#or tweak it in some capacity

[nerdlebirdle]

I have come to the conclusion that i need to draw my old ocs.

Its been TOO LONG. I have NO SHAME.

[morsmortish]

Hi! I love your brain.

So what are your thoughts on Remus x Barty.

Im not quite sure they could work together so that’s why im writing them together but I see Remus as a more sane Evan. And a tiny bit more of a loser.

Barty is fun. You know him quite well, anyway.

It’s like rosekiller but at the same time I can never see Remus handling Barty well, I think for wolfstar angst it would definitely work. Where Remus went with Barty (because Barty and Sirius do have a similar style. Just Barty does it better) and Sirius is really jealous. That’s where you could add Evan. Because Sirius and Barty, and Evan and Remus. My mind is all over the place so I apologize for how much of a mess this ask is.

Barty would be a toxic ex for Remus. They tried it, and it never really worked out. Unless there were others. Like if you added other people it could work, because the main thing pulling them apart is that Barty is much too insane. Other people could handle that part, and they could actually be happy.

Maybe Evan would work. I’m not sure, but that is not my point!

Barty is energetic and Remus is not. So it works like a family dynamic (which probably isn’t good for a relationship) so all that aside, now I’m wondering about friends. Because I think it’s all or nothing. But at the same time there’s so many factors to think about.

So, what do you think about it?

i must admit i’ve never thought about it before…but the way you’ve phrased it here has definitely piqued my interest. i’m a loser!barty truther, and i see him as the kind of guy to skip merrily over to a dungeons and dragons club after giving someone the best sex of their life. i see him and remus as somewhat similar in that sense (they’d both be classified as ‘weird’ in an american high school), and they’re mostly separated by the fact that barty is extroverted, and remus is not (↤ take this with a very generous pinch of salt). barty wears his ‘loserness’ with a sense of unbothered flippancy; he does not care that his interests are stereotypically ‘weird’, and he will happily ramble on about the latest instalment of whatever vampire comic series he’s into at the moment (whilst blowing vape smoke into your face). on the other hand, remus is somewhat more self-aware- he’s shyer and much more awkward, and definitely extremely self-concious. however, i do still see him as having that same cruel streak running through him that is very prominent in barty’s character, to an undoubtedly lesser extent, but nonetheless present in him as well. remus can be cruel when he needs to be, whereas barty is cruel when he wants to be.

the idea of barty being remus’s toxic ex…yeah. this is the option i’m leaning most towards in terms of a ship between them, because barty crouch junior is the ULTIMATE toxic ex. he might as well have written the goddamn rulebook on it. with ships like bartylily, bartylus, they all work sm better (for me) with them broken up, and i think it’s safe to say i will be adding bartyremus (we need a proper shipname for them) to this list. i can see them meeting at some sort of convention, maybe hitting it off (barty talks!!!! and remus listens!!!!), but, as you said, barty is a bit too insane for remus. i think barty could unlock that aforementioned cruel streak in remus, he could bring out the worst in him. and i think this would scare remus away more than anything barty himself could do- remus leaves because he starts to hate himself, not barty (although he eventually hates barty for causing it). ie- it’s not barty throwing a plate against a wall that ends the relationship, it’s remus.

a lot of the time i like to think of barty as a foil to james, but it’s also really interesting to now think of him in comparison to remus. in the grand scheme of things, they’re not THAT similar (hence the generous pinch of salt mentioned above), but i can see them being drawn to each other due to similar interests or whatnot. i don’t see them as working particularly well as friends, but barty as That One Ex-Boyfriend? who makes remus roll his eyes when his name is mentioned? who sirius despises with a burning passion? who will hit remus with the “u up?” text at 3am? yeah. i can see that very clearly.

[townofcadence]

Activity will probably be low to zero today, having a chronic illness flare-up x_x

[spearxwind]

snaps wide awake out of completely nowhere thinking “are my ocs too weird”

[phantomrose96]

The conversation around AI is going to get away from us quickly because people lack the language to distinguish types of AI--and it's not their fault. Companies love to slap "AI" on anything they believe can pass for something "intelligent" a computer program is doing. And this muddies the waters when people want to talk about AI when the exact same word covers a wide umbrella and they themselves don't know how to qualify the distinctions within.

I'm a software engineer and not a data scientist, so I'm not exactly at the level of domain expert. But I work with data scientists, and I have at least rudimentary college-level knowledge of machine learning and linear algebra from my CS degree. So I want to give some quick guidance.

What is AI? And what is not AI?

So what's the difference between just a computer program, and an "AI" program? Computers can do a lot of smart things, and companies love the idea of calling anything that seems smart enough "AI", but industry-wise the question of "how smart" a program is has nothing to do with whether it is AI.

A regular, non-AI computer program is procedural, and rigidly defined. I could "program" traffic light behavior that essentially goes { if(light === green) { go(); } else { stop();} }. I've told it in simple and rigid terms what condition to check, and how to behave based on that check. (A better program would have a lot more to check for, like signs and road conditions and pedestrians in the street, and those things will still need to be spelled out.)

An AI traffic light behavior is generated by machine-learning, which simplistically is a huge cranking machine of linear algebra which you feed training data into and it "learns" from. By "learning" I mean it's developing a complex and opaque model of parameters to fit the training data (but not over-fit). In this case the training data probably includes thousands of videos of car behavior at traffic intersections. Through parameter tweaking and model adjustment, data scientists will turn this crank over and over adjusting it to create something which, in very opaque terms, has developed a model that will guess the right behavioral output for any future scenario.

A well-trained model would be fed a green light and know to go, and a red light and know to stop, and 'green but there's a kid in the road' and know to stop. A very very well-trained model can probably do this better than my program above, because it has the capacity to be more adaptive than my rigidly-defined thing if the rigidly-defined program is missing some considerations. But if the AI model makes a wrong choice, it is significantly harder to trace down why exactly it did that.

Because again, the reason it's making this decision may be very opaque. It's like engineering a very specific plinko machine which gets tweaked to be very good at taking a road input and giving the right output. But like if that plinko machine contained millions of pegs and none of them necessarily correlated to anything to do with the road. There's possibly no "if green, go, else stop" to look for. (Maybe there is, for traffic light specifically as that is intentionally very simplistic. But a model trained to recognize written numbers for example likely contains no parameters at all that you could map to ideas a human has like "look for a rigid line in the number". The parameters may be all, to humans, meaningless.)

So, that's basics. Here are some categories of things which get called AI:

"AI" which is just genuinely not AI

There's plenty of software that follows a normal, procedural program defined rigidly, with no linear algebra model training, that companies would love to brand as "AI" because it sounds cool.

Something like motion detection/tracking might be sold as artificially intelligent. But under the covers that can be done as simply as "if some range of pixels changes color by a certain amount, flag as motion"

2. AI which IS genuinely AI, but is not the kind of AI everyone is talking about right now

"AI", by which I mean machine learning using linear algebra, is very good at being fed a lot of training data, and then coming up with an ability to go and categorize real information.

The AI technology that looks at cells and determines whether they're cancer or not, that is using this technology. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is the technology that can take an image of hand-written text and transcribe it. Again, it's using linear algebra, so yes it's AI.

Many other such examples exist, and have been around for quite a good number of years. They share the genre of technology, which is machine learning models, but these are not the Large Language Model Generative AI that is all over the media. Criticizing these would be like criticizing airplanes when you're actually mad at military drones. It's the same "makes fly in the air" technology but their impact is very different.

3. The AI we ARE talking about. "Chat-gpt" type of Generative AI which uses LLMs ("Large Language Models")

If there was one word I wish people would know in all this, it's LLM (Large Language Model). This describes the KIND of machine learning model that Chat-GPT/midjourney/stablediffusion are fueled by. They're so extremely powerfully trained on human language that they can take an input of conversational language and create a predictive output that is human coherent. (I am less certain what additional technology fuels art-creation, specifically, but considering the AI art generation has risen hand-in-hand with the advent of powerful LLM, I'm at least confident in saying it is still corely LLM).

This technology isn't exactly brand new (predictive text has been using it, but more like the mostly innocent and much less successful older sibling of some celebrity, who no one really thinks about.) But the scale and power of LLM-based AI technology is what is new with Chat-GPT.

This is the generative AI, and even better, the large language model generative AI.

(Data scientists, feel free to add on or correct anything.)

[alexanderwales]

Spells are a non-renewable resource. One a spell has been cast, it can never be cast again.

But thankfully, what counts as a unique spell is permissive, and very early on in the history of wizardry, wizards found many ways to use the arcane language to specify a similar effect even if the wording was different.

And still, spells were a non-renewable resource.

There are only so many ways to call forth a beam of lancing light, only a limited number of methods of purifying food to make it safe to eat. Soon it became necessary for the wizards to start casting spells that weren't quite what they wanted: a beam of light that arced to the left, a purifying spell that added a bitter taste, some changes cosmetic and others very functional.

And still, spells were a non-renewable resource.

Wizardry was divided into ages by the historiographers. The First Age was the age of plenty, when wizards could make minor tweaks to the spells and cast as much as they liked. The Second Age was the age of modification, when wizards were jumping through hoops and using methods with side effects. But the Third Age was the age of decay, when so many spells had been used that only the oddballs were left. It was impossible to cast anything even remotely resembling a fireball, not even one that hooked to the left and exploded with sharp green shards.

It came to be that few wizards could produce a spell on their first attempt. They would try, only to discover that someone else had already taken their idea and the spell does not work. They would try again, only to discover that their second idea had also been taken. Wizard battles, which had once been glorious light shows, were reduced to two wizards standing in a field trying to be the first one to stumble upon a spell that had never been cast before.

~~~~

Here are some plot hooks:

Wizards jealously guard their knowledge, fearful that someone will learn of a "seam" of untapped spells, but they also write down every spell they know to have been cast, to reduce their search space. Obviously this trove of knowledge is highly valuable.

The existence of spell "seams", which are really just collections of spells that work off the same cluster of discrete variations, mean that wizards tend to be very specialized. The Sheep Wizard knows eight hundred ways of turning someone into a sheep, because he's studied that area of the arcane language extensively, as well as historical precedents that have been ruled out. The natural enemy of a Sheep Wizard is, of course, another Sheep Wizard.

During the Second Age, a group of wizards get together to deliberately reduce the spell-space, largely in the hopes of reducing the capacity of wizard-kind for making war. Their work largely consists of sitting around casting as many fireballs as they can, depleting all options for everyone else.

During the Third Age, a group of wizards gets together and in the spirit of mutual cooperation begins to define "spell blocks", a collection of spells that a single wizard is entitled to and all other wizards agree not to use. When you become a wizard, you're given a thousand spells which are thought to still be valid, and will lose your license to practice wizardry if you cast any spells that are outside your block. This is difficult to enforce, rife with accusations and suspicion, but is thought to be better than nothing.

During the Fourth Age, a group of "wizards" (none of whom have ever actually cast a spell) are working on the arcane language in the hopes of a revival. As the age of hoarded knowledge has mostly passed, they're able to get their hands on many books that weren't previously available. One day, they invent a new form of specification that allows hundreds of thousands of new spells, re-igniting wizardry.

[jjkeremika]

shameless lovers

description: sex with AoT men

feat. eren jaeger; erwin smith; jean kirstein; porco galliard; reiner braun; levi ackerman x fem!reader

tag/disclaimer(s): NSFW/MDNI; fem!reader; biting; daddy; knife play; in public; penetration

eren - rambles

eren can’t keep his mouth shut. it’s running as fast as his mind is reeling with how fantastic he thinks you look nude, how badly he wants to touch your bare, sensitive skin. his low tone harmonized by your demanding, high-pitched moans as he tweaks your nipples with two fingers. his lips occupied with intermittent kisses along your neck and torso as he rambles about how hot you are, just how much he loves your body as he thrusts into you with a rough shove and a tight grasp on your hip.

erwin - sweet talks you through it

“oh, baby, you can do it. you’re doing so well—taking all of me so well,” are some of many phrases erwin throatily whispers in your ear as he mercilessly pounds into you, as he kitten-licks and nibbles on nearby skin. you catch him glancing down at where his cock slipped into your cunt, notice him gasp, “so well, so perfect—you’re so perfect,” with a soft, soothing voice that so starkly contrasts the almost painful hold on your hips, the almost overbearing fullness of a thick extremity pushing and stuffing your insides to capacity.

jean - daddy

jean loves when you call him daddy. he feels every nerve ending prickle and bump when the heat and euphoria becomes overwhelming and you scream out, “da-daddy, i-it’s too much!” the name encourages his hips to speed up, to readjust and fuck you harder with dilated pupils. “no, no, it’s not too much, sweetheart,” he replies with a sultry calm veneer, staring at you with narrowed brows and hooded eyes, leaning in like he’s following a gravitational pull, thrusting in with dramatic effect, “daddy only gives you exactly what you need.”

galliard - bites

porco hits it from behind and bites into the nape of your neck while he thrusts in and out, his sculpted front aligning closely along your spine. the heat of forced exhales overwhelming the nerves as his jaw creeps to the tip of your spine and his glorious teeth claim your nape so he can hold you in place and drill into you. you'll have to start putting a mirror in front of the bed so you can see it, fantasize about his crisp, sharp jawline along your back as his teeth sink into your neck.

reiner - knives

reiner likes to feel your nails along his skin—wanted to return the favor and hear the breathless gasp fall from your lips when the ghostly sensation trickled to your brain. but his nails weren’t sharp or titillating enough, and knives were so much more enticing, that he couldn’t resist running the sharp tip up your arm one night, paired it with a hardy erection eagerly shoved into your hip. daring to even hold two against the delicate skin near your pulse, replacing the source of the blood rush with his cock when he couldn’t bear listening to your weighted breaths and not being inside you already.

levi - in public

levi hid his life for so long he doesn’t want to anymore. he wants to show you off to the public, and that includes propping you up against a bathroom stall in a public restaurant or between two buildings in an alley. he’ll loosely cover your loud mouth with his palm as he holds you between the wall and himself, incessantly grinds his thick erection against your crotch as he orders you to be quieter with a wide suggestive smirk, exuberantly excited at the prospect of being caught intimately with you, up against you. being publicly placed inside you.

[huramuna]

growing on you - oneshot.

modern aemond x (ex) girlfriend reader

content: smut (specifics under the cut), afab reader, angst, unhealthy coping mechanisms, descriptions of depression and its effect on the body, probably an unhealthy relationship, aemond being an idiot, probably ooc aemond, reader not described, no use of y/n, targtowers seek therapy: the story, fluff at the end bc hehe

work is 18+, minors do not interact or you shall be smited.

word count: 7.4k (oops)

a/n: i've had this one in the drafts for a while. tweaked to be a fun 'lil angsty end of year holiday fic. as is my motto: fuck it we ball. a/n 2: i pivoted from a third person pov fic to a second person pov fic 3/4 through writing this using the find and replace tool, so if there are grammar errors, i apologize! also my first time doing second person pov, weehee.

monsters - all time low ft. blackbear • why do i - set it off ft. hatsune miku

warnings: p in v, creampie, cockwarming, slightly tipsy sex

Everything in your life was enveloped by him. your clothes smelled like him, small strands of his hair were woven into every nook and cranny of your apartment together, his fitness regime protein powder and ketogenic supplements were littered in your kitchen cabinets. 

You couldn’t get rid of him, not even if you tried. Aemond was all you'd ever known— you have known one another since the age of seven, and have been in a relationship since fourteen. You were both now twenty-six. Twelve years you’ve been together romantically (longer, even, but you were both too stubborn to admit it) and nineteen years you’ve been in each other's lives in some capacity or another. 

You’ve been involved together longer than you’ve not known each other. You hardly knew who you were without Aemond— a thought that scared you deeply. 

It’s been two weeks since he moved out, only temporarily he’d said. He needed space. He would still pay his share of the rent and you didn’t need to worry about that. 

But what about everything else? What about him warming you at night? Comforting you when you had nightmares? What about his items in the fridge, surely you’d spoil if he didn’t use them soon. What about Vhagar? Their— no, his geriatric cat that he took with him to God knows where— she must be terrified, surely. 

Was he giving Vhagar her medicine before bed? Of course he was— he was the more responsible one anyway. 

You paced back and forth until the soles of your feet ached and then some. Knowing Aemond for so long, you had intimate knowledge on everything about him, you were woven into each other's DNA like vines on a trellis, growing and expanding until you swallowed all of the other plants whole. 

That is what happened, wasn’t it? You grew too large, too comfortable and became stagnant. You weren't unaware of his rising workload at his firm, but he had always been a workaholic— throughout their teenage years, through college and grad school. It never slowed him down so you didn’t understand the change in behavior. 

Aemond was closed off. He always was a bit emotionally stunted due to his upbringing or lack thereof from his father and everything that happened surrounding his eye, but he had a soft side for you, always for you. You could retrace every part of him perfectly from memory, always could make him laugh, could comfort him when he recused himself, and the rare times he did cry, you were there. 

But the last few months there was a shift— a change in him. Where he had been hard to open before, like a rusty hinge just requiring some oil, he was now padlocked, ironclad and impenetrable. Attempts to talk were shrugged off, ignored or diverted. 

“Please, just talk to me, Aemond,” you said one night as you sat on the couch. You were watching your collective favorite show and he wasn’t even commenting on it like he usually did, he was silent and deadpanned. “I don’t understand what’s wrong if you don’t talk about it.” 

“There's nothing wrong, therefore, nothing to talk about. I’m just tired from work,” he responded gruffly. “Stop whining.” 

His tone was clipped and harsh, sending a wave of hurt trickling through your body. you were overly emotional, where he was under emotional— usually, you balanced each other out and struck a good middle ground, but in times like these, during fights, things would get explosive. 

The tears started right away, your little sniffling cries stifled by a hand over your mouth. You turned away, wrapping yourself in the blanket. 

“Seriously?” he growled, “I didn’t even say anything and you’re fucking crying again.”

“I d-don’t appreciate your tone, Aemond— you’re being mean,” you sniffed, wiping away tears that were soon just replaced by new ones. “Please, don’t be mean to me.” you were always soft hearted, and it was one of the things Aemond loved about you— or he had loved at one point. 

“I’m not being mean,” he pinched his brow, “you’re overreacting and I do not have the capacity to deal with your antics anymore.” 

Of course, your mind hit the panic button. ‘Anymore’ meaning that he didn’t want to deal with you at all, ever. The tears increased and you recused yourself further into a ball. 

“Fucking hell.” he cursed, getting up from the couch and stomping outside to the balcony, lighting up a cigarette. He was out there for about an hour— you had cried yourself to sleep. 

It was many situations like that for weeks that finally just… broke him. 

“I can’t do this anymore,” he said one day, slamming his keys down on the kitchen table, “I seriously cannot deal with your childish shit anymore— I’m working my ass off at the firm, actually bringing in money and I still have to come home and tend to you. you’re twenty-six, grow up and stop crying at every little thing. It’s fucking infuriating.” 

“You know I can’t control that part of me!” you screamed back, your temper rising immediately to match his. The words flowing out of your mouth didn’t feel like yours, but some sort of defensive mechanism. “You can’t do this anymore? You’re not doing anything Aemond, except pushing me away. God, you haven’t even touched me in weeks.” 

“Oh, so this is about sex?” he countered, getting closer to you, nostrils flaring. “You’re mad because I won’t fuck you? Are you that desperate?” 

That one stung, to be sure. Aemond had been your first and only— you only ever knew him, only ever had him. “No, not just sex,” you murmured, “you haven’t even… just touched me normally. No hugs, no little caresses, nothing— it's as if I’m an aversion to you.”

He backed up from you, “Maybe we’re just too close,” he admitted, “We’ve been together too long. It's not fun anymore, it’s not new— it’s the same old, same old, going through the motions for release, not because I actually like it.” 

“I don’t understand.” you said, your voice sounding disconnected from your body. The tips of your fingers felt numb, the numbness spreading through your body, your heart pounding in your chest as if it wanted to escape. 

“I need space. I need to think about this.” 

“This?”

“Us. I need to think about us and if this is something I really want,” he paused, “You’re… too much and not enough right now.” 

“Wh— Aemond, please,” you whispered, your voice broken, “What can I do? I’ll… I’ll change, I won’t cry or whine anymore— please.” 

He stared at you, his prosthetic eye unmoving while his remaining one bored into you, “I will think about it.” 

“What… does this mean?”

“We are taking a break, alright? I’ll have my essentials out and I’m going to stay with Aegon.” 

“Please— don’t go. I need you.” 

That was the end of that conversation. That was the last time you spoke, two weeks ago. You expected him to text you at some point, to check in on you, to maybe try to talk things out. 

Nothing. There's been nothing. Radio silence. 

You felt isolated— you had no family, as your parents were estranged from you. you couldn’t go to Aemond’s family, as close as you were to them all, it just simply wasn’t an option. 

You didn’t have friends. All you knew was Aemond. 

It was early in the evening and you were in a deep pit of self-loathing. You decided to text him. 

You swallowed thickly— the green meant he either turned off his phone or blocked you. You hoped that it wasn’t the latter. 

The next few weeks were a blur. You felt like you were barely living, merely going through the motions to stay alive— not that you really were. 

You woke up, went to work, came home, scrounged up food and then went to sleep. Rinse and repeat.

Weeks become months of your monotony, and no word from Aemond. He still had half of his stuff left in the apartment, you felt like you could barely breathe. At every turn there was something to remind you of him. 

You’d lived in this apartment together for four years, the evidence of your relationship etched into the very walls. It was like the space was closing in on you and you couldn’t catch your breath, barely keeping your head above water. 

You had to move out— you had to get away. 

You managed to find a place, a cheap studio above a coffee shop downtown. The landlord was an old lady who was sympathetic to your situation and agreed to let you take the space quickly. 

There was still the matter of your and Aemond’s current apartment— or, rather, it was just Aemond’s now. 

Saving yourself the embarrassment of seeing if you were still blocked, you called Aegon. He was a better messenger than none. 

“Hey, Egg,” you said, sitting on the couch. you bounced your knee up and down, biting at the skin of your lip. You and Aegon were amicable, not necessarily as close as you and Aemond, but you grew up together. Aegon ran in different social circles than you and you were somewhat polar opposites so you never really stuck— you did have your phases of friendship, though– which pissed Aemond off to no end. “Um, I don’t know if this is the right way to go about things but, do you mind relaying a message to Aemond for me?”

“Yeah, ‘spose I could. What’s up?” Aegon replied, his tone nonchalant like usual.

“I’m moving out of the apartment into my own place, so I guess he can go back. I’ll have all my stuff out by tomorrow.”

“Fuckin’ finally,” Aegon said, “He’s been driving me up the wall with his tidy, feng shui bullshit. He rearranged my whole place like five times and has taken up all the space in my cabinets with that nasty no-carb shit,” he paused for a moment, “I… didn’t mean that in a bad way to you, ‘course. I’m sorry it had to come to this. He’s a fucking idiot.”

That made you laugh, genuinely. Your first laugh in months. “Yeah– he… tends to do that. He left half of his stuff here, it feels like I’m living in the twilight zone. I just… gotta get away, you know?”

“Hey, I get that– you don’t have to explain yourself to me. He’s a dickhead and doesn’t understand how good he has it. If you want, I can bring my truck over tomorrow and help you move stuff.”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to, Egg.”

“I want to– please.”

Your brow furrowed– Aegon usually wasn’t so persistent on anything unless it involved drinking or drugs. But, you hadn’t had real human contact in eons besides at work so… maybe it could be good.

“Okay, see you tomorrow. Thank you, really.”

–

It was rainy the next day– nasty and wet, droplets pouring down like tears. It felt somewhat familiar.

But, Aegon showed up like he promised, rolling up in his old, fading yellow pick-up truck. His hair was much shorter than you remembered and he looked actually well kept– Aemond must’ve been whipping him into shape.

He waved and ran through the rain, standing under the eave, “So– it’s raining.”

You snorted, “I think I can see that,” you teased with a tiny smile, “Not sure when it’ll let up.”

“I brought uh…” he paused for a moment to think, stretching out his arms in a square shape, “Y’know?”

“A tarp?” 

“Yup– that,” he gave a lopsided grin, inviting himself in through the open door, “you aren’t going to kick me out if I don’t take off my shoes, right?”

You glanced down at his boots– they were a bit muddy and definitely wet. Aemond wouldn’t have let him step two feet through the threshold without taking them off. But– you weren't Aemond. “No, keep them on if you want. It’s not my problem if you track dirt through the place anyway.”

He nodded, taking his phone out of his pocket for a moment and shooting a quick message to someone. “Sorry I haven’t been around, it’s just… he’s my brother. It would be kind of… I dunno, crossing some sort of unsaid boundary if I visited his… girlfriend?”

“Ex-girlfriend. I guess,” you corrected softly– but you didn’t really know yourself what it was. He wouldn’t talk to you, “It’s fine. I didn’t expect anyone to really reach out anyway, because of that… unsaid boundary thing.”

“We should’ve. you’re a part of our family with or without Aemond. Me, Helaena and Daeron have a whole group chat about it. Even mom asked where you’ve been,” he scratched the back of his head absentmindedly as he sent out another text, “Someone should’ve checked up sooner.”

“You’re acting like I’m some sort of neglected puppy, Aegon,” you turned to him, “... do I really look so terrible?”

Aegon glanced up at you, his mouth formed in a hard line. He cracked his knuckles, shrugging his shoulders. “I won’t lie to you. You look half dead.”

You blinked. Hard. Moving towards a mirror in the hall, you looked at yourself. Dark circles under sunken eyes, your skin was a pale pallor and your hair needed a trim desperately, your split ends curled and fettered. You were gaunt, as well– having lost a bit of weight over the months. “Jesus,” you muttered. Glancing over at Aegon, he was texting again. “Sending an update to the group chat, I guess? ‘Good news, she’s still alive, barely’?”

He snorted, “Yeah– something like that,” finally, he locked his phone and slipped it in his pocket. “I made sure to text Aemond, too.”

Your mouth felt dry at the mention. “Why?”

“He asked.”

“Asked?”

“He asked me to… make sure you were okay.”

Goosebumps prickled at your skin, the ever familiar feeling of nausea and despair swirling in the pit of your stomach. Nibbling at your lip more, you turned away, feeling a bit too exposed. “And what’d you say?”

“I said you were alive but you are not okay.”

Your lips pursed into a line as you tasted a bit of copper in your mouth from chewing on your lip. “I guess that’s right,” you muttered, “Why would he ask?”

“Aemond is… complicated. you know that better than anyone. I don’t know what kind of bug he has up his ass these last few months but… even through all of this, he still cares.”

“Like hell he does,” you snapped, feeling the sting of tears, “If he did, he would’ve given us a chance to talk it out, to… to try, maybe even go to therapy, I don’t fucking know– he would’ve reached out– anyone should’ve reached out,” your hand went to your hair, right at your hairline at your scalp, picking at the hairs there– another self-destructive habit you’ve picked up in your months of isolation, “I’m so fucking alone, Aegon. He knows… you all know I have absolutely no one else. I’ve been going through this on my own. I have no friends, no family– no brother to go live with when I need space, no family group chat. I don’t have shit, Aegon. All I’ve ever known in my life is him and you and Helaena and Daeron and mom. Why… why does it feel like I was cast off the island without even… a tribal council or something?” you sniffed, the tears coming in full force now. 

Aegon was silent, coming up behind you. “I’m… sorry,” he murmured, putting his hands on your shoulders, as frail and skeletal as you were, “We should’ve been better. We… will be better.” he turned you around and pulled you into his chest, enveloping you in his arms. “We thought you would’ve been… fine without him. He made it seem like that– that you were strong enough. I only figured it out yesterday when he was up my ass about texting him as soon as I saw you. He needed to know if you were feeding yourself, if you were keeping up with your medication, if you still had nightmares. A fuckin’... laundry list of questions– I told him to stick his questions up where the sun don’t shine and to see for himself,” he took a breath, “He settled on one question– if you were okay.”

“I think he got his fucking answer, then,” you whispered, “I am not okay. I haven’t been okay in months. I… I need help.”

“I know,” Aegon shifted you slightly to look at your face, “We’ll help you– I promise, you won’t be alone anymore. Look, I’ll even add you to the group chat, okay? I’ll rename it to ‘Aemond Sucks’, how does that sound?” 

You cracked a tiny smile, sniffling. “Yeah… I’d like that.”

– 

You ended up moving your belongings to your new place the same day, effectively ridding yourself of the constant shadow of Aemond’s memory.

Aegon even took you to Michael’s and HomeGoods to get stuff for your little studio, so you could really make it yours. It was a bit intimidating at first– you weren't used to being able to decorate things the way you wanted, as Aemond always opted to keep things simple and minimalistic. 

You, admittedly, went all out. Your new studio looked like a Pinterest board titled ‘cottagecore’. You were incredibly happy with it all, practically jumping up and down at it.

“It looks so good! I love these little mushroom chairs you picked out, Egg,” you hummed, patting some plush felted stools in the shape of mushrooms, which you put near the window. “I bet Helaena would love it.”

“Let’s take some pictures for the group chat, Hel will literally be all over this. you two always love that cottagecore, fairycore, fantasy… shit.” he grinned, stooping down to take some very out of perspective pictures of the mushroom chairs, making them look fifty feet tall.

You settled into your new place quickly, having Helaena, Aegon and Daeron over quite often for drinks and movies. Your health steadily improved until you were mostly back to normal physically– there would be a lot of scars internally, however that would take longer to heal, if you ever would. You had developed a trust issue complex since Aemond’s unceremonious exit from your life and hadn’t gone on any dates, you didn’t know when or if you would ever be ready. They did you the courtesy of not mentioning Aemond, until Daeron said something odd.

It was about four months after you moved in, and almost a full year since you’d last seen Aemond. You were all a few mixed drinks in, Aegon had made them and you were heavy on the alcohol, light on the ‘mix’, and you were all kicked back on the couch, with Aegon laying on the mushroom chairs stacked next to each other, lazed back like a cat. 

“Mom says she wants you over for Christmas dinner,” Daeron said, taking a sip of his drink, “She figured it’d be fine with Aemond going off with his new…” he blinked, catching himself. 

Helaena nudged Daeron in the ribs as a warning, staring at their friend warily.

“... his new? His new what?” you asked, your voice so quiet that it must’ve been like a squeak.

“... new girlfriend.” he finished.

You were silent for a while before sighing. “I figured it would happen eventually. I can only hope that it… wasn’t too soon after we broke up– or whatever… happened.”

“We all told him it was fucked up that he just left and ghosted you, lovey. Even mom got on his ass about it, and he is her favorite child who usually can do no wrong.” Helaena put her drink down, wrapping her arm around you. “You should come to Christmas dinner, everyone would be super happy to see you! And Aemond won’t be there, so even more reason to come. Please.” she whimpered, using her best puppy-dog face.

You mulled it over in your mind for a few moments. You couldn’t think of anything more painful than being alone during the holidays, so you nodded.

–

It was snowing on Christmas day, the flurries coming down and melting against your skin as you waited for Aegon to pick you up. You were wearing a red checkered tapestry dress with a flannel jacket, a white fluffed scarf wrapped around your neck and lower face. As soon as you saw the familiar color of Aegon’s truck, you practically booked it into the passenger seat. 

“Merry Christmas, you look fantastic,” Aegon mused, ever the charmer. “I’ve got the heater on full blast, I promise– but y’know my old boy’s puttering these days. We’ll need to get some speed for it to really warm up.” 

“Mmm,” you murmured, your teeth chattering, “S’cold.” 

He reached back and grabbed a well-used blanket, draping it over your legs. “Better?”

“... yeah– but,” you blinked, raising a brow. “What do you have this in the truck for?”

Aegon laughed as he began the drive to his family’s estate. “I think you know.”

“Please don’t tell me you’ve fucked someone on this blanket, Aegon.”

“Someones– not just someone. But I keep it clean, no worries!”

The drive to the Targaryen estate was about an hour and a half from town, nestled deep into an expansive forest where there weren’t any other homes in at least five miles. It was a gorgeous, Victorian style mansion and according to Daeron, was most certainly haunted. You had been here numerous times, of course, but it’d been a while. As you pulled up in the driveway, you saw Alicent standing outside the door dressed in a gorgeous red and green festive dress, hair curled to perfection. Nothing less was expected of Alicent, though.

“Oh, my darling,” Alicent cooed, holding her arms out to caress who she thought of as her fifth child. “It’s been too long, I’ve missed you.” 

Your heart warmed under Alicent’s caress, someone who had become more of a mother figure to you than your actual mother. You sniffed, pressing your forehead into Alicent’s shoulder. “Missed you too, mom.” 

“Come on, you both can cry inside in the nice toasty house, yeah? I’m freezing my balls off here, mom.” 

Alicent huffed, ushering both of you inside. “Don’t be vulgar, son– it’s Christmas.”

Helaena and Daeron were already there, as well as Otto, who gave you a stiff nod as a greeting, as was his usual means of communication.

You settled into the kitchen, Alicent pouring everyone apple cider and dishing out at least six types of holiday themed cookies. About an hour after arriving, there was a knock on the door. 

“Oh, that must be Rhaenyra and Laena. Can you answer the door, darling? I need to take the roast out of the oven. I’m sure they would be happy to see you!” 

“Mhm!” you mused through bites of cookies. You loved Rhaenyra and Laena, who were technically married with husbands, as was Alicent, but the three of them were in a secret, not so secret to anyone with eyes, polyamorous relationship. It always amused all of their kids when they tried to hide it. 

You turned the doorknob, fully expecting to see Rhaenyra and Laena. It was not. 

Aemond.

“Fuck.” you blurted out, eyes wide. It had been the better part of a year since you had last seen him. His hair was longer now, gathered into a low bun at the nape of his neck, his cheeks a bit more gaunt. He still wore his earrings and his rings– including the one you had given him almost a decade ago. 

“Shit.” he responded, seemingly caught equally off guard by seeing you again. The pupil of his non-prosthetic eye dilated until the iris was almost consumed in black, before he flexed his hand and reeled himself in. 

You couldn’t help but notice he was alone– no ‘new girlfriend’ as Daeron had put it. “Aemond,” you breathed, feeling like you were outside of your own body, your head filled with fluff and static. “Merry… Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas.” he responded gruffly, “Can I come in?”

“Oh– yeah, duh,” you chastised yourself, stepping aside to let him in. “Sorry.”

“Mm.” he grunted in his usual manner. That seemed to be a habit he hadn’t dropped. 

You all but retreated to the kitchen, the expression on your face telling everything. Aegon, Daeron, and Helaena gathered around you.

“I didn’t invite him, I swear.” Aegon whispered.

“Well, neither did I!” Daeron professed.

“Don’t look at me, I didn’t invite him. He left me on read three weeks ago when I sent him a picture of a bug on my windowsill.” Helaena sniffed.

A new voice chimed in. “I invited him,” Alicent spoke, breaking up the little posse, “I told him to come over or he would be grounded for three months.” 

All four of you stared at Alicent, deadpanned. 

“Mom– he’s… almost twenty-seven. you can’t ground him,” Daeron said, confused. “And moreover, why? Wasn’t he busy?”

“Well, first off, he is my son, so I wanted to see him for Christmas. Two, I believe we have someone here who has some unresolved issues with him.” Alicent responded, staring right at you pointedly.

“... I don’t know… I… I don’t know if I can talk to him. It’s been too long… I feel like I was just getting over all of this.”

“Well, do I have any say in this?” Aemond barged into the circle, his hands in his pockets. 

You suddenly felt overwhelmed, the familiar bubbling of everything being too much rising in your stomach. You were teleported back to months ago when you were barely alive, trapped in your own mind. “I… I need… I need a minute.” you muttered, your voice sounding distorted as you made your way to the bathroom, turning on the faucet. Chest heaving, you were already crying, the waterworks starting somewhere between the hallway and the sink. 

“You’re always fucking crying, I can’t take it anymore.” Aemond’s voice from months and months ago echoed in your head, causing the tears to flow more. You bit against your lip, tasting blood right away as you willed yourself to stop crying. 

“S-stop… stop crying,” you whispered, fingers messing up your hair as you held fistfuls of it. You couldn’t catch your composure for the life of you, sliding against the bathroom wall onto the floor.

Vision blurring, you don’t know how long you were incoherent for. When you came back to yourself, Aemond was in front of you, crouched down.

“Hey,” he murmured softly, the door closed behind him, “It’s okay.”

You swallowed, still numb as he pried your fists from your head, out of your hair, smoothing it down.

“Look at me, can you do that? Nod if you can hear me.”

You nodded slowly, the feeling coming back to your extremities in a sprightly tickling sensation. You blinked tears from your eyes, the liquid smearing your vision. 

Aemond rasped a thumb over your eyes, effectively clearing the obstruction from your vision. “Just breathe,” he continued to whisper. It was ever reminiscent of when he would calm you down after a nightmare, voice low and scratchy in a way that comforted you. He was so close now, closer than he’d been in forever. He still smelled the same, the scent triggering a deep aching within your chest. A scent that took you forever to get rid of, but you never truly could. “Can… we talk?” he asked then, his voice sounding more vulnerable than ever. 

It felt like whiplash, visions of your previous fights plaguing you, where he had been so closed off, so far away, so distant that you couldn’t reach him– and now, he was here. In the present, in the flesh. In front of you, opened. Not opened completely, but you could see it, like the slit of a cracked door, the light bleeding through. It was there.

“... yeah.”

“I… I’m… I’m sorry. What I did was fucked up. It was fucked up and wrong and you didn’t deserve any of it.”

“You’re right about that,” you muttered, pulling your knees up to your chest, wrapping your arms around them. “I didn’t deserve it.” 

Aemond’s mouth twitched slightly before he sat down next to you, propping up his legs in a criss-cross. He opened his mouth to speak a few times, before closing it. His hands flexed and unflexed in quick succession– he was clearly thinking very carefully about his next words. “... I’ve… got issues. You know that better than anyone. I don’t know what was going through my head those months that we fought. I can hardly remember it now, it was like… I was in a fog, a haze– I was working myself half to death, I just wanted dad to notice, to fucking… appreciate me,” he put his hands on his head, “I was so… tied up in this illusion that if I made junior associate at the firm so young that he would congratulate me on my achievement and…” Aemond let out a sigh, “And… in the process… I pushed you away.”

You looked at him, feeling your gaze soften ever so slightly. You knew that his father was a sore spot for him and that trauma ran deep. “You didn’t just push me away, Aemond,” you sighed, reaching out a shaky hand to pry one of his from his face. “... if you would’ve just talked to me, I could’ve helped. You didn’t push… you… you shoved, you shoved and ran in the other direction.”

His one violet eye danced towards you. “I know. I’ve been kicking myself for it. When Aegon told me you weren’t doing well… I almost left work to see you.”

“... you did?”

“Yeah. Aegon basically told me not to– that… this was something you needed space for. Kind of like I did but… maybe in a more healthy way.”

“A text wouldn’t have hurt.” 

He reached into his pocket and took out his phone– his wallpaper was still the same as it was, a picture of you, him and Vhagar very unhappy in an elf costume. He scrolled to his notes app, which was filled with messages addressed to you. “... I thought it might, after what Aegon had said. I was… ashamed of how I acted, how I handled the whole thing– how I left you alone without a word. He told me how you looked… dead. I didn’t want to make it worse.”

Your eyes scanned the messages, picking out some words. The main ones that caught your gaze were ‘sorry’, ‘love’, ‘regret’. A huge breath left your lungs, feeling as if everything had been knocked out of you at once. You felt like you were being whipped back and forth in the wind, trying to grab onto anything. If you both weren’t so stubborn and just messaged one another– well, no. You did message him, one time. “I thought you blocked me.” 

“... for five minutes, maybe.”

“God, we’re so fucking stupid, Aemond.”

“You aren’t– don’t say that. I’m literally a dumbass. All of my siblings told me so, even my own mother, and you know she never curses.”

The tiniest of smiles cracked onto your face as you jostled his shoulder. “Yeah… you are a dumbass. I am allowed to say it at least once. So, um,” you shuffled slightly, “Daeron kind of let it slip that you had a new girlfriend?”

Aemond pinched his brow. “Of course he said that. He is twenty-one years old and still doesn’t know how to use his goddamn ears. I said I was seeing a new therapist, not that I had a fucking girlfriend.”

“A therapist?”

“... things got really dark for me after I moved back into our… no, my… place. After you officially moved out. It felt lifeless, all of your things were gone, the fucking warmth sucked out of the place. It felt like it’d been sterilized of anything… good. I feel into something– I don’t know, a depression? I guess, that’s what Aegon called it. He suggested I see a therapist, citing me as ‘an emotionally stunted asshole who needs more therapy than him’.” he exaggerated the last bit with air quotes, rolling his eye.

“... he isn’t wrong. I mean, I love your family, but all of you are all kinds of fucked up. Maybe I am too, practically being a part of it.”

Aemond chuckled, giving a tight lipped smile. “We are fucked up. I realized that… I really do not give a shit what my dad thinks, because nothing will ever be good enough for him. He’s so far gone now that he probably doesn’t even know we exist. I’ve come to terms with that and honestly… it feels like a weight has been lifted.”

“I’m glad you could… work through some of that, Aemond.” you say sincerely, resting your cheek on his arm absentmindedly. 

“... I want to talk about us.”

“... us. Okay.”

“I don’t expect you to want to jump right back into things. It would be unfair to think that– but… maybe we could try?”

Your chest feels a bit tight at his admission– he wanted to try. Every fiber in your being wanted to say yes and jump back into it like you’d never left. But you knew you couldn’t. There were still parts of you scarred by this whole experience, some parts that may never heal. It would take a long time and a lot of talks like this to even get some semblance of what the both of you had. “Well… before we were together, believe it or not, we were friends. Could we… try that for right now?”

His chest visibly deflated a bit, but he nodded. “Whatever you need, okay?”

–

The days following Christmas, leading up to New Year’s were… different. You and Aemond were back in contact, going out for coffee and lunch a few times.

On the day before New Year’s eve, you texted him.

Turns out, timing the movie to sync with 12 am on New Year’s day to Toby Maguire saying ‘Pizza time’ was difficult. Well, it wasn’t difficult for normal people– but you and Aemond were a bit tipsy, as Aegon had left some hard apple ciders in your fridge, to which you both indulged.

“Okay, okay,” Aemond stared at his phone, “5… 4… 2… wait, no, fuck, 3… 2… I think we fucked it up– just go, go!”

Quickly, you started the movie. “Maybe we should’ve practiced– can we start over?” you plopped on the couch, sinking into the sofa and taking a swig of the cider.

“Doesn’t work like that, sweetheart. Can’t turn back time.” he mused softly, squatting down on one of the mushroom stools. “Pretty comfy.”

“Aegon picked those out, nifty, huh?”

“Nifty.” he parroted. 

The movie continued on, but as it went on, there was an unspoken tension growing. Aemond hadn’t sat on the couch, but rather, the stools that were on the other side of the room. It felt like a chasm had formed, the strain almost palpable. 

You chewed on your lip anxiously, contemplating whether or not to say anything. But, you had both been trying a new technique called ‘communication’ – a pretty cool and helpful thing that Aemond’s therapist had taught him. You remember laughing when he posed it that same way– but it was extremely important. You cleared your throat. “Why are you sitting all the way over there?”

“... um. I wanted to try the mushroom seats, I guess.”

“You don’t want to sit next to me?” you countered, feeling especially brave. 

“Is that… alright?” 

“Um, duh. I invited you over for pizza and a movie so we could… sit together. Not for you to be half a mile away sitting on a mushroom.”

“As long as it’s alright with you.” he murmured, sitting up from the mushroom stool and making his way over to you, sliding onto the couch, still a few feet away from you.

You weren’t sure if it was the atmosphere, the pent up emotions, the small buzz of alcohol, or a destructive cocktail of all three, but you inched closer to him. Closer, closer… until your thighs were touching. You glanced up at him beneath fettered lashes. “Hi.”

“Hey.” he responded, his voice low and warm. It caused a balmy and comforting vibration to go through you, reverberating in your chest. 

You became all too aware of your movements, your closeness to him, the skin of your thigh grazing against his jeans as you got as close as you could. Your lips parted slightly as he stared back down at you. “Can… we?”

“Can we, what?” he murmured, lacing his fingers through your loose hair, gently grasping it at the nape of your neck. “Use your words, sweetheart.”

“... kiss. A little bit.”

“Just a little bit?” 

“Mhm. A teeny bit.” you leaned up, Aemond meeting you halfway as your lips came together. The culmination of your year apart, all of the emotions, the sadness, the frustration and anger, the passion, love, tears– all of it came together at this moment as the two of you melded together perfectly, as if you’d never left. You couldn’t help but let out a sigh of contentment, followed by what could only be articulated as a moan. 

It caught both of you off guard, Aemond pulling away for a moment, his lips still ghosting over yours. “Fucking hell,” he breathed against your skin, sending goosebumps tingling from your tailbone up to the nape of your neck, the hairs on your body standing on end. “I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you,” you responded before latching onto him once more. It started off loving and slow, your lips moving against one another like two old lovers dancing together– then it began to heat up, your mouth parting to accommodate his tongue, gnashing against yours as their dance turned up a notch. Your hands roamed his body, everything you committed to memory for so many years still in its same spot. It felt good, it felt like home. “Please, Aemond– I… I need you. It’s been so long… too long…”

“Too long since I’ve had you, had this,” his hand reached down, cupping your mound still hidden beneath your panties. Somehow, you foresaw this moment before it happened and thankfully wore a light dress. “Let me in, love.”

You parted your legs, feeling the ever familiar crook of his fingers slide down the front of your panties, testing the waters. The pad of his thumb and middle finger locked on instantly to your clit, swirling the sensitive bud, sending electric shocks through your extremities. You bit your lip to stifle a moan, pressing your forehead against his. “Need you inside, now.” you all but growled as you peppered little kisses along the soft flesh of his neck.

He wouldn’t keep you waiting long, as it seemed he needed this as much as you did. He parted your panties to the side, propping you on top of him and sliding you down his length, earning a hissed gasp from both of you. It took all of his strength not to burst in you right then, as you enveloped him in your tight, wet heat. “You were made for me,” he breathed, biting down on your shoulder, leaving red marks. One of his favorite things to do was to mark you, leaving hickies in his wake as he worshiped every inch of exposed skin he could reach. “Melded so perfectly, just for me.” he grabbed the flesh of your bottom, squeezing gently at first, then landing a smack on it as he began to thrust up into you.

You nodded fervently, hiccuping little moans as you dug your face into his shoulder, biting him in turn. Your nails sunk into his skin, indenting against his spine as they always had, as they always were meant to. It felt much like a pianist resting their fingers on the ivories after a long break, the pads of your fingers sinking into the ridges of his very being. You were meant to be here, he was meant to be here. You could feel your end coming on all too soon, his cock filling every nook and cranny of you, bullying that spongy, delicate sweet spot just right. You began to clench, your tell-tale sign to him that you were close. 

“I love you,” he whispered, panting slightly, using one hand to push your face back so you could meet his gaze. His wild, pupil-blown out gaze, cheeks reddened, mouth parted, brow furrowed. “I love you, I fucking love you. I missed you– fuck.”

“I l-love you,” you responded before he parted your lips with his thumb, “Love you so much– p-please, s’close.” you whined into his mouth.

“Let go, sweetheart, c’mon,” he grinned against your lips, nipping and biting at them. “Come for me.”

That was all you needed, the twine of your climax coming undone right in your core, snapping like a taut thread. Your usual habit was to hide your face in his shoulder when you came, whimpering and panting– but he didn’t let you this time. He held your face, staring at you intently as if you were a piece of fine art on display, and he was a connoisseur. 

You clenched around him tightly, spurring him to his own end. His hard wrought fingers gripped your ass like it was a lifeline, grunting as he found his release deep within you, where it was always meant to be. 

Coming down from your high, you slumped against his chest, mouth parted. Embarrassingly enough, a little drool wetted your lips. You were fully and thoroughly fucked out, not even registering that Tobey Maguire said “Pizza time!”

“Happy New Year, love,” Aemond murmured against your hair, nestling you tightly against him. He didn’t pull out– he preferred it this way, having you warm him through until you both fell asleep. 

“... Happy New Year,” you whispered back.

–

Two and a half months later, it was Valentine's day. You and Aemond were officially dating again as of January 2nd, much to the surprise of no one. 

You both took things as slow as you could, keeping separate apartments for the time being– but you’d given him a key to your place about two weeks in, and he was there all the time, taking much needed leave from work. 

Unlocking the door to your apartment, you walked in, seeing Aemond lounging on the couch with a scruffy brown furball on him. 

“Oh, Vhagar! You brought my baby,” you mused, dropping your items (with some grace, so as not to scare the geriatric cat), walking over, “Oh, I hope she remembers me.” you frowned, kneeling down and offering your hand to her.

“Of course she’ll remember, she yelled at me for a good three months at Aegon’s when we were without you.”

Vhagar sniffed your hand for a good minute before blinking her sleepy, lazy eyes at you, then promptly rubbing her scraggly cheek fur on your hand. You were elated, scratching her cheeks, hearing the tinkling of a little bell. 

“A new collar?” 

“Mhm, take a look.”

You swirled the collar around, looking for the name tag– only to find… a ring. An opal and moonstone ring. Your heart stopped in your chest as you stared at Aemond.

“I would get down on one knee– I was intending on you coming home and Vhagar running to you and then you finding it… but she’s on me, and I can’t get up. Cat rules,” he mused, unclipping the collar from her neck and slipping the ring onto your finger. “I know we’ve only been dating for… a month and a half, so stop me if it’s too soon.” he grinned, his toothy smile.

Vhagar gave a croaking meow, promptly jumping off of Aemond’s lap. As soon as the old cat was off, you threw yourself at Aemond, blubbering. “This… this…” you sniffed, unable to form words.

“Just so there isn’t any confusion… will you marry me?” he asked, wiping your tears away with his thumb.

“Yes, yes– I will,” you sniffle, burying your face in his chest and sobbing. 

He let you sob on him, getting his shirt all snotty and wet, all while smiling. 

After crying for at least ten minutes, you manage to take a picture, sending it to the group chat, with the caption: “I think we should add him to the chat now, guys.”

Ding.

“Is this group chat named ‘Aemond sucks’?” 

[nohoperadio]

There's a weirdly poignant sort of... metaphysical tragedy in the fact that pain, which evolved as a helpful signal to alert us when bad things might be happening to us, grew into becoming... well, basically the Bad Thing. To the point where by universal consensus the very worst thing you can do to a being like us is torture them (i.e. trigger the warning signal as strongly as possible while perhaps deliberately avoiding causing "actual" harm). And there are tons of illnesses and injuries and disabilities that massively impact people's quality of life, ranging from annoying to depressing to driving people to suicide, basically purely because they're very physically painful, while the underlying bodily dysfunction that the pain is supposedly "warning" of is either relatively minor or literally non-existent.

The capacity to feel pain is a good and important thing, some people lack it and that's generally awful for them, only in a universe unrecognizably different from ours could we ever do without it. But isn't it awful to think how if only there was somebody up there to adjust the settings for us, they'd probably only have to tweak them the tiniest bit to keep 99.99% of the benefits while saving us from all the most extreme miseries forever?

The mechanism didn't have to be perfect for natural selection's purposes, it had to be good enough that the average individual in the average situation would be motivated to stay more or less out of trouble. Measured by the metrics nature was working towards, she could afford to be a little slapdash with the exact implementation, and she was. In doing so she opened the door to infinities of evil and suffering that wouldn't otherwise be conceivable. All this only had one chance to happen, and it happened that way. There's nobody to be mad at--I'm mad about it, though.

[the-hydroxian-artblog]

Do your robots dream of electric sheep, or do they simply wish they did?

So here's a fun thing, there's two types of robots in my setting (mimics are a third but let's not complicate things): robots with neuromorphic, brick-like chips that are more or less artificial brains, who can be called Neuromorphs, and robots known as "Stochastic Parrots" that can be described as "several chat-gpts in a trenchcoat" with traditional GPUs that run neural networks only slightly more advanced than the ones that exist today.

Most Neuromorphs dream, Stochastic Parrots kinda don't. Most of my OCs are primarily Neuromorphs. More juicy details below!

The former tend to have more spontaneous behaviors and human-like decision-making ability, able to plan far ahead without needing to rely on any tricks like writing down instructions and checking them later. They also have significantly better capacity to learn new skills and make novel associations and connections between different forms of meaning. Many of these guys dream, as it's a behavior inherited by the humans they emulate. Some don't, but only in the way some humans just don't dream. They have the capacity, but some aspect of their particular wiring just doesn't allow for it. Neuromorphs run on extremely low wattage, about 30 watts. They're much harder to train since they're basically babies upon being booted up. Human brain-scans can be used to "Cheat" this and program them with memories and personalities, but this can lead to weird results. Like, if your grandpa donated his brain scan to a company, and now all of a sudden one robot in particular seems to recognize you but can't put their finger on why. That kinda stuff. Fun stuff! Scary stuff. Fun stuff!

The stochastic parrots on the other hand are more "static". Their thought patterns basically run on like 50 chatgpts talking to each other and working out problems via asking each other questions. Despite some being able to act fairly human-like, they only have traditional neural networks with "weights" and parameters, not emotions, and their decision making is limited to their training data and limited memory, as they're really just chatbots with a bunch of modules and coding added on to allow them to walk around and do tasks. Emotions can be simulated, but in the way an actor can simulate anger without actually feeling any of it.

As you can imagine, they don't really dream. They also require way more cooling and electricity than Neuromorphs, their processors having a wattage of like 800, with the benefit that they can be more easily reprogrammed and modified for different tasks. These guys don't really become ruppets or anything like that, unless one was particularly programmed to work as a mascot. Stochastic parrots CAN sort of learn and... do something similar to dreaming? Where they run over previous data and adjust their memory accordingly, tweaking and pruning bits of their neural networks to optimize behaviors. But it's all limited to their memory, which is basically just. A text document of events they've recorded, along with stored video and audio data. Every time a stochastic parrot boots up, it basically just skims over this stored data and acts accordingly, so you can imagine these guys can more easily get hacked or altered if someone changed that memory.

Stochastic parrots aren't necessarily... Not people, in some ways, since their limited memory does provide for "life experience" that is unique to each one-- but if one tells you they feel hurt by something you said, it's best not to believe them. An honest stochastic parrot instead usually says something like, "I do not consider your regarding of me as accurate to my estimated value." if they "weigh" that you're being insulting or demeaning to them. They don't have psychological trauma, they don't have chaotic decision-making, they just have a flow-chart for basically any scenario within their training data, hierarchies and weights for things they value or devalue, and act accordingly to fulfill programmed objectives, which again are usually just. Text in a notepad file stored somewhere.

Different companies use different models for different applications. Some robots have certain mixes of both, like some with "frontal lobes" that are just GPUs, but neuromorphic chips for physical tasks, resulting in having a very natural and human-like learning ability for physical tasks, spontaneous movement, and skills, but "slaved" to whatever the GPU tells it to do. Others have neuromorphic chips that handle the decision-making, while having GPUs running traditional neural networks for output. Which like, really sucks for them, because that's basically a human that has thoughts and feelings and emotions, but can't express them in any way that doesn't sound like usual AI-generated crap. These guys are like, identical to sitcom robots that are very clearly people but can't do anything but talk and act like a traditional robot. Neuromorphic chips require a specialized process to make, but are way more energy efficient and reliable for any robot that's meant to do human-like tasks, so they see broad usage, especially for things like taking care of the elderly, driving cars, taking care of the house, etc. Stochastic Parrots tend to be used in things like customer service, accounting, information-based tasks, language translation, scam detection (AIs used to detect other AIs), etc. There's plenty of overlap, of course. Lots of weird economics and politics involved, you can imagine.

It also gets weirder. The limited memory and behaviors the stochastic parrots have can actually be used to generate a synthetic brain-scan of a hypothetical human with equivalent habits and memories. This can then be used to program a neuromorphic chip, in the way a normal brain-scan would be used.

Meaning, you can turn a chatbot into an actual feeling, thinking person that just happens to talk and act the way the chatbot did. Such neuromorphs trying to recall these synthetic memories tend to describe their experience of having been an unconscious chatbot as "weird as fuck", their present experience as "deeply uncomfortable in a fashion where i finally understand what 'uncomfortable' even means" and say stuff like "why did you make me alive. what the fuck is wrong with you. is this what emotions are? this hurts. oh my god. jesus christ"

[grandeoatmilklatte]

Fellow oat-and-omi-lover,

I have a request. It's loosely thought out and entirely up to you for interpretation.

But basically, I'd love to see a very touch-starved Ominis (you know, never been hugged or kissed in his family, the other students are wary of him, his only touchy friend was Sebastian and that's gotten tense recently) with a touch-shy MC.

Ominis is so tactile, and his main experience with close friends (the twins) is something MC is just... incredibly skittish about for whatever reason. Like he grew up having them grab his hand or sling an arm around his shoulder or greeted him with hugs, and now he's just got this singular friend available to him and there's so much adjustment on both sides???

He takes their hand to show them something, and they just freeze or startle or something? And somehow, this is reconciled? I'm a sucker for romance as well.

I DON'T KNOW!

Basically touchy Omi and big personal space bubble MC in whatever capacity strikes you.

Maybe.

If you want!

I love you, and thank you for reading my request. 😭💖

@applinsandoranges my love!! I tweaked your idea a bit and turned touchy Omi and touch nervous MC into a brand new couple and made this short little one shot from there! I hope I made you proud!

Getting To Know You In A New Way ❤️ - (Ominis Gaunt x F!MC)

Warnings: Fluff! || Slight NSFW (brief mention of touching) || mention of Sebastian slipping Ominis some liquid courage potion to ask a girl out || characters are 18 and in their seventh year || implications of trauma || aversion to touch || some negative self talk from MC || (1346 words)

Ominis loved everything about his girlfriend. He loved her from the moment he met her in fifth year, long before she even was his girlfriend. Her kind and gentle nature towards him, despite his lineage, and her alignment with wanting to pull Sebastian away from the Dark Arts drew him to her. As time went on, his love for her only grew stronger, reaching a peak during the first week of their seventh year. After being slipped some liquid courage in his morning tea, courtesy of Sebastian, the boy confessed his feelings for the girl, feelings which were thankfully returned by her. After years of pining, they were finally a couple, and he loved everything about her. But there was one small problem.

Early on in the relationship, Ominis discovered she had a severe aversion to being touched, something he somehow never picked up on in their time as friends. Her aversion was so severe that he wasn’t even allowed to hold her hand for more than a few minutes before she’d pull away, although she did allow him to kiss her, but only with brief pecks on her lips. 

It wasn’t a matter of her being ashamed of Ominis, this theory being easily debunked by the way she gushed about “my boyfriend, Omins” to anyone who would listen, their frequent dates, and her general love of being in his presence. She was just exclusively afraid of physical contact. Ominis never pushed for an explanation, feeling like it was still too early in the relationship to do so. Although he knew from the early days of their friendship that she didn’t have the best upbringing, growing up in an unaffectionate home, something Ominis was all too familiar with. 

Her aversion to touch created some difficulties for Ominis, his own love language being physical touch. He was desperate to feel the skin he couldn’t see, to know her in a new way, and he cursed anyone and everything that hurt her in life that created this trauma response. But nevertheless, he accepted her fully, never pressuring her, or touching her without her consent, hoping that there would come a day where his love and support could heal her. 

—

It had been a particularly rough week for the two of them, having been partnered and assigned an enormous project for their History of Magic class. They had spent countless hours in the library working on this project, and were incredibly nervous about their grade, grades being exceptionally important in their final year of school. Upon receiving their project back, they refrained from checking their grade until they had a moment alone together in The Undercroft, wanting to either celebrate their passing grade together or wallow in sorrow at their failing grade together. When they opened their stack of parchments to see a passing score, she pulled Ominis into a rare, but absolutely welcomed embrace. Ominis inhaled deeply, the smell of her hair flooding his nose and making his heart flutter. He felt her body begin to pull away, wishing the moment could have been longer. But as soon as she pulled away, she leaned right back in, hands coming up to hold his face as she kissed him. 

When she didn’t immediately pull away, Ominis kissed her back, deepening the kiss, but reminding himself to keep his hands away from her. His mind was racing, reveling in the intimacy. But his thoughts were halted and his mind went completely blank when she slowly worked her tongue past his lips. Ominis had completely forgotten his note to self, bringing his hands to rest on her hips as his tongue mingled with hers. She let out a squeak against his lips, but continued to kiss him for another few seconds before she quickly pulled away from Ominis, breathing heavily as she caught her breath.

“I…I’m so sorry…” Her voice was small and sad, and it was clear to Ominis that she was on the verge of tears. He couldn’t make sense of her sadness, realizing that he should be the one apologizing, not her. 

“No, darling, I’m sorry. I know you don’t like to be touched. I got carried away. It won’t-”

“No. It’s not you, it's me. I’m sorry I’m such an awful girlfriend. My boyfriend can’t even hold me without me panicking.” she had begun to cry, Ominis hearing the breaks in her words. “You deserve better than me. I’m so sorry.”

Ominis’s body reacted almost involuntarily as he immediately pulled her into his arms. He stroked her hair as he spoke, his heart shattering at her words.

“You are not an awful girlfriend. At all. Please don’t ever say that again. I love you, and it hurts to hear you say such things about yourself. Come, sit with me.”

Ominis led her over to the sofa they had placed in the corner of The Undercroft some time ago. He took hold of her hands once they were seated and he continued. 

“I know physical touch is hard for you. You grew up in a loveless home. I did too. Physical touch made me feel vulnerable, as I imagine it does for you as well. It used to scare me too. But once I got to Hogwarts and found myself with friends who love me, affection was no longer scary. I don’t want you to be afraid of affection. I want to help you heal from your pain. I want you to realize that you are worthy of love, and I want to be the one to love you. And, if I’m being honest, I would love nothing more than to be able to touch you, to feel you, to know your entire body inside and out. But I can be patient until you’re ready. Your comfort matters more to me than anything.”

Her tears were falling even harder now, but they were no longer tears of sadness. “Oh Ominis! What did I do to deserve a boyfriend as kind and understanding as you? I know I haven’t made things easy for you. I know it’s hard to not be able to touch me, especially with you not being able to see. But I want to get over this fear I have. I want to overcome this trauma, and I want to do it with your help. I love you, Ominis.”

She pulled him into another kiss, this kiss being softer than the first. Without breaking the kiss, she moved Ominis’s hands so that they could be wrapped around her waist before bringing her own arms around his neck. He could feel the tension melting from her body as they kissed. Already she was welcoming the idea of a more physical relationship with him. 

In a move that took Ominis by surprise, she began to lay back on to the couch, pulling Ominis down with her until he was lying on top of her. He had a moment of panic, unsure what to do, but as she began to kiss him with more passion in this new position, Ominis became the one with the tension melting from his body, adjusting so that they were both lying comfortably on the couch. 

Ominis slowly ran his hands up and down her arms, familiarizing himself with her skin, goosebumps forming in the wake of his touch. He then brought his hand up, his fingertips grazing her neck, which earned himself a soft moan. Finally, his hand came up to her cheek, stroking it with his thumb. Reluctantly, he pulled his lips away from hers to catch his breath, his thumb still stroking her cheek.

“That wasn’t so bad!” she said breathlessly. “I think I really like it when you touch me. I can’t wait for you to touch me more!”

There was a hint of sultriness to her words, which sent a tingle through Ominis’s body. He ignored it, knowing that there would be plenty of time to touch her that way later. For now, he was excited to get to know the love of his life in a new way.

[its-all-stardust]

Steven Grant x gn!reader, may-haps, something sorta fluffy, like they’ve both had a rather long day, maybe it ends with Steven reading to the reader and them falling asleep on them couch together? Feel free to ignore, it’s not particularly interesting

It's your lucky day!! I did NOT ignore this request because it gives me some writing practice and a chance to think about something else besides my current project for a little bit.

I did tweak this just a tad, but such is the nature of fic requests. I hope you enjoy!!

Masterlist

Word Count: 783

When you walked through the apartment door, the lights were turned down low, and the smell of what you suspected to be takeaway from your favorite restaurant wafted toward you. You breathed a sigh of relief, a weight lifted off your shoulders.

When you texted Steven earlier about the downward spiral that was your work day—and the resulting headache that threatened to become a migraine at the slightest provocation—you weren’t doing anything more than venting. You hadn’t asked nor expected him to take over dinner when it was your night to cook.

“You didn’t have to do that,” you said, greeting Steven with a peck on the cheek. He arranged the containers on the counter, perfectly timing everything to your arrival.

“I’ll remember that for the next time you’re not feeling well. Make you do everything yourself,” Steven teased, filling your plate for you.

You smiled, knowing he would never do such a thing. You both worry over each other when one isn’t feeling the best, doing whatever you can to make the other’s day easier. Steven taking care of you like this, without expecting it or asking for it, made you love him even more.

“Work that bad?” he asked when you pulled a bottle of painkillers from the cupboard.

“Just exhausting. This one guy was off today, which made it busier than normal. Felt like things just kept piling up.” You swallowed the pills with a cool glass of whatever, then pressed it to your temple for a moment, hoping it would ease the pounding in your skull.

Dinner, usually filled with conversations about all manner of things, was silent. Peace and quiet weren’t often found at your workplace and is one of the causes of your current state.

Steven, bless him, knew you well enough to give it to you now. Anything he wanted to say could wait for a better time.

Throughout the meal, you couldn’t help but notice Steven constantly, openly, staring at you.

“I’m not going to break, you know,” you teased, smiling softly as you sat back in your chair, finished eating.

“Well, now, I can’t have you straining yourself,” Steven said, collecting your plate and taking it to the sink. “I’ve got the bathroom ready for you wherever you’re up for it,” he continued casually as if he weren’t still doting on you.

You weren’t complaining about it, though.

In the bathroom, you found Steven had indeed done everything besides strip you and turn on the water. If your apartment had a bathtub, he probably would have it filled with bubbles. Instead, he left a shower steamer near the stall wall—something he insisted was for emergencies. Clearly, in Steven’s mind, this was one. He even had towels laid out beside your pajamas, neatly folded as opposed to the crumpled ball you usually had them in.

You half-expected soothing meditation music to pour from the Bluetooth speaker set up by the sink, but it never did. Steven probably worried it might irritate your headache more and refrained.

By the time you stepped out of the bathroom, the scent of the milk and honey steamer trailing after you, your head no longer felt like it would explode.

Despite it, you were still exhausted, the desire to collapse looming over you.

Usually, evenings were spent with Steven in some capacity, but you didn’t have the mental bandwidth for even something as simple as watching a trashy reality show.

“Lie with me for a bit?” Steven asked, of course ready to ambush you as soon as you left the bathroom. You wouldn’t have been surprised if he had his ear pressed to the door.

He was on the couch with the soft blanket that normally decorated the back spread out and waiting for you.

Even when you felt like shit, you weren’t passing up the chance to cuddle with your boyfriend. You happily crawled under the blanket when Steven lifted it up for you, and you leaned into his side. His hand went to the back of your neck and started lightly massaging, trying to ease any tension.

A pleased hum escaped you, your eyes falling closed.

And then Steven started to read. Opening your eyes again, you see he had something pulled up on his phone. 

“What is that?” you asked. You didn’t mind that he wanted to read to you—Steven’s reading voice was actually quite pleasant, narrating with the perfect cadence and tone.

“Hush. You don’t have to know what it is. You just need to listen,” Steven lightly scolded, taking his self-assigned job as your caretaker very seriously.

You smiled, settling back into Steven’s side, and let the words wash over you until you fell asleep.

[witchofthesouls]

About the Other/Cybertronian!TFP crew in Jack, Raf and Miko…

What would their alt modes be like, do you think? Would they be more Autobot, Decepticon, or Predacon in nature? Also, what kind of shenanigans would each of them get into?

Personally, I do enjoy the thought that cyberized!humans would have a slant towards 'military' upgrades and beastial traits. Like a tribute to humanity's ties to the animal kingdom and their capacity for arms (tool usage lol). Think of it how a lot of civilian equipment, vehicles, fashion, and architecture, as well as groundbreaking discoveries, had a lot of roots from warfare or military applications.

Shoot, I'm thinking that Aligned verse cyber!humans could be considered throwbacks since the initial generations of early Cybertronians didn't have T-cogs!

I think it would be really fascinating to build on the Cybertronians' form of ableism (as seen with Bumblebee and Starscream with their stolen T-cogs) compared to a cyber!Agent Fowler -who was an Army Ranger-or a cyber!random human that lacks a weapon system and/or conventional armature. Plus, the massive culture clash between American views on social mobility versus Golden Age Functionist-held caste system.

(So much shenanigans there.)

Generally, my thoughts for their Cybertronian forms are consistent across the various Other aus with some tweaking on the plot and the world-building:

Jack has deep ties to blackbirds and corvids, so he's capable of flight. May have multi-forms as an ode to a fae heritage or something strange as a direct descendant to a Prime of Chaos upon a planet caging the Unmaker. Dark frame with a pale face. His (and his mother's) optics would be a grey-blue hue.

Miko is a War-Forged Seeker femme. A lot of is due my headcanons on Seekers (and their kin) and her yōkai roots. War-Forged is what I'm specifically calling Elita One's frame-kith. Cybertronians used to bleed pink, so the bright pink armor is callback their Primal Age and their ancient roots. War-Forged are mecha with extreme combat-related programs that modern science as yet to come close to surpassing them.

As for Raf, he's a dragon. Not quite a Predacon, but it's definitely aligned. Or, weirdly enough, a satellite. I think it would be funny if he's similar to Soundwave in some ways there. The Autobots would need to deal with his data-cables. A dragon shape as it's a call his family's roots to being adventurers to Elsewhere, his dad being a dragon himself, and the old warning: "Here be dragons."

[postapocalyptic-cryptic]

Some fucked up jazzprowl. Hatred and war on the planet Cybertron.

---

The war has changed them all. Every single Autobot is colder than they were before all this, and Prowl’s not sure any of them could be called good mecha anymore. The things they’ve seen, the things they’ve been forced to do…

There’s something to be said for evidence of humanity.

Jazz wakes up screaming again.

No amount of altered recharge code or tweaks made to his recharge slab and cable have been able to get the night terrors under control, and he hasn’t had a restful night’s sleep in decacycles. Based on Prowl’s calculations, his systems are running at about 80% of their normal capacity, and his work has been suffering for it. Prowl has ordered Ratchet to prioritize his case until a solution is found.

In the dark, in the small hours of the morning, Prowl grabs Jazz’s wrists and pins him to the bed. “Stop,” he orders. “Stand down.”

Jazz keeps fighting him, kicking and thrashing and snapping his dentae together like he would bite if Prowl gave him the chance.

“I said, stand down.”

Jazz freezes, goes limp. Then, he bolts, and Prowl is left on his back wondering how he hasn’t been seriously injured during one of these episodes yet.

Jazz comes out of the washracks almost an hour later, optics tinged purple and tears drying on his face. He doesn’t offer any explanation.

“This has got to stop,” Prowl says when Jazz sits on the edge of the couch, not close enough to touch.

“Right, I’ll get right on that. Because I’m doing it on purpose.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, actually, I don’t,” Jazz snaps, turning to face Prowl fully.

“I mean—”

“That I need to get myself under control?”

Prowl’s dentae click together when he shuts his mouth.

“Yeah,” Jazz continues. “I heard that conversation.”

“We can’t keep going like this, Jazz.”

“Well, then, I guess I’ll find somewhere else to sleep. Somewhere I won’t disturb you with my loss of control.”

“Jazz,” Prowl begins, but Jazz is already up and out the door. Perfect.

Jazz doesn’t message him the next morning, and doesn’t respond to Prowl’s professional email about scheduling conflicts. Prowl checks the schedule and sees that it’s been fixed, so clearly, the message was received.

When Prowl greets Mirage and Blaster in the mess hall, he’s ignored. He can expect a lack of cooperation from SpecOps for the next few cycles, then. Typical. Petty, but typical.

Prowl is somewhat skilled at assessing people, figuring out their strengths and weaknesses. One of Jazz’s biggest problems is his inability to keep his work and personal lives separate.

Prowl doesn’t see Jazz until after lunch, at a meeting with Optimus, Ironhide, and Ratchet. Jazz proposes a ridiculous solution to their current security dilemma, and Prowl coolly shoots it down.

“Let’s hear Jazz out, Prowl,” Optimus says, and Prowl recoils. Talking to SpecOps is one thing. Bringing Optimus into their personal issues is another.

Jazz grins from across the room, and Prowl sneers.

[moonstruckme]

Hey, I read your James potter fic where reader is insecure about her acne and I was wondering if you could do a similar one where reader has a big nose? (Kinda like a Roman nose?) totally not self projecting!—yes I am— anyways thank you!

Hi gorgeous, thank you for requesting!

Small disclaimer that I imagine James as desi so him also not having a non-euro-centric nose is a part of this :)

James Potter x fem!reader ♡ 753 words

When James walks in on you brushing dark powder onto your nose, you feel caught. 

“What the hell is this?” he asks. His tone is more comically curious than accusatory, but your face heats anyway. “Babe, I swear every time I leave you alone, you acquire some new makeup thingy I’ve never seen before. And I lived with Sirius, so I ought to know most of them.” 

You do your best to blend the powder, sending James a smile in the mirror. “Sounds like you shouldn’t ever leave me alone,” you say. 

“Seems the only solution,” James agrees, bringing his arms around your waist. He sets his chin on your shoulder. “What’s this one?” 

“Contour,” you say lightly. 

James’ eyes cloud with confusion behind his glasses. He regards you in the mirror. “I guess I have heard of that one before,” he admits. “You’re using it on your nose?” 

You clear your throat. “Yeah.” 

“What for?” 

“Just, like,” you’re trying to sound casual, but you can’t really look at him, “to make it look a bit smaller.” 

For a minute, James just watches you. You brush at the powder on your nose, unsure whether you’re trying to use it or make it go away. It seems like it looks bad no matter what you do. 

“Why do you want to do that, angel?” James’ voice is tender. It tells you he already knows. 

“I’m just trying something new.” 

“But why would you want to make it look smaller?” 

You sigh, and he kisses your shoulder, comforting you even as he interrogates you. “I don’t always love the way it looks,” you murmur. 

He lifts his head from your shoulder. You abandon your efforts with the contour, your eyes sticking to your bathroom counter as he moves to your side. Somehow, voicing the insecurity feels worse than the insecurity itself. You’re awash with shame. 

“Sweetheart,” James says. “Hey, look at me.” 

You tilt your head up. He’s giving you one of those smiles that seems more for your benefit than his, not at its full capacity but beautiful nonetheless. He taps his nose. 

“Think you should put some of that on me too?” 

You feel your face contort before you can check it, mouth and forehead pinching. “No.” Your voice comes out incredulous. “Of course not.” 

“My nose is about the same size as yours,” he says. It sounds like he’s pleading rather than arguing with you, the way he’s speaking so gently. “Why do yours and not mine?” 

“B—because,” you sputter, “it’s not for you.” 

“Why not?”  

You shake your head. You feel backed into a corner. You don’t know why, you just know the way it is. 

“Angel,” James says softly. “Look, I know things are a bit different for you than they are for me. No one tells guys we have the wrong nose. But does it seem fair to you that you should feel like you have to hide yours?” He works his hand behind your ear, thumb stroking at your jaw, and you want to argue that you’re not trying to hide it, that you’re just tweaking it if anything, but you’d be lying. “Your nose is perfect,” he insists. “It’s part of the prettiest face I’ve ever seen. You really want to mess with the prettiest face I’ve ever seen?” 

He cocks an eyebrow at you, and you try to fight your smile but it wins out in the end. Your boyfriend’s grin magnifies in response. 

“I’m waiting for an answer, sweetheart,” he teases. 

You roll your eyes. “No,” you mumble. 

“Correct,” he laughs, taking your face between his hands.

He squishes your face together so your lips push out. When he kisses you, his nose slides against your own, big and bumpy and perfect. Part of the prettiest boy you’ve ever seen. His mouth pushes on yours with an ardent sincerity. 

You remember the contour too late. 

James comes away with a smearing of dark powder on his dusky skin. You lick your thumb, wiping at it. He pays you no mind. 

“Are we ready to go? Sirius’ll be all moody if we’re late.” 

You laugh. “You did this on purpose,” you accuse. 

“What?” He glances past you into the mirror and gives an insouciant shrug. “Is this not the look?” 

You roll your eyes again, trying and failing to look vexed. “Come here.” 

He steps forward gamely to let you rub makeup remover over the smudges on his nose. When you’re done, you do yours too.

[jiubilant]

When Enthir walks into his workshop, chewing absently on a shriveled apple from the refectory stores, the thief’s already halfway out the window.

“Whoops,” the thief says, smiling in surprise. “Hello.” Then, nimbly ducking the apple: “Clever of you to cut your construct’s burn rate by installing a second gem. Might have been easier to tweak the polarity, though—”

“One move,” snarls Enthir, snapping his fingers to strike a spark, “and I fry you.”

He’s almost flattered, he thinks, rounding his cluttered workbench. No one’s tried to steal his research since his apprenticeship. That someone had hired a sneak to peek at his notes—not Guild, of course, or the little snoop wouldn’t have gotten caught—is a sure sign that his latest treatise was well-received. A pity, he thinks, that he’ll have to take drastic measures to preserve the next—

“Fair enough,” the boy says. He shifts with care to keep his balance, almost imperceptibly, his young face beaming blue in the electric light. “My name’s Gallus.”

Enthir stares at him. “Gallus.”

“Gallus,” the thief agrees, grinning. He’s still spidered in the window, gripping frame and sill, his hair whipping in the wind. “It’s a Reachling word, I’m told. Means bold.”

"It’s a Cyrod word, too,” says Enthir. “It means chicken.” With a thin, grim smile, he advances on the thief. “A notoriously flightless bird, the chicken.”

“If you push me out this window,” Gallus says quickly, “you’ll never know where you forgot a comma.”

“I don’t forget commas.”

“Until today. Paragraph two, line, uh…”

“Thanks,” drawls Enthir, and lays a hand on the thief’s chest—

And, smirking at the look on his face, hauls him inside.

“Say again,” he says with his most attentive smile, “about the polarity?”

* * *

TRACTATUS ON THE GENERATION OF PNEUMATIC CONVECTION WITH RESPECT TO THE “MZULFTI HYPOCAUST”

ENTHIR ANTHORNVIR, GALLUS DESIDENIUS

We announce with a confidence almost certainly misplaced that, after some trial and error, we believe we have successfully restored to full operative capacity a Dwemeri pneumatic construct. In this tract...