#maybe stuff like this will get me to post more XD

[teruwasright]

Omg tyy!!!! Idk I feel bad sometimes bc I ramble very easily especially about Teru lmao also your words are so sweet and mean a lot!!!! I try my best to understand Teru's character both on surface and on the much deeper level- so it means a lot ty!!

I could say the same about you honestly bc your takes are so good and I really couldn't have said it better!! I agree with everything you said bc something about Teru's character that people fsr OUT RIGHT IGNORE is his EFFORT!!

People always say Teru was "abusive" ect to Kou but he never was- something that I noticed in chps9-10 (young exorcist arc) is how Teru NEVER shut Kou up like people say he did- Teru listened, he gave his view and made him think of the possible consequences but he NEVER shut him up.

Something about them that people don't understand is that they DON'T fight- they don't talk about it and that INCLUDES fighting- and even in the young exorcist arc Teru never told Kou straight up "your wrong" he LISTENED and gave Kou time to figure out how he feels- Teru even said that chp87 was there first proper fight- they DON'T talk OR fight- they keep it to themselves and I feel like people just ignore this to make Teru the villain in there fics-

And don't even GET me started on chp87- I absolutely LOVED that chp and have been waiting for it ever since Teru gave his warning and I was SO disappointed that that entire chp got dumbed to "poor Kou" and "Teru's a horrible brother" honestly I was WAY more mad at Kou at the end of that chp then Teru- ofc no one was entirely right or wrong but Kou was just a complete hypocrite in that chp- and made me realize actually that people will only see the things that Teru say that make him look bad.

"...because you're weak Kou...!" But what about after? "...but sometimes...I envy that weakness..." it COMPLETELY changes the meaning but the first line is all people saw.... same happened with Teru saying he would "kill" Nene....

"...then I'll kill her." Ya sounds bad but after? "would you?" "Maybe. Does that give some small idea of the consequences of your actions?"

He was trying to make Hanako see what HE DID- TERU WOULD NEVER HURT NENE- THE ONLY REASON HER NAME CAME OUT OF HIS MOUTH WAS BC THAT WAS THE ONLY WAY TO GET HANAKO TO LISTEN!!! I find this fight between them especially intriguing for Teru specifically bc of this- why did he try so hard to make Hanako (a supernatural) understand the consequences of his actions and the full extent of what he did? (Also! All these lines I'm quoting are all directly from the volumes- lmao literally had to pull them out to make sure I got the DIRECT quote XD)

Idk it's a pattern with Teru that they always take what he says out of context to make him look bad and it's ALWAYS annoyed me-

Ok ok- I'm rambling a LOT in this I'm sorry (again) I get very excited talking about stuff I love especially Teru so sorry for the brain vomit TwT

Basically I agree with everything you said and I can't wait to see your post about chp87! ^^

Can we acknowledge how tragic of a detail this is? In ch114?

The fact that Teru views Kunishige (shrine grandpa) as the only one he can rely on despite how their relationship is at-best frenemies and at-worst hostile is downright devastating.

Reason #1: Teru and Kunishige’s relationship is predominantly negative.

In ch79, gramps was making jokes about threatening Teru’s livelihood and while Teru later joined in to counter, the comment was clearly in bad faith — an attempted power play to exert control over Teru and his flippant behavior. It’s a baseless threat stuffed within the carcass of a joke: “your family needs us — show respect.” Teru’s an instigator for sure, but he’s not the adult in this situation.

Point #2: Kunishige has done little to deserve Teru’s faith as an individual.

Shrine politics aside, gramps was beefing with a teenager and snitches on him to his dad! He pulled the “I’m telling Dad on you” with Teru’s OWN FATHER pushing 90 — like DAWG.

I don’t fault gramps for reporting the Red House incident given his past experiences or its history, but it was the professional choice — not the kind one. It doesn’t indicate any affection towards Teru nor resemble how you would treat a child you would go out of your way to support. Teru clearly has an adverse reaction to his father. He’s off-put by the idea of contacting him in ch79 and canonically views his father as absent and not someone he can expect help from in ch114. Not over Kunishige at least.

Yeah, gramps puts on the Santa suit per Teru’s request. That in itself is an undeniable act of kindness. He does care and I don’t doubt that he is there for Teru. But it’s not enough to deny this fact:

Conclusion: The only person (and adult) Teru feels he can rely on doesn’t treat him very well and won’t protect him from his father if it meant going against his shrine duties. A bottom of the barrel choice because it becomes unnervingly evident this child, Teru, as early as 14, grew up having no one else. He chooses Kunishige over his own father, family members, friends, teachers — everyone.

And Kunishige doesn’t even like him.

[twstfanblog]

*~500 Followers Fic: WaterPark Episode PT 2/Vignettes~*

A/N: Ignore me taking so long to get this out, AGAIN. I've been fighting to write for the past few weeks for no reason. That's a lie, it's because I wanna write things that are so far in my canon they'd make no sense if I did post them XD I was also consumed trying to finish my Halloween fic Word Count: 8K Warnings: They/She OC, headcanons on the sexuality of the characters Main Pairings: Malleus/Yuu/Jamil/Azul, Alluded-Riddle/Floyd, Jade/Trey, Leona/Ruggie, Cater/Idia, Vil/Rook, Sebek/Silver, Firstie Poly

Part 1

Now that Yuu was free from their duty of making sure the other students were checked into the park, they were able to meet up with the other first-years. They all sat huddled around, turning their lounge chairs into a circle as they planned out their day.

Yuu hummed, looking at the small map of the park Ace had managed to find, “Damn this park is big. There’s like forty slides in this place…”

Epel smirked, eyes roaming over the map and already planning out his route, “Ah’m gonna ride everythin’.”

Ortho had already scanned the map, making sure he noted every location of bathrooms and the park's first-aid station, “That could be detrimental to your health if you ride all forty in a span of our six-hour stay…”

“No pain, no gain.”

Jack raised an eyebrow, tucking his ears into the water cap he had pulled from his bag, “What are you trying to gain…?”

Leaping into Yuu’s lap, Grim smiled at the map while Yuu tucked his own ears into a water cap, “I'm gonna ride everything! And try all the food at every restaurant and stall! And-”

Yuu gripped Grim around his middle, holding him in the air and maneuvering him so that they could stare at the excited monster, “You will die. I need you to know this. If you do all that shit, you will die.”

Ace snickers, “Let him try. Maybe he’ll actually learn a lesson in gluttony for once.”

Deuce raised an eyebrow, glaring at the other Heartslabyul solider, “He’ll learn his lesson in death…?”

Huffing, Jack crossed his arms, “Alright, but seriously. Do we plan on sticking together for the day or are we splitting off until lunch?”

“Hmmm…” Yuu points to the largest slide closest to their rest area, “How about we all do this big slide together just to get used to the water temperature? And we can go on more rides together until we find other stuff we’d rather do. Because, Epel, I adore you. I’m not riding forty slides for you.”

“Fair.”

Deuce nods, “Sounds like a plan. We can still meet up for lunch and touch base, maybe go on more slides together.” He looked to his side, opening his mouth to ask Sebek if he had a slide he wanted to try only to see the serious expression on the half-fae’s face, “Sebek? You ok?”

“...” Sebek sighed, closing his eyes before looking to the side, “I don’t think I can spend much time with you all today…”

The others all whine a bit, even Yuu and Grim, asking Sebek why he couldn’t spend one day not directly attached to Malleus.

Yuu huffs, rolling her eyes, “I’m pretty sure Malleus asked you to just enjoy the park away from him today-”

“That’s not what I’m concerned about!”

Jack leaned closer to Sebek, his hand pressing to the other’s forehead with a worried expression, “Are you having a heat stroke.”

Ace quickly passed over his water bottle, “Here, have a sip.”

Sebek blushed, smacking both of his boyfriends’ hands away, “Enough! I’m concerned about Silver’s enjoyment in the park…”

…

The group as a whole looked over to another cluster of lounge chairs. Silver and Lilia were under an umbrella, Lilia applying a heavy layer of sunscreen to both himself and an already half-asleep Silver.

Sighing again, Sebek called the other’s attention, “Lilia-sama doesn’t do well in high heat nor direct sunlight. He was happy to come along even though he wouldn’t be able to do much. But, because Lilia isn’t able to enjoy the park, Silver doesn’t want to leave his father alone for the day. Plus…the sleeping…”

Epel groaned, seeming to finally make the connection, “Oh yeah…sleep disorders and water ain't a good mix to try…”

“I know we all planned on spending as much time together today as possible, but…I will most likely spend my time with Silver to make sure he can enjoy the park and not potentially drown.”

Yuu nods, “Fair and valid.” She smiles, slinging an arm around Sebek’s neck and ignoring the half-fae scowling at her, “So, the plan is to do the big slide together to break the ice so to speak. Then you can ask Silver if he wants to go on a few slides with us before we all start to break off until lunch.”

“...” Sebek huffed, “I like this plan.”

Floyd had instantly dragged Riddle toward the wave pool, a number of students already being swirled in the man-made current. The mer had been quick to assume his other form, his swimshorts snapping open from the inner seem to allow his tail minimal constriction, “Come on, Goldfishie! I wanna swim with you~!”

Riddle had agreed at first. He planned on swimming, riding the slides and simply enjoying this new experience. But as he walked deeper into the chilly water, his stomach started to roll. His reflection stared back at him as he had an embarrassing epiphany.

Swimming in a lazy circle, Floyd floated closer to a still Riddle, “Goldfishie~? Come deeper in the water, swimming in shallow water is annoying…”

“I can't swim.”

…

Floyd flipped himself over, his back in the water as he drifted to be in Riddle's line of sight. He almost asked if he was joking, only to see Riddle's cheeks flushed and brows creased in what Floyd coined his ‘thinking face’, “Wait are you serious?”

Riddle huffed, turning his head away, “I…I just realized…”

“How do you not know how to swim?”

“I never needed to learn!”

“You're seventeen?”

Riddle huffed and nearly stomped his foot, thankfully realizing it was a bad idea to do in thigh deep water, “Don't you judge me-”

A buzzer sounds, both Riddle and Floyd's attention being called to the far wall of the pool. Symbols eched into the wall start glowing, causing the waves to swell suddenly and easily sweep numerous others into the current and higher into the air. The wave hit Riddle hard, sending him tumbling back into the water as a prisoner with Floyd diving after him. Luckily, the waves calmed quickly, allowing Floyd to lift Riddle out of the water to take a desperate series of breaths.

Riddle hacked and coughed, hands gripping onto the clawed arms holding him up, “UNHAND ME, I'M GETTING OUT!”

Floyd cooed but still swam Riddle to the edge of the pool, letting him grip at the stone and pull himself out, “Aw~ poor Goldfishie…I really wanted to relax in the water with you though…” He thinks, looking at the map of the water park before smiling to Riddle, “I have an idea~!”

“Just help me out of this hell pool!”

Jade and Floyd quickly rushed off once their trio had found a comfortable spot to set as a rest space. Each twin having plans to find their respective Heartslabyul lover, leaving Azul to sit under the shade alone. And while he could enjoy the warm weather, maybe people watch or use his phone to review the past sales reports of the lounge. Instead, his eyes caught the bold numbers along a sign. For a few seconds he felt his brain stall once he fully understood what the numbers said. Now he sat on the lounge chair, staring unblinking at the price sign of a small ice cream stand.

Soon, Yuu walked up to Azul with a smile and holding something behind their back. They moved to speak only to stop at seeing the blank look on Azul's face, “Um…baby, you doing okay? Can you hear me-”

Azul reached out, grabbing Yuu by the underside of their swim top and yanking them down to his eye level, “ My pearl, what does that sign say?” He pointed across the way, his other hand leaving Yuu's top and gripping them by the face to make sure they were looking in the correct direction.

Yuu blinked, raising an eyebrow at the price “...Oh. Nice seeing park prices are the same even in other worlds.” They laughed lightly, smiling at Azul's expression.

“How are they getting away with charging $15 for a single scoop of ice cream?”

Giggling, Yuu leaned more into Azul's hand, “Maybe it's got gold leaf or diamonds in it.”

Azul growled lightly, turning Yuu's face to look at them directly, “You know very well that gold leaf costs basically nothing! Plus that diamond would have to be practically worthless in quality or size! Why even bother!?”

Yuu doesn't reply past making a kissy face to Azul, smiling when the second-year sighed and leaned forward to press their lips together.

Pulling away, Azul made the mental note to look more into the pricing practices for such parks, “Well, that blatant theft aside, how may I-why do you have a gun?”

Azul had finally taken notice of the brightly colored water rifle in Yuu's possession. While a water gun was clearly better than an actual gun, that didn't make him feel any safer.

Yuu smiles, holding the toy up and shaking it so that Azul could hear it was full, “I borrowed it from Vil.”

“Why does Vil have a gun?”

“Oh calm down, it's filled with sunscreen.” Yuu leaned over and pressed another kiss to Azul's cheek. Pulling away they pumped the water gun once, an ominous click sounding, “Now run.”

“...”

“...”

“...”

Trey sighed, closing his eyes and adjusting his glasses, “Jade, I'm not getting in the water.”

Jade pouted heavily, a clear expression of disappointment so exaggerated it was almost believable, “Trey-san…so heartless, so cruel. To deny me the chance to swim with someone I hold so dear…boo…boohoo.”

Pointing to the shallower end of the pool, the few other mers and students keeping a wide distance from Jade, Trey spoke with a smile, “And the fact you've been bullying everyone who goes past the 6ft mark?”

“I'm not making anyone stay in the shallow end.” Jade fluttered his eyelashes, swimming in a small loop and having his tail flip in a teasing motion, “But if you were to…come in the water, I may be a bit friendly.”

“Jade, I'm not going to let you drown me a little just so you can give me CPR.”

Jade keeps his smile, but looks off to the side from Trey's eyes, “Oh, I could…never-”

“Do you want to come with me to the lazy river? Kalim told Cater that this park has a rather extensive one.”

“...” Jade huffed, glaring at the other students cowering on the other side of the pool, “I suppose…this pool isn't as entertaining as I had hoped.”

“Did you try the wave pool?”

“It was already packed when I looked…” sighing, Jade moves to pull himself from the waters, “Just give me a moment to change back into my human form. It takes a bit longer when wet-”

An arm loops around Jade’s waist, suddenly pulling him from the waters and over Trey's bare shoulder. The second year was stunned, eyes wide while Trey maneuvered him into a comfortable position for them both. Trey lets out a huff of air, his free hand picking up Jade’s slack tail before he starts to walk.

“Hm. Only a bit of my Unique Magic and you're pretty comfortable to carry. Are you eating enough?”

“How many children do you want?”

Trey's response was to laugh, leaving a flustered Jade’s question unanswered. An atmosphere that was easily switched once they reached the lazy river. It was as big as Cater said it was, multiple waterways and a number of functional manmade grottos to splash water onto those in the river. A few other students were in the current, but what gave them pause was Riddle and Floyd.

While Riddle was in one of the park's single-person inflatable tubes, Floyd was behind him, swimming at a breakneck pace to zip around the water. Riddle was screaming, struggling to keep a hold of the tube while demanding Floyd ‘STOP’.

Jade laughed, placing a hand over his mouth, “Oh, that looks delightful. Trey-san, we should try it.”

Trey kept his smile, gently tossing Jade into the shallow water and moving to grab his own tube, “Well, I guess this is what my day is gonna be…”

Leona had no plans to get in any type of water today. A fact that made Ruggie deflate, yet respect his wishes to not join him in exploring the park. And, sadly, instead of going with him, Cheka decided he wanted to stay with his dearly beloved uncle.

Sighing, Leona stretched himself on the lounge chair he had claimed as his own, the surrounding area completely empty since everyone knew to stay away from a sleeping lion.

Well…most everyone.

Leona groaned hearing Cheka perk up in excitement, his little tail whacking his uncle in the face from where he was sitting.

Cheka waved, smiling wide as he recognized the tall blonde walking over to their area, “Hi Mr.Vil! Hi! I haven't seen you in forever!”

Vil smiled from behind his shades, placing his bag in a chair beside Leona before he kneels to Cheka’s level. He quickly pulls out a bottle of sunscreen, pouring a bit of the liquid into his palm before he started to rub it onto Cheka’s cheeks, “Hello, Cheka. It's very nice to see you, too. You've grown much taller.”

Giggling, Cheka let Vil smooth the pleasant-smelling liquid onto his face and exposed arms, “Thank you, I ate all my veggies last month, even though they tasted bad. Do you and my uncle still kiss?”

Malleus, who had followed Vil and placed himself on Leona's other side, snorted. Catching the one-eyed glare the beastman threw his way, the fae prince simply laid on his front to sunbathe.

Vil sighed, opening the umbrella closest to their group before sitting in the shaded area, “No, Cheka. We don't do that anymore. We don't like each other like that now.”

Cheka hummed before nodding his head, as though Vil had delivered news from on high, “That's good. You shouldn’t kiss people you don't like…” He looked past Vil, climbing over his lap and sitting on Leona’s back to point directly in Malleus’s face, “Who’s this?”

Leona snickers, speaking before Malleus could, “A lizard.”

Cheka gasps loudly, staring at Malleus with a new sense of wonder, “Really! You’re a really big lizard! I like lizards! There’s a bunch around the castle in the middle of the day because it’s so sunny! They run really fast because I chase and roar and them like this- RAWR!!!”

…

Malleus blinks, the sound of Vil and Leona struggling to hold in their laughter as he stared into the beaming face of an innocent child. A child that just roared in his face, “...That was a very impressive roar for one of your size…”

“Thank you!” Cheka spread himself out on Leona’s back, his chin resting right between the older beastman’s ears, “I practiced.”

Walking the park was somehow the worst thing to ever happen to him. Not his overblot, not being nearly sucked dry of magic, not even being almost smooched to death by a very desperate ghost. But the combo of a blasting hot sun, open toed footwear, and the fact he was forced to use every braincell he had to take the ‘most camable shots’ of Cater taking his selfies, Idia wondered if the universe was getting back at him for attempting global genocide. He wondered if it had to be so cruel…

He knew he couldn't complain. He helped Cater with his blog a lot since they officially started dating; editing, getting him access to music for videos, taking photos with his freakish height stat.

A collection of yells, whooping, and splashes calls his attention. Idia grimaces at the group of students being launched into a pool from a slide. Loud extroverts, jovial casuals. A water park was such an attribute difference than his cozy room with his set up. Even under his coat, past the layers or sunscreen he put on before even leaving his room, Idia could feel his skin cells burning under the unforgiving sun.

Cater’s fiery curls and smile could only enchant him for so long. The fear, the dread building. He's seen the videos, people filming their trips on waterslides. The very fact Cater was using him as another POV camera for B-Roll only pointed to the fact his boyfriend was going to make him get on a slide at some point. He just hasn't said when or which.

Biting his lip, Idia made the choice to just bite the bullet and stop in his tracks, “Can the slide we go on please not be too high? Or have any crazy turns? I know you'll probably want different angles but, I really don't do well all wet and this jacket will only go from the weight of one byte to a kilobyte if I get dunked so-”

“Idia, what are you talking about?”

Cater had stopped, looking at Idia with a sense of mild bewilderment. He blinked, his phone still held up to capture the perfect angle for a selfie.

“Um…” Idia fidgets, looking to the side before pulling his phone out, tapping on it with quick fingers before his text-to-audio voice calls out, “I thought you’d want to go on a slide for ‘camable’ shots. I'm just begging it’s not too wild a slide…”

“...” Cater nearly topples over, bending forward and cackling so loud multiple people had turned and stared at the duo. Calming, Cater stepped closer to cup Idia’s chin and bringing him down to press their lips together. Pulling away he laughed again, “Idia, I’m not getting in the water. I spent two hours just on my hair for today. I’m not getting all messed up and going up a bunch of stairs for a single shot that might not look good. Maybe at the end of the day…but not anytime soon.”

Idia stuttered, being dragged behind Cater while the other junior raised his phone up to line his selfie back up.

“Now, come on. There’s an ivy wall somewhere in this park and I will find it…”

Leona groans, his brow twitching in annoyance as Cheka whined and pulled on his ears.

“Unca! Unca! UUUUUUUNCAAAAAAAAAA!”

Vil spoke up, turning the page of his book from under his parasol, “Leona, I believe your nephew requests your attention.”

“No? Really?” Leona let out a deep sigh, rolling over on the lounge chair and managing to catch the falling child with one arm, “What? It's been an hour.”

“Ouji-Tan! I wanna go play! Come play with me!” Cheka pouted, slapping his open palms against Leona's chest.

“Go play then…” Leona tried to roll back over, gently slipping Cheka to the pavement only to groan when Cheka started to yank at his hair.

“Noooooooooo! I wanna go in the water with Unca! Unca! Uncaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-!”

Cheka had devolved into simply yelling, taking deep breaths before continuing to shout and tug at one of Leona's braids.

Malleus hummed, cracking an eye open to the scene only a foot away from him, “Beastmen child rearing is rather odd…”

Leona growled, pushing up from the lounge chair and scooping the child up in one fluid motion before he started to walk away from the lounge area. Cheka squirmed around, Leona piecing together that his nephew was not only bored but overheating. A quick dip was the easiest solution. Since the wave pool was out of the question and the normal pool was packed, all that was left was the lazy river.

He stood at the edge of the water, watching as a group of students floated closer. Rosehearts and Clover both lounging on innertubes, their respective Leeches circling around them in full forms.

Riddle perked up, seeing his fellow housewarden standing at the side of the river, “Ah! Leona, how can I-”

Leona barely moved, tossing Cheka into the air with his one arm and letting the child arch to splash into the water.

A moment of silence passed, the river group staring wide eyed as they watched a child disappear under the water. When Cheka doesn't resurface instantly, Trey called out to Leona concerned.

“Can he swim!?”

…

Leona glances down at the water, waiting silently while the two Heartslabyul students start panicking. Luckily, the bright orange ball at the bottom of the river started to swim up and break through the surface. Cheka paddled around making over exaggerated shivering sounds.

“It's cold!”

“Yeah, he knows.” Leona turned on his heel, the unspoken task of watching his nephew hung in the air as he walked away.

“Thanks for carrying the tube, Jack!”

“It's not even that heavy…”

Sebek scoffed under his breath, still mad the large tube had unbalanced him and made him fall, “It's ridiculous how big a four person tube is! Could this even fit in the slide!?”

Yuu hummed, looking at the large pipe of the slide beside them as they climbed the stairs to the top, “I would think so. Since that's kinda the whole point you know.”

Sebek had opened his mouth, either to actually respond or rise to Yuu's small jab, Jack didn't let him speak, “Why did you two want to ride this slide with us specifically? Didn't Ace and Deuce get in line before us since we had to wait for a four person tube?”

Epel mumbled, waving his boyfriend's question off as he and Yuu quickly raced up the stairs. At the top, positioning into the small pool before the mouth of the slide, the attendant looked…concerned when Yuu and Epel instructed them to sit on the opposite side of the tube from them.

Holding onto one of the handrails of the tube, the attendant gave both Jack and Sebek worried glances, “You um…you guys sure about this seating arrangement?”

“Just release us already, human!”

“Alright…your funeral…”

Only as he and Sebek descended into the mouth of the slide did Jack realize a few key things. One, physics was a subject he was decent at. Two, this slide had a large bulb filled with water half-way through after a drop. Three, he and Sebek were on one side of this tube and they both weighed much more than Epel and Yuu combined, “...Fuck.”

The resulting screams reached the three lounging juniors. Only Leona perked up at hearing the sudden increased intensity of the four very familiar voices before silence seemed to ring out. 

Vil spoke, not looking up from his book, “Were those ours?”

“...Yep.”

“Were those ‘broken bone’ screams?”

Malleus hummed, tilting his head but not moving elseway, “I don't believe so…”

Vil turned the page of his book, grabbing his bottle of ice water to sip, “They're fine then…”

A few minutes later, Sebek and Jack had walked over still dripping wet. The two taller boys had Epel and Yuu over their respective shoulders. While Jack had sat Epel down beside Vil, the cackling freshman having to lean against his housewarden’s chair. Sebek dropped a laughing, sopping-wet Yuu onto Malleus’s back before walking away without a word.

Leona raised his head, looking at the two still laughing freshman, “What did you two even do?”

Yuu all but cried into Malleus’s hair from how loud they were laughing, “We…we did a flip…”

Lilia sighed, waving a hand in front of his face as he sat in the shallow water opening of the lazy river, “Such a fun place…it's a shame it has to be so hot…”

It was nearly lunchtime, so it was only right to gather his charges and make sure they all managed to have a meal before the food area was overwhelmed. Malleus was easy to find, a large black mass lounging around in the sun. The real challenge was finding Silver and Sebek. While he was happy that his boy wasn't stuck lazing around with him, he could only worry not able to find him In the water park.

Luckily, Lilia had ran into Kalim, the Asim hier carrying the youngest Savanna prince on his shoulders after somehow gaining responsibility for him. Kalim had gleefully told him where he last saw Silver and Sebek, and that they were most likely still there. Parting ways, Kalim had invited Lilia to join them in the children's area after lunch.

He didn't have to wait long, chuckling lightly at the two underclassmen floating in the river.

Silver was asleep, but safely floating on a tube in a comfortable position. Sebek floated behind him completely face down in the water, hands lazily resting on Silver's shoulders. Lilia walked deeper into the river, standing in the path of the two guards. Seeing how neither moved nor noticed him, he could only giggle a bit more.

“Oh, dear…well…I have no choice then…” clearing his throat, Lilia narrowed his eyes and yelled, “SILVER! SEBEK!”

Silver shot up, nearly headbutting Lilia only to fall face first into the water as the general dodged. At the same time, Sebek had jerked and flailed in the water. A cloud of bubbles broke through the water as he jolted upright and saluted.

“SIR!”

Silver stood up in the water after getting his bearings, saluting as well, “Sir!”

Lilia laughed, “I’m happy to see you boys are relaxing on this lovely day. Now come out of the water, it's almost time for lunch!”

Yuu walked around the park, taking in the sights and sounds. They had made a quick stop to where the teachers were all gathered, asking if what Azul had told them earlier that day was true or not. Crewel had been too excited to explain what the numerous advancements in potions and chemistry had done in only a few decades. Allowing rapid growth and processing plants to be used as natural filters in real time. Making such clean and non-chlorine filled waters that were safe for every species.

For nearly five minutes they were trapped in Crewel's too happy gaze before Sam had distracted him with a bottle of suspiciously already opened scotch. Trein had shooed them away while Crewel tried to yank the bottle out of Sam's hands, telling them to drink plenty of water and to get out of the sun when they could. So walking around the park it was, sipping on a blue raspberry slushie and seeing who they could find to bother.

They had to do a double take as they spotted a messy braided bun. Calling out his name they rushed over before they could lose him in the crowd.

Jamil turned, raising an eyebrow as his datemate ran over and stared at him in astonishment. He glanced over to the side, waiting for her to speak, but seeing how they weren't he tilted his head, “Yes?”

“Where the fuck have you been!? I don't think I've seen you since you checked in?”

“I've been enjoying the park, hayati. That was the whole point of the trip wasnt it?”

“Well…yeah. But I haven't seen you, in like…hours… are you good?”

Jamil smiles, raising a fist to his mouth to laugh before leaning over to peck Yuu on the cheek, “I'm fine. I really have been enjoying myself. This day turned out to be more relaxing than I thought it'd be.”

Yuu blushes from his kiss, PDA from Jamil was rare and treasured. They press their slushie to their cheek, “Kalim hasn't been…well, Kalim? His top stay on so far?”

“Don't know, I only saw him briefly in another lunch line. But, he seemed to be doing ok.”

“...” Yuu pressed the slushie to Jamil's neck, ignoring the viper hissing and trying to escape the cold touch, “Are you fucking dying of heat stroke? Who are you!?”

Taking the drink from Yuu's hand, Jamil glared, “That's cold. Yuu, this park was already vetted by the Asims; a second look is only more thorough than the first with Kalim’s family. Since Kalim, the heir, is here, no doubt they sent much more security detail than normal. Just because most of the other students can't see them doesn't mean they aren’t there. And lastly, Cheka is here. Kalim actually engages all his brain cells to keep children both entertained and safe in his care. He's literally more safe and functional than normal so long as Cheka remains attached to him”

He hands the drink back, taking the time to flick Yuu directly in the center of their forehead, ignoring their whining as he speaks, “I'm having fun, don't worry about me. Just be sure to reapply sunscreen.” Jamil hugs them, one-armed and brief before he turns to walk away.

Yuu mumbles under their breath, speaking around the straw of their icy, “I don't need sunscreen-”

Though it was mumbled, Jamil heard them and whipped around to sprint toward them. Yuu screamed, the shriek sliding into a burst of hysterical laughter as they ran from the vice warden.

Deuce hummed, brows creasing as he and Ruggie walked over the multi-colored stone bridge that led to a new area of the park, “Isn't this…trespassing?”

Ruggie snorted, looking over his shoulder at the Heartslabyul first year, “I mean, Kalim’s family bought the park for the day; we can go wherever we want.”

“Really…?”

Sighing, Ruggie pats deuce on the back as they walk through the brightly colored gate of the park's kiddie area, “Don't think too hard about it. Kalim sure didn't when he boltcut the locks off…”

Kalim had almost gleefully explained to anyone who asked how he had magiced up a pair of bolt cutters to break the chains and locks of the park's kiddie area. It was only logical in his mind, since he plucked Cheka from Riddle and Trey's care in the lazy river, he had to take the five-year-old to the age-appropriate area.

The park was big in its own right, and while the children's area was smaller it still had the size to hold a hundred or so people comfortably. The area was whimsical, water spouts shaped as various aquatic and tropical items. Bright colors of every hue at every corner, making it almost an eye strain to both Ruggie and Deuce.

Deuce oo-ed, looking around the space and laughing at a rotating fish that squirted water into the air, “This is a lot, but really cute. I can see how kids love it here…”

Ruggie snickered, looking over at Kalim, Cheka, and Lilia playing on the massive jungle gym and spraying each other with stationary water guns, “Money really buys a plethora of experiences. The kids back home would never believe this place, just from the amount of water alone.”

“Ah…water is scarce in your town?”

“Not so much ‘scarce’. But we have other ways of staying cool than using fresh clean water; that's for cooking and cleaning.”

Nodding, Deuce looked around the space, “I guess when you put it that way…a water park does feel like a waste. But it has been pretty fun, right, Bucchi-senpai? I've never been to one before so I've been trying to go on everything.”

Ruggie hummed, turning a wheel and then sputtering when a ring overhead turned in tandum and dropped water on his head, “Yeah, it's fun. Just really reminds me how many rich people I've been around. I've only gone on a few slides because I've been…a little overwhelmed.”

Deuce nodded, closing his eyes, “I know what you mean. The queendom doesn't get that hot and even when it did mom and I were able to cool down with just ice lollies. But, thinking about how valuable a resource water is for some people…a water park seems kinda wasteful.”

They both sigh, Ruggie muttering good naturally under his breath, “Rich people-”

A loud buzzer made both of them jump. Deuce was well aware of the wave pools buzzer, an auditory warning to the incoming currents.  But looking around, neither could see what was coming. Only the gleeful squealing of Cheka makes them look up. The other three guests on the jungle gym all smiling and pointing upward. Deuce and Ruggie both look at the top of the gym, only now noticing the large bucket witht he park’s logo on it tipping over. The rush of water hit both boys hard and fast. Deuce was able to keep himself standing, sputtering and shaking his head to get the water out of his face. Ruggie wasn’t so lucky. The Savanaclaw boy having been knocked down and nearly waterboarded before the onslaught was over.

Ruggie coughs, sitting up and flicking his ears and brushing his hair out of his face, “This place is for the kids!?”

Cater tapped at his phone, screening through his photos and deleting ones that weren’t up to his standards immediately. Beside him, Idia was crouched before an electric keypad with his own phone connected to it via a cable. A few minutes passed before the previously red light turned green, a pleasant ding sounding as the door's lock disengaged, “Got it…”

Humming, Cater pockets his phone and holds the now unlocked door open for both of them, “Awesome, babes! That felt like it took longer than normal though…”

Idia shook his head, putting his phone back into his pocket as he followed Cater through the restricted area, “I was kinda impressed honestly; security was no real end-game event in difficulty, but it was pretty interesting how they structured it…” he smiled, his face looking smug, ��Wanted to play with it a little…”

Cater snickered, bumping shoulders with the other third-year, “Bully.”

The two walk down the stone hallway, finally entering a large area of shallow waterways brimming with faintly glowing plants. The large foliage growing out of the troughs and interlocking under steel grate walkways. It was peaceful, the sound of water gently trickling through the park's systems. Small fireflies flew lazily through the air, repeatedly blinking as they went.

Ooh-ing, his phone already recording the area as he walked deeper into the room, “OM7, this place is amazing! The other influencers are gonna be #somadcraycraywithjel-layforcaycay!”

Idia sighed from his spot, inching away as a number of fireflies mistook his hair as a beacon, “Have I ever given you my opinion on your hashtags…?”

“Sorry~. Can't hear you over the sound of all the cute pictures I'm taking~.” Cater smiled, winking toward Idia as he held his phone high to take another 30 selfies in rapid succession. But, he blinks, his expression turning into one of surprise before he turned his phone camera toward Idia, “Babes, take your jacket off a bit?”

The other third-year instantly tried to hide in his jacket. Even fully covered he briefly brought his arms up to shield his chest from Cater’s focused eyes, “Why?”

“Ah. No, wait. Yeah, keep the jacket on; it's good since the background is so dull compared to you.” Cater moved around his shy boyfriend, the audible click of his camera going off only making Idia squirm more, “Don't move so much.”

“Why are you taking my picture…?” Idia blushed, trying to hide in his hair and hood as Cater teasingly pushed the phone directly into his face, “C-Cater!”

Cater chuckles, finally pulling away to look over the newest batch of photos while he twirls a strand of hair, “Sorry~. I couldn't help it. You look really good in this lighting…”

“...” Idia glared softly from behind his hair, “Don't post those…”

“Don't worry…” Cater leaned into Idia, pulling the other third-year down to whisper against his lips, “You know any pic of you is #MINE…”

Idia hair had flared for a brief moment, the electric blue overtaken by a soft bubblegum pink before it faded to his edges. He laughed nervously, looking away from Cater, “Wh-What kinda game plan are you even playing at…?”

“Well~...Since you were such a good sport today and helped me get all the Magicam shots I wanted. I thought we could chill out here, away from everyone else. Maybe makeout a little-”

“Yes, please.”

Waiting in lines was a factor Epel hadn't accounted for when he said he was going to get on every slide. He sighed, resting his palm against his face as he looked over the park from the tall walk up tower, the people below slowly growing smaller and smaller as he and Rook climbed higher.

“Monsieur Pom, the line is moving. Come along.”

Epel turned to Rook, walking behind the third-year, “Thanks for hold the tube for us, Rook. Those things get annoyingly heavy after a few hours…”

Rook chuckled, the two person tube looped over his shoulder, “It is no issue. I want to thank you for agreeing to ride this slide with me. Trey was my original target, but his beau would not allow him out of the river without him…”

“Yeah, the Leech twins are…really aggressive in the water Ah’m learning…” Epel had simply tried to ask Riddle if he had more sunscreen he had passed out among his dorm and where to find it. Deuce lost his tube, Ace needed an extra coating, and Epel honestly wanted a tube just to avoid Vil sniping him on the back of the neck with his ice cold sunscreen potion. He had barely walked into the lazy river before he was being round house slapped by a beefy eel tail.

“Ah…Oui. At least you landed further into the river and not on the pavement like moi…”

Epel turned to his senior, opening his mouth to make another comment only to stop and then hum, “Ah. Rook-senpai, hold still you have something on your back.”

“Oh?”

“Ah’ll get it.” Epel brushes at the center of Rook’s back, trying to remove the collection of spots that seemed to suddenly appear on his skin. But seeing they weren’t moved, Epel rubbed at the skin harder only to lean in, “What is on yur back…?”

Rook looked over his shoulder, eyebrows raised in an expression of surprise, “My back? I don’t remember laying down anywhere.”

“Yeah, It’s like a bunch of dots…wait.” Epel leaned in closer, squinting his eyes as he noticed even more darken speckles, “Are those…Are those freckles? You have freckles?” Epel leaned back in surprise, staring in almost horror at Rook’s back.

The third-year only laughs, tilting his head back, “Oh! Is that all? Yes, I freckle when in the sun too long these days. Though when I was younger you’d confuse me for one big freckle. The sun is a creature of wonder, life, and mystery. It’s light nourishes the soil and the flora, giving food to the beasts of man and the night. But its same light can set fire to the savana, burn and boil the skin of those who need it to survive.”

Epel could only stand and listen as Rook continued on and on about about the dangers of the sun while also waxing poetic about it. The longer Epel studied his senpai did he start to see more and more freckles along the third-year’s body. He mumbles under his breath, brows creasing as he thought aloud, “Wait, did you even put sunscreen on?”

Screaming in a more frantic frequency suddenly rings out. A two-person tube from above them flying far off course of the waterslide and sailing through the air until it landed with a massive splash into the wave pool. Epel nearly fell off as he slammed into the railing, screaming at the familiar two people who just flew off the slide, “THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YA TWO!? ACE, DEUCE, AH’M TELLIN’ RIDDLE ABOUT THIS YOU FUCKIN’ DUMBASSES. YA COULDA DIED!”

Rook leans over a screaming Epel, smiling and waving to the two still shell shocked freshmen, “BEAUTIFUL FORM! 100 POINTS!”

Azul looked up as a shadow fell over him. Blocking out the sun stood a dripping Jamil, his fellow second-year staring down at him with his normal expression of unenthused, a bright red slushie in one hand. Azul had remained seated, silent as he gripped his cell phone and wrote down a few ideas on a clean napkin.

Looking to the side, Azul cleared his throat, moving his arm away as Jamil’s hair sent down three drops of water in quick succession, “Hello, dear. Did you need me for something?”

Jamil continues to stare, bringing his straw up to his mouth and slurping loudly. Tilting his head to the side and letting his hair drip across Azul’s still-clothed arm. He smirked, watching Azul cringing his arm to his chest. He decided to be kind, flipping his hair over his shoulder, “Have you been sitting here the whole day?”

“Not…the whole day. I moved after lunch. But, Jamil!” Azul had gripped Jamil by the arm, pulling the other sophomore onto the lunch table bench he held up the napkins, “Look at these calculations, this park is performing theft in broad daylight! The markup is absurd. A single slice of pizza and a bag of chips is almost $20!” Azul turned away, one hand tapping at his phone and the other writing more numbers along the napkins, “That's a single slice and a small bag of chips, not a drink. The pizza wasn’t even good. Could you imagine how much more I could make at the lounge with actual decent cuisine?”

Jamil raised an eyebrow, sipping his slushie before speaking, “I could imagine the riot that’ll break out once you even think of raising your prices. It may have been last year, but people still haven’t forgiven you for the whole ‘School-wide Slavery’ plot.”

Azul stopped tapping on his phone, turning to glare at Jamil’s blank-faced inquiry, “As I’ve told you all multiple times, it wasn’t slavery; everyone signed a legally binding contract that was fully explained and outlined to them. They knew what they were-Stop trying to drip water on me!” 

Laughing, Jamil moves his hair back over his shoulder and away from dripping onto Azul’s arm, “You really don’t want to risk anyone seeing your true form that bad?”

“You know I’m…sensitive, about it…”

“Yuu says you look cute.”

“Yuu’s never seen me in my mer form, they’ve only seen what I looked like in overblot. And let’s not sit here and pretend Yuu is the authority on appearances. If I remember correctly, they saw your overblot form as very attractive-JAMIL! PLEASE GO DRY YOUR HAIR!”

Deuce blinked up at Ortho sitting on the pool's edge, “You don’t know how to swim?”

Ace floated behind Deuce, arms lazily waving around the water but he raised an eyebrow at the automation, “Can’t you just download how to do it?”

Deuce splashes him, glaring at the sputtering redhead, “Ace, that's rude!”

Ortho giggled, kicking his legs lightly in the water, “It’s not Deuce Spade. But, thank you. It’s not that I don’t know how to swim, I’m asking you to help me me figure out a way to swim.”

“Is there…a difference?”

Holding up a finger, Ortho stood up from the edge of the pool. Once he was sure the two other freshmen were watching him, he took a step over the edge and allowed himself to fall into the water. Ace and Deuce both stare as the still-shining blue flame sank lower and lower into the water until Ortho landed on the pool bottom. The robot tilting his head up and waving toward them.

“Oh…”

“Do… do we help him back up?”

“Deuce, what the fuck. How are we gonna-”

Trein looked at the teacher beside him. Crewel leaned back in his chair with his mouth hung open. He could only sneer as the bicolored man let out a loud, guttural snore. He plucked the empty bottle of scotch from the man's hands, recapping it and putting it back in his bag before looking over the rest of the faculty that came.

Oster was reclining in a lounge chair, a trifold in her hands to direct as much sunlight to herself as possible. An empty slushie cup half hidden under her chair with the actual drink poured into a deep margarita glass with a colorful paper umbrella in it.

Hui-Yan was covered head to toe, an ornate swim cover hiding all skin from view as she peacefully read under an umbrella. He at least thinks she's reading. She had on stylish shades, borrowed either from Crewel or Oster, that completely hid her eyes. And while she hadn't put her tablet down, he's also certain she hadn't actually moved…

Rohdri was doing…something. The stoic man had brought some compact contraption with him and he had been fiddling with it since they arrived at the park. He stood in his shorts, button-up short sleeve shirt, and a fisherman's hat, looking over the machine as it gave beeps. He would widen his eye a fraction of an inch every now and again, humming loudly and typing at his tablet.

Dubhghall was Seven knows where. What had started as him accompanying a few students that didn't meet the weight requirement for a ride, quickly turned into the massive teacher simply not returning to the teacher's table and running around the park as if he was a student himself.

And Vargas…

Trein's eyes trailed over, watching the shorter man drag Crowley away kicking and screaming. He laughed loudly, Sam locked under his other arm, stating that the ride he was taking them to would put hair on their chest. Crowley howled and wailed, ridiculous gold tipped claw rings digging into the pavement as he cried out he didn't WANT hair on his chest. Sam seemed to be resigned to his fate.

Looking back toward Crewel, he sighed. Even with Crowley's whining the other man hadn't woken up from his drunken stupor. Pulling out his phone, he could only frown at the text message his daughters had sent him. The both of them more than willing to cat sit Lucious for the day. At the image of his darling boy, tongue sticking out as he slept the day away belly up he could only sigh again.

“I miss my cat…”

Leona glared at his nephew, the five-year-old kicking and screaming on the ground after being told it was time to go home. Cheka was having far too much fun at the water park, not to mention the fact his uncle hadn't even gone on a single ride or swam in the water.

Rolling his eyes, Leona kneels down and scoops the wailing child under his arms, “Stop your yelping. We're leaving.”

“NOOOOOOOOO! UNCA! I DON'T WANNA LEAVE YET! YOU SAID WE'D PLAY IN THE WATER TODAY!” Cheka devolved back into simply screaming and flailing his arms around, climbing up Leona to clutch onto his back.

Leona stood still, glaring into the air as Cheka’s legs kicked against his collar and he screamed into his ears. The only time Cheka wasn’t screaming was when the five-year-old would lean over and try to sink his still dullish baby teeth into Leona’s ears.

Vil scoffed, his bag already packed and his sunhat back on, “Really? Are you going to just let him throw a tantrum?” Shaking his head, Vil leaned forward hands up to pluck Cheka from Leona’s shoulders, “Come here Cheka, you can ride back to the school with me-AH! MY HAIR, MY HAIR!”

Cheka didn’t detach from Leona’s ear as he gripped onto Vil’s hair and pulled at the locks, ruining his hairstyle and knocking his hat off of his head. Malleus even tried to help, if only to try to release Vil from the angry toddler’s hold. Instead, one of his horns were also gripped in a tiny hand.

Leona raises an eyebrow at Malleus, the large fae keeping bent over and doing his best to not move far from Cheka’s range, “You know damn well you can move out of his hold…”

Malleus looked away, pouting lightly but letting Cheka shake his head around from his horn, “I don’t wish to hurt him trying to remove him…”

“...” Only when Cheka takes a deep breath, unlatching from biting at Leona’s ear to let out another piercing scream, Leona speaks up, “FINE! FINE! Pick a damn ride and we’ll go on it!”

Cheka stopped screaming almost instantly, but kept his grip on both Vil and Malleus, “Really?”

“Yes. By the Seven, just stop your shrieking…”

Cheka spent only two seconds thinking over his choices before scrambling off of his uncle, tugging on his swim trunks as to say ‘Follow me’. Beaming and jumping up and down.

Leona stood under the bucket, glaring at the crowd of people all watching him with rapt attention. As the buzzer sounds, he closed his eyes feeling the rush of freezing cold water hitting him hard from the top of his head. It felt like a full minute before the water stops and he’s left soaking wet with a giggling Cheka still gripping onto his swim trunks.

Ruggie looked all too pleased with the current events, eyes just too low to be eye level, “Was the water nice?”

“Everyone get back on the fucking bus.”

“UNCA!”

[motherforthefamicom]

redownloaded an old art program

[victorluvsalice]

Another Smiler Outfit Post For You All

Because back on May 31st, I played around with putting one of my Smiler Sims in a few new outfit possibilities for their birthday, and, well, I like sharing my attempts to make my Sims into fashion icons with you. XD So here is the latest selection of Potential Smiler Outfits:

First up, we have what I believe is an all-Vampires formal look, featuring a lovely fancy tailed tux with a bright yellow patterned vest; a black top hat; and a pair black shoes with white spats. Plus some lovely dramatic purple eye makeup and yellow eyeliner. I genuinely didn’t realize this tux had this swatch – I will have to keep it in mind for future save files where I use Smiler and need a formal outfit for them!

Next, we have another formal look that, as you might imagine, was at least partially inspired by me seeing that sparkly yellow jacket and going “Felix E. Lated Vibes!” XD But yes, Smiler here is sporting a sparkly yellow jacket and off-white shirt combo from High School Years; a pair of black base game pants with a belt (I have decided I like Smiler in belts); a pair of yellow shoes from Luxury Party Stuff (which are maybe not QUITE the right shade of yellow, but they still felt them); and some dramatic yellow Get To Work eye makeup paired with some winged black Luxury Party Stuff eyeliner. I liked the combo and felt it suited the look!

Here we have a party-ready Smiler wearing one of the base game full-body party outfits – loving the sparkly dark yellow jacket and black pants, but I’m not a big fan of the red undershirt or, honestly, the tie. If I could get a version of this that ditched the tie and had like a black or yellow (or even purple) undershirt, this would be fantastic. *shrug* But you work with what you’re given. Anyway, the dark yellow Discover University shoes actually pair really well with this outfit (the texture goes well with the sparkly cloth), and I found some sparkly yellow eye makeup from Luxury Party Stuff to pull it all together! Which doesn’t show up well in the full-body shot, so here’s a close-up:

Yes, so I caught them at an awkward moment mid-blink, what can you do. XD Anyway, yeah, isn’t that a good match for the jacket? I love the glittery effect. Discovered this while working on their OTHER party outfit and realizing I got a LOT more makeup options when I took off the “masculine” filter! Speaking of which –

Almost forgot to get a picture of this particular outfit when I first played through this CAS makeover session! XD Anyway, this one was a result of me playing around with the color filters, looking for stuff in purple and yellow, which led to me stumbling across this High School Years top and going “YES.” I mean, I would have gone “YES” even harder if the overshirt was yellow instead of purple, but this is still VERY The Smiler-ish, I think. Plus I feel it’s good for Smiler to have some purple-themed outfits – breaks up all the yellow and black! But yes, here we have Smiler in a black-and-white-checked long-sleeved undershirt with purple short-sleeved overshirt (not QUITE a fan of the high collar on the undershirt, but still), black belted base game pants (of course), white and black Get Famous shoes (to go with the shirt), and some purple-with-the-brightness-adjusted-to-better-match-the-overshirt Luxury Party Stuff eye makeup! *nods* I mean, I think it looks good. :P

Here’s a quick “hot weather wear” fit I whipped up because, well, it was the Unofficial Start Of Summer when I originally did this. Featuring a Get Together hat that has a plant symbol on the front because that was the only design that had the right yellow brim (again, I need the help of modders to get me a plain version...or a version with The Smiler Logo on the front instead XD); a Perfect Patio Stuff light yellow overshirt/white undershirt combo; those base game yellow-and-black shorts I found and decided had to be Smiler’s from when I did the “SDX Swimwear” looks; a pair of yellow-and-black Get Famous sandals; and a yellow-and-black base game bracelet for their – guess it would be right arm, since they’re facing us – that I stumbled across looking at some of the bracelet options. I like the chevron one on their other wrist best, but this is still good!

And finally, Smiler in goofy heart-print boxers. Because they would. XD And because they were originally wearing flame-print boxers, and I was like “uh, way too Wickerman.” XD

[legolasghosty]

oh shit i forgot to send a new one! brain mush.

uh. let's say 75 please?

No worries, thanks for sending these, they're really nice!!! More Holograms (and the introduction of I think the last major character...)

Julie laughed and followed her brother in, Reggie and Alex on her heels. Fuego was standing beside the receptionist’s desk. He looked up and smiled when he heard them approach.  “Ah good, I’ll let Mr. Covington know you’re here.” He turned away from them, pink nails clicking against his tablet. Julie was about to ask about the agenda for the day when she heard a crash behind her. She whirled around to see Alex lying on the floor, someone else practically on top of him, clearly having just bowled him over. “Oh my gosh, I am so sorry,” the new person exclaimed, scrambling to their feet and holding out a hand to Alex. “I wasn’t even looking.”

(Send me a number and I'll write that many words in my WIP and show you!)

[hyperfixation-tangentopia]

So, I just??? Randomly just the motivation for this??? So enjoy more Tealstar stuff ig lol. Tried to do a lot here, not sure how well it worked for me. You can tell I got a little rundown at Tongbi's part, but I was still really determined to finish this, so. Here ya go.

   Chikao loved the storm.

   The smell of fresh rain and the swirl of dark clouds overhead lit up by flashes of lightning that split the sky in two and sent deep, booming thunder rippling over the land was something she could never get tired of.  Every lightning strike lit up her eyes, she could feel the vibration of thunder running deep within her bones, and the entire world was pulled just a little to the side by the chilling winds that whipped past.

   She was fond of the world after a storm, too.  The way the smell of rain lingered for a week afterwards, clouds drifted past so you could see sheets of rain coming down in the distance as they left, the sudden abundance of greens and the pinks and blues and yellows of plants as they sprouted up, the splashing of puddles gathered in random dips in the ground and squishing of deep brown mud as water sunk into the soil.  She loved that.  Loved everything about it.

   And the best part was that she could do it.  On a whim, whenever she wanted, she could summon the clouds and lightning and feel the very storm surging through her bones.  She could feel the world come alive in a way so, so different than it did in the shine of the sun.

   But, unfortunately, not everyone was so welcoming.

   And why weren’t they?  What was even the point of limiting her ability to create storms?  Why did she have to “register” a storm or whatever to create one?  It wasn’t like she was creating out-of-control tornados or setting forests on fire with lightning.  Most of the time, it was just a little rain to give the village crops a boost!

   But the Celestial Realm hadn’t seen it that way.  The first time Nezha had come down to meet her, he had called it “undermining the Jade Emperor’s authority” and “breaking the laws of the Celestial Realm” and “a matter to be taken seriously”.  But honestly?  How could she take someone that had come down to lecture her about why she couldn’t summon rain without paperwork seriously.

   And that was all it had been, for a while.  Something funny, eventually just a friend coming down to spar.  Barely an annoyance.  Not even a concern.

   And then Princess Iron Fan had joined him.  And they’d struggled over the winds of the storm, trying to turn them on each other to gain an advantage.  And then…

   Flash

   And then people had gotten hurt.

   And the Celestial Realm was angry.

   Stealing the Peaches of Immortality from their orchard?  That was probably just the cherry on top.

   But even when they’d come to arrest Chikao for her “crimes” (come on, they were peaches), they’d made a mistake to dare go after Tongbi.

   Chikao sighed quietly as she stared up at the endless night sky, the stars twinkling back at her like tiny diamonds against a sheet of inky paint.  It felt so close when the storm was swirling around it, the wind catching every little loose thing on the ground and throwing around every small hair out of place, but when the night was clear like this and she was laying on the ground beside Tongbi…it felt so, so far away.  She itched for it to be close again, to touch the clouds and feel their water in her hands. 

   She wondered if, in a world where Nezha had time, where Nezha could step away from his celestial duties and just relax for a moment, they could fly around through the clouds and throw water at each other.

   She didn’t live in that world.  She didn’t know.

   “Chikao?” Tongbi’s soft voice pulled Chikao out of her thoughts.

   “Yeah?” Chikao rolled onto her side to look at Tongbi, flattening the grass beneath her. 

   Tongbi’s eyes stayed on the sky as he spoke and his hands picked through the fur on his tail.  His voice was muffled by his dark green scarf as he buried his face into the fabric.  “You won’t let them t-t-take you from me, will you?”

   A small spark of anger flashed in her chest.  She’d said they’d be together forever, and she’d meant it.  No Celestial Realm would change that.  “Of course not.  And I won’t let anyone hurt you, either.”

   Tongbi didn’t respond and Chikao rolled back onto her back with a soft sigh.  She didn’t want Tongbi to worry.  He shouldn’t have had to worry.  She dealt with Nezha and Iron Fan on her own fine, didn’t she?  And then even when more celestials had shown up, she’d dealt with it.  But Tongbi was still worried, and Chikao knew well by then that the only thing that was going to soothe his concern was time.

   Time, or get rid of the Celestial Realm’s meddling completely, but she knew that wasn’t going to happen.

   At least, that’s what she thought, as the days went by and Tongbi slowly felt safe being outside of his library again.  As toddlers and children became teens and adults.  As people aged and grayed and passed.

   Until the Brotherhood reached out with a dream.  A dream of glory and ambition.  A dream of change and prosperity.  A dream of safety and comfort.  A dream of freedom.  A dream of storms.

   A dream of a day storms could freely brew in the days, and the skies would be theirs at night.

   A dream where the Celestial Realm wouldn’t meddle, Nezha could freely come and go, and Tongbi’s concerns would vanish.

   And Chikao took it.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tongbi hated surprises.

   The unexpected whirlwind of emotions he wasn’t ready for, having to think on his feet and his mind going blank, only moments to make a decision and if it was the wrong one he was doomed.  The mounting pressure of what felt like a mountain behind his head and the crushing weight of do or die that he just couldn’t pull himself out of.

   And the aftermath was worse.  Because then there were a hundred different feelings all weighing him down like boulders, telling him there was some way to alleviate their weight but not giving him a single how-to.  Sometimes the boulders were hot and sometimes electric and sometimes just heavy, and those meant different things, but he didn’t know what they meant.  But apparently, knowing what they meant and how to sort them out was the very key to getting them under control sometimes, because otherwise every time he thought about the surprise he would trigger another rockslide.

   Physically, Tongbi didn’t mind rocks, boulders, or even mountains.  Feet on the ground, dig his heels in, take a deep breath and move.  He could move boulders, sort out rockslides, split entire mountainsides in two that way.  The boulders he could touch the rough or smooth surfaces of were lighter than the ones that crushed his heart and held him down in the corner with tears spilling onto blurry pages, but never had a texture.

   Fortunately, people were welcoming.

   It had been a strange change after the curious chirps of the monkeys that found him hiding away in caves on Flower Fruit Mountain, but a warm one.  Chikao helped lift the boulders off his chest, explain some of the feelings and help him separate them apart so he could think without folding into a mess of matted fur and heavy emotions. 

   The warm nights of staring up at the stars and pointing out constellations as Chikao worked through his fur were the best nights he’d ever known.  Spending days reading books about the sun aloud and telling Chikao about asteroids that flew by brought him a warmth he could never quite explain.  Even the flower pin he had, with teal and red petals, served as a small comfort when he was alone, to remind him that someone cared.

   Though he had been nervous at first, the village was nice too.  Adults were happy to trust him to read about the phenomenon of eclipses to children and watch meteor showers with them, and the kids were always fascinated by his words and eager to ask questions and learn more.  Even on days where he didn’t have books, several of them were ready to ask questions and listen to him ramble. 

   And even as they grew and had more chores and work to tend to, nobody minded when he sat on a bench and read the afternoon away.

   Tongbi hummed a tune as his eyes scanned across neat words, written with meticulous precision.  Dust kicked up into the air as the click clack of horseshoes went by, but Tongbi was fully absorbed, the rest of the world blurred as he imagined how it would feel to step on the moon.  Would he feel lighter?  Would it feel like stone on earth, or dust, or powder, or something else entirely?  Would the stars look different?  What kind of new star charts could he make from there?

   “I’m bored!” The high-pitched whine of a kid caught his ear.  He almost called out to invite them to read, but…no, they probably didn’t want to hear him.  All of the kids he used to read to were teenagers or adults now, and had too much responsibility to bother listening to him anymore, and the new ones probably didn’t have any interest in him.

   “Hey, this guy’ll read to you about some pretty cool stuff, if you wanna.” Tongbi glanced up from his book to see a teenager with long black hair running down past her shoulders and freckles mixing with the dust and dirt on her face.  He felt a small flower of warmth bloom in his chest.  He knew this kid.  Did she still remember him?

   “Ooo, like what?” One of the children asked as their arms swung back and forth.

    “Well, you know the little white things that are up in the sky every night?” She smiled.

   “Uh-huuuuh.” The kid nodded.

   “Well, he taught me that those are called stars, and they’re actually very, very distant suns.” She said as she walked over to the bench Tongbi was sitting on.

   “Woah!” Three kids followed her, their eyes shining brighter than the sun. 

   “But suns don’t look like that.” Another kid frowned.

   “That’s the fun part.” She sat down in front of Tongbi and skimmed the title of his current book.  “He’ll explain the whole thing.”

   The kids promptly sat down in front of him, staring up with eager curiosity that filled Tongbi with warmth.  He started explaining, slowly at first, then faster when they only seemed more intrigued.  More children, kids playing in the village and teenagers he used to read to just finished with chores, came around him and sat down, enjoying his reading and explanations.

   He hoped this never changed.  And, luckily for him, it didn’t seem that was going to happen. 

   At least, that’s what he thought, as Tongbi’s reading slowly expanded to the entire village.  As toddlers and children became teens and adults.  As people aged and grayed and passed.

   Until the Brotherhood reached out with a risk.  A risk of danger and hostility.  A risk of battle and bloodshed.  A risk of pain and uncertainty.  A risk of imprisonment.  A risk of change.

   A risk of ferocious and bloody battles by day, and wounded and torn foundations by night.

   A risk of the Celestial Realm coming down with all their fury, Nezha would be injured, and Chikao being imprisoned.

   And Tongbi denied it.

   Tongbi denied the dream.  Chikao took the risk.

[celestie0]

gojo satoru x reader | oneshot smut [18+]

title. around the clock

Hooking up with your little brother’s babysitter? That sounds more like a bad porno than a sensible decision.

ᰔ pairing. babysitter/boxing au - underground boxer & babysitter!gojo x college student!reader (f)

ᰔ summary. when underground boxer gojo satoru becomes a little strapped for cash, he gets a day job as a babysitter for a five-year-old kid named yuuji who most definitely has adhd (but that’s besides the point). the kid’s mom gave gojo two rules, and two rules only: don’t accidentally kill my son, and do not flirt with my daughter. he’s pretty sure he’s got a good hold on the former, but he’s got no self control over the latter.

ᰔ warnings/tags. 18+, fem!reader, smut, casual sex, lil bit of fluff, lil bit of crack, slight age gap (reader’s 22 & gojo’s 27), cum play, creampie, unprotected sex, praise kink, slight degradation, gojo is a sleazebag that cares?, sort of porn-coded smut except there’s a lil bit of lore so it’s kinda porn w plot, uhh having sex with risk of getting caught, gojo beats people up at night & then plays father figure to a 5 y/o during the day, mentions of violence/alcohol/drugs/blood/cigarettes

ᰔ word count. 12.6k

a/n. hiiii friends jeez it feels like FOREVER since i've posted some good ol' smut (still has plot tho xd)...hopefully you enjoy n see ya at the bottom! lmk if i missed any warnings! if you asked to be tagged but didn’t get tagged it’s bc you have your tags off aaa :( even when some ppl tried to fix it i still couldn’t tag them i’m sorry!!

alsoooooo so very much love to @starmapz for beta reading this for me :”) really helped me w my posting nerves haha. she is also a wonderful jjk author pls go check out her works!! 💕 ART CREDITS: @/3-aem

➸ masterlist

2:34 pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): heyy um i’m sorry if this comes off kinda rude i just am kinda bad with this but i was wondering if you could text my mom for questions about yuuji’s care instead of me?

2:46pm Gojo Satoru: Oh 2:46pm Gojo Satoru: Yeah, sure

2:34 pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): sorry i know my mom doesn’t know much ab how to take care of him bc i was the one that took care of him for a while but i just really want to separate myself from that guardian role now that i’ve transferred to NYU yknow? :/ i think it’s not my place anymore. i just wanna be big sis now haha

2:46pm Gojo Satoru: I get it. Sorry if I was making you uncomfortable with my texts

2:48pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): no no not uncomfy by it, thanks for looking after him. it’s just i’m kind of busy n stuff so it can be distracting 

2:49pm Gojo Satoru: Ok, got it

2:52pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): and it was kind of an issue with his last babysitter

2:53pm Gojo Satoru: Oh?

2:55pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): yeahhh like he would keep textinf me n stuff uhh kinda weird things… i told my mom about it and she was super pissed so she fired him

2:55pm Gojo Satoru: Weird things?

2:56pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): yeah he was always “accidentally sexting me” n like he sent me a dick pic once sooooo yeah

2:56pm Gojo Satoru: Who tf 2:56pm Gojo Satoru: I’ll go beat him up

2:57pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): oh no no its fine lol 2:57pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): please dont beat anyone up 2:58pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): i’m not saying you’re like him tho i just think maybe less texting unless its an emergency okay?

3:00pm Gojo Satoru: Are you sure because I will totally go beat him up for you

3:01pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): NO I DONT WANT YOU TO BEAT ANYONE UP FOR ME 3:01pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): also no offense but you dont look like you could beat someone up

3:01pm Gojo Satoru: WHAT 3:02pm Gojo Satoru: Tf you mean “no offense” that’s literally the most offensive thing you could say to a guy

3:04pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): yeaa i mean you have muscles ofc but in the ‘ohhh i wanna look good for instagram’ way and not like real man muscles yknow

3:06pm Gojo Satoru: Ok princess next time you visit home and go on one of your stupidly large grocery hauls I’ll make sure you carry all those groceries in by yourself 

3:06pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): NO 3:07pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): I WAS JUST JOKING 3:07pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): YOURE SO STRONG TY FOR ALWAYS CARRYING THE GROCERIES INSIDE 3:08pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): PLEASE KEEP CARRYING MY GROCERIES INSIDE

3:09pm Gojo Satoru: Nah 3:09pm Gojo Satoru: Should we be texting right now? I’m not sensing any emergencies here

3:11pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): pls. my groceries :(

3:16pm Gojo Satoru: I’ll let the kiddo know you say hi 👋🏼 

The irony of it all was that, if Gojo really wanted to, he absolutely could beat the shit out of someone. And he has, hundreds of times, pseudo professionally. Although that isn’t something he’d admit to you, out of fear that you might relay that info back to your mom who would then become mortified that she’s entrusted her five-year-old son’s life to the hands of an underground boxer. 

But he needed the money. A night-time job didn’t really make daytime money, not when they could easily replace him with the next dude the second he gets knocked out of the ring more than twice, let alone if he let it happen once. And although he sometimes made large sums, it wasn’t stable income. He needed a back-up plan, and so babysitting it was. 

The babysitter working nights at unsanctioned dojos and gyms located in the back of cartel blocks, knocking teeth out of men twice his size, would put any decent mother into a coma or induce some episode of syncope, hence why it wasn’t something he put on his resume before he got hired. Not that he even needed to provide a resume; your mom seemed desperate to cover the position as fast as possible, that promotion at work was moving faster than she wanted to, and Gojo’s beneficial attribute that he possessed as a candidate to look after her son, compared to all the other potential hires, was that he had a penis.

He likes the kid. Yuuji. He’s got kind of a short attention span, and makes Gojo weary of his age. Hold up, that makes him sound like he’s geriatric, he’s really only the ripe old age of twenty-seven, but the immortality and infinite stamina that a five-year-old boy has on him is enough to have him huffing and puffing at the end of every single evening shift he takes on with the rascal. 

Fighting is all sprint, and no stamina. Sure, there might be some more seasoned boxers that might disagree with him, but for someone as young as him in the field, it’s the tactic he’s been forced to gain. If he draws a fight on for too long, he'll get killed by a forty-two year old man with steroids clogging up his adipose tissue and enough  testosterone to grow a full-body beard by the time the sun starts to set. No, his strategy is to knock them out within the first fifteen seconds. Use their weight against them, and whatnot. A tactic he’s found has worked, since he’s been undefeated thus far. 

He can never wrap his head around it. The drug lords that run the rings who’ve gained millions the night before from selling crystal meth only to lose it all the night following in the second Gojo hooklines a solid punch to their betting boxer’s chin, making them see God & their Momma before they tap out (if they’re even able).

He doesn’t pocket much money from it, not anything compared to what the men who bet on him end up making at least, but it’s a decently solid sum. How lucrative it really is depends solely on what he thinks the value of his life is.

It’s not unheard of, boxers dying in the ring. Turns out, rich drug dealers care very little about the sheep they’ve captured to perform their entertaining little stunts. But Gojo wasn’t doing all of this to feel some sense of work-life pride, no, it was just sustenance. When basic needs are not met, humans resort to the most animalistic of all behaviors, and while he’s not proud of what he does, he can’t deny the fact that it’s turned him into an adrenaline junkie that gets a rush in his veins every time he knocks a jaw loose.

But balance was key. And hence why he’s a boxer by night, babysitter by day. For at least four days a week, he gets to pretend he’s the king’s most trusted appointed knight, or he’s the radioactive tyrannosaurus rex that wants to tyrannize all the other dinosaurs, or maybe he’s the evil power ranger (he always forgets which color that one was) that is determined to make the world a living hell by smashing mr. potatohead against the bunk bed post a billion times for all the other toys to see. Or whatever other imaginative hyperfixations Yuuji imposes on him in the later afternoon once he’s had his bowl of spaghetti-O’s and is ready to play. Lately, the kid’s been really into space. They’ve got all sorts of space toys these days. Back in Gojo’s day, he just had a good ol’ Buzz Lightyear.

“One rule, that’s it: don’t accidentally kill my son. Actually, one more rule. Don’t flirt with my daughter.” 

There’s a part of Gojo that believes your mom kind of knows he’s up to shady shit at night, otherwise why else would she clause for him to not flirt with you if she didn’t read the slight swell to his eye and the healing gash across his cheek as anything other than this boy is trouble and I want him nowhere near my too-good-for-him daughter of reproductive capacity since that’s the exact tale of how I became a single mother in the first place. Or maybe he inherently looks like he’s up to no good? He’s not sure which angle is more offensive, and which one was more flattering. Well in any case, she entrusted Yuuji’s life to him, despite acknowledging the plausibility of harm, and that means she overall thinks positively of him, right? ……right?

The first night he met you, it was awkward to say the least. Gojo spends most of his nights performing deadly stunts for middle aged men with potbellies, and most of his days hanging out with a five-year-old (one who he’d argue is his only friend at this point). Sure, he’s got some people he sees occasionally back in his high school hometown when he can brave hearing about how everyone’s in college now or doing a masters or they’re working respectable nine-to-five day jobs meanwhile he has to lie to his Pops that he’s been working in insurance for the past two years. Listen, in fairness, he probably makes the same amount of money as an insurance broker would anyways, but he can’t exactly own up to the identity of his craft. 

Anyways, the point is, he’s not used to seeing other people his age anymore. There’s the occasional hook-up with girls he hasn’t seen since Mrs. Tracy’s homeroom period back in sweet two-thousand-sixteen, or his twice-a-year hangout with Suguru where he only learns the day of where he's visiting from since the guy moves around more than Gojo can keep up with. But save for that, he mostly just sees your mom and then Yuuji. 

So seeing you standing in the kitchen for the first time when he went to put Yuuji’s half-finished GoGurt back in the fridge was startling to say the least. When the sight of a woman startled him, he knew he needed to start getting out again.

You were on your tiptoes, reaching up to grab at something over the fridge, and wearing these ridiculously short shorts to where he could see the curve of your ass, his line of sight trailing down the skin of your bare legs. He couldn’t see anything of your form above your shorts, given you were wearing an extremely baggy t-shirt with NYU on it in big bolded university letters. As far as he knew, you were a senior at NYU, studying psychology, made dean’s list consecutively for the past three years given the way your mother posted all your stellar transcripts up on the fridge (he gets that she’s proud of her daughter, but doesn’t that kind of stuff usually end in grade school?) But other than that, it was all the information he had on you.

“Here,” he said, pressing his front to your back, maybe just to get a feel, as he reached over to you to finally grab the box of cereal you were swatting for, the one that he purposefully placed at the back because Yuuji learned how to climb counters recently. “Is this what you want?”

He had heard you gasp, spinning around on your heel fast, staring up at him with wide eyes like you weren’t expecting some random man to be in the house right now, and your first instinct ended up being to grab the knife out of the kitchen knife block and lunge it straight at his torso.

If it wasn’t for his boxer reflexes, he’d have ended up at the ER that evening. Or dead. All depending on the strength you could pack into a stab. But instead, he deflected it, though not without a gash to his torso through the fabric of his shirt, one that you spent the rest of the evening profusely apologizing for and eventually mending to with cotton balls and neosporin. 

“I didn’t know you were my little brother’s babysitter,” you mumbled with a small wince on your face as you dabbed ointment on the wound while he pulled the hem of his shirt up to his shoulder. He’s never had an injury tended to before. It was nice.

“It’s fine, I get it, totally acceptable response to seeing a random dude in your house.”

He remembers the curl of your eyelashes while you stared down at his bare upper half, something he imprinted on his memory rather than the concern in your face as your fingertips traced the scars across his chest. He hoped they made you feel better about the one you just slashed into him, because after all, what was one more? 

He knows he shouldn’t have, but he kissed you that night. Two minutes before your mom came home, and right after you bid him goodnight with one more apology, he backed you up against the door of your bedroom, his hands on your hips pulling you towards him, and his lips pressed against yours. Something seamless, from candid conversation that was heading towards an end, to full fledged making out against white-painted wood, his teeth nipping at your lip and he wondered just how touch-starved those university boys were leaving you given the desperate way you’d clinged to his shirt for dear life as he deepened the kiss.

The moment only lasted one minute and fifty-seven seconds, and in the remaining three, your mother’s key pushed into the front door and he had to pull away. Always, on the dot, 10PM, she was home. It was how he knew he had two minutes left to make a move in the first place.

So much for no flirting.

6:57pm Gojo Satoru: Bahahah I accidentally forgot where yuuji’s epipen is 6:58pm Gojo Satoru: [sent a photo] 6:59pm Gojo Satoru: Turns out this can-o-soup was just covering it in the cabinet

7:01pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): ??? why did you need to find his epipen

7:08pm Gojo Satoru: Oh he accidentally took a bite of my pad thai 7:09pm Gojo Satoru: I freaked cuz I thought it had peanuts in it but I remember I asked for it without any  7:09pm Gojo Satoru: shit’s crazy

7:10pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): WHY THE FUCK DIDNT YOU TEXT ME????????

7:12pm Gojo Satoru: YOU SAID YOU DIDNT WANT ME TEXTING YOU UNLESS IT WAS AN EMERGENCY ?

7:13pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): SATORU YOU THOGHT HE ATE SOMETHING W PEANUTS IN IT AND YOU FORGOT WHERE HIS EPIPEN WAS THATSS A FUCKIGN EMERGENCY

7:15pm Gojo Satoru: THE KID IS DOING FINE HES ALIVE JESUS LEAVE ME ALONE 7:16pm Gojo Satoru: [sent a photo] 7:16pm Gojo Satoru: See. he’s chill 7:17pm Gojo Satoru: with intact airways might I add 7:18pm Gojo Satoru: Also isn’t he a little too old to still be watching baby sensory videos?

7:20pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): yeah my mom thinks he has adhd :(

7:22pm Gojo Satoru: oh

He tried to keep his word though (although he doesn’t recall ever giving it) out of the respect he had for your mom. She was a hard-working lady, single mom of two who went from working three jobs to now being a major administrator at a big law firm near the outskirts of town. It was an underdog story if he’d ever heard one, and he loved an underdog story. 

But a little texting here and there wouldn’t hurt, right? Or so he thought, until you told him to cut it out with the contact. Maybe you were just trying to be the good one in this situation. After all, hooking up with your little brother’s babysitter? That sounds more like a bad porno than a sensible decision. Still, he’ll eventually get your replies to his which shirt should Yuuji wear to the park? and look, the toothfairy gave him the butt of a joint and a couple thumbtacks for his front tooth. he’s ecstatic texts, although in a less timely manner than before when you weren’t trying to preserve propriety. And when you’d occasionally visit every other weekend, he’d do his best to keep his hands in his pockets, and you’d fill up your nights with hangouts with your hometown friends to avoid spending too much time with him at the house. A silent agreement to not fuck each other, it was. 

4:55pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): send pic of yuuji pls i miss him :(

5:04pm Gojo Satoru: [sent a photo]

5:08pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): IS THAT BLOOD?!?!?!?!

5:09pm Gojo Satoru: chillllllll it’s fake. We’re working on his halloween costume

5:09pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): WHY DOES IT HAVE BLOOD?!?!?!?!?!?

5:10pm Gojo Satoru: He wants to be a baby xenomorph and I'm his parasitic host. You know that iconic chestburster scene from the old school alien movies? yeah

5:12pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): satoru please for the love of god just dress him up as a dinosaur or something

5:13pm Gojo Satoru: I’m not the one that came up with the idea, okay? It was him

5:14pm yuuji’s sis (no flirting): because you let him watch adult swim with you before putting him to bed. you’ve deranged his brain.

5:14pm Gojo Satoru: He needs it. Builds character.

Gojo was living a double life, and if someone asked him, he’d say it was less of a Clark Kent way and more of a Bruce Wayne way, although in reality, he knows it’s close to neither. He’s no superhero with a concealed identity fighting crime, he’s a con artist that’s tricked a hard-working woman into hiring him just because he’s trying to save up enough money to get the fuck out of this godforsaken town, given he’s not knocked dead before then for the crime’s amusement.

But Yuuji looks up to him now. And Gojo’s grown attached to him too. He taught the kid how to tie his own shoes and piss inside the actual toilet like a real man. And that kid’s the only thing that’s made him question any of this. Maybe that’s what dads feel, suddenly held to all this impossible responsibility and the pressure to stop doing stupid shit so that you’ll stick around to see your kids get older. The thought that there are eyes on you now, eyes that are innocent and hopeful and learning, and because they know nothing at all, you feel the responsibility to protect them from everything. For fucks sake, remind him to never become a dad. 

“Do you like my sister?” Yuuji had asked him out of nowhere one afternoon after he just got home from preschool, stacking a blue cube over a yellow one at the dining table.

“Uhh,” Gojo starts. He wondered if your mom had put a wire on the kid, so his answer was as diplomatic as he could manage. “Yeah, she’s cool. You’ve got a cool sister.”

“But. But.” Yuuji stutters, trying to find his big boy words. He stretches up higher to reach the top of his stack of blocks, but he only has so much arm real estate at the age of five. “Do you like her like you wanna kiss her?”

Gojo grabs the block from the kid’s hand, for a moment questioning Yuuji’s decision to want to put a blue block over another blue block, but he figures aesthetics are the least of a kid’s concern, and so he places the block where Yuuji wanted it. 

Why does the kid know what kissing is anyway? Do kids know that kind of stuff at that age? Isn’t a kiss to a five-year-old just something their mom gives to them before they head off to preschool for the day? And not something that happens between adult men and women? Maybe he should stop watching that adult swim in front of him.

“No. I don’t want to kiss your sister,” he says, again, because he is suspicious of a wire. It was a lie and then some, because he wants to do a lot more than just kiss you.

Gojo lifts the RedBull he was nursing up to his lips and watches Yuuji in the corner of his eye as the kid stares at his growing stack of blocks with a concentrated expression on his face, his chubby fingers squeezing tightly into little round dimpled balls, like he’s putting together all his tiny brain cells together to form another coherent thought before turning to face Gojo on the chair.

“It’s ok. You can kiss her if you wan’ed to. You can marry her too,” Yuuji says.

Gojo almost spits out his RedBull. He barely manages to swallow it, a broken cough immediately leaving his throat when some of the liquid goes down the wrong pipe and he’s smacking a fist against his chest to knock the sanity back into himself.

“Where the fu—…where the flip did that come from?” he asks, blinking back tears from the rasp in his throat.

Yuuji’s small shoulders sulk as he sits back on his heels. “I want a papa.”

Oh fuck that hurt. Jesus christ, there was nothing more sad than that. Yuuji has literally never known what it’s like to have a dad, since his had left before he was even born. Gojo’s not really close to his old man by any means, but he had still been a fatherly figure in some pivotal moments when he had needed it growing up. Kids need their dads. And he’s seen enough people lose their way without one to know that the value of them is really underestimated.

He’s also kind of shocked that Yuuji really did think of you as his motherly figure. Maybe since it had always just been him and his dad, Gojo learned how to self sustain from a young age, and he and his dad became accustomed to just looking after their own interests to avoid the headache of tending to one another. My land is my land, and your land is yours, and there was the occasional Saturday night spent together with his dad’s millions of beer bottles emptied dry on the carpet in front of the 1992 box TV as the two shared a greasy pizza from the place down the street. That was the extent of family solidarity that he knew.

But he can’t imagine being barely eighteen and having to take care of your little brother all by yourself because your mom was too busy trying to put food on the table and was too poor to hire a babysitter. Your mom tried so damn hard to keep you away from the single teenage mother life, but somehow ended up giving it to you by proxy in the end anyway. It was no wonder you wanted space now that Yuuji’s a little older and your mom can afford a babysitter. No matter how much you might love your sibling, being their effective guardian out of pure necessity had to have taken a toll.

Gojo clears his throat before he speaks. “Buddy. If I married your sister, we’d be brothers. I wouldn’t be your dad.” 

Yuuji’s eyes light up at the word brother. “Brothers? Me and you?”

“Yeah. Bros.”

The kid giggles, all bubbly with cheeks rounding fully and eyes sparkling. Gojo reaches out to ruffle at his hair before Yuuji gets down onto one stubby leg at a time from the chair then bolts towards the kitchen.

“Juice!!” he yells somewhere around the corner out of sight.

Gojo sighs, staring at all the toys he pulled out for Yuuji to play with, all left in a scattered mess across the table. He gets up out of his chair and heads towards the fridge. “Yeah, yeah. I’ll get you your juice, you little demon.”

The conclusion he comes to, and it might read like an obvious one, is that kids don’t really know the reality of life, hence why adults hide so much from them. 

This is what he thinks of tonight when he wraps his worn out boxing tape around his hands and his wrist, tightening it with his teeth, and he can smell the sweat and grime from them. The back of the underground gym had an old dated locker room, and as Gojo stretches his neck side to side while sitting on the stiff metal bench, he eyes the peeling red paint of the locker in front of him, blurring vision making it look like spilt blood. 

His phone pings with a text. He shuffles inside his duffle bag to look for it while his other hand scratches at his bare chest.

1:07am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): hhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii 1:07am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): omgomgomg sor y i’m 

He blinks at the screen, confusion flashing across his face. He types one letter, but then he sees three dots and a speech text bubble in the bottom left, so he waits for you.

1:09am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): i drunk :(

The corner of his mouth ticks up slightly. 

1:09am Gojo Satoru: Yeah I can tell

1:10am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): at a apartyyyy

His eyebrows raise slightly, the thought of you tipsy on some frat party couch flashing through his mind, yet of all things you could be doing at that frat party, you’re texting him? Must be a really boring party.

1:11am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): whyyy are you aawake?

1:12am Gojo Satoru: Couldn’t sleep 1:12am Gojo Satoru: Don’t you have a midterm in the morning?

1:14am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): wtf hwo do you knwo that

1:15am Gojo Satoru: Your mom keeps your schedule posted on the fridge

1:15am yuuji’s sister (no flirting): im so fucked;’;(((

He snorts. He’s got a bit more life experience than you, five-ish years to be exact, more than enough time to master the no-hangover hangout, but just before he can offer you some advice, he sees another text from you. 

1:16am yuuji’s sister (no flirting): can i tell u smething 

His gaze flits up to the ceiling briefly, and he hears commotion outside the thick walls of the locker room. The previous fight was over, and fast. The guy must’ve been knocked out in under twenty seconds tops, which means that Gojo was next up against whatever superbeast just beat him up. 

1:17am Gojo Satoru: Sure

He stands up, placing his phone down on the bench before he flexes the muscles in his arms a couple times to get the blood flowing into them. And there’s the noise of another ping. Actually, four.

1:14am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): sonetimes 1:14am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): i thikn of  1:14am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): when u kisse me 1:14am yuuji’s sis (no flirting): *kissed me

His eyes widen slightly, irises dry to the ashy cigarette smoke from outside lingering in the air, and his heart rate picks up a bit. An adrenaline junkie with close to no fear in his veins due to the way his amygdala’s been fried to a crisp from years of boxing, yet he’s got his breath hitched from the memory of your soft lips against his. It makes the blood rushing through the muscles of his arms rush somewhere down south instead.

Loud banging on the door of the locker room jolts him out of his trance, and he’s stiff around the edges once more.

“Satoru! You’re up, man,” he hears Danny, the fight coordinator, yell at him from the other side of the heavy & poorly-installed steel door.

Gojo sighs, glancing down at the texts on his phone. To respond, or not to respond. You’re off your face, clearly chatty from the alcohol, and he knows for certain you’ll regret every life decision you’ve ever made once you wake up in the morning and see the self sabotaging behaviors you’ve engaged in tonight. He knows that responding to you might put you at ease rather than straight up ignoring you, but the feeling will pass, and he has a match to win with no more room left to stall.

He makes his way out the locker room, pushing past the crowded halls of people underneath dim flashing club lighting, some dudes angrily jerking to face him when he pushes past them with a stiff shoulder, only for their eyes to widen when they see just exactly who pushed them. 

There’s strippers in the ring, doing some routine for pre-match, and Gojo narrows his eyes at the man he sees laying back over the rubber boundary rope, head tipped back up to the ceiling with a wicked grin on his face. So that was his opponent? He’s never seen the guy before. Was he from a different district? Different district talent was tough, you had no background info on them, while they’ve been preparing to be here for weeks. Hence why boxers tend to do better when they visit a different district than they do in their own. There have been rules made to limit these types of fights, mostly over outrage that it was unfair to bid on them, but they were also usually more entertaining to watch. Gojo’s got a sick feeling to his stomach as the strippers clear the ring.

“Hey,” Gojo calls out, grabbing Danny by the back of his collar and dragging him towards him and away from the girls stepping down onto the floor, “what’s in for this fight?”

Danny glances up at the ceiling. “Tarp’s bettin’ tonight, so it can’t be anything less than ten grand for you. I’d say tops fifteen?”

Gojo narrows his eyes further, then glances off into the ring again. The man stands up, and Gojo gets a better look on his face. He’s got short hair, neon green in color with a dark fade underneath and tattoos all over his face. But those eyes. They were freakishingly red, and it made him uneasy. He knows the type. The type of boxers that do this to genuinely hurt people for thrill. Make no mistake, Gojo understands he’s made himself out to be like that too, gaining some kind of rush out of this profession, but this type of fighter was different. The type to literally continue smashing a dude’s face into the floor until they’re a bloody mess even minutes after the winning call, and no referee to stop it because that’s the kind of action the spectators wanted.

Danny reads his line of sight. “That’s Gale. Newton’s new boxing toy. Came outta nowhere about a month ago. He’s undefeated so far in his district, and Newton specifically wanted to see you up against him tonight,” Danny tells Gojo, resting his elbow up on his bare shoulder. “Chances are he’ll compete with Tarp for final bid if you win this one. I’m talking twenty-five grand in the next if you can knock him out in this.”

“Uh-huh,” Gojo acknowledges, rolling his shoulder so Danny’s elbow falls from it. Forget the money, he just wants to make it out of this alive.

He sets his foot up on the square, ducking through the dividing boundary straps and the tacky caution construction tape that the gym thinks creates an exciting ambience. He hears the static of the speakers as the announcers call out Gojo’s name, then this other guy, loud bass club music booming through Gojo’s chest as he tries to take a few deep breaths through the thick air of this low-ceiling arena. 

The dim overhead lights flickered, casting shadows over the makeshift ring, and the crowd pressed tight around at every perimeter area, yelling and pushing, one even tosses a beer bottle on the square and it shatters, spreading glass all across, a few shards reaching Gojo’s feet and he looks down at them with a shudder. A fight immediately breaks out in the crowd over something related or possibly entirely unrelated, and he’d have no way of knowing as he swipes the shards away with his heel.

The influential men always sat up on higher seating, off towards the back in their own VIP section where they suck in the smoke of fat cigarettes and peer through 100% tinted sunglasses to assess the boxers they’ve bid thousands on. The light reflects off the golden grills of their teeth with every snarl at any passerby that gets too close, like a lion in its den. That’s what the sanction was called. Lion’s den.

Gojo sighed, eyeing the twisted grin of this Gale guy across from him. Was that his real name? Usually, foreign district guys get nicknames. Gojo’s always thought the nicknames were tacky, and he’s accumulated some of his own over the years, but to his ears, none of them ever really landed, although The White Fox admittedly was kinda nice. Reminded him of throwback shooting games. 

He sucked a breath in through his teeth, holding his hands up in front of his chest in weak fists, storing energy in them in the form of pure anticipation alone, and then the bell rang.

His opponent lunged towards him immediately, fists flying in a barrage of reckless strikes, and Gojo’s eyes momentarily widened in the briefest moments of hesitation he had been allowed before ducking and dodging every one of this guy's shots, then jumping a step back to create distance.

Fuck. He was fast. Not just boxer fast, athlete fast. There was a difference. And it wasn’t a good one to be up against.

Gojo picked up light on his feet. He couldn’t win this one fast, that much was certain. One single careless or reckless move, and he’ll get tackled. He knows that by the malicious look he sees on that guy’s face, grin wide like he’s some cannibalistic beast. 

Stepping back towards the center, Gojo purposefully set himself up for Gale to swipe a vicious hook towards his head, before Gojo last minute ducked down, crouched to the floor, and swung his leg out to knock the guy off balance by his ankles, and he falls onto his back with a loud thud!

There’s a moment of momentary silence from the crowd, right before Gojo put the man in a torso-lock, twisting him in a way a human body should absolutely not be twisted, hearing the grunts of pain and the crack of spine even through the shouts of the crowd.

He can hear it. Kill him! Knock his fucking teeth out! Snap his neck like a goose, man! FIN-ISH HIM! FIN-ISH HIM! FIN-ISH HIM!

He feels like throwing up. 

Gojo looks up at the referee, who wasn’t really a referee, just there to run the clock when there was action and only barely stop it before near death. “This is enough, right?” he asks.

The referee nods. “1-0, next round.”

Gojo lets go of his opponent, leaving him there to heave for a moment before he gets up onto his feet again. Just needs one more, and he’s a winner. Ten grand in his pocket, and he won’t have to come back here for a couple weeks.

Gale gets up, swiping at the spit that had trickled out the corner of his mouth down to his chin, and he had an enraged look on his face. The second the bell rang for the second round, he exploded forward towards Gojo with even more fervor than before, gritted expression with a thirst for violence fueling the storm of punches he was throwing towards Gojo but he tried to remain calm, light on his feet, swiftly duck and avoid before he can find another opportunity to clear a sharp, clean jab right to the ribs—

sometimes, i think of when you kissed me

Gojo misses his strike, leaving his guard wide open, and Gale takes the opportunity to land a solid punch straight to his jaw, sending his mouth guard flying straight out of his mouth into the air, and knocking him backwards onto the ground with a thud and then he finds himself staring up at the rusting metal ceiling and a ringing in his ears that almost matches the roar of the crowd.

His head is in a haze, dizzy like where one second could feel like a millennia. He feels a soreness underneath his chin, a pain that radiates to his mouth, and he briefly swipes his tongue over his front teeth to make sure he still has all of them. 

What the fuck was that? That intrusive thought. There’s no intrusive thoughts allowed in life or death situations, not when he was always just one smash to the head away from a permanent concussion. But, fuck, he can’t help it. Can’t help thinking of you. Even when his vision has gone blurry and he should really be weary about what happens next in this ring, his mind’s just thinking about you, at some frat party, tipping back shots of tequila and waiting for a text-back in response to your tipsy ones. Were you even waiting up on him? Have you already passed out on the couch, or were your friends dragging you back to your dorm? Or are you fucking some other dude right now? Has he got his hand up your top, squeezing at you, sleazily feeling you up before spilling beer all down your shirt, and are you kissing him back with the same enthusiasm, your phone now somewhere long slipped between the cushions of the couch and out of sight?

Even though it’s still sore, he tenses his jaw. Grinds his teeth, even. Tasting blood somewhere along the line of his gums, he realizes his lip is split. He licks at it, the flavor of copper more rich on his tongue, and he clenches his fists tightly. Why’s he thinking of that right now? It just pisses him off, the thought of you with some other dude. Maybe that’s what he needs to win this fight. Spite. Although he’s not sure why the guy across from him at the ring has to pay for it.

He lifts his head up off the ground, and while it felt like years he had been down, a glance at the timer tells him it’s only been a solid four seconds. A solid four seconds that his opponent had to fully charge a lunge towards him with the look of death in his face, raising his elbow up into the air in time with his leap, ready to come straight down, and Gojo’s eyes widen at the sight above him from where he’s still lying on the wood.

“Shit—” he cusses, rolling his body over to the side so that the dude falls straight down onto the floor rather than elbow Gojo in the fucking ribs, and then he gets back up on his feet. 

Stakes were high, he has to end this, he has to end this now, and he flexes the muscle in his right bicep, channeling everything he has into this one blow, and before Gale even really has a chance to turn around and face him again, Gojo’s already three-fourths set up a knockout undercut that he drives straight up the guy’s chin, with so much force it has him lifting up off the floor, a vertebrate stretch to his spine before he’s sent flying backwards and slammed against the tight rubber lining of the ring to where he was half hanging over it.

The room fell silent for a split second, then erupted in a roar as the referee fell to one knee beside Gale, checking him for any semblance of consciousness, and when he found none, he waves the match off. 

Gojo’s eyes flit up towards the lion’s den, the only opinions that he really needed to care about were sitting in those mahogany chairs with glasses of scotch swirling around in their hands, and he sees some of them looking straight at Gojo before leaning towards one another and discretely talking about something he can’t make out because he doesn’t know how to read lips.

He feels someone tug at his arms from behind, pulling him to crouch down and he balances back on the balls of his feet. He glances down through the ring at the floor. Danny was leaning against the wooden surface of it. “Dude. Go.” He jerks his head towards Gale, who still laid there sprawled across the now stretched out rubber perimeter bands. “Go fuck him up. Knock a few more teeth out, I don’t know, get some more blood out of him.”

“What?” Gojo huffs, yanking his arm away from Danny’s grip. “The fuck are you saying?”

“I told you, man, Newton’s here and he’s got his eye on you. Go give him a show,” Danny says, “do it.” And when he sees clear frustration on Gojo’s face he sighs. “Twenty-five grand, consider that, will you?”

Gojo sneers at the man, an awful taste in his mouth as he spits blood towards Danny’s feet. “Go fuck yourself on his cock if he wants a show that bad.” And then he ducks underneath the bands and hops back down onto the floor, pushing past people who were trying to grab at him and pull at him and lift him up and even throw him down until he made it through flashing hallways and back to the locker room.

He shuts the door behind him, sliding the bolt lock into the frame so no one can follow him inside, and then he leans his weight back against the chilling steel before tipping his head back until it hits the surface too.

He lets out of a few deep breaths, then stares down at the sting he finds over his knuckles. Red and blistering from the last punch he delivered, and he’s almost certain he broke a bone in his hand. Fuck. It was bleeding across the cuts, too. He had to figure out a way to get it all healed by tomorrow, as if that was humanly possible, just because he doesn’t want Yuuji questioning him about it.

Yuuji. For fucks sake, when has he ever thought about the kid this much? When has he ever thought about much of anything when he’s out here or in the ring? He’s a babysitter by day. He’s a “part” of your family when the sun is up and normal functioning society is breathing their lives into the clean air. That’s it. He’s no five-year-old’s caretaker in front of all these primetime drug lords, and he certainly shouldn’t be thinking of you when facing big, burly men he’s aiming to rough up, all within the dead hours of night. So then how come these thoughts are on his mind at all times, twenty-four-seven, around the clock?

He heads further into the locker room, glancing down at the bench where he’d left his phone, then picks it up, neck craned all the way down to glance at the screen as he holds his phone by his hip because he doesn’t have any energy to pick it up any further towards his eyesight. 

He sees your messages. You never sent any follow-up ones, just your horrendously typed out sonetimes, i thikn of when u kisse me *kissed me across the span of four texts, and Gojo runs a tired hand down his face.

He tips his head back to groan at the ceiling, guttural with no basis other than a release of all the pent up frustration of every sort, then he types in a couple messages to you,

3:23am Gojo Satoru: That’s nice 3:24am Gojo Satoru: I think about fucking you all the time 

—and then tosses his phone into his duffel bag to call it a night.

⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘

You’re awoken to your alarm blaring heavily, and you whack your arm across your nightstand table beside your tiny twin-size bed to hit the snooze button, then rub your eye with a loose fist while smacking at the residual taste of alcohol you have on your tongue. 

“Mm…” you mumble to yourself. And then the thirst hits you. The overwhelming, intense, unquenchable thirst that leaves your mouth feeling like the Sahara desert before you grab your twice-dented Hydroflask from the nightstand, twist the cap off and chug about twenty ounces of water in one breath. 

You let out a deep exhale and fall back into bed, your hand resting on top of your water-filled tummy, and you stare up at the ceiling of your dorm. 

Last night was horrible. You knew you shouldn’t have gone to that frat party, especially given you have an exam in—you checked the time on your phone—about an hour, and an hour was not enough time to recover from the raging hangover headache that’s pounding through your head. But your roommates insisted you went, and so go you did. You never knew what to expect, always torn between shaving your pussy before you go or throwing on a stained pair of sweatpants to keep the guys away instead. Sometimes, it was a combination of both. But last night, you ended up drinking more than you usually do, and that always led to poor, poor, poor decisions, in which all the sense of pride you had in yourself was washed down with the puke that you hurled into the upstairs toilet. 

You grab at your phone again, briefly seeing that your friends had sent you some photos from the night. You immediately swiped off to the side to dismiss the notifications, because as far as you were concerned, you never wanted to see those photos in your life.

And then, in the briefest of moments, you saw a familiar name in your notifications that made you heart skip a beat.

Gojo Satoru (yuuji’s babysitter)

With an immediate gasp, you pulled your phone to your chest and held it there, blinking up at the pale yellow ceiling, your heart picking up in rhythm.

Oh fuck.

That was right.

You drunk texted him last night.

You drunk texted your little brother’s hot babysitter.

Fuck.

Mortified was an understatement, possibly because you don’t even remember what you said, and so you don’t even want to see what he replied with.

You groan, rubbing both your hands across your face then kick your sheets back with your feet like a child having a temper tantrum because you were so embarrassed you had even texted him at all last night. I mean, he was hot. A little older than you, really gorgeous eyes, tall, and, yeah, you gave him shit for the Instagram muscles thing, but that’s only because you thought he’d find it cheeky that you were trying to humble him despite the fact that he’s more toned and ruggedly sculpted than any other man you’ve ever met. You didn’t want to have a flustered schoolgirl attitude because it would just seep through to his ego.

In any case, he was hot, there was no denying it, so can you really blame yourself? But still. There was collateral with this. You had to see him every other weekend. He knows your family, even your extended since they invited him to Thanksgiving dinner a couple weeks ago. A high-risque drunk text recipient if he ever was one (of course he has been, look at that face). Why couldn’t you have just drunk texted ECON160 guy from last semester who Clit DJ’d you underneath your desk at the back of the lecture hall instead?

The thing that made you nervous about Gojo Satoru was that he was just so…confident? Like, in that I was raised to be this way confident and not that I fought inner demons my whole life to barely end up this way confident, y’know? Never had to fake it ‘til he made it, he just was. At least that was the kind of energy you got from him, and unfortunately for you, it was nerve wracking but enticing all at the same time.

You sigh. “Stupid. Stupid. Stuuuuuupiiiiidddddddddddd. You. Are. So. Stuuuuuupiiiiddddddd,” you sigh, running your hands through your hair to grip at the strands.

You pull your phone away from your chest, and finally brave yourself to read the texts from your notifications screen, but not without blurring your vision a little to further stall. And then you finally refocus it to read them. The first one you see has you gasping—

3:24am Gojo Satoru (yuuji’s babysitter): I think about fucking you all the time 

It has heat spreading across your cheeks, and you blink at your screen, then quickly swipe up to read the previous messages with rushed glides of your index finger on the screen to see that he had sent it to you in response to your barely coherent texts about how you still so often think about that time he randomly pressed you up against the door of your bedroom to kiss you that night you first met him.

I think about fucking you all the time

At 3 in the morning? He decided to send that text at 3 in the fucking morning? That was the devil’s hour. What’s he trying to tell you? 

Oh come on, you’re not stupid. And you know he isn’t either. The sexual tension was palpable, it was there since the day you two met and you almost stabbed him, and also everytime you were visiting the house, and his shoulder brushes against yours when he’s trying to get past you in the kitchen, or when you’ve got Yuuji in your arms and the kid is clinging to Gojo’s sleeve because he wants him near him at all times. There’s even sexual tension over the phone, in those stupid texts he sends you all the time about meaningless child care stuff, and honestly, those little updates made your day.

But… you don’t know much about him, and your mom would kill you if she ever found out you wanted him. And she’d probably pulverize him if she found out he ever made a move on you. Cremated without leaving a trace behind would be an understatement. She thinks he’s no good and she thinks you’re too good. You know she’s warned him before to not get close to you, as if she was pre-emptively expecting him to try to get in your pants like it was some canon force of the universe, hence why he’s probably so fucking awkward around you whenever she’s there too. Like if he accidentally got caught staring at your ankles, your mom would light him on fire, so he’d rather not risk it by just avoiding looking at you at all.

Your mom has always been protective of you. Your father was a deadbeat, one she thought she loved, only to watch him leave. And she had to raise a baby all by herself. He re-entered your lives right before you graduated high school, knocked up your mom again with Yuuji, and guess what? Left again without a trace. To be doubly humiliated by a man is a fate you wouldn’t wish on any woman, but that’s exactly what your mom went through. It was a wake-up call for her, though. No more living paycheck to paycheck like you had been your whole lives up until Yuuji was born. The kid doesn’t even know how lucky he is with everything he has right now. Your mom worked her way up the corporate ladder and made something of herself and now you guys were comfortable, so it was safe to say she had some sort of right to look after her daughter, of whom she simply doesn’t want to follow in the same naive footsteps of her youth.

You get it. She wants to break the generational cycle. But it made being with men tough on all fronts, let alone dating. You could never bring a guy home because he’d never be enough, even if he cured cancer or could make you orgasm while doing a sixty-nine handstand. And while her overbearing paranoia over what you do or where you are or who you’re with has since dimmed slightly since you officially moved out to finish your last year of higher education at NYU, you can still feel her disappointment from a hundred miles away when you’re making out with some random frat guy on his beer-stained couch at eleven AM on a Tuesday.

But you got to college. You’ve already made it this far. You’re on dean’s list. You graduated high school as salutatorian. You’re the most highly decorated cello player in the state. You won Miss County pageant when you were sixteen for your philanthropic efforts towards feline leukemia. You did online community college for three years so you could stick back after high school and help your mom raise Yuuji, which meant that you had to forfeit your scholarship to Cornell. You’ve spent your whole life being good, you just wanna be bad for a little bit.

And if bad meant fucking the hot and mysterious babysitter, then so be it. 

You pick your phone up, begin blasting what the hell by Avril Lavigne on your dorm room bluetooth speaker, then type a message to him that says—

10:34am you: do it then

—then shove your phone under the sheets and belt out the lyrics aaaall my life i’ve been good, but now, ahhhh i’m thinkin’ what the hell!!! while kicking your feet and clutching your pillow.

⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘⫘

Gojo has no clue what divine entity has overcast their gratuitous spirit over him on this blessed Monday afternoon, but he’ll thank them for it later once his balls are empty. 

He’s got you on your back, sprawled across the couch in the living room, the first fuck being a rushed one that you offered him with before he has to go pick Yuuji up from circle time at preschool, which wasn’t ideal, but he’s delirious at the sight of you underneath him right now. Your little NYU shirt, a tighter one this time, bunched up over your bare breasts, otherwise entirely naked other than the flimsy panties dangling at your ankle, and the view of the tip of his cock looking hot and heavy against the velvet of your cunt, slowly pushing in, feeling the warmth of your walls squeeze around him paired with the sweet moan that leaves your lips, makes him fall forward with a bracing hand dug into the cushion by the side of your head because the sensation feels so fucking good he can hardly keep himself upright.

“Fuck, you’re so tight,” he grunts, pushing himself in further to try and bottom out but he’s still got a couple inches he needs you to take, and so you curl your hips upwards towards the cieling to make more room for him, practically putting yourself into a mating press and soon enough he’s balls deep, “you on any birth control?”

“Uh-huh,” you moan, eyes closed and head tipped back with one hand squeezing your own tit.

“I can cum inside then, yeah?” he asks you, pushing your knees to your chest, slowly drawing his hips back and you squirm underneath him.

“Let’s get there first, and then we’ll discuss,” you breathe out.

“I’ve been there for the past ten minutes, baby. I could cum at any second with the way you look and feel,” he informs you flatly, because it was just the truth and you had to know it, then he feels himself twitch inside, slowly working up to a languid rhythm, almost fearfully like your mom’s going to pop out somewhere around the corner with a camera crew ready like one of those retro TV shows just to humiliate him on national television for not keeping it in his pants like she’d told him to. 

“Harder,” he hears you whisper, and he rolls his eyes shut to just focus on the feeling. The feeling of your nails grazing down the skin of his chest and his abs, tracing the scars he’s collected over the years, and he feels you tightening around him. He leans down to kiss you, fucking you properly now with the squeak of the couch springs echoing across the room, your hums of moans seeping through his lips until he’s fully taking them on with an open-mouthed kiss of sloppy tongue. 

The fact that it was wrong felt right to him, and he realizes in this moment he’s lost all sense of control. He wasn’t just an adrenaline junkie that liked to rough up dudes, he was an adrenaline junkie that wanted to fuck you against all better judgement or moral compass. The way your tits were bouncing, the slap of skin on skin, his balls slapping against your ass while you wrap your legs around him tighter, all convincing him that any consequence made it worth it.

“Good,” he groans the praise, pinning your hands above your head as he rams his hips against yours, your cute moans and squeals sounding like literal music to his ears and he feels heat spread all the way up his neck, “goooood, keep squeezin’ me like that, fuck.” He slows down momentarily, just to take a moment and watch, really look and see the way his length disappears inside of your pretty self with every push forward, and then he works back up to a relentless pace that has you tipping your head back with a slack jaw and eyes closed tightly shut, sprained expression of pleasure spread across.

“Oh, oh my god, Satoru—” you mewled and he felt dizzy from the sound of his name from your softly parted lips.

“Fuck, I’m gonna—” His hand finds it’s way between your legs, calloused pads of his fingers brushing against your clit and you jolt underneath him, gasping as your hand shoots out to dig your nails into his bicep for purchase. “I’m gonna cum, better tell me where you want it.”

“In me,” you moan, “nowhere else.”

He presses his mouth against your cheek in a lazy smile, “Atta girl,” he drawls before pushing your ankles down as far as they’d go near your ears, folding you in half and then reigns all hell into your cunt. He should really care a bit more about your pleasure, but testing your flexibility like this with both his hands holding you down was doing sinful things to his brain, and besides, you had yourself covered with the messy circles you were rubbing over your clit. It was hot to see that too, your nimble pretty fingers so close to the place where he was pounding into you. 

“Oh shit, shit, shit—” he grunts when starts to see blistering white in his vision, balls straining with a pleasure that was almost painful. The moment he finishes feels like hot flashes in his brain, a heat like the cum he begins to paint inside your walls in time with your release, thrusting over and over and over, each one more staggered as he lets off a long, drawn out groan that comes from deep within his chest with the feeling of you milking him dry and the sound of you enjoying every second of it. He can’t remember the last time he came this much or this hard and even after coming down from the high, he feels the remnant pulse of your orgasm around his now half-flaccid dick.

He leisurely pulls out, hearing you let out a soft whimper as he marvels at the sight of his cum slowly dripping out of you and down towards the couch, before he scoops it up with a couple fingers and pushes it back inside. You grip his wrist tightly, but you weren’t stopping it, that motion of him plunging it all back into you.

“Want a taste?” he asks, casually.

“Mhm,” you nod, face looking flush.

He pulls his fingers out of you, coated with sex, then plugs your pussy with the fingers of his other hand because he kinda likes the idea of you walking around all day with him inside of you, so he doesn’t want it getting out. He’s then pushing his other fingers past your lips, pleased to find he’s met with not even so much as a grazing of teeth, and he grins, “bet you take a dick in your mouth as good as you take it down here.”

Your furrow your brows at him, the pout of your lips seen in the way they were puckered to lick his fingers off clean, and when you release the suction with a smack of your tongue and his fingers were wet from your saliva now, his eyes narrow with desire. You push his face away with the heel of your palm to his forehead. “Flattery won’t make me suck your dick.”

“Alright. So? How is it?” he jerks his chin towards your face, pushing against your hand with his forehead until he’s hovering over you again, “taste good?”

“It’s cum, Satoru.”

He shrugs. “Bad?”

“No,” you say, and you can’t make eye contact, “good.” You sigh. “Hot. I don’t know. Salty, sweet. I’m the sweet. You’re the salty. And this conversation is obscene.”

He kisses you, capturing your lips softly, tongue darting out to taste what’s on yours. “I like it that way. Dirty. Nasty. Obscene, whatever.”

There’s the slam of a car door heard from the driveway, and the two of you instantly make eye contact with round eyes.

“Sa—” you stutter, “Satoru.”

He gets up off the couch in a panic, and heads to the window of the living room fully butt-ass naked, then peers through the blinds to see—

Your mom was making it up towards the front door, rustling with her keys in her purse. And the last thing he sees before he turns around to face you is her pushing the keys through the lock.

“Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” he cusses, finding his boxers off of the floor, hopping on one foot with his cum & slick coated dick flapping around and slapping against his thighs unceremoniously as he tries to get one leg in through them and then the other. You’re trembling as you hook your panties back into place, pull your shirt back down your torso, and even in his extremely panicked state, he’s still sad he can’t freely stare at your tits anymore. You’re rummaging for your skirt in a haste, looking everywhere for it, and he finds it underneath the coffee table before tossing it to you and then he side-to-side hops towards the coat closet while he pulls his sweatpants up over his ass, in time for you to quickly run and shut the door of the closet closed just before the front door of the house swings open.

The inside of the coat closet is dark, barely enough space in there for a six-foot-four two-hundred-and-twenty pound man, but it’s better than being balls deep inside his boss’s daughter on the couch when said boss just came home from work.

He hears conversation on the other side of the door, albeit muffled, and he presses his ear to it to hear better while he tucks his dick into his boxers from where it was hanging over the waistline.

“Mom! You…you’re home so early,” he hears you squeak out.

“Yes,” your mom says, “The rest of my meetings today are online, so I figured I’d come home when there’s less traffic.”

Gojo feels you lean against the coat closet door.

“I see, I see, how was your day at work?” you ask with a tremble in your voice.

“Fine.” And then nothing. The silence could mean that was all she had to say, since your mom wasn’t really a woman of many words, or it could be a silence that means she’s suspicious about something. “Darling, why is your skirt flipped up and tucked into your panties? Your whole butt is showing.”

Through the wood of the door, he hears you softly gasp. “Oh, um, I just went to pee. Must’ve—…must’ve got caught when I pulled it back up.” 

“I see,” your mother says, and Gojo can hear her dropping her heels down near the shoe rack at the entrance. “You know, I really don’t like those short skirts you wear often. Maybe it’s just your generation, but I think it looks tacky and cheap.”

“Mom,” you say, in as stern of a voice as you can manage without sounding embarrassed.

Your mother sighs. “In any case, where is Satoru? I still would like him to go pick up Yuuji. I don’t have the patience to sit in preschool & daycare traffic right now.”

“Oh gosh, I don’t know,” you chirp, and then he hears you let out a small oh no before you lean even more weight against the door, this time somewhere lower, and he realizes you’re pressing your ass against it. His eyes narrow with a small frown, and then he realizes— his cum must still be trickling down your thighs. You couldn’t put your panties on fast enough. 

Shit. That’s hot. A little fucked up, but hot. He feels his dick harden against the fabric of his boxers, and he rests his forehead against the door, fringe stuck to his forehead with sweat as he slips his hands down his sweatpants and then gives his cock a firm squeeze. The thought of you discretely swiping his cum up your inner thigh and smearing it against your thin panties so your mom doesn’t catch sight of it dripping down your legs has him slowly working up to a rock-solid erection, and he almost lets out a broken grunt from the feeling.

“What?” your mother says, “what do you mean you don’t know?”

“I’ve just been watching TV this whole time,” you say, “last time I saw him…he was…um, in the backyard pulling weeds?”

He lets out a small scoff through his nose at your cover-up. Cute. And not bad. 

Your mother sighs loudly, and he glances down at the strained veins on his dick as he tugs it through his hand, the tip rearing and appearing flushed and dripping with precum. God, you were just on the other side of this door. Less than a few inches away, and he’d be inside of you. 

“I’m going to take a shower. Go find him and tell him to pick up Yuuji soon. But before then, change into something less revealing,” your mother says in a more or less detached tone, and he can hear the stomps of her footsteps up the stairs from above him in the coat closet.

The two of you wait at least a solid minute, and just when the coast is clear, he hears you turn the knob of the coat closet and slowly crack it open.

“Okay, I think she’s in the shower, I hear the water running,” you whisper at him, “you can go now—” You glance down towards his groin, your jaw dropping. “What—…Satoru, why the fuck is your dick staring at me right now?!” you whisper-hiss at him.

He pulls you into the coat closet, pushing your front against the door to where it clicks shut, and you gasp when his hands pin your wrists crossed behind your back and his dick presses into the plush of your ass.

“You talkin’ to your mom while your pussy’s stuffed full of my cum was the single hottest thing that’s ever grazed my lizard brain,” he tells you, flipping your skirt up and hooking your panties to the side, his index finger briefly brushing against your entrance to find it still leaking from the way your walls were pulsating from his words. And then he aligns his tip to your entrance. “Now keep quiet while I do this, ‘kay?”

“Oh—” you gasp, your cheek pressed against the door as you arch your back and push your ass out for him, “okay—” you say, barely vocalizing the first syllable before he’s already stuffing himself inside of you with one solid glide of a push, making you yelp loudly and he has to instantly cup a hand over your mouth.

“Shhhhhh,” he hisses at you, immediately starting to pound you from behind, “told you to— fuuuck,” he catches sight of his length covered with a mix of your glassy arousal and his white cum, now starting to cream at the base of his cock, “jesus christ—” he breathes out, squeezing the flesh of your ass harshly with his other hand and you let out another yelp, “I told you to fuckin’ keep quiet.”

“I’m—mff,” you muffle against his palm, “I’m trying but,” your hips move back in time with his, “feels good, feels too good,” you mewl, and his hand desperately yanks up the fabric of your shirt so he can squeeze at your breast.

“Yeah?” he grunts, hypocritical for telling you to keep it down when he was slamming his hips against your ass with so much fervor he wouldn’t be surprised if the sound was reverberating across the entire house, “you like it when I fuck you while your mom’s all clueless just up the stairs?” His rhythm falters, feeling his release building, and his hand reaches in front of you to rub your clit, making you drop your head against the door with tightly closed eyes. “Gets— you—wet, doesn’t it?” he torments you, his lips near your ear as he slams his hips against you harshly with every enunciated syllable. 

“Mhm, mhm,” you easily agree, or maybe that’s because it’s all you can really articulate, and he angles his hips up so his balls slap more fervently against your clit, making you scream into his palm while he picks up the pace of the circles he draws on your clit and in one, two, three— beats of his pounding heart, he feels you come undone around his cock, gushing wetness leaking out of you, he can feel the mess of fluids splattering on the skin of his thighs due to each of his heaving thrusts as he cusses out a fuuuuuuckkk before spilling his cum inside of you, a short-lived and thicker release this time that has you mewling from overstimulation, and in a few following thrusts, he’s given you everything he had to give.

His eyes open, he wasn’t even aware he had shut them in the first place, and he glances down at where the two of you were joined. Rings of arousal coat the length of his half-pulled-out dick, and the second he retreats all of it, a bulging push of his cum seeps out of you, dripping and pooling all over the hardwood floors.

“Holy shit, I wish I could take a picture of this,” he says, taking a step away to commit the sight to memory, your legs trembling and still slightly spread, ass pushed out and when you wiggle it a little, he lets out a huff of an exhale because he just can’t believe how sexy you are. Are all college girls like this? He’s never been to college, his old man’s been trying to get him to go for years, but maybe this is what finally convinces him.

“No pics,” you breathe out once you catch your breath, standing up straight slowly, “that’s my one sex rule.”

He takes a step closer to you, flipping your skirt back over your ass while you shimmy your shirt down to cover your chest. “That’s the only rule you have? Anything else goes?” he asks.

You spin around to face him, his eyes briefly flitting down to the still exposed skin of your midriff. “I have a feeling I’d be making up more specific rules if it was with you.”

He smiles, his hands grabbing your hips before pressing you up against the door again. “I also had a rule. It was to not fuck you. Wait, no, to not flirt with you. Which, technically, I didn’t do.”

You blink your eyes at him. “You’re kidding, right?”

“What?” he asks, genuinely confused, “I didn’t.”

“Huh—” you scoff, “how do you think we got into this situation in the first place?? You didn’t just say wanna fuck? You were insufferably flirty with me.”

“Nahhh nah nah nah nah, baby, that’s not flirting,” he tells you, thumb running circles over your hips, “that’s, like—…I don’t even fuckin’ know how it worked on you to be honest, I was just being stupid.”

“Oh okay so I’m stupid.”

“I never said you were stupid?”

“Well you said you were being stupid so me falling for it must mean I’m stupid.”

“Pshhh. You’re cute. Pulling weeds, by the way? Adorable.”

Your hand slowly roams up the front of his shirt, the fabric bunching at your wrists until you uncovered up to his collar bone, and you stare at his skin. He tries to not let the way his heart’s beating faster show through the heave of his chest. 

“Why do you have all these scars, anyway?” you whisper to him.   

“Too many girls tryna stab me,” he tells you.

You roll your eyes. “Seriously.” Your thumb traces the one you had left on him. 

“I—” He stops himself.

Does he tell you? Should he tell you? What, just because he’s seen you naked and you took his dick like a queen he’s supposed to open up to you about these things now? He doesn’t know. Maybe he could? Maybe you already suspect what he does at night. And if not, at the very least, I’m an underground boxer might make you think he’s hot? At the very worst, you’ll report him to the cops and he’d get fired as your little brother’s babysitter then thrown into jail, but not before the busted cartel gets him first.

“Maybe I’ll tell you some other time,” he says, his hand wrapping around your wrist and pulling it from his chest, “no hyper personal details until you’ve had my dick in your mouth at least once or twice. That’s my one rule.”

You snort. “I could’ve guessed that rule from a mile away.”

He hums. And then there’s the sound of steps creaking down the stairs above the two of you.

You both make eye contact, eyes widening, internally yelling at each other: how the fuck did we get into this situation twice?!

This time, Gojo opens the door and stumbles out of the closet, leaving you inside of it, just in time for your mom to come down the stairs.

“Satoru. I was looking for you,” she says as she rounds the post. “Have you picked up Yuuji? He has to go for his swimming lessons soon.”

“Ah, nope, was just about to head out,” he says, letting out a cough to diffuse tension, “sorry, I was—” he points his thumb over his shoulder to behind him, “…pulling out some gnarly weeds.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “I see. Well, thanks. If you want, I can add a gardening stipend to your paycheck. Let me know.” And he’s not sure how to respond because he’s not sure if she’s joking. 

He heads out the door, the keys to your mom’s minivan in his palm as he throws them up into the air and catches them a couple times. And just before he gets inside the car, he turns on his heel to face the house and pulls his phone out of his pocket to type in a message for you.

3:22pm Gojo Satoru: Send over those me-specific sex rules soon

.

.

.

[the end]

a/n. hope u enjoyed im shitting bricks posting this bc i haven't posted a oneshot smut since february but thanks so much for reading i appreciate u!! i got way too invested in the whole underground boxer thing 😂😂 but the fact i managed to keep everything under 12k is an accomplishment to me bc if u read my other fics you know i’m a yapper LOL i have another kind of a similarly written smut oneshot n it’s a lil angsty (totally different au tho) i’ll probs post that one next but yea i really like, hmm, i really like exploring entire characters within a short amount of time i enjoy writing the obscure lore drops xd it’s been kinda fun so far anywho much loveee hope to see u around! <3

➸ masterlist

taglist:

@joemama-2 @erencvlt @pickuptruck01 @hanakotateyama @nuronhe

@beabadobeee @air3922 @timetoletmyimaginationfly @chiyokoemilia @jotarohat

@sirencholia @sorcerersseestars @horisdope @to-dabi @staoru

@aliidarling @ninjaturtletoes @lavender-hvze @lanadelreylover11 @chckn-pi

@satoryaa @gojodickbig @v4mpieres @reinam00n @sleepyyammy

@haikomaiko @tbzzluvr @myahfig4 @arabelluhhh4200 @bloopsstuff

@nat-the-gayass-down-bad-mf @badbclub @blackunecorn @geniejunn @n0tviv

@verystrawberryhottub @iheartshopping @peonysfordayz @dreamsxmerci @aishies-stuff

@milkm4nz @athinasaurus @sashisuslover @welldamnsatoru @aeriiixhh

@crystalymin @dcvilxswish @miakxn @satxoru

[kuiinncedes]

whee i wrote something

[spottedenchants]

Alrighty, pulled together my fic notes for some rationale and timestamps and things!

TL;DR at the bottom because this is Long

Also, to clarify outside of tags: this is me stating a headcanon for my own canon-adjacent Essek-centric fic purposes- I'm not intending any of this as meta/analysis for the canon stream xD

That said, Touching Sentiments lore anchors ahoy! :D

-

First, geometers don't just track where leylines are, but the overall strength of them! (which can indicate if they are moving! 👀👀)

In ExU:C, the absurd strength readings (0.5!! :0) that Laerryn gets from the Grand Geometer tell her the Apogee Solstice is immediately impending, but even a much much smaller strength reading (0.025) would tell her that the leylines are on the move.

When Essek describes his own weather-vane device (which for simplicity's sake I am also calling a geometer here), he mentions that it tracks the way leylines "shift and swell and expand and reduce based on the seasons, [...] the time of year, [and] celestial gatherings and alignments", so it's also measuring their strength.

Solstices are global events on Exandria, so no matter where someone is on the planet (or- in the atmosphere in Avalir's case xD), they will likely see a gradual surge of power even if they aren't near a nexus point.

So it's not location (of the geometer or the leylines) I'm considering here, but leylines' strength. :0

-

Second, the timing! (both of the Solstice and of Essek's involvement)

Apogee Solstices occur every 100-120 years, and that 20 year wiggle room is a pretty big window for inaccuracy if you're trying to plan something precisely, such as building large structures in very specific places in order to harness the power of the Solstice at its maximum.

Construction on the Exandria Malleus Key likely didn't begin until Unndilar of 843 PD (3 months before the Apogee Solstice in Fessuran 843 PD), as that is when the Cerberus Assembly took over the Tishtan site, but we know that Ludinus was already working on the Feywild Malleus Key by around 836 PD (seven or so years before 843 PD). In order to do this, he would need to know where to put them, yes, but he would also need to know the time frame in which the final designing/testing/construction needs to be completed by.

Knowing that an Apogee Solstice was approaching (because it is a repetitive cycle), wouldn't it be convenient if Ludinus could outsource research on the precise timing of the Solstice before it happened, just as he did for resource gathering and Key design/construction, to someone with the time (in terms of lifespan and/or cultural record keeping), arcane knowledge, training, and equipment, distance from Empire oversight, and (granted, external) motivation to do just that? 👀

We know Essek had been working with Ludinus/Vess/Trent for 3 years before the peace talks, which took place in Unndilar 836 PD (836 PD being the same year the Feywild Key construction was going on).

Was Essek simply sitting idle after handing over the beacons, waiting on them to provide insight into their findings in a one-way trade while he himself contributed nothing else aside from covering his own tracks? Or was he perhaps engaging in an active two-way trade of information, whether dunamantic or otherwise? 👀

(Or maybe some secret other option, idk xD)

(Also purely an aesthetic note, but that '3 years' puts the start of Essek's involvement at a nice round decade before the Apogee Solstice in 843 PD. xD)

-

TL;DR:

Perhaps during those three years TS!Essek was working with the Assembly peeps, he had been giving Ludinus readings on the shifting strength of leylines in exchange for the Assembly's findings on the beacons, maybe even alongside Dynasty-timespan archival data (since TS!Essek has been interested in leyline weave things for A While and leyline research certainly could fit the Shadowhand job description as a 'dark mystery').

If so, that data could have helped Ludinus extrapolate the exact timing of the upcoming Apogee Solstice, thus ensuring he finalized his plans and was prepared to enact them by then. 👀

Here is a cat for you: ♡ॢ₍⸍⸌̣ ʷ̣̫⸍̣⸌₎

is now a good time to state my headcanon that essek's theft of the beacons was a minimal contribution to ludinus's overall plans (in that, aside from the distraction of the war, he only gave lewds like a few months head start and maybe some dunamantic basics, since the assembly would get ahold of the pride's call beacon anyway) and that the part essek actually heavily affected was analysis of exandria's ley lines with that geometer on the top of his towers

[sagasolejma]

How do you feel about the post getting to 80085?

Uhm, well, honestly not great (⁠•⁠ ⁠▽⁠ ⁠•⁠;⁠)

Kinda been holding off on making this post cause I've literally gotten like 50+ asks reminding me of it plus all the people on other social media reminding me of it constantly lol.

Truth be told the original post was just a joke? I'm sadly not in a place right now where it would actually be safe for me to start presenting fem, nor am I in the right headspace for it. But then the post just kept getting more and more notes and admittedly I do get pressured quite easily by stuff like that and was worried people would be mad at me if I deleted it, but obviously I know people will also be mad at me now that they've put so much effort into it and I won't do it. It all felt like a bit of a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation.

So yeah, I'm sorry everyone. Please don't hate me. I've literally been so anxious just opening Tumblr for the past two days after it hit the "goal". So don't worry I have been tormenting myself plenty in case you wanted revenge xD

I will say though, the support meant a lot to me. Really sweet to see so many people come together around it, it has given me a lot more confidence, and to at least keep some of the original post, I've thought about maybe presenting fem at a local DnD group I play at ^^

So uhm yeah sorry everyone, I will get there some day I hope, obviously boymoding isn't exactly good for my mental health but right now it's better than... well it's better than the current alternative.

I'm sorry (⁠´⁠-⁠﹏⁠-⁠`⁠；⁠)

[darqx]

HEEEY MACARENA (ALRIGHT!)

Here's some long overdue BP and HH asks :) I tend to combine the two since there's not as many as the RADs, so this starts with BP and then moves into HH/Gen qs.

BP

MUAH ~ (I actually doodled this some time last year for fun and whimsy, based on those long mouth kiss meme pics XD)

A very quick overview of these types!

Vescordem: Maneaters/cannibals, excessively tall and strong.

Aleores: Minor dealmakers (goods and services). Jaw can unhinge and has venomous bite.

Sollicio: Major dealmakers - soul stealing ability. Often very good looking, has ichor powers.

Voxter: Ability to project 'thoughts' into someone else's mind - you ever have an intrusive thought? Same concept. All have a unique mark across the top part of their face.

Caumacies: Maneaters/cannibals, very strong. Has a third eye which sees only in heat vision - rarely opened simultaneously with normal eyes.

Hmm M or MA15 i think 🤔

You know, i actually have an idea for a game that has nothing to do with anything I'm currently doing XD One day i'll actually have time to make it, maybe. But anyway currently my actual project is i'm planning on making a comic \o/

I AM PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE that i have thumbnailed like 70 pages of this bloody thing and i'm still only in the first quarter of the planned chapters lol OTL Once i finish thumbing the chapter I'm on I plan to go back and render the pages properly before starting to post them :D

...which should hopefully give me a buffer as i repeat the process for the next chapters |D

You know, the concept of my characs being comfort characs for someone will never get old for me. It just tickles me pink ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ This answer will have two levels to it.

It's fine to RP or ask blog with Rire - he's one of my more "known" characs thanks to BTD so as long as credit is given (and it's made clear I'm not running the blog so it's not canon) then it's cool.

I'd prefer if no ask/RP blogs are created for any of my other BP or HH characs, as they are not as known yet. This may be revisited once i actually get the BP comic out but for now it's a no, sorry! (Though, if you are RPing in like...a private Discord with other friends who know who the characs are then I'm a bit more lenient with that.)

The reason for the BP/HH level is that ages ago when I had started establishing my own characs more, I randomly happened to find a forum where someone was RPing as Izm and .D but no one else knew who the characs were and so they clearly thought the RPer was the original artist and creator. Said RPer was not dissuading anyone of that notion. That has stuck with me for forever because at the time i never anticipated that someone would...actually try and do that with an OC. Like, bro srsly?!

One pet peeve for everyone:

.D: Willfully stupid people

Izm: .D smoking. He could care less if anyone else smokes but .D is not allowed on his watch

Marcus: Having decisions made for him without his input

Zeke: "How's the weather up there?"

Wei Ren: When people think he can't understand English cos he has an accent and so they deliberately speak slower and louder

Geez Caleb why are you damn RUDE

Here's one i prepared earlier! 😌

I'm not sure why you included Marcus as a demon, he's a human lol.

HH/More Gen

There are clubs which are created by students but need approval from the adults to exist.

HH is one of the better boarding schools which generally turn out successful alumni. The "obvious problems" we see are not actually obvious lol.

He doesn't need such manipulations.

Thanks! I hope you are inspired to go forth and create stuff! :D

One of the only perks of being a prefect at HH, really :d

Absolutely not lol

↓

4. These types of qs are always amusing to me only because you guys expect me to know but i absolutely do not XDD. Do normal people actually have a fave animal?? I dont even have a fave animal!! Anyway offshoot aside sorry that i can't even randomly assign anything, but if you are interested here is what they might be AS animals lol.

They actually don't have names because they were randomly designed NPCs i drew as like, placeholders |D;

Not including Rire or Nurse Isla:

.D is asexual, Izm is bisexual, and everyone else is straight probably. Caleb and Desmond are violently straight (as in Des is like very 90s stoner bro adamantly vocal about being straight and Caleb will actually try and break your neck for insinuating anything).

I have some female characs but I dont draw them that often as they are more side characs in BP and HH. The ones ive's drawn at least once are Isla (who looks like this, also doodled above), Tish (Des's sister) and Kenzie and Kelly (Zeke's sisters).

Every once in a blue moon i get an ask saying this but whenever i go to check nothing is wrong, so...nothing is wrong they do work |D; As the age old tech saying goes have you tried turning it off and on again? :d

Aren't those kind of things supposed to be...based on yourself??

[factual-fantasy]

27 asks! Thanks yall!! :}} 📐

@milk-powrit (Referencing this post)

..Because I don't like Zooble. 😐

Zooble up to this point just hasn't been a pleasant character most of the time for me- She swears like a sailor, is always flipping people off and being rude left and right. Not my kind of character. 💀

Now you might say "Zooble clearly has some issues going on deep down that makes her act that way" or "Zooble is mean to Caine because she doesn't like her body" In this case, I point you to what I said on that post-

"while I know many characters are likely to turn out evil or turn out to be really sweet, I'm taking them all at their current face value. Hope this helps some of my maybe.. surprising? Tiers make some more sense" This was directed at Zooble and Jax. They've probably got some lore that will make me sympathize with them but currently I just don't like it when those two characters are on screen :|

I will say though that Zooble was saved from being moved even lower in the tiers for the tenderness she showed in setting up Kaufmo's funeral.. <XD

@eggnonymous

Little does the egg know I have a frying pan behind my back.... just in case.. 👁️👁️

@i-dogtor-dog

Feeling pretty rough <:( but doing my best.. <:) 👍 Also thank you! :)))

(Link in ask)

Woah.. the designs for this AU(?) are wild :00

@thangone

Woah! Your artwork is looking great! :DD And what a cute littol fwoggy :)))

His voice gets on my nerves if I listen to it for too long- but otherwise he's really funny and I like him as a character :)) I will be really sad if/when he turns out to be an evil master mind/the villain or something :(

They belong in Minecraft.

@neo-metalscottic (Kinger love post)

Hello! :DD I'm glad to hear you liked my Kinger post! Its nice to see him get so much love after the new episode :)) the poor guy deserves it.. <:(

Now Funky Kong, he is in my AU :00 and I intend to incorporate most other Kongs as well! Maybe I can tie in his "traveling salesman" type vibe and make him a brave/reckless Kong that likes to explore new areas on their island..? :00

As for Kirby, the Anime has a special place in my heart. And I also know barely anything about the games lore- The characters also seem to have a lot more personality in the Anime. For better or for worse <XDD

My favorite from the anime is definitely Metaknight. His only downside is he doesn't appear to have wings. <:/ (I remedy this in my AU >:) )

@stupid-thatsme

If I read this correctly, it seems like you wanted some written out explanation or something? If so I'm afraid I cant help you there- I don't consider myself to be very good at explaining art things-

The best I could do is draw some examples and try to explain the drawings. But since you said you already know all the lines and stuff.. well.. :x

@weirdweeb83

Now THIS.. Is some proper Halloween candy 🤩

@holly-opal

Not anymore! :)

@p0wer-up21

One of the scariest creatures on Earth <XDDD

@mrrebel7

AAA THANK YOU!! :DDD AND THAT'S AWESOME TO HEAR!! :))) I hope your project goes smoothly! :))))

XDD I can pronounce that just fine!

OH YEAH ITS YOU! :00

Also yeahh,, things have been really tough for me.. I'm doing my best to keep my head up and get through it. I'm hoping to get some relief from my symptoms soon. <:/ Thank you <:))

That's not a fun fact, that's a sad fact :( I'd rather people never find me then find me through waves of stolen artwork..

But none the less, thank you. I'm glad to hear you like my art! :))

@marionette-jester

I don't know if this is an insult or a cursed compliment XD But I choose to give you the benefit of the doubt and think the latter! So thank you! :)

@the-8th-of-w1zards

AAAA THANK YOU!! :DDD Also I've been drawing far too long to remember my original inspiration.. but my guess is playing sonic games and wanting to draw Tails..? XDD Maybe Pokémon too..?

Meh 🤷 not particularly interested in those guys

Thank you! :))

Idk how long I'll play, but so far I've been enjoying it! My favorite cookie based on appearance is Star Coral cookie. Story/personality wise its a tie between Pure Vanilla and White Lily-

O_O oh dear-

@inkyblots

All I have to say is use references and do you very best to keep the drawing in model <:/

:DD Thank you! :)

Oh yeah, I've seen some of those around 😅 They're not really my taste anymore-

@captain-skyler1987

Uhg, that's always disheartening to see. Thanks for letting me know.. <:/

@hershelwidget

I cant share most of the books I read for a few reasons- but the book you're talking about sounds so good!.. And so sad.. <:'(( I'll have to keep it in mind! :)

[microwavetoaster-selfships]

What I did when I was getting married with A.xlerod, I planned out a season I'd want the wedding to be in, then narrowed it down to month and then to day. Honestly there's a lot of ways you could go about it, and it highly depends on how conventional you want the wedding to be. For us we just went to a field of flowers, said our vows and then kissed and stuff. Wasn't even an official ceremony 😅.

And a lot of people use rings for engagements, but it's up to what yall like! Necklaces? Earings? Article of clothing? Maybe you two buy a small bracelet chain and pick charms to add to it together? Really, go crazy with it. Almost considered just giving each other necklaces at home and calling it a night.

I made a pinterest board for wedding stuff, like what we might where, what the place might look like, what we give each other might be like, etc.! Maybe write out vows if yall do that, or what will be said when proposing.

Is it a surprise engagement? Do you two discuss it before hand? Where's it at? Is anyone else there? Does the place have any meaning to yall or is it somewhere new?

Do you want to publicly share with friends/media(if you or your f/o is famous) that yall are engaged? Or is it all super private?

But main point: if you wanna do a conventional thing, go for it! And if you wanna do something entirely new the 100% embrace it. Whether you propose at a restaurant or a gaizibo or if it's maybe just in yalls house in a warm relaxing way, do whatever feels nice!

Bonus points: thinking about them fidgeting with the jewelry/item and/or showing it off to others

For those it applies to, how did you guys go about becoming engaged to your f/o?

Trying to get some ideas.

[zeondraws]

Ok, Fellas, so today was wild

I'm at Gamescom atm and a week before this I tried to make a small plan for myself. Mostly because I had gotten such a big interest for the game, I wanted to see if I can meet anyone at the event.

After having had a big hurdle while trying to reenter the business area, I was able to go back and meet someone from the Chinese Room (I met two today). Which was wild for me, didn't think with this sudden interest in the game that I was able to meet someone from the team who worked on the game so soon.

I told them how I struggle to find interests in most games since those usually don't speak to me, but Still Wakes The Deep suddenly caught my attention. Where I ended up researching a bunch to find hidden details or eastereggs, looking through the game files and replaying the game to further understand the story.

I only had a small window to ask a bunch of questions, I sadly couldn't ask silly questions like "Does Muir look like a Bagpipe?" or ask some Questions about Caz.

Before the meeting I asked people on the discord server if they wanted to know anything. So I tried to take the questions I had for the moment and get through them XD

I did tell them how there is a small community on tumblr/discord where we gather. And that I asked some folk for questions I should ask.

Ok these are big spoilers, at least some suprised me, quite a bunch if them are of course about Muir and Innes.

I hope I remember everything properly that he told me, I immediately wrote everything down on discord for the others to read, but figured making a tumblr post will be good as well.

Innes:

Quite a lot of people asked about the VA of Innes, apparently they forgot to include him in the credits which made them feel extremely bad, even apologising to them. I can definitely understand how that must feel, I think I'd melt away. They'd fix it in the next patch, I can't check if it's already fixed atm.

At the very end of our chat, while shaking hands, I asked if Innes is bald. And the answer was "*laughs* yes".

Now I clearly asked this one as a joke, because I found it funny to tell the others on discord, however I very much support luscious hair Innes that many are drawing.

Muir:

I explained to them how I've been researching some stuff in the game. And figured out, that Muir must've died around the time when Caz flooded the Forward Pontoon in Marine Control. So I asked if that's possible to be the time when it actually happend- and they did confirm this! I was surprised that I got that on point.

But I got some further details about this, apparently they wanted to showcase how Muir would've died there.

Basically, once Caz flooded the Forward Pontoon, you would've seen Muir outside loosing his grip out in the deck and getting crushed under debris.

Which was so painful for me to imagine, to see Muir outside, walking on his tendrils and suddenly not being able to keep his balance.

I tried illustrating how I roughly imagine this scene, it ain't perfect, but maybe it helps everyone to visualise it.

The Flooding shifted the entire rig and debris fell onto him.

To have some sense where everything is, Accommodation Roof (where you find Roy) is on the left side, if you look at the rig from the Derrick entrance. And Marine Control should be on the right side.

The thing is Marine Control is facing the ocean (if I remember correctly, I hope I do, I'm currently not home to check), so you couldn't take a look at the derick while Caz does the thing. Which basically made them remove this and hid Muir nearby the Derrick for players to find. And I told him how I replayed the game and saw Muir lay there with Innes, it was 6AM and I just sat there like O-O

Muir & Innes:

A burning question for many was, what their relationship is. And they told me it's more like a father son relationship, saying how Innes is very strict to Muir.

Muir is the younger one of the two and also likes to tease Innes a bunch (so the pipe thing is one of his many shenanigans he'd do)

Here we see a wild Muir in his natural habitat about to prank his friend (caught in 4k) (I almost died) (look at him plotting).

Now, I could not forget to mention that the fandom decided to ship Muir and Innes and wanted to see their reaction. They took it with a smile and just talked about their complex relationship again. Which I found cool to hear.

I sadly don't remember every small detail of the convo, since I wanted to make sure that I was able to ask all the questions people wrote on discord.

Brodie & Raffs:

This was a surprise to hear, which also made me very sad. Brodie was also like a father for Raffs, he knew his mother too.

And apparently Brodie was supposed to tell Raffs mother incase anything happened to him. So that she can feel better knowing Raffs died quickly and without much pain. Which is just... I'm in shambles. sobbing

Gibbo:

Some folk wanted to know if he had an actual model, to which the person answered with yes. They planned to show him at some point, but decided that the player should see Trots firstly.

I also randomly asked if the Gibbo model ingame was a part of Addairs model (judging by the game files), if I remember correctly he nodded.

I hope we get to see it in the artbook, I preordered it but forgor to tell him that. But it's okay.

I sadly don't remember everything here, I had to check discord for the questions (I hope I don't say anything wrong), but with Gibbo they focused more on the sound design and the mystery. And I think in the end it worked out perfectly.

Other:

They implanted a bunch of eastern eggs into the game, the art director even said he's still finding new ones to this day.

He mentioned the pictures shown in various areas and mentioned that he inserted pictures of his family and cousins etc.

Also the Kid inside the TV in the Crew Lounge? That's the Art Director as a kid! Whaaaaaaaa- Didn't know this one for sure.

And another random thing, I showed him the meme that @cazrig made. Because I inserted it inside my piece of fanart. I sadly couldn't show him more memes of the community because I forgor/no time. The memes Robin made are also comedy gold.

It was this one (I keep dying of laughter)

He found it very funny, so did the other person I showed it to.

But he also talked about how worried he was how the game would be perceived in the end. Since it came out extremely close to the release date of the new Elden Ring DLC. And having worked on it for so long they didn't know how the reactions would be.

But were positively surprised how well it was perceived, people playing the game, tears being shed and so on.

Okay that took me ages to write, I just wanted to have it all inside a tumblr post. Otherwise I may forget stuff if it's scattered on discord.

The event day turned out well for me today. I was so worried, that my tiny plan wouldn't work yesterday. But somehow I had some luck on my side.

After I got home I added his signature to my physical copy. I also made myself a small card with my artwork for it. I also gave them a small card and a big printed version of the fanart as well.

Thank you John!

I go sleep now, tomorrow is another gamescom day

[snippit-crickit]

I've been learning art for almost a year and I'm almost finish with the fundamentals. I'm scared to post a whole lot cringe art in my tumblr because of my lack of experience. Has it been scary to post art for you? or were you confident posting anyway?

Hai!! Thats a good question:]] When it comes to posting art, i wouldnt actually consider myself a chronically online kid but i did post my stuff from a young age in closed communities such as transformice forums and facebook with irl friends and relatives on it (with excessive descriptions)

We could say i was confident because i didnt care!! And i didnt care for a long time, i think posting stuff should be an add-on to drawing, you dont draw to post but for yerself:]] If people scare you you can try doin that! Well maybe not posting where your irl people can see it but finding a small community where you can share your stuff What actually stressed me out was posting with an audience, i had cultivated quite a large following on twitter and it made me have dreams that i was doxxed over posting cheese and stuff like that xD

I kinda moved onto tumblr and im more comfy here, i am old man coded and i dont even know where the number of followers here is (nobody tell me i want to live in obliviousness) Id say find a comfy space and dont get discouraged when your art doesnt get much attention, it do be like that when you start out:]! And dont let it get in your head too agsdh, you can do this!

[hauntedhopeghost]

Ghost ranting about Green's glasses because they needed to get this down on words

With the whole "Green eating grass video dropping" and stuff

I wanted to explain my rose/orange-colored glasses theory in more detail. Because I made an entire timeline just to try and prove this. And for the other post I only put pictures and I find it super interesting.

(I know, I made another post about this but I'm going to say it again)

So, a lot of people already know that Green's sunglasses, (which he wears more and more often throughout the influencer arc) are orange, and that they match up with Second's as seen in the episode Skyblock. And that Green's glasses first show up in the episode A Special Song. Which was mainly just for fun.

And now he wears it in multiple posts now, mainly when he's alone, I've noticed.

Now, the term rose-colored glasses means having a positive outlook on life, sometimes not noticing the negative things or choosing to ignore it.

Green's sunglasses are orange. orange-colored glasses.

The meaning of the color orange, according to the top Google result is this.

Optimism. Rose-colored glasses is literally another word for optimism. And happiness + enthusiasm which plays another role in this. (Mainly with the rick/stickroll and with how Green's channel originally started)

And then there's the negative side. Arrogance, pride, impatience.

Traits that a lot of us associate with how Green is. It almost makes too much sense.

And working through my timeline, I find he mainly only wears those glasses when he's alone. Another very interesting thing to think about. The only time he wears it around his friends is, again, the rickroll episode.

Edit: I actually got that wrong, he did wear it at the end of the Minecraft vlog, but that's when his friends left him when he was trying to promote Instagram. So they might have seen something he didn't, or it just helps this theory even more. (Thank you so much to @dobrinata for pointing this out to me and adding it onto my original post)

So why am I talking about this? It's just a pair of sunglasses that have nothing to do with the plot whatsoever

I think, with how things are going so far, the glasses are going to serve a kind of symbolism, with Green's outlook of everything and how his perception of the new fame would change things, even if it isn't true he may have a more warped view of what happened, maybe with the Color Gang.

(I sound like I have no idea what I'm talking about XD)

They are sunglasses, too. He might be blind to what's going on... or...

(Just something I thought was interesting to think about)

So yeah, we might see more appearances of those glasses later on, but most likely, with how things are going so far, they'll disappear at the end, or at one point. Maybe it's the Color Gang, or maybe it's something else that he has to come to terms on his own.

Yeah uhh... thanks for coming to my talk where I rant about glasses lol-