#like very stream of consciousness answers some times

[anywaythewinds]

[Translation] INTERVIEW: Park Kang Hyun of The Man Who Laughs says, “Gwynplaine, who dreams of a better world, is like me”

By Park Min Hee February 8, 2020 Translated by @anywaythewinds

source

Translator’s note: This interview was conducted during the second season of The Man Who Laughs, an original production of EMK. Full disclosure that I am not a native Korean speaker, I just study it and translate for fun. Read at your own risk. If you find any mistakes please message me :) also please don't steal or quote without credit (link to this post) thank you

[some minimal notes from me are in brackets]

For the audience members that attended the premiere season of The Man Who Laughs, what do they remember? The cast was irreplaceable; even the most talented actors would have difficulty getting into its ranks. Musical production company EMK invested five years and a record 17.5 billion KRW into the production, saying, “We could not have created anything greater.” For a production of this scale, the casting of Park Hyo Shin and Suho made sense, but the appearance of Park Kang Hyun, who had barely grown out of “rookie” status, was unfamiliar and even brave. Park Kang Hyun says that while at that time it was scary, he now thinks of himself as a rising star working to become an even better storyteller. 

How do you feel about doing The Man Who Laughs again?  When it was confirmed that I would be in the second season, I definitely felt some pressure to perform better than in the premiere, but I was mostly excited to be doing it again. The order of some scenes got switched around so Gwynplaine’s journey is shown more naturally. I also had a hand in creating this work as a part of the premiere season of an original production, so I contemplated more deeply about the character’s layers. Since some time has passed, aren’t I at least one percent deeper as a person, too? From my love for Dea and my father [Ursus], to my conviction to change the world with my beliefs, I’m experiencing everything more powerfully and deeply. I thought that since it’s a musical that I’ve done before that it would be a lot easier, but it’s much more difficult both physically and emotionally. But I feel that as difficult as it is, the final product turns out a little better, too.  

The Man Who Laughs received a lot of acclaim during the premiere season - you must be a bit proud of yourself  From the beginning, I poured my soul into this show. I do the same for every show I’m in, but since it was an original production, it was much more challenging. When you’re creating something, it always ends up getting changed, and if you get a better idea it gets changed again. Perhaps because of that process, I’m even more attached to this musical - through this show, I received an award and a lot of people discovered me, so it became a really meaningful piece of work to me. 

Are there more reasons to why you felt that this show is physically and emotionally draining?  I feel it the most during the curtain call. It’s when I get to say thank you to everyone that came to see the show, but my legs shake so much that I can’t even stand straight. It shows that I’ve really poured my entire being into the show. I’ve never done another show where I’m having such a hard time during the curtain call. Of course it was already a struggle in 2018, but it wasn’t as hard as this time. I think because I know what to do now that I’m putting more of myself into it. I’m pouring my heart and soul into it but I still wonder if what I’m doing is right. Like, is it supposed to be such a struggle? But I shouldn’t feel like I’m already using up all the tricks under my belt, so it really feels like I’m crashing into the stage [to be honest, no idea what he’s trying to say here]. The other Gwynplaines also say it’s hard but I think I’m having the hardest time. 

During the premiere season, the other actors casted in the same role as you were extremely popular. Since then, as you’ve done more musicals, you’ve gained more fans and filled more seats - do you feel like you’ve proved yourself with just your skill? It was scary. I try not to feel pressured by it but it’s impossible not to. So I try to do even better, and I also hope that I can seal my place as the actor people think of when they hear about The Man Who Laughs. I’m not sure about what the ticket sales are like, but there should be more people that know who I am now, and there’s even people that watched the movie The Man Who Laughs and then came to the show. It’s cool and I’m very thankful.

It can be said that The Man Who Laughs is EMK’s representative work. It’s clear that in the art world, Korea is raising the bar for musicals. But there’s something missing in the narrative between characters. The main character is Gwynplaine - what do you think is the story that you’re telling? The one thing that is the most lacking to me is that the main theme is “The paradise of the rich is made by the hell of the poor,” but in the show you can’t actually see what that hell looks like. If the audience can see that hell then it’s easier for them to get the message, but that hell is only implied in the show. All the characters that perform inside the story are all impoverished people, but they don’t really look to be in misfortune. I try really hard to show with my eyes that I see those people and think, “Yes, we’ve lived like this until now, I have to change the way things are for them,” but it’s difficult to fully convey that since it’s implied. Given the show’s limits, all I can do is try my best. The plot development is quick, but we have to express everything within the limited amount of time. If it was a four hour long show maybe it could be explained better; if it was a movie perhaps we could efficiently transition between scenes, but I think this is also a part of the Korean musical industry’s development process. 

Was there anything that you suggested to the directing team that was put into the show? We are always communicating but the process of making something efficiently and well is not easy. I try to change stuff in scenes or in the lines, but when you actually perform a change it ends up different from what’s in your head, so I kept thinking that it really must be hard to be a director. There’s a part where Gwynplaine says this long speech after Lady Josiana comes to see Gwynplaine’s performance, and I changed the order of those lines. Gwnplaine also has this monologue before singing “I Could Change the World” when he’s expressing his conviction to change the world where he says, “Yes, I’m Gwynplaine, but I’m also Lord Clancharlie. Now I know the meaning of my fate. I got it, I can change it all!” I also changed the order for these lines so it sounded more natural. You know, actor Yang Jun Mo [Ursus] even now keeps thinking about the show even after he’s gone home. He thinks, “Today, I’m going to do this scene this way, won’t it be better if I do it this way?” and brings something new to the show every day. I’m really thankful for it and I also think it’s something I should emulate. It’s all a part of the creation process of The Man Who Laughs. 

It seems like you look more at the entire piece of work rather than just what you have to do. When I work on a musical, I usually think only about the entire musical. It’s okay if I’m not seen. If the musical’s message is properly expressed to the audience, then I don’t want to nor need to stand out. But Gwynplaine is a character that needs to stand out, since the message is communicated to the audience through my journey. It’s kind of like I’m trying to solve an impossible homework problem.

The two actors that play Josiana have different vibes. What’s different about working with each of them? Shin Young Sook pulls me along with powerful charisma, so powerful that you can’t shake off her seduction. Kim So Hyang has kind of a cute side to her since she has a small frame, but when she seduces you, she’s definitely not to be underestimated. I think that’s the biggest difference. I get seduced and I can’t break free from it. I decided that for my Gwynplaine, it’s the first time a woman has ever done something like that to him. He’s tempted by this excitement that he’s feeling for the first time, but since he’s been hidden away and separate from other people since he was young, he feels like he shouldn’t be feeling these emotions. And what he feels for Dea is a love even bigger than love, someone that’s even more precious than himself, that she could even be his entire identity as a person. A person more precious than Gwynplaine. But, in reality, I personally don’t love anything to that extent, since I have to exist to be myself. Dea’s like a unicorn in a fantasy world. I’m not a romantic person like that. Like I empathize with my friends if they’re upset, but since they’ll be okay after a while… (smiles) 

Since you grew so fast, you seem to be a role model for a lot of actors. One could say that I’m growing very fast, but I’m still in the process of learning and growing. There’s a lot still for me to do and a lot of mountains to climb, so I think I don’t quite deserve it yet. I think people that consider me their role model just don’t know better or something. But I’ll acknowledge it if they’re just wishing that they could also get the same opportunities so quickly. 

Anything interesting stories from the audition process? There’s been times where even though I feel confident going into an audition I get too nervous and get rejected, and times where I have no confidence but end up doing better than I thought and getting the role. The Man Who Laughs was like that. In May 2017, I auditioned for The Last Kiss and got to the final round. That was the first time that the EMK producers saw me. If I didn’t do that audition, it’s possible that I wouldn’t have been able to do The Man Who Laughs. I really didn’t feel confident about The Last Kiss, but even I think I did well. (smiles) Director Kim Moon Jeong must have thought, “It’s the first time I’m seeing this kid but he’s pretty good.” She’s a professor at Hanse University and I heard from my friends that she said in class, “Do you all know Park Kang Hyun? He’s pretty good.” I felt pretty proud of that. 

People say that you’re like blank drawing paper. What do you think of that?  I’ve said that I’m like that myself. I like it. It could mean that I don’t have any super special qualities, but I’ve always been that kind of person. I fit in wherever I go and don’t stick out. I personally think that I’m like running water. Those that say that about me, they’re right. That’s the kind of person I am. 

You have precise diction. Is that something you work hard on?  A performance is for the audience to watch, but at the same time you’re still having a conversation with the actor next to you. Actor Jung Sung Hwa said this to me: imagine while walking down the street someone picks a fight with you. There are bystanders that gather around you, so there’s a nuance where the one that decides who wins the argument is not the person you’re fighting with, but the bystanders. You’re speaking to the person you’re arguing with in front of you, but you also have to think that you’re speaking to everyone else that’s around you. When you have the intention to communicate precisely, and you also know precisely what you’re trying to say, then you’ll be able to communicate precisely. I also pay close attention to the Korean language’s short/long sounds, and I think I try to slow down a bit if it seems like I’m speaking a bit too fast to understand. 

Is there a role that you’ve done that you like the most?  For every role I take on, I create the character by finding the intersection between myself and the role, and I’ve never had any major struggle when doing this, but the easiest character has been Gwynplaine. He’s a free spirit and a bit mischievous. He has some sadness in him, and he also has a passion for going down the right path. Moreover, since it was the premiere of an original production and I could create this character, it was easier for me to play this character.

What does the director think of Park Kang Hyun the actor?  The director himself is great at acting - he was once an actor. He’s directed a lot of shows in Korea so I think he’s become quite Koreanized. He’s emotionally sensitive and detailed. He has us rehearse until the scene matches what he’s looking for. When I’ve rehearsed it a few times, I kind of get the scene he sees in his head. Starting from the second season, it’s been easy to carry out what the director wants. He’s older in age but he’s incredibly passionate. Sometimes he hits my head. In Korea, if someone hits your head you’d be shocked, but I guess outside of Korea it’s common to smile and hit people’s heads. (smiles) If Robert [the director] was Korean, he might not have been as easy and comfortable to work with. This season, Robert saw two shows and went back home, and he said, “Of all the shows I’ve seen so far, this one is the perfect performance. You’ve performed everything I wanted.” I was moved. He said that while hitting my head. (smiles) I feel like I can tell what he wants with just a look. My English has also gotten better thanks to him. 

Anything planned after this? Is there a role that you want to play? I think I’ll rest. I’m also thinking about what different roles I could try. I want to try Phantom [it's a bit ambiguous but I think it's likely that means ALW]. Raoul while I’m in my 20s, and Phantom in my 30s. I want to train myself. I don’t exercise at all except for my fingers. I need to improve my stamina and strength. I don’t think I’ve ever taken a proper rest. I kind of want to try TV dramas or movies, but I don’t think it’s time yet. I started out with a film so I think I want to try doing another film the most. 

Will Miraclass activities continue?  We made some organizational changes, so I think Miraclass will continue. A while ago, some fans sent a coffee truck to a The Man Who Laughs show and the Miraclass members kept making fun of the picture of me on the monitor. [I think he starts talking about his solo concert here, not sure how this part is related to the question lol] I really wanted to put on a good show for the audience members that came to see me, so if I’m able to do it again I think it’ll be fun. It was a meaningful time. While I was doing it, I thought to myself, “Park Kang Hyun has grown up a bit!” but at the same time I was like, “Is it real life that I’m having so much fun right now?” But I think my next solo concert I’m going to have to push to 10 years later. 

Self esteem is the trend. How do you take care of yourself mentally?  I work hard not to waver, when I’m extremely tired, when I’m out of it mentally, or when I’m tired but I still have to get to work. Like when you were in middle school and you really didn’t want to go to school. I think, “I wish I could disappear right now.” I’m super tired in the morning. There’s nothing worse. While I’m in a musical, I feel so tired that I want to disappear, but I think, I can’t be like this! And I break out of it and get up. In a way, it’s like I’m becoming a superhero. I feel like such a wimp when I start shivering in the winter cold, so even if I feel like my head is going to split open I take a shower with cold water. After showering, even if I go outside into the cold, steam comes from my body and I’m warm. I get stronger. Sometimes, if I ask myself questions it helps. Often when I’m contemplating something it’s just in my head, but if I say it out loud and hear it and answer myself, the solution appears clearly. 

Is there a question you asked yourself during the hardest times?  It was when I was about to graduate from university and I wasn’t doing well on my auditions. I was walking on an overpass on my way home, and I kept asking myself questions; after all I chose this career because I wanted to do it, so if I just give up because I’ve failed a few times then I’m just a weak willed person. So what am I going to do? I’m going to follow this path to the end, I remember saying. In reality there was nothing in front of me: I was failing my auditions and completely in despair, but if other people are making it, then what am I if I can’t make it too? I talked to myself like that. That’s another trait I have in common with Gwynplaine - I like imagination. And I’m actually a bit of a comedian. The rumors that I only tell dad jokes are wrong. 

Is there a belief or principle you hold with which you want to influence other people?  I’m a person that always wishes for a better world. From my present position, I think the only thing I can do is to express the message a musical holds to even just one person in the audience. So I always perform sincerely, every single show. I can’t know for sure how I’ve influenced others, but if someone came to see a show and then thought about it afterwards, then I think I’ve done my job. When I was in middle school and I prayed for the first time in church, I had nothing in particular to pray for so I just prayed for world peace. So that everyone can live peacefully. I saw a saying that was like, if everyone in the world had a pet dog then there would be no war in the world. I kind of see where they’re coming from. Dogs are so cute that you become kinder. 

Finally, how do you want to end this story?  This could be the last time you’ll be able to see Park Kang Hyun’s Gwynplaine. Come see one of my shows while my voice is younger. Perhaps everything could be resolved if Gwynplaine took a little more time to reach out to the audience when he appears. 

[whispers-whump]

Some writing advice

that I like to use when I write. None of this is meant to be taken as hard and fast rules, they’re just things I like to do/keep in mind when I’m writing and I thought maybe other people would enjoy! <3

Never say what you mean

This is an offshoot of the very common “show don’t tell” advice, which I think can be confusing in application and unhelpful for scenes where telling is actually the right move. Instead, I keep the advice to never say exactly what I mean in stories.

By using a combination of showing and telling to hint at what you really mean, you force your reader to think and figure it out on their own, which makes for a more satisfying reading experience.

You might show a character getting angry and defensive in response to genuine care and concern. You could tell the audience that the character doesn’t see/talk to their parents often. But never outright give the real meaning that the character feels unlovable because of their strained relationship with their parents and as a result they don’t know how to react to being cared for.

Your readers are smart, you don’t need to spoon feed them.

Be sparse with the important things

You know how in a lot of movies there’s that tense scene where a character is hiding from something/someone and you can only just see this person/thing chasing them through a crack in the door? You get a very small glimpse of whatever’s after the character, sometimes only shadows being visible.

Do that in your writing. Obscure the important things in scenes by overdescribing the unimportant and underdescribing the important.

You might describe the smell of a space, the type of wood the floor is made of, the sound of work boots moving slowly across the room, a flashlight in the character’s hand. And there’s a dead body, laying in a pool of blood in the far corner of the room, red soaking into the rug. Then move on, what kind of rug is it? What is the color, patterns, and type of fabric of the rug?

Don’t linger on the details of the body, give your reader’s imagination some room to work while they digest the mundane you give them.

Dialogue is there to tell your story too

There’s a lot of advice out there about how to make dialogue more realistic, which is absolutely great: read aloud to yourself, put breaks where you feel yourself take a breath, reword if you’re stuttering over your written dialogue. But sometimes, in trying to make dialogue sound more realistic, a little bit of its function is lost.

Dialogue is more than just what your characters say, dialogue should serve a purpose. It’s a part of storytelling, and it can even be a bridging part of your narration.

If you have a scene with a lot of internal conflict that is very narration-heavy, breaking it up with some spoken dialogue can be a way to give some variety to those paragraphs without moving onto a new idea yet; people talk to themselves out loud all of the time.

Dialogue is also about what your characters don’t say. This can mean the character literally doesn’t say anything, they give half-truths, give an expected answer rather than the truth (“I’m fine”), omit important information, or outright lie.

Play with syntax and sentence structure

You’ve heard this advice before probably. Short, choppy sentences and a little onomatopoeia work great for fast-paced action scenes, and longer sentences with more description help slow your pacing back down.

That’s solid advice, but what else can you play with? Syntax and sentence structure are more than just the length of a sentence.

Think about things like: repetition of words or ideas, sentence fragments, stream of consciousness writing, breaking syntax conventions, and the like. Done well, breaking some of those rules we were taught about language can be a more compelling way to deliver an emotion, theme, or idea that words just can’t convey.

Would love to hear any other tips and tricks other people like to use, so feel free to share!!!

[frickinsleepdeprived]

Ride or Die Part 1

Sanemi x Fem! Reader - Motorcycle Club AU

Word Count: 9.4K

TW: DEAD DOVE, DO NOT EAT - READ THE DAMN WARNINGS BEFORE READING P L E A S E: Mentions of violence ● school fights ● blood ● so much fucking blood ● domestic violence ● hospitals ● alcohol ● marijuana ● vaping/smoking ● reader being a stubborn bitch ● Sanemi being even more of a stubborn bitch ● so much fucking angst ● Sanemi has unpleasant memories of a lost loved one ● readers going through some shit-

CW: MINORS DNI - Reader has a wet dream and gets herself off in her sleep in Sanemi’s room (and Sanemi hopelessly watches, therefore by extension, voyeurism.)

A/N: HOLY FUCKING SHIT ITS ABOUT DAMN TIME- After promising this *checks calendar and cringes* New Years of this year and April of this year, I’m finally done with the first part of this multipart fic! No explicit smut in this part unfortunately, this is mostly about the opening dynamics between Sanemi and Reader. Smut, however, will definitely come in the next part hehehe- enjoy! I hope I didn’t disappoint with this lol

...

The moment she opened her eyes, she couldn't register anything. It was dark, darker than the abyss of her mind as her mind slowly manifested into consciousness. 

Though (Y/N)’s head was still foggy, she was able to figure out where she was. She was in a car, an SUV at that. Two women hunched over here trying to keep her bleeding at bay and her mind focused on something else. Her immediate thoughts were simple.

“Who the fuck are you?”

“Hey, can you hear me? Are you awake?” One female voice called out, it sounds like she's crying, more than likely she was worried. Another female voice scolded the other.

“Are you blind?! Of course she's awake! She's just not able to comprehend anything right now, Suma. And if she is, it's a damn miracle.” The voice, deadpan and flat, was from another woman. “Besides, it's not like she's in any position to answer questions anyway.”

“No no, ask all the questions you can. Get as much information as possible, Makio. The more the better.” Another female voice called out from the front passenger seat. Her voice soothing and calm, one could only assume she had the patience of a saint. “Tengen, love, can you make this go any faster?”

“There's a problem with that, Hinatsuru. Last time I was speeding with Kyojuro in the back after he got in a fight with Seis Lunas, I got pulled over for doing forty over the speed limit. Like, yeah, the cop was cool and all, let me off with a warning. But still, not risking it.”

That name…

That fucking name.

“Wh-what?! What the hell?! Where am I?!” (Y/N) sat up immediately. That name, Seis Lunas, wasn't something to be taken lightly. That name was the very foundation of her pain. The catalyst for her suffering and the only reason why she's in the situation she's in now. “WHERE IS HE?! WHERE'S THAT FUCKING BASTARD?!” her mind turned to one thing; fight or flight. And it looks like she chose to fight. The two women in the backseat holding her down to the seat and trying to calm her down as best as they can.

“Makio do something!” Suma cried out, struggling to keep (Y/N) from not only injuring herself more, but from trying to keep herself and her sister-wife from getting punched in the face

“HOW DO YOU EXPECT ME TO DO ANYTHING SUMA SHES FREAKING THE FUCK OUT!” Makio screamed, restraining both of the injured girl’s wrists and holding them down. (Y/N)’s tears making her feel a hint of remorse.

“Well try something!” Suma retorted, feeling an overwhelming sense of guilt as she pressed hard on (Y/N)’s thigh, causing the poor woman to yelp in pain. “Aaaaaahhhh I’m sorry-!” 

Their bickering and arguing only caused (Y/N)’s state of mind to worsen. The tears streaming out of her eyes proved that she was not only trying to keep her screams of pain at bay, but she was also terrified- no, she was mortified.

“EVERYONE SHUT THE HELL UP!” The male shouted, both of the women quieting at a moment's notice. “Alright, here's what the fuck we're doing. Makio, Suma, keep the lady's bleeding stable. Hina, start asking questions, and you,” He pointed to (Y/N) in the backseat, his voice turning calm, yet still stern as ever. “Don't worry, everything is gonna be fine. We're taking you to a hospital.” (Y/N)’s eyes widened at that. The last place she needed to be, of all places, was a damn hospital. “No, you don't get a say. No, you don't get to just fight us on this. This is happening, because it'll be hell or high water if we don't get you some help.” His tone was final, as if no one could argue with him.

Going to a hospital meant many things; healthcare, security, stability, and of course, a chance to get better in peace. But this? 

This would be anything but peaceful.

“No… no no no please-” (Y/N) protested softly. Sweat began to collect on her brow and her hands started to shake. Makio kept a hand on her forehead while Suma suppressed the bleeding.

“Whoa whoa, hey. It's okay, you're going to be fine. The doctors and nurses at Saint Tamayo are amazing, Hina would know, she works there. You've got nothing to worry about.” Makio tried to soothe her.

“No! You don't understand, if I go, he'll find me. He's got eyes everywhere, there's no way I can stay under the radar.” (Y/N) started to panic. She never went to hospitals for that reason. She was used to treating her wounds on her own, let alone fighting for her life.

“Can I ask you a personal question?” Tengen commented.

“Sure?” Her head tilted to the side as (Y/N) gave him an unsure confirmation. 

“Does this have anything to do with Seis Lunas?” The albino man asked, his maroon eyes flashing in the rear view mirror at her. The mere name alone sent her into a state of panic, but it was a silent panic. The kind where one would freeze, then look away. The one where it would make someone unsure of what to say, but their body language and expressions said it all. “Hinatsuru-”

“I'm calling Windbreaker and Ouroboros right now.” Windbreaker? Ouroboros? If these people are who (Y/N) thinks it is, then she's in for a lot more than she bargained for. “Hey, we're stepping on the gas. Seems like this girl is involved with some sort of domestic situation with the Kizuki, and it doesn't look good either… yeah,” she looked to Tengen “Step on the fucking gas, we have to get there before the Kizuki do.”

“Where to?” Tengen replied, his voice unsure and worried. (Y/N) speaking up before Hinatsuru could.

“I told you guys once, and I'll say it again, if I go to a hospital, he will find me and I will be dead!” Her voice was hoarse, the pain becoming too much to bear. One more moment in this car and she'll more than likely die from stress alone than the actual blood loss. Hinatsuru gave her a sympathetic look in the rearview mirror. “I… I get you guys are trying to help and I get that it's important I get the proper medical care but I'm fine-”

“You are anything but fine! You’re going to a goddamn hospital and that is final!” He slammed his hand against the steering wheel, picking up speed and rushing towards Saint Tamayo hospital. “Do you know what kind of condition we found you in? You were covered in sweat and vomit, you went into shock. You're not fine and you're going to the hospital. And I swear to God if you try and back out of this again, I'll personally see to it that you're restrained to the fucking gurney once we get there. Got it?”

“That's unsettling!” (Y/N) shrieked, her voice strained with tears and horror. Makio sighed and held her close, pressing a reassuring kiss to her temple, all platonic.

And that's when everything got faster, and everything turned dark.

…

A young albino man sped on his motorcycle on the highway. A determined, seemingly menacing look on his face as he rode alongside a fellow biker- a group of them, actually.

It was times like this when he was more focused than he was with his own day job. Going ninety on the highway when he knew the speed limit was sixty-five. He could easily get pulled over by one of those state troopers if he and his fellow riders aren’t careful. Yet, that doesn’t stop him, because this is personal for him.

Needless to say, he doesn’t like to hear about domestic violence. Not that he doesn’t care, because he does, deeply. But the thought of a woman being beaten by a man. He was raised better than that. 

And by God if he doesn’t do something about it now, it’ll be the end of his pride.

Skidding and drifting on the asphalt of the highway, he took an exit and slowed to a halt at the light. Finding the time to open his helmet shield and take a hit off of his vape. The strong, raspberry and pineapple scented smoke wafting in the chill of the fall night, causing him to sigh as he quickly put the cancerous device back into his pocket and closed his shield. Revving his engine, he sped off as the light turned green, making his way to Saint Tamayo with the rest of the group riding with him.

Maybe this time, he’d be able to save someone. Albeit it’s someone he doesn’t know, but at least it's a life saved… hopefully.

…

Her kicks and screams resounded at the entrance of the emergency room. Her fighting was rough, and unfair.

(Y/N) was a scrapper, a dirty one at that. Even through the blood loss and the injuries she had, she could still put up one hell of a fight despite seeing black. Not red, black.

“Dammit! You’re going to injure yourself more if you keep fighting!” Makio struggled to get her out of the SUV. Holding onto (Y/N)’s underarms as Hinatsuru and Suma took hold of her legs. Tengen’s hands gently restraining the injured woman’s wrists as they loaded her into a wheelchair.

Though, (Y/N)’s efforts proved to be vain and futile; becoming far too stressed. Nurses and doctors rushed out to see what was wrong, and upon seeing the state of her injuries, they had no choice but to take the poor soul in. (Y/N) kicked, punched, writhed and squirmed the entire time the hospital staff took her to the back. A group of motorcycles pulled up in the parking lot and walked briskly to the quartet waiting at the entrance of the emergency room.

“About damn time you showed up Windbreaker. Where the hell were you?” Tengen sighed deeply, running a hand through his silken white hair. Windbreaker took off his helmet, exposing his scarred face to the bitter chill of the night. His leather jacket is not doing much to shield him from the cold either. The rest of the riders took off their helmets as well, most of them male, but two of them female.

“Well, trafficks fucking horrendous. Not to mention, state troopers are everywhere tonight. I’m surprised that me and the rest of us didn’t get pulled over. But that's neither here nor there.” Windbreaker spoke casually, watching the taller albino and three ladies in front of him light a cigarette. “And you get onto me for vaping, hypocrite.”

“Hey, this is stressful, cut me and the ladies some damn slack.” Tengen sighed, taking a heavy drag and exhaling deeply. “How’d you even come across her anyways? Were you and Ouroboros just out riding around or something?”

“Man, we watched the poor girl crash.” A ravenette cut in, his short hair tied into a small ponytail at the dead middle of the back of his head and a mask concealing his nose and mouth. A pink haired cutie in a pair of denim short-shorts, a white crop top, a pair of riding boots, and a leather vest attached to his hip. “We don’t know where the black eye, bruised knuckles, and the cut on her thigh came from though. However, we’re thinking it’s some sort of domestic from what we all heard over the phone.” He spoke grimly, a cold and distant look in his eyes as he spoke of (Y/N), gripping his female companion tighter by the hip as he sighed.

“Well, the way she spoke of Seis Lunas earlier makes it seem like it is domestic. She was practically hollering and begging us to not take her here. Like, yeah, she acknowledged she needs the attention for her wounds, but she did mention something about how Sies will come around at some point, he’ll find her and kill her is what she said.” Makio chimed in, throwing her cigarette butt on the pavement and stomping it out. “Woman’s so stubborn that she started fighting us in the backseat, but she was too weak to get any real licks in.”

“Well, that comes as part of being involved with the Kizuki, I guess.” Windbreaker spoke with a snort, taking another drag from his vape as a few of the other riders went into the waiting room of the ER. “But regardless, the priority here is this chick and what the hell happened to her. I’m betting she has a concussion too, she wasn’t really smart with the way she was riding earlier. No helmet, no protective gear.”

“Maybe she was in a rush?” The pink haired girl spoke up, “I mean, if it's a domestic like we’re suspecting, then chances are she was just trying to get away from her aggressor quickly regardless of any implicated consequences.” The men nodded in agreement, they had to admit, despite her being a bit of a bubbly, happy-go-lucky girl, she’s got her wits about her. “Not to mention, no one would ride like that if it wasn’t serious.”

“That much is true… anyways, we should probably head in with the rest. I’m sure they’re getting the rundown on her injuries right now.” Windbreaker spoke up, watching the others put out their cigarettes and hide away their vapes. Some of them had flasks, making him shake his head in disapproval.

Maybe this time he can save the poor soul he found on the side of the road. But from the looks of it right now, (Y/N) won’t be recovering anytime soon.

After all, extensive injuries like that don’t just heal overnight.

…

About a week had passed and (Y/N) was, arguably, in worse shape than she was before. Eye still blue and black- slowly turning yellow, her scars stitched up and wrapped heavily. A few broken ribs and a concussion, but expected to make a full recovery. Still and unconscious in an ICU room, Windbreaker stood by her bedside, and not once did he want to leave. Doctor or nurse came in to check on (Y/N)? He was right in the corner watching silently. Anytime anyone else was in the room, he made sure he was there so that way nothing would go south- and god forbid anything happen, lest someone wanted to face the lilac eyed man’s wrath.

(Y/N), on the other hand, was oblivious to the man’s presence. When she came to, she gave him a look of confusion. “Wh- who?-” she was cut short by his quick interjection.

“Eh, just the guy that saved your life. You’re lucky I caught you in time, well, me and the others did.” The albino spoke softly, yet something in his voice sounded stern. “You’re also lucky you didn’t die.”

“Well excuse me macho, but I didn’t need saving.” (Y/N)’s curt response stirred a slight annoyance in him, though, he couldn’t help but be strangely amused at her sharp tongue and cold words. “If anything, he’s-” once again, (Y/N) was cut off.

“He’s gonna find you and he’s gonna kill you? Yeah, I heard that whole rant on the phone sweetcheeks.”

“...Sweetcheeks?” The disdain in her voice was palpable, dripping with scorn and offense, yet she couldn’t help but blush at the thought of being called such an endearing name. Yet she knew such sweet words could be laced with the most bitter of intentions. “I- I’m not sweet, dammit!”

“Well, maybe not sweet, but definitely helpless, at least for the moment.” He spoke candidly, crossing his arms and leaning back in the chair by the woman’s bedside. “Your bikes totaled too, I’m not sure if it can be salvaged either.”

“Goddammit- okay, who are you? Name, please, I can’t be talking to strangers right now, my psyche can’t handle it.” (Y/N)’s voice sounded hoarse, likely from the screaming she was doing last night. The man sighed, running his hand through the mess of silver locks on his head, he was losing himself in his mind. Plagued with thoughts the last time something like this happened… the last time he couldn’t save someone like her.

“Name’s Windbreaker.” he spoke with finality, “I ride with the hashira, as if the patches on my vest weren’t a dead give away already. You crashed last night, like I said, your bikes totaled and more than likely scrap at this point. You’re extremely lucky to be alive, but you’re also kinda dumb for driving the way you were.” (Y/N) rolled her eyes at his comments, scoffing slightly as she rubbed her sore eyes, wincing slightly when she touched them.

“Well, Windbreaker, when you’re trying to get away from an abusive ex like Seis Lunas, you don’t have a choice but to ride fast. Whether I ended up dead or alive is a different story.” The last of her strength was used to hoist herself up, but only to fail when she tried with all her might to use her upper body strength. Flopping back onto the mattress, her head hitting the pillow, letting out a defeated sigh as she looked over at him. She drank in the sight of him, her eyes narrowing in recognition, but she wouldn’t dare say anything about it, at least not yet. The real question is why the hell he looked so familiar. “Anyways, why did you decide to “save” my sorry ass?”

“Because I was raised better than the scum of the earth that decided to do this to you. Besides, why the hell would I just let you die anyways? That’s blatant negligence on my end.” He crossed his arms, sighing in exasperation. Did she really think she wasn’t worth saving, that she wasn’t worth anyone’s time? It only made him wonder how much Seis Lunas had broken her down and rebuilt her in his image. “Did I mention that you’re also quite the fighter?”

“Yeah, you kinda have to be in this cruel world.” (Y/N) sighed as she spoke, looking at the IV that’s lodged into her hand. “As soon as I get out of here, it's back into hiding.”

“Hiding? Where?” His eyebrows raised in intrigue, but his concern outweighed his curiosity, crossing his arms and leaning against the wall. “This town isn’t exactly big, you know.” He sighed softly, tilting his head.

“Wherever the hell is farthest from town. Might go two counties over if I’m honest.” She spoke with yet another resigned sigh. It was as if she was giving into whatever her circumstances threw at her. Which honestly, was quite sad in his eyes.

“Well, yeah, but… don’t you have a place to go? Family? Friends?” His voice grew solemn.

“Family lives out of state, as far as friends go, I have none of them. Seis asserted his “dominance” and drove all of them away. Now I’m just out of touch with all of them.” This… this hurt Windbreaker, hard. It was like someone put him in her place. At this rate, he hurt for her. 

He might just bleed for her.

…

Weeks followed, then about a month and a half. After (Y/N) had been discharged from the hospital and started physical therapy, he hadn’t heard anything from her since. With every passing night, the bitter chill seemed to get even colder as Windbreaker thought about her. He would stay up at night, haunted by the things she told him about Seis Lunas.

“Anyways, why did you decide to “save” my sorry ass?”

That one stung the most, if anything, it tore his heart in two. And though he probably shouldn’t be thinking about her, because she was only saved out of what he felt was obligation, he couldn’t help it. After all, a woman’s safety, to him, was probably the most precious thing he keeps close to himself. But a snap of someone’s fingers alerted his senses elsewhere. A certain masked ravenette staring down at him with cold eyes.

“You’re thinking about her again.” He spoke, his eyebrow raised as he stood in the doorway of the silverette’s room within the confines of the Hashira clubhouse. With a heavy sigh, Ouroboros leaned on the doorframe of Windbreaker's room. “Let her go, man, she likely doesn't want to see any of us again. I mean, unless you want to be a creep and go find her.”

“It's not being a creep if it's a welfare check. I know you'd do the same for L'Amour if she was in that girl's position.” Windbreaker sighed, sitting up shirtless from where he was laying on his bed. Picking up a black muscle shirt and slipping it on. “Where are we meeting for church?”

“Dive bar downtown, it's usually pretty empty on Sundays so everything we're gonna talk about should be safe and sound.” The ravenette took his hair down to re-tie it. “And after all is said and done, I'm getting L'Amour to cut my hair.” Ouroboros sighed and crossed his arms, one gold eye and the other blue looking at Windbreakers lilac ones. “If you happen to come across that girl, though, offer the clubhouse to her or something. I'm sure Mariposa wouldn't mind feeding her or anything.”

“She likely needs it, god knows where she is now.” The silverette rubbed the sleep from his eyes, putting on a pair of riding pants. “Matter of fact, I think I might go out now. Do a scan throughout town and see if I can find her.”

“You're really hellbent over this, aren't you? Isn't this what happened with-” Ouroboros was cut off by Windbreakers cold stare. “Nevermind… anyways, church is at seven at the dive bar downtown, don't be late.'' With that, Ouroboros walked out. Not a care in the ravenettes eyes as his footsteps thundered on the carpeted floor of the clubhouse. Windbreaker sighed deeply, setting out to ride around town for the girl he saved a few weeks back.

But he came up empty.

…

Stepping into the establishment, clad in a pair of dark jeans and an equally dark shirt with a pair of sunglasses, (Y/N) hoped no one would recognize her.

Many clubs, including the Kizuki and the Hashira, come to this particular bar for church. (Y/N) has always been to these meetings, but never allowed a chance to voice anything thanks to the Kizuki being a one-percenter club. Always left in the background, or attached to Seis Lunas’ hip with a drink in hand. (Y/N)’s car keys attached to one of her belt loops as she sat on a stool at the bar counter. The doctor told her not to drink, but it was her only hope at forgetting that horrible and damn near fatal night.

Part of her, however, winced as the bartender poured the amber brown, poisonous liquid into a glass with whiskey stones. Yet the other part was screaming “DRINK DRINK DRINK DRINK DRINK-” As the young woman brought the class to her lips, a bitter euphoria overwhelmed her senses. The grainy, caramel scent comforted her mind as she downed the whole glass in one singular swig, not a damn given about the consequences. Over in the left of her peripheral vision stood the hashira motorcycle club. Perhaps they were having church, or maybe they all decided to get out of the clubhouse for an evening. Either way, (Y/N) kept her head low, making sure it wasn’t obvious that she may or may not be eavesdropping, even if it were a breach of privacy.

“Come on man, get over her. She’s likely out of the hospital and doing better. Besides, she’s probably far out of town anyways.” Tengen patted Windbreaker on the back, passing him a pint of whatever draft beer was in the glass. The silverette shook his head and pushed the glass away. “Still don’t drink? Man, you’re twenty-one goddamn years old! Live a little!”

“You know me, I don’t drink, and I won’t drink until Genya’s out of high school.” Windbreaker sighed, his silver hair unruly and a mess from the ride around town. Though, Tengen did have a point; he’s a grown man, what’s stopping him from drinking? Besides, his younger brother is old enough to take care of himself. But then he remembered what his brother had been through, and that was enough to make the lilac eyed man turn down alcohol, regardless of the occasion.

It was like that for three hours; three hours of Windbreaker turning down drinks and of (Y/N) actively avoiding the temptation to turn her gaze to the group of bikers. Of course, she couldn’t ignore the fact that she had been sipping on her third drink for a while now, lost deep in thought of where to go from here, until she got a call. “Hello? Yes, this is her… I’m sorry? Ah, I see, I’m on my way.” Stepping down from the barstool, (Y/N) quickly makes her way out of the bar, her movements quick and fluid- amid the pain of her injuries. It seems like someone was following her out, yet she paid no mind. Slipping into her car, she speeds off towards Kimetsu High, where she’s supposed to pick up two troublemakers that got into a fight. Of course she had to be the one the school called, Jim Jones was too neglectful to even do anything. Reyes was too busy- as was Seis Lunas. Spinjutsu, well, Spinjutsu just doesn’t want anything to do with that. So it’s up to (Y/N) to make sure the bullshit gets settled.

Only God knows what kind of trouble they’ve caused this time.

…

“I’m sorry you did what?!” The two kids in front of her; a girl with long platinum, green tipped hair and caked makeup and a boy with a scrawny, lean build, rolled their eyes and sighed deeply. “How many damn times do I have to tell you guys?! Stop. Getting. Into. Fights! You will be suspended or expelled, or at worst, arrested!” (Y/N) groaned at the thought, rubbing her sore eyes and letting out an exasperated sigh. “Where are the kids you beat up? And don’t tell me they’re in the nurse's office.” The girl had a guilty look on her face. “Isis, what the fuck did you guys do?”

“Well, we had to teach them a lesson somehow.” The boy spoke up, crossing his arms and leaning back on the chair, as if all of this was just normal. “And hell yeah, they’re in the nurse's office, and I bet that those hashira bastards are on their way to come pick them up now.” He had an almost proud look on his face, as did his female companion. The two siblings had always found a way to get themselves into trouble, whether it be minor or major things. They’ve always been troublemakers, even before (Y/N) came around.

A distinct voice came in through the door of the front office; male, gruff, and definitely pissed off. (Y/N) looked up from the two to face who it was, lo and behold it was Windbreaker. “Yes, I’m Genya Shinazugawa’s older brother. Now where is he?” He was practically interrogating the front desk clerk, who basically had no answers to his questions, and that only pissed him off more.

“The nurses office. I’m talking with the assailants right now, actually. Also, nice to see you again, I guess.” (Y/N) spoke up, her voice tired and frustrated, just like his. Windbreaker looked up at her, making a beeline in her direction. The look of rage in his eyes was palpable, but she knew it wasn’t for her. “Look, I know that this is unexpected, but I’ve got this.”

“Oh no, no no no. Your siblings or whatever the hell those two are, they’re gonna pay. They’re gonna pay double. Because no one, and I mean no one lays a damn finger on my brother.” He spoke sternly. “And by God if I have anything to say about it, I’d say lock those two the hell up if they’re not going to alternative school.” (Y/N) sighed deeply, pinching the bridge of her nose. This situation, on top of her injuries and meeting Windbreaker in unforeseen circumstances, was too much.

“I… I understand that. Believe me, if they were my blood siblings, I’d definitely make a decision on their behalf. But unfortunately, I’m not, so there’s very little that I could do legally. Rest assured though, I have all of this under control.” She winced at the pain in her black eye, a headache looming in her skull. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to talk to the principal and see what the hell those two will be going through as far as a punishment goes.” (Y/N) stepped into the principal’s office, shutting the door behind her and leaving the silverette out in the lobby. 

The conversation didn’t last long, it was only a matter of time before (Y/N) learned that the two siblings wouldn’t be receiving a punishment at all, considering this was the first incident of the year. With a frustrated sigh, she snapped her fingers at the two siblings and motioned for them to follow her. But before she left, she passed Windbreaker a piece of paper. “If these two assholes cause you any other issues, call me.”

Windbreaker stared at the piece of paper and sighed deeply, nodding solemnly. “Will do, thanks.” He looked down at the contact information. “(Y/N) (L/N): (***) ***-****”

He would make sure to remember this.

…

It had been a while since that encounter, (Y/N) would receive calls here and there from Windbreaker, who’s contact name came up as “Sanemi”. She had assumed that was his real name, as if the name “Windbreaker” wasn’t enough evidence to it being an alias. “Look, all I’m saying is that Isis and Osiris are just… troubled. But that’s still no excuse for what they’ve done. And what's more, I’m not even their legal guardian, Jim Jones is.” Sanemi, on the other end, let out a scoff.

“Well, that explains a lot. He just lets those kids just run around and do whatever?” he asked, scrunching his face up in confusion. “Moreover, why the hell does Jim Jones of all people have custody of two teens anyways? That guy’s an internet cult leader and everyone knows it.”

“Alleged cult leader, but I have my suspicions also. No one really knows how he got custody of those two in the first place, but that’s neither here nor there right now. Where are you anyways? I hear something in the background.” (Y/N) spoke up, which caught Sanemi off guard, why is she so interested in him all of a sudden?

“Oh, uh, I’m at the hashira clubhouse. One of the members wanted me to offer it to you at the hospital once you got out. But you kinda went off the grid for a while afterwards, so I never got the chance. Where are you though? You sound like you’re outside or something.” He asked softly, concern lacing his voice despite not knowing her well enough to truly have the right to be truly worried.

“... weeeeellllllllll-” her voice trailed off, awkward and nervous before she was cut off by the silverette.

“Location, now.” He demanded, his voice stern and cold.

“And if I don’t?” (Y/N) scoffed, not taking him seriously.

“I’ll scour this entire town looking for you.” Sanemi concluded.

“I’d love to see you try.” She spoke confidently, as if challenging him to even try to get near her. She hung up, and just to humor him, gave him her location. There's no way he’d actually show up, right? “Not to mention, that's an awfully mighty claim for someone that barely knows me. What makes you think I’d go to someone else’s house when I barely know them?” Sanemi scoffed on the other end of the phone. 

“Well, for one, rude. Two, I don’t have a house, at least not yet, working on that.” He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Now, will you please drop your damn location so I don’t have a heart attack?” (Y/N) groaned softly at that… something about that noise roused something within Sanemi. It was wrong, so devastatingly wrong, he barely knows her. Why is he feeling so warm inside at the prospect of bringing her back with him?

“What has you so concerned, Sanemi? You only brought me to the hospital once, besides, it’s not like we’re dating. Unless I need to clarify that for you?” The woman’s tone was annoyed, and definitely not the warmest. “Look, I appreciate your concern and interest in me, that is if there’s any sort of interest or concern in the first place, but I’m okay-”

“You’re not fine, you hear me?! You’re still injured, you’re still being hunted by the Kizuki!” Sanemi snapped, sighing deeply as he threw on some sweatpants and a shirt. “Look, I’m not gonna let you be out there alone. So do me a favor, drop me your location so I can at least get you somewhere safer. You don’t have to come anywhere with me if you don’t want to. I get that I don’t know you very well and that's fine, but at least let me make sure you’re okay. Please?” There was something about his voice… it was desperate, that much (Y/N) could tell. But there was a hint of something else.

Was… was that longing she heard?

“I- you know what, fine. But don’t expect anything to come of this, because that’d be entirely by coincidence.” She sent him her precise location, which was a park on the other side of town.

“Are… are you fucking kidding me- That's it. Stay put, stay on the phone, I’m on my way. If one of those Kizuki fucks comes around then start running towards downtown, got it?” His voice was stern, a little too stern. It made (Y/N) roll her eyes again, but hearing him so riled up opened up her mind to other things also. She knew they were wrong, but dammit if it wasn't enticing.

“Sanemi I-” Her protests were in vain as Sanemi’s voice cut through.

“Got it?” The sound of a door slamming and a car starting made (Y/N)’s heart drop. His voice was demanding- almost too demanding as she heard his car speeding out of a parking lot. Of course there was no convincing this man otherwise, he’s far too stubborn, far too set in his ways to listen to anyone else’s opinion.

“... Alright, just uh, get here quick, I guess.” Her voice was unsure, but her mind was already seemingly made up, not by her own choice of course. With the way Sanemi spoke to her, it’s almost as if he cares. It’s eerily similar to the way Seis Lunas would talk to her, but this is different somehow. It has no malicious intention, at least she hopes it wouldn’t. He’s definitely hard to read, well, that's a lie. His intentions are obvious- painfully obvious. But (Y/N) just can’t shake the feeling of an ulterior motive, especially after everything Seis Lunas put her through; the rat bastard broke her, that much was evident. With a heavy sigh, she sits on a curb and sparks a blunt, inhaling on the Lord’s lettuce and exhaling in the same manner it went in- deep, sharp, and heavenly. The sangria flavored cigarillo wrap made it a little easier to smoke, though she had it in the back of her mind that she probably should’ve gotten a real tobacco leaf to smoke out of; but that's neither here nor there right now. 

As she awaited the hot tempered silverette’s arrival, she contemplated her next move. Would she stay in town? Would she leave and never come back? Where would she go, knowing that her family is far away and friends were out of touch because of her association with the Kizuki, even if it is now former? (Y/N)’s mind raced, her heart heavy as the stress became too much to bear. The heartstrings were pulling, the tears pooled in her eyes- which she quickly wiped away. Reminding herself that she's a grown woman and capable of handling herself. She didn’t need a man, despite how she had to accustom herself to the lifestyle synonymous to that of a housewife. A degrading thought, really, because she never figured she’d find herself at the mercy of someone who is pretty much a stranger, and a member of a rival motorcycle club to boot. “How could I have let myself fall so hard from where I was?” was her immediate thought. Though even her thoughts didn’t quench the sweltering fire that were the burning questions of her uncertain future.

Sanemi, on the other hand, was occupied with other thoughts. Why was (Y/N) out in a park on the other side of town at one o’clock in the morning? What happened to the beat up pontiac grand prix she owned; the one that had a missing front bumper and chipped dark blue paint? Whatever happened the night she was taken to the hospital by Tengen and his wives? He remembered her mentioning something about Seis Lunas being her ex, but that was the extent of it. But the mention of Seis Lunas raised even more questions in his mind. Why was (Y/N) even affiliated with the brutal one-percenter club in the first place? How did she come to meet Seis Lunas? Why was she Osiris and Isis’ emergency contact at the very same school that Genya, along with other Hashira prospects, go to?

As both of their minds were caught up in a slew of questions and thoughts, Sanemi had reached her location faster than he had anticipated. He hung up the call and got out of the black sedan he drives, looking around and spotting (Y/N) almost immediately. Her condition seemingly improved; the black eye was nearly gone and she didn’t look as lethargic as before. Though, there was no mistaking the fatigue in her body language as he stepped closer and closer to her. His movements slow, cautious, and weary as if he were moving towards an injured dog. “Hey…” those were his immediate words. She looked up at him, an involuntary breath of relief escaping her lungs as she took another hit off of the blunt. He sat beside her on the curb, lighting his own cigarette and taking a drag. “You alright?” She looked over at him, trying her hardest to keep her tears at bay, but to no avail, seeing as how they just couldn’t stop falling.

“Depends on what your definition of “okay” is.” (Y/N) spoke softly, her sigh heavy and tired as she took another hit from the blunt. “Car broke down, and I've been walking ever since. Just kinda left it there, it was a piece of shit anyways. Payments were overdue, tags were no good and it had no insurance. If  anything if I was caught riding around in it I’d get arrested, maybe it’s a blessing in disguise or something.” Was she ranting now? She’s never done that before, especially not in front of Sanemi. Like, yeah, they’ve had their fair share of long talks over the phone, but never about personal struggles. She was far too prideful to want to admit she needed help, so why do so now? Sanemi sighed and nodded in acknowledgement, taking another drag off of his cigarette and running a hand through his hair.

“I getcha, it's hard to figure out your priorities, especially in a situation like yours. Hell, maybe it really was a blessing in disguise, considering the Kizuki would know what your car looks like. I’d have definitely ditched the car if it meant your safety.” He took another drag from his cigarette and looked at her. “But I guess you’re not really one to worry about things like that huh?” (Y/N) looked his way with a sneer.

“Really? You’re seriously asking me that? My bike is totaled, my car is gone, all of my shit is at the Kizuki hideout. I doubt Seis Lunas would give it back to me anyways, hell, he probably already burned most of my clothes and broke a lot of my valuables.” She shook her head and took another heavy drag from the blunt. “I don’t even think he wants to see me anyways.” Tears filled her eyes, but she was quick to blink them away. Though this didn’t escape Sanemi, seeing the tears in her eyes broke his own heart. He knew it was wrong, he shouldn’t feel something for her, but he couldn’t help it.

What’s more, (Y/N) feels something for him also, and it’s definitely not what she’s supposed to be feeling. It’s not contempt she feels, but pure and utter infatuation for someone who’s basically a stranger. They barely know each other, hell, they don’t even know the most basic information about one another. They don’t know each other's hopes, dreams, aspirations- not even what the other person’s favorite food is. Why the hell are they so hellbent on feeling this way? This isn’t supposed to be happening, this shouldn’t be happening. But (Y/N) knew that maybe it was just the overwhelming wave of emotions clouding her judgment; that it was simply the blunt she was smoking that was altering her state of mind. But weed doesn’t affect her like that, at least not when it comes to her self control. Sanemi could smell the whiskey on her breath, the weed in her blunt, the pure and utter despair she was experiencing.

He had enough of this, enough of watching her suffer. Without even thinking, he put out his cigarette and took her hand, gently guiding her up into a standing position and to his car. What the hell was he doing, taking a stranger into his car and offering help when he knew she’d probably deny it in the first place? What about (Y/N) was so enticing to him that he just had to do this? “Your hands are freezing, what the hell are you doing out here without the proper clothes? This thin hoodie of yours isn’t going to keep you warm.” He spoke sternly as he took off his jacket and wrapped it around his shoulders, damning the consequences of his own actions in his mind. “At this rate, you’ll catch pneumonia if you’re not careful.”

“Then let me get sick.” (Y/N) spat, a defiant huff escaping her lungs as she sniffled from the bitter chill of the otherwise clear night. Her breath came out in the form of white mist, visible in the blue-violet glow of the street lamps. “Why do you care so much about me? You’re a stranger! Why do you want to help me when you know I’m bound to suffer anyway?” Once again, Sanemi’s heart shattered, feeling his heartstrings pull as he wrapped her up in his arms, trying his hardest to keep her warm. “S-stop, just… don’t, please.” Her pleas fell on deaf ears; gone were the worries of her well being. Sanemi would make sure she was safe, no matter what it took. If the other hashiras didn’t agree, or even if the Kizuki went after him, he didn’t care. “Sanemi enough-”

“Stop. Stop talking, just shut up.” He looked her in the eyes, nothing but care and tenderness within his lilac gaze. “Do you not realize how fucked up your situation is, (Y/N)?” Sanemi spoke softly, wiping errant tears from her cold cheeks. Her skin felt like ice under his calloused, warm hands. “I met someone like you before, she… she meant the world to me, but… that's a story for another time. For now, let's just get your shit from the Kizuki. You’re not staying outside tonight, or any other night for that matter. Alright?” Her eyes narrowed, what the hell was he talking about?

“Who is this we? If you step foot near the Kizuki they’re going to kill you. I’ve seen it happen before, they don’t care who comes around, friend or not. If they don’t want you there, they’re going to hurt you.” Why was she even giving him this warning in the first place? It’s not like she cared about what happened to him or anything, he's a hashira. She’s supposed to hate him, to want nothing to do with him, to loathe him with her entire being because she was supposed to want nothing to do with him. But his touch felt warm, so comforting and so warm that she couldn’t help but lean into his scarred hands that rested on the skin of her face. His gaze was kind and caring, making a foreign feeling swell in her heart and bubble in her gut. It was never supposed to be this way. Sanemi shook his head slowly, a soft sigh escaping him as he thought about the girl in front of him now,  how she’s so eerily similar to the one he knew as Flora, at least, that's what her road name was. “Sanemi answer me!” (Y/N)’s voice brought him back to reality, his eyes narrowing as he regarded her. She’s stubborn, but so was he, and he was determined to help her regardless of whatever protest he gave.

“The “we” is us, (Y/N). I’m not letting you face your ex alone. Not after what he did to you.” Sanemi’s hands ran through her hair, his touch gentle, a far cry from his usually harsh demeanor. “You were put into the ICU for weeks, doll. Who’s to say Seis wouldn’t do it again? If anything, the backup from me should be enough, and if it’s not, you’ve got a whole slew of people ready to back you up at a moment's notice.” Doll… (Y/N)’s never been called that before. “I’ll be goddamned if something like that happens to you again. I… I can’t stand to see you like that again, or like the mess you are right now. So for the love of Christ, stop being so fucking stubborn and just let me help you.” He’s conflicted now, he’s not supposed to be pining over her like this, yet, here he is. Fawning over a woman he barely knows and she’s obviously not having it- or so he thinks.

“Sanemi be honest with me are you just looking for a fuck?” (Y/N) spoke softly, her gaze meeting his in an almost intimidating manner. Her vulnerability causes her to feel weak, and that's the last thing she wants right now. After all, being weak is what almost got her killed in the first place.

“You honestly think I’m that shallow?” Sanemi scoffed, sounding almost offended as he opened his passenger side door as it started to snow. Getting in on the passenger side, he slipped the key into the ignition and started the car. “But if you really need to know, no, I’m not looking for a fuck. That's the last thing I’d look for, especially in someone who’s in a situation like yours. You’re still recovering from your injuries, don’t act like I didn’t see you limping.” He put the car in drive and headed further into town, towards the area of the Kizuki hideout. (Y/N) felt her heart drop at the thought of it, knowing that she’d have to go in there and get her stuff, even if it was just the bare minimum of her clothes. She quickly hopped on the phone and made a call.

“Do you honestly think it’s a good idea to make a call?” Sanemi questioned, raising a curious eyebrow, but his eyes gave away concern. (Y/N) looked at him with a deadpan expression, a deep sigh escaping her as she rolled her eyes.

“Would you rather die? Because that’s what's gonna happen to the both of us if I don’t call ahead of time. It’s for both of our sakes.” She redirected her attention to the conversation on the phone. “Hey, you burn my shit or is it still in your room?.. Excuse me? Donated? I mean, did you at least keep my underwear and stuff?.. You’re fucking kidding me- alright, fine… yeah, yeah, whatever… don’t get smart with me, dipshit… hey, last time I checked, I wasn’t the one that swung first, and I certainly wasn’t the one that left a gash in my leg- shut your goddamn trap, Seis- you know what, fuck you.” Sanemi’s eyes widened at her harsh language, watching her not only hang up, but completely turn off her phone also startled him as well. He let out a low whistle, cringing at the mere thought of what was said on the other line, that is, until (Y/N) spoke up again. “Just take me to the next town over, I’ll manage.”

“No.” It was an immediate response from him, as if it were easy for him to say such a thing. As if (Y/N) meant something to him, and deep down, he knew it was just utterly and horribly wrong. “I can't let you go off the grid, not after what you said to the vice president of the Kizuki. If you're with the hashira, it'll be like having bodyguards-” He was cut off yet again by her protests.

“I don't need bodyguards, Sanemi! I just need time! Time away from this godforsaken, dusty old town where there is nothing for me here!” Sanemi slammed his hand on the steering wheel, a frustrated groan ripping from his throat, pulling over on a deserted road and putting the car in park.

“Goddammit (Y/N) what the hell do you not get?! Going off the grid isn't doing you any favors! It's just a show of cowardice! That you're letting Seis, your fucking ex boyfriend win! If you go, he wins, you understand me?!” His voice raised, but never harsh, Sanemi tried his hardest to make his point known. There was a beat of silence as Sanemi collected himself. Clearing his throat with a sigh, he spoke up again. “I will not sit here and watch you destroy yourself. You know I had to pose as your boyfriend for them to give me visitation rights? You know that I made sure you were getting the proper medicine in that hospital? You may not think I care but the reality is that I do! I WON'T JUST FUCKING STAND BY AND WATCH YOU SUFFER ALONE!-” He was cut off yet again by one of (Y/N)’s frustrated groans.

“Just take me to wherever we're going then, since you won't give me a choice!” (Y/N) snapped, her arms crossed as defiant, solemn tears ran down her face. Her shivering form igniting a fire within Sanemi, making him swear a silent vow to himself.

He would keep her safe, no matter what.

Without another word, he started the car once more, and sped off to the hashira clubhouse. Blasting the speakers with rock and rap. Not a word exchanged as they drove fast and dangerous.

…

As she sleeps in Sanemi’s room, his eyes lock with Ouroboros��. “You… you actually brought her back?” The shorter man spoke incredulously, hitting his vape like it was the one thing keeping him grounded to reality. Sanemi sighed, his clothes snow-soaked and eyes tired. “Man, you're either insane, or you just lucked out.”

Sanemi scoffed, addressing his jet black haired companion by his government name. “She fell asleep in the car, Obanai. She was exhausted, god knows the last time she even slept properly.” A sigh escaped the silverette, tired and anxious, he took a hit from his own vape. “I don't even know when the last time she ate was. I mean, look at her, she's practically skin and bones.”

“Skin and bones is an exaggeration, Sanemi. She's not emaciated, she's just underweight. I'll see if we have anything, but try to fill her up with fluids for now.” Obanai deadpanned, earning himself a glare from his lilac eyed friend.

“Fluids? Really? We'll start her off small, see where it goes. If anything we can always have Mariposa or Hinasturu make sure she's okay.” Sanemi sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose while Obanai snorted with contempt.

“Does she even have the basics? Clothes? A place of her own? Hell, does she even have a job?” The ravenette looked at (Y/N) with a scrutinizing, appraising stare, hitting his vape once more as Sanemi shot him another cold glare.

“She's working on it, dude, don't push it so hard. The more you do the more pissed off she's gonna get.” The silverette whispered to his companion. Of course she was working on it, or at least, he hoped she was working on it.

“She's asleep, she's not going to hear us-” Obanai was cut off by a female voice, one that resounded from behind them, not from the bed where (Y/N) laid asleep.

“Can a girl get any sleep around here without having to listen to yalls bitching and arguing?” They looked behind them, finding a pink ane green haired, pale skinned, green eyed girl. One who looked like she had just woken up- and was clearly irritated. “It's two in the morning, get some goddamn sleep. And you,” she pointed to Obanai, “why are you still awake? I thought you said you'd come to bed an hour ago?” Her voice turned soft, and so did Obanai's gaze. The ravenette wrapped his arms around her waist, pulling her closer and pressing a kiss to her forehead.

“I'll be in bed soon, love, just go back to sleep. I'll be there in a moment, okay?” His whispers soothed the pinkette, who nodded softly and went back to her own room with tentative, quiet steps. Sanemi scoffed with a smirk, taking another hit from his vape.

“You might wanna do that now before your wife gets pissed again.” Obanai casted him a sharp look, heterochromic eyes meeting Sanemi’s lilac ones.

“She's not my wife.” Obanai spat.

“Well, you guys certainly act like a married couple, just saying.” Sanemi snickered, earning a groan from the jet black haired man. “But anyways, go sleep with Mitsuri. I got this from here.” With that, Obanai simply nodded and walked back to his own room to be with his lover. Sanemi looked at (Y/N), who was still sleeping, walking over to her and laying next to her. “I… I hope you're okay.” He whispered softly, memories of the former flower hashira enraptured his mind, flooding his heart with waves of melancholy and bitterness.

But this time it would be different, this time it would be-

“H-hah…” the soft gasp cuts through the air like a cleaver. Sanemi hoped it came from the other room where Obanai and Mitsuri resided. Or maybe that insufferable long haired ravenette's room- Giyuu's room, where he stayed with Shinobu. “Ah…!” Yeah, nope, that's coming from his room. Right where the wounded woman laid in his bed asleep, the slight shuffling of her body under the covers indicated some sort of dream. Whether it was a nightmare or otherwise, Sanemi couldn't tell. However, (Y/N)’s blissed out expression gave evidence to all signs pointing to anything but a nightmare.

He knew better than to disturb her, taking the cold, carpeted floor where concrete resided underneath. Using a bunched up hoodie as a pillow, he knew he had to get some sleep. Yet all he heard was the sounds of her voice; breathless and wanton as she gave into the bidding of her dreams. Her gasps and moans, hitched and hushed, as she gave into the pleasure of her subconscious mind. He knew it was dirty, he knew it was wrong to just sit there and watch her please herself; yet despite himself, his reservations, he couldn't help but to sit and listen.

Soon enough, the cold hard floor of the room proved to be useless in aiding Sanemi's battle against insomnia. Although it was against his better judgment, he gently scooped (Y/N)’s body up, and laid beside her in bed. Gently pulling the sheets over the both of them, he allows the siren call of sleep to consume him.

...

Likes, comments, asks, and reblogs are appreciated!

Tag list: @giyuuzas @peachdues @bnuuybee-writes @mitsuristoleme

[phoenixcatch7]

Wayne doll house: demon children.

Idea: each of the batkids is theorised to have a different origin.

Thing is, there's so many of them. The oldest is actually the youngest in body. It seems to be able to share memories with those who follow. It changes design right before a new bat appears.

The hero in the town over is definitely one of them, but what's it doing over there?? Asking just gets non-answers.

What happened to the ones that the Joker tried to destroy? One - the oldest and smallest - came back, but different, whereas the other - the purple and orange one - came back for a while and then vanished again for good.

None of them seem to age??

The first, smallest, oldest, it seemed to be some sort of circus performer? It gave its acrobatics to the blue one when it arrived, grew clever and defensive. It gave that to the skull headed red one, focused on technology and detective work after the Incident. Then again, and again, and one time even the bat changed along with it, but though the bat returned to normal the little Robin didn't, and now it's just as stabby and creative as it is small and creepy.

It's a good sort of creepy now, after over a decade of beating up bad guys and comforting victims, Gotham has gotten used to it, but outsiders don't much like it.

The justice league have a different opinion.

They know, or at least can observe, that the... Souls? Brains? Programs? Switch around, that it's not memories but persons that bring the new bats to life.

They just don't know where batman gets them. The new one, especially, is very circumspect.

For all this talk of the blood son, all the bats calling it demon child with varying levels of fondness, the way batman doesn't deny the claims...

Thing is the bat doesn't have blood. Everyone's well aware of this by now. Whatever sulpheric black tar he and the bats leak probably-certainly isn't blood, or at least... Not anything with dna.

So... What blood?? If not the bat's, why does it tie the newest mind of Robin to him?

Captain marvel is the first to think of an idea.

A blood child of a demon for a blood ritual for a demon.

Constantine and Zatanna second the notion - it's perfectly possible. Reasonable, even. The bat admitted himself he had no way to procreate the way humans did, nor any interest in doing so. Wanting a legacy was perfectly normal.

Except he already had, what, seven, eight, nine kids? He loved all of them, it was clear, and he'd always seemed happy with them. He'd even sighed over how many he had, had rebuffed the teasing about getting more. The new Robin mind had been a surprise to everyone, and the old one in a new body had been a little salty about it.

So the new theory was that batman hadn't decided to get a new Robin. Maybe the old mind had been ejected unwillingly! It had happened at roughly the same time batman had gotten a new personality - maybe the incidents were related?

But if batman hadn't done the ritual... Who had?

Who would do something like that???

Cultists. Cultists would do something like that. But giving the bat a son unwillingly seemed... A very odd goal, even for that type.

So... Had they messed up? Had they tried to summon the bat with a blood sacrifice ritual, and summoned a demon instead? Had it partially worked? Was the bat susceptible to demon summonings?? Did the summoning damage his own mind/consciousness/soul in some way, and that led to the creation of the new demon child while the bat changed until he'd healed????

How kind of batman to take it in!

Tldr; the league thinks Robin V is a demon born/created through a failed summoning ritual involving blood sacrifice that made batman like puns until he healed. The truth is the canon events of Damian arriving at the manor only for b to get tossed into the time stream, becoming the Robin to nightwing-batman while Tim, who is much less annoyed about it than canon, focuses on getting him back. Lmao.

[luckycharms1701]

Oh, please, I must know now… Donnie during mating season??? :D I’m loving ur writings about this :)

alright you thirsty purple fans, it’s time!

sidenote: i am. so glad. that people are enjoying these. they’re a lot of fun to write!

double sidenote: i have added a link to my masterpost to all my bayverse mating season headcanons! you can also find them here

sooooo donnie. he's a freak in the sheets, you cannot change my mind. so especially strong spicy warning for this one 🌶️

Donnie is extremely matter of fact about mating season. The first time he brings it up with you, he’s more nervous about your answer than he is shy about explaining what it entails. (You couldn’t hear the words, but you did hear him muttering to himself before he came up to ask you. You suspect it was a pep talk.) He is very thorough when explaining mating season in general and how it affects him in particular. You are grateful and also a little turned on by the time he’s done.

Before you were in the picture, Donnie used to work himself until his system overloaded and he passed out during this time. Now he finds himself working a lot less, because he has you to focus on. He appreciates that you make him spend more time on leisure and don’t let him overwork himself. He also appreciates that you do let him work at least a little when the desire hits. Getting to cuddle with you is a surefire way to get him to rest when he needs it though. As long as you’re nearby, he’s happy to do whatever.

Donnie is a talker in general, but it gets ramped up to 100 when it’s his season. Unless his mouth is busy doing… other things… it’s basically a 24/7 stream of consciousness fest. Mostly it’s about you. How much he loves you, what in particular he loves about you, how exactly he wants to make love to you. His morning star, his starlight, his celestial beauty. Sometimes, though, he’ll interrupt himself to talk about something that just occurred to him about one of his projects. It never fails to pull a laugh out of you and make him rub the back of his neck in (adorable) embarrassment.

He enjoys physical affection and often seeks it out from you, and this holds true during his season. He won’t whine or get grumpy if you don’t want to be touching him all the time (*cough* like his brothers will *cough*), but he does prefer if you’re in contact with him somehow. He enjoys watching movies with your head on his lap and your hand in his. He especially likes it when you're on top of him.

Donnie is used to just taking care of himself whenever necessary, AND he is used to handling delicate things during his season. So there is a lot of gentle manhandling when the time comes. You can't do anything particularly engaging because he will come up and interrupt you whenever to have sex. IF you are wearing clothes at all (not often), you cannot wear underwear or pants, at most a skirt. That way he can just lift it up and enter you whenever the urge hits. He is especially fond of doing this when you're sitting on his lap while he's working (... "daddy's little cockwarmer").

Having you around does not mean that all of his toys go unused, oh no. He is very considerate, and would rather resort to them when you're getting rest. (He got your permission to stare at you while you slept and he used his toys. So considerate.) He also came up with some new toys that the two of you can use together. Having toys custom designed for your pleasure? Well. It really adds to the experience of mating season.

He likes to take his time and study you. He is always coming to you with a new experience he wants to try. He does get a lot of pleasure out of trying new things, but he mostly just wants to know how you'll react. He is intimately familiar with your body and how it reacts, and he wants to see if those reactions hold true when different stimuli are applied. His prodigious brain is always working. He particularly likes when something catches you off guard and a surprised gasp comes out of your mouth.

Donnie is not overtly possessive, even in his season. But there is always one hickey very carefully placed somewhere noticeable that you can't cover easily. He knows just how much force to use to leave an imprint of his hands without hurting you more than you enjoy. And if he catches someone looking at you? You will probably be walking a little funny the next day. When he ties you up (he enjoys tying you up. a lot.), he'll take a minute to sit back and observe you, pleasuring himself to thoughts of how you belong to him the same way he belongs to you.

When his season is over, his favorite thing to do is cuddle with you while the both of you sleep it off. He won't leave the bed, not even to work, until he deems you fully rested. (He will work in bed while you sleep on his plastron though.) His second favorite thing to do is bathe you. He takes his time to make sure every inch of you is clean and cared for. It's a lot like going to a spa, because Donnie did a lot of research into spas so that he could replicate that experience for you. And if you give him a little pampering in return? You'll get to hear him chirp and churr in complete satisfaction.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

head bonks: @yorshie @avery73 @justalotoffanfiction @thejudiciousneurotic

[funtheysaid]

IWTV 2x01 Initial Thoughts (Stream Of Consciousness)

- That title card for Delainey felt very stage play to me (ahhh I adore the theatrical elements for this season)

- Ooh I love the idea that vamps can take on the emotions of whosever blood they’re drinking - it’s like the vampire equivalent of when werewolves can smell ppl’s emotions and fears through chemosignals (a la Teen Wolf iykyk)

- “Disregard” is the funniest shit ever 😂 Oldmaniel they could never make me hate you

- There’s a Real Rashid OMFG ??? Lol imagine he’s not actually Rashid and they pull one over on us again I’d fucking shit myself

- “Your love was in a box” OH MY GOD EAT HIM UP DANNY BOY

- OMG OMG LOUSTAT ITS HAPPENIGN ITS HAPPENING EVERYONE SHUT UP

- I MISS YOU TOO LESTAT

- “Quite fucked” 😏😏😏

- “mon amour” “mon cher” “love” IM GOING TO EXSANGUINATE MYSELF ISTG

- The singular finger on Louis’ chin 🥲 so delicate so soft so bad for my mental health

- I like Emilia

- “They are not used to seeing man with good looks” OKAY I know they’re just racists BUT she also wasn’t lying bc beautiful Louis is canon god bless you Jacob Anderson

- Lol Morgan a little fruity

- OOH memory is a monster! They be redoing scenes as Louis “fixes” his memories !!!! That’s gonna show up again for sure :))))

- “Stupid Halloween costume” Daniel Molloy the brat that you are (is okay, Armand likes brats) *cough cough*

- I’ve never seen someone *elegantly* close an iPad before. Armand, you have bewitched me.

- The fucking sexual tension between DM is stifling 🥵😶‍🌫️ Um if this is us “not getting Devil’s Minion” then I think imma be okay

- Claudia pushing the little racist boy 🤪🥹 we can’t help but to stan

- WTF AMC you can’t just jumpscare me with a Grace photograph :’)))

- “UP YOUR BUM” EXCUSE ME MORGAN I KNEW YOU WERE FRUITY BUT SIRRRR?

- so the makeup department really put their whole sfxussies into that decrepit ass abomination

- Louis: Alexa, play Mr. Steal Your Girl by Trey Songz

- Claudia calling Louis Daddy in S1: ☺️🍭👼 Claudia calling Louis Daddy in S2: 😖🤢😟

- I’m dubbing Louis “The Rat Prince”

- “If he can’t take you ballroom dancing and call you pretty” ICONIC.

- “the motherfucker” it’s on sight Bruce or Killer or whatever the fuck your name was 🤕🥊

- “her hand twitched like yours would” why was that line lowkey out of pocket. My mans has Parkinson’s Louis !!!!

- SHE DREAMS 😭 MY FUCKING GOD STOP MY EYES ARE GONNA BE PUFFY WHEN I WAKE UP TOMORROW

- that wasn’t even acting that was some REAL shit. Get Jacob Anderson his Emmy or Oscar or Tony or whatever the fuck I just need him to be awarded for his talent

- Daniel’s soft compassionate side: rare but that much more meaningful when it makes an appearance

- LOUIS you did not just do Emilia dirty like that TF!?! She helped you dude.

- “Human affairs. Their problem.” Not you listening to Lestat now of all times

- “Catfish with teeth” Louis can really read a bitch to filth can’t he?

- AHHH THERE ARE TWO OF THE FUCKERS 👹👹

- Oh shit he’s a kid okay I’m sorry for calling you an abomination earlier. That was mean.

- Woman vampire, you standing precariously close to that fire 👀

- Delainey’s facial expressions are the perfect blend of innocent and slightly unsettling

- OPP INTO THE FIRE SHE GOES rip 🔥

- What the hell is a bacon triptych am I just stupid don’t answer that

- Armand you ain’t beating the iPad kid allegations

- “It’s his drug” He said that with such malice. Is this a “he needed me but he needed drugs more” plot line???

- So Dubai Loumand is chilly frigid tepid frosty glacial

- Free feet? Okay im sorry

- “We can have him saying what happened next in no time” okay wait hold up why you making it sound like YOU don’t know what happened next and you need him to tell you???

- oh danny boy whistling while the couple he’s counseling walks in… is this a comedy or ?

- Daniel: yeah? 🤓 Armand: yeah 🫦

- “the mother of New Orleans” oh he misses home

- LMFAO Daniel interrupting Armand before he can start soliloquizing

- Louis and Claudia in a truck full of art which they belong in bc they too are pieces of art to me

- hard words. soft words. 🥺

- “a shit life beats no life” god damn this monologue feels like Louis is speaking directly to my soul

- “as long as you walk the earth I’ll never taste the fire” If this is foreshadowing I- I- I don’t know what I’ll do but it’s going to involve a baseball bat and a waffle iron and my head

- “it would be enough” pan to Lestat 💀 you can’t be fucking serious right now you just cannot

- okay it’s over and the teaser for the season just started playing and I just have to shout out the score bc damn if those violins don’t get me every god damn time

(Stutter) That’s all, folks! 🐷👋

[21wanderer]

Mason and the golden skin

A special thanks to @dulafer, who helped me come up with the idea after having hit a minor writer's block Body a day - #14: Battery

Mason had been envious of his classmate Chris since the first day he met him at Colchis University, so much so, that it had become an obsession. He envied him, he envied him so strongly that all he could think about was becoming him. Every thing about Chris, he desired and longed for, so much so that it became unbearable.

One of Mason’s former highschool classmates, Jed, was also studying at Colchis, studying both neurology and engineering. When Mason confessed his feelings towards Chris, Jed became lost in thought. The silence was eerie, but Jed was definitely contemplating Mason’s thoughts.

“If you really could switch places,” Jed said after the very long pause, “would you?” “Yes!” Mason blurted without hesitation. “Even if it meant giving your life to him?” Jed asked. Mason was a bit more reluctant this time, he hadn’t actually considered that, but if he had to swap places with Chris, it made sense, that Chris had to be somewhere else. But there would be no way, that Chris would ever accept that. “I’m sure, I’ll manage…” Mason said nonchalant.

Jed seemed very interested in the conundrum, but more out of curiosity than envy nor desire.

“If I come up with a solution – I want you to do something for me…” Jed said looking up at Mason. “What do you want?” Mason asked. “I want you, or rather you in Chris’s body as my boyfriend.” Mason blushed, “you have a crush on me?” “Maybe,” Jed answered clearly embarrassed and uncomfortable, not even looking at Mason anymore.

“Hey,” Mason began softly, breaking the awkward silence, he walked over to Jed, then pushed Jed’s chin up so that they had eye contact. “If you are really willing to do this for me… Then you might as well call me your boyfriend already,” he said, touched by Jed’s sentiment.

Two semesters later they came up with a prototype for a body-swapping device, technically it was a mind-swapping device. It would carry the full neurological pattern between two brains within a very short distance. Mason had to get Chris somewhere secluded, so that no interference was possible, and he had to take a clean shot. Jed was confident, it would work, but there were many potential risks. The device looked similar to a tablet with a camera attachment, except for the fact that the tablet part mostly consisted of batteries in a series. The device took an unbelievable amount of power, 75% of the device’s weight consisted of the batteries powering it.

Jed somehow managed to arrange a meeting with Chris at a remote part of campus. Mason wouldn’t have been successful if he had tried, after all Chris knew him, but Jed didn’t actually tell Mason, exactly how he managed to convince Chris to turn up at that place. But he did, and armed with the tablet-camera-thingy, Mason was prepared to welcome the unsuspecting Chris, who arrived on his bike.

“What are you doing here?!” Chris drawled as he noticed Mason, “is this some kind of joke?!”

Mason was nervous, almost afraid, but still infatuated and smitten with Chris. Mason let his envy consume him, he took some big steps directly towards Chris, aimed the device at his face, and pressed the button. There was a blinding light, and they both felt like they had been electrocuted, their bodies were shaking, but they couldn’t see anything.

Then Mason could see again, no longer blinded by the light, he could see himself, but from a taller perspective. He wasn’t looking in a mirror, the device had worked.

Mason’s body was still dazed and confused, the device fell out of his hand and hit the ground.

Mason was in awe. Chris’s body was all his, this perfect body was all his. He didn’t get to enjoy the moment for long however, he was ripped out by his stream of consciousness, when he heard his old voice shout at him: “What the hell have you done?!”

Chris had apparently already figured out exactly what had happened, there was a look of pure hatred in his eyes.

Mason’s body picked up the device. “You aren’t getting away with this. I’m gonna take my body back, and then… And then you won’t even live long enough to regret this!” Mason’s voice snarled, his words dripping with loathing and vindictiveness. Mason had a feeling something was wrong, he could smell burnt ‘something’, rubber or plastic maybe, the smell definitely came from the device, it was about to break down. Even a single use had put massive strain on the batteries, the device couldn’t handle another swap.

Mason in Chris’s body froze, blinded by the bright light, but also something else, it was like his mind was clouded by all sorts of unrecognisable impressions.

Mason’s body fell unconscious to the floor, but Mason was still looking at it from Chris’s perspective, he felt a bit of satisfaction seeing his former body collapse. But to make sure nobody would accuse him of anything, he picked up the foul-smelling device and stuffed it in Chris’s bag, then he begrudgingly called an ambulance. Then he went over to his unconscious body and more by instinct than choice began to perform CPR on it, then it dawned on him… He did not know, how to perform CPR, but Chris did. The faulty device must have transferred parts of Chris’s consciousness to him. He was still Mason at heart, he knew that much.

Mason’s body was taken away by the paramedics, as Chris explaining something about having witnessed Mason having a heart attack or something. With the ambulance gone, Mason could finally wrap his head around the other dramatic events. The faulty device had transferred Chris’s memories to him, he wouldn’t have any problem fooling everyone, he didn’t have to pretend to be Chris, he was Chris.

[autistichalsin]

My chapter-by chapter analysis of The Hunger Games, chapter 1

Disclaimer: this and all future chapter analyses will contain spoilers for all the books.

What really strikes me about this chapter is what a masterpiece it is; a masterpiece of foreshadowing, establishing moments of characterization, worldbuilding and more, all without ever feeling like we're actually getting infodumped on. This is accomplished with Katniss's stream-of-consciousness storytelling. I've heard it criticized so much, but even aside from the very salient point that it fits her characterization as an emotionally stunted, traumatized, poorly-educated teenage girl, it still helps the story in moments like this. We feel Katniss's inner chaos, and it makes the story that much more immersive.

On to the spoilery part of the analysis:

When I wake up, the other side of the bed is cold. My fingers stretch out, seeking Prim’s warmth but finding only the rough canvas cover of the mattress.

There was a post, a while ago, that I can't find but wish I could. In it, the OP talks about how Prim is literally doomed by the narrative, not "heavily foreshadowed death," but literally doomed by the narrative, and this paragraph is the first sign, because Katniss reaches for Prim and feels emptiness instead. And re-reading this, I agree. The first thing we see Katniss do is reach for Prim, and find nothing. This time, it's temporary, but by the end of the series, it won't be. We've been warned, even if we don't realize it yet: Prim is doomed.

Scrawny kitten, belly swollen with worms, crawling with fleas. The last thing I needed was another mouth to feed. But Prim begged so hard, cried even, I had to let him stay. It turned out okay. My mother got rid of the vermin and he’s a born mouser. Even catches the occasional rat. Sometimes, when I clean a kill, I feed Buttercup the entrails. He has stopped hissing at me.

Katniss loves her sister and will do literally anything for her. Katniss also has no moral qualms about drowning kittens. With just one paragraph, we learn what a simultaneously harshly practical yet beautifully caring, loving person Katniss is. She has no room in her life for useless things like pets, and drowning strays probably helps the people of 12 in the long run by leaving vermin to be eaten by those on the verge of starvation. But her sister wants to keep Buttercup, and so she will. Katniss will sacrifice anything to keep Prim happy.

Foreshadowing. Prim is doomed.

Entrails. No hissing. This is the closest we will ever come to love.

STILL more foreshadowing, for different themes: both for one of Katniss's biggest complexes (I'll get into details about this later) and for the theme of love. Katniss doesn't truly love anyone but Prim. Her entire world, we know, is going to be shaken when she does finally feel that for someone else again. Once again, we are being introduced to the recurring themes of love vs practicality and the classic question, "how much pain is love worth?"

Katniss is going to answer this question again and again: for Prim, there is no amount of suffering too great. For others... she'll find different answers. Eventually.

My father knew and he taught me some before he was blown to bits in a mine explosion. There was nothing even to bury. I was eleven then. Five years later, I still wake up screaming for him to run.

The first hints of Katniss as a deeply traumatized girl emerge. Sometimes, when you're traumatized enough, thoughts can segue into The Event with no warning, just by proximity. And through the combination of blunted language and stream-of-consciousness leaps, we can see just how broken this has left Katniss. Unfortunately, this is only the start of Events for her.

My father could have made good money selling them, but if the officials found out he would have been publicly executed for inciting a rebellion. Most of the Peacekeepers turn a blind eye to the few of us who hunt because they’re as hungry for fresh meat as anybody is. In fact, they’re among our best customers.

A brilliant bit of worldbuilding. The Peacekeepers are working off of deeply corrupt laws, which they ignore because they too are being mistreated and systematically starved, even if they aren't as at risk as the people of 12. The system doesn't care about the very same people it safeguards to enforce its rules. This is the first hint we get that the system isn't sustainable, and it comes before we even fully understand what kind of hell this government is.

The theme of "bread and circuses" is going to be hammered down to us again and again that this is how tyrannical governments, including this one, pacify the masses. But when only the bourgeoisie are being given the bread and circuses, well.... the proletariat aren't going to take it forever.

The book hasn't shown itself to be the anti-capitalist masterpiece it is yet, but this is the first hint that we're reading a tale of class warfare.

“District Twelve. Where you can starve to death in safety,” I mutter. Then I glance quickly over my shoulder. Even here, even in the middle of nowhere, you worry someone might overhear you.

I have seen criticisms that this is an egregious case of showing and not telling, with Katniss constantly talking about the dangers of badmouthing the government while never facing them. But in truth, it's the opposite. Yes, Katniss hasn't been caught despite repeated statements that she could have, but we'll learn, here and in future chapters, that 12 has been receiving a sort of tradeoff with other districts; their more severe poverty places them below notice. No one thinks them capable of causing real trouble, and even their district specialty- coal- is later proven to be basically useless, busy-work. So they get ignored... for now. Until the oligarchs start seeing what the proletariat can actually do and crack down all the harder to ensure they keep their cheap labor.

Are you seeing the resonance with the real world yet?

Even at home, where I am less pleasant, I avoid discussing tricky topics. Like the reaping, or food shortages, or the Hunger Games. Prim might begin to repeat my words and then where would we be?

Here we see the dual themes of parentification and sacrifice. Katniss will be the adult, even though she ISN'T an adult, for her sister. She will keep quiet on things that hurt her, and upset her, to set a better example for her sister and keep her from getting hurt. Prim gets to have the normal and safe childhood Katniss never had, because Katniss has invested everything into ensuring she does.

We are taking a step up the ladder of self-sacrificial acts, here. In other words: more foreshadowing. Katniss will give everything for Prim. Prim is going to die, because Katniss is going to lose everything she cared about in the process of protecting everything she cared about.

In the woods waits the only person with whom I can be myself.

Katniss can't be a teenage girl. She has to be Prim's mom. She has to be tough. She has to be a provider. She has to be a trader. An advocate. She so rarely complains about it, too. But it shows here just how much she's given up. Only one place, and one person she can be herself with, and yet...

Gale.

Isn't this ironic. Because we are about to see, throughout the entire series, that this day is going to be the last time Gale actually lets Katniss be herself (and even here, there are strong hints that Gale wants Katniss to be something very different).*

*Disclaimer, because it seems important: my opinion on the Katniss/Gale vs Katniss/Peeta ship war is "team nobody." I think both of them were very bad for her in different ways. Any comment I make that seems like it is favoring one ship or the other... isn't.

“Hey, Catnip,” says Gale. My real name is Katniss, but when I first told him, I had barely whispered it. So he thought I’d said Catnip. Then when this crazy lynx started following me around the woods looking for handouts, it became his official nickname for me.

Maybe I'm overanalyzing, but I feel like this sums up the Katniss/Gale relationship so much. Katniss tries to speak, and Gale doesn't hear or understand her. Gale projects something onto her, and Katniss rolls with it. Sure, in this case it's a cute nickname, but it represents so much more to me.

Gale doesn't understand Katniss. Fundamentally. He understands the Katniss he wants to exist. The one who will run off with him and play house in the woods and indulge his little fantasies. He doesn't know very much about the real Katniss, at least as long as he's looking at her through a romantic lens.

“Look what I shot.” Gale holds up a loaf of bread with an arrow stuck in it, and I laugh.

Despite what I just said, I do love Gale and Katniss's friendship, and it breaks my heart that their friendship was as doomed as Prim. (Hint. Hint.) Katniss needed someone who understood the unique pain of parentification due not to abuse, but poverty- the kind where you aren't 'allowed' to feel angry at anyone within reach. Which is the worst kind of injustice. Getting mad at someone who harmed you is one thing, but getting mad at a system you can never (... yet) hope to change is different.

She must have really loved him to leave her home for the Seam.

It's said in a casual and sort of admiring way here. But Katniss is going to learn firsthand about the intersection between love and sacrifice. With the generational mirroring as a theme, especially between Katniss and Peeta, we're being given more foreshadowing that Katniss has self-sacrifice "in the blood."

I try to remember that when all I can see is the woman who sat by, blank and unreachable, while her children turned to skin and bones. I try to forgive her for my father’s sake. But to be honest, I’m not the forgiving type.

Another little glimpse into Katniss's pain and trauma. Her mom wasn't there when Katniss needed her most, and Katniss and Prim both almost died as a result. It wasn't her fault, and we see later that she regrets it deeply, but this still leaves scars. Your parents, above everyone else, are supposed to protect you. Katniss's mom didn't, Katniss nearly died, and because of that, Katniss had to sacrifice what remained of her childhood to become Prim's mom.

Katniss and Prim's relationship never goes back to just normal sisterhood after this. From the moment Mrs. Everdeen's trauma rendered her catatonic onwards, Katniss and Prim's relationship was infused with a mother-child dynamic that never left, not even when Mrs. Everdeen became well again.

It's so painful, all the more so because it's so real. I lived this with my little brother, albeit with stakes maybe 1% this high, when my mom became an alcoholic and my dad was too busy just trying to survive to really do anything. I was the one to take care of him emotionally, to show someone cared, to provoke my mom's anger so he wouldn't be hit, to make sure homework got done and he didn't skip school (I failed. Badly.) He still considers me more his parent than either of our parents. It never really goes away, even when you're both adults; that overdeveloped feeling of responsibility stays with you. Always.

And the worst part of it is when the parent who made you have to do this decides, on their own, that the time is right for them to come back. Katniss's mom is far more gracious about it than my own. She at least understood Katniss's pain, and didn't try to force the role on her; it happened only when Katniss was ready. But that too, as we'll see in a minute, was painfully real for me.

“I never want to have kids,” I say. “I might. If I didn’t live here,” says Gale. “But you do,” I say, irritated. “Forget it,” he snaps back. The conversation feels all wrong.

Once again, a hint that despite their sweet friendship and similarities, these are two tragically, fundamentally incompatible people. Katniss is in too much pain to think of ever having a family, and Gale is in too much pain to think of not ever having one. Katniss wants to survive the way she always has (which she doesn't realize isn't her destiny yet) and Gale wants to flee and survive literally any other way.

Both change in the end, but the underlying incompatibilities in their life approaches are still there.

And even if we did . . . even if we did . . . where did this stuff about having kids come from? There’s never been anything romantic between Gale and me. [...] Besides, if he wants kids, Gale won’t have any trouble finding a wife. He’s good-looking, he’s strong enough to handle the work in the mines, and he can hunt. You can tell by the way the girls whisper about him when he walks by in school that they want him. It makes me jealous but not for the reason people would think. Good hunting partners are hard to find.

A few very interesting things are happening here. One, we're getting another hint, first dropped during Katniss's thoughts about Buttercup, that Katniss has a pathological inability to believe others actually like her- romantically or otherwise. Part of it is low self-esteem, part of it is putting Prim on such a pedestal that Katniss feels she can never live up (and giving her more self-esteem issues) and feeling like anything she attributes to herself might take away from Prim, and part of it is just raw cynicism. And maybe a dash or two of the feeling of permanent othering trauma gives you. Especially when that trauma involves a realization that you're never going to be able to rely on others to meet your own needs. You're responsible for your needs and your loved ones' too.

(Katniss is one of the most complex and real characters of all time. I relate to Katniss an uncomfortable amount sometimes.)

The other interesting thing is that you're getting a sense, for the first time, of how much trouble Katniss has recognizing and processing her own emotions- a very common trait in neurodivergent people. She can sort-of-understand a feeling of jealousy, but can't quite put her finger on the reason, and fitting with her attitude of relentless practicality, she decides that it's the worry of losing a useful hunting partner. Because, after all, Prim is the only person she loves, she can't care for anyone else, there isn't room for that. To care about anyone else would be to "take away" something from Prim.

Katniss repeatedly raises the question of when self-sacrifice crosses the line into self-harm by proxy. When altruistic love becomes self-negation instead. It's sweet that she loves Prim so much, but the codependence... If this is the benchmark for love for Katniss, it's no wonder that she feels at this point that she can't feel it for anyone else. This isn't sustainable.

(Prim is doomed. We've been warned.)

I found the patch a few years ago, but Gale had the idea to string mesh nets around it to keep out the animals.

This is going to be a recurring theme; Katniss is too impulsive and lacking a sufficient cause-effect pathway to be a planner/strategist. Gale makes the plans now; later it'll be Peeta and Haymitch.

(Also, this is foreshadowing Katniss's lack of agency. She is about to become an audience member in her own life story. She found the strawberries, but she didn't decide what to do about them. Gale did. That's about to become her entire life.)

No one in the Seam would turn up their nose at a good leg of wild dog, but the Peacekeepers who come to the Hob can afford to be a little choosier.

There is a hierarchy still, where the Peacekeepers are starving, but not as starving as the people in the communities they're sent to. Everyone is hungry, but some are hungrier than others.

Hint. Hint.

“That’s not her fault,” I say. “No, it’s no one’s fault. Just the way it is,” says Gale.

"Remember who the real enemy is." Katniss gets told this repeatedly, by Haymitch and others, and eventually she learns the lesson in time to lead a successful revoltuion.

Gale does not learn this lesson. He will end up destroying everything he cares about in his pursuit of revenge against the Capitol and anyone associated with it.

Gale would normally say that there is a huge difference between Madge, the mayor's daughter who is pampered and comparatively privileged, versus the willfully malicious Peacekeepers; the middle class are still part of the proletariat, after all. But Gale, in his pain and fear, loses sight of it and lashes out. This time, it's just words. By the end of the series, when he gets actual power, it will lead to something far more catastrophic.

Prim is doomed to die, Gale and Katniss's friendship is doomed to end in the most bitter way possible, and Gale is doomed to be his own worst enemy.

Gale knows his anger at Madge is misdirected. On other days, deep in the woods, I’ve listened to him rant about how the tesserae are just another tool to cause misery in our district. A way to plant hatred between the starving workers of the Seam and those who can generally count on supper and thereby ensure we will never trust one another. “It’s to the Capitol’s advantage to have us divided among ourselves,” he might say if there were no ears to hear but mine. If it wasn’t reaping day. If a girl with a gold pin and no tesserae had not made what I’m sure she thought was a harmless comment.

Gale knows he's wrong to say things like that. But again, as said above, his pain and fear get the better of him, and cause pain to those around him. His normal philosophy is correct, but he loses sight of and discards it far too easily.

(Gale is going to lose everything because of his scorched-earth approach to anger.)

Also, a note: this is how the real world operates too. Culture wars to distract from class war. For an entire generation of readers, this was their introduction to the basic principles of socialism.

But what good is yelling about the Capitol in the middle of the woods? It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t make things fair. It doesn’t fill our stomachs. In fact, it scares off the nearby game. I let him yell though. Better he does it in the woods than in the district.

Katniss is still hung up on practicality. When she rants about the Capitol, she is, subconsciously, crying for help. But venting for the sake of venting doesn't make so much sense to her, given her stunted emotions.

Another bit of characterization I really enjoy here is the realistic teenage behavior. Yes, they're the oldest in their families, responsible for their entire family and only able to support them by hunting, and they should "know better". But they're teenagers in a fascist government, with an already extreme list of traumas and corresponding problems with emotions. Of course they're going to act irrationally at times and scare off game because they're having a meltdown- even non-traumatized teens would do that sometimes!

They're teenagers. Incredibly well-written, realistic teenagers. They don't have fully developed frontal lobes with the corresponding gifts of planning, impulse control, cause-effect relationships, and other things yet. They're more mature than most, but they're still going to behave foolishly sometimes.

Prim is in my first reaping outfit, a skirt and ruffled blouse. It’s a bit big on her, but my mother has made it stay with pins.

This is probably a "the curtains are blue because they're blue!" moment, but this is another bit of symbolism I enjoy. Katniss, at Prim's age, was hunting and entering the Hob. Prim is being kept alive by both Katniss and Mrs. Everdeen. She has a dress that mostly fits. She has good meals now. She is protected where Katniss wasn't. The dress represents both the sacrifices Katniss made for her and the fact that now, Prim has the adoring mother Katniss didn't have. She has two loving people looking out for her, willing to do anything to keep her safe, healthy, and happy.

(Prim is doomed.)

To my surprise, my mother has laid out one of her own lovely dresses for me. A soft blue thing with matching shoes. “Are you sure?” I ask.

Katniss can't comprehend her mom doing motherly things for her. Both because of the parentification, and because Katniss still fundamentally can't believe that anyone, even her own mother, actually cares for her enough to want to do anything for her. Not after four years of Katniss carrying the entire family on her back. It's incompatible with the world she's lived in for the last four years.

Katniss is painfully relatable.

I’m trying to get past rejecting offers of help from her. For a while, I was so angry, I wouldn’t allow her to do anything for me.

Painfully. Relatable.

What Katniss is feeling in this scene, I don't think I can describe to anyone who hasn't been there. It's relief-bitterness-anger-hope-longing-mistrust.

"Oh great, look who's finally here to help now that things are okay again and I figured everything out on my own! I want you back. I want a parent back. I don't want to do this anymore. I can't stop it. I can't trust you not to make me do it again. I'd better keep doing it so I don't get my hopes up. How do I even live without doing this? How do I live as a person and not a caretaking robot for my family? Am I allowed to do that? What kind of selfish person would I be if I did, especially now that I've seen what will happen if you fail again? No, I'm not letting you do this. I'll let you pretend to the little one because they need a parent figure and they deserve to feel normal, but me? Hell no, do you think I'm stupid? I am taking care of myself, I already learned what it costs to trust other people to see to my needs and that is not a price I'll pay a second time, thankyouverymuch. Yeah, mom I love you. I'm glad you're okay now. And thanks for doing this for me, I guess."

It goes something like that.

But I digress.

In just this paragraph Katniss expresses so much of the pain of parentification, so succinctly yet vividly that it makes my chest hurt.

I just really, really love Katniss, okay?

“You look beautiful,” says Prim in a hushed voice. “And nothing like myself,” I say.

Ow. Just... ow. She says it so matter-of-factly. Like she's just accepted it into her worldview; Prim, the embodiment of everything good in the world, is beautiful. Katniss, the leftover, the thing that exists just to take care of Prim, is ugly. That simple.

I wish we could have seen Prim respond here; surely she doesn't like anyone, even her sister herself, talking about Katniss this way? Or maybe Prim is so used to these kinds of casual self-put-downs that she's stopped trying to talk Katniss out of it.

Again: painfully relatable.

I protect Prim in every way I can, but I’m powerless against the reaping. The anguish I always feel when she’s in pain wells up in my chest and threatens to register on my face.

Once more: Painfully. Relatable. You put so much into protecting 'your kiddo'. And then something comes along and reminds you that you're even more powerless than the useless adults in your life. It hurts. It feels like you failed. It's one thing for you to get hurt, you already know how to deal with it, but them?

Ugh. Dystopian fiction isn't usually where my inner abused and parentified child gets validated, but this series unlocked some things in my neural pathways.

Thank you, Suzanne Collins, for Katniss. I feel so seen in so many ways through her and her story.

Sorry. I know this is supposed to be an analysis, not a love letter, but damn if Katniss doesn't play my heartstrings like a fiddle.

“Tuck your tail in, little duck,” I say, smoothing the blouse back in place. Prim giggles and gives me a small “Quack.” “Quack yourself,” I say with a light laugh. The kind only Prim can draw out of me.

Sorry, I am going to try to not repeat myself so much, but once again it just... Prim gets to be a child, because of Katniss. She gets to be a normal-ish 12 year old who makes silly animal noises and can't tuck her dress in. Katniss was fighting for her life and trying to find food. And of course it's not Prim's fault- I love Prim. But there's something just so painful about this contrast. Katniss had her childhood stolen from her, first by the tyrannical government she lived in, then her father's death, then her mother's mental illness, and finally the needs of a child she never should have been responsible for.

It's no wonder Katniss spends so much of the series in that emotional state abused, neglected, and traumatized children know all too well. You're simultaneously precocious and childish. Too grown-up one minute and acting like a child the next. Katniss never got to experience linear growth, and her psychology sure as hell shows it.

Painfully. Relatable.

Also, yet again: Prim. Is. Doomed. She's the most important thing in Katniss's life, the rationale for every decision Katniss makes, the reason she gets out of bed in the morning. The one person who makes Katniss's life worth living. Precious, sweet Prim, who retains her innocence and kindness in a world that aggressively stomps out both, is doomed by the narrative in every possible way.

Anyway, Gale and I agree that if we have to choose between dying of hunger and a bullet in the head, the bullet would be much quicker. The space gets tighter, more claustrophobic as people arrive. [...] I stare at the paper slips in the girls’ ball. Twenty of them have Katniss Everdeen written on them in careful handwriting.

When you're a child, you can't comprehend something awful happening to your parents, because your life experience just hasn't shaped yet to show you that it's even possible. You don't understand that it can happen.

When you're an adult, you can't comprehend something awful happening to your child, because your life experience has shaped to show you exactly how it's possible. You know exactly how it can happen, so you can't believe that it can actually happen.

Katniss is at a stage of her life that would already be transitional in normal circumstances, where she'd start contemplating mortality- but she's already dealt with it for years.

Her own death doesn't scare her anymore. Her sister's scares her so much that she doesn't even think it's a possibility. After all, everything she's done for the last four years of her life has been for Prim. To keep her alive and give her the childhood Katniss lost suddenly and traumatically.

Prim is doomed.

Taking the kids from our districts, forcing them to kill one another while we watch — this is the Capitol’s way of reminding us how totally we are at their mercy.

We got hints of apathy and cruelty before, but now the curtain is, for the first time, being peeled back. This isn't a system built on simple oppression. It's a system built on raw sadism.

It's another sign that Panem isn't sustainable. People can endure a lot of cruelty when their loved ones are hostages, but there are limits. When those limits get pushed (hint), something will have to give.

To make it humiliating as well as torturous, the Capitol requires us to treat the Hunger Games as a festivity, a sporting event pitting every district against the others.

Bread and circuses. The poor give labor (food) and entertainment, and the rich receive them. The rich live sequestered lives full of privilege, yet ultimately just as much under the thumb as the tyrant as anyone else. But still supporting the system because they lack the empathy to want change when they benefit from the status quo more than they would from a new system, so they think. They are simultaneously disgusting and pitiful.

Like the comfortably wealthy Trump-supporting boomers we all know and loathe.

The last tribute alive receives a life of ease back home, and their district will be showered with prizes, largely consisting of food.

Our very first, incredibly subtle hint, that winning the games might be even worse than losing them. The first time reading, of course, you'll take this at face value. Later, though, you'll think of this and realize it was all only mockery and isolationism, a way of guaranteeing that the victors would be scapegoated by their District, ensuring they would never find companionship again even if their trauma didn't prevent it. And they can't complain, because, after all, they now have a life of comfort.

So many things are intersecting here; class warfare (Victors being an allegory for "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" and the American Dream) and the isolation of trauma and mental illness and more.

But suddenly I am thinking of Gale and his forty-two names in that big glass ball and how the odds are not in his favor. Not compared to a lot of the boys. And maybe he’s thinking the same thing about me because his face darkens and he turns away. “But there are still thousands of slips,” I wish I could whisper to him.

Katniss so rarely worries about herself, only those she cares for. Again; her own mortality is okay to her. It's those she protects she can't let this happen to. But since she can't even bear to face the possibility of Prim being chosen (Prim is doomed) yet, she focuses her feelings on Gale, not only worrying that he'll be picked, but worrying that he will be upset that she might be. She only spares thoughts for herself for a few brief seconds, in the next paragraph.

Katniss gets accused of being selfish so many times, but it's notable that those moments only happen once she volunteers to go into the arena, once her survival depends on a bit of selfishness. Before then, she's one of the least selfish people in the entire series, and I'd argue that even at her worst she doesn't count as truly selfish. She's a teenager trying to survive and return home to her family, not a toddler who won't share toys.

I’m feeling nauseous and so desperately hoping that it’s not me, that it’s not me, that it’s not me.

But, of course, even when you are theoretically okay with dying, being faced with the actual thing will still inspire terror. So for just a moment, Katniss lets herself lapse into worry about herself.

For just a moment, she thinks about herself- and just that fast, Prim is placed in danger.

(This is how Prim will die too, by the way; being put in danger the one time Katniss is focused on something other than her. Prim is doomed.)

Effie Trinket crosses back to the podium, smoothes the slip of paper, and reads out the name in a clear voice. And it’s not me. It’s Primrose Everdeen.

The unthinkable has happened, and Katniss's life has been changed forever.

And even though she can save Prim this time, it's only temporary.

Prim is doomed. Nothing in the world can prevent it now. Prim would die in the arena, but by going instead, Katniss has put herself in a position where any and all actions she does will spark a revolution that gives her a Pyrrhic victory.

There is no version of events where Prim lives.

Prim is doomed.

[nightowl33art]

How To Make A Toxicsona- A Master Post!

!This page may update over time! So I was looking at my inbox and noticed I got sent an ask. Likely due to site bugs, I was not able to answer directly, but I'm sure the asker will be able to see this post.

Hello Anon! Firstly, thanks for the fun ask! Keep in mind this post will apply to most toxicsonas. I'll be using my own designs and process as examples. What I recommend does NOT have to be followed. In the end it's your design and it should be for fun most of all. I'm just presenting what the "ideal and average Phisnom toxicsona/toxic blob oc" should have.

For those tuning into this lengthy post with no idea what I'm on about, I'll be excerpting the toxicsona submission form Phisnom/Phil made for his toxicsona review streams. (Phil being the leader of the Toxic Cesspit community.)

(Despite "sona" being in the name, a toxicsona does NOT have to be representative of you! Toxicsonas can also be regular ocs!) Now to the advice!

1. READ UP!

Read the Toxicsonas For Dummies character guide! This image contains all the basic lore and traits for toxicsonas! What I say going forward may reference it. (Reading may also give you some fun ideas!)

You should also peep this from the toxicsona submission form:

In order to have a toxicsona you need* a:

Dark body for a base with accents (ie lines) that must be neon/brightly colored.

Mouth(s) with sharp teeth. Ideally will have at least one extra mouth somewhere on the form.

Unique pattern image for the body.

*You may not need it but it's more or less what makes a toxicsona a toxicsona. I'll be going over each point in detail later!

2. Purpose

What purpose will your blob fill? Are you creating an oc, a sona for yourself, or something else? This will affect what you create and how. If you have a preexisting design/sona you want to toss into the slime, reference off that design! Use what you know about that character/person to create this new form!

Starting from scratch? What I do is come up with a basic idea to concept off of! Think of something you want to design! If you need help, try using one of the countless idea generators out there or put your head together with others and see what you come up with! Moodboards, playlists, and Pinterest albums also serve well! Whatever type of brainstorming gets your inspiration bug flying, go for it!

Regardless, one thing to make note of is who was this design in life? Most blobs were once living beings. They all come from a liquid superorganism called The Substance. When a living being with a consciousness foreign to the slime (like a person) is absorbed into The Substance, it'll be spit out and reanimated anew if it has a strong will. Your blob must've been alive or had a connection to living things. Then it must have undergone some sort of transformation after making contact with The Substance. Asking who your blob was before the slime will be very helpful!

3. Body

You likely either have an idea of what your design will be, or you're jumping headfirst into the doing part. Either is okay! Everyone's process is different. If your design is based off a preexisting one, you're likely to make the new form into a similar shape. Some things to think about when coming up with a body:

A slime body is meant to reflect the ideal self. What are your toxicsona's ideal traits? If you're making a sona, what are YOUR ideal traits?

What were they when alive? Were they a feral stray cat? A human? You may want to stick to a shape that resembles their former appearance, especially if they are in denial of being a slime.

Who were they when alive? Did they like a certain animal a lot? Give them physical traits of said animal! Maybe your toxicsona wanted freedom, so they develop the wings they always envisioned. Maybe they believe they were a terrible person and so deserve the devil horns on their head. Were they two-faced? Give them two faces!

Is this the only form they have? Do I want to add a simplified blob form? Do I want to make a bigger/smaller form? If my character has an alter ego disguise, should I make a form for it?

(Most toxicsonas have a simplified little blob form, reflecting what they looked like at default after The Substance. They're super cute and puntable!)

How much mass do they have? The more mass a blob has, the more they have to work with physically, the more developed they are. What appendages have they formed with this mass? Many toxicsonas lack legs, including Phi himself, who is simply too lazy to use legs. Why your blob does/doesn't have legs can have a reason too!

What colors are they? Common dark colors for the majority of the body include black, gray, and dark shades of any given color (ex dark blue.) The neon can be just about any color! If the design is a sona, pick your favorite color(s)! Keep the color vibrant- it's supposed to stand out from the dark color! Your slime will always be surrounded by a dark/black outline around the very edge.

Where's the extra mouth(s)? The best designs have a mouth placed with thought, but not all are. Thoughtfully placed mouths have significance to the toxicsona. Scars/important wounds on their living body can become mouths. Perhaps if they were a gluttonous or starved person, you'll put a mouth on their belly to represent their hunger. If they're anxious about their mouth or general appearance, maybe it's hidden. (Ideally let the mouth be visible. It's visually appealing.)

(Dutch's extra mouth is on his back. Wings were always a big part of him, both appearance and story-wise, so the mouth emphasizes that. His wings come out of the mouth like tongues!)

Being a cartoonist, we're personally big on shape language and like to have designs with strong, recognizable silhouettes, but you do not have to do this.

Some advice on basics for drawing your slime!

Here's how I create the lineart, clothing coloring, and the outline that surrounds the blobs. (Some steps may be done at the same time or skipped entirely. This is the Nightowl 33 method so your mileage may vary.)

Draw lineart.

Alpha lock lineart layer. Recolor it to neon color.

Clip new layer on lineart. Color clothes black.

New layer for body color.

Move body color layer under lineart.

Color body colors. (I clip different clothing coloring layers on the main color layer. This main base color layer gets colored black when ready.)

Make a folder. Place all lineart, lineart coloring, and all body coloring layers in the folder.

Add a dark color outline in a layer beneath the folder. (I use the "stroke (outer)" tool in my art program, ibisPaint X.)

How I draw eyes!

Draw eye lineart.

New layer, clip on lineart layer, draw dark circle.

Layer sclera coloring under lineart layer.

Add pupil layer below lineart layer and above sclera layer.

(Coloration used to show different steps/parts of the eye!)

(Without the weird example coloring, your end result should look like this!)

4. Pattern

Much like how everyone has their own unique fingerprint, every toxicsona with a well defined identity develops their own unique pattern. Coming up with the right pattern is tricky! Patterns are made up of symbols, lines, or a combination of. They have a rhyme and reason to them. A pattern to the pattern, so to speak.

(Here's a bunch of example patterns, created by me (sometimes with the help of CrystalKleure), or Phil and StupidButterfly. Stare at them for a while and take some notes on what rhythms you recognize.)

For maximum appeal, your pattern cannot be too complex or simple! Try to select 2-4 symbols/lines to create your pattern. These symbols/lines should be thematically relevant to your blob. Ex: A spiderweb pattern for spider-themed toxicsonas, checker pattern for a blob that likes checkers/chess, a UFO for an alien slime, eyes for an angel slime or a slime that loves/fears being watched! (You may also want to reference off the emotion patterns if your blob is heavily associated with an emotion. Ex: sparkles for a very happy/excited slime!)

Feel free to pick basic shapes, like triangles and circles, for one or more symbols.

Create a few variants of your chosen symbols. Draw them big, medium, and small. Fill some of them, leave others empty/"hollow."

Patterns are seamless! This means when you apply a pattern to your toxicsona's clothing or body, it must be able to consistently loop! While you may wing it, below is a handy lifehack to easily make a seamless tiling pattern by @crystalkleure !

1. Draw a base design 2. Split that design in half, and arrange the two halves like this. [You might want to use guide lines/a guide grid to make sure the pixels line up in such a way that these two halves will stitch back together correctly, so they'd make clones of the base image again if you were to tile sets of these halves horizontally.] 3. Stitch the two halves together by adding more to the design 4. Split the image again like you did in step 2, except this time split the top and bottom apart instead of the sides. 5. Add more stuff to the design again, in any way that crosses the "seam" made by step 4 [where the top of the bottom half meets the bottom of the top half]. And if you lined up the pixels correctly while you were splitting and rearranging the chunks, you now have an image that tiles seamlessly both horizontally and vertically. The trick is just splitting an image into halves, swapping those halves' places, and then adding more to the image to hide the seam made by splitting and rearranging parts of it like that. Do it with the sides and you get a horizontally-tiling image, do it with the top and the bottom and you get a vertically-tiling image, do it with both the sides and the top + bottom and you get an image that tiles in all four directions.

Here's a speedpaint where I make a pattern using this method! While creating, double checking that your pattern looks good when looped is important! Don't forget to experiment with placements!

(Wow! What a cool pattern!)

Your pattern doesn't have to be insanely unique, hell you don't even HAVE to have one, but it's honestly better if you come up with one. There's no reason NOT to have a pattern unless it's for lore reasons, such as a confused identity or a mimic character. (Do NOT copy others' patterns and make them your own, especially without permission!)

(Phee, Pho, and Phum have the same default pattern as Phi because they're copycat scammers! They try to convince others they're related to Phi to get what they want.)

Gradient and pattern application!

Now you may want to give your slime a gradient! Gradients tend to appear on the lower halves of blobs but can be placed anywhere! Below is a guide to show how I apply the pattern and gradients to the body! While defaults apply to many toxicsonas, like Phi, they do not have to be followed.

Clip pattern layer over body color layer. (Pattern transparency default is 47%.)

New layer (add mode), place under pattern, clip over body color layer. Draw gradient. (Gradient transparency default is 40%.)

Alpha lock the pattern layer.

Airbrush the upper half pattern layer with the dark body color.

The pattern is often the same color as the neon lineart, while the gradient is often a darker version of the color.

(Weird bright green coloration used to emphasize the layers clipped onto it.)

(The finished gradient, sans weird example coloring, looks just like Phi's!)

Here's how to apply a pattern to clothing! Create a new layer with the pattern. Clip it to your base. (Pattern layers on clothes are usually somewhat transparent. The default is 65% but you can deviate.)

5. Outfit

Clothing is a HUGE self expression that extends to the world of toxicsonas! Blobs can harden mass they acquire, turning it into wearable cartilage clothing! Below are some tips but the bottom line is DESIGN WHAT YOU WANT.

Who they were before the slime often heavily influences their outfit(s). Ex, if your blob was a clown when alive, they may dress the same as a slime.

You'll often find the body pattern on the clothes, but you don't have to do this.

A popular addition to blob fashion is caution/hazard tape! While often black and yellow, feel free to deviate the colors.

(A bunch of fashionable slime outfits with caution tape themes that I made or had a hand in making!)

Phil does not like hoodies on toxicsonas but you can totally join the #hoodiesweep nation. (It would be super funny.) That aside, many do put their blobs in hoodies, so avoiding a standard hoodie is preferable if you want to make a super unique design.

You don't have to give your blob any clothes, especially if they're non-humanoid. Accessories are still recommended to personalize your design and make it stand out from an average ...whatever it is.

Unlike the rest of the slime body that has colored lineart, clothing almost ALWAYS has black/dark color lineart.

Any slime overlapping atop non-slime materials requires a black outline, including over clothing.

(While the consistency of this rule varies with established toxicsona art (ie Phi), I personally try to apply it as much as possible, even when slime overlaps slime. It makes things look nicer and allows the neon lines to stand out more. It's also easier to make out what's going on when looked at.)

Misc. tips!

Bananas are the main unit of measurement in the cesspit! Giving your blob a height can help people draw them to scale, especially when drawn next to other blobs! To get the accurate height: 1. Conjure a length of your choice. 2. Convert your length to inches (in). 3. Divide the inches by 7. (Because 7 inches is the average length of a grocery store banana.) 4. Congrats! You have banana height! Now you can also reverse the order and get standard heights!

Too gay or lazy to do math? Click here for faster conversion! http://bananaforscale.info/#!/ (Note the results will be slightly shorter than my method above but the measurements are about the same so who really cares about that.)

Come up with a backstory for your toxicsona! If you haven't already made one during the design process, you may want to now! -Consider what life was like before they came in contact with The Substance. How did they feel about their old life? -How did they come in contact with The Substance? (Preferably avoid the basic backstory of accidentally falling into a vat. It's overdone, mainly due to how vague lore was before the toxicsona review streams. I'd suggest letting Phi lure them into the slime or tossing them in, if you want something traditional. Phi's goal is to make a blob army, after all.) -What is their life like now, post-Substance? How do they feel about their new life?

(Canon backstory comic on how Phee, Pho, and Phum became blobs!)

Feeling social? Working with other cesspit members (or your own ocs), you can develop links between your toxicsonas! Make your friend's blob their friend! Or maybe enemy! Why not ship them? GO NUTS????

(Phee is a massive flirt in the cesspit. Mr. Sex/Noctus belongs to @corovusin !)

-Consider how your blob may feel about others. Are they a social butterfly or a shut in? Who do they like? Who would they rather avoid? -What are their thoughts on Phi, the leader? (Generally avoid giving them a super strong, personal bond with Phi, such as relatives, best friends, or close partners of any kind. Phi does not have a family and she's a total bitch to just about everyone!) -Phil says there's no love in the cesspit but he's literally just a hater. Make your ocs gay kiss!!

Feel like cooking a little more? Why not design a pre-slime form if it doesn't already exist?

(Phee and Phum before their fatal scam attempt on Phi.)

Many cesspit users also create a "living disguise" form for their toxicsonas, so the slimes can wander among others without rousing suspicion! Blobs have the ability to learn to shapeshift. It's a skill that must be mastered with experience and time, so disguise forms often have "flaws" that give away an inhuman quality, like extra mouths, eyes, patterns, or gradients on their skin.

(Dutch is very good at shapeshifting, so his disguise lacks most flaws. The flaws that are there are mostly intentional, since he's proud of his slime qualities. A blob who perfects the skill of shifting can look like an ordinary human, but where's the fun in that?)

Most toxicsonas can change color based on emotion. (They may also change based on other factors so feel free to get creative with it.) -As a slime has a base pattern and color of choice, these will change based on their mood and that mood's assigned color! Many toxicsonas share patterns and colors with Phi (like red and triangle pattern for mad, blue and flowered squiggles for sad, etc.) but this is not a rule. You can assign any color to any mood. You are not limited to Phi's emotion set either! You can even make your own patterns for your blob's moods if you feel like it! -Some color changes are very subtle in some slimes! Is this true for yours? -Modifying the design of your blob to match their mood is a fun way to create expressive and interesting variants!

(Dutch's hair, horn shape, halo, face, and hands can change with his mood! He has an array of emotional patterns, both preset and custom-made, to match the different colors/moods.)

(When Goober was alive, they had DID. Mimicking the behavior of their former life, the three alters, Ziggy, Skrunk, and Wumbus, became separate blobs. They still need to work together to function properly. They combine to bodily become "Goober." Goober's left eye functions as a collective eye, while their right eyes that can emote separately reflect their respective alter.)

(Goober's default color is green, indicating all alters are co-fronting. When there is a primary fronter or two, the upper body color changes to match!)

Design a shell for your toxicsona! Shells are foreign objects blobs use, often to live, sleep, or hide in. Shells are protective. ANYTHING can be a shell. Not all toxicsonas need one, but those that do often have a thematic shell that relates to who they are. (Ex: Phi-barrel, Bucket-bucket, Collette-chocolate box.)

(Thanks to his angelic theming, Dutch's shell is a reliquary- a display container for holy relics, often being remnants of holy figures. Goober's shell of choice is a mini UFO!)

Stuck? Want to grow your design with less work? Collaborate with others or take their advice if you like what they give you. Ask people what they'd change about your design!

You should NOT be designing just for the approval of Phisnom, You should design for YOURSELF (or whoever is paying you- I see you, adopt/custom ppl.) He's just another person out there. Yes, a creator of the species, but he does not have to dictate your choices or give your design an S tier ranking just to validate it. The satisfaction should come from inside, not outside.

Hope these tips help, best of luck creating your own toxicsona, and feel free to ask any additional questions regarding this! ✌️

[outofgloom]

heyo! kind of curious what your writing inspirations are, or just. things you've read that you liked. cause the bionicle stuff seems pretty cool and different to what im familiar with in style... (⁠≧⁠▽⁠≦⁠)!!

Glad you’ve enjoyed the Bionicle stuff--very kind. To answer this, I’m gonna list authors and stories that I like, partly stream-of-consciousness and partly just…what’s on my shelf:

Roger Zelazny (huge fan, I own most of his works at this point; Lord of Light, This Immortal, Creatures of Light and Darkness, Jack of Shadows, Dilvish the Damned, The Changing Land, Roadmarks, "Dreadsong", "Dayblood", too many others to list), Tanith Lee (Night’s Master, Death’s Master, Volkhavaar, The Storm Lord, Red as Blood…too many), Ursula K. Le Guin (love everything Earthsea, The Dispossessed, "Elementals", "The Stars Below"...etc.), Fred Saberhagen (Empire of the East series, The Veils of Azlaroc also a personal fav), Arthur C. Clarke (Rendezvous with Rama was very formative, I re-read it like every year). Now in broader strokes: Gene Wolfe, Barbara Hambly, Jack Vance, Jo Clayton, Tim Pratt, Frank Herbert. Obviously Tolkien is also pretty high on this list, but everyone knows him.

I love short fiction also, especially these days when I (feel like I) have no time to read for pleasure. Some short stories that float around in my mind:

“Sandkings” (George R.R. Martin), “Through the Flash” (Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah), “The Osteomancer’s Son” (Greg van Eekhout), “King Dragon” (Michael Swanwick), “Of Soil and Climate” (Gene Wolfe), “Cup and Table” and “Fable from a Cage” (Tim Pratt), "She Unnames Them" (Ursula K. Le Guin), "Permafrost" (Roger Zelazny), "Paid Piper" (Tanith Lee)

[retributory]

Can you talk in detail about LBH and what your favorite things are about him?

second go at this because tumblr nuked it the first time. lol. sorry this is so long and unorganized and only a little answers the question this is more of a stream of consciousness nico inner monologue sneak-peek that is binghe themed.

1) just the concept of binghe is very funny and appealing. 2014 edgy mary sue half-demon big dick op sex guy emperor of the whole world domesticated by loser 20-something with a 10k karma reddit account. really good no notes.

2) i think a lot of people (even binghe fans) tend to unintentionally flatten him because it's actually a little hard to write him. the fact that for most of the novel you have a misinformed opinion of him based off of sy's meta-contextual knowledge of events that have not happened and will not happen within the current timeline means that it's hard to actually know binghe's deal the first time around. even after that you have to grapple with the meta-meta-contextual facts of binghe being an alternative version of a character within a character within a novel within a novel that is being affected by a 'real person' within the first layer of meta, but of course svsss being very much a story that is often about being a writer/creative that second layer is played with often . . . to put it lightly i think it's probably a contributing factor to both the fact that he's really controversial and to the fact that a lot of svsss meta can get really, really existential LOL. this is before getting into the fact that you're at minimum actually talking about two characters anytime you're talking about him, so . . .

3) the thing is that i think binghe (both) fans are often incorrect about him because he (bing-mei) isn't actually a puppy crybaby, he's just acting like one. but haters are also incorrect, because similarly he (bing-ge) isn't really a domineering evil emperor. putting aside the very complicated ideas we could get into re: are fictional characters the executors of their own actions when viewed meta-contextually, the fact is that binghe spends most of the novel playing some sort of role. which makes sense! at the time of sy transmigrating, (nominally) 14 year-old binghe has already lost his birth mother, been found in a river, lost his adoptive mother, been ritually abused by his peers in all settings, lived on the streets, managed to get into cqms just to be a scapegoat, been ritually abused by his shizun, etc . . . when sy uses the term 'white lotus,' it's not actually a compliment. it should be noted sy also knows that ultimately binghe is acting nice because he wants adults to treat him nicely, and he does not (yet) have any kind of power or authority to do anything about being treated wrongly. i think probably the first hint of binghe's real personality is when he leads off lmy because he thinks sy is staring at her - i don't think binghe is mean, but he isn't nice either. he's very jealous, he gets upset easily, he doesn't take issue with manipulating others to get what he wants.

(aside: even as a child, he has already very much formed the worldview that existence is transactional, something that is informed even more by sj's treatment of him. even though sy challenges that worldview, he doesn't get rid of it. all of binghe's love language is based around the idea of doing something for him; cleaning his house, making him meals, keeping him safe. naturally i think that's informed by the only affection he's received being at the hands of a woman who couldn't do much for him other than acts of service in the first place, but i also think that usefulness is a core tenet of what binghe believes that he and other people need to be.

i don't think it's controversial to say that bing-ge does not actually love any of his wives. i'd go so far as to say i don't even think he actually enjoys having sex with them - he is purely doing so to fuel xin mo, and would otherwise either not bother with them at all or kill them. being the wife of the Emperor of Both Realms is the transactional reward for providing him with no-questions-asked xin mo-feeding sex, of which he textually will just rape them if they don't agree. because bing-mei actually does love sy, i think he has to consistently challenge the idea of 'usefulness as a core tenet of a relationship,' which is one of the bigger problems they have to navigate).

very much a core part of svsss is that both of these people (sy and binghe) are. hmm. not the best people. bugfuck crazy actually. binghe puts on the waterworks because sy likes fussing over him like an overbearing mother, and while the underlying thing that he's having crocodile tears over really is bothering him a lot of the time, he's playing it up for puppy baby points. but that isn't his actual personality. his actual personality is when sy starts soothing him automatically when binghe gets the idea that sy may have been sexing lqg up in those caves. lmfao

4) speaking of, he's very easy to read as having bpd. i think other people are fully entitled to have their opinions on the matter but binghe's quote-unquote bad personality is majorly explained if you simply operate under the assumption that he has a cluster-b personality disorder (which are caused by childhood trauma, dontcha know . . .). it's easy to view his xin mo-induced catastrophic meltdown in vol 3 as splitting, and his constant back-and-forth of "shizun is the best person ever, shizun is an angel, shizun is incapable of wrongdoing" to "shizun is the worst person ever, shizun is cruel and unrelented, shizun hurts me on purpose" is easy to see as the sort of black-and-white thinking that bpd is characterized by. of course you can just think whatever, but i like to see it that way, especially because binghe is still seen as desirable despite his flaws, while any character that has or is implied to have a cluster-b disorder is usually treated as some sort of inhuman monster.

5) of course, backing off that, did you know i actually rarely like romance? for years i made a habit to intentionally avoid all romance novels because i disliked the genre out of principle. despite being largely into the shipping scene of any given fandom i was in, i both generally did not interact with other fans and also generally avoided anything romance-centric. i avoided mxtx's works (tgcf specifically) for years because i was quite convinced all romance was the same as the very very boring sort of stuff i had unfortunately read, where both the main character and the male lead are completely and utterly perfect and the only conflict is the fact that they aren't currently together. the only reason i read svsss . . . was because someone on my twitter tl at the time was complaining about it, and their complaints sold me on it because they (bq) sounded so weird. i read the entirety of it extras and all in 3 days. it sent me cartwheeling down a rabbithole of a genre i had FOOLISHLY written off. thank you binghe's terrible personality for saving me.

6) i also . . . am eternally enchanted by binghe's borderline horrific body. the satire of 'what does a perfect harem lead power fantasy stallion actually look like' kills me. when sy feels his abs and they're uncomfortably hard all the time . . . his actual literal horsecock obliterating sy's stupid insides . . . i think binghe has body dysmorphia but the opposite way around people usually have it. he wants a smaller dick and a less sexy body. i think he is trapped in his perfect stupid sexy body and it really kills me.

7) this is getting too long i think i have to shut up. my FAVORITE THING ABOUT BINGHE?? his personality. if you put a gun to my head. but he is so cutiebaby anyways. i understand sy completely; i also want to coddle and baby binghe when he does awful things. binghe would have loved puppygirl posting online . . .

[birindale]

Hi I just wanted to double check something I am pretty sure I read on this blog. Is the origin of C'yra of D'riluth iii from the original cannon or was it a later addition? Also what does "of D'riluth iii" actually mean? I remember there being some vagueness to what it means

Okay there's a long version and a short version of this story.

Short version: It was a later addition. In 2008 Mattel launched a toy line called Masters of the Universe Classics, which could only be ordered through their website and was aimed at the collector market. One of the things they did was include "character bios" in a sort of homage to the G.I. Joe toys of the 80s, which featured 'personnel files' that gave specializations and a brief character history, including their real names (e.g. Duke was actually named Conrad S. Hauser).

Catra's figure was released in 2011 for about $65 USD. Her bio (which I've lifted from a Poe Ghostal review) is as follows:

We (I, and my friends whom I've pestered for opinions) are pretty sure D'Riluth III is the name of her planet, even though another planet in the same solar system (from the New Adventures of He-Man in the 90s) has the Arabic numeral 7, so including Roman numerals is a strange choice.

Long version: There was a fellow working for Mattel at the time named Scott "Toyguru" Neitlich, and he was (and remains to this day) exceptionally bad at things like 'writing' and 'creativity'. He was never very interested in She-Ra, though he loves to tell the story of stealing his sister's doll one year, so to him Catra is simply an agent of the Horde... which, in order to adhere to the 2002-2003 tv show, was now 5,000 years old. This bio directly contradicts the Filmation canon of Catra's mask having belonged to the Magicat queen, for instance, and introduces a number of confusing details.

One of the least popular was Adora being Hordak's "step-daughter" instead of his "adopted daughter", which was already kind of a gray area since he didn't exactly raise her. Scott digging in his heels on the matter was actually how I learned he'd written the thing in the first place:

Now you may be wondering, jeez, it's pretty confusing and the writing isn't great but aren't you being kind of harsh? Surely the push-back from the He-Fans was bad enough. Well give me a minute, dang. This is the long version!

I reached out to him about a year and half ago to ask 1. How it's pronounced, 2. If he could confirm that D'Riluth III is the planet, and 3. If he remembered how he came up with it. He told me the following:

Some backstory here--Scott runs a bit of a one-man content farm, in an effort to avoid paying hosting fees for advertisements or actually engaging in SEO. He is a marketing consultant.

He used to upload a 5-10 minute video every day, but shortly after I contacted him that dropped to only five a week, and his weekly "Director's Commentary" videos about MOTUC figures that he worked on (largely just explaining who the character even is in an unedited stream of consciousness, as his videos became slideshows of google images) moved to bi-weekly.

I was like, okay, he left Mattel in 2014 right? So surely once he's through that year he'll get to this new series.

Nope! He's doing 2015 too! So I reached out again in January, just to like. See if he was still intending to cover the 'real names', which imo should have been part of his commentary to begin with, but...

He had forgotten <3 I explained no, I was asking about these specific questions that I had outlined in my first email (I had replied to his last message in the chain for simplicity's sake), and he just said he'd be doing it soon. So I was like oh, cool, do you know if you'll be doing one a week still? since that would put a Catra video about 4 years out as he does them in release order, and he then promised he'd get to it soon and didn't answer the question.

Annoying, certainly, but whatever. Unless one of us dies horribly I can wait it out, right?

WRONG.

Scott, being an idiot, has not credited a single one of the images he lifted from google over his four years of mostly-daily slideshows. And recently, somebody fucking noticed!

So this guy--Ethan Wilson, a very talented toy photographer and reviewer--was informed that Scott (in his capacity as Spector Creative, the name of his YouTube channel/consulting business) had been using his pictures in videos. Actually, let me use Ethan's own words here:

I decided to dig a little deeper into Spector’s channel, and found 81 instances of my photos being used in 68 of the channels videos.  None of these featured credit to me for use of the photos, and 48 of the 81 instances removed or obstructed my watermarks.

-About This Spector Creative Thing

I very strongly encourage you to read through this linked post, as it gets worse! Somehow!!

Scott, not noticing these as they came in over the course of 10 days, logged in to discover his channel had been taken down. He emailed Ethan in something of a panic to ask that Ethan reverse the claims as a 'professional favor', as Scott got all his clients through his channel's "advertising".

Now you're never gonna believe this... but when he and Ethan came to an understanding, suddenly Scott didn't give a shit.

He released a libelous video claiming Ethan had no rights to the images (he does) and that Scott could use them all he wanted because of Fair Use (he can't) and emailed Ethan the following.

First of all: this is bullshit. Copyright is automatic in the US, trademark wouldn't apply regardless, and as Scott should fucking know by now Ethan doesn't have a 'channel', he has a blog.

Second, he shot himself in the foot with the Fair Use defense by outright stating that his channel is his exclusive advertisement for his business and that he depends on his content to make a living. He said in his first video that it was "educational" 🙄

So Ethan realized Scott was a Fucking Liar and decided he should just copyright claim the rest of Scott's shit, in order to protect his images and rights thereto. YouTube can't take the channel down again unless Ethan is willing to pursue legal action--which he isn't, because he has a full time job and two kids and even though he'd probably win, it's a lot of time and energy.

I and a few others were trying to convince him that it would be worth it anyway, and looking into identifying and contacting the other artists Scott's stolen from over the years, when... Scott released a book. His first-ever graphic novel [looks into the camera like i'm on the office]

drawn entirely by AI.

So we have a frankenstein's monster of copyright infringement masquerading as illustrations (with all the uncanny valley that implies), Scott's technically and practically terrible writing, and the plot is Greek mythology. There are four and a half typos just in the free sample, and that's not including the words in images like his map or logo. He claims the title is a registered trademark but it certainly isn't registered in his state, or federally, and it's already in use by several other brands, so I wouldn't believe him even if he hadn't demonstrated a lack of understanding of copyright & trademark as recently as last week.

So I'm kinda fucking done waiting for answers! I can't trust a thing out of this guy's mouth! And he's pretty stupid, so do I even care what he thinks? I have decided that no. No I do not. I'll check back in 2028 and if he's survived + actually followed through then maybe I'll give his video a watch but until then it is simply pissing me off to remember this guy exists.

Sorry this turned into a rant I'm just really starting to loathe the guy. It's been an infuriating week or two. But uh... No, it's only canon to this one action figure line that ran for a little over a decade. We're certainly not beholden to it, it's more of a fun little in-joke for the fandom these days. You see someone use C'yra and you're like haha I know her! It's fun :3 Regardless of Scott's bullshit I enjoy seeing it around, and it's not like he owns or benefits from it in any way when maybe 1% of the people using it know where it comes from (and the people who know it was him specifically may be limited to the followers that have watched me complain about it).

Thank you for asking, I really do love asks even if the answer isn't what I want it to be lol. I'm happy to verify or explain anything I can!

[i-can-read-to-him]

The Wesper Fic Club's Author Spotlight is a post series that aims to feature two to three fic authors a month, randomly selected from a pool of names put forth on our server. The authors are then asked to answer three interview questions, select up to five of their fics for us to feature, and finally, recommend three fics by others in the fandom.

(Note: Our spotlighted fics are not limited to Wesper, though they tend to be a central pairing in most of our authors' featured works.)

This week, we are putting a spotlight on Elias's writing!

Socials: @starwritebrekker (Tumblr) | starlightwrite (AO3) | starwritecos (TikTok) | wellelwrites (Instagram)

❀

Part One: Author Interview

Q: What’s your favourite fic you’ve written for this fandom?

A: Do Us Part! It’s my first time writing a modern AU and I’m loving the challenge of finding modern day equivalents to the Crows world.

Q: When did you first start writing? What keeps you going today?

A: I’ve been writing stories since elementary school, earliest I can remember is second grade (seven years old). What keeps me writing is how much writing feels like a release. I’m not very good at speaking what’s going on in my head (see: neurodivergent), and writing it out helps me comprehend my own thoughts more and it helps me communicate my thoughts much better. It is my favorite form of expression.

Q: Who is your favourite character? What do you love about them?

A: Kaz Brekker. This boy is the embodiment of a person in survival mode for most of their life and not truly understanding what it is to come out of it. The world has hardened him but inside him, despite his best efforts, there is still that hope. That heart.

Q: Have you had a chance to interact with the SAB cast? Tell us about your experience(s).

A: Amita liked the photo of my Dregs tattoo on instagram! I love her so much and I’m so glad she interacts with the fandom so much as well.

Q: If you could be friends with any character in the Grishaverse, who would it be?

A: Matthias and I both grew up with organized religion being the backbone of our perspective of the world, so I feel like he and I could get along well. I want to give all the crows a hug (an air hug for Kaz).

Q: What are some headcanons you have that you consider your personal canon?

A: Kaz Rietveld-Brekker is transmasc. Argue with the wall XD. (I am nonbinary transmasc I hold this headcanon so close to my heart).

Q: Are there any songs you strongly associate with a favourite character or ship?

A: Francesca by Hozier is Kanej coded.

Q: How do you feel about your fics being translated into other languages?

A: Go forth and translate (just give me credit please and thank youuuuu)!

❀

Part Two: Selected Works

Do Us Part

Teen | 4.1K | Kanej, Wesper, Helnik Modern AU, Mentioned Character Death, The dog lives In Progress

Part of the Wesper Fic Club Big Bang 2024! The Crows run a funeral home in the suburbs of a modern day Ketterdam. There’s death. There’s a dog. There’s healing. There’s still a dog.

No Funerals

Teen | 10.1K | Kanej, mentioned Wesper, mentioned Helnik Vampire AU, slowburn, Wesper Child, Alby Rollins is there In Progress

There’s a figure that haunts the Barrel at night since time immemorial, he exists in the shadows and watery reflections of the canals of Ketterdam. He was once the undisputed king of the city, and now? He runs a gang of misfits and swindles the merchant council, not even death can escape his cheating. 

Forever Not to Disappear

Teen | 20.5K | Kanej, Wesper Sickfic, slowburn, healing from trauma In Progress

Kaz Brekker is stuck in bed (it’s a bad illness day) and is forced to reflect and process his emotions.

Clouded Judgement

Teen | 441 words | Kanej, Wesper Stream of Consciousness, Wishful thinking, Reflective Kaz Brekker Completed

Post-Season Two finale of Shadow and Bone, Kaz is hoveled up in his room, and his mind never stops moving. Nor does his pen.

❀

Part Three: Author's Recs

I’m The Perfect Stranger Who Knows You Too Well by @remadora-black / actressforever14 (my sister Cassie!)

Teen | 54.9K | Kanej, Wesper, Helnik Jordie Rietveld Lives, Childhood Trauma, Major Illness In Progress

Cassie’s description: What if Jordie did not die of Firepox? What if, instead, when Kaz returned from the Barge, his brother was waiting for him. Firepox would leave them both forever changed, but how will the course of the rest of their lives go? What will happen to Jordie when he realizes his little brother is no longer the boy he knew before, and that he has been left with a shell of a boy with only one thing on his mind: vengeance?

What the Water Gave Me by 19burstraat (astardanced)

Teen | 23.9K | Kanej, Crows friendship Post Canon, Canon Divergence, Angst With A Happy Ending Completed

Kaz as a Tidemaker. Get into it. Kaz as a grisha is extremely my sh*t. 

You’re A Dog And I’m Your Man by limelacroix

Not Rated | 27.8K | Kanej, Wesper Kaz Brekker gets a dog, Fluff and Angst, Hurt/Comfort

Kaz Brekker gets a dog. That’s the whole thing.Also extremely my sh*t

The Unexpected Visitor by insignificant457

Mature 90.9K | Kanej Post-canon, Implied/referenced SA, Implied/referenced sex In Progress

Inej brings one Bastard of the Barrel to the caravans for a family wedding. Hijinks ensue.

❀

Please support our authors by commenting and leaving kudos on any stories of theirs you read and enjoy! Don't forget to also reblog this post and check back soon for our next author spotlight to come.

Interested in joining our server and getting to know our community? Feel free to request an invite via the @i-can-read-to-him ask box.

[glass--beach]

hi j!

my highschool band and I played for the first time at a small music fest. we only sang covers and we're not very good lol, but we kinda want to start making some songs ourselves!!

do you have any tips for songwriting? how do you choose themes and melodies, and what's your process with glass beach?

doing covers is a good place to start! i like to learn songs i like and then try to take them apart and try to understand what parts i like the most and why they work. i do most of my songwriting by playing some chords and humming or singing until i find stuff that works. you can even take chords from an existing song to start with, lots of songs reuse chord progressions. lyrics usually come way way later. once you find two sections that feel connected but contrast each other a bit you're golden (verse and chorus is enough, you can figure out bridges later)

i like to structure melodies as a "question" and "answer", so every first phrase ends in an uncertain place (any note other than the 1st note of the scale, the 3rd and 5th note of the scale are usually good options) and every second phrase ends on a resolved note (the 1st note of the scale, OR the 3rd or 5th if the first phrase ended on a note besides those two). this is more of a guideline than a rule though, plenty of great melodies don’t do that but i find that method to be reliable. i hope that makes sense

next bit of advice i have is to just try to write as many songs as possible, and don’t take it too seriously, especially if songwriting is new to you. spending a really long time trying to get one song perfect can be a trap. lots of people will just idly sing little made up songs to themselves, or to their pets or whatever, that’s the kind of stuff i’m talking about, goofy and frivolous. it should be fun! that’ll give you a lot of practice and make writing more “serious” songs a lot more comfortable. lots of my oldest songs were conceived as jokes.

if you’re trying to write with your band i say take a really simple chord progression (like 2 chords even, definitely no more than 4) and just loop it over and over and jam on it and try our different ideas. you really can write a song with just two chords, I - IV is a good progression for that (ie D - G, C - F, E - A).

this was kinda disorganized and stream of consciousness but i hope it helps! i have spent so long honing my songwriting craft but it is very difficult for me to explain how i actually think about it. keep in mind there’s pretty much no rules and the best thing you can do for yourself is make songwriting fun! good luck writing some songs!!

[concerningwolves]

Hey! Do you have any tips for breaking writers block when you're adhd and/or autistic? Be it your own tips or a link to another post? My friend and I need help haha

Ahh sorry you got buried under spam and old ask game asks. (I... really need to sort my ask box >.<' ). But here we go, a month late, and hopefully better late than never:

Quick ideas for beating writer's block when autistic and/or ADHD

I've got this old post I wrote on writer's block and focus troubles. Ironically, this was before my autism diagnosis but the tips still happen to be things I, an autistic person, did to manage writing when faced with executive dysfunction (except I didn't know what executive dysfunction was at that point lol). I'm linking this with one important caveat, though: if you have ADHD, "stepping away" might do more harm than good; struggling to start tasks is a Big Thing with ADHD, so not starting the task at all is entirely counterproductive. (Unless you're in burnout! Here's a post about the differences between block and burnout with some ideas on what to do for each, in case that's at all helpful to you).

And here's something yoinked from another old ask-answer:

sometimes a break from more “serious” writing is what you need. Maybe try and take the characters from your main project and drop them somewhere else for the hell of it. I like to throw my characters into the MCU without warning like “lmao have fun in a strange modern world where there are gods and a guy in an iron flying suit bye.” Or, if fandom cross-overs aren’t your thing, find a writing prompt or take an idea you like and use it to form a short story with your characters instead.

Some other ideas I've seen around for writer's block with ADHD/Autism are:

Try voice recording or text to speech (i.e., absolute stream-of-consciousness unfiltered brain-to-mouth, giving yourself permission to 100% bullshit if you like, and see what rattles loose in the brain box)

Stream of consciousness writing in general, not even necessarily about a particular prompt or particular project. This one can be done in combination with:

Writing sprints! One minute timers, two minute timers, five minutes – set it for as long as you want, but when you're fighting executive dysfunction and/or difficulty focusing, the burst of urgency that comes from a shorter timer is very helpful.

And speaking of the sense of urgency: gamify your writing! There are different ways to do this, with varying elements of risk. I'll link some ways to do this at the end under "resources".

Exercise. I don't necessarily mean hitting the gym, but a quick burst of exercise prior to writing to get the heart rate up can help wake your brain up a bit. (Or, if you find repetitive exercise mind-numbingly boring like I do, the writing sure does start to look appealing lol).

Meditation. Okay, this one is sort of 🤔 for me, because I do often hear from fellow autistics and our ADHD cousins that meditation is literally impossible for us. It is for me. But! Like with exercise above, if meditation bores you instead of helping relax and ""clear your mind"", you can probably use that boredom to your advantage. Or, it might work as intended.

Change your workspace/situation/routine. Sometimes the problem is that you need new sensory input, or that your brain has gotten thoroughly bored and decided not to tell you. Use a different chair. Move to the kitchen table. Write at a different time of day. Have a different snack (or try having a snack while writing...). Basically, look at what you're currently trying, and see how you can do it differently.

It's also really good practise to get comfortable with Being Bad At Writing. Perfectionism and Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria are the biggest, meanest brain weasels with the sharpest teeth. Don't let them bully you. It sucks. It takes a lot of time and effort and internal work, which is why I was loathe to include this on a post of quick solutions, but. It is important.

And getting comfortable with this doesn't necessarily mean learning how to accept critique, or accepting that sometimes you'll write things that suck. It means accepting that sometimes you won't handle critique or feedback well, and also accepting that you won't always manage to beat the writer's block or be productive. Sometimes you have to make peace with the fact that you're going to feel horrible, feel your feelings, and try to remind yourself on the other side that none of it means you're a talentless hack.

Resources

Anything with a 🪙 next to it is paid only (I've tried to limit these and find alternatives).

The resources are split into things that "gameify" writing (i.e., hack your dopamine/serotonin in ways that reaaaaallly help autistic and ADHD folks), writing programs that are designed to help you focus, writing programs that track your habits and appeal to the "ohhhh numbers going up" brain, focus-aiding apps, and some miscellaneous stuff. Under the cut to save your dashes.

"Gamifying" your writing:

The Most Dangerous Writing App – You can't stop typing before your set timer runs out, or you risk losing your work. Excellent for warming up, stream-of-consciousness, or if you're feeling reckless, working on your actual project. I did a lot of the second draft of When Dealing with Wolves on this thing (it was terrifying yet highly effective).

Written? Kitten! – Get rewarded for meeting your set writing wordcount with kitten pictures. Haven't used this one personally, but heard wonderful things about it.

4TheWords 🪙 – This one gamifies writing in the most literal sense. As in, it's an online game where you defeat monsters, explore and level up by writing words. I did the free trial a couple years back, and I've heard there are a lot of different ways you can lower the subscription cost. The only reason I haven't gone back to it is because I feel like I can't justify spending money on it when I'm doing fine with Scrivener and free resources, but maybe one day I will purely for the fun factor...

StimuWrite – similar idea to Written Kitten; the app provides visual/audio stimulation while you write, which is great for many ADHD-ers and autistics. There's a progress bar, soundscape options, typing effects and emoji reactions as rewards, among other features.

Write or Die – This is The Most Dangerous Writing App meets Written Kitten. As far as I can figure out, the basic web version is free to use; you can set the parameters like how how long you want to write for, how many words to reach, and whether you want rewards for meeting goals or punishments for failing to meet them. There's also a stimulus mode, where the nice auditory stimulus goes away if you stop writing.

Minimalist/Focus writing programs:

Focus Writer [Windows] – thoroughly stripped-down minimalist word processor. As far as I know, it has basic functions like find-replace, but mostly it's designed only for writing. Not for formatting, spellchecking or editing.

iA Writer 🪙 [iOS] – Similar to Focus Writer, it's designed to fill your screen with a simple workspace. Allows you to use markdown formatting, and has a feature called Focus Mode that blurs out everything except the sentence you're typing. (If I could find a Windows-friendly alternative to this with that same feature I would be so happy). A cheaper alternative is 1Writer, but that doesn't have the focus mode.

Typewrite Something �� Absolutely bare minimum web-based typewriter simulator. Basically just a blank screen that you start typing on, and the words appear in a typewriter font. Great for stream-of-consciousness without the risk level of TMDWA because you can't backspace. If you don't like the clacky sound, turn off your volume.

Focus Apps

Cold Turkey – Block applications and websites on your laptop/computer for a specified period of time. You can even block the entire internet.

Forest – Similar to Cold Turkey in that it stops you from seeking distractions or getting distracted. Set a timer and the app starts growing a tree. If you leave the app, the tree dies. Once you have a tree, you add it to your forest.

Habit-building writing programs:

Novlr – Simple, minimal layout, and tracks your writing goals per month and day, and your daily streak. There are more features in the plus and pro versions, and you can only have five projects in the free version, but otherwise it looks like a good free alternative to the next two programs:

750 Words 🪙 – Made for free writing, but also very useful for drafting. I had it for a month or so a while back on the free trial. It tracks writing streaks and gives you fun graphs and statistics at the end of each session, including number of distractions, actual typing time vs total time and average words per minute. Also, it analyses the mood of what you wrote, which I always found delightful.

Writing Analytics 🪙 – If writing streaks, badges and analytical graphs get your dopamine going, then I really recommend this one. The writing screen itself is very minimalistic, but it still shows your writing speed (I loved watching that go up) and your goal progress. In terms of analytics, it tracks a LOT of different things, including time spent writing vs revising, average wordcounts per day/month/year, and words written vs words deleted. I used this for about a year before I switched to Scrivener, and the switch was purely because I needed something that wasn't subscription-based. (Apparently since I stopped using it there's also a new feature that lets you create private writing rooms and see other writer's progress).

Misc.

WriteTrack – Not a word processor, but it has very good tools for tracking and planning your writing. Again, if graphs going up helps your brain, this is excellent, but you can't see it in real time.

10 ADHD-friendly brain tricks for writers – what it says on the tin: ten tips for writers with ADHD; I'm particularly fond of "Put away one knife", which breaks the nebulous task of "start writing" into something really simple like just... pull out your desk chair.

[shubblelive]

— SOURCE MATERIAL

summary : tommy’s plan to get you and wilbur back together doesn’t work. fortunately, you don’t need it. a quiet christmas party, joni mitchell and a little bit of alcohol works just fine.

genre : fluff with some angst peppered here and there

warnings : mentions of a breakup, alcohol/drinking (one mention of being drunk in the past, no one’s drunk in the fic), swearing, very minor panic attack, tommy being a little shithead

pairing : cc!wilbur x ex girlfriend!reader

pronouns : she/her

featuring : cc!wilbur soot, cc!tommyinnit (tommy and will are the only creators with dialogue),cc!phil + kristin (mentioned), cc!ranboo (mentioned), cc!tubbo (mentioned), cc!james marriott (mentioned), cc!aimsey (mentioned)

word count : 4.3k

note : christmas fic christmas fic christmas fic!!! december is one of my favourite times of the year and suddenly i am so inspired like i haven’t written anything in ages but december rolls around and boom here’s a 4k wilbur fic. thank you to carrie for letting me yell at her about this fic.

it wasn’t unusual for tommy to call you and ask for a ride home. he would catch an uber somewhere and sometimes he’d go to book one home and the nearest car would be over an hour away, so if his parents were busy he turned to the next best thing; his siblings. 

the internet was well aware of the younger boy’s habit of adopting older creators as family members. phil and kristin were his parents, and you and wilbur were his older siblings, and you were more than happy to give him lifts whenever you were free. 

“can you come pick me up?”

“hello to you too, tommy.” you had just ended your stream, and were processing the footage for editing to go on your youtube channel. “where are you?”

“i’m about twenty minutes from your place, i can text you the address.” tommy answered. “please?”

you were already putting on your coat. “alright, send me the address, i’ll be there soon.”

“you’re a life-saver, atom,” tommy said. you huffed at the nickname, given to you because “you barely matter” as tom had joked one afternoon a few months ago. before you could respond, he had hung up.

“shithead,” you pocketed your phone and bent down to tie your laces. your phone vibrated in your pocket, probably tommy with the address. you pulled it out one handed as you tightened your shoes. without looking, you copied the address into google maps and pressed enter, putting it on your dashboard mount. 

it should have clicked when you passed the dive bar you used to frequent. it should have clicked when you passed the corner shop.  it should have clicked when you passed the ginger stray you used to pet on your walk to the corner shop. perhaps you were in denial, but you didn’t register where you were until you were parked in front of the building.

you were nervous when you’d first moved in there. you had lived in the same shitty flat since uni, and when wilbur had tentatively asked you to to move in with him you had your doubts. not because you didn’t love will, no that was the least of your issues. you just didn’t want to step on his toes, it was his place after all. you were hesitant to bring your things in, feeling guilty when wilbur’s novels were moved to make room for your plants, when he had to install another rack to hold all your shoes, when you had come home from the bakery and found wilbur had swapped out his sheets for a set of yours. but over time, wilbur had eased you into it, and soon it was just as much your place as it was his. 

now it was just his again. it hadn’t been yours for nearly a year, and yet when you pulled into the strip of parking you had to consciously go to the ‘guests’ section. you took your phone off the dock, your knee jumping up and down as you called tommy. he didn’t answer. you texted him. and again. then you called a second time, leaving him a desperate voicemail. fifteen minutes went by and tommy hadn’t even read any of your texts, so you huffed, realising that you were going to have to physically go and retrieve tommy. 

you dug out your key card from the depths of your purse, praying that wilbur didn’t block your card. the light turned green and you breathed a sigh of relief, pushing the door open. in an attempt to make it take longer, hoping and praying that tommy would reply before you reached the third floor. you reached the top of the stairs and sighed, counting to three in your head before knocking. “tom? it’s me!” you knocked again, not wanting mr adams next door to hear your voice and come out to talk to you. he was a nice older man, but you didn’t want to be in this building for a second longer than you had to. “tommy?” you inhaled. “will?”

you heard a muffled voice, and the door swung open in front of you. “tom.” you breathed another sigh of relief. “great. let’s go, i have a video to edit.”

“wait, i have to grab my stuff.” tommy said, and then he was off, and you were alone. 

the first thing that struck you was how the place looked. it was exactly the same as when you had been there. you turned around to the end table behind the door. a few unopened letters, a small wooden bowl, and a small plant. the bowl had been your idea, weeks of wilbur coming to you with “darling, do you know where my keys are?” before you caved and bought it for him. lo and behold, his keyes were nestled inside, spotify code keychain that you had also bought him sitting face up. the plant was new, and you ran a finger over the leaf.

on the couch there was a grey woollen blanket thrown over the back, also yours. though, technically he had bought it. you were the only one who used it, complaining about the cold. as lovely as you thought will’s flat was the heating barely worked. will radiated warmth, both physically and emotionally. 

the entire flat still contained your presence. any random person wouldn’t be able to tell that you hadn’t lived there since you and wilbur broke up. 

“hey.”

you spun around, wilbur smiling sheepishly. “sorry, sorry. would it be awfully cliche if I said I didn’t mean to startle you?”

you laughed breathily. “yes. but it’s okay.”

he nodded, guilty smile still pinched across his face. “tommy’s just grabbing his shit. you know that kid, fucking menace.”

if tommy noticed how awkward it was, he didn’t say anything. you and wilbur both brightened visibly when he came through the door. watching wilbur hug tom goodbye, squeezing his shoulder gently, it hits you suddenly that you haven’t seen wilbur in nearly seven months.

you’re quiet as you drop tommy off, and he wants to apologise. wants to say sorry for making you pick him up and not telling you his phone was on the verge of dying. he wants to say he’s sorry for all those times you cancelled streams, claiming you “weren’t feeling well” when he knew you were upset about wilbur. 

but tommy also saw all those times wilbur was curled up in that grey blanket you left behind. buying plants to fill in the gaps of things you took and to give him a purpose, something that depended on him. he saw the way wilbur’s eyes brightened when he heard your voice, his shoulder’s slumping before the door shut when you left. 

how one time he’d had stood in front of a drunk wilbur, tear tracks running down his face and had to wrestle will’s phone off him to stop him from calling you. 

tommy didn’t know what had happened between you two; you were adults, he was only seventeen at the time. it felt naive of him to think you two belonged together, but he couldn’t help it. 

“thanks for driving me.” he said earnestly as he stepped out of the car. you nodded and gave him a pained smile. “i love you.”

it wasn’t a normal occurrence, saying things like that, but you softened. “i love you.” tommy brightened seeing your more genuine expression, but he could still see that your interaction with wilbur had left you upset. 

you collapsed back onto your sofa once you were home, not in the mood to edit your video anymore. 

wilbur always worked too much. it was something his viewers loved; how dedicated he was to them. but they didn’t see the sleepless nights, when you would wake up to wilbur typing frantically in his notes app, a muffled “go back to sleep, darling” when he noticed you were awake.

but then it turned to missing entire nights of sleep, coming back from streaming to find wilbur passed out on the couch, shoes still on from last night. sometimes he would talk to you about it, laying on your chest as you ran your fingers through his hair and whispering about how he didn’t want to let anyone down.

you soothed him as best as you could, but you knew that the dark circles and the endless cups of coffee would only get worse. he didn’t have the time or energy to take care of himself, let alone you. not that you needed him to take care of you, but the two of you lived together and you probably talked to the fedex person more than you did your boyfriend.

you’d only been split for eight months, but you’d been missing him for far longer.

you were putting up christmas decorations when tommy called next. stringing lights across the shelves in your office, only bothered to decorate the one room. it wasn’t like you’d be doing anything anyway. “yeah, tom?” your phone was wedged between your shoulder and ear as you tried to detangle the lights. 

“hey, me and will were streaming together and i have to get home like, now but my dad isn’t available until three,” tommy explained, and you winced at the sound of wilbur’s name. “i totally get it if you can’t, but-“

“i’ll be there, but i’m going to mcdonald’s on the way back and you are paying.” tommy laughed and you had to move the phone away from your ear, giving up on the lights for the time being. “will still has the same office right?”

“yeah you can get there alright?” he asked. “you don’t need the address?” you assured him you’d be fine, and he paused guiltily. “we may also be locked in. the door broke again.”

“jesus,” you shook your head. “yeah, alright i’ll come let you out. dickhead,” you smiled at his noise of indignation before hanging up.

this time it was worse. the last time you’d been planning on avoiding wilbur until about five minutes before you saw him. this time you had the whole drive over to think about what it would be like. his hair was longer, you’d noticed when you first saw him. you always loved it when his hair was longer but it got in his face too much and he hated the feeling. 

you’d cut his hair for him once. wilbur sitting on a chair in the kitchen of your flat (this was before you’d moved in together) while you sat on the bench behind him, swinging your legs ever so slightly as he gazed adoringly up at you.

“let me take a picture,” you’d giggled, turning to grab your phone. “you look so cute.”

“no,” he’d whined. “darling,” he’d still smiled when you prompted, and you looked softly at your screen, completely enamoured. “do not post that anywhere, can’t have anyone knowing that i simp for you.”

“dork,” you had put your phone down and ruffled his hair, some loose hairs falling out from where you’d cut. 

you pulled your car up to the pavement and went up to wilbur’s office. it was a fairly small building, and you managed to get there without anyone asking any questions. 

you reached the office and peered inside. it was dark. you opened the door and stuck your head in, but there was no one inside. “hey!” tommy said much too loudly, him and wilbur coming around the corner. your eyes flicked between the two of them, narrowing slightly.

“i thought you said the door was locked?” you asked uncertainly.

“it’s not,” tommy said simply, and he reached a hand out and shoved you through the open door, shutting it behind you. “but it will be.”

“what the fuck?” you banged on the window.

tom pushed wilbur over, but the older man just looked at him incredulously. “have you lost your mind?”

“please?” tommy asked, gesturing to where you were glaring at him.

“no!” wilbur said, hitting tommy’s arm off his shoulder. “you’re a dickhead. now let her out.”

“fine.” tommy’s shoulders slumped and he moved out of the way. wilbur rolled his eyes at tommy, saying he’d do it and then making will. his hand wrapped around the doorknob and he was halfway through an apology to you when tommy’s hand collided with his back.

wilbur stumbled toward and you both watched in horror as tommy shut the door, triumphantly locking it with a click.

“tommy you fucker!” wilbur yelled.

“now, i may have been lying about needing a lift and being locked in the office, but i wasn’t lying about needing to go home.”

“thomas if you leave i’m gonna delete your channel!” tommy actually looked nervous at wilbur’s threat. “open the door.”

tommy sighed again, finally giving up. he jiggled the doorknob and his eyes widened. “okay i would let you out but i may have broken the door.”

he backed away, both you and will yelling at him. 

you turned so your back was against the door, sitting down with your knees up to your chest. will came to sit next to you. “are you okay?”

“i just don’t like knowing there’s no way out of a room.” you said quietly. “i don’t like being trapped.”

“i know,” he said softly. “is there anything i can do besides breaking a window?”

you exhaled, smiling weakly. “can you just talk to me?” you fiddled nervously, suddenly worried about what he would think.

“of course i can.” without realising, wilbur had reached out and was dragging his thumb gently over the back of your hand. “you know that step down the street from ou-my flat? the one that you always used to trip on? they fixed it.” you didn’t seem to notice his mistake, so he kept going. “and there’s a new bar a few miles away and we’ve been trying to get them to let us play there, so we might have a new gig bar soon.”

your breathing was more even now, and he squeezed your hand gently. you squeezed back and he smiled.

you could vaguely hear tommy saying he was going to get maintenance, and wilbur shuffled. “i’m gonna see if i can jimmy it with a card. could you grab one for me please?” 

you reached over to will’s desk and grabbed a random card out of his wallet. you went to hand it to him but before he could grab it you took a closer look. “you kept this?”

over a year ago as a joke you’d bought him one of those simp cards from the arthur meme, and it had your name written underneath it. “you’re only allowed to simp for me,” you’d say as you gave it to him, making him crack up.

“yeah,” wilbur admitted, his cheeks turning warm. “guess i forgot it was there.”

he shoved it into the lock and wiggled it around until he heard a click and the door swung open. “here.” he tried to give it back to you, but you shook your head.

“you can keep it, or throw it out. whatever you want. it’s yours,” you babbled, not meeting his eyes.

wilbur wasn’t sure what came over him in the next ten seconds, but before he could stop himself he blurted out “does this mean i’m still allowed to love you?”

your gaze shot up and your eyes met wilbur’s, warm and brown, filled with uncertainty. eventually, you nodded. “always.”

wilbur wasn’t sure if that was if that was an invitation, but before he could stop himself he was wrapping his arms around you. you burrowed into his chest, breathing deeply. “did tommy really parent-trap us?”

“well,” you replied shyly. “don’t they get back together in the parent trap? not exactly accurate to the source material.”

“well we all know how important it is,” wilbur said quietly, eyes flicking down for just an instant. 

“very important,” he could feel your breath on his face.

“it’s a christmas miracle!”

“it’s gonna be if i don’t kill him,” wilbur muttered, teeth gritted as you pulled apart to find tommy. he was holding a stick, and seemed to register your confusion.

“couldn’t find maintenance, so i went outside and found this.” he said proudly. “i was helping.”

“yeah actually,” will said genuinely, holding his hand out. “give us a look.” tommy handed the stick to wilbur and was promptly hit in the face with it. “that’s for locking us in there, bastard.”

“ow.” tommy picked the stick off the ground and chucked it at wilbur, but it just bounced off the door behind him. “okay fine. i’m sorry.”

“you better be,” you stepped towards him and he flinched, clearly sure you were going to attack him like wilbur had. “come on, let’s go.”

as tommy said goodbye to wilbur, the two of you made eye contact over tom’s shoulder. he smiled at you, and you smiled back. he raised his eyebrows slightly, grin overtaking his face. you nodded almost imperceptibly. he’d call you.

he didn’t. 

it had been two weeks since you’d last spoken, and he never called you. you didn’t want to admit that it hurt you. you had spent eight months trying to get over wilbur, all that progress destroyed in an instant.

you’d never deleted his contact, not even when you first broke up. you hovered over it debating on whether to call him, before exiting out and closing your phone.

your phone stayed dark for approximately one second before it was lighting up again. you answered, “yeah, tommy?”

“so, atom, me and a few others were thinking of having a little christmas get together on the 23rd? would you want to come?” he rushed out, wanting to get the words out before you said anything.

you considered it for a second. your parents would be going on holiday. they invited you, but you always wanted to spend your christmas with wilbur. this year, you’d declined again, without really knowing the reason. it’s not like you had other plans.

“yeah, alright,” you said, and you heard tom let out a triumphant breath on the other side. “who’s coming?”

“you, phil and kristin, tubbo, james, ranboo, maybe aimsey, a few other people maybe…” he trailed off, and you frowned.

“wilbur?” you asked.

“yeah.” tommy admitted. “but there will be enough people that you can be a coward and not talk to him.”

“tommy,” you said, voice low. “don’t.”

“okay, i’m sorry. please come?”

it’s not like you had anything better to do. “i’ll be there, tommy. don’t worry.” 

the things you would do for that fucker. he could never know. god knows his head was big enough without you telling him that.

while you were quietly dreading it, tommy seemed almost giddy with excitement. so you forced a smile and acted happy about it, even after tommy abandoned you within thirty seconds of you arriving. 

you managed to strike up a conversation with ranboo, though, grateful that you knew everyone. you’d isolated yourself quite a bit after the breakup, worried that your friends would rather be friends with will.

your worries were shattered when you were  engulfed in a hug from him. they seemed really interested in your upcoming projects and you asked about his with equal fervour. 

the night was going much better than you’d expected, and it was winding down when wilbur finally approached you. joni mitchell singing through the speakers about her lover making her weak in the knees, sipping on a drink with your head resting on top of aimsey’s.

“hey,” he was quiet, words slurred more from being tired than drunk. “can we talk?”

you looked down at aimsey, who was immersed in conversation with james and tommy, so you slid off the counter and followed him down the hall. tommy’s flat was small, so the two of you found a quiet corner. your shoulder was pressed into the wall, looking at him over the rim of your glass as he fiddled with his glasses. “i’m sorry i didn’t call.”

“it’s fine.” you said stiffly.

“no, it’s not.” he pressed. “i fucked up. not just when i didn’t call. i fucked up when we were still together.”

“will,” you tried. “it’s okay. it’s the past.”

“but you’re not.” he said. “you’re not the past, not my past. at least, i don’t want you to be.” he took a shuddering breath. “i was so worried about letting people down that i fucked up, and i ruined us.”

“you didn’t ruin anything.” it came out breathy, just above a whisper and you gave him a watery smile. “definitely not us.”

you didn’t know why you were getting so emotional, maybe it was how cold and dreary it had been, maybe it was exhaustion or the alcohol. or maybe it was because wilbur had taken your hands in his and pressed them to his lips. 

“i’m so sorry, darling,” he murmured against your fingers, squeezing his eyes shut tight. “so so sorry.”

“it’s not your fault, will.” you said. “i could have done something.”

he opened his eyes and met yours, shining as you tried to fight back tears. “i’m so hard to handle, and i’m selfish and i’m sad,” he sang along to joni mitchell softly, pulling you forward to wrap your arms around him. he smelled like cinnamon, and he let you cry for as long as you needed.

you pulled away softly, looking at him as your hand ghosted over his jaw. “you didn’t lose me, will.” 

“you’re saying you think you’re the best baby i ever had?” he asked, eyes shining, and you pushed him away. 

you giggled. “how presumptuous of me.”

“you would be correct though,” he admitted, coming to pull you close again, swaying on the spot. he leant forward and pressed his lips to yours, you threading your hands into his hair.

“you have got to let me cut this,” you mumbled, and wilbur laughed against your mouth. he pressed his forehead against your shoulder, and took a shaky breath.

“i miss you.” he said. “i stopped working so much, i’ve been taking care of myself more. let me love you again?”

his voice wobbled, clearly so sure that you would reject him. he had hurt you, he knew that. will let his thumbs stroke up and down your arms and you got goosebumps even through your jumper. “you do have a permit, don’t you?”

he laughed, relief thick in his voice. “of course, darling. have my card in my wallet.”

“then i guess that’s okay.” you said, as if it didn’t matter to you all that much. “as long as you let me love you.”

“you can do whatever you want,” wilbur kissed you again. “as long as it’s with me.”