#offline queue

[abandoned-beast]

artificial su*c*de

[vel17]

[calamitysshatteredson]

Now technically officially taking the week off though of course I will pop in to spread news of the chocobo auction far and wide, you know how it be, but I will also link to this official invitation to pop into the stream at any point this week. They're good folk doing good things and we could all use a little more of that right now, yes?

[goldendivinewrath]

@eventheodds [From here.]

It's been... rough. That's putting it all much too lightly, but there are things that words can't really bother to cover. Best to fall to severe understatement, less trying to hold or cover it up with a single word than to simply fall back on simplicity. Rough.

Not always, not as an overarching and inescapable feeling. But it's there just the same, layered and endless, rising and falling like sand dunes. He could get lost in the metaphor if he wants, but the whole thought is dropped, pushed aside, left behind until it catches up to him again.

Vash hadn't felt awkward about approaching, and not about sitting. He feels awkward in speaking after that silence, but it's something that's been sitting on his tongue and little by little making it hard to breathe. He hasn't been keeping an eye on Meryl because she can't be trusted, and certainly not because she needs someone to tend to her, but he still wants to stay... close. Close enough. Dichotomy; he still wants to keep himself away because he is, really and truly, a disaster. But the urge to protect, defend, make up for keeps being stronger.

(That doesn't make it right, he reminds himself. Often. As often as he ignores it, because that doesn't make it wrong, either.)

Meryl's reaction isn't really stronger than he expects, but it's altogether different. Stunned to wide-eyed silence, there's an enormous part of him that wants to reach for her, to comfort with touch the best way he knows how-- He doesn't know if she wants that. How she might consider it in the moment, if she'll know he doesn't mean to treat her like a wounded thing. Vash decides to wait on an invitation for touch, or to get closer, but he doesn't so much as turn away. He won't. At the moment, just being there seems... fine. Almost enough.

When asked about a drink, he offers only a quiet, "Yeah." Deep thoughts while swallowing down a line of liquid fire isn't as rare for him as it should be, maybe, but as he hands the bottle back, he allows himself a few seconds to think about what he wants to say. How he wants to say it. Words almost don't leave his tongue with the little wheeze that comes first, needing a cough and another swallow first. "Doesn't seem fair if you put all the blame on yourself, either." And maybe, maybe, he can be reasonable about it. See that maybe it isn't... entirely his fault. Or maybe-- "We didn't know. We couldn't have known. So we... shouldn't blame ourselves."

Can he hold to that? He suspects the answer might be about as much as Meryl can. Whatever that ultimately means is well beyond the cool of the night and the quiet moment they share. Certainly well beyond that bottle.

[stonecoldmeme]

What if . . . Prompto witnessed Noctis take his final breath at the end of the game before dawn came again ?

What If..? Scenarios | accepting but slowwwww

He didn't-- He didn't know why, he didn't know--

Their numbers were starting to dwindle. The daemons. They were still fighting, yeah, but he noticed it on reloading. A few less emerged from the shadow on the ground each time a new wave came, and then...

"You guys got this." He'd already turned to sprint up the stairs, just knowing. It was a feeling in his gut, it was an instinct he couldn't define, didn't understand, didn't want to understand, it was--

Prompto had no memory of the elevator ride. Little memory of the direction he sprinted in, but he knew, he knew where to go, he knew where Noct was, he knew...

And in some ways, he also knew what he'd find. It wasn't like they hadn't been told. At the campfire. Like he didn't try his best to hold in the sadness and the rage and smile.

Like the weak smile that greeted him after he'd managed to take the stairs three, four at a time, managed to face the throne and-- It--

Noct. He couldn't say it. The... the sword through his chest. The look on his face, the...

He smiled. One more moment. Smiled at him, and then his eyes just sort of...

Dimmed.

So did Prompto. Falling to his knees at his king's feet. Laying his head in his best friend's lap. Sobbing for--

More. More than that. More.

He didn't feel the warmth of the sunlight on his back.

[royalbratprince]

@themageofmany [From here because muse and brain declared it so.]

Oh, he was no good at being reassuring. Or offering much of an innocent smile. Where was Prompto when he needed-- Ah, right, the blond had seen right through him and made himself scarce. Damn, some best friend.

"What? A guy can't ask if you like frogs? And mud?" Oh yeah, that wasn't suspicious at all.

Another tactic, then. "Do you wanna... help the advancement of science..? Somehow? With frogs?" Not... better...

[polinsated]

3.02 -> 3.08

[arsenicflame]

Bonus round! Do you use a queue tag?

[abandoned-beast]

"One day at a time is what we've got. It's what everybody's got, if you get down to it."

[goldendivinewrath]

@full-of-mercy

Much as he tries not to think about fighting during times like these, he can't help it. They move well together. They move well together nearly always when they're not quite thinking about it, and that means the goal is being achieved. Vash almost laughs, but the whole of his attention is stolen easily.

Finally, finally, he gets to see what he'd mapped out with his hand before, and it's-- Oh. Intriguing. It'd been intriguing before, of course, but to see the piercing, to take in the full sight of it makes his mouth water. Unexpected. Suiting. Questions to ask but no answers needed, but then he--

Vash finds himself lacking words. Certainly not lacking a voice, because it's a full-on guttural moan harmonizing with a sudden surge of resonance. His fingers pause in their continued exploration, but shiver along with the rest of him, motion like a wave across his body. Focus is absolute but scattered at the same time, unable to pinpoint exactly what makes it feel like something's gotten knocked loose in the best possible way, but...

He feels it, how his body shifts fully; or the one part in particular, anyway. The filling out, the way his petals tremble open as far as they can as if presenting the quickly filling bud, lengthening and thickening in full instead of opening up. There's no missing it, and no missing the way it becomes the epicenter of sensation when fully hard, sensing the finest details of heat and texture and his own slick mixing with saliva, and--

He's leaking something else from the tip. Honey-sweet and thicker, and it's been-- It's been so long that he's not ready for the jolt of hot-tingling-pleasure that comes with that for him. He just hopes it's not minded. It must not be. He doesn't know what the experience might be for Wolfwood, but he's sure there will be protest if necessary.

The thinking aligns and then fades out like a bad signal. Unneeded, forbidden even in the midst of worry. He's only got enough concentration for what's in front of him, what he needs to get back to, grateful for the fact that he's partially being held up when the shiver continues to move through his body in pulses. Inside. Right, back to the goal, wanting to reach for, find, that place that's going to shake the other man to pieces like he deserves. Vash tries to be delicate, fingers still slick, starting with a single digit and savoring as slowly as he can stand--

There's a little giving over to another distraction, though. Too curious to know what that metal might feel like against his tongue. Flexible though he is, there's balance to think of, extra shifting to do to reach fully, but bracing himself a little more steadily against the bed with his prosthetic hand, he can at least easily flick his tongue against the metal nearest the base of the other man's length.

Thinking.

Thinking is the enemy right here and right now. That's right. They'd agreed in their way. They'd come to an accord of sorts in their own way, and things progressed as they did, and now…

Now.

Now he aches. Now he has his face buried in feathery soft and wet and luminous, his senses utterly subsumed in scent and taste and warmth and heat and if he had a thought to spare he might be worried about just how much he has fucked up his mission and maybe just how much he has succeeded in it. (That really bears no consideration; the Gung Ho Guns are not in the room, nor are Knives or Legato, after all).

He has had a few breaths and a few heartbeats to skip past the sensitivity of biology—still human, after all, or close enough to count. This, too, does not enter his reckoning, because something else more immediate has his attention.

Movement.

Specifically, movement with an admission, but movement is both a thought and an action and Wolfwood grunts his assent before Vash even begins to shift. Assent becomes assistance—assistance of a sort, anyway, the kind that they oftentimes offer one another in combat, one part interference and one part sheer geometric ridiculousness that somehow ends up with more property destruction and the same number of idiots still capable of gunning them down in the none too distant future. Most of the time, at least in the beginning, Vash intended to keep Wolfwood from shooting his (literal) shot, and now it seems like an attempt to encourage a more figurative one, but that involves thinking and Nicholas is not about that in this moment.

Broad palms seize Vash's hips. While they might be points of restraint, they are also points of bracing; a raspy breath sounds almost like a snarl as the Independent makes his rotation, the inside of a knee grazing Wolfwood's head and carding sweat-and-other-matted hair askew. It is not as graceful as it could be, not as fluid, but he is more concerned with other fluidity in the here and now.

Hands to hips, fingers dig divots into the rounds of buttocks. Vash presses and he's hard again. Still, maybe, with his mutated biology, aching and arched but focused on something else entirely as is his preference.

A tug and a shimmy tuck his forearms around the outsides of pale thighs, and then with little more than a guttural thrum that might be a sarcastic 'right,' might be just a more primal affectation, he moves.

Pulls Vash's hips down, thrusts his face up, burying himself from nose to chin while laving, licking, sucking, humming.

He needs this. Wants this. Seems they both do.

[vel17]

[calamitysshatteredson]

Imagine this: Hojo secretly runs a fanclub of Sephiroth and shares some private details in a very unsophisticated manner, going as far as talking passionately about how good Sephiroth's hair smells.

And Sephiroth finds out it's Hojo writing all that

...So. The whole Silver Elite/Chairwoman H thing in Crisis Core comes off as... so incredibly creepy and awful (more so over time, haaa), but this... immediately became ridiculous crack in my mind. Sometimes you gotta let crack!Hojo out of his reinforced prison cell for a few minutes, okay.

"Hojo."

The man did not fumble with the glasswear he was oh so carefully dropping a certain amount of technically forbidden, questionably legal, certainly not moral liquids into. Sephiroth's presence had already been announced by the series of steel doors kicked off their hinges on the way there. He didn't bother to turn around before insisting, "You could have texted."

"I broke the phone." The response was a low growl, followed by something dropped in front of the scientist-- Ah, yes. That pile of sparkling plastic and glass had been a phone once. "This... fan club, what is this?"

"What is what?" Hojo responded innocently enough, putting his bare thumb over one of the slender test tubes and shaking the liquid to a froth before putting it back carefully. "All of the Firsts have fan clubs."

Sephiroth loomed over the feeble man to point at the broken phone screen. "None of the others have lengthy descriptions of what their hair smells like."

"None of the others have such dedicated chairpersons." Hojo sniffed, shaking a second test tube and making a small noise of disappointment when nothing frothed.

The SOLDIER finally physically turned Hojo around in his swiveling chair, looking ferocious. "No one should know what shampoo we use or exactly what it smells like."

"You use Shinra products. The scents are clearly labeled. If anything, it's just a product placement done as only a genius can do it." The scientist perfectly reasoned with a little flourish of his fingers... which were starting to turn neon blue.

Sephiroth took a moment to collect himself. A few breaths. Trying not to think about how easy it would be to just snap that tiny twig of a nec-- "So you're admitting to writing this?

"I admit to nothing." Hojo huffed, turning himself back around to continue his work.

He could be drop-kicked. He'd go flying in such a satisfying arc... "But--"

"Nope, no admissions." Hojo reassured loudly, shaking another tube. The result was a neon purple thumb.

Sephiroth drew a deep, loud breath and decided it probably wasn't worth the physical violence. There were better ways to attack. Leaning in, he stated clearly, "Your grammar is atrocious and you mix tenses."

[goldendivinewrath]

@forgivenpunishment [From here because someone's a problem muse.]

The size of Vash's eyes as he stares at both creations is comical, jaw slightly slack. Not reaching immediately, or speaking, but just. Staring.

Staring as if what's in front of him is a wonder before slowly leaning in, lowering his chin to the tabletop to inspect it further. Surely anyone who's watching him is going to find it silly and strange that anyone would look at a cocktail so close up, like it matters, like--

It was made for him, though. Sure, Wolfwood has one too, but this one, the one in front of him, looks like something he likes. It even smells sweet, a little, and as he picks himself back up to sit more or less properly (always a little hunched, always), his organic hand very gently wraps around the glass.

His smile is achingly, painfully soft. Agonizingly fond. It only gets reflected in his voice. "Thank you, Wolfwood."

And if he's accused of teasing with the little kitten lick at the top of the whipped cream first, well. He can ignore it.

[goldendivinewrath]

@millionsnife

"Well I don't eat that much, usually..." The nervous little laugh is noticeably a bit of an act; mostly because he doesn't want the urge he has to grin becoming far too obvious. There's just... something about Nai-- Knives, making food. Cooking. Cooking for two, and making use of his knives to do it. And if Vash so much as thinks of the word "domestic" he risks the kind of ear to ear grin that he isn't going to be able to hide at all.

It's nice in a way that he really can't begin to explain or describe. One more thing that he carefully mentally gathers like a stone to inspect later. It helps quell his near need to teasingly criticize any part of the process, tempted though he is.

Luckily his brother manages to draw his attention with conversation, Vash's posture relaxing again as he rests his hands in his lap. "Yeah. First time we met formally, anyway. Guess there was a reason I never had too much trouble with worms, huh?" Or, it could have been a lot worse while he was wandering around on his own, anyway. He'd mostly thought it was luck that he hadn't ended up a meal-- Er, more thank a couple of times.

Of... course... "If that was just luck, consider not telling me? Please?"

His thoughts haven't actually changed, but his habits have, a little–he'd needed a secondary source of energy for Conrad's medical experiments, too lethargic when relying solely on his own reserves and the sun. It'd cut into his plans too often.

Annoyingly, it'd stuck.

He pushes away from the table, heading to find the eggs in the fridge. "Eggs? I should have enough for two. ...Maybe. Depends on how much you eat, I suppose. And if Zazie comes back for food." There's still some tomatoes in his vegetable patch, if he needs to add something to it, Knives thinks. Or some cucumbers.

Absently he flicks a hand to send a string of knives at the cupboard, searching for a pan.

"You met Zazie for the first time when you met Wolfwood, yes? Or had you met them before then? If you did, they never told me."

[stonecoldmeme]

...It's the warm weather look.

[royalbratprince]

❛ i know i ruined your life. i suffer for it every day. ❜

Quotes That Broke Me starters | accepting but VERY SLOW

The king didn't know if the entire room had gone silent or it was just him. No one else seemed to matter if there was anyone else there at all. "N-- Novus..."

The ache in his knee didn't matter; he needed to lower himself to the floor, trying to take his son's hand carefully in his own. "Don't ever think that of yourself. Ever. Alright?"

How did he even-- Where did he begin? " You didn't-- I was terrified to have children. The idea... I didn't want to saddle anyone with what I'd been expected to do. To be responsible for putting the world back together. Your mother and I, and your uncles, we... talked about that for a long time."

Noctis tried to move aside the idea that his fears were founded. "I was still scared, but the world... it's gotten so much better. A better place to grow up in, and you... you never ruined anything, Novus. And we've got a big family, right? Many people who love you very much. Not because they have to, not because you're a prince; because we love you. You didn't ruin anything."

Maybe it was over-dramatic, he didn't... he didn't know. "But please, Novus, if there's something hurting you, tell us."