there’s this feeling in my gut that she may be the one.  ’ ‘  i don’t know how to be with you right now and that scares the shit out of me.  ’ ‘  it’s a big, bad world full of twists and turns and people have a way of blinking and missing the moment.  ’ ‘  i don’t know what’s going on with us and i can’t tell you why you should waste a leap of faith on the likes of me.  ’ ‘  it’s a lost art, really. like handjobs.  ’ ‘  i have a confession to make... i didn’t like you very much at first.  ’ ‘  you didn’t seem to have much interest in me, which i of course found vaguely insulting.  ’ ‘  funny how some things never change.  ’ ‘  i cruised along, doing my thing, acting the fool, not really understanding how being a parent changes you.  ’ ‘  i don’t remember the exact moment everything changed. i just know that it did.  ’ ‘  loving you has been the most profound, intense, painful experience of my life.  ’ ‘  i made a silent vow to protect you from the world, never realizing i was the one who would end up hurting you the most.  ’ ‘  when i flash forward, my heart breaks, mostly because i can’t imagine you speaking of me with any sort of pride.  ’ ‘  i care for nothing and everything at the same time.  ’ ‘  noble in thought, weak in action.  ’ ‘  i think that’s the good thing about never being married, it’s impossible to divorce.  ’ ‘  i tried, but somewhere along the line, you slip back into what you know and i’m sorry about that.  ’ ‘  i’m sorry we haven’t talked in awhile because i miss you.  ’ ‘  you’re doing the best you can. you’ve done good.  ’ ‘  that fucker is the horniest man i’ve ever met. he’ll be pitching a tent on his deathbed.  ’ ‘  don’t tell me what to feel.  ’ ‘  all my fucking life people have been telling me i do things wrong. i’m always the fucking asshole. i look around and i see everybody else is infinitely more fucked up than i am.  ’ ‘  i’m offering you sex, and you just want to talk? has the earth spun off its axis?  ’ ‘  i question everything. it’s very healthy.  ’ ‘  you should live with someone who everyday reminds you how fucking lucky you are to be with them.  ’ ‘  you don’t want to be with me.  ’ ‘  if i were to give myself to you, you would run for the hills ‘cause you’re not in love with me. you’re in love with the idea -- the idea of love.  ’ ‘  imagine my fucking disappointment when you turned out to be the biggest cliche of all.  ’ ‘  a great father is a guy that gives it all up for his family and leaves his self-destructive bullshit at the door.  ’ ‘  there isn’t a woman that i’v’e met that i haven’t fallen in love with for 10 minutes or 10 years.  ’ ‘  friends don’t let friends bang each others soulmates!  ’ ‘  i consider that whole area -- general area -- my cock. like, from my knees to nipples.  ’ ‘  two people of the opposite gender can’t rendezvous after 7 pm.  ’ ‘  life’s just too fucking boring not to try.  ’ ‘  i may be easy, but i’m not sleazy.  ’ ‘  a morning of awkwardness is far better than a night loneliness.  ’ ‘  i like it here. it’s nice. the sun is chirping, the birds are shining. the water’s wet.  ’ ‘  life is good, sweetheart. life is good.  ’ ‘  you can blame everything on the economy, douchebag.  ’ ‘  no man should ever have to bear witness to his “o” face.  ’ ‘  you know, it’s not fair to say “b.r.b.” and then never actually b.r.b.  ’ ‘  fuck around all you want. i’m no judge judy. but don’t string a woman along for a major chunk of her childbearing years. that’s not cool.  ’ ‘  when it comes to emotions, women know how to pain with the full set of oils while men are busy doodling with crayons.  ’ ‘  there’s nothing quite like getting stoned on the very bed that your ex-domestic partner shares with her fiance. it’s the little things.  ’ ‘  hang out with your wang out, but remember: no gloving, no loving.  ’ ‘  hate the game, not the playa.  ’ ‘  no matter what you did, don’t give up. do not give up because if she loves you, she’ll forgive you.  ’ ‘  things fall apart. they break. that’s life.  ’ ‘  despite all evidence to the contrary, i am a gentleman.  ’ ‘  i’ve been thinking about us -- that’s us with a capitol “u”.  ’ ‘  the story of us... how the fuck do i sum it up?  ’ ‘  any story with me in the center of it will never be anything less than a big, smiling mess.  ’ ‘  our time in the sun has been a thing of absolute beauty.  ’ ‘  for years i woke up, fucked up, said i was sorry, passed out, and did it all over again.  ’ ‘  i’m a sucker for happy endings.  ’ ‘  there’s just the two of us, which can be fucking ugly sometimes.  ’ ‘  i didn’t know how to finish it because it’s not over.  ’ ‘  it’ll never be over, as long as there’s you, and there’s me, and there’s hope, and grace.  ’ ‘  wine me. dine me. stand up 69 me.  ’ ‘  one does not very easily forget the kiss of a beautiful woman.  ’ ‘  that’s right. i said it. i meant it. i’m here to represent it.  ’ ‘  can you slow down? i don’t know why you’re so fucking angry.  ’ ‘  i’m not the one who disappeared to the bedroom with that fucking weirdo degenerate.  ’ ‘  you’ve got a fucking nerve to take issue with anything i do, ever!  ’ ‘  you’re right, but what am i supposed to do? just sit there and watch it happen?  ’ ‘  why the fuck did you come here tonight anyway?  ’ ‘  there’s always this voice in the back of my head that says ‘maybe this time it will be different, maybe this time the stars will align and there will be this magic moment between us where everything will be okay again.’  ’ ‘  there’s always something or someone in the way!  ’ ‘  you want me not to see anybody else, just say the word. but if you keep me at arms length, what am i supposed to do? just sit around with a cock-cage on and hope that you’re going to have some kind of epiphany about us?   ’ ‘  do you honestly think i care about you fucking someone else? if we’re not together, i don’t expect you to have taken some vow of celibacy.  ’ ‘  when i see someone look at you the way i used to look at you... i fucking hate that. it makes me sick to my stomach.  ’ ‘  i don’t want to be that person. i don’t want to start playing games and like, trying to get back at you or try to hurt you.   ’ ‘  i thought there was something wrong with me, but it’s you. you’re a loser.  ’ ‘  i’m sorry you got hurt. i thought we had an understanding.  ’ ‘  i swallowed your cum, but worst of all, i swallowed your bullshit.  ’ ‘  i guess being there made it easier to forget that i still love the shit out of you. yeah, wow, i said that out loud, didn’t i?  ’ ‘  so? i still love you. i always will, till the day i die. but at some point, i had to choose happiness, i had to make that a priority.  ’ ‘  i’m with someone who understands that i’ll never stop loving you and that makes me happier than i’ve ever been.  ’ ‘  contrary to popular belief, i’m not out there trying to hurt anyone.  ’ ‘  by the way, you’re an incredibly woman. very sexual. are you ovulating right now?  ’ ‘  don’t blame me because you were born with a clit for a cock and a tiny beanbag to house what passes for balls.  ’ ‘  eat my shit.  ’ ‘  it makes my labia shrivel.  ’ ‘  die young and suffer, dickless.  ’ ‘  you can either cry like a bitch or smack a bitch.  ’ ‘  what, you going back to your mommy’s? you fucking infant.  ’ ‘  sperm would enter my pretty little vajoojoo and my cold black heart would kill that shit dead, son.  ’ ‘  trust me, getting your asshole bleached would be much more fun.  ’ ‘  you’re like one of those freaky chicks who marries serial killers on death row.  ’ ‘  well, if you were not so preoccupied with sticking your dick in anything with a hole that will have you, you might noticed these things.  ’ ‘  i want to go back and do it all over again. only this time, not make the same mistakes... this time, do it better. this time do it right.  ’ ‘  our best days are behind us now. you’re just chasing a dragon. we’re never going to life happily ever after.  ’ ‘  you’re going to die poor, drunk, and alone.  ’ ‘  welcome to the place where time stands still, where whisky flows and always will.  ’ ‘  i came back... for you. i know it’s overwhelming, disorienting even.  ’ ‘  we have to resolve this shit one way or another, don’t you agree?  ’ ‘  i say we stay here until we figure it out... or until we both get so fucking horny we can’t stand it. either way, it’s a win-win for both of us.  ’ ‘  what is this? explain yourself, woman.  ’ ‘  do you realize that the bottom has just officially dropped out of our relationship?  ’ ‘  angry? i’m not angry! why would i be angry? i’m not even entitled to angry.  ’ ‘  that’s what makes it worse: she was there first.  ’ ‘  you might wanna curve your crazy bitch.  ’ ‘  why, do you still love her?  ’ ‘  are you challenging me right here in my own home?  ’ ‘  of course i love you! i’ve always loved you!  ’ ‘  i didn’t fuck anyone, if that’s what you were wondering.  ’ ‘  who gives diamonds to the homeless? not i.  ’ ‘  i love you and i want to spend the rest of my life annoying the shit out of you.  ’ ‘  i’m sick and tired of fighting about the past.  ’ ‘  home is wherever you are.  ’ ‘  you are so full of shit?  ’ ‘  other than making the sweet love to me, that’s the nicest thing you could’v done.  ’ ‘  you’re right, i know everything there is to know about you.  ’ ‘  i am lucky. i’m lucky to have known you, i’m lucky to have loved you.  ’ ‘  i like you when you’re crazy.  ’ ‘  you have so much shit going on in your life right now, you don’t want to add this to the mix.  ’ ‘  thank you for letting me be the crazy one for once.  ’ ‘  merry fucking christmas. can we go home already?  ’ ‘  it’s your life. if there’s something you don’t like about it, you can change it.  ’ ‘  you need to be in the middle of a mess of your own creation, right? that’s what makes you attractive and also, impossible to live with.  ’ ‘  impossible is a very strong word.  ’ ‘  i love you, but i can’t be with you. when will you accept that?  ’

[mintyisms]

Overly Sarcastic Productions Starters:                  😈 👼  The Divine Comedy  👼 😈

~Inferno~

Sadly, this is not actually a mountain of infinite candy.

Somehow I feel that my dentist would disagree with my analysis.

Looks like you’re too lame to go to heaven.

Hey, why do I hear so much screaming?

I said welcome to hell, idiot. What part of that was unclear?

You are being a real downer, you know?

The first circle of hell isn’t really hell, either, it’s more like diet hell.

So this is the nice, comfy part of hell?

Hell is neither nice nor comfy.

Guess who gets to babysit this loser all the way to purgatory?

Oh yeah, this was so worth plotting to kill my mom.

So your wife and that bull, huh?

Of all the potential eternal punishment someone could suffer, I’d say rooming with Cleopatra and Helen of Troy forever is hands down the one I’d pick.

If you do this every time you hear a sob story we’re going to be here for seven hundred pages.

I mean. . .rain is uncomfortable.

This sounds less like a hellish punishment and more like an activity from my middle school gym class.

YOU LADIES CALL THAT PUSHING BOULDERS? MY GRANDMA PUSHES WALKERS HEAVIER THAN THOSE!

In my experience, this is how most bureaucratic processes end up.

Must be nice being alive and, you know, not on fire.

Heh, stoked. Get it? ‘Cause they’re on fire?

I just hate trees SO MUCH.

This isn’t anything like Mulan.

He’s not exactly the straightest crayon in the box, but he’s still a really swell dude.

And on your left you’ll see the blood waterfall!

At least I can finally see my own butt!

Am I the only one who finds this stunningly unfair?

I like it when their flesh falls off.

What did I tell you about the hope thing?

This snake pit is actually somehow worse than your average, run-of-the-mill snake pit.

Everyone rooming down here is provided with their own personal bubble of fire, which honestly sounds pretty cozy.

If they were so attached to their city, maybe they should have thought twice about that stupid horse.

Whatever, we never asked for mythical authenticity.

What idiot thought ruling in hell would be fun for anybody?

Hell is all about disproportionate retribution.

Just don’t think too hard about how close we are to Satan’s butthole.

~Purgatorio~

No, it’s cool, his dead girlfriend sent us.

Are we in Australia?

It’s boring, but at least it’s pretty!

Purgatory has only one rule, and it’s not don’t talk about Purgatory.

It’s not hardcore, it HURTS.

If you wanted an in-depth, symbolic analysis, you’d be over on SparkNotes right now.

Who wants to hear me read the fourteenth century equivalent of the phonebook?

In my experience, singing while climbing mountains makes the climbing more difficult, but whatever.

Purgatory isn’t all fun and games.

Sloth is purged through rigorous use of middle school gym class punishment tactics.

I’m pretty sure I haven’t eaten since we went to hell.

Now we need to walk into the fire.

There is no way I’m going to set myself on fire for your amusement.

So tell me about your suppressed affection for your mother.

Ever try Pilates?

I’m sorry, but my soul is needed elsewhere.

Come on. Let me go back to hell already!

Quit crying. This is supposed to be a place of fun.

I mean, sure, I was dead, but it’s not like you were never gonna see me again.

Clearly this was a proportionate response that wasn’t over-the-top at all.

Insert joke about jealous ex-girlfriends here.

~Paradiso~

It’s full of spirits buzzing around like ten-year-olds jacked up on pixisticks.

In conclusion: it’s dark because God said so.

It’s so crazy, you never know what it’s gonna do next!

And so the sands of time wear down on us all.

Who cares? Certainly not us!

I dunno, the cathedral’s pretty nice.

This path is so inefficient!

Even the Magic Schoolbus visited the planets in order, and they did that in a bus!

It’s so cool how this isn’t killing me instantly!

That’s not space. Space doesn’t look anything like that.

Also, the eagle is probably Jesus.

And that’s why gardens are just the best.

I don’t know what’s happening but my eyes really hurt.

I was in Eden for all of seven hours.

Man, the Bible just cannot be asked to keep its terminology straight.

There are also rainbows, because of course there are.

Are you telling me God is a reading rainbow?

My childhood just got so much more theologically significant.

[bananxjin]

Communications Book // Park Chanyeol  x Reader Soulmate!AU

Hello, reader! This is my first time writing any kpop fanfiction and it’s my first time writing a soulmate!AU, so I apologize if it’s kinda awkward! Hope you enjoy!

|| List ||

Word Count: 2,394

Synopsis: Soulmates are funny little things, aren’t they?

|| Fluff ||

☆

I don’t quite remember how I got this notebook, or where it even came from, and it seems like that’s how it is with most people - Or at least that’s what I’ve heard from my friends.

It’s a white hardback notebook, and I’ve had it since I was a child. I don’t know where it came from or why it was always on my bookshelf. I asked my parents about it, and they would just smile at me and reply, “You’ll understand one day, (Y/n).” I didn’t understand at the time, and that’s what frustrated me the most. My parents made it very clear to me that I could only keep it at home, and that I should use the notebook carefully. Being about six or seven years old at the time, I had no idea what that meant, but just decided to go along with it. For a majority of the time, I would just leave the notebook on my shelf. Had it never reached out to me, I probably would’ve never touched it.

It was early October - mere weeks before my tenth birthday. It had been storming all day and well into the night, and the storm only got worse. The thunder cracked, making it feel like the house had shook beneath me. I didn’t think a whole lot of it as storms never really bothered me. I shut off the light, preparing to go to bed when I noticed something glowing - Literally glowing on my bookshelf. The light wasn’t strong, but it was enough to catch my attention. Confused and somewhat spooked, I cautiously tiptoed to the shelf to see what was shedding the light.

It was the book.

My jaw dropped. How was a book glowing?! I wanted to run and tell my parents, but at the same time, I didn’t. Their little riddles kept repeating in my head - Everything they told me about this book being something unique… Was this what they meant?

I cautiously pulled the book out of it’s place and held it firmly in my hands. The cover was still as blank as it had always been. I turned it over and back again, trying to find some sort of off switch or perhaps something a little less exciting like a firefly; whatever the source of the light was, it needed to stop.

I sighed and turned it back to the cover. Deciding I had no other choice, I opened it up to the first page. My heart seemed to shoot up into my throat when I read the word “Help!” in giant letters. panicked, I threw the thing across the room. It hit the wall and landed in my bean bag chair. The glow was gone, but now something was written in it! I knew I’d never used the book before - I could never think of anything important enough to write in it. Sure I could’ve used it as a diary or something, but I was never really interested in keeping such a thing.

Moments later, the book emanated a small light once again. For a second, all I could do was stare at it. Occasionally the light would seem to flash a little brighter, but only for a second before returning to it’s normal intensity. I swallowed and dropped to my knees, crawling over to where it lay. I sat against my bed frame and opened it up to the first page once again. The words: “My parents are asleep and I’m really scared of thunder!” Had been written - Slightly smaller beneath the cry for help, and…. Was that permanent marker? What is this?

My breath hitched when I could actually see the words being written right before my very eyes.

“My mom always told me that if something scared me, I should write it down here, and the book would appreciate me sharing my feelings.”

I stared in awe at the sentence as the words were written a little smaller towards the end. There was no more writing on the first page so I turned to the second, watching as a second sentence was thought out.

“She told me that this book would be like one one of  my best friends, and it would be here to talk to me.”

Curious, I scrambled to grab something to write with from my bookbag so that I could test this out for myself.

A purple crayon.

It’ll have to do.

“Hi… can you see this?”

I didn’t get a response immediately, and for second, it actually made me think there was a ghost, or maybe my parents were playing some cruel prank on me.

“Yeah I can see it. Is this the book?”

“No, I’m a person. What’s your name?”

“I’m not telling you my name unless you tell me your name!”

“But I asked you first!”

“But I don’t know who you are! My mom said I shouldn’t talk to strangers!”

“But you’ll talk to a book!”

The writing stopped for a moment. I was worried I’d upset them or hit a nerve possibly.

But then they replied.

“My mom and sister call me Channie.”

I studied the name, trying to burn it into my mind.

“Is that what you want me to call you too?”

“Yes… What’s your name?”

I stopped for a second, wondering if I should actually tell him my real name or not. I decided to go with a nickname that only my parents knew me by.

“(Y/N.N)”

“(Y/N.N)? That’s a weird name.”

“Your name is a weird name!”

I replied angrily. When Channie didn’t respond, I immediately felt really bad and decided to apologize.

“That was mean, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it. You just hurt my feelings.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay. Why are you afraid of thunder?”

“It’s too loud! And it scares my kitty, it makes her run and hide downstairs.”

“I’m sorry, but the thunder can’t hurt you. You are inside of a house!”

“Maybe. Will you talk to me until the storm is gone, (y/n.n)?”

And we spent the rest of the night, writing back and forth to each other which made me really tired the next morning. My parents wanted to know why. I just told them I was sick, and I ended up getting to stay home that day.

Fast forward ten years later. Channie and I have been good friends ever since then. In high school, everyone had a required class that taught people about their soulmates and we should’ve received our communications book already. There were certain things we couldn’t share in our communications book - First and last names, phone numbers, addresses, photographs - Basically anything that we could potentially use to communicate outside of the book, and if we tried to write those things down, the page would burn immediately. Which would suck especially if that page had an ongoing conversation on it. However, our communication books have an infinite amount of pages in them! The book will only end when we finally meet our soulmate.

My teacher at the time had also advised our class about not taking the book outside of your home. “You’ll only get the one book, and you don’t get a replacement, so keep it in a safe place.” He told us. I mentioned it to Channie, but he said it was worth taking it to school since it meant he could talk to me more.

Channie actually got in trouble a couple times with his book - He would get it taken away when he’d be using it during class, and each time he’d disappear in the middle of one of our conversations, I’d always end up panicking, but he always got it back at the end of the day.

Channie and I are both in college now, and I was more wary than ever to take it to class with me. The last thing I wanted was to lose my best friend and soulmate, and since this communications book was my only connection to him, I always remained extra aware of the books presence at all times.

Even though I’d never seen this boy with my own two eyes and only knew what he’d ever told me about himself, I found myself feeling attracted to him, and I’d felt attracted to him for a few years by now - Makes sense, we are soulmates, but even though I know we’re going to end up together in the end, it still feels uncomfortable when I think about telling him how I feel. Just the thought of being rejected is enough for me to shove those emotions away and allow me to forget about them for a couple hours.

I was currently on a break in between my classes. I sat on one of the benches outside with my knees propped up against my chest so I could use them as a surface to write a note to Channie. That’s when I felt a presence looming over my shoulder.

I look over and come face to face with Byun Baekhyun, trying to read what I’m writing. I squeal and slam the book shut. “Gah! Why do you always have to do that?! Don’t you have anyone else to bother!” I demanded, standing up so that I could create some distance between us. He started giggling. “I’m sorry, I can’t help it! You always look so cute when you’re all focused, writing in your journal.” He replied, playfully poking me in the side. I huffed, “For the last time, it’s not just a journal. It’s my communications book.” I told him for the millionth time this semester. “I like writing to my soul mate.”

Baekhyun took it upon himself to stride up to me, wrapping his arm around my waist and leaning his forehead against my own, and whispered, “Well what if I was your soulmate?”

My cheeks flushed deep red and I pushed him away from me, taking the book up and holding it tightly against my chest. “I know you’re not my soulmate because you act nothing like the guy I’m writing to! Plus your name isn’t… Isn’t his name.” I stuttered the last part, feeling positive I’m probably not supposed to share his name with anyone. Baekhyun came up behind me and wrapped his arms around me.

“How do you even know you’re going to meet this guy?” He whispered against my ear, making me squirm. “Because that’s how the whole thing works, now get off me.” I said stubbornly, pushing him away once again.

“I’ve had several friends who’ve already met their soulmates, who’s to say I won’t meet mine next.” I say confidently. He smirks, “You’re wasting your time.”

I frown, “What about your soulmate, Baekhyun?” I asked him, he shrugged. “Don’t really know, wasn’t really interested. There’s so many other cute girls going to this school,” He explained, winking at me. “didn’t really wanna wait for anyone.” I rolled my eyes and sat back down, opening my book back up in my lap. “That’s so depressing. Your soulmate is like an instant best friend and lover.”

I picked my pen back up to continue my note when I realized that I was on my last page. My eyes widened.

Huh!? But it was full just moments ago, wasn’t it?!

I immediately looked back up at Baekhyun, wide eyed and a sense of dread that made me want to run for the hills.

He couldn’t possibly be my soulmate! He said he hasn’t been writing in his book, but…

Baekhyun smiled and took my book from my lap, tossing it on the bench and pulling me up by my wrist. I stumbled and fell right into his chest. “One little date wouldn’t hurt would it, (Y/N)?” He whispered, leaning his forehead against my own. I furrowed my brows and pushed at his shoulders, “No, Baekhyun! How many times do I have to tell you!” I demanded, but he wouldn’t release his hold on me.

That’s when someone grabbed him by his shoulder and forcefully yanked him back - Then he let go of me.

“The girl doesn’t want to go with you, how about you leave her alone?” The taller boy insisted. I couldn’t help but gaze at his profile. His fluffy brown hair and broad shoulders. Then it dawned on me…

Is…. Is he my soulmate?

“How about you back off, dude? Nobody asked you.”

“Maybe not, but I can tell she didn’t ask for you to bother her either.” The boy retorted.

Baekhyun scoffed and turned away. “Whatever, man.” he said in a defeated tone before sulking away from us. I watched as his back got further and further away until I noticed that the boy in front of me cleared his throat.

“Uhm, I’m really sorry about that! It just seemed like you didn’t want to be bothered, and well…” He explained rather quickly while rubbing the back of his neck. I gazed at him for a moment before smiling. “No, no! I’m glad you stepped in! Thank you!” I exclaimed. I held my hand out, “My name is (Y/N) by the way.”

“Chanyeol.” He replied, shaking my hand. His cheeks turned a bit crimson as he slowly pulled his hand away; our pointer fingers locked for a moment before I finally had my hand back.

“I hope I’m not being too forward when I ask this, but…” He began as his gazed shifted around. “My uhm… My communications book ended right before I got here, so I was wondering…”

My eyes went wide, “Channie…?”

“(Y/N.N)?”

We smiled at each other. I could help but giggle a little bit. “It’s really nice to finally meet you.” I said kind of shyly. He smirked and looked down at his feet, “It’s nice to meet you too. If you aren’t too busy right now, would you like to go get lunch?”

My heart skipped a beat, but I couldn’t be happier. I could feel my face turning red, “Sure!”

I quickly gathered my things and threw my backpack on. “Okay! You lead the way!” I said with a smile. He smiled back before taking my hand in his own. He intertwined our fingers and leaned down to press a small kiss to my cheek.

“Just so you know, you are incredibly cute.”

☆

Hope you guys liked it! Sorry for making Baekyun the semi-bad guy /)o(\ ☆ Rei

[heywritebetter]

Rules Schmules

    Rules rule, fool, so don’t be a tool, just stick to ‘em and you’ll be cool!

    I apologize for that outburst, but there’s really no way to say “rules are important” without sounding like a complete loser, so I figured I might as well go all the way, and sell it with the oblivious panache of a high school improv PSA. The reason it sounds so silly, of course, is that it’s obvious. Everyone above the age of twelve (without an encircled “A” carved into their hand with crayon) understands that structure is important. Hell, if you didn’t believe that rules were important to writing, you wouldn’t be here, you’d be out writing poetry, and making the world a worse place for literally everyone. The importance of learning the fundamentals of writing is so obvious, in fact, that it would be stupid to dedicate an entire post to it. Which is why I’m not, you idiot, you goddamn fool. Today we’re talking about the rules of your story.

    Beyond the universal rules of writing like show don’t tell, use active voice, and that using semicolons makes you a tool, every story has its own set of rules. They define not what makes for compelling storytelling, but rather the boundaries of the world you’ve created. It’s something you undoubtedly do subconsciously, but failure to maintain awareness of the rules you’ve created can lead not only to breaks in the believability of your story, but also a myriad of missed opportunities for storytelling.

    Of course, nothing in writing can be straightforward, and so rules can take many forms. First and most obviously, there are the literal, physical law of your world. Sci-fi writers tend to be good at this, since their code is pretty much just whatever the author remembers from high school physics, but inexperienced fantasy writers are often terrible about this. Look at Tolkien; while he never lays out to the reader in exact terms what wizards, elves, dwarves, etc. can do, there is always a consistency to it, and the character’s actions inform our knowledge of what the rules are. If, in the Two Towers, Gandalf cast a spell which turned a hoard of orcs into a squabbling horde of curmudgeonly emus, the audience would be left wondering why he didn’t use this on the Balrog in the previous book(or movie—it’s okay, no one’s judging). Honestly, you should probably have the bulk of your world’s rules established before you even start on your story, but if you don’t, then you have to take great care to keep note of the rules you’ve already laid out for your audience, by your character’s actions or inactions, and be sure to look out for inconsistencies in subsequent drafts. As well, if you’re borrowing from folklore or real science, take great care to note where your portrayal deviates from common interpretations of the myth. You can have your vampires sparkle in the sun or fire gallons of mayonnaise from their tear ducts when startled, just be sure to make that clear to your audience.

    Hey! You, literary writer, snickering in the back! Put away that copy of Infinite Jest you’ve never read and get over here, this shit applies to you to. While the physical rules for your world are predefined for you in more realistic fiction, rules go far deeper than that. Every culture, family, friend group, and hell, every individual person, each has their own set of rules that they have to follow. No women in the workplace, no chocolate after 10PM, no more tazing Uncle Jack whenever he talks about his stupid koi pond. Anywhere that humans go, rules are sure to follow, because to be human is to attempt to apply structure to this cacaphonic nonsense world we live in.

    Knowing these rules, any of these rules, all of these rules, is important for a number of reasons. Obviously it’s necessary for consistency and believability, yes, but it goes beyond that. For a clever writer, rules are one of the most valuable tools in creating tension in a story, whatever the genre. Broadly speaking, tension arises when rules are broken. There are only so many ways to do this within the confines of the universal rules of your culture--someone lies about something important, someone steals, someone kills--but when you bring in your own rules, the possibilities increase exponentially. Dr.Evilman unites the scattered pieces of the ancient wand of penile disintegration, Justine spills red wine on Melanie’s yacht shopping dress, someone's laces Uncle Jack’s fish feed with cyanide, the list goes on. Play on rules the audience knows that the characters don’t for irony, play on rules the characters know that the audience doesn’t for shock. Once you bring your own rules into the fold, you have so many more tools for taking your audience where you want them to go. Hell, rules can even get meta: think of the effect of a particularly long or short chapter. Or perhaps the gravity lent to a situation when your pithy narrator stops quipping during an important moment.

    Now, with all this in mind, I imagine you’re wondering how to organically communicate all of this to an audience. Well that… frankly, that deserves it’s own post. If you’re reading this archivally, I’ll provide a link to that here once it exists. It doesn’t yet though, so um... Sit tight.

    One last thing, I think writing prompts would be fun, yeah? So from now on I’m gonna drop a writing prompt at the end of each post. You better do it to, or my feelings will be hurt deeply, and you don’t want that, do you?

Writing Prompt: Uncle Jack’s stupid fish are dead, and he knows that one of you bastards did it. Easter brunch has become a police lineup, and no one’s allowed to eat until they solve this murder most foul.