#maybe a little scattershot but whatever

[canmom]

canmom.art is well overdue getting updated with a lot of posts on here. it still doesn't even have the music theory series, for example. plenty of other posts, book crit and such, needs to go on there. rpg posts are woefully behind current thoughts on all that.

unfortunately this seems to be slipping into the 'bin of large imposing tasks', which i rarely open, instead apparently preferring to say something about AI or some shit, which is easy to start doing.

the habits need to change. my relationship with reading and posting on this site (and other social media feeds like youtube) is not healthy - projects I want to continue have been backburnered for months of years, new ones barely get started, my work is not doing great rn. and yet it seems to represent something I need, because I keep coming back here for many hours when I planned to do other things.

I have tried other approaches, like keeping a personal journal that nobody else will read, but somehow I come back here, maybe because I will get a number for my trouble. the exact number isn't that important, if it isn't zero - sometimes it's less than 20, sometimes it's like 60, these are about equally satisfying. the rare numbers above 100 can be pleasing, but also slightly worrying, since they are more likely to bring in someone who comes in hot with an angry disagreement.

I do however have a lot of admiration for (presumed to be) autistic people who define their own little web corner full of blog posts, fiction, art, comics, manifestos etc. etc. etc. on all of their projects and scattershot interests. Jennifer Diane Reitz is the prototypical example. Schuschinus and xrafstar are powerful examples in the artistic sphere; floraverse is a more community-shape one; qntm is a more normie-aligned one; todepond is a newer flavour; bogleech is borderline, hewing a bit close to a consistent listicle Content(TM) flavour. they might deliver fiction, essays, or some other stranger thing. sometimes the material is quite inaccessible to outsiders, or requiring immersion in an insular but devoted community, but these are not totally inaccessible - they aren't timecube style crank websites. other times it goes to great pains to lay it all out and be somewhere you can get lost, and yet can't help but have its own specific character. it must be at least a little intriguing. you should be saying 'what's the deal with this' - it must have its own deal, but the more inscrutable the deal, the better.

depending on the person, the look and feel of such sites can be aggressively saturated and high contrast blast, or at the extreme end of programmer-driven cleanness and readability. what you should not find is ads. the site is paid for by a day job, or perhaps a patreon. it is personal. it accumulates sporadically over the years, more varied than your average webcomic site, by the whims of its creator.

very often people who run such a site will have strange opinions that interject unexpectedly into their work. JDR infamously positioned herself as the expert on 'transexuality' in the early internet, presenting a very partisan medicalist account best represented in the 'scientific' are-you-trans test called the COGIATI. today I came across someone from the ratsphere called 'gwern', whose site was among the most impressively featured static sites I've encountered with some very clever hover-based interactions, but they will also randomly drop into some bizarre eugenic parenthetical about the effect of mental illness on evolutionary fitness or some other condescending shit. baffling person. this is part of the character of such websites, though. you don't get to be a weirdo on the internet without being, well, a weirdo.

if you vibe with their flavour of weirdness, finding such a site is like finding a treasure trove, and feels more like getting to know someone's soul or whatever than most other encounters on this dreadful internet. even if this is as illusory as all other parasocial relationships.

this is what I want canmom.art to be. perhaps it already approximates it. and if I can make it the main nucleus of activity, then I am less tied to one or another social network. such is the hope...

when I die, I hope my website will serve as some sort of time capsule record of what I was, a place for someone to discover what one life was animated by in the early 21st century, and ideally a trove of art to fascinate them. but it is perpetually incomplete; for all the pride I take in making it standards-compliant web engineering, it's never quite there. some known issues: the comment field breaks the responsive design causing a huge horizontal scroll on mobile. it is not loading as instantaneously as a static site should, largely due to the large web font, with a warning about layout being forced that I have not solved. most images in the animation night archives do not have alt text, and may never. there are no pages which collate tags.

[unicyclehippo]

imodna + ‘scattershot’

Imogen had something of a scattershot approach toward cleaning, which had the fun properties of being both a shit way to approach it, on account of not working at all, and also deeply aggravating, on account of the fact she’s nearly thirty and ought to be able to keep her damn life together. Which is why, ten minutes before Laudna was due to arrive at her apartment, it still looked like a sandstorm had crashed through the place. And like maybe she’d been robbed. She tossed a weeks worth of laundry into the bathroom and prayed Laudna wouldn’t need to use it while she was over, and was halfway through vacuuming when the janky doorbell croaked. Did the place look worse, somehow, despite her feverish efforts?

‘Hello?’ she said into the intercom. Maybe it wasn’t Laudna.

‘Hello! Doctor Laudna Bradbury here! You invited me!’

Imogen knocked her head against the wall. Fuck.

‘I’m sorry?’ Even over the crackling intercom, Imogen could hear the surprise—and hurt—in her tone.

‘Shit - no, sorry - it’s just…’

‘I can leave,’ Laudna offered, tone stiff now.

‘No! No, I’m so -‘ happy you’re here, she tried to say, but as ever the words stuck. Untruthful as they were. ‘Wait there,’ she said instead. ‘I’ll be right down.’

The intercom hummed. Finally, Laudna said, ‘Alright. I’ll wait.’

Imogen grabbed her keys from the hook and thundered down the stairs. Through the frosted glass of the entryway door, she could see Laudna’s silhouette—stately, almost loomingly tall—and the headache that had begun to grip at the back of her skull eased, just a little. She hurried out, wincing against the chill.

‘Doctor Bradbury—Laudna—‘

Laudna interrupted with a click of her tongue. Whatever upset had lingered in her expression vanished into concern. ‘Doctor Temult, it’s freezing out here. Where is your coat?’ she asked, and began to unbutton her cloak.

‘I couldn’t see it and,’ she offered a crooked grin, ‘I didn’t want you to leave.’

Laudna’s fingers paused on the second button. She glanced up with a slight frown. ‘I wouldn’t have left. We agreed to meet.’

‘Wouldn’t want you to think I weren’t eager to see you, then.’

‘Despite the fact that I said hello and you said Fuck?’

Imogen felt her cheeks heat up. She hoped Laudna saw it as embarrassment rather than the immediate hope she could get this woman to swear again at some point. Clearing her throat, Imogen said, ‘That wasn’t about you. I swear. It’s -‘ She ran a hand through her hair, or tried to; fingers caught in snarled knots and she swore again, tugging free. ‘Listen, I’m shit company today. I only got back a few days ago ‘n flying always makes me sick. My place - it’s a mess,’ she admitted with a grimace. ‘That’s why I swore. I was tidyin’ but I lost track of time.’

‘I see.’ Laudna finished unbuttoning her cloak—Imogen had not watched intently the whole time—and swung it from her shoulders, handing it out to Imogen. ‘Here.’

‘I couldn’t—‘

‘Please, I grew up here. I hardly feel the cold anymore. It must be a shock to your system. I insist.’ She stepped closer. In the protected eave of the entryway, the air was fresh and clean and chilly indeed. Laudna’s hands were cool, brushing against Imogen’s, but her cloak—and it was a cloak, Imogen saw now, a real medieval type cloak, handmade—was beautiful warm and settled heavy across her shoulders. ‘There. Hm. I thought it might be too long but it works quite well!’ Laudna beamed. Touching a single finger to Imogen’s shoulder, she added, ‘You have broader shoulders than I do.’

Imogen wouldn’t be able to speak even if she could think of something not desperately gay so she didn’t try, only nodded.

‘We don’t have to go upstairs,’ Laudna continued. ‘If you are uncomfortable with that. And I should hate to make you uncomfortable at all. I know well how terribly unsettling it can be to bring new people into a space as personal as your own home, especially if you are not prepared to do it. I myself find that difficult, I can’t think of a single person who has seen my apartment.’ Laudna fell silent for a moment. Imogen stared up at her—ghostly pale, her bearing and dress out-of-time and place, seemingly so much better suited to an earlier age—and, struck by the urge to keep her, to anchor her to the here and now, took her hand. It was solid, though delicate. Imogen felt the press of a scar, the flex of muscles. No ghost. A small smile spread across Laudna’s face. ‘I live not too terribly far from here,’ she continued. ‘I know the neighbourhood well. There’s a garden—it’s walled off, which should keep out the worst of the wind. We could walk.’

‘I’d like that,’ Imogen agreed.

[lettersnorth]

The Gift

To the untrained eye her study had become a disorganized mess. A collection of mechanical contraptions and spare parts spilled across the desk of her terminal. Books lay splayed open, scattered on nearly every available surface as though the reader had stepped away for a moment. Maybe to write a note or sketch a quick diagram in one of several notebooks that were piled haphazardly across her writing desk.

But to Aislinn there was order in this chaos. She knew the location and title of every book scattershot around the study, the purpose of every mechanism she had pulled from her workshop. She was working, thinking, racking her mind to try and make any of this problem with Lewra and the other seemingly lifeless bodies make sense. She barely ate, slept in short fits when she’d succumb for a bell or two at her desk and generally had no time for anyone in Heartwood outside of those that needed her attention in the clinic. 

A planning meeting had been called of which she did not attend. She’d been around long enough to know how “planning” meetings went when Heartwood’s group of mercenaries got together. They never met a meeting they couldn’t turn into an opportunity to bicker and argue. She may as well go outside and wander in ever-maddening circles. Instead, she was in her study digging through her shelves and cabinets of spare parts she kept on hand for Sergius. Finally she found it. The aether signature creator. 

The inconvenient truth was that everything that had been happening was creeping up on Aislinn like a rising tide. Lewra. The Kugane job. Sterling. Stark Oak. Yami had said to let her anger out but when had that ever in her life done her one lick of good? Anger didn’t bring Lewra back. It didn’t untangle her complicated feelings over watching Sterling bleed out in the dirt. It did nothing to the knowledge that she could do no more for Stark Oak than hope the monks followed through on their promise or the low grade anxiety that was ever present when Locke was away on a voyage, wondering if the last time she saw him would end up being the last time. Because one day, it would be. 

No. Anger changed nothing. All her life it had been a luxury she couldn’t afford. So instead, she worked. She worked until all these thoughts became nothing but background noise. Until there was just her and a problem to be solved. 

She powered up the signature creator, letting the mock aether stabilize and then she opened her senses. The signature wasn’t a perfect replica. If she focused on it she could pick out the wrongness, the sour, artificial note, but for most applications it would do the job of fooling anyone but the extremely versed and aetherically sensitive. 

She had no idea if this would end up being of any use to her, Yami or Tynos but in her experience it was better to be prepared than to find yourself wishing for something you didn’t have. 

She turned away from the row of cabinets and bumped against a work table. Hard enough to jostle a round sphere decorated in Starlight wrapping paper. A gift from Lewra. It rolled until it hit a book and stopped. Guilt washed over Aislinn. Yami had given it to her days ago and she hadn’t brought herself to open it. She had missed the family Starlight gathering, off on the Kugane business. It wasn’t something she could have explained in a note. Or in person. Or…she just couldn’t. So she just sent her regrets. That life wouldn’t intrude on this one and with any luck it was behind her for good now, anyroads. 

She set the signature creator down and picked up the sphere. It was heavy and solid, whatever it was. Slowly, she unpeeled the wrapping to expose a brass metallic sphere. She didn’t know what else she was expecting, after all the wrapping had done little to hide the shape of the object underneath. Etched across the interlocking plates of the sphere’s surface were geometric designs not unlike constellations but no matter how she looked at it, its purpose eluded her. Lewra had to know one of the only ways to stop the woman she loved like a daughter in her tracks was to present her with a puzzle. 

Sidetracked by this new development Aislinn ran her hands over the sphere, testing the interlocking plates as she slowly made her way to the couch and sank down to sit and solve this new problem. Something about it soothed the frazzled edges of her tired mind. 

Time slipped away like water through cupped hands as she sat there on the couch, head bent over the sphere in her lap, her deft fingers and agile mind moving in concert over the sphere’s puzzle until all at once with a satisfying click two things happened. Green aether pulsed out of the sphere in a rush and a panel popped open, revealing a note that had been tucked inside. Still images formed from the aether in the air around the sphere. A multitude of ghostly projections, hovering in place. 

'To my oldest,

Happy Starlight, and I hope you enjoyed the puzzle to get to your gift. Keep it close for when those dark times come to keep you going, and don't worry, I'll teach you how to add more memories to your aetherical album when you're ready so you can have more of you and Locke. I only had one to start it out. I have a feeling you're wondering how this works, I'll go over that with you don't worry. Other family members have one as well, and memories can be exchanged to add to your own album.

You may not be mine by blood but I'll always love you, and be so proud of you like you're my own.

Love, Mom’

Reaching out, Aislinn touched one of the images and at once it came to life. A memory. Lewra’s memories. 

Their first meeting. Her first medical lesson. The way Lewra had patiently taken her alarmingly unscrupulous and criminal alchemical knowledge and honed it against her own Sharlayan practices. The moments Aislinn opened up to Lewra. Talks over tea and baklava. Aislinn introducing her to Locke for the first time. She had gently teased her all while overjoyed by the casual way he could reach for Aislinn’s hand, understanding it for the feat it was. All of it. It was all here. 

These were shared experiences but as seen from Lewra’s perspective. Memory was not so much a camera as a filter. The particulars it held on to was nothing compared to what bled through. 

She hugged the sphere tight against her body. As though it could fill the gaping hollow that had been carved from Aislinn’s chest. Too much. The grief and very real possibility that she may never speak to Lewra again threatened to drown her and she struggled to keep her head above water. Her searching hand dove into the pocket of her coat, wrapping tight around Yami’s crystal she found there. For when it all became too much, the Seeker had said. And now the crystal siphoned the waves of emotions before they could buffet Aislinn to even darker depths. A burden shared.

Aislinn was not good with words. The ones she had were unwieldy tools improperly calibrated for the swirling riptide inside her. Anger was too small a word. Grief, too vague. Sadness was an insipid and reductive term. But Yami knew that. Hence the crystal. Through that tether Aislinn’s outward silence was shown for what Lewra always understood it to be, a barrier to be navigated and nothing more. She felt drained and yet her whole rib cage ached, her heart banging around like it was angrily trying to find a way out of her chest. Fiercely, savagely reminding her in case she had forgotten; 

She had to get up. She had to get up, there was work to do. 

[honeysweetcorvidae]

hey would you like to do all the prime numbers for the ask meme too. :3

i WOULD i’m gods bravest soldier and i can answer questions

i am, like mango, going to put this under a cut, because good grief this is a lot of questions.

2. Do you plan each chapter ahead or write as you go?

lol. I tend to have a general shape in my head for what the whole thing will look like when i do multichaps, but no, i wing it; if i allow myself to do an outline then it will be Done in my brain & therefore dead in the water

3. Describe the creative process of writing a chapter/fic

1) go on swingset, play music on shuffle 2) put that bitch in a Situation in my brain 3) enter fugue state 4) hit post

5. Do you like constructive criticism?

ehh. i am very sensitive, but from people i trust & when i have time to brace myself it can be helpful? most of the time i am just sitting here though. love 2 have fun and indulge.

7. How do you choose which POV to write from?

fugue state.

genuinely, it’s just whatever feels best at the moment! I have a taste for outsider POVs, but what i do for things that aren’t that varies from story to story— WTA flips back and forth from chapter to chapter where playing heroes is scattershot, etc.

11. Link your three favorite fics right now

oh geez picking “favorites” is an ASTONISHINGLY difficult thing for me— i have read probably hundreds of fics in the shuake tag alone, and the things I like I like for different reasons, and my MEMORY is so terrible that the word ‘favorite’ fills me with dread— so I’ll go with ones I immediately think to recommend? for p5, @malevolentmango’s what you’ve already buried and everything or nothing at all are phenomenal (i am marking this as One because mango is sooo specialwonderfulthebest and i could just list everything on their ao3. god wait how could i not also shout out no ballad will be written)

and then there’s interminable ballistics, which rewrote my brain, first step, which is frankly ASTONISHING, killing care and grief of heart by @jortsbian, which made me want to tear down an office building with my nails(honorific), and so on and so on and so on. this is way more than three. @ceilingfan5 has some of the best taakitz fics out there, if you’re into taz.

i would also, of course, be remiss not to nod to the fic i’m most insane about of all time, my guiding light my life my joy my favorite most special little enormous incomprehensible sadomasochistic bug alien clown porn religious worldbuilding space opera epic, @birchbow’s price of forgiveness. i’m super normal about everything they’ve ever written for homestuck tbqh BUT PoF is my darling. (it’s NOT the one i wrote a whole real actual literary analysis essay about. but that’s because it’s too long.)

okay moving on. i did not answer this question correctly.

13. What’s a common writing tip that you almost always follow?

uh. um. uh. does “don’t misuse punctuation too badly” count as a writing tip? man i don’t know i am an insane person about writing styles

17. What do you do when writing becomes difficult? (maybe a lack of inspiration or writers block)

if it sucks hit da bricks >:/. no but actually for real though, i tend to go out on my swingset, switch to a different project, or just Do Something Else for a while! i’m a big proponent of taking breaks.

19. What is the most-used tag on your ao3?

well,

23. Best writing advice for other writers?

please for the love of god punctuate your dialogue correctly

no, but sincerely— i think that the best possible thing you can do for your work is to write what you actually want to write. do the stupid self-indulgent bullshit! write tropey nonsense, write the same shit over and over in different permutations, who cares! if you love it it’ll show.

31. Do you start with the characters or the plot when writing?

the characters make the plot happen and the plot makes the characters act? so i mean i guess characters, but they’re interminably linked.

37 I already answered;

41: Do you tend to reread fics or are you a one-and-done kind of person?

ha. hahahaaaa. according to ao3 i have visited price of forgiveness one hundred and sixty-seven times. i know i have read it logged out at least twice. so, you know,

43. Do you take a sadistic joy in whumping your characters, or are you more the “If you hurt them I would kill everyone and then myself” kind of person?

i like recovery! I like to see people brought down and still swinging, and then for them to be happy again after. so i guess the latter?

47. How many times do you usually revise your fic/chapter before posting?

that’s between me and god

53. How do you spend your time when it comes to fanfiction? Are you primarily a fic reader, writer, or a perfect 50/50 split of both?

well it took me going back ~50 pages into my ao3 history to find PoF, and the last time i read it was in june, so i’d say i read more than i write

59. Does anyone in your personal life know you write fic? if not, would you tell anyone?

everyone i know knows everything about me because I have cannot-shut-up-ever-disease, yes. my mom has been forced to hear the plot of my NG+ au.

61. Why do you continue writing fics?

I enjoy writing, and I like to have a community! when I’m not writing fic I write original stuff, and I miss the engagement when I do that, but it’s still the same compulsive joy, I think. I doubt I could ever just stop writing forever.

67. Do you prefer prompts and challenges, or completely independent ideas?

independent ideas, generally! I am very bad at sticking to a prompt; my mind tends to wander ALL about the joint.

71. When it comes to more complicated narratives, how do you keep track of outlines, characters, development, timeline, ect.?

[LAUGHING]

(the answer is severe autdhd and being an extremely fast reader.)

73. What do you think makes your writing stand out from other works?

um. uh. um um uh. someone told me the other day that i am a fizzy mocktail and i don’t know what that means but i’m gonna go with that. i think my style is pretty distinctive, and i know i’m a skilled writer, so I guess. that? and i mean who else would write quite so much deeply emotionally vulnerable tentacle content. really.

[nonbinaryhatboxghost]

8:00am. I successfully socialized for a while last night. Had some good Korean BBQ, caught up with some folks I haven't seen in a month or so, then I went home.

I'm going to try and write a longer entry here because I've been doing these brief scattershot posts that almost certainly don't convey a positive mental state. Which, to be fair, is accurate.

I'm not at my best lately. I've had difficulty finding energy for things outside of work because my new position (I've been in this position for almost three months and yet it still feels new) takes a lot out of me. I'm dealing with constant questions/clarifications from co-workers on a specific project that I was assigned to be the new expert on, I'm dealing with more consistent interactions with upper management, I'm staring at multiple computer monitors for hours every day (I have blue light glasses, so that helps a little), and while I'm no longer isolated in a screening room for 8 hours a day, I'm still working in a windowless room.

I have a retail therapy problem. I've definitely already talked about this, but I love physical media. I've been collecting CDs since I was in elementary school, DVDs and Blu-rays for almost as long, and lockdown finally made me cave and start collecting vinyl. And the thing about physical media, particularly vinyl these days, is that there is always a new thing to acquire that's only going to be available "for a limited time." So my already collecting-happy self goes into overdrive trying to acquire whatever new shiny disc relevant to my interests is about to be released. Today it was pre-ordering the Best Buy 4K SteelBook release of (the incredible) Prey and the mail-order exclusive "They Live" Blue with White Splatter variant of John Carpenter and co.'s upcoming album Anthology II (Movie Themes 1976-1988).

Now, do I genuinely want and enjoy these things? Hell yes. I was floored by how good Prey was, and I am still shocked that Disney has decided to start releasing some of their streaming titles on physical media. I am also a huge fan of John Carpenter, and own almost all of his music in one form or another.

But these are also not solutions to my current, to be honest almost-always-present problem: I feel isolated.

I have full brain servings of depression and anxiety. I became aware of the former maybe a decade ago, and discovered the latter was a bigger problem than I thought after I had my first(?) panic attack at work a few years ago. I've been in therapy since 2016, I've taken meds since 2018. I am doing better than I was, but despite all of the progress that I logically know that I've made, I feel stuck.

I've tried asking for help outside of therapy, but part of the problem is that despite being someone who wants/needs more attention and affection from folks, I have an instinct to isolate myself in order to not burden others with my problems. I've been fighting that instinct to mixed success. I suspect that I've isolated myself in this regard for so long that now a lot of folks don't really think of or invite me to hang because they're possibly under the impression that I don't want to interact with them. Or maybe it's the standard people growing apart thing. Or (and here is what the depression monster tells me) they find me boring/depressing/annoying/pathetic/etc.

Another thing is that I'm newly polyamorous. I'm currently seeing one person, who has needed to take some time for themself for a variety of reasons. I understand and respect that, even though I wish I could do something to help outside of leaving them alone for the time being. I also miss them. Part of the point of polyamory is not putting all of one's emotional eggs into one basket, and I'm always open to new connections. But with how I'm doing lately, I'm getting trapped in this vicious cycle of wanting to connect with someone because I want connection/attention/affection, then feeling guilty for wanting that and worrying that I only want connection/attention/affection as a distraction from how not well I'm doing, then my brain tells me that I shouldn't be with anyone until I've sorted all of my own stuff out and around and around it goes.

I'm a person, I have problems, and I don't want to put all those problems on another person. I once said to current partner that "my loneliness is not your responsibility." I still feel that way. But I also can't find a consistent solution or solutions to this loneliness.

I'm a very simple nerd. I like hanging out and chatting with folks, and I'm not opposed to going out and doing activities. But I don't really do things like bar-hopping or going to nightclubs. I'm very shy and don't really know what social space I'd be most comfortable in. Dating apps make me uncomfortable, and years ago when I was actively using them I had nothing but bad experiences. There's a local arcade bar that I go to for karaoke sometimes, which has been nice, but not really a space for making new friends.

I just don't know how to initiate hangs outside of movie nights. And despite watching movies with folks sincerely being one of my love languages, I know that can't be the only way I spend time with people. I'm open to new stuff, I just need help with the new stuff.

I'm looking into taking piano lessons for the first time since I was in 4th grade. I left the chorus I was part of a while ago, so I would like a new consistent music-related thing/structure in my life.

I have a close friend visiting next month and I'm really looking forward to seeing them.

I know that at some point next year I'll be traveling to wherever The Kingcast is hosting their next big event, and possibly with another friend who has recently gotten into King (and who has rapidly overtaken me in the number of King books they've read).

I'm hopefully remote-hanging with someone this week that I haven't gotten to hang with in a while.

And yeah, I have a 4K disc arriving in the mail today (The Nightmare Before Christmas).

I'm trying. I just wish I was getting better faster.

[jacketlady]

I know I'm speaking to the void, but I can't sleep, and I know I will never stop thinking about it. It's a good place to get my thoughts out there, and those who know will know. Forgive me if it's scattershot.

I just really miss my old online friend right now, and it kills me inside to this day that I may never know what happened to them. I've been facing a lot of personal familial losses this year, and thus I keep getting reminded of this one in particular. I've tried "moving on", but I don't know if I ever fully will. I've been quiet about it for a while, but I need to get it off my chest.

It's true what they say in that you never know when the last time you talk to a person is - it just happens. Just like I didn't think that night on Animal Crossing: New Horizons would be the last time we'd play online together.

It was funny - what happened. They had asked me what some of my favorite villagers were, and among my long list, I accidently mistyped Cheri, when I meant Cherry (the goth dog girl with a sisterly personality). They were excited and asked if I wanted them to move Cheri into my town (since they had her), and I was delighted and said yes! I realized as it happened that it wasn't Cherry, and was, in fact, Cheri (she's a red bear cub with a peppy personality - I know, it's confusing). But I didn't correct them, and I didn't say anything to the contrary. I was grateful I got to have one of their villagers in my town. In the end, I was just so happy I had someone to play Animal Crossing with and that I made a new memory with a friend there. And best of all, I had the chance to get to know a new villager that I hadn't had in any of my previous towns before.

After we stopped playing that October night of 2021, (God, has it really been nearly 2 years?), they were getting a new job and said they may not be as active. Which is fine you know, life stuff happens! Messages were sparce, but they were still there for a bit.

Their very last message I received was them being excited about having Takis and a clementine over their lunch break. We were catching up. Nothing strange or unusual, just a fun little thing they wanted to talk about in their free moment.

I didn't know that would be the last I had heard from them.

I thought that they were just busy those last few days when they couldn't talk. I left pebbles for them - funny memes I thought they'd like and pretty pictures of clouds I found so they could see them when they got the chance. Again, it was October, and Halloween was fastly-approaching. I was so excited to show them my Beetlejuice costume I threw together for Halloween, and get them caught up to speed on my D&D session that night! But I didn't hear anything back yet.

Hallows Eve, I find out that all of their Tumblr blogs and online accounts are gone through their mutual friends, and that they vanished without a trace. No word on why they were leaving - just gone. I didn't even know until it was too late. That time that I thought they were just busy, in actuality, they disappeared in that absence. Unfortunately, it takes a while for Discord to show that a user has deleted their account.

I know I naturally want to blame myself and think that maybe I did something wrong to make them leave, but I know that isn't true. All the things I wish I could have said and done, had I'd known they'd leave, plauge my mind at times. I'll always have hunches as to why they left, but I don't know the truth. I realize that I'll never know the reality of the situation unless they come back online. I just hope that they're okay and that their life is going well. I hope that they finished their Animal Crossing town and got it just the way they wanted. I hope that they finished, or are at least continuing, their writings in their spare time. I hope that they are continuing to make their awesome artworks to this day - whatever it may look like. Whether it's the original characters and sculptures they made, or Beetlejuice, or Doc Ock, or maybe even their spidersona since the new Spiderverse came out (they're probably on that Spiderverse kick, let's be real). I hope that they are achieving their goals and doing what they love to do, and I hope that they find peace and happiness - they deserve it.

These days though, I can't help but find myself even more worried for them. After all this heinous anti-LGBTQ+ shit that's going on right now, and knowing about the context of their unfortunate family situation, I hope that they are safe more than anything. God, I hope so.

It's hard to play Animal Crossing now after their absence, but when I do, I go and visit Cheri. I even planted an orange tree in front of her house, since I know how much they liked clementines, and I think of them. As a veteran Animal Crossing player, I understand why the old feature of villagers moving away suddenly was supposed to reflect how people you love and came to know would sometimes just leave. But I'm glad I can be a little selfish with the new game in that - even if I don't play the game as much anymore, Cheri will always be there for me to visit. I'll always have a little reminder of them.

I love you friend, I will never forget you, and I wish you all the best. Thank you for being a part of my life, even though probably it wasn't as long as we'd like. Thank you for all of the laughs, the meme exchanges, the silly sketches and drawings, the youtube viewings, the late nights on animal crossing, the deep talks at 2am, and so on. I will always cherish all of the things we did together and will never forget them. I wish I could hear from you again, but I also understand that I may not. Please know you are dearly loved by many and are very, very missed.

[gwynbleiddyn]

💥🙈💢 for our favorite princelad?

ohoho there's one in there that immediately made me go oh no

💥 COLLISON - what emotions do they have trouble dealing with?

Maahes is not what I would call a sincere person, but he does have a lot of sincere emotions... which definitely causes a lot of internal conflict. he loves easily, he feels deeply, but everything about him is designed to maintain an image no matter the cost to his own sanity.

in that regard, he has a hard time portraying genuine love/affection in earnest, and quite frankly, anything else that comes from a similar place of raw/unfiltered emotion. he either doesn't process it (looking at you, years of untouched grief) or he is hyperaware of it and keeps it locked away, never to be acknowledged.

above all, he truly hates being put in vulnerable positions with regards to his thoughts and feelings. if his deceptive nature can't shake off any questions, he gets angry and dismissive, quite often resorting to just being a fucking mean bitch about it. sharing is only on his terms.

🙈 SEE-NO-EVIL - whats a side of your oc that they don't want to show other people?

this is a really interesting one because like we keep saying, he's very much a curated image of whatever persona he thinks is suitable for Akhenaton's throne. what that looks like might change over time, but the intention remains.

i guess similarly to the above, he's reluctant to be visibly vulnerable and his interpretation of that is showing affection or any sort of deep emotion without any filter slapped on top of it. i also think in moments where mio asks for help that isn't disguised in some sort of deal, he can barely stand to think of how he looks to the people he's asking.

while i'm on the topic though, this could be interesting?? maybe?? it's not something he would outright share but he has alluded to: Mio knows that he really, really wants a family - regardless of the necessity behind having children to continue the divine bloodline, he has so many thoughts and hopes of being a dad and protecting and loving his children no matter what - the kind of unconditional love i think Mio wonders if he was ever given, sometimes. i think again it's the vulnerability aspect playing here, i don't know that he'd feel great showing somebody this side of him.

also relating to this: one thing i don't know that Mio's realized yet, but i don't mind sharing, is i think he really protects his younger self. i don't know how to explain it fully but leaving Akhenaton the way he did felt like being shunted out of his own existence, and he was still so young when it happened that i kind of think he's got that boy hidden away inside. there's a child in him that he protects so intensely and so desperately, that i think it would be deeply uncomfortable to see any glimpses or memories of that child in the Shadowfell or even in Akhenaton - it would be an acknowledgement that he wasn't treated fairly growing up, and it will call into judgement his belief and relationship with akhen and its creator. he couldn't cope with that, and he definitely wouldn't want anybody in Talisman to see him wrestling with that.

💢 ANGER - what are some habits they have that will take some getting used to?

the way he expects luxury LMAO he is 100% an entitled bastard, he will make snide digs if things aren't up to his standards, he won't be a karen about it but he has such a passive aggressive smile reserved for the many nights Talisman have spent in camps on the road. thank god Laz has the ability to cast Magnificent Mansion.

probably another annoying thing is that he rarely tells any one person the full story of something, instead delivering bits and pieces across random scattershot trajectories. sometimes it's intentional, other times it's just because he's a fucking gossip and it's second nature to him to sprinkle little juicy tidbits into a conversation.

[milkmaidovich]

For a long time, Ian wondered if Mickey even knew he had them.

When they were younger, still living on the South Side, he could understand if he'd missed them. The Milkovich kids had a different system of operating than the Gallaghers did—never an "Us against the world" mentality, no unifying Fiona to impress upon them that together was the only way to make it through. Maybe it would have been Mickey if he'd been the oldest, but the way Terry (rest in fucking pieces) had done things there was no chance Iggy or Colin would be the one to step up and make sure a goddamn thing got taken care of, like property taxes or utilities.

So the water was frequently off at the Milkovich house, Mickey was frequently smudged with dirt and dust from whatever bullshit jobs he ran for his dad. Ian knew now that he'd hated it, hated being "that dirty little Milkovich brat," but he also knew there really wasn't shit Mickey coulda done.

Ian, though, had always seen them, those faint little scattershot freckles hidden amongst the dirt and the grime and the bone-deep fear that was Mickey when he met him, angry and sharp and desperately desiring something he didn't dare name.

Ian remembers the first time he tried to kiss them, just a small little bit of affection for part of Mickey he felt hopelessly fond of, and almost got elbowed in the face.

Even after kissing became a thing they did, casual intimacy and affection took the longest for Mickey to allow.

-

Now, though-

"Love your freckles, Mick," he murmurs against his husband's cheek, the corner of his eye, the ever-deepening smile lines around his mouth.

Mickey threads his fingers softly through Ian's curls, toying with them gently while he lays back on their couch and lets himself be loved on, smiling while it happens. "You're the only one," he confesses, soft and sweet, the years of unconditional, unending love bolstering his ability to put these "sensitive" things into words. "Nobody ever noticed before you."

Ian moves to Mickey's nose, following the sun-baked path of darker spots across the bridge, nuzzling their noses together as he passes. "Always felt like mine." The little confession is pressed into Mickey's skin, like speaking it there will indelibly ink his possession into these marks on his husband's beloved face. "No one else took the time to look, so they didn't deserve to see them."

-

These days, Ian always makes sure they put their sunscreen on when they're out in the sun, even if it means neither of their freckles are quite as prominent as they used to be. But that's okay. Means you can only see Mickey's if you're real close.

And real close to Mickey is Ian's favorite place to be.

hey, i’ve read a lot of fiction in which Mickey is obsessed with Ian’s freckles, but do you know of any fiction where Ian is obsessed with Mickey’s? thank you

Hey! We don't know any one-shots that focus on this and honestly, we don't have memories of something in a longer fic either :(

Mickey does have freckles though! I can't believe no one wrote about it. Are we missing something?

[crazy-sevens]

Writing Snippet #31

The hero woke up with a start. Even after being knocked out the dreams didn’t give her any release. It was the same one every night. One memory that ruined her life. 

The day she got her powers. 

It was kind of fitting, considering the fact that the creator of that memory was sitting right in front of her.

“Nightmare?”

The hero took a minute to clear her vision. It was a dark room, cameras in every corner, the villain sitting leisurely on a metal chair. She wondered how long he had been sitting there. And how long she had been out. It had taken nothing short of a small army to take her down. The villain must have been really determined this time, he was usually more subtle than that. 

He raised his eyebrows, still waiting for an answer.

She sighed. “Bad memories.”

“I think I would know what you’re talking about.” The villain stood up. “You know it’s nice seeing you like this. You’re finally showing a little bit of gratitude.”

The hero looked down and realized the position she was in. Chained down on her knees. Of course.

“It’s nice knowing I can help you with your ego trips,” the hero said. She tugged on one of the chains and cried out when an electric shock coursed through her. 

“Yeah I forgot to mention that would happen.” The villain smiled. “Of course any normal person would have died with that many volts, but you’re anything but normal, aren’t you?”

The hero grit her teeth. “Why am I here?” 

The villain shrugged. “Why would I trap a pest in my house?”

The hero scoffed. “Don’t act like you’re going to kill me. You need me, remember?”

“That’s not true,” the villain said. “I need some DNA, maybe a few pints of your blood, but I don’t need you.” 

He lingered on the word ‘you’ like it left a bitter taste in his mouth. 

She swallowed. “Then why am I still alive?”

The villain crouched down, close enough that the hero could feel his breath on her face. “Because against my better judgement I have decided to give you another chance.”

Here we go.

“Why would you give a pest another chance?”

The villain’s jaw ticked. “Don’t forget who gave you these powers.” 

“On accident,” the hero clarified. “And besides, how could I forget? You keep reminding me.”

“And you keep throwing it back in my face,” the villain shot back. He stood and started slowly circling the hero. “Do you want to know what we call you around here?”

“Beautiful and genius come to mind.”

The villain stopped circling. “And you think I’m the one that needs the ego boost.” He shook his head. “You’re a traitor [Hero]. An ungrateful child.”

The hero broke eye contact. “You used me. You wanted me to hurt people.”

“And you were willing to for a while,” the villain said. “I gave you everything.” His eyes darkened and his voice dropped low. She knew him well enough by now to know that when he was angry his voice didn’t rise, it went quieter. “And how did you repay me?” He asked.

“By getting some morals.”

“Morals.” The villain repeated softer. “And what has that gotten you? A life lived in fear. I could give you so much more.”

“I don’t really think I want a collar or a leash, but I’ll get back to you on that.”

The villain’s hand shot out and grabbed a fistful of the hero’s hair. She cried out. “Need I remind you what precarious situation you are in,” he growled. “Despite how confident you are, no, I don’t need you. An autopsy would give me all I need to figure out what happened with you.”

The hero’s jaw clenched.

“And with your powers I’m sure you would stay alive for a long time. Feeling every bit of it. Is that what you want?”

The hero slowly shook her head.

The villain released her hair, throwing her head aside as he did so. “You should be thanking me. You wouldn’t be a hero without my work.”

“Maybe I didn’t want to be a hero.”

The villain’s eyebrows raised slightly, almost imperceptible. He was surprised. But he didn’t say anything. He just examined her with those cold eyes.

She matched his cold stare, all filled with spite. No, she didn’t ask to be this. She didn’t want it. But now that she had it, what was she going to do? Run? Hide? People needed her. And she didn’t care how cliché the notion sounded, she was responsible. He offered her everything, but she knew better. 

There is more to life than things.

He smirked. It was almost like he could read her mind. “Maybe you didn’t want to be, but you’ll keep doing it. It’s hard isn’t it?”

The hero didn’t say anything at that.

The villain kept talking. “You’re a simple woman [Hero]. Unmaterialistic. I admire that. Really, I do,” he said. “But what I’m offering isn’t money or status. It’s reassurance. Currently, you run from place to place, nowhere to go, enemies everywhere. When was the last time you saw your family, [Hero]? Wouldn’t you want to see them again?”

Her family. 

“You don’t know where they are.” That statement sounded more like a question than she would’ve hoped. 

Fortunately, he shook his head. “No. But they could come back. You wouldn’t have to worry about them anymore. Any need of theirs taken care of. No more threats.”

The hero laughed, the shaky thing that it was. “You’re the one that threatened them in the first place.”

“Only because you forced me to. How else could I get you to listen?”

The hero shrugged. “I don’t know. Normal people usually make a phone call. Maybe a candy gram?”

The villain gave a thin lipped smile. “You are so predictable [Hero]. You make jokes when you're scared. I think it’s adorable.”

“Well, do you want to know what I think?” The hero asked. “I think you’re afraid too.”

The villain’s smile dropped. “And what, pray tell, would I have to fear?”

The hero felt like she was stepping on dangerous ground, but she sprinted on anyway. “You’ve always been afraid of what you don’t understand. You don’t understand me. My powers. You don’t understand why I have them while all the others died. Why I’m able to outsmart you at every turn.” The hero smiled, vicious now. “And I know it drives you crazy. The puzzle you could never solve. You’ll do anything to figure it out. No matter how many second chances it takes.” She spat. “Keep your reassurances. I don’t need them.”

In that moment she knew she had taken it too far. The villain’s jaw clenched. He turned to a camera in the room. “Make it twelve.”

The electricity ramped up in the chains. The hero gasped, eyes welling up with tears as pain racked her body. 

“Again I offer you everything and you throw it back in my face,” he said. “Your confidence can only get you so far. How could I be afraid of you when all it takes is a phone call to bring you here kneeling at my feet.” He crouched down now, locking dangerous eyes with her. “But you’re right about one thing, [Hero]. I’m curious. I’m curious how a scared teenager like you could survive while all the others couldn’t. And believe me when I tell you this, I will figure it out. And there are two ways I could do it. We could cooperate, maybe manage to make it a comfortable process, and I could give you everything I offer, or you can stay defiant and we can test just how far your endurance can keep you alive.”

He stood up and opened the door. “I’ll give you some time to think it over.”

Through blurred vision the hero watched him leave. 

She wasn’t feeling so confident now.

[thewertsearch]

In Davesprite's timeline, he and Rose - who presumably know a lot more about the game than we do - don't bring up the status of Jade's dream self, even though she'd have been safe from the meteor that destroyed her island.

If she was alive, she would have contacted her co-players - either through Pesterchum, or in person, via a daisy-chain of Gates and transportalizers. My working theory is that a dream self simply can't exist without its counterpart. You can live without it - lucky for Jade - but not the reverse.

Now that that's out of the way...

...yeah, I think Vriska has a pretty good chance of dying for good.

Doc Scratch seems to think her days are numbered. I don't fully trust the guy, but this statement has to pay off somehow - it's too heavy-handed to be ignored. Something Vriska does is going to go very, very wrong.

I don't expect this to happen anytime soon. She's around in the Veil during Project Trolling, so I think this Final Vriska Incident will occur some time after the trolls 'lose' their session to the Mistake. That sounds like something a 'winner' like Vriska would take personally, and maybe she'll do something drastic to try and squeeze a victory out of their defeat.

If I had to guess, I think Vriska will employ a dangerous cheat that backfires on everyone and everything - but especially her. She's been fucking around for most of her screentime, and eventually she's bound to find out.

I don't have too many other death predictions. I mentioned before that I think the Guardians might die, but that was one of a list of scattershot predictions I made for fun, without much evidence to back them up.

I think my justification was that the death of one's parental figure(s) is a common trope in RPGs and coming-of-age stories, and Homestuck is both. Plus, Kanaya was convinced that Sgrub killed the troll Guardians...

They don't really have much to do any more, do they? This session is unwinnable, so they can't fulfill whatever game purpose they originally had.

Shit, I've half-convinced myself now. I really don't want these guys to die, especially since we still know precious little about their motivations. I guess we'll see what happens.

Sollux's prophesized death is a freebie. I really hope he somehow pulls through, though, because I have a soft spot for the lil' nerd.

I think we've been told exactly how Lord English will be killed - and I'm sure Slick will be the triggerman. I'm looking forward to this.

I think our four kids will be sticking around until the end, as are particularly shippable important trolls like Karkat and Kanaya. I'm not so sure about the trolls that are getting less focus, though - I could see the likes of Gamzee or Nepeta dying if shit hits the fan.

I do have one more prediction. It's not a death, but it's adjacent.

I think Aradia is becoming progressively more alive. She's gone from a fully dead ghost, to a mostly dead sprite, to a semi-alive cyborg - and I don't think she's going to stop there.

Her body is already on the way out, and she's probably going to want a new one, without any of Equius's 'alterations'.

I predict that Aradia will have a new body made, and that this one will be an even closer approximation of her living self. Maybe she'll transform from a mechanical cyborg into an organic one - presumably one with her actual blood color.

[dragonmuse]

(An I May Be Bad, but I'm Perfectly Good at It epilogue inspired by many different requests, so this one is for everyone that wanted to know about Charlie's extent of knowledge, how their fleeing to a sunny beach went, and if anyone else ever found out what happened to the dearly departed.

CW: discussion and viewing of skeletal remains, discussion of established major character deaths, and speculation on the manner of death. This isn't super detailed or graphic, but it does happen so mind your step.)

These days, Charlie doesn’t have much use for technology. It was hard to remember when he was tied to his desk, fingers glued to the keys. Izzy liked him better this way, untethered and free to wander. They both wake up early and go down to the beach. Izzy would go  for a long walk and Charlie swam. Izzy watched from the shore most mornings as the pale dot made its way out against the loose waves. The sand crunched  forgivingly under Izzy’s sandals. The sun threatened heat that early, but hadn’t yet produced it. 

The sand was nearly white. The sky was a brilliant blue. There are trees set back from the shore, glistening green. Everything here was bright and stark, exactly the color it would be in a coloring book.  There was very little gray, except for a few outcroppings of rock. 

They usually re-converged in time to share breakfast. Charlie would juice oranges and Izzy would shovel granola into yogurt or whatever kick Charlie was on. Shakes, smoothies, bizarre combinations of nuts and dried fruit. After they ate, they’d run errands or tidy. By then Read and Anne might be awake and they’d share plans for the day. 

Read and Anne would take the speed boat out usually, heading for the main island. They both had jobs out there, part time things, mostly as something to do and also to meet people. They had a small group of friends, sometimes staying out there for the night if there was something of interest.

Izzy found very little to interest him outside of his small world these days. He tried to get Charlie to go with them though. Sometimes he would, but he never stayed long. Whatever taste the man had had for a fast life seemed to have died with their move here. The main island had two clubs and he pronounced both of them as firmly ‘meh’ and that ‘anyone worth hooking up with is taken’. 

Instead, Charlie spent a lot of time writing. He filled notebooks, not particularly special things, just the fat spiral bound ones used by students for time out of memory. 

“Journalling?” Read had asked him once. 

“Remembering,” he’d shrugged. “And forgetting.” 

But he’d let Izzy read through them when they were done. Some of it was memory, scattershot over Charlie’s life, but some of it was nothing like real life. Dreamy, disconnected story parts or something that was almost like what had happened, but taken a left turn. Some of it was essays, opinion pieces that Izzy could see easily going into a paper. 

“Maybe someday,” Charlie said when Izzy mentioned it. “But I’m not ready yet.” 

There was a laptop and occasionally, Charlie would transcribe something and it did go out onto the internet, but Izzy didn’t know where or for what reason. It was odd that it bothered him not to know. An entire lifetime of letting Lucius tell him next to nothing had been fine, but Charlie, who kept no other secrets, shielding that part of his life made Izzy twitchy. 

But he left it alone. Charlie didn’t get angry when pushed about it, he just closed down, oyster snapping shut around his pearl. So Izzy left it. Instead he did his own work, the careful surveillance of old names and then tending to investments to keep their lives as even and easy as possible. Sometimes he still did the odd job himself, doing taxes for a few local businesses. It was still interesting work, making everything come out right and he liked the feeling of use. 

By the time lunch had come and gone though, he was usually a little tired. He’d head back outside to the cabana they had set up on the beach. It wasn’t much really, just four sturdy poles and heavy canvas tied down between them. Enough to keep the sun off a cluster of lounge chairs and a firepit that was often lit at night. Izzy would head down with a book, in full acceptance that he’d read about a page of it then nod off like the pensioner he’d become. 

Like magic, he would wake with someone else pressed against him, Charlie’s face mashed into his ribs. The lounges were side enough for that though Charlie’s feet would hang off the edge a little, long bit of business that he was.  Asleep, Charlie lost the things that made him look older.  Since coming here, he’d let his hair grow a little more, and it came up in surprisingly sweet waves that were perpetually dried out from seawater and stuck in a million directions. Izzy would run his fingers through the stiff locks, breaking apart knots and smoothing hair back into place. 

Eventually, they’d get dinner started in time for Read and Anne’s return. They tended to spend evenings all together either in joint or individual pursuits. Izzy had found himself unwillingly drawn into jigsaw puzzles which made him feel ridiculous until he got very deep into putting them together. Anne loved them too and they spend many nights completing impressionist paintings or seascapes. 

Read had taken to Izzy’s woodworking lessons and she’d used them to learn how to make frames. The puzzles hung in almost every room. Soon they’d have to start swapping them out and stowing some of them away to make room for the new ones. 

But today, Read and Anne had come back early. A half day or something that he hadn’t really followed. They’d headed back into the house, but Izzy had still come out for his afternoon nap and he’d still woken up with Charlie draped over him, making them both sweaty and even drowsier. 

Read’s shadow fell over him. She was holding out a black rectangle.

“He left his phone inside and it’s been ringing like crazy. Texts too. I think it’s his sister.” 

“Shit,” Izzy tapped Charlie’s shoulder, “wake up, sweetheart.” 

“What?” Charlie muttered. 

“Your sister is trying to get you on the phone.”

“She is?” Charlie sat up all at once. “Why?” 

“Didn’t look,” Read dropped the phone into Charlie’s hand. “Hope everything is okay.” 

She ambled off as Charlie dialed and put the phone to his ear. Izzy could give Charlie privacy too, he supposed, but Charlie didn’t ask for it, so he stayed. 

“Are you okay?” Charlie demanded in lieu of ‘hello’.  “...yeah, I remember the renovation. We just talked on- oh. Oh shit.”

Charlie’s hand came down to Izzy’s holding on tight. He was listening with an increasing tightness. 

“How sure are they?” he asked eventually. “I mean, how are they even identifying them?” 

Izzy’s blood went cold. He held Charlie’s hand back. 

“Yeah...yeah...okay. I’ll ask him. But I don’t-  No. Let me- Alma. Alma! Of course I’ll come back for a few days if you want. I was going to visit soon anyway. We’ll figure something out.” He listened again for a bit then said, “Yeah, I know. It’s a lot. I’ll start looking for flights. I’ll email you once I have something....yeah I don’t know, I have to talk to him about it. Okay. Yeah, love to everyone. See you soon.” 

Izzy watched Charlie end the call. He didn’t ask. Charlie didn’t say anything for a long time. He stared out over the water. 

“Do you want to know? Charlie asked eventually. 

“Yes,” he said, holding on for dear life. 

“When my father bought the Revenge, there was apparently some kind of sub-basement. They used it for storage, but apparently it wasn’t very well built and cold air used to come up. He had it bricked up since it wasn’t serving a function.” 

“But it was,” Izzy followed Charlie’s gaze out into the water, “wasn’t it?” 

“Lucius was probably the one who suggested boarding it up in the first place. They had to knock into it to add the staff bathroom Alma’s been wanting to do for ages. Turns out someone was getting in and out of there for years. There was a basement window hidden behind the dumpster.” 

The sun on the water was hypnotic, the beams tossed among the waves. 

“How many?” 

“They aren’t sure yet. It’s all jumbled up. There’s only two skulls though.” 

Izzy nodded.  “They bought a boat only a year after they got the Revenge.  I was on it a few times. Neither of them liked the water much, but I figured it was one of those things. Flaunt the money a little.” 

“Did you?” Charlie asked dully. 

“No. Not really.” 

“How many does the sea have, do you think?” 

Izzy knew exactly how many, in his heart of hearts. He hadn’t gone looking, but he knew what Lucius was like following. How he’d move slower, then suddenly want to be everywhere at once, a burst of energy that would sweep through their home, creative and destructive simultaneously. Izzy had kept silent count of those days. 

“Most of them were Jim’s. Vengeance. The ones for business were left out as statements, but you know about those. Then the few that just got in the way.” 

“How many?” Charlie asked again. 

“Twenty-six.” 

Charlie’s eyes slid closed and he rested his forehead on his knees for a long shuddering moment. 

“I helped with some of them. The ones that seemed necessary. But I didn’t think-” 

“Most of it was before your time,” Izzy pressed his shoulder against Charlie’s. “Jim always focused on the goal and Lucius didn’t like playing too loose if he wasn’t 100% sure he could win.” 

“Alma thinks one of them is our father,” Charlie said into his knees. “I figured that out, you know. A long time ago.” 

“Before I slept with you?” Izzy tried to remember. 

“Yeah. Probably seven or eight months before that? Jim was explaining a job to me and it just fell into place.  But I was so deep in already and I was so fucking angry with him anyway....what did it matter, you know?” Charlie picked up his head, turned to Izzy. “You knew, right?” 

“I tried not to. I never met your father. Heard about him, never laid eyes on him. But...” 

“Yeah. Yeah, I don’t know Iz, but it would be very Jim to put them together.” 

“A gesture,” Izzy said grimly. “Who’s going to identify them?” 

“They don’t know yet.” 

“I'll start looking for flights.” 

“Iz.” 

“I’m not going to just sit around here while you go back to face that on your own, sweetheart. C’mon. And I owe her this. Far more than this, but it’s at least something.” 

“I should be angry, right? Or sad?” 

“I don’t know. Just feel whatever you want.” 

When they went back into the house, Charlie sought out Anne. The two of them had gotten close. Read found Izzy, not saying a word as he booked flights. She waited for his travel spreadsheet to be mostly filled out and his hands to slow on the keys. 

“We’ll keep the home fires burning,” she told him. “And you better come back.” 

“Nothing to keep me there.” 

“Both of you.” 

“His life. He might not forgive me this time.” 

“Forgive you for what?” She scoffed. “You didn’t do it.” 

“I did all of it,” he stood and closed the laptop. “Because I made him. Intentionally or not.” 

“You’re so full of shit,” she snorted. “You think he’d agree with that?” 

Izzy twisted the ring around his finger. It never came off now. His knuckles had swelled the last few years, warning shots of arthritis. Even if he wanted to remove it, it wouldn’t budge without someone cutting it free. 

“He wouldn’t. But he’s dead. He doesn’t get a say.” 

Four days later, Charlie and Izzy flew home. There wasn’t a place there anymore. Their apartments had long since been sold off, but the city greeted them and folded them into its arms. Alma had offered her a guest room, but they took a hotel. A mid-tier one, more convenient than fancy and that was fine too. 

That night, for the first time, Izzy crossed the threshold of the place that had been the Revenge. The Coyote had a neon sign out front, asserting its name and ‘Open’ status in teal and orange. It was a good size place with a stage and a sweeping bar. There was thin man with long blond hair behind it, mixing drinks. Someone was on stage, testing a mic. 

“That’s Ethel,” Charlie told Izzy. 

He walked confidently through the space. This place had been as much his domain for a while as the offices. It showed. Alma appeared from the backroom and rushed to embrace him. Charlie hugged her back hard. The two of them snapped together like puzzle pieces. 

When they pulled apart, Alma’s eyes were wet. Charlie’s were dry. 

“Thanks for coming,” she sniffed. “You too, Izzy. I know you don’t like to travel much.” 

“Seemed like something I could do.” 

“Let’s have a drink, not much else we can do tonight, but run a show and hope no one asks why there’s crime scene tape in the alley.” 

Izzy didn’t drink anymore. He sipped a seltzer and watched a drag show. It was mostly unremarkable. A lot of young talent, a few seasoned pros. More dancing and singing than he generally cared for, but he clapped politely when everyone else did. 

He spent more time trying to place his husband here. Had Lucius really stood behind this bar almost every Friday night for years? This was the place where he’d played at being a small business owner and flirted with customers? Here under chandeliers and standing on glitter strewn floors? 

For a horrible, freefall moment, Izzy missed him with every single cell of his body. It happened like that sometimes, a swell of grief that threatened to drown him. No matter how complicated and dark things had gotten, Izzy had loved the man for nearly twenty-five years. How could he not mourn him? 

They slept on rented bleached sheets that night, the unfamiliar bed threatening insomnia, but it had been a long day of travel and neither of them were used to staying up late. Sleep took them whether it should or not. 

Morning came and with it, the core of the whole terrible trip. They walked the twenty blocks to the coroner’s office. It was long and colder out than they were used to, but neither of them suggested getting a cab or getting on the subway. They started their mornings with exercise and they weren’t going to stop now. 

Even if this one terminated in clinically gray building that smelled like chemicals and dust. Alma was waiting for them and then they all had to check in, signing sheets and making promises about their identities and intentions. 

Down several flights of stairs to meet a cop in street clothes with a sober tilt to their mouth as they rattled through their prepared scripts. 

“The remains are mostly skeletal, but we’ve laid out what’s remained of their clothing alongside them. We’re confident that it’s only two skeletons now, mostly complete.” 

“Thank you,” Alma said tightly. 

More words. More assurances about not leaping to conclusions. More promises that they’d be honest. It was the longest time Izzy had spent with a police officer voluntarily in his entire life and he couldn’t wait for it to fucking end, except that he didn’t want it to end because then they would open the final door. 

It opened anyway, in the end. 

They walked through. 

Izzy stayed back while Charlie and Alma approached the first metal bed. A sheet was lifted. He kept an eye on Charlie, who’s breathing had gone shallow, but was otherwise steady as a rock. 

“I don’t know,” he eventually said. “Alma?” 

“I recognize the jacket,” her voice fluttered. “He loved blue. Remember how much of it was in the storage boxes when we looked?” 

“No,” Charlie frowned. “I don’t. But...the rings.” 

Charlie still wore one of Stede’s rings from time to time, a golden pinkie ring with an emerald set in it. 

“Yeah, he’d wear a few at time,” Alma told the officer. “My mom might recognize them better, but I’m pretty sure those were his.” 

There were more questions. But Izzy just watched Charlie. The man never flinched. He asked no questions, gave his answers briefly and without detail. Old training returning as easy as anything. 

And he had to watch Charlie or he’d look at the other blanket. Look into the abyss. 

“Mr. Spriggs?” the officer’s attention snapped to him. “Are you ready?” 

No. He would never be ready. But he was already  thirty years too late. 

“Yes.” 

He stepped up to the table. The sheet came down. 

The bones didn’t bother him. They were just what they were, inert and without ability to harm. He didn’t try to overlay a face over the skull. Just absorbed that it was there. 

But the clothes. 

“Yeah,” his voice dragged out raw from his throat. “That’s their jacket. Not a lot of people wearing a leather jacket with one sleeve.” 

“Are you certain?” 

“Yes.” 

He spelled out their full name for the officer. Gave their social security number, still ingrained in his memory. Did they have any enemies? Yes. Many. She’d been good at making them. When was the last time you saw her? 

Mr. Hands? 

When was the last time? 

He’d seen her leave the office in a silk jumpsuit and high ponytail, the jacket over one arm. Headed out. A last wave over her shoulder. He’d waved back. She hadn’t seen. 

When they were back on the street, Alma started talking about funerals. 

“We already had one,” Charlie reminded her. “And they aren’t going to let us bury him for ages. He’s evidence.” 

“Once they find out who killed them, then we can have the body,” she lifted her chin. “And they will find them.” 

“They might be dead themselves,” Charlie warned. “Don’t get your hopes up.” 

They sure might be. 

Of course, you weren’t supposed to bury a body that was evidence. Or touch their possessions. That would be wrong. That could prevent justice. 

Izzy put his hands in his pockets. Justice for the dead against the dead. What an idea. Arrest that corpse, coppers. Make it pay for what it did. 

“I have to believe it’ll be solved,” she swept a stray hair out of her face, “he deserves that. We should know what happened to him.” 

“He was shot at point black range, probably feet from where they found him,” Charlie said tonelessly. 

“How do you know that?” she scoffed. “You sound like a Law and Order episode.” 

“His skull was shattered. You could see the entrance wound. His ribs were broken, probably a second shot at the heart. Close range given the impact. It would’ve been a very bloody mess. Transporting a body bleeding out like that would’ve been risky. People would’ve seen things. But if you were nearby, you could drag them to that window and shove them in. Maybe go in after them to tidy things up if you needed to.” 

“You always did read too many mystery books,” Alma frowned. “But it sounds plausible, I guess. What do you think, Izzy?” 

“I think it happened a long time ago,”  he said distantly. “And you should mourn however you think is best.” 

What Alma decided was best was a party. Two days later there was a locked door rager, only club staffers and family invited. Izzy made the acquaintance of Charlie’s mother at last. She was not pleased with the meeting though she shook his hand and talked to him neutrally. Icy dislike radiated off of her. Izzy approved. He’d hate him too if he was her. 

Izzy didn’t drink and when he saw Charlie gunning for another shot, he pushed it further down the bar. 

“Oh, hey,” he pouted. 

“You’re getting loud,” Izzy put a hand to Charlie’s back. “You’re getting dangerous, sweetheart.” 

“I want to go,” Charlie sat down heavily on the barstool. “I keep seeing him here. Or them. They’re everywhere and nowhere and that isn’t fucking fair. It should be one or the other, don’t you think?” 

“Yeah, sweetheart, I know.” 

“I want it to go back to before. When I didn’t know for sure. When I could pretend that it was all maybe.” 

“I know.” 

“Don’t you?” 

Izzy wrapped an arm around Charlie’s shoulders. “No. Pretending hurt worse than knowing the truth.” 

Charlie cried and Izzy held him and no one bothered them. Grief was grief, so Izzy figured it was all honest enough. 

“Take me back to the beach,” Charlie begged through his sobs. “I hate this fucking city.” 

They were gone by the next afternoon. It took days for Charlie to refind his routine. He slept long hours, wandered like a ghost at night. Izzy didn’t chase after him, didn’t try to smooth it down. Instead, he made good food, kept their bedroom dark and kept his own metronome life ticking away. Eventually, piece by piece, Charlie fell back into routine. 

He didn’t accuse Izzy of anything and if he was angry with him, it disappeared incrementally with every sunrise they watched together. Within a few months, their lives were normal again. Read and Anne took it all in stride, but were clearly grateful when the worst was over. They weren’t going to lose Charlie, an essential piece of their small world. IzzyandCharlie remained unbroken, a safe bedrock to continue to build upon.

That was good for them. Izzy breathed into it. 

He waited for a night in April, then slipped away from Charlie’s soft sleeping wheezes. The beach was different in the dark, painted in shades of black and blue. His flashlight didn’t do much against the persistent dark, the moon too slivered to be of much aid. But he made it to the water’s edge before sinking to his knees in the sand. 

From his pocket, he drew out the first thing he’d stolen in years. The silk square was ratty, moth-eaten now. In the gloom of the night, it didn’t even look red, just a deep black stain over his hands. 

“Knew you had this on you all the time,” he told the silk. “Don’t know why you thought it was a secret. Hard to hide red on black. 

“You never got a funeral. Not sure you would’ve wanted one anyway, but the chance got lost in there. There’s been so much time gone...I don’t know if I remember you right anymore. You were brave and funny. Unpredictable and clever. I remember racing through the streets. Fucking like we thought we were trying to kill each other. Building a life together even after that. I remember that you loved candy and meeting new people. You loved new things. Novelty. 

“Eddy, I loved you,” he tightened his hold on the fabric. “And I built the gun that killed you. I’m so fucking sorry for that. I’m sorry I never searched for you even if it would’ve been too late. I spent twenty years looking to you and then I just...blinked. I looked away for a second because I was angry with you for going. For leaving me without a second look back. 

“But maybe you would’ve looked. Maybe he took that from me. From us. We’ll never know now. And I’m so sorry. And you are so very fucking gone that this can’t mean shit to you. But I’m still sorry. And I still miss you all the fucking time. All these years I spent trying not to think about you and I did nearly every goddamn day anyway. 

“Goodbye, Eddy.” 

He let the wind take the fabric, watching it flutter out over the water. It might just as easily wash back up tomorrow or it might be dragged to the depths in seconds, never to be seen again. He’d look for it now and again. Another thing to search for in the water. 

He heard the footsteps before he saw the shadow. 

“What was that?” 

“A funeral,” Izzy told him. 

Charlie knelt down beside him in the sand. “Tell me about her.” 

There was no immortality. But Izzy could tell Charlie stories. If the world was fair, Charlie would be here long after Izzy and he’d have those stories. Maybe he’d even tell them to someone else some day. Charlie might even write a book, filled with those stories and give a copy to Izzy mere weeks before publication.

Eddy could live a little longer in her legends. It was the only gift Izzy had left to give her.

[aranarumei]

i'm still reeling over this. at least now i'm reeling with... let's call these annotations, but they're not that highbrow. commentary? commentary. read at your own risk. all typos are my own, as are all failures of comprehension and/or eloquence.

he kind of doesn’t know why he does it, didn’t really take the time to think about it. all he knows is that the time read 2:41 a moment ago and changed the second shirahama’s voice crackled over the phone, “what?”

first sentence and so many things to say already. tashiro immediately so strongly characterized by acting before he thinks, and the moment itself happens in this cluttered, scattershot sentence, bridging together the reflection the action and shirahama’s dialogue all in one. Full approval to the disregard for conventional dialogue tags. not only does the lapslock allow you more leniency just by being what it is, keeping all this stuff in one paragraph really sells the surprise and fluidity of the moment. 

tashiro squeezes his eyes shut, groggily rubbing a thumb over quick-drying salt at the outer corner of his eye. “just dreamed about hanzawa senpai dying on me.” 

“…” shirahama breathes in; tashiro can hear him hold it. similarly, the sound of his hand being dragged over his face is crisp and loud.

finally, he says, “fascinating.” 

this exchange is so awesome. not just saying this because shirahama saying fascinating like that is totally how I talk, but it’s like. there’s a deliberate casualness to the whole situation. The way tashiro phrases it like it’s something weird, nothing more. The way he’s not crying, those aren’t tears—we’ll just reference “quick-drying salt”. shirahama’s silent but exasperated in a kind of comical, gag-like way. it just manages the tone so well. it’s serious, in some senses—in a lot of others, they’re just highschoolers. it’s kind of a comedy. that doesn’t make it any better or worse. 

could go for a vending machine drink, yeah, but he hasn’t had the chance to yet. hard to sneak out of club when you’re the president. harder still when you’ve got a nosy little ghost creeping over your shoulder about it.

not that anyone’s dead. that was a metaphor. the ball’s put back in play. tashiro’s mind wanders back outward.

placing all this introspection in the context of playing ping pong is SO good. also hanzawa as a ghost. really good. love how tashiro’s maybe inherited some of that sadism but he’s still very himself as club president. points to tashiro for the correct usage of the word “metaphor”.  

started keeping a personal score of how many piercings he’s got to compare against the cagey answers he gets when he asks the question, Hey, senpai, how many piercings have you got now? 

just feel like letting u know that when i first read this at 4am or whatever my insomniac self opened it’s mouth and replied, Hey, Tashiro, why don’t you bite his ear and find out? 

tashiro gonzaburou is curious about hanzawa masato and wants to know things about him. 

this sentence is so good like. you’ve showed this already but just saying things so plainly is. it’s good. hits hard, because it’s a sentence that’s so simple it’s almost over-sincere. 

someone who had piercings before and more piercings after, and likes milk tea, and will not turn down a favor asked of him no matter how many other favors he’s doing already. 

such a choice thing to pick as tashiro’s last hanzawa description. like, the other stuff we know, but it’s like… all those details, the 100-person groupchat, the milk tea, the piercings… we, the audience, know it because of tashiro. and like this thing about favors is… it’s implied, sure, but the confidence in which tashiro states this suggests some kind of like. personal involvement. his voice message about wanting hanzawa to sleep. of course you know this, dirtbra1n. you wrote it, and you’re a genius worthy of any inner circle. 

a weird senpai who decided out of the blue one day to finally hammer in that last nail in tashiro’s custom-made president-shaped coffin. 

i feel so crazy about this description. like, as far as weird senpai go, tashiro has two. the coffin is custom-made, like it’s meant for one person, but it’s president-shaped, which isn’t just the one shape. but it’s a special, unique kind of coffin nonetheless. like i know you address this at the end of the scene, but it’s so awesome how this sentence so perfectly leads you into thinking like… oh, that’s hanzawa, tashiro’s special senpai… sike! 

ping—pong—ping-pong-PING—PONG. “ha-HA!”

so obsessed with this. like the formatting conveying the increasing intensity of a volley in ping pong, and then crucially, that rush of excitement as a win. it’s so like—in the middle of a really introspective bit, tashiro’s natural charm and excitement spark into sight. 

tashiro, spooling thought back up as neatly as he can the table’s net, clocks two corrections to make.

yeah this line fucks. that spooling phrase, that’s so awesome. how’d u know I like zeugmas. 

sat with his legs criss-crossed on unfinished stone, knife getting weaved through idle fingers, tashiro watches up the river. 

thinking about this. tashiro’s the butcher. he’s the one with the knife, but he’s not like… ruthless. he’s idle. you’ve used the term weave—like butchery is a kind of domestic work. (skipped the playlist forward to put on butcher vanity for this one. just for fun. will borrow a lyric from that song and call this an “aortic work of art”.) the stone is unfinished, because they are. he’s looking upstream, for something to arrive towards him. not for something drifting downstream and away. 

he’s sat for three more blinks before he hears one solitary CRACK, maybe a musket, some kind of old-timey gun for sure, and falls back with a hole in his forehead. 

this just makes me think of tashiro buying that gun on his school trip. it also makes me think of. well. that taisho era au, but… well. won’t that kill me, too? oh also perfect sonic description as always. i love how your writing utilizes sound and onomatopoeia in particular. 

hanzawa senpai, spoken of by the devil, is here in front of him, and he looks… 

wordless feelings about the way you’ve decided to mess with the phrase “speak of the devil” into spoken of by. it’s doing untold damage to me. it’s also a decidedly sinister kind of descriptor, which contrasts with the following description in a painful way. 

scared. big shoulders shuddering a little, strong arms connected to shapely, masculine, trembling hands, toned legs tense enough to break into a run, handsome face almost hidden in full, half-dozen piercings in his ear, at least, glinting.

this description is SO. tashiro’s assessment reveals so much. the way he describes hanzawa as attractive all while cataloguing his fear. the way he specifically does this in a way that highlights hanzawa’s masculinity, and we know tashiro’s kind of got some gender things going on— 

and you pull back from all of that with the hiding, of the face, and the assessment of his ear piercings once again; he’s keeping score. 

“tashiro-kun,” he says. tashiro startles. feels a little stupid after. hanzawa senpai raises his head enough to look at tashiro’s face, sort of. “how are you?” 

this is something i have to steal (learn) from again. tashiro’s actions are neatly caught between hanzawa’s dialogue instead of breathing in their own paragraph. it makes the moment feel tight, intimate. 

it’s not really an answer to his question when hanzawa senpai says, plainly, lightheartedly, his eyes sliding shut and that smile pulling at his lips, “I’m doing bad.” 

would love to know what tashiro means by that smile. the fact that i don’t know is proof of tashiro Knowing things, though, and that’s really cool. Neat to see how they unintentionally mirror each other, though. like, hanzawa’s saying this like it’s a drink order. tashiro recalls hanzawa dying in his dreams like it’s a bit of whatever, too. both are a kind of non-confrontation. 

“I like someone.”

oh, wow. “I didn’t know you could do that.” 

this is fucking hilarious by the way. like i laughed out loud in sharp delight when i read this line. tashiro describes the silence before this statement like a black hole and once he gets the words he goes oh, wow. it’s comedy. tears in my eyes. 

he’s home and wearing one less shoe than he was a second ago when a big long reel of spooled memory barrels over him.

he’s wearing no shoes when he says, out loud, “Wait.” 

this is also so funny. I mean the reaction is vague, but seeing where it’s placed, i have to imagine this is tashiro going: wait, hanzawa senpai likes someone. the recurring use of the spool, and the mundane of taking off his shoes as he’s grappling with something potentially catastrophic—it’s amazing. 

embrace it. go into the water, take hold of his wrist before he plunges under, go down with him. pull him into your chest before you can think better of it. 

[head in hands] there’s two different kinds of embracing going on here. also really good usage of the second person. it makes everything feel so instinctive. like it’s a command from the soul. 

senpai’s warmth clings stubbornly to your chest—he’s far from small, so the temperature feels like a botched seam in your subconscious; pressure from the inside and out, water pressure compressing you to one single, massive point of contact. 

“botched seam in your subconscious” what an incredible turn of phrase. the way you’ve used this water pressure to both obscure and amplify the language of touch and sensation of temperature… there’s water pressure, and then the pressure of contact, the warmth of someone against yourself… 

you won’t see the glossy stone you rocket into; only hear the sickening crack. 

love how this mirrors the previous. the CRACK of a gunshot and now the crack of glossy stone. 

I’ve played a game like this before, you know. girl insists on cleaning up all on her own and she gets—

shirahama undercutting this situation is so. it’s like. the way it’s a game, like something that can be gamed, and solved. the way mr. dating sim is referencing like. a horror event. the way the horror event is what gets mentioned, here, alongside the drowning and the dead. that’s what it is. also i love that you introduce this here and not at the moment of tashiro in the classroom, which is debatably more relevant. 

sopping wet, tashiro says, “this is so gross.”

worse than wet, a gnarly broken… everything, replies, “you’re telling me.”

they’re soooo funny. twirls hair. gross, tashiro says. I’m reading this as that crack of stone. hanzawa’s probably bruised/bleeding to death. probably already is, but he’s dream-talking. gross, because they’re children, and because tashiro is blunt like that. 

jolts, pitches, watches his heart plummet. watches himself plummet, too.

love how this mirrors the dream, with the plummeting… makes the horror feel real for us, too. 

he gives the classroom a courtesy sweep. 

love the wordplay in this. sweeping like looking for intruders but also sweeping because he’s holding a broom so might as well sweep the floors. it’s what those things are made to do. 

the cold has a numbing, vicious bite to it. the sound of his shoes on cement and old, dead, dry grass is deafeningly loud cutting through the still. 

just. really good words. can you tell i’m having a hard time getting the proper words to appreciate it. because i am. it’s just like… the words you use are so cood at conveying a feeling of death… apart from the dead grass, it’s dry and old like a skeletal thing, and the cold is numbing, cement is unforgiving, and there’s a still. it’s just such a good job in terms of evoking non-motion. 

it’s not his or shirahama’s genre, but tashiro feels eerily like the protagonist of one of those first-person horror games. crunching and slipping, no good foothold. he swallows stiffly; his collar, pressed up against his adam’s apple, is too tight. 

noted tashiro girlisms enjoyer is not going to be normal about the collar pressing against his adam’s apple. that protagonist shirahama mentioned was a girl. 

shadow of the moon, not much else to look at. he takes a picture to send shirahama, accompanies it with a text that reads have u gone outside today

they’re so friends. absolutely the type of people to make fun of each other like this. love how quickly shirahama reads him in response. also “not much to look at” yeah i’m going to go crazy about how it’s just the shadow you see. 

still unstained, tashiro squints wearily at his reflection in the cleaver’s face. 

tashiro as butcherrrrrr. really good. again i love how its unstained, and not like. no blood. you’re so good at being vague in a really pointed way. 

ta—shi—ro—kuuun. tashiro cradles his phone in his hands as he goes back down the hall. are you free? I know it’s late.

hanzawa drawing out tashiro’s name like this will never not get me. it’s the stringing out of the name and then the consideration, the admission of the time. why is he so weird!!!! like the way he says that name, it suggests this kind of… play, playfulness, right, like he’s yanking tashiro’s chain, and then he moves right out of that space but the past doesn’t disappear. 

at one point or another, he takes the cleaver to old wood.

you know. this doesn’t make me think butcher. this makes me think woodcutter. like a folk hero. 

tashiro’s looking down at hanzawa senpai standing in a dried up waterway with a trash claw in his hand. 

really good line. waterway—river—dried up and dead. last uses of the word “claw” have been used to describe the creeping edge of paranoia. now it’s just this mundane thing hanzawa’s holding. if I’m crazy I say it’s representative of how he keeps distance. you can’t touch the trash with your hands. 

tashiro’s been calling so long his voice has gone raw, rumblier, and hanzawa masato hears it through the din of blood in his ears and static behind his eyes and he croaks, so quiet, reverent, out of his mind, “god?” 

god… i love how blurred everything gets here. they’re texting, tashiro’s alone in the school, hanzawa’s there, he’s the cleaver, and all of it works even though it darts around reality. dunno how you always do it so effectively. also insane sequence of description words. you’re so good at prose… 

hanzawa senpai, with something like a dozen cuts in each foot, is leaving a bloody trail; it makes tashiro wince. senpai won’t let him wrap the—he’s not gonna admit it but he won’t let tashiro touch him, damn it.

just going to essentially repeat what i said first time i saw this. the way you’ve chosen to omit tashiro calling the injuries what they are—a wound, damage, cuts, scars, slashes, anything—and cut into touching really enhances that this frustration’s core lies at intimacy and not injury. it’s really good i love how the blood is not really the problem here. 

you’d think, running from a flood—taxing, tiring, kind of pointless, a massive pain in the ass—that you’d take a leg up when it’s offered to you. 

I love how that description of a flood is also a really good way to describe hanzawa. 

senpai, though. he’s running like—tashiro swallows around that something again. he’s running like he’s not bleeding out, first of all. like his eyes aren’t foggy. like you can’t nearly see straight through him—this would be funny irony if anything funny was happening at all. 

tashiro, thinking something is ironic: wow, this is like, funny irony, but like not-funny irony. wonder what word that would be.

anyways. something interesting about the clear vision of this. hanzawa without foggy eyes, but he’s seen straight through, but also nothing is clear. 

laughs as he apologizes to the faceless people he blusters past, even though they haven’t heard one single objection. 

thinking about this. he’s smiling he’s laughing. he looks like he’s having fun. he has to apologize, almost compulsively. guy who’s so scared of everything. that’s what I see. 

“tashiro-kun,” hanzawa senpai manages, pulling the less mangled arm, the one tashiro moved to take hold of, up to his face to wipe at his eyes. 

I’m very delicate. are these not-tears again. or is that fogginess. is that fogginess tears. probably I won’t survive the answer. the way he’s laughing through all of this but has to manage dialogue. 

another peal of rough laughter sees old blood spat onto the stone. “no. you go.” 

yeah this fucks so hard. laughter bites into some kind of violence with your description… the rejection here. Like… you know the hit is coming, but you can’t really brace for it. [head in hands] OH MY GOD… i was like “hm that expression sounds familiar” and i think it might be from an mtv interview stephenie meyer gave soon after the release of the book, breaking dawn. I’m so cursed forever. fuck butchery hanzawa i have worse horrors than you dude

tashiro watches senpai’s throat bob. old blood gets older, looks like it’s been there forever. “you’re going to see me cry.”

GUY WHOS INCAPABLE OF VULNERABILITY!!!! GUY WHO’D RATHER DIE!!!!!!!! man. the usage of dreamscape is so good here… it magnifies the feeling so deliciously. you’re so good at. is the word surrealism? the following exchange just slaps so much. the frustration tashiro’s feeling, the forced defeat, the lack of humor in the situation. even though hanzawa’s, well. who’s to say that it’s laughter. 

he’s lying down in bed when he says, “oh, my drink.” 

this gave me whiplash. that vending machine drink? from ping pong? i saw like three deaths or some shit, what do you mean, your drink— 

why shouldn’t he get mad and frustrated and have cracks in his composure spilling over each other. why shouldn’t his face fall when he sees someone he cares about dying all over again for the— 

the spilling here, cracks… it aligns interestingly with tashiro describing himself as some kind of human kettle. also this makes that plaintive statement about caring for hanzawa and worrying for him have so much more weight. Like, man, of course it’s something he has to introspect deeply about and state. of course he has to state it, if someone keeps acting like he won’t believe it. 

why shouldn’t tashiro crumple when the moon drops out of the sky. 

“just” the shadow of the moon, huh. 

why shouldn’t he stare up at it when he’s fallen on his back, hard, with a stupid, smoking hole in his forehead. 

a witness, mourner, undertaker. the only person around to look the corpse in the eyes. 

well. butcher also looks at corpse, i say, super intelligently (not). dunno about the eye contact. I think it might feel like that. but eyes… well, hanzawa’s tend to be closed or obscured quite often. eye-smile, you know. 

tashiro got brought into it. all of it has hurt. it can’t be helped; if you see someone drowning, you try to pull them up. that’s all. that’s interesting. 

gasping, grasping, coughing, free fall. three beats: CRAAACK.

CRACK. crack. CRAAACK. you’re so good at sounds db

“sorry,” says shirahama, raspy. “can’t use my hands right now. talk.”

“wh—what are—”

click. click. br-ri-ring!

ah. “never mind.” 

[EXTREMELY DELIGHTED LAUGHTER]

“oh, I see. ‘another one’.” 

tbh if my friend texted me at odd hours of the night, telling me about the homoerotic dreams he’d been having, even if they were kind of serious, I would be razzing him. shirahama you’re so funny.

isn’t that because you did a bad job!? “st—” 

so like. I think about this comment a little. that’s the frustration here, I think, that tashiro wants to be able to do something. that this should be a case of doing, like, a bad job, instead of an unskippable cutscene. 

shirahama weeps, “mysterious older girl.”

a crease forms between tashiro’s brow. “I think… I probably can’t help.” 

who else is mysterious older… not-girl, I suppose, but like a coffin, that isn’t custom-made. there’s more than one shape that fits there. part of me is also like. sooo curious to know what kind of game mechanics are involved in this galge that’s not real. i think shirahama & tomoda should kiss. 

he closes one eye and goes blind in the other.

oh just kill me. the fact that this sentence is placed in the middle of mundane dialogue makes me feel like i’m devouring my skin. also the fact that the dialogue sounds mundane but it’s shirahama’s ambiguous vote of confidence regarding tashiro’s continued survival. so that’s also kind of insane.

a note of longing floats from one bedroom to the other, “mirai.” 

wonder if that’s supposed to mean future…? fascinating. also really good prose, that drifting longing. the way it establishes connection between shirahama and tashiro, but also suggests like… tashiro’s longing, too. 

shirahama sobs.

tashiro’s throat closes up a bit. “shouldn’t have said that, sorry. I’m sorry. give the book back, return the bracelet later.” 

something really tender about how this gets a bit too real, even though it’s a game and what’s going on with tashiro is… well, i don’t actually know what that is. 

a screenshot of the game menu reads, ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO RESTART?

OH FUCK OFFFFFF. <- thing i said when i read this line. then i opened up my DIE OVER? playlist because of course tashiro post is going to make me have dating sim au feelings. of course that’s a normal fucking thing i should be expecting, because you want me dead— 

tashiro climbs back under his covers and throws an arm over his eyes. swallows hard. an echo of words he wanted to hear just once: I want to. 

way too many things to say about this scene but i truly don’t have the words. literally just look at that conversation. the overflow of want, imbued in that whole thing. the fear and the trepidation and the unknown of it all. I want to live. shirahama’s maybe too attached to the game. tashiro’s attached it with—the river, i guess. I don’t know whether I’d describe him as too attached. he just is. but I personally don’t want to say he’s too much. don’t really wanna call shirahama that, either…

tashiro’s still flat on his back when he hears hanzawa senpai’s voice say, dull and rumbly and cracking, “please, god, just make me clean.” 

trash claw. that reverence, when he saw tashiro. tashiro, reflected in the cleaver, but still unstained. clean. I am putting things together without proper conclusions except for like. tears. from my eyes. ha. you can’t see my cry, though. 

he’s set flat on his back when that stupid gun shoots him, too. 

“those dreams you’re having are your dreams, and generally I think it means something when you get into these… situations… over and over with one person in those dreams.”

[EXTREMELY DELIGHTED LAUGHTER PT. 2] 

tashiro, someplace between bored and enraptured, and able to stand on two feet, is carving notches into rotting wood. 

love this line. it’s like, the constancy of this dream. of course it’s boring in a way. but hanzawa, voice worn anew, that’s gotta be something special. also the “able to stand on two feet” is such a good way of conveying the magnitude of how injured hanzawa is. I’m glad it’s not easy for him to die. 

“ta—shi—ro.” he felt warm breath on his ear and jumped. “d’you wanna free pass to say my name?” 

THIS IS EVIL. the—the same way hanzawa says it, minus a honorific. but that three-syllable stretch, that’s all… well, if anyone’s copying, it’s probably not prev pres. 

tashiro caught his breath enough to say, “what would I want that for?!”

“oh, you did.” 

this dialogue arrangement is so… the way it’s like, oh, you did hear my question, but visually it sounds like hes saying you did about the wanting. which… I remember love & passion. that was a wanting that did until it didn’t, all of a sudden. 

tashiro looked up at the president. the president was looking down at where tashiro was rubbing the space over his heart. 

the height difference here, and the sort of like… physical tension that it creates here. really good setup for the [GUNSHOT] later. it’s just such immediately good characterization, though, of a kind of unreachable existence. he’s imposing and a tease and unknowable and knowing. 

tashiro paused to take a sip of his water. “…mm?” a little dribbled out the corner of his mouth. 

[head in hands] you knowwwwwww i get fucked up about water bottles. you KNOW!! whatever. I’m going to delude myself into thinking you used the word “dribbled” because shirahama plays basketball. “why would linking that be relevant right now—” I didn’t say I was smart, okay? 

two long strides; he crouched right in front of him. brought his glasses up to sit atop his head. went over the corner of tashiro’s mouth with his pinky, like tashiro didn’t already wipe the water there. 

[GUNSHOTS] this doesn’t qualify for laughter. I’m like seigi handling richard’s… hair. pinky finger, like it doesn’t mean anything. glasses off, to be… I don’t know. eye to eye. I asume that’s why he crouches. the way this emphasizes his like… height, physically, and also just the. largeness of his existence. 

he smiled knowingly. “break’s over. up we get.”

choked. just remembered tashiro fervently wishing for hanzawa to get up. 

hanzawa senpai, from the storage room, called back distantly, “one more round!”

the distance of this gets me, like… they didn’t fully know each other, yet. not that they know each other now, but—the stuff is different. one more round! tashiro’s hollow emptiness when the prev pres leaves. one more round, and he’s locking eyes(?) with hanzawa. 

another lifetime, maybe, when tashiro through the throbbing in his forehead hears a low voice—electrifyingly familiar—ask liltingly, “do you want to be clean or don’t you?” 

the bathhouse… taisho era au strikes with a vengeance. anyways. why does this dialogue sound like he’s asking, do you want to be alive or don’t you? also the idea of prev pres existing in this au is going to have me killed. 

“tashiro.” his name jolted through him, and another ball went flying past him, closer this time. tashiro’s gaze fell back across the table just in time to see hanzawa senpai reloading the president with another missile.

they’re so weirdddd. it’s like. the way with how you’ve constructed the paragraph, for a moment one might mistake this dialogue for hanzawa. you get to just in time to see hanzawa senpai and then you lead into reloading the president with another missile, and so you recenter, tashiro recenters, and hanzawa moves into the background. what’s wrong with everybody. 

tashiro’s whole mouth feels kind of numb, actually. “what?” 

oh? like, say, cotton mouth?

he saw a smile tugging at the president’s lips out of the corner of his eyes. “‘that so? why not? practice against me off the record… thought you’d do more with it.”

tashiro’s brow furrowed. “your arm’s like a gun.”

loud laughter hit him at the back of his knees. the president’s arm drew back. “hey, tashiro,” he said gamely. tashiro dropped his weight into his feet. “incoming.” 

oh first time i read this i knew the gun was something but on the second time around I am Realizing something. let’s connect prev pres to a gun for a moment. let that linger. 

instead of confronting it I will think about the subtleties of calling something off the record. Of, once again, the emphasis of prev pres’ strength. that bigness, it’s unavoidable. it’s like it creeps into every bit of tashiro’s narration, like he’s incapable of not noticing it, not commenting on it. 

an arm holds him up by the waist; tashiro’s head rolls limply onto a broad shoulder. warmth drips low in his ear, “guess you’ve got sharper ears than I gave you credit for after all, huh?”

I don’t even want to place this into context. brain isn’t working enough to do so. can’t delighted laughter about it either this is like. sexy-threatening. 

tashiro figured it out a while ago. that he wants to win, but not the way everyone else does. this much time spent playing against the old folks at the bathhouse, more time spent in club without him than with him, and he still gets a taste in his mouth, once in a while, that says, I want to beat him. 

this is just a really well-constructed paragraph. like not really any analysis here, but this just says the thing in the most correct way to me. it’s just so good, but in a way where it’s just plain effective. 

hungering for the chance. hungering for the chance to get one over him. 

[hollering] and on top of him!!!!

the entire thing feels like tashiro’s got this unfulfilled something, playing out this game of cat and mouse. because they saw something in you.

he saw something in you. you don’t even realize you’re idolizing him until—

the they -> he shift might’ve done me in. 

yet.

shirahama’d amended his statement: 

I’m trembling. I couldn’t think of what statement this was and then all of a sudden I remembered that thing about bucket lists and then I really started shaking. 

tashiro doesn’t recognize the cleaver but he knows it’s his hand holding it because he sees the trembling of the blade and feels the trembling in his wrist and forearm, bicep, shoulder, chest, ribs. connective tissue being sheared by the fiber. he doesn’t recognize the cleaver but he still sees his reflection in the metal. 

love the disconnection of tashiro from this idea of a butcher, because like, he is that, he’s holding the knife and everything, but he’s not quite… all of it. 

some time ago—he doesn’t know, it doesn’t matter—tashiro pinched his lips together. “uh.” wet them. 

[despairingly] so, like, tashiro, there’s this thing called chapstick, and they come in some pretty like, fun flavors, which maybe, well, I don’t know if you’d be into it but others could be, I guess you both could be—

senpai closed his eyes.

senpai covered his face.

something about this strikes at me, because it’s exasperation, but also like… obfuscation. he’s hiding. 

senpai has got that damn look in his eyes now, too many moving parts; self loathing and good humor, anger and pity and hurt. he asks skeptically, like it’s been weighing on him, “you couldn’t use a normal knife?” 

don’t know why this specific section made me cry, but oh boy, I cried. badly. madly. just. they’re both kneeling, looking at each other, but it’s still too much, to get all the words out, to really do much of anything. hanzawa’s hurt—he looks like he’s hurt, and not just ‘cause he’s bleeding. he for-real looks like he’s got negative emotions up in his noggin. 

tashiro wants to tell him, you don’t trust me. I’m better with this thing than I look, I’ll show you. it’ll tell me something, so give me the worst you’ve got.

and this, the weird begging of it… this dialogue makes we weepy

“man,” says shirahama, muffled, distressed, “do you remember ‘hey’?” 

I am also so distressed right now. The way shirahama’s still keeping that faux-casual veneer though even in that there’s this sense of distress. it’s fucked up!

“look at you, tashiro,” the arm curling just under his hip trembles for a second. “tall enough now that I have to really hoist you to keep you off the ground.”

now I’m frustrated. really good way of keeping this height emphasis fresh, by the way. now I’ve remembered that tashiro’s taller than hanzawa now. still not as tall as prev pres, I bet. 

all he sees is skin. he heaves a sigh and feels a jolt run up the body carrying him so vividly it pings in his brain as plain electricity. 

and, of course, the way it’s electricity mentioned in the taisho era au, with that nameless person… the way it’s all skin. that’s suggestive. that’s a tease. 

bullet hole be damned, tashiro drops his head back onto its perch.  

[frenzied stillness] it’s the gun again. 

the quarter of a face he can see smiles a little. “you can handle a little cruelty from me, can’t you?” 

not only is this line killer, i love that he can’t see prev pres fully. 

talking to the train tracks, tashiro announces, “I think something is really wrong.” 

what train tracks. what train tracks— 

shirahama only replies, “congratulations on finally hitting puberty.” 

[EXTREMELY DELIGHTED LAUGHTER PT. 3] shirahama thanks for being my buddy thru this all… 

—

lasts only until he emerges with a little kid’s wet cough before laughing hard enough to push tears out his eyes. 

thinking about how this is how we see hanzawa cry, first time. he’s laughing here, too. 

“now then,” tashiro and hanzawa senpai watch him reach over his head to tug at the neckline of his uniform shirt. it comes off in one motion after that. “should be for the best that you two make way…!” 

[broken laugh] do you want to be clean or don’t you? 

[faintly] I am not addressing the. the rest of that. I don’t have words for it. 

there’s a sign over hanzawa senpai’s head. if tashiro squints—it’s a dusty ditch-sign and the evening’s only getting dimmer—he can barely make out the words NO DIVING.

ignoring the fact that they totally failed that, i love how kind of mundane the sign is. it’s just placed well, this bit, in the whole of everything. 

tashiro’s head is lying on—

[...]

—the president’s forearm. there is the occasional muscle tremor. tashiro feels no particular way about this. 

WELL I DO. 

hanzawa senpai has got his wide eyes on when tashiro turns his head. 

tashiro’s bangs just got brushed down. If I’m having a crisis, hanzawa better be having one! 

long pause. tashiro squints an eye to see hanzawa senpai pinching his lips. “…hold still for a second.” tashiro’s eyes fly open as hanzawa senpai takes his more busted hand to brush up tashiro’s bangs. “I suppose so.” he takes a finger and flicks tashiro’s forehead dead center. “you’re back in one piece, after all.” 

hair fixation. I respect that. I am also thinking about holes, now. Specifically a kind of, say, “a yawning, lonely feeling of loss” and then I don’t get it. What happened to the loneliness? tashiro’s back in one piece. 

a snapshot: tashiro’s wrist, between jaws, and a crunch. 

read this and thought to myself: man. I have got to get weirder. 

shirahama sits up to look at him. he has tears in his eyes. “can you give me like twenty minutes to pretend I’m dead.”

“I think I’m just really touch-starved.”

“Please.” 

[EXTREMELY DELIGHTED LAUGHTER PT. 4] yeah i also pretend i’m dead for like twenty minutes each line i read. shirahama and me, we get each other. kinda-sorta. I think I’m actually prev pres, which is a terrifying line of thought to go down. 

he doesn’t look down at it to swing it right again. sheepishly, he coughs, “cosplaying the meat guy at the supermarket.” 

HE’S THE BUTCHER!

“ain’t enough for you to just let me haunt you, huh, tashiro?”

tashiro shifts his feet, squints, exasperated, across the table. “I can’t just take it lying down forever, you know.”

the table rattles. tashiro hasn’t ever felt his heart pound like this. he’s asked: “spoiling for a fight?”

the weird romantic of all of this… it’s crazy! not enough to be haunted… what, does he want to be hunted, too?

dull teeth grin sharply at him.

taisho era au strikes again… shining, dull teeth. really good way to give prev pres character, again. 

“get home quick. and, ah, good luck tomorrow,” he says. 

looming feeling of danger. good luck for what, I think to myself. there’s also something about ceilings and sky and looking up that i haven’t quite pinned down yet. perhaps it’s for me to get another time. 

—

miyano, to his right, looks at him with massive doll eyes. kuresawa, to his left, fixes him with a stare over his glasses before going back to his phone. 

I know they don’t get much space here, but you perfectly pin them down here. It’s so great

hanzawa senpai, dead center, looks down at him, hands ghosting over his neck where he was ‘evening his complexion’ a second ago, before tashiro went and opened his mouth, and he says, “really?” 

yeah. perfect use of the word ghosting, there. thank you so much. also great it’s the cultural festival i’m going to be sick. sure, go even his complexion. go cover up a bruise. i’m kidding. don’t. tell someone how to, though.

fingers poke lightheartedly where bone juts. tashiro’s in a glass jar, and he flinches.

he’s getting studied. he should learn, though. if he’s going to hold a cleaver, he better learn.

probably bl. tashiro poses with a hand on his cheek and says, “thanks, miyano.” 

and once again i’m haunted by miyano saying it’s “too easy” to imagine tashiro in a BL situation. 

the picture he takes of his feet, hovering as he sits on the windowsill and clad in black crew socks—he left the shoes somewhere else, he figures miyano will chase him down about them later—is waiting to be sent with incomplete text suck i when he spots someone out the very corner of his vision.

like tashiro, I want to delight at the way he and shirahama bicker, but like him, the slightest bit of prev pres is going to divert my attention. and kill me. I really do love shirahama and tashiro though. They bicker in a really fun teenage way, but also a way that’s like, elegant in a way that fiction can achieve over reality. It’s so cool…!

funny thing about crossdressing, see, is the worldview shift. that broad back looks broader, a piece-of-work senpai haunting his memory like a grief-hallucination. 

oh i just straight up want to highlight this whole thing. It’s all explosions. grief-hallucination, like somehow that hyphenated compounded noun fucks me over because it’s so succinct, because you could use more words but you really, really, don’t have to. as always I admire your creativity with the writing format. and here that constant emphasis of like… broad back, of height, intersects with the specific gendered context tashiro’s in, and things get so crazy I feel dizzy.

how many people in the world could possibly look like that. 

I think I might’ve said this already but it bears repeating: you do such a clever job of having tashiro describe people in a way that shows he thinks they’re attractive, all without him really ever needing to really confront that fact. it’s so obvious but it’s also subtle and that’s amazing, to pull that off, and do it with such variety. 

it’s a second of stirring in his stomach that bridges the space between shoujo manga and violent murder. his feet are back on the ground but they might as well be dangling out the window; an impulse in the shape of today you are a girl has him gripped by the shoulders, nearly chasing after a living ghost and using strangers as stepping stones to do it. 

yeah this paragraph just fucks in its entirety. once again another perfect set of words that just lays out the situation with the words that are just the correct ones to use. love is violence. 

thundering resonance. tashiro croaks, “what?” 

it’s electricity again, I see… 

“—this vision of a lost lover. and she goes running after him, obviously, because he moved away when they were kids or whatever. and she missed him sooo bad, so she’s really hoofing it down the stairs and out the front gate and she’s only delicately out of breath, after the whole thing, which I thought was kinda stupid, but whatever. he’s standing a block away, staring back at her over his shoul—tashiro what are you doing?”

we CANNOT be talking about lost lovers at the moment of prev pres’ approach. 

the president’s voice carries like it’s nothing, “you look pretty cute today.”

I think I’m being like. Strangled? sure his voice carries. it’s big and booming or whatever. of course it’s like. inescapable.

tell me your name for real this time. it’s not really fine with me either. “have you, uh. been dreaming about anyone lately?”

the president’s shoulders shake, lips splitting impossibly wider. his eyes shine. tashiro hears thunder. “nooope.”

okay so I think this might be totally out of left field. but like. nooope. but he’s also there, of course, if i’m tracking places and universes right. I think I am. there’s a dream bathhouse, right? “thundering resonance,” I remember that, that line was recent… but I was thinking, really thinking, about that gun. his arm like one. the one that shot tashiro and opened a hole in his chest. got him flat on his back. a bullet hole, like a yawning kind of emptiness in the center of your chest. like you’ve lost something. 

well. I sure feel like I’m being shot at. I sure feel like he’s that gun, too. 

he kind of doesn’t know why he does it, didn’t really take the time to think about it. all he knows is that the time read 2:41 a moment ago and changed the second shirahama’s voice crackled over the phone, “what?”

“gonna tell you something weird.”

“…mhm…?“

tashiro squeezes his eyes shut, groggily rubbing a thumb over quick-drying salt at the outer corner of his eye. “just dreamed about hanzawa senpai dying on me.”

“…” shirahama breathes in; tashiro can hear him hold it. similarly, the sound of his hand being dragged over his face is crisp and loud.

finally, he says, “fascinating.”

—

thing is that tashiro could go for a vending machine drink, right about now.

not that he’s bored. the underclassman sweating and fighting for his life across the net is putting up a solid fight, and sweating enough to really make you believe it. tashiro’s having a lot of fun just watching the kid’s expressions alone.

he returns the ball, hard; there’s a sour taste in his mouth all of a sudden. he wonders if the president position makes sadism into a contagion. the ball floats back in his direction. he sends it back with spin.

his point. his chest inflates with fresh air.

could go for a vending machine drink, yeah, but he hasn’t had the chance to yet. hard to sneak out of club when you’re the president. harder still when you’ve got a nosy little ghost creeping over your shoulder about it.

not that anyone’s dead. that was a metaphor. the ball’s put back in play. tashiro’s mind wanders back outward.

somewhere between here and there, points a and b, aka kinda always aka from the beginning, tashiro started worrying about hanzawa senpai, started thinking about him a lot. started keeping a personal score of how many piercings he’s got to compare against the cagey answers he gets when he asks the question, Hey, senpai, how many piercings have you got now? it’s really not about the words that come out of his mouth, see. there’re more of them now than there were a year ago than there were two years ago. eyes on the prize—sharp eyes pay big dividends. you get the idea.

tashiro gonzaburou is curious about hanzawa masato and wants to know things about him.

it’s hard not to. right? he spent so much time seeing this guy who had a network of something like one hundred people in one single group chat to snitch on tashiro when he tried to play hooky. someone who had piercings before and more piercings after, and likes milk tea, and will not turn down a favor asked of him no matter how many other favors he’s doing already. a weird senpai who decided out of the blue one day to finally hammer in that last nail in tashiro’s custom-made president-shaped coffin.

ping—pong—ping-pong-PING—PONG. “ha-HA!”

tashiro gonzaburou notices and notices and notices, hears and sees and gathers and wonders and thinks thoughts that unspool into these big long tangents of thought that might start with ‘You should sleep more’ but end up right back at ear piercings again.

he also wins games of ping pong.

tashiro, spooling thought back up as neatly as he can the table’s net, clocks two corrections to make.

“see the lot of you tomorrow!”

he wasn’t worried about senpai from the beginning, not the way he is now. and that coffin isn’t custom-made.

—

sat with his legs criss-crossed on unfinished stone, knife getting weaved through idle fingers, tashiro watches up the river.

he’s sat a long time before a massive, shuddering, foreign boat appears there.

he’s sat for three more blinks before he hears one solitary CRACK, maybe a musket, some kind of old-timey gun for sure, and falls back with a hole in his forehead.

—

figures that he spends this much time being curious about hanzawa senpai and, out of the blue, as his reward, goes and finds him sat on hard concrete with his back against the wall, his eyes wide open, his hands at his face.

it’s kind of so far removed from the enigmatic senpai tashiro got used to seeing and wondering about that it’s—like—a bucket of cold water dumped over his head, maybe. waking up out of real deep sleep because of an alarm he didn’t remember setting. another last step on a staircase, followed by another followed by another. or something.

hanzawa senpai, spoken of by the devil, is here in front of him, and he looks…

scared. big shoulders shuddering a little, strong arms connected to shapely, masculine, trembling hands, toned legs tense enough to break into a run, handsome face almost hidden in full, half-dozen piercings in his ear, at least, glinting.

hanzawa senpai, who tashiro didn’t know he could describe so well, is sitting on the ground, against the wall, and he looks scared.

“tashiro-kun,” he says. tashiro startles. feels a little stupid after. hanzawa senpai raises his head enough to look at tashiro’s face, sort of. “how are you?”

how are you? “alright, I guess.” tashiro swallows, looks around a little. “are you, um. what’s up with you, hanzawa senpai?”

it’s not really an answer to his question when hanzawa senpai says, plainly, lightheartedly, his eyes sliding shut and that smile pulling at his lips, “I’m doing bad.”

“oh. why?”

the lull that follows feels a little like what tashiro thinks a black hole would feel like. like it’s sucking all the oxygen out of the air and the breath out of his lungs and the words out of his mind and the everything out of the everywhere. the words that follow throw all of it back out, mach speed.

“I like someone.”

oh, wow. “I didn’t know you could do that.”

hanzawa senpai’s eyes are back on tashiro’s face. “neither did I.”

—

he’s home and wearing one less shoe than he was a second ago when a big long reel of spooled memory barrels over him.

he’s wearing no shoes when he says, out loud, “Wait.”

—

embrace it. go into the water, take hold of his wrist before he plunges under, go down with him. pull him into your chest before you can think better of it. let the water carry you down,

down

down

down

down

down,

cold in your ears and eyes and nose and lungs.

feel it all as much as you can. you don’t have the best grasp of dreams even still, after all this time, but you know that this here won’t ever really compare to the real thing. might as well play at being a kettle for a while, let water fill up any space water could. senpai’s warmth clings stubbornly to your chest—he’s far from small, so the temperature feels like a botched seam in your subconscious; pressure from the inside and out, water pressure compressing you to one single, massive point of contact.

not the real thing. you won’t know what drowning feels like after this, let alone the other thing.

they’re fun things, dreams. in a second you’ll start plummeting, the two of you, divorced from the water. you’ll cough, hard, to expel the water from your body, and it won’t really work but you’ll pull senpai away from your chest to get him to do the same anyway.

and your vision will be blurry, so it won’t really matter when something like a sixth sense has your shoulders tensing up. you won’t see the glossy stone you rocket into; only hear the sickening crack.

what you have to do is embrace it all. it’s not drowning, at least.

—

I’ve played a game like this before, you know. girl insists on cleaning up all on her own and she gets—

—

sopping wet, tashiro says, “this is so gross.”

worse than wet, a gnarly broken… everything, replies, “you’re telling me.”

—

the timing’s off.

tashiro feels he wants to be alone in the classroom after school. he doesn’t really know why. he falls asleep.

jolts, pitches, watches his heart plummet. watches himself plummet, too.

the classroom he wakes up to is pitch dark. figures.

paranoid unsafety gets its claws in him. shirahama’s words drudge themselves up. a girl gets what? tashiro holds a broom stern in his hands and swings it around like there’s something sharp at the end of it.

he gives the classroom a courtesy sweep.

after much debate, he leaves the broom behind when he goes to throw out the trash. probably won’t need it.

the cold has a numbing, vicious bite to it. the sound of his shoes on cement and old, dead, dry grass is deafeningly loud cutting through the still.

it’s not his or shirahama’s genre, but tashiro feels eerily like the protagonist of one of those first-person horror games. crunching and slipping, no good foothold. he swallows stiffly; his collar, pressed up against his adam’s apple, is too tight.

this is something he can blame shirahama for, and he does.

finally he puts out the trash. shoves his back up against the nearest wall and looks up at the sky. shadow of the moon, not much else to look at. he takes a picture to send shirahama, accompanies it with a text that reads have u gone outside today

obviously he has. it’s the principle of the thing.

quickly shirahama replies, You’re just putting the trash out aren’t you

You fell asleep didn’t you

I tried to warn you and everything. Stuuuupid

tashiro squints. takes another photo, of the trash bag. u should be here. two thumbs down emojis. he mutes the conversation before shirahama can reply and shuts his phone off again. pushes himself off the wall.

walks three absent steps towards the door, hands to his lips, blowing into them. the timing’s really off. still unstained, tashiro squints wearily at his reflection in the cleaver’s face. another step. he feels his heart overshoot all the way back up into his throat, distantly for a second, at the sound of a message notification.

those claws dig in a little deeper. he can’t help feeling a little watched. he waits ‘til he’s back inside to take his phone back out. hanzawa senpai.

ta—shi—ro—kuuun. tashiro cradles his phone in his hands as he goes back down the hall. are you free? I know it’s late.

tashiro brings his hands to his chest, trying to leach enough warmth to reply. halfway rickety fingers manage, yea

another few seconds of friction against his sweater. i’m at the school still

hanzawa senpai doesn’t reply for a minute. the classroom door clatters extra loud when he pulls it open. tashiro picks up his bag and creeps down the hall for a third time, footsteps either light or muted. at one point or another, he takes the cleaver to old wood.

the notification tone spooks him again. tashiro grasps his chest.

you didn’t happen to fall asleep there, did you?

tashiro doesn’t reply to that text. where are you, senpai?

a panda sticker laughs at him. the location comes a moment later.

tashiro’s looking down at hanzawa senpai standing in a dried up waterway with a trash claw in his hand.

really, really off. tashiro’s been calling so long his voice has gone raw, rumblier, and hanzawa masato hears it through the din of blood in his ears and static behind his eyes and he croaks, so quiet, reverent, out of his mind, “god?”

—

hanzawa senpai, with something like a dozen cuts in each foot, is leaving a bloody trail; it makes tashiro wince. senpai won’t let him wrap the—he’s not gonna admit it but he won’t let tashiro touch him, damn it.

you’d think, running from a flood—taxing, tiring, kind of pointless, a massive pain in the ass—that you’d take a leg up when it’s offered to you. tashiro swallows around something. tashiro does not ease up on his pace.

senpai, though. he’s running like—tashiro swallows around that something again. he’s running like he’s not bleeding out, first of all. like his eyes aren’t foggy. like you can’t nearly see straight through him—this would be funny irony if anything funny was happening at all.

but really, senpai runs like he’s having fun.

he laughs every time his feet catch on something, every time he jumps over a tree root—always pushing up stones, always reaching for his legs—and every time he’s back on the ground. laughs as he apologizes to the faceless people he blusters past, even though they haven’t heard one single objection. laughs and laughs and—

he’s laughing when he goes skidding on cobbled stone and crashes into a dilapidated market stall. curls into himself, laughing so hard that it sounds like something comes up.

tashiro hisses as he hits the ground beside him, momentum skinning his knees.

“come on, senpai, let’s go,” tashiro reaches for his elbow. “get up.”

“tashiro-kun,” hanzawa senpai manages, pulling the less mangled arm, the one tashiro moved to take hold of, up to his face to wipe at his eyes. “hey, tashiro-kun,” his gaping chest heaves, “go already.”

“yeah,” tashiro says, “let’s go.”

another peal of rough laughter sees old blood spat onto the stone. “no. you go.”

he hears the roar of water. he kind of really doesn’t give a shit about it anymore. “I don’t want to.”

tashiro watches senpai’s throat bob. old blood gets older, looks like it’s been there forever. “you’re going to see me cry.”

what’s so funny? tashiro’s own throat bobs. “wh—“

“go.”

get up. “you can’t really—“

“go.”

tashiro, maybe as angry as he’s ever been in his entire life, stays planted on the ground.

it doesn’t even really sound like laughter anymore. “now why did I know…?” hanzawa senpai puppets himself back onto his feet, listing sideways. tashiro pushes onto a knee to reach for him again and crumples in on himself.

hanzawa senpai drops limply into the river.

“no, wait. wait, just—hold on, you can’t. senpai, you…” tashiro swallows. off the ground, his own blood seeps into the stone. on unsteady legs scraped raw, two steps forward.

tashiro gonzaburou, from on high, spits, “god damn it.”

—

he’s lying down in bed when he says, “oh, my drink.”

—

why shouldn’t he get mad and frustrated and have cracks in his composure spilling over each other. why shouldn’t his face fall when he sees someone he cares about dying all over again for the—

he doesn’t even know how many times it’s been. a nightmare is a nightmare is a nightmare.

why shouldn’t tashiro crumple when the moon drops out of the sky. why shouldn’t he stare up at it when he’s fallen on his back, hard, with a stupid, smoking hole in his forehead.

a witness, mourner, undertaker. the only person around to look the corpse in the eyes.

tashiro got brought into it. all of it has hurt. it can’t be helped; if you see someone drowning, you try to pull them up. that’s all.

if he’s been here once, and more times after that, so many times he can’t even remember, then he’ll keep trying. tashiro sees him drowning, and tashiro tries to pull him up. he tries. he’s trying. he’s—

“come ON. please. please,” he spits out a mouthful of silt. “come on.”

gasping, grasping, coughing, free fall. three beats: CRAAACK.

tashiro wakes up with a groan. rolls sluggishly onto his side, grasps for his phone, texts are u awake

startles a second later when his phone starts buzzing in his hand.

“you scared me.”

“sorry,” says shirahama, raspy. “can’t use my hands right now. talk.”

“wh—what are—”

click. click. br-ri-ring!

ah. “never mind.”

“are you hanging up?”

“no!” tashiro rolls back onto his back, resting his phone on his sternum. “had another one.”

“oh, I see. ‘another one’.”

tashiro ignores him, humming noncommittally. “I think these are… maaaybe. making me worse.”

shirahama sighs, big and drawn-out. he pauses for a second like he’s mulling something over. “…you know…”

a chill rushes down tashiro’s spine like a cold marble. “don’t start—”

“played a game once with a plot like this…”

“dude—”

“really didn’t end well…”

isn’t that because you did a bad job!? “st—”

shirahama ignores him, speaks over him, is suddenly right up to his phone’s receiver. “you could die.”

tashiro digs his palms into his eyes. “you could die.”

he’s still close enough to the receiver that tashiro hears him exhale a sleepy laugh, “juuust saying.” shirahama has returned to his game. click. …click… ba-woomp.

“are you winning?”

another big sigh. “I am losing. so bad.” a thud on the other line. too close, “tashirooo...”

“did you die?”

“she hasn’t killed me but I bet she wants to.”

tashiro sucks on his teeth, grasping around in his memory. “which one is she?”

shirahama weeps, “mysterious older girl.”

a crease forms between tashiro’s brow. “I think… I probably can’t help.”

sniffling. “could you pull up a guide for me?”

tashiro rolls onto the floor and crawls towards his laptop. “do you really think I’m gonna die?”

“well…” silence. tashiro lies on his side and curls up. he closes one eye and goes blind in the other. “probably not.”

massive vote of confidence. “what happened in,” he sighs, kind of defeated, “what happened in your game? and what’s her name.”

a note of longing floats from one bedroom to the other, “mirai.” tashiro guesses at the spelling and completely whiffs it. shirahama’s longing cuts short. “they died, tashiro.”

“before that, though. what happened to them.”

shirahama sniffles some more. “we shared dreams and I tried to save her and I couldn’t. and then we died. they died.” tashiro hears him laugh at himself a little resentfully. “the characters died.”

he refocuses his seeing eye. “what chapter are you on?”

“seven.”

“did you give her the bracelet or her book back?”

“I—” shirahama’s voice travels like his face is in his pillow. “I gave her… melon bread...”

“ohhh.” Her humiliation at the perceived transparency drops her affection low enough to trigger a bad ending, regardless of current standing. “she does want to kill you, a little.”

shirahama sobs.

tashiro’s throat closes up a bit. “shouldn’t have said that, sorry. I’m sorry. give the book back, return the bracelet later.”

face still in the pillow, “the bread?”

“chapter, um. chapter eleven. she really doesn’t want you to know she likes it right now.”

miserably, shirahama replies, “okaaay.” tashiro hears him whisper, I’m really sorry.

click. click. …click. whoosh. tashiro scrolls a little further. a screenshot of the game menu reads, ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO RESTART?

tashiro gives him a minute before asking, “in the other game, that was a bad ending?”

shirahama blows his nose. “yeah.”

“did you go back to fix it?”

he doesn’t reply for a while. br-ri-ring! “I was too scared.”

tashiro flinches.

“I just… I messed it up really bad. it was my fault and she wasn’t even mad at me when she died. held her with blood everywhere ‘cause mine didn’t stick.” tashiro’s eyes fly open. blinding, ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO RESTART?

shirahama keeps going, “I didn’t leave her side after, but I couldn’t carry her home, too weak, so we both just stayed there. I couldn’t do anything. and then I died. and it was over.”

a little nauseous, tashiro reaches out slowly to shut his laptop. “do you know—mm.” what happens when you get it right? “do you think you’re ever gonna try again?”

shirahama’s voice comes out rough. “I wanna save her.”

tashiro climbs back under his covers and throws an arm over his eyes. swallows hard. an echo of words he wanted to hear just once: I want to. “are you doing anything tomorrow?”

tashiro can hear the scowl on his face. “you know I’m not.”

“it’s not too late. to—save her, I mean.”

tashiro can hear the scowl falling away. “yeah. fine, whatever, I’ll go to sleep.”

he finally takes his phone off speaker. “thank youuu. and you’re welcome.”

shirahama grumbles, “I don’t think it’s making you worse, your—this. just kind of…” shirahama sighs through his nose, “different.”

tashiro peels his arm off his face to stare at the fan spinning overhead. “I guess. see you tomorrow.”

“yeah.”

the silence stretches blandly. tashiro presses his lips together. “good night.”

“mm. night.”

—

tashiro’s still flat on his back when he hears hanzawa senpai’s voice say, dull and rumbly and cracking, “please, god, just make me clean.”

—

tashiro forgot to end the call. there’s only snoring on the other end. kyouji grumbles, “hey, tashiro, I’m gonna tell you something you might think sounds crazy.”

no response. he wasn’t expecting one. “those dreams you’re having are your dreams, and generally I think it means something when you get into these… situations… over and over with one person in those dreams.”

tashiro hardly says, “hrngh?”

kyouji says, “go back to bed, punk,” and hangs up the call.

—

hanzawa senpai’s voice is reaching a quality it only ever got to once, during the last quarter of a tournament day—harsher, raspier, more mean than usual. irritable, impatient. waiting for something lying flat on a dozen broken… back… bones. “I miss when I was alone,” he announces at the sky. a boat horn bellows way far off. “I miss when you weren’t here. do you know how easy it was to die then?”

tashiro, someplace between bored and enraptured, and able to stand on two feet, is carving notches into rotting wood. “I bet I could guess. how long do you think this thing has been here?”

hanzawa senpai throws an arm over his eyes, deflates a little. “not as long as its occupant, I wager.”

—

“ta—shi—ro.” he felt warm breath on his ear and jumped. “d’you wanna free pass to say my name?”

tashiro spun on his heel, covered both ears. “aaahhh????”

the president stood there still, bent a little at the waist, hands behind his back. he asked, “you didn’t hear me?”

tashiro caught his breath enough to say, “what would I want that for?!”

“oh, you did.”

tashiro grasped at his chest. “just ‘president’ is fine with me.” he got a funny look.

“I didn’t spook you that bad, did I?”

“huh?” tashiro looked down at where his hand was rubbing the space over his heart. “uh. hm.” tashiro looked up at the president. the president was looking down at where tashiro was rubbing the space over his heart. tashiro stopped. “maybe a little,” he conceded the apparent truth, sounding a little petulant out of the corner of his mouth.

the president’s eyes narrowed a little, like he was holding back an indulgent smile.

tashiro got back to packing his bag.

out of his periphery he saw the president bring his arms over his head, fingers interlocked.

“I don’t think it’s fine with me, though.”

tashiro paused to take a sip of his water. “...mm?” a little dribbled out the corner of his mouth.

the president seemed to notice before he could wipe it. he didn’t repeat himself.

“what’d you say just now, president?”

realization clicked on. “you didn’t hear me. just as well—nothing much.” two long strides; he crouched right in front of him. brought his glasses up to sit atop his head. went over the corner of tashiro’s mouth with his pinky, like tashiro didn’t already wipe the water there.

he smiled knowingly. “break’s over. up we get.”

“wh—I’m done for today!”

the president towed him by the forearm back towards the last table left set up. used his big, booming voice to announce, “one more round!” to a room without an audience.

hanzawa senpai, from the storage room, called back distantly, “one more round!”

—

another lifetime, maybe, when tashiro through the throbbing in his forehead hears a low voice—electrifyingly familiar—ask liltingly, “do you want to be clean or don’t you?”

strong arms hook under tashiro’s armpits. hanzawa senpai drawls, somewhere, like his filter has gone completely, “is this wise to do?”

just above him, rumbling through him, “what’s ‘wise’?” tashiro cracks his eyes open to see lips curling up over shining, dull teeth, “aren’t I wise? you don’t trust me?”

tashiro interrupts with his cotton mouth, “what’s this got to do with me?”

he’s someplace else entirely when he hears the two of them at once tell him, “nothing.”

—

“tashiro, focus up.” the ball went whizzing at the wall.

“I’m focused…” tashiro grumbled, tongue feeling numb. his eyes slid over the room—each match a brutal pace, the few members who weren't playing dispensing incisive commentary while pulling new balls out of infinite pockets. the room was buzzing and the air was warm. tashiro shuddered to think of going back outside. he forgot his jacket. icicles were gonna be hanging off him by the time he got to the bathhouse.

“tashiro.” his name jolted through him, and another ball went flying past him, closer this time. tashiro’s gaze fell back across the table just in time to see hanzawa senpai reloading the president with another missile.

tashiro’s whole mouth feels kind of numb, actually. “what?”

“I want you to focus on the game.” hanzawa senpai moved to another table.

tashiro slid back into position. “yeah,” he murmured, “I don’t think that’ll make much of a difference.”

he saw a smile tugging at the president’s lips out of the corner of his eyes. “‘that so? why not? practice against me off the record… thought you’d do more with it.”

tashiro’s brow furrowed. “your arm’s like a gun.”

loud laughter hit him at the back of his knees. the president’s arm drew back. “hey, tashiro,” he said gamely. tashiro dropped his weight into his feet. “incoming.”

—

an arm holds him up by the waist; tashiro’s head rolls limply onto a broad shoulder. warmth drips low in his ear, “guess you’ve got sharper ears than I gave you credit for after all, huh?”

—

tashiro figured it out a while ago. that he wants to win, but not the way everyone else does. this much time spent playing against the old folks at the bathhouse, more time spent in club without him than with him, and he still gets a taste in his mouth, once in a while, that says, I want to beat him.

hungering for the chance. hungering for the chance to get one over him.

on a separate layer, tashiro watches a fraction of the president’s face shifting in low light; it’s still him, but different. tashiro drags his head back up and looks down at him. the stranger doesn’t turn his head, but watches him out the corner of his eye.

tashiro watches the eye roll, watches a smile tug at his lips.

the entire thing feels like tashiro’s got this unfulfilled something, playing out this game of cat and mouse. because they saw something in you.

he saw something in you. you don’t even realize you’re idolizing him until—

“aw, hell,” tashiro murmurs, half-asleep, arm aching under his pillow, “did I ever even learn his name?”

—

desperate times. he doesn’t recognize the hand that’s holding the cleaver and he doesn’t recognize the white hot feeling that’s lighting him up. they don’t really reconcile with one another.

yet.

shirahama’d amended his statement:

“well,” he’d said, hand brought conspiratorially to cover his mouth, sweat beading at his brow, “define what you think is ‘worse.’”

tashiro doesn’t recognize the cleaver but he knows it’s his hand holding it because he sees the trembling of the blade and feels the trembling in his wrist and forearm, bicep, shoulder, chest, ribs. connective tissue being sheared by the fiber. he doesn’t recognize the cleaver but he still sees his reflection in the metal.

some time ago—he doesn’t know, it doesn’t matter—tashiro pinched his lips together. “uh.” wet them. turning to look at hanzawa senpai, he was faced with the full weight of his characteristically threatening smile. he ended up saying, under these circumstances, “okay. don’t get mad.”

hanzawa senpai replied, levitously, “tashiro-kun.”

“…but I’m kind of… trying to…”

hanzawa senpai cut in, levitously, “tashiro-kun.”

“…get you before the water does?”

senpai closed his eyes.

senpai covered his face.

senpai… sighed. “tashiro.”

“…yeah?”

“come here, please.”

“got it.”

tashiro took an unsteady step forward. took another one. stood before hanzawa senpai, kneeling on the ground, and got a dizzying feeling of déjà vu.

hanzawa senpai looked up at him with a weird look on his face. “you need to kneel down, don’t you?”

a couple moments ago, tashiro still felt like this was out of his hands. he knelt. hanzawa senpai took one of those steadying breaths that tashiro is supposed to take before a serve and has yet to follow through on.

“okay, tashiro-kun,” he says pointedly, now, in a funny kind of way, “don’t get mad.”

it’s like a shutter had gone up. tashiro can’t figure out why he would ever be mad. ‘mad’ couldn’t begin to cover any of this.

senpai has got that damn look in his eyes now, too many moving parts; self loathing and good humor, anger and pity and hurt. he asks skeptically, like it’s been weighing on him, “you couldn’t use a normal knife?”

tashiro wants to tell him, it wouldn’t be enough, this’ll be faster. you’re like livestock. that’s not right, sorry. prey?

senpai looks at him dubiously, filmy glaze creeping in over his eyes.

tashiro wants to tell him, you don’t trust me. I’m better with this thing than I look, I’ll show you. it’ll tell me something, so give me the worst you’ve got.

the breath catches on something in his throat. whatever listless feeling he had a moment ago plunks dully into the water.

tashiro tells him, “just watch.”

the instant he wakes up, confident he’d be awake even still, tashiro calls him raspy-voiced. “there weren’t any endings where you killed her to save her, right?”

“man,” says shirahama, muffled, distressed, “do you remember ‘hey’?”

—

“look at you, tashiro,” the arm curling just under his hip trembles for a second. “tall enough now that I have to really hoist you to keep you off the ground.”

tashiro pulls an eye open.

all he sees is skin. he heaves a sigh and feels a jolt run up the body carrying him so vividly it pings in his brain as plain electricity.

“...figure yourself a tease these days, huh?”

tashiro swallows down around the cotton in his mouth enough to say, “nope.”

lifting his head’s a chore, but he does it anyway—hanzawa senpai’s thrown over the other shoulder, sack-style.

“hm,” tashiro says.

“don’t wanna hear any accusations of favoritism.”

bullet hole be damned, tashiro drops his head back onto its perch. thinks about blood and brain gunk staining an otherwise pristine uniform.

un-damning the bullet hole, “your favoritism looks a little funny to me.”

the quarter of a face he can see smiles a little. “you can handle a little cruelty from me, can’t you?”

tashiro squints at him. before he gets a chance to stitch together a response—feels like thoughts are just spilling out his forehead and onto the ground—hanzawa senpai groans, “let me off here.”

rumbling through them both, “hmmm?”

hanzawa senpai laughs, then sighs like he hadn’t meant to. “...please.”

the hum that means half-hearted consideration. “almost there. request denied.”

tashiro chokes on his own laughter when hanzawa senpai replies weakly, “damn you.”

—

talking to the train tracks, tashiro announces, “I think something is really wrong.”

shirahama only replies, “congratulations on finally hitting puberty.”

—

“hup!” tashiro watches hanzawa senpai fall bonelessly into the bath.

lasts only until he emerges with a little kid’s wet cough before laughing hard enough to push tears out his eyes.

warmth poured over itself again in his ear, “nope, you aren’t safe eith—”

“AUH!” water’s hot. he resurfaces. wiping his hair off his forehead, he asks blandly, “is something funny, senpai?”

hanzawa senpai squeaks a little, gripping his stomach where he kneels in the water. his own hair has already been swept back. their catapult stands triumphant with his hands on his hips. the stains on his clothes are apparently a nonissue. the only indication of exertion is a shudder that runs up from his feet and shakes the sweat-matted hair on his head.

tashiro experiences a feeling of clarity so strong watching the two of them that it knocks him on his ass.

“now then,” tashiro and hanzawa senpai watch him reach over his head to tug at the neckline of his uniform shirt. it comes off in one motion after that. “should be for the best that you two make way…!”

—

there’s a sign over hanzawa senpai’s head. if tashiro squints—it’s a dusty ditch-sign and the evening’s only getting dimmer—he can barely make out the words NO DIVING.

—

“you’re not supposed to use soap here.”

“ask your senpai if he wants to get out to actually clean himself up before nagging me, you.”

hanzawa senpai, dropping his head back onto the elbow he’s got resting on the ledge, groans.

tashiro’s head is lying on—

“could I call you ‘president’ once?”

his face twitches, amused, “if you really want to.”

—the president’s forearm. there is the occasional muscle tremor. tashiro feels no particular way about this.

he stares up at nothing.

no time or tolerance for musing, the president cups water in his hand and dumps it on tashiro’s face, stubbornly brushing his bangs back down. “now if you’d just close your eyeees…”

tashiro pushes his face back ‘til his elbow locks. the president just guffaws.

stretching his neck, the president sings, “ought to see about a change of clothes, huh…” tashiro watches him climb out of the bath with exaggerated effort. pretends he isn’t watching when the president massages his shoulder. he vanishes around a corner.

hanzawa senpai has got his wide eyes on when tashiro turns his head. startles him so bad he slips up to his neck in the water.

“am I some kind of clown to you, senpai?”

senpai wipes his eyes, “only the best one.”

tashiro lets his eyes fall shut and sighs. “are you alive yet?”

long pause. tashiro squints an eye to see hanzawa senpai pinching his lips. “...hold still for a second.” tashiro’s eyes fly open as hanzawa senpai takes his more busted hand to brush up tashiro’s bangs. “I suppose so.” he takes a finger and flicks tashiro’s forehead dead center. “you’re back in one piece, after all.”

tashiro can really only hear static anymore. “huh?”

“self-indulgence. you should be proud of me.” a towel gets dropped over his eyes. “I think he’s been boiled enough, don’t you?”

strong arms hook under his armpits; déjà vu as a feeling moves quick. the tile’s cold.

the president crouches to lean over him, takes his towel and chucks it. in snapshots, tashiro watches his hand lift off the ground, reach upward, be taken. in an instant, “welcome back to the world of the living, tashiro.” a snapshot: tashiro’s wrist, between jaws, and a crunch.

—

“hey,” tashiro says.

shirahama groans affirmatively.

is this something I should say out loud?

YES / NO

“do you think I should’ve touched the president?”

shirahama goes stiff.

“like not in a weird way. I’ve just been dreaming some more stuff lately.”

shirahama sits up to look at him. he has tears in his eyes. “can you give me like twenty minutes to pretend I’m dead.”

“I think I’m just really touch-starved.”

“Please.”

—

if it’s a contagion, tashiro is so, so sick.

old man kumano-san asks him, "say, tashiro... what’s got you gripping the paddle like that?"

he doesn't look down at it to swing it right again. sheepishly, he coughs, "cosplaying the meat guy at the supermarket."

—

“ain't enough for you to just let me haunt you, huh, tashiro?”

tashiro shifts his feet, squints, exasperated, across the table. “I can’t just take it lying down forever, you know.”

the table rattles. tashiro hasn’t ever felt his heart pound like this. he’s asked: “spoiling for a fight?”

“...not any more than before, I guess.”

the ball bounds over the net—tashiro returns it, narrowly; caught off guard.

dull teeth grin sharply at him. “bzzt.” his eyes are shining with something. “try that again.”

tashiro drops out of a dream at the bathhouse in worse shape than he's ever been at that river.

he clears sleep gunk out of his throat. purses his lips. dreamed he was at the bathhouse, at the bathhouse. feels, right now, like a squeezed lime.

he doesn’t remember who won. he doesn't know who he wants to have won.

"tashiro,” yamada-san says flatly, “I told you to get a move on already. look at the time!"

"yeah, yeah," tashiro groans. yamada-san—just before standing from where he was sat keeping vigil over him, apparently—balances a milk carton, still cool, on his forehead.

"get home quick. and, ah, good luck tomorrow," he says.

tashiro, saluting at the ceiling, replies, "...roger."

—

over the bustle beyond the open window, tashiro finds himself saying, to no one in particular, “did you know that heat makes you dream weird?”

miyano, to his right, looks at him with massive doll eyes. kuresawa, to his left, fixes him with a stare over his glasses before going back to his phone.

hanzawa senpai, dead center, looks down at him, hands ghosting over his neck where he was ‘evening his complexion’ a second ago, before tashiro went and opened his mouth, and he says, “really?”

like it’s news.

something in his throat keeps down a disbelieving you didn’t know?

tashiro catches his eye. squints hard. something shutters where he can’t see.

“hmmm?”

tashiro throws his head back with an exasperated sigh, and the extensions whip down his—

“senpai,” tashiro calls, louder than the music outside, it feels like, “what were the parts of the spine called again?”

“pfft,” hanzawa senpai, behind him now, murmurs like he doesn’t mean to, “they’re called vertebrae.”

fingers poke lightheartedly where bone juts. tashiro’s in a glass jar, and he flinches.

“gon-chan,” kuresawa chides disingenuously, standing to stretch his back and head for the door, “ladies tend to have more poise.”

miyano, in his periphery, blinks for the first time. he brings a hand to his chin, nods. “pretty good appeal.”

probably bl. tashiro poses with a hand on his cheek and says, “thanks, miyano.”

—

tashiro’s phone pings with a message from shirahama that reads, If you do anything to screw up your hair I’m shaving it all off your head

ping. And making you eat it

ping. Keep one foot on the ground at all times if you do anything insane I’m really gonna do it

tashiro purses his lips. glances out the open window; first floor.

the picture he takes of his feet, hovering as he sits on the windowsill and clad in black crew socks—he left the shoes somewhere else, he figures miyano will chase him down about them later—is waiting to be sent with incomplete text suck i when he spots someone out the very corner of his vision.

the very corner. an unmistakable figure at the edge of the crowd, staring over the living mass of strangers, right into tashiro stood in the window, until he isn’t anymore.

funny thing about crossdressing, see, is the worldview shift. that broad back looks broader, a piece-of-work senpai haunting his memory like a grief-hallucination.

that was him though. there are only so many people tashiro could recognize from the moon and he’s one of them. how many people in the world could possibly look like that.

it’s a second of stirring in his stomach that bridges the space between shoujo manga and violent murder. his feet are back on the ground but they might as well be dangling out the window; an impulse in the shape of today you are a girl has him gripped by the shoulders, nearly chasing after a living ghost and using strangers as stepping stones to do it.

one foot on the ground with his hands braced on the sill, he hears, “tashiro.”

sky still looks like rain. indistinct collective murmur hangs over the crowd outside like smog. a metal rod’s pang clefts clean through his forehead, up between his eyes. taiko drums. dwarfed by encroaching shadow miyano calls again, “tashiro,” from down the hall. tashiro’s shoes dangle limply from his hands.

thundering resonance. tashiro croaks, “what?”

—

“hey, senpai,” tashiro calls, “where’s, uh. where’s the coffin?”

hanzawa senpai points factually at the water. “go after it, if you want.” he smiles at him; a chill zips down tashiro’s… vertebrae. “maybe you’ll catch him this time.”

—

“—this vision of a lost lover. and she goes running after him, obviously, because he moved away when they were kids or whatever. and she missed him sooo bad, so she’s really hoofing it down the stairs and out the front gate and she’s only delicately out of breath, after the whole thing, which I thought was kinda stupid, but whatever. he’s standing a block away, staring back at her over his shoul—tashiro what are you doing?”

tashiro points at shirahama’s window over the crowd and waves him off. he huffs into the receiver, “I’ll be back in time.” he hangs up the call.

he’s standing two blocks away.

tashiro calls, “could you slow down? please?”

the president tilts his head and grins at him. “haven’t moved much at all, just now.”

he’s standing a block and a half away.

the president’s voice carries like it’s nothing, “you look pretty cute today.”

one block. now or never, “hey, president.”

the lopsided grin widens affectionately. “not the president anymore.”

tell me your name for real this time. it’s not really fine with me either. “have you, uh. been dreaming about anyone lately?”

the president’s shoulders shake, lips splitting impossibly wider. his eyes shine. tashiro hears thunder. “nooope.”

[laserbread]

Cybertron first impressions after 2 episodes:

Pros:

-higher dub quality

-higher animation quality (though this sometimes makes the humans look out of place especially if there's a 3d background)

-some really interesting design choises (Starscream has purple eyes (wow), Megatron has some really appealing colors, Vector Prime at least looks old)

-characters have wonky faces. Sometimes it's funny

-Scattershot. His dialogue is so entertaining that I might learn to like his terrifying design. Maybe it's so bad it's good?

-A lot of characters have the same VAs as the earlier shows in the trilogy, which will be nice to latch onto until I get used to the style of the show

-Jetfire's design is really nice

-Starscream is still making noises. This is good. If Starscream is being played by Pauli Virta, he must make noises. (example of noises)

-Thundercracker. And he has an unique design!

-The montage of them leaving their base looks really cool (though it must take them an impractical amount of time to get outside)

-One of the kids is kind of ok

-Scattershot again. Because I like him

(Decepti)cons: (there is more good than bad, I just go into more detail here and also nitpick some things)

-weird yellow and purple explosions

-characters have wonky faces. Sometimes it just looks bad

-the humor really doesn't translate well

-I'd rather take bayverse Optimus design over whatever is going on with his mouth in this

-why even have multiple humans if they all react the same way to most things (the younger boy (still don't know their names) is a little more energetic and the girl gets offended over weird things but other than that they're mostly the same), are all chosen ones and all fill the role of the tech support character? They bickered a little in the first episode but after that they haven't really done anything that would require multiple characters. Maybe this will change in the future, but so far their reactions and personalities seem really shallow

-these human children are giving alien robots tech advice. And not just a few ideas here and there, no. One of the first things they do in the show is fixing up Landmine's wound. Then they go on to redesign their entire base floorplan and suggest adding a launch catapult. Having motocross as a hobby really doesn't cut it here as an excuse. They also know a suspicious amount about geology and how it can help hide a base. And the alien robots don't know all this for some reason?

-this is a dub thing, but isn't Vector Prime supposed to be old? He doesn't sound like he is

-I've seen gacha videos with better lipsync

Things I'm looking forward to:

-Soundwave and the birb are going to be in this

-Megatron is gonna say "Turpa kiinni!", which means "shut up" but is sort of worse (not swear level but still) and not something you'd expect in a kids' show

Also I can't take the intro seriously. Not just because of the meme and because I (used to) find it (the intro, not the meme) kind of cringe, but also because of an YTP that replaces "Maailmamme ovat vaarassa" ("Our worlds are in danger") with "Maailmamme ovat Vaasassa" ("Our worlds are in Vaasa")

[mavoorik]

What do you think Connor’s best quality is and what do you think has worst quality is?

ALAN RUCK: I actually think he’s really loyal. He’s in love with Willa and he’s devoted to Willa. I actually think he loves his father. He loves his siblings as well, but he truly loves his father. And when push comes to shove, unless the old man really does him wrong, I think he’ll always come down on the side of his father. I’ve known him longer than anybody else and his loyalty is like a dog. He’s quite loyal. His worst quality is maybe that he’s just a scatterbrain. He’s not stupid. He just not at all linear. He’s scattershot in whatever grabs his attention, at any moment. He does suffer from delusional disorder. Maybe that isn’t his fault, but it’s not a great quality in a presidential candidate.

Brian Cox has said that Logan loves his children. Do you believe that’s true? If he is capable of love, do you feel like he loves them equally, or is that not possible?

RUCK: I’m not exactly sure, if he loves us equally. I actually think he feels very guilty about Connor because he virtually abandoned Connor when he divorced Connor’s mother. Connor didn’t actually see his father for awhile, and then he was off with this new family. I think Logan actually carries some guilt about Connor and he cuts him some slack, every now and then, because of that. This is a guy who was whipped as a child. We saw the scars on his back, in Season 1. The way he tells us he loves us is with these harsh insights into his world, the real world, the world of killers and media moguls and titans. There are these little glimpses into the way he lives. I think that’s the way he tells us he loves us.

[ x ]

[pollylynn]

Title: Maybe. So . . .  WC: 1000 Episode: Private Eye Caramba! (7 x 12) 

For the last six years and then some she’s had a pretty simple policy, philosophy, creed—whatever you want to call it.  When it comes to him, she has always known what to say: No, Castle. It’s a phrase fit for any occasion. It’s an answer to a million stupid questions. It’s the sensible denial of countless outrageous requests. It’s a philosophical guideline robust enough that Kant only wishes any of his imperatives were this categorical. It has rarely, if ever, failed her up to this point. It might be failing her now. 

She had wanted to tell him No, Castle from the moment he had fluttered the stupid, surreptitiously obtained PI license in her face. She had wanted to snatch it away from him, tear it to pieces, light each individual piece on fire, and send them sailing out Shana Baker’s conveniently broken window. Strike that. She had wanted to bat him on the nose with it like a rolled up newspaper while uttering a stern No, Castle, and then, tear it to pieces, et cetera, et cetera. 

But he’d gone a long way toward solving Shana Baker’s murder. He’d kept her, ultimately, from arresting the wrong man and fulfilling the sinister plot devised by whomever had been pulling Nicole Morris’s strings. He had, as she’d honestly been able to say, impressed her. And he’d admitted in a small voice with just a hint of the little boy excitement that she’s missed so terribly these last few weeks that he’d wanted to stick with the PI work. He’d wanted to try. 

No, Castle was definitely not the answer in the moment. It might not be the answer now. She just doesn’t know, and neither does anyone else, apparently. 

He’s given Martha the truth and nothing but the simple truth. She doesn’t know what he’s told Alexis or if he’s even talked to the boys or anyone else about what’s been going on. She thinks she might be a one-stop shop when it comes to the not-so simple truth.

His office line is ringing off the hook, all right, but it’s not the sound of business picking up. The conspiracy theorists are taking their toll. He’s anything but at peace with not knowing about his disappearance, and he shouldn’t have to rehash what might have happened with the deranged and the restless. And even the straight up swooning of the mostly non-creepy fans isn’t lifting his spirits any more than the possibility that some who don’t qualify for non-creepy status might well be adopting pets with the sole intention of losing them so he can find them. 

She doesn’t know what to do with any of it. Her approach is scattershot. It’s failing. She tells him the website looks fantastic, and it does—for a mostly fictional PI business. She asks him directly how things are going, and he’s forthright that he’d hoped for more clamor but he’s slogging along, taking on whatever comes his way. But what’s coming his way, at least at that particular moment, is so trivial that she feels compelled to give him the out—to tell him that no one is looking for him to prove anything. 

None of it is the right thing to say. None of it is the wrong thing, either, not entirely, and she hates the ambiguity of this. She wishes that a firm No, Castle were the answer here. She wishes it could just give him the out and they both could breathe a sigh of relief, but there’s no relief even the hypothetical out. He’s bewildered and a little hurt that she doesn’t think he can make this work with time and stick-to-it-iveness, and that’s a mess because she’s not even sure she doesn’t think he can. 

So she tries to say Yes, Castle. When Sofia del Cordova is mourning the loss of her purse in equal measure to the loss of her friend, she tries to say yes, though she’s not at all sure how he’ll take it. She’s not at all sure it won’t look like pity in the form of a participation trophy. 

She should have been sure how he would take it. She should have remembered that he finds inspiration, motivation, a sign from the universe in the smallest thing, and so he is delighted about working together. He has painted the Case of the Cast-Off Clutch with all the noir at his disposal.

They do get to work together. (Sort of.) 

He does gain some classic gumshoe experience. (In the unlikely setting of an opera house ladies room.) 

He satisfies his first customer, but only after said customer has held him at (fake) gunpoint, only after he’s been duct-taped to a chair by a knife-wielding ex-marine. 

He solves his first case and damned if he doesn’t all but solve hers along the way. 

It’s not an argument for saying Yes, Castle, not in the long-term. It’s simply another manifestation of the charmed life he leads: He demanded a case rife with mystery and intrigue, and she should have known that the universe would deliver, scaring the hell out of her along the way, just for good measure. 

There’s a lot of No, Castle in her future. 

No, Castle, you are not allowed to impersonate Ryan or any other sworn office. 

No, Castle, you may not go on investigative walkabout without checking in. 

No, Castle, you will never, ever again try to disarm someone holding you at gunpoint with your online self-defense to back you. 

The tried and true No, Castle system stretches out before her. But as they walk out of the precinct, arm in arm, as he noir narrates and she gives him grief about it, as she feels for the first time in weeks like she knows who she is and who he is—she knows what their roles are—she’s glad, just this once, that she said Yes. 

A/N: There is no morphousness in the fiction that No, Castle is somehow not always the best policy

images via homeofthenutty

[radiomurdeer]

"Well we'll just have to get you back to your time then, won't we?" Alastor brushed off those concerns that he himself had just built up as though they were nothing, waving his hand as if that'd be enough to do so. It wouldn't, he'd played this game before. Poke and prod until he'd made an Alastor-shaped hole in their defenses before plugging it up with a solution only he could provide. It didn't matter if what he said didn't make sense or was pure speculation. The point was to confuse, disorient, distract and then go in for the kill. It's a scattershot method, just watching to see where to press the attack. "And obviously you will make it back to your time, or your future self wouldn't be here now, wherever they are! We just need to give you the time and opportunity to find them, and whatever you decide to do now won't change a thing for your future isn't that wonderful? To be liberated from the damning weight of consequence, oh but I do envy you, my good man."

Suspicion bubbled up in the back of his mind, everything so very familiar but not. He'd taken a gameshow host under his wing before, after all. Maybe he could do a bit better with this new one. It was too ridiculous to think they were actually the same person - all the blue must just be an idiotic TV thing that Alastor didn't even want to pretend to understand because then Vox would win a point in their little feud and he wouldn't give that man the satisfaction even in his thoughts.

Vincent blinks, his entire facade stuttering for a moment like a tv glitch. "That would put is squarely into the 21st century." He says, the intention to keep that a private revelation disrupted by how incredibly far away the whole thought seems. "And I could just have easily died tomorrow as I will fifty years from now." Would he even still be a TV host when he died, or did he leave the career he so adored? What about him existed in such a concrete way that it couldn't be rejected?

Vincent sets his cup down, a lance of fear striking through him. No, no it's fine. The lightheaded fear is nothing more than conjecture. Even then, the fear isn't one of losing loved ones-- it had been easier, safer, to stand apart. "Not a lot of people to lose," he says, but he feels far away, staring at his coffee rather than drinking it. "I don't even know if I could, or how. He was born in 1915, this is later than he ever could have dreamt of making it, and the idea that he could be stuck forever out of sync with reality terrifies him.

"What an unsolved case I would be!" He opens his mouth to continue, the the airy start to the 'V' of his whole name before changing tactics, some lingering survival instincts coming through. "Gameshow host missing: no suspects, no motive, never found."