#link in bio for all the above!

[synonymroll648]

IF LORE UPDATES APPLIED TO PEOPLE I WOULDVE JUST GOTTEN ONE OF MY HAPPIEST LORE UPDATES TODAY

[usersanon]

Please be aware of the user @/saintsugu also known as Ezra.

Past pseudonyms include (but are not limited to: @/aces_high

I never thought that I would have to create a post like this. In my near 12 years on the internet, I never thought I would have to write down the words I am about to type, especially about a fellow fanfic creator, one I used to enjoy before I found out about the type of person he really is. I apologise for the long post, however I want to make sure I am as thorough as possible so I can bring this person to justice.

Before opening the read more/ continuing with this post, please read the trigger warnings. This will deal with heavy topics, ones that make me sick to my stomach. I apologise for all of the censoring in this post as well.

TW: P*DOPHILIA, UNDER*GE, SEXUALIZATION OF EDS AND SH

I would just like to start off by saying how difficult this post is for me to write. I have had to take multiple breaks while typing this out. I have felt disgusted since I first saw the posts on his twitter. Like I need to take a shower and scrub myself clean, however, at the same time I feel like I cannot sit idly by while Ezra still has a platform.

The posts I have seen on his twitter, what he actively endorses is just disgusting and predatory in nature. I have done my best to censor them so as to not continue the spread of such material. As of the time of this post, his twitter is still public.

HIS TWITTER (X) IS CURRENTLY UNDER THE NAME @/ezr_ace

First, I’ll give evidence I have to prove that the twitter account stated above is in fact his. I was wary at first as well, however, I believe this evidence in fact proves that beyond reasonable doubt that the account is his.

The obvious reasoning is as follows: Ezra goes by the pseudonym Ezra currently, and has gone by the pseudonym Ace in the past. Both the twitter account and his tumblr state that he is 21. Both twitter and tumblr themes are the same in nature, featuring manga panels of Suguru edited in the same way.

If you’re familiar with Ezra at all, you would know that they are very close with another user, Flora, also known as @/fyogasm. Previously known as @/pussydrunkfyodor on tumblr. When going through the followers of this twitter account, I noticed someone by the name of Flora following him (one of about 34 followers), with the user @/floratumblr. This account had their tumblr linked in the bio of the profile, and it led straight to Flora’s tumblr. Screen recording is posted below:

UPDATE: since Ezra has been called out, Flora has unfollowed Ezra’s Twitter as well as deleted her account. I can only assume it is to try and dodge the backlash of being associated with him. Here are screenshots proving they are moots/ interacting with each other.

Note: I do not know what this means for the content of Flora’s character. All I can say for certain is that she is close friends with him (to the point they have each others numbers), and that she follows his Twitter. I did not dive deep into her Twitter before she deleted it. But I can say that I do believe she knew the content he was posting about, otherwise she wouldn’t have deleted her Twitter the second he was called out while remaining mutuals with him on tumblr.

UPDATE 1/19/24 1:50 pm: Since creating this post, Flora has reached out and stated that they have broken all contact with Ezra. They state that they are not frequently on twitter, and was completely unaware of the type of content he was posting on the account. They state that the content found on the account has made them feel sick and that they are no longer friends anymore.

Back to the main point, this only adds to the similarities listed above. A close mutual that he has been seen actively talking to on his tumblr also follows him on twitter, endorsing his behavior. This alone was too much for me to ignore. However, one final factor came into play that solidifies that user ezr_ace and user saintsugu are the same Ezra.

He not only posted to his tumblr about hateful anon messages, but also his twitter at the same time. Right after the messages were sent, he tweeted the following, as well as posted the following messages on his tumblr. Screenshots with time stamps posted below:

This for me, confirms that the two accounts are the same. There are simply too many coincidences for me to ignore. I feel that there is no argument about the validity of the accounts, as there are just too many similarities to ignore. Now, I can delve into what the post is really about. The content of the Twitter account.

P*DOPHILLIC ACTIONS AND UNDRE*GE CONTENT.

To put it simply, I was horrified when I first opened the profile to be greeted with Shotacon artwork. Full on artwork of an adult Toji a*saulting a child Gojo. In this artwork, Gojo looks as if he can be no older than 10. Most of the image is censored for obvious reasons, however, part of the screenshot appears in the video above as well. Proving that it cannot have been doctored in any way.

As you can see, the post is tagged with tw sh*ta. For anyone unaware, the definition of Sh*ta is as follows: “Sh*ta is a term used in manga and anime fandoms to indicate sex involving an under*ge boy.” (Fanlore.org) Aka, CP.

It is disgusting to see someone who I once enjoyed, once trusted, interact with literal cp. Drawing or not, the effect of it is still massive. Viewing children (ANYONE UNDER*GE) in a sexual nature is harmful to everyone. It breaches past dark content into something horrible. Something dangerous.

I felt sick seeing someone be as brazen as to repost a picture of a child being a*saulted. To get off on it. It is p*dophilic. That is the only way it can be put.

Further on this, he has written smut of, in his words, “not necessarily under*ge” Suguru in highschool. There is a whole thread on it on his profile, however, I will not be showing it here. The screenshot below describes the nature of the whole post from his own words.

When I first read “not necessarily under*ge”, my first and only question was literally, what the fuck does that mean? Either he is under*ge or not. There is not some fuzzy grey area coating the world between adults and children.

But sure, give him the benefit of the doubt. That does not excuse him liking multiple posts tagged with under*ge content. The most recent being less than an hour ago. Posts censored to the best of my ability below.

These posts all point to the same thing. The disgusting, undeniable truth that this man is attracted to under*ge content. Content depicting minors in sexual scenarios. Content that no member of society should ever consume. He is a p*dophile. For viewing this content of his own accord. For liking it, for reblogging it. For creating it on his own. He is a disgusting person.

FOLLOWING MINORS.

Him interacting with content like that above, consuming it in any capacity at all makes him unsafe to be around. For anyone. Especially minors.

Even though his blog is 18+, even though he preaches that minors should stay away from his blog. He still found himself following a 16 year old. Becoming mutuals with them. The fact this person is 16 is clearly displayed on their blog as well (in their pinned post).

Screenshots shown below. The individual’s user is censored out as, once again, they are a minor and I don’t feel they should have to be wrapped up in this mess.

Once again, Ezra is someone who preaches about minors staying out of adult spaces. Multiple times he has complained on his blog about minors following him and having to block them. You would think he does the same and would be more careful about curating his online spaces, however it he fails to do that.

I don’t believe this can be boiled down to a simple case of missing the age in their bio— this user has their age in their pinned post, as well as their about me. Along with the sexualisation of minors prevalent on his Twitter, it makes me extremely uncomfortable to know that he is following a minor in any capacity. I’m sure it would make anyone.

SEXUALIZING EDS AND SH.

To end the laundry list of posts on his twitter, we have him writing smut glorifying eds, as well as liking posts depicting sh in a sexual light. As always, screenshots are shown below, censored to the best of my ability.

In the post listed above, Suguru is described in a way that is hard to stomach. While it is not nearly as bad as everything else stated above, I feel it is still necessary to include, especially because in this pairing he has often described and implied Suguru to be a minor. There is a line and he has crossed it several times, this is just another example of such. Serving as the cherry on top to further demonstrate his mindset.

Dark content and discussion of these subjects in fiction are not the problem. The disturbing part of this is that Ezra often uses these tropes within his min*r/adult sexual fantasies, and when paired with the sh*ta and under*ge content, leaves a very poor taste in the mouth. It comes across as not only a gross f*tishization, but a gross f*tishization of taking advantage of a minor that way.

A DISCUSSION ON THE LIMITS OF DARK CONTENT.

In this section, I feel that it is important to touch on how dark content plays into all of this. I’d like to expressly state that this is NOT a condemnation of dark content or its consumption.

Dark fiction and dark content are a fine line. It’s a fantastic tool for exploring taboos and emotions or experiences that aren’t often talked about openly. DC creates what is essentially a safe space for exploring things that are not typically done or seen in the real world, with the knowledge that writing or engaging with it does not necessarily mean condoning it. That being said, this callout post is NOT about being anti-dc. Dark content is a literary or artistic tool. Keeping all of this in mind, to actively engage with sh*ta content in which a character is depicted sexually not only as a minor, but as a child, and to be sexually aroused by that image is the definition of p*dophilia. Writing or drawing children and engaging with that content in a sexual capacity is p*dophilia and at the very least, has p*dophilic tendencies. This is not dark content, this is p*dophilia.

It is one thing to write or create dark fiction between adults for the purpose of gratification or exploration of social dynamics and it is entirely another to engage with art of a child engaging in sexual acts with an adult for (seemingly) the intent purpose of sexual gratification. Everyone draws their own line, but it is also important to acknowledge that there are some depictions of taboo subjects that border (if not fully step-into) harmful, p*dophilic content that perpetuates behavior and mental tendencies that truly are dangerous.

To engage with a drawing of a child and a full grown adult in sexual acts for the purpose of sexual gratification is incredibly fucked up. And the fact that minor and adult p*rnography are not just common, but dominating Ezra's twitter page, should be an absolute red flag. It’s okay to acknowledge that dark content is a medium for fiction while also acknowledging that there are some ways of engaging with it that are harmful, especially when it is so glaringly obvious that the content is between a child and an adult (the art I am talking about specifically really is a child. I don’t urge anyone to look at it, but it is gojo depicted as a child of maybe 8 - 10 years old. I’m not using the term child as an umbrella term for minors here).

The problem, stated very plainly, is that the post/s he is engaging with are sexual depictions of a child with the purpose of sexual gratification. That’s the point here. It’s not the dark content, but rather that he is retweeting posts depicting a child of about 8-10 engaged in sexual acts and created for the purpose of sexual gratification.

Once again, this is not a condemnation of dark content. Dark content can be used in so many valuable ways— facing trauma, dealing with taboo subjects, exploring the literary world in a safe and healthy way. As someone who actively consumes dark content, I will be the first to tell you this. However there should always be limits to the types of content produced. Gaining any kind of gratification from looking at a child being a*saulted is disgusting. It is p*dophillic. Especially when he actively engages with minors on his platform.

This is not a conversation of morals— which side is right and wrong. But rather a conversation about the safety of children. This is not a conversation about ageing up as that is not what he is doing. The characters being depicted here are not being aged up, rather are being depicted as minors, or literal children being used for the sexual gratification of adults.

The issue here is a p*dophile. Not dark content. Not anything else.

CONCLUSION.

I’ll be honest, post was extremely hard for me to create. Discovering that someone I once thought was close to me is this kind of person feels disgusting and abhorrent. I honestly wish I never had the displeasure of meeting them in the first place.

Hopefully, by the end of this post you are able to see the kind of person Ezra really is. I could not be silent about this. I knew that the moment all I found all of this out. This post has been very difficult for me to write, but I hope by the end of it some good will come. Some people will be able to avoid interacting with this man.

I believe Ezra needs professional help, and truly hope that he is able to get it some day soon.

Please be careful with who you interact with on the Internet. Adults and minors alike, there are predators everywhere. Please try your best to stay safe in your own online spaces. All of the love in my heart goes out to anyone who has survived child expl*itation. I hope for nothing but the best for you in the future.

Thank you all for taking the time to read this post. I know it is long and triggering for most people. I hope you all have wonderful days and try your best to take care of yourself.

Listed below are some important numbers I would like to bring awareness to before this post is over.

National Child Ab*se Hotline (USA): 1-800-422-4453

National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (USA): 1-800-843-5678

The National Sexual A*sault Hotline (USA): 1-800-656-4673

Childline (UK): 0800-1111

International Child Helpline: 116-111

TLDR: Ezra has a Twitter account where he retweeted artwork of a child gojo being a*saulted by an adult toji. He liked as well as created posts depicting under*ge characters (literally tagged with ‘under*ge’). All while being mutuals with a 16 year old on tumblr.

Tags used to try and spread awareness. I tried to mostly include fandoms that he is in.

UPDATE: lmfao, he has since deleted the retweet of sh*ta gojo after he was called out. Literally proving that it was him.

[myfriendgoo94]

Heya, today is my birthday. I’m 30 now and I’m cautiously hopeful but also having a bit of an existential crisis. I was never supposed to make it to this age. Something in my brain tells me that this is the beginning of the end of my life, which is obviously bullshit, but those feelings are intense to say the least and easy to let spiral out of control.

BUT!! Here are some facts:

1: my early and mid 20s were garbage. I’m willing to believe plenty of ppl have good times during this time but i didn’t.

2: i know myself better than i ever have, and i even sorta like myself a lil bit. DEFINITELY not every day but more and more often then i ever did before. I’m getting downright comfortable with myself, which is frankly shocking to me.

3: i’m prettier than i’ve ever been before. Even looking at pictures from a year ago i almost don’t recognize myself and that’s a great feeling. The dysphoria is as bad (if not slightly worse) than it’s been in the past, but when i *am* feeling attractive i feel crazy attractive. So that’s a win i think.

4: this has literally been the best year of my entire life. No competition. Like it’s not even *close* lol. I’ve really come into my own with fashion, restarted my love affair with both music and books, became very proud of my ability to cook, and i even managed to get engaged to the love of my life! This one is by far the best.

So, while i’m indeed feeling strange and a lil sad about my 20s being over, i can at least take solace in the above facts. Sry if this was meandering or self-indulgent but i sorta needed to get all of this off my chest tbh.

(ALSO: if you wanna be a sweetheart and get me a present my amazon wishlist is pinned to the top of my page, and if you wanna support me/see me naked my onlyf@nz link is in my bio ☺️)

[genericpuff]

Hey y'all, this is a very heavy post to write, but one of our beloved community members and iconic panel editor @theweeklynark has recently had their home devastated by Hurricane Helene. Phone reception is incredibly spotty for them at this time so communication is difficult, but they've put forward some donation links in their bio, both to support the relief efforts that are working hard to help the victims of this tragedy, as well as help their own family so they can get back on their feet.

(^^^ full list of donation links, just tap right!)

(^^^ their GoFundMe; they've requested that people prioritize donations to the relief efforts to help their community at large, but whatever people can spare afterwards should go here !!!)

I cannot even begin to imagine how horrifying this situation is for all the people who have had their homes and way of life destroyed by the current onslaught of hurricanes. All the photos that TWN has shared of what's become of their home in the wake of Helene are like something out of a nightmare and it breaks my heart to see a fellow community member living it with each passing day. I truly hope their situation improves as soon as possible and that they never have to live through such an astronomically devastating event like this ever again.

So please, if you're able, consider donating to any of the above organizations / collections, every little bit helps. If you can't donate, then please share this post, more visibility means it can reach more people who can. Thank you 💖

[swishbishbosch]

Yet Another Major Revamp: Semi-Realism Edition + make-your-own toolkit!🥳

🐸 DOWNLOAD: SFS

This is an edit of Phaenoh' Realistic Major to Career Linking BUT with the following BENEFITS:

🌟 NOT REALISTIC... BUT MAXIS-REALISM: this edit made the ideal careers for each major somewhat logical and coherent (consult the table below for the changes) yet respects the internal logic of the game because Maxis' humor is underrated, slacker and criminal are treated as serious career pathways in this game so why not 🤩

🌟 ALL MAJORS BALANCED ⚖️: frustrated with the lack of benefits that some majors offer compared to others? want an easier time being a job-hopper?? what do you mean my skills aren't transferable in this market??? WELL:

All majors are now supporting at least 5 or more careers

Art [6]: Adventurer, Architecture, Artist, Culinary, Gamer, Slacker

Bio [5]: Athletic, Medicine, Natural Sci, Ocean, Science

Drama [6]: Athletic, Dance, Entertainment, Law, Politics, ShowBiz

Econ [5]: Business, Criminal, Music, Politics, Show Biz

History [5]: Adventurer, Artist, Law, Military, Politics

Lit [6]: Artist, Edu, Entertainment, Journalism, Law Enf, Music

Math [6]: Business, Culinary, Edu, Gamer, Natural Sci, Science

Philo [5]: Culinary, Law Enf, Music, Paranormal, Slacker

Physics [5]: Athletic, Dance, Medicine, Ocean, Science

PolSci [5]: Intelligence, Journalism, Law, Military, Politics

Psych [6]: Architecture, Business, Criminal, Edu, Intelligence, Paranormal

All careers are now supported by 2 or more majors, only the Politics career is supported by 4 (cause Maxis' choice was so good I didn't want to touch it!)

8 careers that require degree (only available for graduate): Architecture, Education, Intelligence, Law, Medicine, Nat Sci, Oceanography, Science.

🌟 OTHER INFOS:

🎓 You'll need UNI EP 🎓

Credits: Phaenoh (for the base mod I edited and the tutorial!), SimPE

Conflicts:

mods that lock/unlock degree requirement like Lamare's getUniCareerWithoutEducation

any mods do the same thing (Belladovah's, Phaenoh's & Cyjon's) which you might want to consider shopping around first before picking mine so look below 🛍️🛒👀

also conflicts with lauratje86's but their mod works with default replacement majors so it can't be covered here, check it out though!

note: Cyjon altered some majors' names and skill requirements (he also hates Philosophy methinks), Phaenoh offers a different version that changes which career requires degree (just like mine but ADDED Business), Belladovah offers Education version in which every major benefits the Education career.

📁 MOD RESOURCE: Linking Maxis Majors & Degrees to Maxis Career Toolkit 🥳

🎯 Difficulty: EASY (no modding experience needed)

It's easier to customize own or track which majors your career is linked to with a bunch pre-made templates right???

Download my edited mod as a base & start making edits 📝 Have these templates to easily cross-reference 0x2(2) values you need to change in SimPE following PHAENOH'S TUTORIAL.

The templates will look like the 2 tables you see above, they are available in:

odt (highly recommended, easy to use word doc file with Phaenoh's tutorial included)

md (markdown file)

csv (for both of the tables you see above)

Comparison Table - use to compare your edits to MAXIS original Career By Major Table - work out which major supports your career and calculate 0x2(2) values

4. zip (for SiYuan users to import, highly rec because I used that program to make the tables, it's Notion but ✨uglier and offline✨)

🐸 DOWNLOAD (browse what you need): SFS

[thyme-in-a-bubble]

the murder at evergreen university

a/n: asdfghjkl I have been writing this since january...... wow. it's never taken me that long to write a story before... also I made a quick student bio about the majority of the people in this story, so if you wanna start off by looking at that, then here is the link ♡

summary:  just a slutty murder mystery

warnings: reader x various CEvans characters (Ransom Drysdale, Curtis Everett, Ari Levinson, Steve Rogers, Frank Adler, Jake Jensen, Lloyd Hansen), DARK content, noncon, smut, violence, university AU, murder mystery, detective!Ari, family friend!Ari, mma!Curtis (I just couldn't resist), surely extremely inaccurate on all levels (the college stuff, the investigation, everything, but this is just for fun so it's okay. lol I got the frat name from fantasynamegenerators.com hehe), polyamory, kissing, alcohol consumption, crying, drugging, murder, somno, daddy kink, dirty talk, choking, penetrative sex, size kink, vomiting, flashback sequences are written in all cursive

word count: 11.100

∼ gentle reminder that feedback, but especially reblogs are the way you support writers on here ∽

masterlist | join my taglist | evergreen university masterlist

Walking up the steps of the Kappa Zeta Nu building, you pulled your humming ear pods out of your ears and popped them in the jacket pocket where your phone rested. If it hadn’t been for the big Greek letters above and its proximity to the college, the fraternity house could almost fool someone into thinking it was just any other regular suburban home. 

Giving the front door a rhythmic knock, it quickly swung open to reveal a scruffy-looking mathematics major, still groggy from sleep. 

“Morning Frank,” you couldn’t help but notice the spark in his eye that your presence generated. 

“Angel,” your nickname sounded so good on his sleepy lips, making you smile as he gave you a quick glance up and down, “how do you look like that this early in the morning?” 

Walking past him, further into the house, you chuckled, “8:30 is not that early.”

“Um, on a Saturday it is.” 

Thanks to the open floor plan, you quickly caught sight of Jake sitting by the kitchen island, scarfing down a bowl of cereal. 

“Hey!” the blonde smiled, mouth still full of his breakfast, “I��m guessing by the gorgeous look on your face that you made it through last night?”

“Yep,” you exhaled, thinking back on the major cram session you had to power through in order to meet the paper’s deadline. The lengthy assignment for your cognitive psychology class had been so extensive that it probably hadn’t been that smart of you to keep procrastinating it the way that you had, but somehow you got it done, “turned it in just in time.” 

“Atta girl,” the computer whiz reached over the counter to give you a high five, “I knew you could do it!”

“Speaking of yesterday,” yours and Jake’s fingers lingered a moment before parting ways, “how’s our boy doing? Did he make it through last night?”

Appearing behind you, still sweaty and panting from his morning run, Steve answered your question, evidently catching the tail end of the conversation just as he came in through the door, “Curtis is doing just fine,” he leaned against one of the counters, catching his breath, “better than fine actually, he won.” 

“He did?” a bright smile bloomed on your face, “man, I wish I could have been there…” you were usually so strict about being there for important things, such as Curtis’ occasional MMA fights, but because of your procrastinated schoolwork, you hadn’t been able to tag along. “It’s all Lloyd’s fault, you know. He did the whole oh yeah, we can have a little study date, get that paper done, no sweat, and then distracted me, leaving me with all of the work to get through yesterday.”  

“You wanna turn the faucets on down here, give his shower an icy turn as revenge?” Jake suggested, fiddling with his spoon playfully. 

“Nah, I’ll just give him the cold shoulder for a bit,” you settled your forearms against the countertop, unintentionally giving the guys a better view down your top, “he hates it when I ignore him.”

“He sure does,” Jakes drawled, nearly dropping his utensil into the milky bowl as he unabashedly stared down your cleavage. 

Biting your bottom lip a second, you returned to the matter at hand, “is he up yet?”

“Curtis?” Steve clarified, opening the fridge and plucking out a cold bottle of water. 

“Yeah.”

“Nope,” Frank shook his head behind you, “he’s still sleeping.”

Only pushing yourself halfway up, you asked “can I go see him?” slightly taking the others by surprise. 

“When have you even needed permission to go barge into his room?” Frank questioned.

“I don’t know…” you muttered, glancing down at the speckled pattern of the counter's surface, “maybe he’s got company or something…”

“Angel,” Steve leaned over the opposite side of the table, craning his neck so that he could catch your timid eyes, “he is not gonna go pick up some random girl just because you miss one of his fights.”

Bowing your head, you opted not to answer, instead just attempted to shake the doubt off you entirely. 

In a bouncy rocking motion, you straitened back up and moved towards the stairs, two of the guys tagging along as they too needed to head upstairs. 

“So,” you glanced over your shoulder at Frank and Steve, “how’s Ransom settling in?”

“The new guy?” Steve spoke, “fine, I think. I don’t know, I don’t speak trust fund kid, so how would I know.”

“I don’t think he’s that bad… Shouldn’t we at least try to include him in our little group? It just seems kinda mean not to since we’re so tight and you all live with him,” reaching the top of the stairs, you heard, from the bathroom directly in front of you, the trickling clues of Lloyd’s luxurious shower, and briefly glanced down at the far end of the hall where the new guy’s closed door was, his vast room mirroring Steve’s at the opposite side, though his was much more secluded from the rest, being closed in by the injection of both the broad staircase and the bathroom before the cluster of rooms came. “Like you said, you don’t know him yet, he might be super sweet and just takes a bit of time to warm up to people.”

“Maybe,” was all Frank cagily, not giving it any more thought. 

Coming to a stop in front of Curtis’ door, you slowly creaked it open, revealing the sleeping display of a bruised buzzcut, still lightly snoring on his back.

“Jesus christ,” you breathed and leaned your shoulder against the doorframe, taking in the beaten form of your friend, “you sure he won?” you asked the men still lingering a second longer, peeking over your shoulder into the room.

“Yeah, you don’t wanna see the other guy,” Frank gave your behind a quick tap before ducking into his own room. 

Turning your head to look at Steve, himself leisurely making his way down towards the room at the end of the hall, “you sure he’s fine?” 

Stopping in his step, he offered you an earnest glance, “he’s fine, Y/n. Go wake him up.”

After shutting the door behind you, you peeled off your jacket and let it drop down onto the desk chair you passed on your way towards the small mattress. Kicking off your shoes, you climbed the twin bed, kneeling beside your resting friend.

“Wake up,” you sang, dipping your smile down low to rouse Curtis. Receiving a less than lively reaction, only getting a soft inhale of breath as an indication that he’d woken, you tried again, swinging one of your legs over his form to straddle his hips, “hey, tough guy,” you felt his palms slide up the curve of your ass and come to rest around your waist, “you alive?”

Just barely fluttering his bruised eyelids open, a bright smile bloomed on his lips, “hi angel,” he sighed contently at your presence, blinking up at your softly illuminated form as the gentle morning light streamed in through his open window, the family of birds living in the tree just outside aiding in the gentle ambience. 

“A little birdy told me that you won last night,” you let your upper body sink down against his, resting your chin on top of your folded palms, right underneath his chin.

“I did,” you saw as the sting of his various injuries woke him up even further, “although I still would have preferred if my good luck charm had been there instead of doing boring homework.” 

“Oh, please don’t make me feel any worse,” you hid your face in his chest, “I already feel like I have too much making up to do.”

“Oh yeah?” he picked your head up for you to see the sly smirk now adorning his face, “what did you have in mind?”

“I don’t know,” you spoke shyly, feeling your cheeks flush as the position the two of you had found yourself in dawned on you, “I just really wanted to have been there,” and you sat back up, wary of where you placed your hands for support on his beaten frame. 

“Ah,” he waved a reassuring hand, “you’ll be at the next one.”

“Oh, I will,” you grinned promisingly, scooting down to the foot of the bed as you watched him sit up, the duvet falling off his body to relieve the rest of the colourful aftermath, “a simple assignment won’t be able to stop me,” your enthusiasm made him smile through the wince he let out as he got up off the mattress.

Tailing after Curtis as he moved out into the hall and made his way down towards the lavatory, you suggested as you followed him into the bathroom, “we should totally do something to celebrate your win! It’s the weekend, we should do something fun!”

Standing by one of the sinks, Lloyd, fresh out of the shower, didn’t take his eyes off his hair in the reflection as you sauntered in. As Curtis grabbed his toothbrush, he leaned down and whispered cheekily in your ear, “I know a way we can celebrate, just the two of us,” flashing you a glance that caused your breath to get caught in your throat. 

Cutting off your flustered giggle, Lloyd spoke, “there’s supposed to be a party tonight down on the other side of campus. Me and a few of the others were talking about going.” 

“Oh, the one Delta Phi is throwing? Nat’s going to that! Said something this morning about meeting the guy she’s been seeing there.”

“What-, guy?” Lloyd finally ripped his eyes away from the mirror, “what happened to that yoga chick?”

“I don’t know, I think she was moving a little bit too fast for Natasha’s speed,” you spoke of your commitment-phobe of a roommate. Saddling up beside the fighter now brushing his teeth, you said, “so, what do you say?” bumping your hip gently against his as you saw him look back at you in the mirror, “it could be fun.”

Pretending to ponder the proposal, Curtis answered, “if you put on a pretty little dress, then I might be convinced to go,” the foaming toothpaste lightly murmuring his flirting.

“…It’s always the innocent-looking ones you’ve gotta look out for,” Ransom spoke over the loud, bassy music to the moustachioed man next to him on the couch, “and this little charade you’ve all got going on must be a hell of a good time,” he elbowed him suggestively, though didn’t conjure the desired reaction from him, “oh, come on, you can tell me, dude. Just help a brother out with a few details.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Lloyd shrugged with a smirk and took a sip of his beer. 

“What do you mean?”

Huffing out a soft sigh, he answered, “she’s an amazing girl, don’t get me wrong, but she just has a few rules.”

“What, like some bdsm kinda rules?” Ransom’s eyebrows wiggled excitedly. 

“No, man,” he tried not to chuckle at the yearned-for images his inappropriate guess provoked, “back when we met her she-… her heart was fucking broken and there wasn’t a lot of stuff that she wanted to do anymore, that she felt comfortable with, but over time, I guess when she started getting over whomever that fucker was, she began to relax and let us in.”

“So, you’re really saying you haven’t hit that yet?” the prying man furrowed his brows, unmoved by the sob story. 

“None of us have.”

“Then are those stories about you banging her last week just rumours?”

“No, no, well not exactly, we did have fun, trust me,” he chuckled, poking his cheek playfully with his tongue, “but I didn’t exactly bang her.”

“So, let me get this right, you’re all mad for her and she hasn’t given out? To any of you? What, is she still a virgin or something? Waiting for marriage?”

“I don’t think so,” Llyod thought for a moment, “but it kinda wouldn’t surprise me either if she was… I don’t know… it’s kinda complicated, but damn if she isn’t worth it.”

Letting out a low exhale, he shook his head, “I don’t know how you stand it, dude. If she was mine, she wouldn’t be able to walk. Hell, how do you even share someone like her?” 

“Well, I don’t know if she’s mine per se, we all just have fun, you know? Why not share?”

“Hey,” your chipper voice interrupted their lewd convocation as you finally caught sight of them on the dark leather couch in the corner of the party, “there you are,” and immediately grabbed each of their hands in yours, “come on,” you leaned your weight back, ushering them to get up, “we’re doing shots in the kitchen!”

“Seriously, Barnes? Watch where you’re going!” Ransom exclaimed as the host of the party had rowdily bumped into the rich boy on his way through the narrow kitchen, causing the bright pink shot in his hand to spill all down the front of his white sweater, “this is cashmere, dude!” he yelled after Bucky’s quickly disappearing form, clearly not haven noticed the interaction himself over the deafening music and his drunken haze.

“Oh my god,” you gasped, noticing the huge stain now blooming on the man beside you, “are you okay?” the sharp alcohol still stung in your throat causing your words to come out ragged. 

“Yeah, I’m fine,” he stared down at himself, then over his shoulder in contemplation of whether or not he should run after the guy in pursuit of revenge, “this sweater however is not.”

As your eyes washed over the ivory knit, watching it soak up the colourful cocktail, you thought out loud as an idea struck you, “well, maybe…” and acted quickly, grabbing the man’s hand, “come with me,” you yanked him past the rest of your jovial friends and down the hallway towards the small bathroom.

Catching on to where your head was at, Ransom spoke after crossing the threshold, “Y/n, this is very sweet, but I don’t know if it will work.”

“Just shut up and take it off,” you held out your hand, too blind by your inebriated problem-solving instincts to consider any other outcome.

Gazing back at you a moment, he then chuckled and tugged the sweater over his head with one hand, your eyes widening as he placed the item in your waiting palm, it haven apparently been the only layer he had on.

“Thank you,” you breathed, dumbfounded for a second as you stared at his bare chest, briefly admiring his toned form before shaking it off and spinning around to turn on the sink. Holding the stained material against the slowly trickling cold water, you pressed and pinched the spot gently in an effort to not agitate the delicate fibres. “I swear, I’m always the worst at spilling stuff on myself, I’m like a child, plus the fact that I’m a knitter, so not to promise anything, but I’d say you’re in pretty good hands.”

He didn’t say anything, simply settled in beside you, leaning against the edge of the sink as he watched your face contort in adorable concentration. 

“Oh, dammit…” you gave up after a few minutes of gentle scrubbing. Turning the faucet off, you held the sweater up and looked at the, although lighter, still very much visible pink stain, “well at least it’s a little bit better than before,” you tried, flashing the half-naked man an apologetic look, “maybe if I soak it a bit it’ll get better, but-”

“Hey,” Ransom placed his fingers atop yours still clutching the wool, “it’s fine,” he lowered your hands as he leaned in and closed the gap between you two, his alcoholic breath fanning across your flush cheeks as he uttered a quiet, “thank you,” before unexpectedly pressing a greedy kiss against your lips. 

Feeling his grip tug the sweater out of your hands, you instinctively pressed your palms against his chest for support as the whole move had made your intoxicated body lose its balance. His lips were soft, but his kisses were hungry, determinedly letting it build far faster than you were ready for.

You let out a soft giggle of surprise as he suddenly scooped you up and planted you on the edge of the sink, nestling himself in between your parted thighs, your short dress haven ridden up from the movement.

“So, is this why they all call you angel?” he asked as his heated pecks fluttered down your neck, “because you swoop in and save the day?”

“I don’t know if I do that…” you breathed timidly, the reality of what he was doing just catching up to you now. 

“Oh, but you do. You saved mine,” he smirked, “you’re my hero,” you felt the tickle of his fingers as they snuck further up under your dress, “however can I repay you?” 

“I, um,” you giggled nervously, catching his wrists before they could get any further, pressing your lips against his in an effort to soften the blow as you thought of a gentle way to let him down, “I think that kiss by itself was a pretty good thank you,” you hopped down from the sink even though he made no effort in providing you room to do so.

Enclosing his arms around you as you giggly stumbled further towards the still-ajar door, he uttered, pressing the obvious tent in his pants up against your softness, “but why stop there? I can do a lot better than that if you just give me five more minutes,” but the door conveniently swung open a bit more just as two familiar figures passed it.

“Angel!” Jake, completely blind to the man still clawing at you to stay inside the bathroom, hooked an arm around your waist and yanked you along as he and Frank jovially strolled past, “there you are! It’s almost 11 o'clock, please don’t tell me that you’re bailing on Curtis and truly dooming him to lose to us.”

“I think Curtis would lose to you two in beer pong whether I am on his team or not,” you smiled, thankful of their timing, “you guys are the reigning champions after all.”

“Damn right,” Frank roared, excitedly lifting his fist, “J and F! F and J! Ain’t nothing this duo can’t accomplish.”

“Well, not everything,” you giggled, hooking your arms around their forms as they strolled on either side of you, their arms draped over you in return, “for instance, you’re both terrible cooks.”

“Shut up, angel,” Jake said playfully, “we’re unstoppable and you know it,” he stopped you in your tracks and trapped you against the wall, “say it,” he smirked down at you as Frank, not missing a beat, slipped in as well, enclosing you completely, “say that we’re unstoppable.”

Sucking in a sharp breath, you uttered, “you’re unstoppable,” the sudden proximity awakening memories that made your heart flutter. 

“Good girl,” he purred purposely, and a shiver ran down your spine as you recalled just how hot they both sounded cumming for you, a while back, when they had managed to talk you into playing with them both. 

“You guys are so mean,” you said light-heartedly. 

“Yeah,” Frank scrunched his nose through his warm smile, “but you like it.”

Twirling you around the dancefloor, Lloyd had been the only one in the mood to satisfy your surge of energy when you came pouting, begging the boys to dance with you. Holding you close, his hands roamed as you rocked to the music, causing you to close your eyes and drift away.

“Hey,” a different hand suddenly tapped you on the shoulder and tore you out of your dream, “I need to talk to you a sec.” 

Eyes fluttering open to look back at your redheaded roommate, you gave her a quick, “okay,” before raising yourself up onto your toes to speak into your dance partner’s ear, “hey, I’ll be right back!”

“Okay,” he shouted back over the loud music, “I’ll just go grab a drink, you want any?”

“Please,” you reluctantly let go of his hand and yelled after him as you followed your friend through the swarm of partying people, “a beer, thanks!” 

Rounding the corner to settle into a comparatively quieter nook, you tugged your wild hair behind your ears as you looked back at Natasha, “what’s up?”

Biting her lip, she spoke, “you love me, right?”

“Well, obviously, I’m about to get down on one knee and everything,” you joked, “what is it?”

“Can I have the room tonight?” she asked with a small winch, knowing damn well how frequent this request was. 

“Seriously?” your eyebrows shot up, “again?”

“Please?” she folded her hands dramatically in front of her and begged. 

Letting out a soft sigh, you said slowly, “if you buy me that super good chocolate with the blue wrapper that they sell down on the corner, then-”

“Oh my god,” she cut you off and threw her arms around you, “thank you, thank you, thank you!”

“You’re the worst roommate ever, you know that?” you smiled, patting her back. 

“And you are the best, a true saint! Me and my sex life pray at your altar.”

“Yeah, yeah,” you chuckled, playfully pushing her away, “go on then, get laid.”

Returning to find that Lloyd had settled in with the rest of the guys, taking up all of the clustered couches, you put on your best miserable expression as he handed you your beer, “guys,” you dramatically caught their attention, “I have some really devastating news to tell you…” faking the need to suck in a self-soothing breath before uttering, “tonight, on this very night, I am homeless!”

“Oh no!” they played along, giggling as you pressed the back of your hand up against your forehead. 

“I know! Whatever am I to do? If only some big, strong, handsome boys would let me crash at their frat…”

Clutching onto Curtis’ broad shoulders as he gave you a piggyback ride back to the frat, you all laughed at Jake and Frank’s terrible, lewd rendition of the school’s fight song. If Lloyd had been here, if his stamina hadn’t forced him to stay out and enjoy the night a little longer, he would have probably not only joined in, but led the tune, waking up everyone in the dorms you passed. 

“So,” Ransom smirked as you all tumbled in through the destinated front door, “who will have the pleasure of bunking with you tonight?”

“I, uh,” you giggled as Curtis sat you down, your shoes clutched in your hand, “I don’t know…”

“You can sleep in my room if you want,” Steve offered generously, “I’ll just sleep down here on the couch.”

“Really? Are you sure? Because I can just sleep down here on the couch, it’s fine.”

“No, no,” he waved a hand reassuringly, “you’ve had way more to drink tonight than I have, so you should really take the room closest to the bathroom, just in case.”

Smiling widely, you stumbled over and wrapped your arms around his bulky form, “thank you, Steve,” breathing in his scent as you smooshed your face into his t-shirt, “you’re the best.”

“You wanna borrow a shirt to sleep in?” Curtis asked, reaching out a quick arm to steady you as you lost your balance on your way towards the wide staircase.  

“Oh, yeah,” you offered him a fuzzy smile, both the alcohol and the hour causing your eyelids to feel like they weighed a ton, “that would be great.” 

Getting settled into the comparatively more private bedroom located next to the stairs, the bathroom too separating it from the rest of the doors clustered down the narrow hallway, you lazily changed into the t-shirt Curtis soon handed off to you, tugging it over your dress before sliding your party outfit off underneath the grey cotton, keeping yourself somewhat covered purely because you didn’t wanna end the conversation you and the rest of the boys were trying to wrap up.

“Alright, we should probably let the lady sleep,” Steve spoke, watching closely as every time you blinked, your eyes gradually stayed closed just a little longer, nearly falling asleep against Curtis’ broad shoulder.

“No, no,” you protested, inhaling sharply in an effort to wake up more, “I’m just resting my eyes…”

“Right,” Frank chuckled as they all got up from their comfy seat on the mattress, being too tired to fight it, Curtis gently helped you lay down, tugging the duvet over your curled-up form.

“Hey,” Ransom poked his head into the room as the rest began to filter out, “I thought you might like this,” you were surprised to see him have a small glass of water in his hand for you. Not simply placing it on the bedside table by your head, he kneeled down next to you and held it out, “here,” expecting for you to take it, “I swear, chugging a glass of water helps with the hangover,” sliding his free palm under your head to raise it up.

“Thank you,” you smiled wearily as you slowly accepted it and raised it up towards your lips. 

Noticing that you were only taking a small sip, his fingers found the bottom of the glass and pressed it up further, “all of it,” he tilted it for you to down it all, “or else it doesn’t work.” 

Coughing lightly as you lowed the now empty glass, it left an odd taste in your mouth, though you just summed it up to be the handiwork of some of the strong beverages you had consumed during the night working its way up again. 

“Thanks, Ransom,” you groggily patted his cheek, “you’re so sweet.” 

His eyes flickering over your tired face, smooshed against the pillow, he smirked, “goodnight,” got back up and strolled out past Curtis still lingering in the doorway, arms crossed and watching over you like a guard dog. 

“Night,” you quietly called out after him as you saw his frame disappear towards the furthest room down the hallway. Redirecting your attention back to your friend, you hummed, “go to bed, Curt. You gotta still be super sore from last night.”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Oh, so you’re just gonna stand there all night, fall asleep on your feet and act as my sleep paralysis demon for the night?” you joked with half-closed eyes. 

A small laugh bubbled out of him as he finally moved, “sleep well, angel,” he uncrossed his arms and reached out for the doorknob to tug it closed. 

“Goodnight, Curtis,” you snuggled further into the pillow as you felt sleep overtake you like a wave crashing the shore, adding absentmindedly under your breath, “love you.”

“Hmm…” you hazily blinked your heavy lids open, roused by the pinching pressure between your thighs. Looking up at the dimly lit figure, you mumbled fuzzily, “w-what?” unsure if this was real life or a dream as the whole bed spun beneath you and you felt like you were floating. 

“Shh, go back to sleep, angel,” Ransom’s grunt pierced your ears as his palm pressed over the bottom half of your face, silencing any words you might speak, “It’s alright, daddy’s got you,” a shy cry vibrated against his hand as you felt him rock against you, finally noticing fully the unexpected sensation of his thick girth stretching you out, “just be a good girl and lay right there, let me have a little slice of heaven.”

Keeping your exhausted legs spread wide apart, his determined hips acting as a door stop, he moaned quietly, “fuck, it really did do the trick,” he looked down at your dazed form, awake enough to be present for him, but unknowingly sedated enough for you not to fight back, “almost a shame you won’t be able to remember any of this in the morning,” he slid his hand down to squeeze your throat, pinching your rapid pulse and making the world even more blurry, “look at you, fucking out like a perfect little doll. You wanna be doll, huh? My own personal little fucktoy?”

Fighting to keep your eyes open, your whole body rocked at his movements as he frantically picked up his pace, selfishly pounding into you, melting on top of you and pressing your sedated body further into the bed. 

“You know, I barely needed to touch you a second before you soaked my fingers, you clearly want this as much as I do,” he tightened his grip on your throat, “you need this, you need me,” stifled moans flowed from his lips as he unmercifully pounded into you, scratching his own vile itch, “poor you, none of your boyfriends ever touch you properly. That’s just what you need, isn’t it?” he mocked as your fluttering cunt tried to squeeze him out, expelling him from your body, “you just need your tight little pussy to be stretched out? Just need some good dick? Don’t worry, angel,” you vaguely felt his tongue flicker against your slightly numbed skin, “as long as I am here to help, I’ll keep your pussy sore, keep it filled up,” you just managed to catch him growl before you lost the forlorn battle and your body dozed off again. 

Waking up with a low groan, you quickly sprung up, feeling the contents of your stomach fighting their way out. With no time to entertain the surprising presents of Curtis already curled up at the foot of the mattress, you bolted out of bed and ran out the door, thankful for the close proximity to the bathroom as you soon found yourself kneeling in front of the toilet, regretting every sip you had indulged in as they burned your entire chest on their way out again. 

Feeling as your loose hair suddenly got picked up and gently held back, you heard the warm rumble of Curtis’ voice as he said, “wow, okay, alright,” his large palm found your spine, soothingly caressing it as you hurled your guts out, “it’s alright, angel. Just get it all out.”

“Urgh,” you groaned, clutching the cold porcelain as you spat out the fowl tang, “I am never drinking again,” keeping your head over the bowl till you were sure you had gotten it all out. With a heavy sigh, you slumped back, colliding softly with the mass of your friend. 

“You okay?” he asked, lightly running his hands over your goosebump-ridden form. 

“I think so,” you blinked up into his steely eyes, the reddened look to them flying over your exhausted head, “at least I made it to the bathroom this time,” you tried to joke with a half-hearted smile. 

Letting your body weakly droop down, sighing in relief as you felt the cold tile hug your form, you heard Curtis notice, “no, no, you can’t fall asleep out here,” feeling his fingers already slide beneath your body. 

“But it’s so comfortable,” you let out a small winch as he scooped you up into his arms, your frame draping over his strong limbs, and a dull pain stung your core. “Hey, what date is it?” you suddenly asked, trying to make sense of the uncomfortable tingle.

“I-, uh, why?” he thought, carrying you back into Steve’s room, your eyes noticing the other doors down the dark hallway were all open wide, even though it was the middle of the night. 

“No reason, I just think I might be getting my period or something…”

“Miss Y/l/n?” a voice called, though you were a million miles away, “Miss Y/l/n?” 

“Huh?” you blinked, shaking your head slightly as you unsteadily glanced up at the figure, “sorry, yes,” you reluctantly let go of your friend’s hand and rose from the seat you had been waiting in. 

“You’re gonna be fine,” Curtis gave your hand one last squeeze, “I’ll wait right here for when you’re done, okay?” 

He and the other guys hadn’t let you out of their sight since the terrifying news had spread like wildfire yesterday morning and rocked the entire campus to its core. 

“Okay,” you nodded weakly, not truly present as you followed the stranger inside. 

Pulling out a chair at the cold table, you sat down and averted your gaze from the walls of the bare conference room provided by the school for the law enforcements to use for their investigation. 

“The detective will be right in, you just sit tight,” the figure spoke before they closed the door behind them, leaving you alone in the makeshift interrogation room. 

You didn’t know how long you were in there, maybe a minute, maybe ten, but soon you heard the door creak open once more and a voice, long forgotten, found your ears, “hello, I’m detective Levinson, I will be conducting this-”

“Ari?” you blinked up at your elder childhood friend in amazement, the nauseating feeling of grief momentarily washing away at his unexpected presence as he sat down opposite to you, “what are you doing here?” your eyes drifted over his informal suit, the jacket missing and the sleeves sloppily rolled up passed his burly forearms, “and when did you stop being a beat cop?” 

“Uh,” he blinked, a solemn expression washing over his stern face, softening it significantly, “around a year ago,” he then sighed deeply and said, “I really hoped there had just been another Y/n Y/l/n here at this school…”

Effectively bringing you back down to earth, “oh, yeah… will this be a problem? Can you not do this if you already know me?”

“No, no, it’s not that. I just-,” his head tilted gently to the side, “this isn’t something I ever wanted you to go through.” 

Sucking in a sharp breath, you nodded shyly, “yeah, well, I am.”

Looking over you a moment, taking in the small changes you had adapted in the years since you had last seen each other, he offered a genuine, “I’m sorry,” and attempted to catch your weary gaze. 

“It’s not your fault,” you glanced down at your hands as your fingers once again began to dig nervously into your skin, leaving angry little half-crescent marks in its wake, “you’re not the one running around murdering students,” you awkwardly attempted to joke.  

Exhaling lowly, he then opened the file in front of him and laid out a small tape recorder in the middle of the table, “are you ready to begin?” 

“Yeah.”

Pressing on one of the side buttons on the recorder, Ari then announced methodically, “can you please state your name for the record?” 

“Y/n Y/l/n.” 

“And for the record, are you speaking to me voluntarily?”

“I am.”

Glancing over the open folder sprawled out in front of him, he asked, “what was your relationship with the victim?” 

“Ransom, he-, um… he was a friend. I honestly didn’t really know him for too long, but he lived with some of my best friends, so it just seemed pretty natural for him to also become a part of our little group, if you’d call it that.” 

“And you last saw Mr Drysdale when?” 

“At the party Saturday night. I crashed at their flat after that, so it was probably early Sunday morning that I saw him last, when he was on his way to bed, I think.” 

“Did anything happen to him that night? Anything unusual? His behaviour? Someone he interacted with? Anything you can think of that stands out?” 

“Uhm,” you thought back, remembering the heated kiss you had shared in the bathroom, though looking back into Ari’s studying eyes, you couldn’t help but lie and say, “no, I don’t think so. It was just a party, you know,” the thought of telling your childhood crush that you drunkenly made out with a guy sent your stomach turning, crushing the truth before it could crawl out. 

“Alright,” he nodded, “well, if you do remember anything, please reach out, we’re running the bulk of the investigation from here, so you know where I’ll be.”

“Still have your number,” you forced an awkward laugh.

“Right,” he sucked in a breath and averted his piercing gaze, “so, uhm, I don’t think I have anything else to ask you right now. Thank you for your cooperation with the investigation.”

“Of course,” you watched as his fingers wrap around the tape recorder, clicking the protruding button and making it stop, “it-, um,” you felt a shiver run down your spine as his eyes fell upon you once more, making the polite words seem that much harder to muster, “it really is good to see you again. Nice to see that you’re doing good,” then added jokingly, “that your mom still hasn’t talked you into cutting your hair,” a sincere smile tickled your lips at the mention of the warm woman living next door to your own parents. 

Even though it was clearly forced, your words still conjured a genuine reaction from the guy who used to babysit you, “yeah, no, you know she’s never winning that battle,” he chuckled, shaking his head lightly, “it’s, uh, it’s great to see you as well. You-, um… yeah…” he dropped whatever compliment was on the tip of his tongue and averted his gaze, “I don’t wanna keep you any longer, you can go, you probably have classes to get to.”  

“I actually don’t,” you informed him, though still slowly got up from your seat, “our professors have given us all some time off to-, uh, you know…”

“Yeah…” he nodded understandingly, his vision following your form as you made your way towards the door. 

Pausing just before your fingertips grazed the doorknob, you looked back, timidly chewing on your bottom lip, “hey, Ari?” 

“Yes?” he responded quickly, clearly still completely captivated. 

Finding it difficult to even breathe properly in his presence, especially when those soulful eyes were locked upon yours, you found that your words crumbled before they even got to see the light of day, “I-, um…” then hastily scrambled your brain for a makeshift, “good luck.”

Breathing out a soft smile as he watched you nervously fiddle with the door handle, he said, “thanks, Y/n.” 

It had been Monday morning that a garbage man had found Ransom’s body in a dumpster on the far side of campus. Even though they had tried to contain the news, it still spread like a wildfire, and come lunch that day, it was the only thing any student could talk about. 

The frat quickly got sealed off as an active crime scene as it had been the last place witnesses had seen him alive, forcing the rest of the guys to temporarily bunk up with friends in their dorms. You felt a bit ashamed about the immense relief you felt at that small detail, the comfort of having each one of them fight over who got to stay with you being something you welcomed with open arms. In the end, it was both Curtis and Steve who stayed with you, Natasha giving you the room and staying with her newfound beau in the meantime, giving you the entire space for a while.  

The guys had always been protective of you, but it almost seemed to have grown over the past few gloomy days. Not a second passed by where at least one of them wasn’t at your side, holding you as you cried, walking with you through the crowded campus or just keeping you company, making sure you weren’t alone. You just added it up to be their version of freaking out and buying into the whole conspiracy that it hadn’t been a drug deal gone wrong as so many had assumed of the recently deceased playboy with a penchant for illicit substances, but actually someone on campus, a stone-cold killer masking as just the person next to you in your lit class. 

“Why don’t you go ask him?” 

“Me?” your brows furrowed in Lloyd’s direction, “why me? If you wanna know so bad, why don’t you just go ask him yourself?”

Chiming in, Jake tilted his head, “well, you did say you know the guy.” 

Exhaling lowly, you averted your gaze, your crossed arms tightening over your chest, “yeah, you could certainly say that…”

“So just go, bat your eyelashes at him for a bit and figure out how much he knows,” Lloyd tried to persuade you, though even his ever-present cocky charm couldn’t sway you this time.

Previously assuming that the whole conversation had just gone over Curtis’ head, as he had just quickly sat beside you and stared out the window, he suddenly perked up, “we just-…” he struggled to vocalise, “if it really is someone here on campus… just the thought you sitting in class with them or-, fuck, anything, it just-…” like a magnet, your fingers naturally found his own in a comforting squeeze, “angel, we just wanna keep you safe and the thought of someone like that running around terrorising the school-… just please go figure out if he has a suspect yet. See if he has got any leads.”

From the moment you had said goodbye to the familiar detective, shame about not telling him the whole truth had nearly eaten you alive. You had lied to not only a person you had known your whole life, but also a law enforcer. It was insufferable, like a snowball rolling down a hill and growing bigger and bigger with each accumulated snowflake. 

“Fine,” you cracked, the shameful storm inside your body becoming too much to bear, “I’ll do it.”

“Knock, knock,” you said with a small smile as you pushed the ajar door open completely. 

“Y/n,” Ari’s spine straightened in surprise, his eyes no longer glued to the computer screen before him, “what are you doing here?”

“Thought you might be hungry,” you held up your alibi for coming in the form of a takeout bag, “it’s from this little Indian place downtown,” you shut the door behind you before plopping the crinkly bag down on the table, the warm light from the desk lamp illuminating the brimming containers of curry stacked inside, “you like Indian, right?”

“I-, I do,” he said, still taken aback by the kind gesture, “thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Thought it was the least I could do as a thanks for what you’re doing,” you waved a hand in the direction of the cluttered corkboard on the wall. 

“It’s just my job, you don’t need to thank me,” he said modestly, leaning back in his chair and lending you to spot the silver pen his fingers fiddled with. 

Lowering your gaze to stare at your shoes, you exhaled, “right…”

“So, um,” he filled out the awkward silence, “was there anything else you needed?”

“Oh, sorry,” you mumbled, keeping your eyes averted, “you’re obviously super busy and here I am just barging in,” your vision finally flickered up to lock with his, already steadfast on you, “I just, uh…” your breaths became more jagged as his sky-like eyes captivated your own, “there was actually something else I wanted to talk to you about, something I wanted to tell you.”

“Alright…” he nodded, listening intently. 

Blowing out a shaky breath, you revealed, “I lied, something did happen that night.”

“Okay,” his brows furrowed, though not as much as you had feared, “what was it?” your anxious brain haven already thought of a million different dramatic punishments he could penalise you with.

“I, uh…” you squeezed your eyes shut nervously, “I kissed him,” your pained voice rushed to force out, “at that party. It was in the bathroom and almost became something else, but, um yeah… we kissed… me and Ransom…” you peaked just one of your eyes open, your tense shoulders nearly pressing against your ears at this point, “I’m really sorry, I just felt like couldn’t tell you something like that, not you. I won’t be arrested for hiding this information, will I?”

“No, no,” Ari quickly rose from his seat, “Y/n, you’re okay,” he stepped closer to you as he attempted to calm your uncalled-for panic, “you won’t be arrested.”

“Oh,” you breathed, “good,” feeling your shoulders begin to drop back down again, “you know how my mind tends to freak out.”

“Yeah,” he nodded softly, “I do…” his words genuine as memories conjured the whisper of a smile to appear upon his lips, “thank you for telling me.”

Awkwardly, you flashed him a tight-lipped smile, grateful that uncomfortable moment had passed, you recalled the other reason for why you had come, “so…”

“So…” he echoed.

“Do you have any leads, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“That’s classified information, you know I can’t tell you that.”

“I know…” you averted your gaze and scrabbled your brain for what you could do or say to get him to tell you, “it’s just, I’m so scared all the time. The school was always a place that made me feel safe, till now…” although your intentions behind those words weren’t completely truthful, the statement wasn’t that far off, “it was just worth a try asking you.”

Holding your gaze, you could almost see his heartstrings get tugged as his brows quivered in compassion, “I-… I do have something. If you didn’t know, we just finished sweeping the victim’s living quarters, so if they haven’t already been notified, your friends should be able to move back in by tomorrow, but we also found something, not there, but in proximity to the dump site, there was a knife with traces of the victim’s blood on it. It’s in the lab right now as we speak, trying to decipher if there are any identifiable prints on it.” 

“Oh my god…” you felt goosebumps sting at every inch of your skin. 

“You haven’t heard any details about what state his body was found in, have you?” 

“No…” both from avoiding the papers and keeping to your dorm, you might be the only student on campus not aware of how your late friend had died, “he was stabbed?”

“That was decisively what killed him, yeah, but he was brutally beaten before that.”

“Holy shit, that’s-…” you shuttered, your eyes just now noticing the nauseating photos pinned on the board beside you, “fuck… I don’t know how you do this all day, deal with these kinds of things.” 

“It gets easier over time,” he shared, his worried eyes scanning your face a moment before apprehensively uttering, “this might be a really stupid question, but how are you holding up?”

“I-…” you toyed with the thought of lying to him yet again, but then opted to share the truth, “I am not doing so good, to be honest. I could probably count the number of hours I’ve slept in the last few days on one hand, or so I’ve been told. I don’t think it feels like I’ve slept at all, but apparently I have, just a little bit.”

Sucking in a pained breath, he murmured, “I’m sorry. I can help find someone you can talk to, if you want.”

“No, it’s alright,” his kind offer made it easier for you to look away from the horror plastered all over the office walls, “I mean, I’m not alone, that fact has become crystal clear throughout all of this.”

“Yeah, I kinda pieced that together,” he spoke in a much different manner than before, causing your brows to crinkle, “I conducted all the other interviews. It’s nice that you’ve made friends, making the most out of your college experience,” he said in a tone, almost reminiscent of jealousy.  

Averting your eyes, memories you so desperately tried to keep at bay pried their way in and snuffed out the fuming flicker his resentment had ignited, “hey Ari?”

“Yeah?”

“Did you know?” you asked wearily. 

“Know what?”

“Did you know all of those years, growing up together?” you lifted your vision once more as he offered you a questioning hum, “did you know that I was in love with you?”

Taken aback, it took a bit before he managed to answer, “no, I didn’t.”

“Why didn’t you ever call me? You just left.” 

“I was getting married, Y/n. What was I supposed to do?” 

“Not fuck the girl you used to babysit,” you shot back coldly, “what even was I to you?”

“I-… I don’t know,” his frustrated words came out breathy, “do you think I planned for any of that to have happened? To sleep with you of all people? I didn’t. But when I came home that summer and saw you again, saw who you had become, I don’t know, everything just changed, you changed. I fully thought that you’d to still be that same little annoying brat you used to be, but you really weren’t. I didn’t expect it to happen, I didn’t expect you to suddenly do something like that to me, have that kind of power over me!”

“So, you just decided to break my heart instead? I was mad for you, for as long as I could remember. That summer was the happiest I’d ever been and then you just up and left in the middle of the night without a word. Did you even think to imagine what it was like for me to run around that morning looking for you and instead finding an invitation for your wedding? I had to hear from your fucking parents that you had just come home to prepare things before the big day. You hadn’t even mentioned to me once that you were engaged, or even as much as just in a relationship. Was any of it even real to you or was I just your last bit of fun before you got tied down?”

“It was, Y/n,” he insisted sincerely, “it was the realest thing I’ve ever felt.”

“Then why did you go without as much as a goodbye? You know how much that broke me?”

“Yeah, well you seem to be doing just fine now,” he said pettily. 

“Excuse me? You don’t get to say something like that to me. You were the one who broke my heart, you don’t get to judge how I glued it back together. Just go back home to your wife, why don’t you.”

Suddenly looking back at you in confusion, Ari then illuminated carefully, “Y/n, I’m not married.”

“What?” you blinked. 

“I mean, I know you weren’t there that day, but I thought my mom at least had told you,” the gears turning inside of him were nearly visible to the naked eye, “I couldn’t go through with it.”

“What? Why?”

Biting his tongue as he held your eye, he then exhaled, “because I didn’t think I should get married if I was in love with someone else.”

Sucking in a stunned breath, you saw tears cloud your vision, “b-but… you never even called…”

“I know I didn’t,” he concurred heavily, his eyes unable to look away from your glossy ones. Feeling as if you might faint, you saw his woeful vision flicker down towards your lips, “I’m sorry, Y/n.” 

But just as you saw him slowly inch his face closer and closer to yours, a sharp intake of air stung your lungs as you raised a hand up as a barricade, “I can’t…” too scared of history repeating itself, “we can’t…”

Sighing deeply, his eyes traced the tear that rolled down your cheek, “I know…”

You had just been helping the guys move back into the frat. That was all you had been doing. One moment you were all laughing, actually having a normal and pleasant moment for once, and the next, two officers were barging down the door and reading Lloyd his rights. 

You’d nearly lost it completely and Curtis had to hold you back so that you didn’t go scratch one of the officer’s eyes out. The man in the cuffs however took it with style, only trying to break through your hazy to let you know that he would be fine and for the others to take care of you, after all, this wasn’t his first rodeo down to the station, although those times it had only been for petty crimes like bar room brawls and such. 

“But I mean, how did it even happen?” you thought out loud a while later, the miranda rights still ringing in your ears like a triggering song you just couldn’t get out of your head, “that’s what my mind keeps going back to,” you had finally calmed down after what felt like forever of the guys talking out of marching down to the station to do something, anything to get Lloyd out. Completely powerless, you sat curled up at the end of the couch as words flowed from your exhausted lips, “how could someone like him be killed? He was such a nice guy.” 

Not being able to stand it any longer, Curtis pipped up from the armchair on the other side of the living room, “no, he really wasn’t,” your bolstering words about the deceased being too much for him to take without cracking, “he was a rich creep and everyone knew it,” frustratingly, he gesticulated, “with everything that he did to you, how can you just sit there and say that he was a nice person? The guy drugged you and violated you in your sleep for fuck sake!” 

The room went dead quiet as soon as those words left his lips. 

“…what are you talking about?” your voice no higher than a whisper as you watched your burly friend shrink in regret. “Curtis,” you repeated more sternly this time as he didn’t offer an explanation, “what do you mean? What did you do?” your voice broke as thoughts about if Lloyd’s arrest hadn’t been a misunderstanding after all entered your mind. 

“You can’t tell her,” Frank shot a glare at the fighter, “we had a deal.” 

“Yeah, well that was before Lloyd got fucking arrested!” Jake chimed in, panic shining clear through in his tone, “she’s a part of this, has been since the very beginning. She has a right to know.” 

Finding your wide eyes in the crowd, Curtis asked you wearily, “you really wanna know what happened that night?” hugging your knees tighter to your chest, you gave him a small nod in confirmation, “fine, I’ll tell you.”

…

“Is she okay?” Curtis pushed the ajar door open further to ask, haven, on his way to the bathroom,  caught sight of an out of breath Ransom tugging the covers back over your passed out form. 

The head of the cashmere-clad man snapped up at the sign of company, the sudden alarm that began to bloom on his features was quickly drowned out by his usual arrogant air, “yeah, man,” he shot back defensively, rushing to get out of the room, “she’s fine,” sounding like it had been a completely crazy question to ask. 

Furrowed brow staying put, Curtis uttered slowly, “alright, but I think I’m just gonna check myself, if you don’t mind.”

“I said she’s fine!” Ransom slammed the door shut behind him, prohibiting the man now only inches from him from entering, “just go back to your own room!”

Worry and suspicion only growing at the obvious fibs, Curtis demanded, “what were you doing in there? What did you do?”

“What are you talking about?” he scoffed back. 

“What did you do to her?” Curtis took a looming step closer just as their raised voices began to stir some of the other slumbering residents.

“I didn’t do a thing,” he cockily dared a chuckle, “calm down.”

“I will not fucking calm down,” Curtis barked back before attempting to call to you through the closed door, “angel, you okay?”

Leaning against the wall beside his own room, Jake rubbed the sleep out of his eyes as he groaned, “guys, can you not yell in the middle of the night? Some of us are kinda trying to sleep here.”

Frank, as well haven appeared, seemed a little more alert at the sudden commotion in the hallway, “hey, what’s going on?”

“Nothing’s going on,” their suspicious friend waved a hand, “Curtis is just being a little bitch and freaking out for no reason,” the ostentatious gesture granted the opposing man an opportunity to slip past and enter the room.

Nearly kicking the door down, Curtis rushed to your side, examining your unconscious form with worried eyes, “angel?” the dim lights streaming in from the hallway just barely letting him notice how wrinkled and haphazard the t-shirt he’d lent you just a few hours before was on you. 

“Jesus, just let her sleep, dude.”

Ignoring Ransom’s words of warning, Curtis tried once more, “Y/n?” touching your skin lightly before giving you a gentle shake, “come on, wake up for me, baby,” his heart nearly beat out of his chest as he unsuccessfully tried to stir you, the shallow rise and fall of your abdomen not granting him as much comfort as it should have. 

Nearing the end of the hall, Frank asked once more, “what’s going on?” side-eyeing Ransom warily, “is she okay?”

“Of course she’s okay,” the trust fund kid scoffed.

“The fuck she is,” Curtis’ head whipped back in the direction of Ransom’s silhouette in the doorway. Getting back up on his feet, his sharp intakes of air causing his shoulders to rise, he stormed back out and demanded, “what did you do? Why were you in here and why the fuck is she not waking up?”

“Did you not see how much she had to drink tonight?” Ransom defensively gestured to your passed-out form on the narrow bed, “I was just checking up on her,” and with a heavy sigh abandoned the argument entirely and descended the stairs. 

Catching Curtis’ arm just in time to stop him from storming down after the man at the centre of the quarrel, Frank tried to catch the darting eyes of his friend as he asked firmly, “Curtis, what’s going on?”

“I saw him in there, hovering above her like a creep.”

Already worried eyes suddenly growing in alarm, “he was in there?” Frank quickly shared a panicked look with Jake, both now sharing the same inkling of what horrible thing had occurred, “alone with her?”

“Yes.”

“Wait,” Frank gasped, “did you say she’s not waking up? She is still breathing though, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, she’s just out cold. Why?”

“Oh my god…” Jake shuttered, his interrupted slumber now long forgotten.

“What? What is it? What aren’t you guys telling me?”

Exhaling lowly, Frank carefully began to explain, “Curtis, you know that my sister goes to Bayshore, right?”

“Um, sure, yeah?” unsure as to why that fact was significant.

“Well, she told me about this student who overdosed after being drugged and raped. The guy was apparently caught and everything but just came from a wealthy enough family to not only never be convicted, but also keep the news out of the papers. Curtis, that’s where Ransom transferred from.”

Seeing nothing but red, Curtis stormed down the stairs. On his determined path to the kitchen where the object for his bubbling rage now stood, leisurely sipping from a glass of water. Curtis narrowly caught sight of Lloyd as he finally stumbled through the entrance from his drawn-out merriment, uttering a hushed apology to the bulky frame of Steve on the couch for the way he had carelessly slammed the front door shut behind him.

Only rolling his eyes at the sight of Curtis, Ransom didn’t even lower his glass as the fuming figure neared, “dude, I already told you, I didn’t do a thing-” though the rest of his provoking words got squashed as Curtis’ fist suddenly collided with his jaw, swiftly grabbing onto his soft sweater before he could crumble like the shattered glass now scattered across the cool tile, “what the fuck!”  water splashing onto both of their feet. 

“What did you give her?” Curtis barked, his fingers digging into the intricate, stained knit so hard that they threatened to poke through to the other side. 

“Give who what?” appalled glare piercing as he fought against the hold. 

“Y/n!” he shook him heatedly, “what did you give her?”

“I didn’t give her shit, man,” Ransom just managed to spit out before white knuckles collided with his face once more. 

“Did you touch her? Because I swear to fuck, if you laid even as much as one finger on her, I’m gonna-”

“Oh, I see,” he actually dared to chuckle, a bit of crimson already staining the pearly whites he flashed, “you’re jealous that you didn’t get with her tonight.”

Landing another raging blow, Curtis yanked him in close and growled, “you shut up and answer my question! Did you touch her?”

Scoffing through his laboured groans of agony, Ransom finally disclosed smugly, “of course, I did, man. She’s been all over me all night long, begging for me to give it to her good.”

The rest of the frat haven now clustered in the kitchen as well, staying in the periphery, Frank accused, “what did you give her? Was it the same as the girl you killed back at Bayshore?”

The deep-pocketed man’s eyes flickered over Curtis’ shoulder, bruises blooming and swelling up his vision, “excuse me?” 

“The rape victim that overdosed at your old school?” the bridge of Frank’s nose twitched in fury, “it was you that killed her, wasn’t it?”

“I didn’t do anything of the sort, all I did was show those girls a good time, it’s not my fault some can’t keep up.”

“Is that what you think happened tonight?” Curtis hauled him against the fridge, gaining the man’s attention once more, “you call assaulting Y/n a good fucking time?”

Keeping his head held high, Ransom slurred, “what are you ashamed you’re not man enough to rough your girl up a bit and give her what she really likes?”

Huffing like a bull, he uttered, “she does not like it like that.”

“Oh yeah? Then tell me why I had her moaning the way I did, dripping down on ol’ Steve’s bed like a cheap whore. Kind of a shame that she won’t remember any of it in the morning, just hope I fucked her good enough that at least some part of her won’t forget…”

…

“Oh my god…” you shuttered, unable to look any of them in the eye, “oh my god,” your palm shot up to clasp over your lips to choke the shaky cry that forced its way out, “I thought-…” vision darting everywhere and nowhere at the same time, “I thought it had been a dream,” tears streamed down your ghostly face as the hazy nightmare suddenly came into focus, “oh my god! I-… I knew him,” you jaggedly tried to piece it all together as vile stung in the back of your throat, “he was-, he was my friend. I hadn’t known him that long, but he was my friend. I-… he wasn’t just some dangerous stranger in the back of an ally threatening to kill me, he was my friend.”

…

The incoherent screams of Curtis slowly subsisted as his rampant blows finally slowed down. Slowly backing up, chest heaving, horror took over his eyes as he saw how far he had been pushed, watching as blood bubbled out of Ransom’s mouth, guggling his words.

“Just you fucking wait till my family finds out,” he weakly continued his threats from his wrecked position on the tiled floor, “do you have any idea how much power money gives you? I can squash you all like little bugs, ruin any chance you might have of a pathetic future and keep angel all to myself.”

Unable to look away, Steve suddenly uttered as Curtis shakily retreated into the shadows, “…guys, we have to call an ambulance.”

Whipping his head around, Jake protested, “no, don’t!” ready to swat away any phone that might be raised, “he’s right. He has the upper hand no matter if we get him to a hospital or not.”

“So, what do we do? Look at him,” Steve woefully gestured to the beaten playboy crumbled on the floor, “he’s dying. We can’t just leave him here!”

“No…” Lloyd sighed, his demeanour seeming surprisingly calm and level-headed under the circumstance, “but we can use what little time we have left before the sun comes up to our advantage…” 

“What the fuck are you talking about?” Frank’s brows furrowed frightfully. 

In a wide arc around Ransom’s broken form, Lloyd made his way over to one of the kitchen counters and pulled open a drawer, “he said it himself,” he exhaled lowly as he accepted his fate, “he is more than capable of making not only angel’s life hell, but also all of ours,” his tone cold, he riffled through the utensils, “from where I’m standing, there’s only one way for us to get out of this with minimal casualties,” and fished out a knife, the steel reflecting in the low light seeping in through the other room. 

“You can’t be fucking serious,” Steve gasped, “we’re not murdering him!” 

“So you’d rather try and explain his corpse just lying here in our kitchen? This way we get the upper hand, we speed up the process and use the remainder of the night to our advantage till the rest of campus wakes up, hide him somewhere else, somewhere he won’t be found,” Lloyd stressed, “we have to kill him, it’s the only way.” 

“Shit dude…” Frank breathed, he and the rest realizing that he was right, “where would we even hide him?”

After only pondering it a second, Jake pipped up, “it’s trash day tomorrow,” tensely sharing glances with the rest, “if we get him to one of the big dumpsters on the other side of campus, drop him in there, no one will know! And even if they do eventually discover parts of him out on some dump, they won’t be able to get anything off of him anyways at that point.” 

“I-…” Curtis’ shaky voice finally filled the room, guilt seeping through in his brassy timbre as he asked what no one else would, “…who’s gonna do it?” 

Not letting the others even consider that weight, Lloyd swiftly declared, “I’ll do it.”

“What?” the trembling fighter’s eyes finally lifted.

“If they actually do somehow manage to nail us for this, it should be me that goes down for it,” he stated deliberately, “always knew I’d go to prison at some point just like my old man, this way it wouldn’t be for anything stupid.” 

© 2023 thyme-in-a-bubble 

[velvetreds]

01. unrequitedlovers.org

unrequitedlovers.org

a website made for those who have fallen for someone they cannot have. chat with other people who are going through the same pain as you! discuss your problems with understanding partners in peace without the worry of anyone important finding out. completely safe, secure and anonymous. join now at unrequitedlovers.org/signup

the advertisement looks interesting enough; the fact that you've been in love with your brothers' best friend for almost seven years only adds to the temptation. stifling a yawn, you click the link to sign up. it's just an anonymous chat site, what's the worst that could happen?

×

unrequitedlovers.org

a website made for those who have fallen for someone they cannot have. chat with other people who are going through the same pain as you! discuss your problems with understanding partners in peace without the worry of anyone important finding out. completely safe, secure and anonymous. join now at unrequitedlovers.org/signup

rintarou suna stares blankly at his laptop screen — or more specifically, the flashing advertisement playing right in the middle of his screen. what the hell, is it a dating site? a quick skim through the blurb says otherwise, and after a few seconds he realises that he's actually considering joining the site. after all, he's secretly been in love with the one person who's always been marked off-limits — his best friends' younger sister, y/n miya. oh well, whatever.

[...set username]

[are you sure? this cannot be changed once it is set]

[username set]

welcome to unrequitedlovers.org, jellyfruit!

scan this QR code to download the app now! he doesn't know why he listens and downloads it there too

suna squints at the welcome screen, already somewhat regretting his decision to sign up. the layout of the app is bright, somewhat gaudy, and more like a dating app than a chat site. a few users are automatically scrolled through in front of him. FIND YOUR NEW BEST FRIEND, says the text box above them.

the thing that all the profiles have in common is how unappealing they are; he's almost ready to log off when he sees the first interesting account. normalcatliker143 sits unobtrusively between romanticlover69 and DATEME_HOT_BABEZ, and he almost lets it pass by before he sees the profile picture. it's the first one he's seen that's not one of the automatic site ones or AI generated. he's about to send a friend request to them when a notification pops up onto his screen, and oh, what the fuck, normalcatliker143 has sent him a request first. he clicks the vaguely terrifying profile picture to find out a little more about them.

NORMALCATLIKER143

name: catliker is good

age: 18

likes: cats

dislikes: cat haters

bio: here cus im bored. i talk a lot if youll listen

he taps "accept".

series masterlist

authors note(s) !!

ch1!!!!

FIRST CONTACT HAS BEEN MADE

ARHSDHDSHRHR

idk wat 2 write here um,, good luck chat

tooru oikawa screams like a little girl btw

send pics of black cat stuffed toys

taglist is open ! (29/50)

@wooasecret @yuminako @dawnisatotalqueen @thechaosoflonging @boogiemansbitch @chloiyoomi @mikauraurr @just-coreee @chemiru @twiishaa @imcheshire @zozodahobo @fallenisded @nyxlai @sp1ng @sunsribn @sellomaybe @savemebrazilhinata @semieita24rockstargf @marsoverthestars @bellsoftheball @renardiererin @akaakeis @dazqa @piopioo @theepitomeofswag @smellysluna @theycallmenanamisgirl @strxbxrrylover

comment or send an ask to be tagged <33

© iiwaijime 2024

[twilightaurora]

bolstering a fighter's spirit – sage

sneak peek: before battle, link pulls you aside with a request. he wants to wear his barbarian armor into the fight, but he needs help with the paint patterns of the set. after all, the attack bonus only happens when the purple paint completes the armor. won't you help him?

pairing: sage (totk!link) x fem!reader, background chain (no wind) x fem!reader (poly) – this will be four parts! one for sage, wild, and cal, then the triplets together ;)

warnings: 18+ content! (do NOT interact with this unless you have an age indicator in your bio - I WILL block you) cursing, spitting, handjobs/masturbation, hair pulling, praising, mentions of oral (m! receiving), sage is a big tease, a little bit of exhibitionism (public setting, but you're alone), jealousy ;) biting (forgive me if sage is ooc, he's just a little gremlin in my eyes) this is mostly teasing – the good stuff will come in part four ;)

word count: 6.4k

a/n: i want sage in a way that is concerning to feminism i think (/j... or am i??) this is dedicated to @neverchecking who fueled my brain rot xD this series is for you >:D

It starts with Sage.

Because it always does. 

The chain landed in his Hyrule the day before, appearing on the borders of Zora’s Domain. The shift wasn’t terrible this time – for you anyway. Hylia, whether intentionally or not, had dumped you directly atop Time and Twilight. 

In your humble opinion, Time made a much worse cushion than his successor. With his broad chest and stiff armor, the eldest hero was less than comfortable to land on. Twilight, on the other hand, managed to grasp a hold of your waist in the midst of the fall, and dragged you into him as the three of you went down. You ended up landing mostly atop Twilight, much to your thanks. However, you could still feel the harsh press of Time’s armor against your sides.

“Oof,” you grunt as the air escapes your chest involuntarily. Pressing a hand to your ribs, you suck in a grateful breath of air as you lean forward. 

A hand slips around your hips as another gently taps against your back.

“You alright there, darl’?” 

It’s Twi. His accent is unmistakable. 

His hand rubs sweetly against your side as you cough. Sitting up with a huff, you feel Twilight hum as you lean away from his chest. Awkwardly, you shimmy off his lap to land between him and Time, smiling with a little chuckle, you nod. 

“Yeah, m’okay,” you smile, feeling your breath return. “You?”

Twilight chuckles, shifting and stretching his back. The three of you landed on your backs, facing skyward as the portal closed above you. It wasn’t a big fall, but it was enough to leave you winded. 

“M’alright, too. What about ya,’ Time? Ya’ good, old man?” Twilight turns over his shoulder to look at Time with a toothy grin. You catch a glimpse of his sharpened canines and have to look away before he catches your lingering stare. 

Time huffs, rubbing his own hand against the chest-plate of his armor. 

“Watch it, pup,” the eldest murmurs, but there’s no heart in it. Especially when you find the grin twisting the corner of his mouth upwards. “I’m okay. Is everyone all here?”

“We’re good!” 

The reply comes from Wind, the youngest already standing and looking around the new environment. His hands are on his hips and there’s a beaming grin on his lips. 

“Speak for yourself, kid,” Legend grunts. The Vet is pulling himself from a pile of limbs, buried beneath the forms of Hyrule, Sky and Wild. “You didn’t land at the bottom of the pile.”

A resounding groan comes from Sky as he weasels his way from underneath the others, offering his own complaint. 

“Four’s a little woozy, but other than that we’re doing fine,” Warriors inputs, his form crouched beside the mentioned hero. Four is on his hands and knees, panting as he attempts to right himself. Shifts are always a little different for him. Perhaps it had something to do with the other parts of him still constrained within one form, but he didn’t quite know. 

“I’ll be fine, Wars. Just gimme’ a few minutes.” 

Time is on his feet a moment later, turning back to you with a sweet smile and offering a hand. 

“Thank you,” you hum as you slip your fingers into his own. Twilight props you up as you begin to stand, his hand sliding from your back to a fraction lower. When you turn over your shoulder to shoot him a look, Twilight gives you a wolfy smile and a little wink before he begins to stand as well. You roll your eyes goodnaturedly and ignore the flash of heat that zings through your gut. 

“Of course, sweetheart,” Time murmurs, brushing the dirt off your tunic as you fix yourselves. “Anyone know where we are?” 

“It’s my Hyrule,” comes Sage’s voice. The Hero of the Zonai is looking down at his Purah Pad, scanning through something as he speaks. “We landed pretty close to Zora’s Domain. If we’re lucky we can make it there before nightfall.” 

Wild nods, brushing off his tunic as he confirms Sage’s words. 

“I recognize Inogo Bridge,” he muses as slings a Lynel Bow over his shoulders. “Is the road to the Domain as overrun here as it is in mine?” 

Sage hums as he filters through his weapon inventory, eventually summoning a Zonaite Sword that’s been fused to some monster part that the others don’t recognize. That Fuse ability of his is still something the Chain is getting used to. 

“It’s not so bad. I cleared it out before the last Blood Moon, but I’m not sure how long I’ve been gone.” 

Time leaves your side to join Sage and Wild. Cal fills his empty place easily, a little grin on his lips as he scans over your form. When he finds no injuries, his smile broadens, giving you a nod as you lean forward to pat his cheek sweetly. The pinkish hue of his cheeks is too cute. 

“I’m fine, Cal, really,” you murmur, leaning into the Hero as he blushes. 

“Just checking, is all.” 

You smile, pecking Cal’s cheek as you leave his side to join the other heroes. Time has his arms crossed over his chest as Sage speaks, his one eye still shut and his armor glinting in the sun. 

“Okay,” the Hero of Time begins, scanning over the Chain as he mulls over his words. “We move in an hour. That should give everyone a chance to recover from the shift. We should prepare for a fight – with our luck, the road will probably be overrun.” 

The rest of the Chain offer various forms of agreement, beginning to move away as they shift through their various belongings. You pull your pouch to your front and untangle the strings as you rifle through the magically enhanced insides. Finding the bottles you’re searching for, you count the number of healing potions and fairies still on your person. Mentally accounting for the rest of the chain and the number of potions you know are in Wild’s slate, you hum thoughtfully. There’s enough. As long as nothing goes terribly wrong, everything should be just fine. 

A moment later, your name is called. 

Lifting your head, you find Sage’s eyes across the clearing. The Hero of the Zonai finds your gaze and lifts his hand to beckon you closer. 

“C’mere, sunflower,” he smiles, the glint in his eyes reflecting something deeper. His grin looks a little too close to a smirk, and your heart skips a beat. He wants something. “I need your help with something.”

You follow his motion with a silly tumble of your stomach. Sage never fails to make your gut flip and your skin warm. You’re so weak for this man and he’s not even doing anything. 

“What’s up, Sage?” 

The hero is already wearing different clothes from the ones he landed in. You recognize them – you’ve seen his barbarian armor before. He and Wild – as well as Cal, you’ve come to learn, each have a set of the ‘armor.’ You’re hardly sure it can be called armor, given how little it actually seems to protect during battle. Wild had mentioned the armor was enhanced by the Great Fairies, giving him some kind of magical boost during battle. You didn’t really understand it, but you believed him. The triplets were wonders on the battlefield, and with the addition of the armor, you could tell their prowess seemed to grow. 

However, though Sage dons the leg wraps and the chest guard, the helm is still missing. When you step closer to the hero, you notice he’s suspiciously missing something else too. 

There’s no paint decorating his skin. 

The fur of his boots and at his shoulders ruffles with the soothing breeze, and you desperately try to keep your eyes away from the toned lines of his abdomen. Sage, however, seems to notice your struggle, because his grin only seems to broaden. 

When you reach his side, Sage holds something out to you. 

A paintbrush. 

“Can you help me with this, pretty? I can’t reach my back as easily as you can.” 

You have to battle against the way your stomach flutters. Skin warming and fingers twitching, you reach out to grab the brush from Sage’s outstretched hand. 

“Are you sure?” you murmur. “I don’t know the pattern as well as you.” 

Sage gives you another grin, humming sweetly as he reaches for your hands. His skin is warm as he pulls you closer. 

“Of course I’m sure. I’ll help you, love. Just come with me, please?” 

The look he gives you makes your knees weak. His lidded eyes are filled with something you can’t decipher, and his pretty cerulean irises are peering down at you with something dark in their depths. The way he leans forward over you is troubling given the way your heart clenches. 

“Okay, if you’re sure,” you whisper, smiling back at the hero.

Sage leads you away from the camp the Chain begins to build. You’re not quite sure what the distance is for, but you assume he must want some privacy given how close the paint is to… 

Oh. 

Sage smirks as you begin to realize what he’s asked you to do. His grip on your hand tightens and you press your lips together to repress the way your cheeks warm. Your stomach flips and something hot surges between your thighs. 

“You finally realize what I’m asking you, pretty girl?” 

Goddesses, this man is too much for you. 

You offer Sage a look, feeling suddenly small beneath his heated gaze. His blonde locks are loose and hanging delicately around his face, and you want to run your fingers through the silky tresses. You wonder what kind of sound he’ll make if you tug on them. 

Turning back to you when he’s deemed the distance enough, Sage gives you another smirk and pulls you close. He clutches your hips in his hands, tugging you closer with lidded eyes and leans down closer to you. Your heart skips a beat as his lips graze over your own, and you surge closer to his pretty mouth. 

Sage chuckles, the low sound making your stomach feel funny. 

“Ah ah, sunflower…” he tuts playfully, squeezing your hips and pressing his waist into your own. “I still need your help – there’s no attack boost without the body paint, you know?” 

You huff, shooting him a withered look at Sage grins. The hero pulls out the paint he uses for such purposes, outstretching it towards you as he motions towards the paintbrush. 

“Please, my love? You can start with my legs.” 

You nearly roll your eyes at his honey-sweet tone, giving him another look as you accept the paint. Your stomach flips again when Sage leans back, resting his weight against a tree behind him. The hero spreads his legs a bit, offering you the space between them as he looks down at you. 

With something hot rippling beneath your skin, you realize what he beckons for you to do. Huffing, you drop to your knees at Sage’s feet and look up at him with your brows raised. You find the man already looking down at you with a toothy grin, and something feral in his expression makes you even weaker to his salacious smirk. 

“This what you wanted, Sage?” 

“That’s perfect, sweet girl. You know I love you on your knees for me,” he purrs. “You know what the pattern looks like?”

You offer a small nod, shifting your eyes to the empty expanse of his toned thighs. On your knees, your head comes up to his hips, and you’re given a beautiful view of his gorgeous legs. The little skirt the armor uses barely covers more than a few inches beneath his hips, and you’re given more than an eyeful of his pretty, bare skin. 

Turning back to the paint in your hands, you dip the paintbrush in the royal purple color and lift it back towards his skin. Looking back up at him once, Sage inclines his head in a nod and you melt underneath his dark eyes. 

You start at his legs, dragging the paintbrush across his right leg. On his outer thigh, you paint the crossing pattern that you’ve seen span over his legs. You definitely have not been paying close attention to the pattern that the armor always dons… 

Flushing at the memory, you feel your thighs weaken, so you spread your knees farther apart to counter the weight. Head spinning as you finish the first leg, you look back up at Sage. He’s still watching you, one of his hands lifting to brush some of your hair out of your eyes sweetly, you melt into his hand. He gives you an uncharacteristically tender look before he nudges you back to your job. 

When you turn to the other leg, you find the leather drop sheath encasing his upper thigh. The dagger in the holster glints in the sun, but that’s not why your stomach flips. 

“Can I…” you murmur, voice uncharacteristically weak. “Can I take this off? I think the paint goes across here, doesn't it?” 

Sage hums, a knowing smirk on his lips as he runs his fingers across your scalp again. Leaning his hips forward towards you, you feel another lick of heat flick between your thighs. 

It’s so… hot. Everything is so hot. You know he’s teasing you, but it’s working. 

By the Three, is it working... 

Sage makes no move to take the holster off himself, simply offering you his hips and looking down at you through his lashes. “Go ahead, pretty. Take it off f’me.” 

You melt beneath his gaze, shakily lifting a hand to his legs. Your brain is racing and your thoughts are so fuzzy. Sage knows exactly how to make you weak beneath him. It takes so little effort. In any other situation, you’d probably throw a playful swat for such behavior, but when Sage gives you that lustful smirk, you find you’ll do anything he says – as long as he keeps looking at you like that, you’ll do anything and everything. 

When your fingers find the holster, skimming across the pretty, pale skin of his inner thigh, Sage keens. Goosebumps ripple across his flesh where your fingers were, leaving a trail of little bumps in a pattern across his skin. Knocking his head back against the tree trunk, Sage hums out a sweet sound and pushes his hips closer to you. 

“Hnng…” 

Goddesses, does he make pretty sounds. 

You want to hear more. As his hips roll forward, you become more than aware of how close his waist is to your face. It takes every fiber of restraint you have not to drift your hand just an inch closer to the edge of his little skirt. 

Loosening the strap of his sheath, you begin to pull the leather from around his thigh. Dragging it down his legs, you drop it at his feet and look back up at him. 

Sage still has his head thrown back against the tree, his lips tugged upwards in a hazy look with his eyes closed. You’re so tempted to brush your lips across the span of his inner thigh, just where you need to paint. Your legs clench, the heat beginning to swell between your own thighs. Before you stand back up on your knees, the leather discarded at Sage’s feet, you indulge your fantasies. Darting forward, you drag your lips across the pale skin of his inner thigh, grinning when Sage curses. 

“Oh, Hylia,” he hisses, eyes prying open to glare down at you. You grin and Sage reaches a hand out to flick your forehead. 

“Keep going, sunflower. There’s still more to paint, and we’ve only got an hour,” he coos. “If you’re quick, maybe I’ll give you a reward for being so good for me.” 

You hurriedly dip the paintbrush back into the violet ink and Sage chuckles in that deep tone that makes your insides mushy. You finish the second crossing pattern on his leg before Sage’s eyes open again. 

Looking up at him, you lift off your knees and sit up. Now closer to his stomach, you hum shakily and whisper quietly. 

“I can’t remember the entire pattern on your chest, Sage. M’gonna need some help.”

“Of course, my love,” he muses sweetly. His hand is back at your scalp, gently scratching at your scalp and grinning when you keen into his hands. He loves when you go limp in his grasp. Oh, Hylia – he wants to see the look on your face when he yanks the strands back. Would you make a pretty sound for him when he does? Would you beg him to do it again? 

He wants to find out. 

Sage loves the sound your voice makes when you beg him so sweetly. He remembers the way your hips canted up into his own not so long ago, desperate for him to roll back into you as he pinned you beneath him. His eyes slide back shut at the memory, feeling his cock stiffen beneath the skirt of his armor. It twitches and Sage can barely contain the urge to drag your hand beneath the waistband to solve the growing problem. He can so clearly recall the touch of your fingertips against the head of his cock. 

Fuck, it’s so hot. 

“There’s a line across each of my ribs. They go around my back,” he manages to choke out. “Do those first.” 

You obey him without complaint, dragging the soft bristles of the brush across his chest just beneath where the chest-plate ends.  The bristles tickle across his ribs, and in any other circumstance, they might have elicited a silly giggle from the usually so stoic hero. However, Sage is far more distracted by the throbbing beneath his waistband to spare the attention for such sensations. 

As you lean back on your heels, tilting your head to assess if the short lines of pain across Sage’s abdomen are even, the hero chuckles again. Licking his lips, he gives you that feral grin that makes your heart clench. Pushing off the tree, he twists around to give you his back. 

“They go down to my waistband,” he murmurs. “You remember ‘em?” 

You offer a vague nod, too distracted by the cutting lines of his hips. Sage eats up the attention. 

With a racing mind, you finish the pattern, dragging the brush from mid-back downwards to the small of his back. When you lift a hand to the edge of his skirt, pulling the edge slightly to dip the brush beneath his waistband, Sage shivers. 

You grin. 

When he turns back to you, he speaks with a flash of sharpened canines. You nearly squirm at his feet, a notion Sage adores. 

“Now my hips.” 

You swallow thickly. 

Before dipping the brush back into indigo paint, you bite the edge of your lip and push back the smirk that attempts to show. You have an idea. 

“Sage…” you hum sweetly, leaning closer to the hero’s waist. Just an inch from the waistband of his skirt, you pull one of your hands up from the ground to rest against the bare skin of his hip. The toned skin of his waist flexes under the touch of your fingers, and you watch Sage’s closed eyes twitch. 

Perfect. 

“Can you help me, darling? I can’t remember how this looks?” 

Sage’s eyes pry open, seemingly with immense difficulty, and the hero’s dilated pupils meet your own. Blown wide with some kind of primal emotion, Sage’s flushed cheeks spread into a grin as he registers your words. You lean closer to his hips, your fingers delicately tracing shapes over his side. You try desperately to restrain a scheming grin when Sage pushes closer to your hands. 

“‘Course, my sunflower. S’just a triangle over my waist. I’ll help you.” 

When one of his hands reaches for yours, you beam. Sage gently lifts your fingers, pulling you closer by your wrist until your front is nearly pressed up against his legs. He looks down at you with that feral, dominant look he knows you love, and you shiver. Your heart thunders beneath your ribs and Sage adores the way you move so easily for him. Always so eager to obey his commands… Goddesses he loves you. He’ll treat you so well after this – he promises. 

Lifting your hand, he helps you drag the paintbrush over his right hip and carefully draws the triangular shape across his waist. He twists a little, allowing you to finish the shape at his back. With another silly grin, he begins to help you start the other side. 

“There you go,” he coos with batting lashes. “Doin’ so well f’me. That’s just perfect.” 

When you finish his hips, Sage helps you paint the three dots on his front before moving to allow you to replicate the same at the small of his back. 

Then, you’ve reached the part you’ve been eagerly awaiting. The last part of his barbarian armor – the handprints.

Sage twists back to his front, leaning down to press a tender kiss to your forehead – a sweet caress compared to the way he’s been looking at you. He’s always so adoring in the way he treats you, even when he’s manhandling you beneath him. When he pulls your legs over his shoulders, darkened irises scanning over your bare hips, Sage always presses a chaste kiss to your calf to apologize for the stretch of your muscles. Always so sweet to the one he loves. 

“Thank you for helpin’ me. Now, give me your hand, sweet thing.” 

You obey, hand already outstretched with your palm facing skywards. Offering him the brush, freshly dipped in orchid-colored paint, Sage hums and accepts. He delicately cradles the back of your hand and begins to coat your fingers in violet ichor. The clay feeling of the paint sinks into your skin, and you sit obediently as Sage paints your palms. 

His eyes flick upwards to meet your eyes with another teasing grin. 

“You’re enjoying this as much as I am, aren’t you, pretty?” 

You nod, a matching smile on your lips. 

“Good,” Sage purrs, finally finishing the coat of paint across your palm. “C’mere then.” 

He twists to give you his spine first. You grin, reaching forward with your unpainted hand to pull gently at his waistband. Sage’s head knocks back as you nudge the skirt lower. When you can clearly see the small of his back, accentuated by his thin waist – his slutty waist, in your opinion – you lift the violet hand and carefully lay it across his spine. 

Sage hums, head still tilted backwards and his eyes closed. 

Before lifting your palm, you lean forward, eyes closing as your lips graze over the bare skin of his hip. Sage’s skin is hot, flushed red with the rush of warmth surging beneath his waistband. His cock twitches again. 

“Naughty…” he whispers teasingly. 

Twisting back around to the front and reclining back against the tree, Sage is careful not to smudge the paint you freshly smeared across his back. Inclining his hips forward again, the Hero of the Zonai gives you that feral look once more before his hand lifts and he’s beckoning you closer. 

“Just one more…” Sage teases, beginning to paint your palm once more. “One more and I’ll reward you.” 

You shiver, the rumble of his voice seemingly sinking beneath your skin to sink into your chest. He makes you so weak. Perhaps it’s something about the way dominance seems to radiate from him during moments like this. All he has to do is bat those blonde lashes and give you that feral, little grin, and you’re putty in his hands. Well, you suppose it’s not so bad. Sage always treats you so well. 

“Yeah, you want that, huh? ‘Course, you do… I always treat you so good, don’t I?” 

You hum in response, shuffling forward on your knees, “Yeah, I want that, Sage. Please?” 

Sage coos, a teasing smile stretched across his lips. He strokes one of his hands over your cheeks before it crawls behind your neck. Cupping your head, he runs his fingers through the hair at the base of your skull. Your thighs clench again. Sage does the same thing when your mouth is preoccupied with something else – running his fingers through your hair and pulling your face closer to his pretty hips. His head shifts between tossing back and staring down at your face, as if he can’t decide if he wants to give in to pleasure or if he can’t stand to look away. And he always sounds so pretty when you go down on him. 

“Ahh, I love it when you beg so sweetly for me, my darling. Finish this and I’ll give you what you want.” 

Releasing your hand, Sage drops the brush and lays back beckoning you forward with a lustful expression. When you shuffle again, inching closer, the hero pulls you forward by the back of your head and your stomach flutters. Offering you his waist, you lift your unpainted fingers with only a single tremor of your awaiting hand. 

Sage nods, inclining his chin in a command. 

“Pull ‘em down, pretty thing. You’ll need to see what you’re doing, right?” 

You huff, unable to offer a teasing remark in return, simply too transfixed on the sharp lines that lead down his waist. The v-line beckons you, guiding down where you want him most. 

Brushing your fingers across his waistline, you find the band of his skirt. Looking up at him once, Sage watches you with fluttering lashes as you begin to nudge the waistband. Tugging on it, Sage pushes his hips towards you to help you pull the skirt down onto his hip bones. 

It goes slow – tantalizingly slow. Revealing bare skin inch by inch, you lean forward to press a kiss to his left hip, but Sage’s fingers grip the back of your neck harshly. Tugging gently at the strands of your hair, your stomach flutters and heat prickles between your thighs. You let out a little grunt and Sage grins wide. His body shivers, seemingly pleased at the tiny sound of pleasure that fell from your lips. 

“Not yet…” Sage coos. “Be patient, sunflower.” 

You give the hero a haughty look, but obey regardless of the sweltering heat building in your panties. 

Weaseling the waistband downwards, you feel your heart jump into your throat. With more of his heavenly hips exposed, you feel another wave of heat flush through your skin. Each of your nerves seems to jump with adrenaline, and you eagerly lift your violet hand to finish the task appointed to you. Finally, you stop tugging at his skirt, leaving the waistband just above his dick. You know it’s uncomfortable, given how it twitches beneath the cloth of his skirt, flexing upwards at your teasing. Sage gives you an unimpressed look, motioning for you to finish. 

So delicately, you press your palm against his pelvis, the purple paint sinking into his bare skin. Fingers following after, you teasingly rest your hand between the sharp edges of his v-line – just above the throbbing muscle between his thighs. 

Sage keens, his head finally tossing back against the tree with another delicious sound. His hips push forward into your hands, tugging you closer to his waist by your neck. The other hand drops across his eyes, hiding his flushed cheeks in his elbow. 

“Hah… fuck.” 

With his arm hiding his eyes, you finally lean forward away from his fingers and leave a kiss on the edge of his v-line just beside your violent hand. Sage grunts, clenching his jaw as your warm mouth opens to drag your tongue over the dip in his hips. 

“By the three…” he whines, finally scrambling to tug at your hair again. Pulling you away, you drag your hand away from his pelvis with a feral grin of your own. Looking up at your work, you watch as Sage pants, his chest heaving with each breath. 

When he finally shifts his arm, his eyes prying open to find your scheming smile, Sage huffs and tightens his hold of your neck. Tugging you closer, he drops his other hand to slide two of his fingers beneath the waistband of his little skirt. Tugging at the band by his hip, he drags it another inch downwards with a primal grin. 

The paint must be working – that ‘fighting spirit’ finally kicking in. 

Wild had tried to explain it before; the magic the armor gives them. He said it enhanced his attack in battle, by somehow ‘bolstering his fighting spirit.’ However, when you questioned what that meant, Wild had gotten a little shifty. His cheeks had flushed and he rubbed his hands together, simply waving off your question with a simple “don’t worry about it.” 

But you’re not stupid. 

You’ve seen the way the triplets get a little more… primal with the armor on. They’re more aggressive, quicker to jump into battle in an attempt to burn off the adrenaline surging beneath their skin. It makes their eyes glint with something dangerous, and you’re not ashamed to say that you quite like the way they look. 

“My good girl…” Sage coos, still dragging down his skirt at a teasingly slow pace. “Will you help me with one more thing, my love? Just one more?” 

You nod before he even finishes his words. 

Sage grins, all teeth and darkened irises. 

“Hmm, thank you, baby.”

Then, Sage finally pries his skirt from his hips, letting the fur material slide off his waist and drop to the forest floor in a single motion. You only have a fraction of a second to admire his bare skin before his pretty cock fills your vision. Nearly slapping against his stomach, Sage’s dick twitches just once when you shift to look at it. The hero keens into your grip when you lean forward, painted hand sliding over his hip where you know the skirt will hide the smeared violet color. 

Sage’s cock, hard and already leaking at the pretty-pink tip, lays against his stomach. It ends at the tip of the purple handprint you had just pressed into his pelvis, almost as if you had known exactly how long his dick was. 

The Hero of the Zonai grins in that feral way, his form nearly radiating with primal dominance. He slides his other hand down across his stomach, taking care to avoid the fresh streaks of paint. Sage wraps a hand around his cock, tugging gently and stroking until it comes to its full hardness. He suppresses the sweet whine that desperately wants to escape – you have to work for those sounds if you want to hear them. 

“Open your mouth f’me, my good girl.” 

Your head tilts back into Sage’s hand, squeezing your legs together as something warm drips between them. Opening your lips, you look up at Sage as the hero smirks. 

“So good… thank you, darling,” he coos sweetly, moving his hand to run his thumb over your bottom lip with a dark look. Leaning forward, Sage spits into your open mouth with a smirk. 

Swallowing obediently, Sage hums happily and leans downard again to tug your lips to his own. Groaning into this kiss, Sage pries open your lips to lick into your mouth. Moaning happily, you melt into Sage’s hand, now returned to the back of your head. Sage kisses you wetly, saliva smearing onto your lips as he pants, still tugging at his cock. Pre-cum slides down the head, slicking up the length as he slides his fist over it with a whimpered sound. 

“Mmm…ah” 

When he finally pulls away from your swollen lips, you chase after his mouth with a sigh. Sage grins, his dilated pupils scanning over your flustered face with a haughty look. You watch him tug at his dick, rubbing your thighs to combat the throb between them as he keens into his own hands. 

“Sage…” you whine, trying to shuffle closer. 

Something flashes across Sage’s darkened eyes. 

“That’s not my name, sweet girl,” he murmurs with a frown. “You know better. C’mon, wanna’ hear you say it right.” 

Your stomach flutters, his teasing tone making your skin tingle and your head spin. You lean closer to his stomach, whining again. 

Sage frowns, pulling your hair gently to redirect your attention. 

“C’mon, pretty. Say my name – my real name.” 

Your eyes find his, tugging carefully on your bottom lip with your teeth before you whine out the name he wants. 

“Link…” 

Sage – Link groans, head tilting back to expose his pretty throat as he slicks up his cock again. Tugging fiercely at the length as his gut clenches, heat swelling and twisting in his pelvis with a sweltering warmth. 

“Oh, fuck…” he whines, pushing his hips closer to your face with a twitch of his dick. “That’s it, my pretty girl. Thank you, baby – thank you.” 

Just the sound of his true name on your lips makes him so aroused he can feel his cock throb painfully in his fingers. His hand tugs your head closer, now looking back down at you with those dark irises. Sliding his other hand away from his dick, Link allows your mouth to suck two of his fingers. Tasting the salty pre-cum coating his fingers, you shift on your knees again with a pretty sound. Link smirks. 

“Okay, my sunflower. You want your reward now?” 

Nodding, your tongue still flicking over his two fingers, you lean closer. Purple paint smears onto both your hands, and you know there are streaks of it on both of Link’s hips. You hope the other’s don’t see – or perhaps, you hope they haven’t paid too close attention to where the paint is supposed to go. You think you can feel little smudges of the orchid clay spreading across your throat where Link is clutching your neck, but you forget about it when Sage whines again as you lick over his fingers like you would his dick. The pretty sound makes you drip, and the panties you’re wearing are surely soiled now. 

“Yes please, Link,” you whisper. 

Link grins again, then pulls his fingers from your mouth and pulls you into his waist. Heat in his stomach and cock throbbing, purple paint decorating his pretty skin, Link slides a hand around his dick and taps it against your lips. 

“Good,” he murmurs, abs clenching as heat continues to stir. “Then suck and I’ll give you another.”

When an hour passes and you and Sage return to the temporary camp, the Chain turns to find faint streaks of smeared paint across Sage’s waist and a lilac tint on your palms. You’re both grinning, wild smiles on your cheeks as you step back into camp. Sage is in his barbarian armor, the skirt ruffled and twisted around just slightly and the helm now on his head. If Wild looks close enough, he can see a faint, dark mark on Sage’s inner thigh, just barely obscured by the skirt of the armor set.

“Are you kidding?” Wild exclaims as the two of you enter camp. He had to paint the armor himself when he could have just asked for you to do it? 

Wild and Cal are both in their barbarian armor, having painted on the violet patterns themselves. The former rolls his eyes as he watches Sage follow you, a smirk on his lips. He finds Wild staring at him and his expression only seems to grow more teasing. Cal shifts on his feet uncomfortably, finding your eyes and offering you a bashful look. 

“What?” Sage responds, his fanged grin still beaming. 

Wild grunts, huffing as he steps closer to you, beginning to pull you away from the other hero. The long-haired hero shoots Sage a glare, but the elder hero only seems to enjoy the spotlight. Wild wraps a hand around your waist, pulling you close as he finds a streak of orchid-colored clay across your throat – a fingerprint shaped print. 

“You have other armor that gives you an attack boost, you know?” Wild grunts towards Sage, jealousy swirling angrily in his stomach. 

“Yeah, but I wanted this one,” Sage smiles. “And our darling just wanted to help me with the paint – didn’t you, my sunflower?” 

You offer a shy smile to Wild, feeling suddenly flustered beneath both their gazes. 

Some of the other members of the Chain slowly begin to congregate in the center of the camp, drawn to the chatter. Wind remains over the ridge of camp, scouting the path ahead with Four. Legend scans over Sage’s slightly smudged paint and your ruffled appearance, rolling his eyes and huffing. 

“Could have been more subtle, Sage,” the Veteran sighs. 

“But what’s the fun in that,” said hero responds, sending Legend a grin. 

Legend simply rolls his eyes again, stepping forward and licking his thumb to scrub away the paint across your throat. You shrink under his gaze, feeling so shy with their attention now on you. Legend scrubs gently and you shiver at the feeling of his saliva against your skin. 

“Stay still,” Legend murmurs. 

“Sorry, Vet.” 

Wild, still at your side, pulls at your tunic and straightens your ruffled appearance, wiping away something at the corner of your mouth. You shy away from their attention with a flutter of your stomach. When Legend is satisfied, he sends you a knowing look before he turns back to Hyrule. 

Wild hums thoughtfully at your left, and you twist to face him. You tilt your head, silently questioning Wild’s thoughts. The hero follows your titled head, eyes dilating as he examines your swollen lips. Lifting a hand, he brushes over the bottom lip with lidded eyes and something dark flashes across his expression. 

Oh no – you know that look. 

“Wild…” you murmur carefully. 

The Hero of the Wilds meets your eyes with a smirk of his own, leaning close until his mouth is pressed against your ear. He breathes a warm sigh over your skin and enjoys the way you weaken in his arms. When he’s sure the Chain isn’t looking, he drops a hand to squeeze one of your thighs, briefly dragging a finger across the seam of your pants. You keen into Wild’s chest with a breathy sound and the hero sighs happily.

“After we reach Zora’s Domain,” he whispers, voice saccharine like the honey he cooks with. His mouth presses a sweet kiss to the skin of your throat, pecking it gently before he sets his sharp teeth against your shoulder. You whine quietly into him as they prick your flesh, and Wild bites carefully into your throat with a huff. “It’s my turn…”  

bonus:

sage, walking back into camp: sorry i'm late I was doing stuff

reader, emerging from behind sage: i'm stuff! :D

[unseelie-grimalkin]

I'm going for gold, lads, lasses, and other gendered classes!

Do you like visual novels? Do you like stories about the fey? Do you like your entertainment as EDUTAINMENT?

IF SO, BOY HOWDY DO I HAVE A VISUAL NOVEL PROJECT FOR YOU.

The Good People (Na Daoine Maithe) is a lore-rich and choice-driven romantic visual novel inspired by Irish mythology. Play as an Irish tenant farmer from the mid-19th century, whose path becomes inexplicably entwined with fairy affairs after getting robbed by the roadside and lured into the mythic and war-torn world of Tír na nÓg: A once unified land, now divided into the Seelie and Unseelie Courts. Will you escape with your stolen belongings? Or does fate have something else in mind?

OKAY, BUT WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR YOU, SEEKER OF SEROTONIN?

6 wonderful romantic/PLATONIC options (each love interest can be pursued entirely platonically)

a visual novel whose philosophy is less on anxiety-inducing, arbitrary choices to get a good or bad ending, but instead focuses on if you, the player, are interacting with a character in a healthy or unhealthy manner, leading to player freedom and choice

intelligent and reflective writing that is reflected within character moments and dialogue

and MORE! (so much more!)

WHERE CAN I FIND MORE OUT ABOUT THIS GAME?

Here is the bio link, which has links for the indie developers' social media accounts (Tumblr, Twitter, Discord Server) along with the link to their official website, which has a deep dive into every main NPC and the philosophy of the game. The demo is out now and free on both Steam and Itch.io

(As an official statement: I am in no way employed or affiliated with Moirai Myths and I was not approached in any way to make this post. This is me being a feral fan on main, blazing this post)

EDIT:

HELLO EVERYONE! DID YALL KNOW THE KICKSTARTER FOR THIS GAME JUST LAUNCHED TODAY? NOW YOU DO! MORE DETAILS AND MORE FUN TO BE HAD!

They’re doing voice acting reveals this month, along with an early bird special to see blushing/flirty emotes!

EDIT THE SECOND:

WE HAVE REACHED FULL FUNDING WITH THE GAME! Which is excellent, because it means that my little hyperfixation is gonna be made!

However!

It would be very nice if we could reach some of the stretch goals (which go into depth here: x). Not only are they fun (MC customization, a switch port, expanded voice-over work, more sprites, mini-games, side stories), but I think they'd spark a lot of serotonin for folks playing (myself included).

If this post has interested you at all, please, please, please check out the Kickstarter above! Thank you!

EDIT THE THIRD

Since this is still getting notes beyond my wildest dreams:

Hello! It's been a while! The Kickstarter ended a bit ago (I did not update this post when it did end, due to being ecstatic to how much the project managed to get: 130% funding!), but development is ongoing and strong! The first two routes are in development right now. Please keep tuned at @moiraimyths for official development updates!

[ffsg0jo]

🍉 fics + matchups for gaza 🍉

i really want to try and help as much as i can to raise money and donations for gaza, and @ficsforgaza is running an amazing scheme where you can request a fic/ sponsor a wip through donations. my rate is $5 per 500 words to any of the verified fundraisers listed here !! if you can't request/donate anything, then that's totally okay, but please do share and reblog !!

donation link 1 :: link 2 :: link 3 :: link 4

just to reiterate, the money does NOT go to me. you donate directly one of the fundraisers linked above.

feel free to pop into my ask box or my dms to request a matchup/fic.

if i write more than the requested words, then that's totally on me, and ill cover the rest of the donations $1 per extra 100 words (with proof).

RULES for requesting ::

first and foremost, a screenshot of your donation (please do NOT forget to censor your personal details, and please don't use the same screenshot to request multiple fics), these will NOT be posted publicly.

please also include the link to the page you donated to.

description of what you'd like me to write (can be as detailed as you want)

e.g: headcanons, one-shot, drabble + fem/gn reader

the fandom / character(s) if you want multiple

whether you'd like sfw / suggestive / crack / angst (please note i don't write hard-core nsfw)

i am also accepting requests for matchups, and the max words for that will be 1000 words [500 words for drabble and 500 words for headcanons]. what you need to include for a matchup has been listed in the example below.

request example :: hi :) hope you're well. id like to request a sfw drabble of gojo meeting his newborn daughter with a female reader. i've included proof of my $5 donation to help Deyaa and his family escape Gaza. my personal details are all censored as well. thank you very much. [then include the screenshot in your ask/dm]

suggestive request example :: hi :) hope you're well. id like to request a suggestive drabble of choso making out with a female reader. i've included proof of my $5 donation to help Deyaa and his family escape Gaza. my personal details are all censored as well. thank you very much. [then include the screenshot in your ask/dm]

matchup example :: hi :) i hope you're well. i'd like to request a (romantic/platonic) matchup for (jjk/aot/bnha/haikyuu). i have included a screenshot of my $5 donation to help Deyaa and his family escape Gaza. my personal details have been censored. my pronouns are (insert pronouns), my gender preference is (male/female), and my personality type is (mbti personality type). my love language is (love language) my hobbies are (insert hobbies in as much detail as you want). my top 3 pet peeves/icks are (include pet peeves and icks). here are 3+ fun facts about me (include three or more fun facts in as much detail as you want). i am (include your appearance in as much detail as possible if you've donated $10 for a drabble e.g hair types, hijabi, skin colour etc). could you please avoid the following matchups (insert characters to avoid). [please also include any other details that you want and feel free to make it as long as you want !! and include the screenshot of your donation too]

GUIDLINES for requesting ::

i do NOT write nsfw works, but i am open to suggestive requests

the max words i'll write is 2000 words, but please feel free to donate as much as you can

i write gender-neutral and female reader so please include which one you'd like me to write.

i am open to writing specific readers (e.g. hijabi , tall , short , south asian , curvy)

i'll try my best to finish your requests as soon as possible but please bear with me (i'll probaby create a spreadsheet where you can track the progress of all my requests/wips)

if i write more than the requested words, then that's totally on me, and ill cover the rest of the donations $1 per extra 100 words (with proof)

i do NOT accept requests from blank blogs/blogs with no indication of age (must have age in bio or somewhere on your blog).

i will accept asks and dms but asks must NOT be anonymous !!

CONTENT/CHARACTER GUILDLINES for requesting ::

CHARACTERS:

jujutsu kaisen: sfw + suggestive : toji , choso , gojo , geto , nanami , higuruma , sukuna , mahito , shoko , ijichi

jujutsu kaisen: sfw ONLY : nobara , maki , inumaki , yuuta , itadori , megumi

haikyuu: sfw + suggestive : daichi , hinata , kageyama , tsukishima , sugawara , oikawa , iwaizumi , ushijima , kuroo , kenma , bokuto , akaashi , osamu , atsumu , kita , suna , sakusa , aran

my hero academia: sfw + suggestive : most pro-heroes , class 1-A , dabi , shigaraki

misc: sfw + suggestive : eren , levi , zeke , jean , reiner , mikasa , armin , erwin , saitama (opm)

depending on the characters, i am open to writing for percy jackson/heroes of olympus

CONTENT:

sfw: domestic bliss, general fluff, sick fics, nonsexual intimacy (cuddling, kissing etc), random headcanons about characters, pregnancy/family fics, platonic situations, pretty much anything sfw i'm open to

suggestive: making out, light sexual intimacy (nothing hard-core)

angst: major character death, hurt/comfort, hurt/no comfort

crack: any silly little scenarios/ideas you might have.

HARD NO'S:

anything nsfw - oral / penetration / sexual nudity

male reader (i'm sorry but i dont think i'll be able to accurately portray a male reader)

anything military/war related

minor x adult

domestic/physical abuse against reader (by requested character)

alcohol / drug abuse

incest

yandere / noncon

any explicit kinks

© ffsg0jo 2024 — do not plagiarise, repost, modify, or translate any of my work, in any way shape or form; i will piss in your cereal if you do. all work belongs to me and me only.

[turtle--soup]

Okay.

I have not seen ROTTMNT yet, but I've picked up some stuff from just floating around the fandom. Something I've learned, which is discussed in this post here, is that Rise Leo is generally considered - and considers himself the 'Face Man' of the team. (GIFs below are swiped from the linked post by @risestarkiss - I couldn't find them in tumblr's gif search function...)

Anyway. This is interesting to me because I am, for my sins, also a fan of The A-Team.

(I promise this is going somewhere! If you want to find out where I'm going with this, I'll put the rest of the post under a cut because it got a little long...)

For those of you unfamiliar with The A-Team, it's a (very silly) 80s TV series about a group of Vietnam War veterans who are on the run from the government after being convicted of a crime they didn't commit. The four of them spend their lives in hiding, making a living by using their combat skills to help people in need.

Here they are:

Left: Colonel John 'Hannibal' Smith, leader of the team, brains of the outfit and most likely to have become an evil mastermind in an alternate timeline.

Right: Sergeant B.A. Baracus. Nicknamed 'Bad Attitude' due to his lack of patience for bullshit, B.A. is the resident tough guy but also an absolute teddy bear of a man, and is always ready to help people, especially children and the elderly.

Left: Captain H.M. 'Howling Mad' Murdock is the team's pilot and can fly just about anything. As his nickname suggests, he's considered a bit eccentric and is a silly kind of guy. (He's also a permanent resident of a psychiatric hospital but let's not get into that right now.)

Right: Lieutenant Templeton Peck. His role in the team is to provide them with whatever they need, whether that be vehicles, weapons, tools or access to places. He usually achieves this using his charm and wit, gaining him the nickname 'Face Man.'

Okay, so bearing these descriptions in mind, look at Leo's dialogue in this GIF:

I'm assuming that Donnie is the brainy guy, Raph is the smashy guy, and Mikey is the 'eats peanut butter with his fingers guy'. And Leo is the Face Man. That's his role.

But these descriptions fit the members of The A-Team too. Hannibal is the brainy guy, B.A. is the smashy guy, Murdock is the guy who absolutely eats peanut butter with his fingers (while maintaining unbroken eye contact throughout). And then there's Face.

How is this in any way relevant?

Well.

It just so happens that someone else is a fan of The A-Team...

Of course the Mirage turtles watched The A-Team! It was a popular show in the mid-80s, and you have to admit - they do have a lot in common, being four guys fighting injustice from the shadows and all... The A-Team even have a friend on the outside who helps them out - Amy Allen.

She's a reporter. Like someone else we know...

But which of the Mirage turtles in the image above is suggesting they should watch The A-Team?

According to this bio card from 1990 that coincides with the 1987 series...

... it might be Leo!

Was this intentional on the part of the Rise writers? I don't know!

Is it relevant? Probably not!

Does this tentative link between these two silly 80s series make me ridiculously happy? Yes!

Was this entire post just leading up to this? Yeah... sorry...

I like to think that the link is intentional. I've heard that Rise makes reference to other iterations of TMNT, as they all do. I would just personally love it if someone on the team wanted to draw parallels between these two series on purpose!

Anyway.

I just noticed that and really needed to get it off my chest! Thank you to everyone who stuck with this longer-than-intended post right to the end! 💙💜❤🧡

[rebel-girl-queen-of-my-world]

Six Israeli soldiers spoke to @972mag and @mekomit.co.il following their release from active duty in Gaza in recent months. Corroborating the testimonies of Palestinian eyewitnesses and doctors throughout the war, the soldiers described being authorized to open fire on Palestinians virtually at will.

Read some of the testimonies in the graphic above, and the full piece by @oren_ziv through the link in our bio.

Photos by Oren Ziv and @m.z.gaza / @activestills.

[alexlwrites]

As REQUESTED! Here's part 3 of "Yoongi who never had a crush... Until you" from my notes app!

This is a little longer than the others due to my commute to work taking a little longer today, so yall can thank the Sao Paulo train system for that!

As I mentioned previously, I am now open to commissions through my ko-fi! So you can buy me a coffee and request a short scenario, whether it be based on this fic, one of my others, or something entirely new! The link to my ko-fi is in my bio!

Anywho! Enjoy!

----

Yoongi had an on going theory - now proven over many many times - that any and all problems he encountered could somehow be traced back to Jimin.

Beer missing from the fridge? Jiminie. His files mysteriously disappearing from his computer, replaced by a bootleg version of The Sims 3? Jimin. The Plague? Park Jimin, that fucking rat.

And once more, in a house party he had no interested being at, poor Yoongi found himself victim of the consequences of his ill-fated association with that god-forsaken gremlin, now smiling smugly from across the circle where his friends and a few acquaintances sat.

"Everyone knows the rules, right?" Jimin said, innocently like he wasn't the cause of Yoongi's on going demise "You spin the bottle and whoever it points to, you have to kiss!"

Yoongi snorted from his place in a chair outside the circle. At 30 years old, he was clearly above such childish games and would never submit himself to such humiliating and depraved behavior...

"I'm here! I'm here! Sorry I'm late!" he heard and he swore time stopped as you, of all people, sat within the circle next to a Jungkook, smoothing down your tennis skirt as you smiled "What are we playing?"

"Spin the bottle!" Jimin smiled grew, a mischievous gleam appearing as he peared at his frozen friend.

Your eyes looked around the circle, falling on Yoongi's a couple feet behind and he swore even the singular hair in his left toe stood up in alert "Yoongi's not playing?" You asked.

Jimin shrugged in despondency "Well, no-"

"Of course I am!" Yoongi threw himself onto the ground, sending a poor unsuspecting Taehyung flying out of the way with a whelp "I love this game!"

Yoongi did not in fact love this game. He loathed it.

They had played several rounds and his bottle was nowhere close to pointing at you. Instead, he kissed Namjoon twice and slapped Taehyung once for putting his slimy tongue out as their faces got closer.

Was he cursed, he wondered, the face of dispirited desperation, watching as Hoseok and Jin made out in a way that could only be described as disproportionately violent. What could he have done in his past lives that would lead to this punishment, the sheer torture of sitting across from you and not getting to kiss you? Had he not earned your affections? Did he not claim your love through the cosmical power of dibs?

Whatever. WhaTEVER! So it would be, he would die alone. A monk amongst 6 manwhores, a fortitude of loneliness, cursed to roam the earth in his loveless state...

Oh, it was his turn. He spinned the bottle thoughtlessly, mind still wondering about the implications of his slowly returning virginity due to solitude.

Oh.

Oh.

You looked up at him as the bottle pointed straight at your form all the way across the circle and Yoongi swore someone had to call 911 at the way his heart stopped. His condition - simptitis - was worsening by the second.

Someone wheel him into the emergency room - you were crawling across the circle, prowling really, your blouse dipping in a way that left nothing to the imagination, and trust him, he had imagined!

You stopped, kneeling in front of him "Hi, Mr. Min."

Here are some symptoms to look for if you believe you could suffer from simptitis:

-accelerated heart beat

-exaggerated hand sweating

-inability to form coherent thoughts, not to be confused with just being stupid, which Yoongi was starting to think it was his case

-ill timed boners

And, the most common one:

-praise kink

Yoongi seemed to be displaying all of the above at the same time and when you softly asked "Are you okay with this?" All he could do was brace himself and nod.

If Hoseok and Jin's kiss was violent, this one was peaceful, slow, soft and way too passionate for a spin the bottle session. You tasted like sicilian lemon and gin and Yoongi was only but an alcoholic man at your feet, cradling your face to keep you close, refusing to let go of the addictive feeling of your lips on his.

Someone coughed awkwardly and you stepped back, face flushed and chest heaving. You looked deliciously disheveled and Yoongi thought of other circumstances where he could make you look like that again.

Okay, so maybe Jimin wasn't that bad.  Maybe he wasn't the physical manifestation of Yoongi's karma. Maybe that phat assed hobbit was up to something with his seventh grade games...

Oh, it was your turn. Maybe Yoongi would get to kiss you again!

Nope. It landed on Jimin, who wasted absolutely no time in bringing your face down to his.

The betrayal? The bro-trayal?

Back stabbing little tinker bell bitch.

Bugger.

Bugger it all to hell.

[shenanigans-and-imagines]

I Want It All: Masterlist

Summary: A collection of Astarion x AsexualBard!Tav stories and headcanons based on the initial three parter, I Want It All (Ao3 Link)

Series

I Want It All: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

One-Shots/Drabbles

Scrappy Little Mutt

No Excuses Necessary

cuddle drabble

Your Heart Or Mine

Put Your Lips Together

Better Than a Memory

For All I Care

Small Gifts

Muses and Devotion

I Would Have Killed You

Home is Where the Heart Is

A Little Much

Headcanons/Notes

Random Ship Question Headcanons

Astarion x Tav Being Silly Together

Companions Music Taste + Ace!Tav

Cuddles Headcanons

How I Visualize Ace!Tav (using picrew because I can’t draw)

Assorted Couples Questions

What Ace!Tav and Astarion do to cause the bed to rhythmically creak / Unintentional Dirty Talk

Reverse AU Rambles

How Ace!Tav Would React to Astarion Dying and Unable to be Revived and Vice Versa

Astarion Being Ace!Tav’s Guard Dog

Astarion and Ace!Tav Keeping Each Other Warm

Ace!Tav's Reaction to Halsin Propositioning Them

Ace!Tav’s Reaction to Realizing Gale is Into Them

Bloodweave x Ace!Tav AU/ Astarion x Evie (Ace!Tav) x Gale Reprise

Ace!Tav Fashion Sense

Ace!Tav Confiding in Shadowheart

Sleeping Headcanons

Dancing Headcanons

Helping Astarion See Himself

Astarion Comforting an Embarrassed Tav

Elvish Terms of Endearment

A Christmas Carol AU

Conversation and Banter

Companion!Evie(Ace!Tav) Rambles/ More Rambles

Ascended Astarion AU

Hadestown AU/ Ascended!Astarion Hadestown AU

Assorted Soft Headcanons

Dancing + Mutual Pining AU

Circus AU + Above the Influence

Bloodweave x Evie (Ace!Tav) Cuddling

Evie (Ace!Tav) Character Bio

Evie (Ace!Tav) Day by Day Playthrough

5 Sentence Fics

“Darling, look around at the bizarre company we keep; anything you’ve got to say to me can’t possibly be that much of an outlier.”

"Oh, that's a nice tavern… Where the fuck am I?!"

“Help me with the laundry?”

“Everything ok? You’ve been very quiet all day."

"And here I thought you didn’t speak Elvish."

"Would you put money on that?"

“I came for you.”

“Goodbye, Love.”

"I'll wait for you."

“Sorry I’m late.”

Spotify Playlist

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Better failure for social media

Content moderation is fundamentally about making social media work better, but there are two other considerations that determine how social media fails: end-to-end (E2E), and freedom of exit. These are much neglected, and that’s a pity, because how a system fails is every bit as important as how it works.

Of course, commercial social media sites don’t want to be good, they want to be profitable. The unique dynamics of social media allow the companies to uncouple quality from profit, and more’s the pity.

Social media grows thanks to network effects — you join Twitter to hang out with the people who are there, and then other people join to hang out with you. The more users Twitter accumulates, the more users it can accumulate. But social media sites stay big thanks to high switching costs: the more you have to give up to leave a social media site, the harder it is to go:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

Nature bequeaths some in-built switching costs on social media, primarily the coordination problem of reaching consensus on where you and the people in your community should go next. The more friends you share a social media platform with, the higher these costs are. If you’ve ever tried to get ten friends to agree on where to go for dinner, you know how this works. Now imagine trying to get all your friends to agree on where to go for dinner, for the rest of their lives!

But these costs aren’t insurmountable. Network effects, after all, are a double-edged sword. Some users are above-average draws for others, and if a critical mass of these important nodes in the network map depart for a new service — like, say, Mastodon — that service becomes the presumptive successor to the existing giants.

When that happens — when Mastodon becomes “the place we’ll all go when Twitter finally becomes unbearable” — the downsides of network effects kick in and the double-edged sword begins to carve away at a service’s user-base. It’s one thing to argue about which restaurant we should go to tonight, it’s another to ask whether we should join our friends at the new restaurant where they’re already eating.

Social media sites who want to keep their users’ business walk a fine line: they can simply treat those users well, showing them the things they ask to see, not spying on them, paying to police their service to reduce harassment, etc. But these are costly choices: if you show users the things they ask to see, you can’t charge businesses to show them things they don’t want to see. If you don’t spy on users, you can’t sell targeting services to people who want to force them to look at things they’re uninterested in. Every moderator you pay to reduce harassment draws a salary at the expense of your shareholders, and every catastrophe that moderator prevents is a catastrophe you can’t turn into monetizable attention as gawking users flock to it.

So social media sites are always trying to optimize their mistreatment of users, mistreating them (and thus profiting from them) right up to the point where they are ready to switch, but without actually pushing them over the edge.

One way to keep dissatisfied users from leaving is by extracting a penalty from them for their disloyalty. You can lock in their data, their social relationships, or, if they’re “creators” (and disproportionately likely to be key network nodes whose defection to a rival triggers mass departures from their fans), you can take their audiences hostage.

The dominant social media firms all practice a low-grade, tacit form of hostage-taking. Facebook downranks content that links to other sites on the internet. Instagram prohibits links in posts, limiting creators to “Links in bio.” Tiktok doesn’t even allow links. All of this serves as a brake on high-follower users who seek to migrate their audiences to better platforms.

But these strategies are unstable. When a platform becomes worse for users (say, because it mandates nonconsensual surveillance and ramps up advertising), they may actively seek out other places on which to follow each other, and the creators they enjoy. When a rival platform emerges as the presumptive successor to an incumbent, users no longer face the friction of knowing which rival they should resettle to.

When platforms’ enshittification strategies overshoot this way, users flee in droves, and then it’s time for the desperate platform managers to abandon the pretense of providing a public square. Yesterday, Elon Musk’s Twitter rolled out a policy prohibiting users from posting links to rival platforms:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221218173806/https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platforms-policy

This policy was explicitly aimed at preventing users from telling each other where they could be found after they leave Twitter:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221219015355/https://twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1604531261791522817

This, in turn, was a response to many users posting regular messages explaining why they were leaving Twitter and how they could be found on other platforms. In particular, Twitter management was concerned with departures by high-follower users like Taylor Lorenz, who was retroactively punished for violating the policy, though it didn’t exist when she violated it:

https://deadline.com/2022/12/washington-post-journalist-taylor-lorenz-suspended-twitter-1235202034/

As Elon Musk wrote last spring: “The acid test for two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!”

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1533616384747442176

This isn’t particularly insightful. It’s obvious that any system that requires high walls and punishments to stay in business isn’t serving its users, whose presence is attributable to coercion, not fulfillment. Of course, the people who operate these systems have all manner of rationalizations for them.

The Berlin Wall, we were told, wasn’t there to keep East Germans in — rather, it was there to keep the teeming hordes clamoring to live in the workers’ paradise out. In the same way, platforms will claim that they’re not blocking outlinks or sideloading because they want to prevent users from defecting to a competitor, but rather, to protect those users from external threats.

This rationalization quickly wears thin, and then new ones step in. For example, you might claim that telling your friends that you’re leaving and asking them to meet you elsewhere is like “giv[ing] a talk for a corporation [and] promot[ing] other corporations”:

https://mobile.twitter.com/mayemusk/status/1604550452447690752

Or you might claim that it’s like “running Wendy’s ads [on] McDonalds property,” rather than turning to your friends and saying, “The food at McDonalds sucks, let’s go eat at Wendy’s instead”:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1604559316237037568

The truth is that any service that won’t let you leave isn’t in the business of serving you, it’s in the business of harming you. The only reason to build a wall around your service — to impose any switching costs on users- is so that you can fuck them over without risking their departure.

The platforms want to be Anatevka, and we the villagers of Fiddler On the Roof, stuck plodding the muddy, Cossack-haunted roads by the threat of losing all our friends if we try to leave:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

That’s where freedom of exit comes in. The public should have the right to leave, and companies should not be permitted to make that departure burdensome. Any burdens we permit companies to impose is an invitation to abuse of their users.

This is why governments are handing down new interoperability mandates: the EU’s Digital Markets Act forces the largest companies to offer APIs so that smaller rivals can plug into them and let users walkaway from Big Tech into new kinds of platforms — small businesses, co-ops, nonprofits, hobby sites — that treat them better. These small players are overwhelmingly part of the fediverse: the federated social media sites that allow users to connect to one another irrespective of which server or service they use.

The creators of these platforms have pledged themselves to freedom of exit. Mastodon ships with a “Move Followers” and “Move Following” feature that lets you quit one server and set up shop on another, without losing any of the accounts you follow or the accounts that follow you:

https://codingitwrong.com/2022/10/10/migrating-a-mastodon-account.html

This feature is as yet obscure, because the exodus to Mastodon is still young. Users who flocked to servers without knowing much about their managers have, by and large, not yet run into problems with the site operators. The early trickle of horror stories about petty authoritarianism from Mastodon sysops conspicuously fail to mention that if the management of a particular instance turns tyrant, you can click two links, export your whole social graph, sign up for a rival, click two more links and be back at it.

This feature will become more prominent, because there is nothing about running a Mastodon server that means that you are good at running a Mastodon server. Elon Musk isn’t an evil genius — he’s an ordinary mediocrity who lucked into a lot of power and very little accountability. Some Mastodon operators will have Musk-like tendencies that they will unleash on their users, and the difference will be that those users can click two links and move elsewhere. Bye-eee!

Freedom of exit isn’t just a matter of the human right of movement, it’s also a labor issue. Online creators constitute a serious draw for social media services. All things being equal, these services would rather coerce creators’ participation — by holding their audiences hostage — than persuade creators to remain by offering them an honest chance to ply their trade.

Platforms have a variety of strategies for chaining creators to their services: in addition to making it harder for creators to coordinate with their audiences in a mass departure, platforms can use DRM, as Audible does, to prevent creators’ customers from moving the media they purchase to a rival’s app or player.

Then there’s “freedom of reach”: platforms routinely and deceptively conflate recommending a creator’s work with showing that creator’s work to the people who explicitly asked to see it.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

When you follow or subscribe to a feed, that is not a “signal” to be mixed into the recommendation system. It’s an order: “Show me this.” Not “Show me things like this.”

Show.

Me.

This.

But there’s no money in showing people the things they tell you they want to see. If Amazon showed shoppers the products they searched for, they couldn’t earn $31b/year on an “ad business” that fills the first six screens of results with rival products who’ve paid to be displayed over the product you’re seeking:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

If Spotify played you the albums you searched for, it couldn’t redirect you to playlists artists have to shell out payola to be included on:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

And if you only see what you ask for, then product managers whose KPI is whether they entice you to “discover” something else won’t get a bonus every time you fatfinger a part of your screen that navigates you away from the thing you specifically requested:

https://doctorow.medium.com/the-fatfinger-economy-7c7b3b54925c

Musk, meanwhile, has announced that you won’t see messages from the people you follow unless they pay for Twitter Blue:

https://www.wired.com/story/what-is-twitter-blue/

And also that you will be nonconsensually opted into seeing more “recommended” content from people you don’t follow (but who can be extorted out of payola for the privilege):

https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/Twitter-Expands-Content-Recommendations/637697/

Musk sees Twitter as a publisher, not a social media site:

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1604588904828600320

Which is why he’s so indifferent to the collateral damage from this payola/hostage scam. Yes, Twitter is a place where famous and semi-famous people talk to their audiences, but it is primarily a place where those audiences talk to each other — that is, a public square.

This is the Facebook death-spiral: charging to people to follow to reach you, and burying the things they say in a torrent of payola-funded spam. It’s the vision of someone who thinks of other people as things to use — to pump up your share price or market your goods to — not worthy of consideration.

As Terry Pratchett’s Granny Weatherwax put it: “Sin is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”

Mastodon isn’t perfect, but its flaws are neither fatal nor permanent. The idea that centralized media is “easier” surely reflects the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been pumped into refining social media Roach Motels (“users check in, but they don’t check out”).

Until a comparable sum has been spent refining decentralized, federated services, any claims about the impossibility of making the fediverse work for mass audiences should be treated as unfalsifiable, motivated reasoning.

Meanwhile, Mastodon has gotten two things right that no other social media giant has even seriously attempted:

I. If you follow someone on Mastodon, you’ll see everything they post; and

II. If you leave a Mastodon server, you can take both your followers and the people you follow with you.

The most common criticism of Mastodon is that you must rely on individual moderators who may be underresourced, incompetent on malicious. This is indeed a serious problem, but it isn’t the same serious problem that Twitter has. When Twitter is incompetent, malicious, or underresourced, your departure comes at a dear price.

On Mastodon, your choice is: tolerate bad moderation, or click two links and move somewhere else.

On Twitter, your choice is: tolerate moderation, or lose contact with all the people you care about and all the people who care about you.

The interoperability mandates in the Digital Markets Act (and in the US ACCESS Act, which seems unlikely to get a vote in this session of Congress) only force the largest platforms to open up, but Mastodon shows us the utility of interop for smaller services, too.

There are lots of domains in which “dominance” shouldn’t be the sole criteria for whether you are expected to treat your customers fairly.

A doctor with a small practice who leaks all ten patients’ data harms those patients as surely as a hospital system with a million patients would have. A small-time wedding photographer who refuses to turn over your pictures unless you pay a surprise bill is every bit as harmful to you as a giant chain that has the same practice.

As we move into the realm of smalltime, community-oriented social media servers, we should be looking to avoid the pitfalls of the social media bubble that’s bursting around us. No matter what the size of the service, let’s ensure that it lets us leave, and respects the end-to-end principle, that any two people who want to talk to each other should be allowed to do so, without interference from the people who operate their communications infrastructure.

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Heisenberg Media (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elon_Musk_-_The_Summit_2013.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: Moses confronting the Pharaoh, demanding that he release the Hebrews. Pharaoh’s face has been replaced with Elon Musk’s. Moses holds a Twitter logo in his outstretched hand. The faces embossed in the columns of Pharaoh’s audience hall have been replaced with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The wall over Pharaoh’s head has been replaced with a Matrix ‘code waterfall’ effect. Moses’s head has been replaced with that of the Mastodon mascot.]

[cantheykillmacbeth]

In Shakespeare's Macbeth, there is a prophecy made to the eponymous Macbeth that "no man of woman born can kill him." Ultimately, Macbeth ends up being killed by MacDuff, who sidesteps the prophecy due to being a C-section baby.

With the wording of this prophecy, it can be said that quite a few fictional characters could, theoretically, kill Macbeth if they wanted to. Several factors could make you exempt from this prophecy: being any gender other than a man; not being conventionally "born"; and birthing parent is not a woman. Here are the three main criteria that will be analyzed for a character:

Gender Clause: A character applies for this Clause when they do not identify with the term "man" in reference to themselves. Inversely, the are disqualified from this Clause if they do identify with the term "man." Since characters' gender identities are rarely looked this far into, it will be assumed that if a character uses strictly he/him pronouns, then he will be disqualified for this Clause by default.

Unconventional Birth Clause: A character applies for this Clause if their inception was done in some way other than a conventional live birth. This could mean they were extracted via c-section, delivered posthumously, hatched from an egg, manually constructed, etc.

Birth Parent Clause: A character applies for this Clause when the person attributed to their creation does not identify with the term "woman." This functions similarly to the way that we handle the Gender Clause.

Unique Exception: This is used for any character with some other loophole, such as being able to canonically change the path of fate.

Google Doc Link for all characters already covered

FAQ under the cut, PLEASE READ BEFORE SUBMITTING:

Why isn't there a Species Clause?: A character's species is not taken into account for the "man" portion of the prophecy, as a character of a different species can still identify as a man. Why isn't there an Age Clause?: Unless the character specifically says that they are not a "man," but a "boy," (See: Peter Pan) then a young male character will still be disqualified for the Gender Clause. How would a genderfluid/trans character be counted?: Whether or not a character applies for the Gender Clause is determined by how they personally identify at that specific time. A genderfluid character could kill Macbeth one day, but not the next; a trans woman could kill Macbeth, but a trans man could not. Who runs this blog?: We currently have 2 members, Mod Anthem and Mod Pepper. Mod Anthem made the blog initially, and Mod Pepper is its sister here to help. Mod Anthem also runs @periodiccompletionist Could the owner of this blog kill Macbeth?: Yes, I apply for the Gender Clause due to being a demiboy(? it's complicated) who does not identify with the term man. How do I know if a character has been done already?: I tag all submissions with the character's name and associated fandom. You can also check the Google Doc linked above the cut. Could [character] kill Macbeth?: This is what the ask box is for! Feel free to submit whoever you want when it's open. Is the ask box open?: Check my bio for ask box status updates. :) I sometimes close it to work through backlog, and have anon turned off to cut down on the amount of asks coming in. Can I submit real people?: Yes, but I will most likely not give an answer in my post; these sorts of details are often highly personal, so I will not be doing research on them for this without their consent. If they're on Tumblr, they can respond to the post itself and give the definitive answer if they so choose. What should I do if I have a correction/rebuttal to a post?: Please do this in a reblog instead of an ask/DM/reply; it makes things much easier for me. My submission didn't get answered. Should I submit it again?: I would strongly advise against it. It's most likely that I didn't answer it for one of the following reasons: I haven't gotten to it yet through the backlog; it's a real person not on Tumblr; the character/media was too difficult to research (I'm not going to be reading/watching through the actual source material, sorry); the character/media makes me personally uncomfortable; or someone has already submitted your character. If you're REALLY curious about what happened to your ask, you can send me a DM and I will give you the reason why or tell you if I didn't receive it. Are you dead?: No, I just have ADHD. Errm, actually, wasn't the prophecy just a trick to fuel Macbeth's hubris?: Great job, you just defeated the entire point of this blog! What the hell do expect me to do with that information? Delete my account?? Ruiner of the spirit. Jarvis, piss this guy's pants. How do you pronounce axolotl?: a-SHOW-loa(tl). (tl) represents a sound that we don't have in english, but is commonly used in native Nahuatl.

What media properties should I avoid submitting?: Dialtown (makes me uncomfortable), Homestuck (personal reasons), Hazbin Hotel/Helluva Boss (or anything vivziepop-related), Harry Potter (JK Rowling is a bitch and I'm the only god here), Slay the Princess (want to play; avoiding spoilers), Hades II (want to play, avoiding spoilers), FNAF (you actually can submit this one but be aware that you will not view me the same afterwards also all my homies hate Scott Cawthon)