#phantom bullet spoilers

[sterlinggalaxy13]

Kirito and Asuna

[braisedhoney]

g… get it, he’s… he’s a phantom drifter… heheh…. Ha…

[sexy-dance-fighting]

I made a journal spread with some of my favourite panels from a glitch in time because why not lol. It's been my personal flavor of this summer.

[be-cat-do-crime]

Johnny Silverhand's design is iconic: Leather pants, dog tags, sunglasses, and a bullet-proof vest. Pretty often, when he's being especially sincere or straight-up with you, he'll take off the sunglasses. This is an obvious visual metaphor, and is probably meant in-universe by him; he's taking of the sunglasses so you can look him straight in the eye. But there's another slightly harder to spot visual metaphor in some specific scenes. During the visit to (spoilers ahead) his grave in Chippin' in, along with another few spots in Phantom Liberty (notably it's ending), instead of his usual bulletproof vest, Johnny will be wearing a Samurai tank top. The vest is a representation of Johnny; closed off, defensive. But in these scenes, he's being totally open to you. He's no longer closed off. So instead of wearing something that literally defends his core, he wears something that represents himself, that represents who he in on the inside and shows it right to you-- He wears the Samurai logo.

[iamumbra195]

!!SBG FASTPASS CHAPTER 86 SPOILERS!!

Oh my god, this chapter was insane. The stakes are rising so high now. The kids are being hunted in both the human and the phantom world and the fact that the phantom world has been more relaxing in the last few chapters is insane.

Jasmine is batshit insane and I don't know if I love or hate her. She's shooting those bullets like this is a BB gun or something but OH MY GOD, LOGAN! LOGAN, LOGAN, LOGAN, LOGANNNNN!

HE SHOT A HUMAN BEING! HE WANTED TO KILL HER! ALL THE KIDS DID AND THESE PANELS ARE SO FUCKING UNSETTLING I LOVE IT!! @pipthetwip it would be so cool if you did some horror art based on these panels!

The way Jasmine was fully ready to kill him for shooting her, talking about how Maverick can make do with five of them and SPEAKING OF THAT!!! @hozaloza YOU PREDICTED THAT JASMINE AND LOGAN WERE GONNA HAVE BEEF, HOW??? ARE YOU SECRETLY A SEER OR SOMETHING?

Anyways onto my favourite loser, Charlie! I literally love him so much he is my favourite member of the Crane Cult. He's like if a normal dude with somewhat decent morals was randomly shoved into a criminal organization and just vibed there until he couldn't anymore XD

Little bit of Aidlyn holding hands for the soul :)

The kids are now heading for New York to get help from the facility headquarters so they can shut the facility down and save their parents, Alex, Ryan, and maybe Charlie? Hopefully Charlie? Please don't kill him off Red

But speaking of New York, DOES RED KNOW THE AMOUNT OF FANFIC POSSIBILITIES SHE HAS GIVEN US AS A FANDOM WITH THIS NEW GOAL? THEY'RE GOING TO NEW YORK, THE LAND OF FICTIONAL HEROES! DO YOU KNOW HOW WELL THIS FITS INTO MY ATSV X SBG CROSSOVER?? RED, I LOVE YOUUUU

Anyways, good night, I can't wait for next week!

[davidtennantgenderenvy]

out of context bullet points from my Mario movie review notes (spoilers kinda):

“Did we finally get a movie displaying a perfect understanding of both Mario, the idea and Mario, the man? (Perchance?)”

“King Bomb-Omb F***ing Dies”

“Shouldn’t this be in the second half of the movie? Time has lost all meaning”

“I swear if this movie were written by me and my tumblr mutuals instead of Matt Fogel it would have been a 10/10”

“99 problems and chris pratt ain’t one”

“DK and Mario both have daddy issues which is very funny”

“Bowser is just the Phantom of the Opera but worse”

“Seth Rogen is perfectly cast as much as I hate to admit it”

[yeyinde]

after dark

Keegan P. Russ x f!Reader

⟶ WARNINGS: 18+ SMUT; P-in-V sex; female reader, female gendered anatomy; gratuitous use of kid; slight body worship; established history/relationship; canon-compliant, takes place after Sin City; minor game spoilers; mentions of death (canon-compliant); war; fluff - this is honestly just gratuitous smut and my awful attempt at fluff ⟶ WORD COUNT: 9,7k ⟶ SUMMARY: you want to see him break. ⟶ NOTES: my first foray into Keegan! this took a bit of time since i wanted to include so much, and it ended up growing a little out of hand. i might expand on this/make it into a series potentially (just small drabbles). Keegan was so fun to write for!

Keegan looks good like this. Laid out, bare; skin stained with the bites of your nails, the nips of your teeth, nestled evenly amid the smattering of battle wounds and blemishes that colour him in a rich history wrought with gunfire and calamity. (You often tell him that the two of you are kismet. He says Momus just has a sick sense of humour.)

The milky white expanse of his torso is littered with scars, and you map them with your greedy eyes, drinking each bloom of imperfection that stains his ivory skin. Finding new ones that weren't there before. 

Blades, bullets, burns, pockmarks—many from weapons you can't even begin to name, to know—all etched into sinew. Into bone. 

They mar him in a brutal smear of varicoloured hurt. A mosaic of near–death laid out like Orion, curved like the tail of Sagittarius. It's spooled, knotted, in a way that makes you think of Lyra. Of the stars you can see so clearly now without any light pollution around to smog the indigo sky above. 

The scars are healed in uneven patches; some darker, uglier than others. Raised welts, bumps. Deep indents in his skin, cutting through muscle and tissue. 

There is no sense of structure in the gashes that line his body—silver, to red, to purple, to black—and you know they were collected over time. Over years, decades, before you ever met him. Knew him. 

(The only one that looks familiar is the jagged hole on his shoulder where he stepped, stupidly, in front of a bullet for you. 

Stupid, because no one, especially him, should risk themselves for you.)

They sit, carved in flesh, as a testament to his nomadic lifestyle, one drenched in danger, death, and calamity. Shadows moulded into man. Into ruined skin and jagged bone. Deadly forces of nature hidden in the craters where the earth split into twos, threes. Triplicated ravines clogged with the rubble of was once life. Peace. Home, maybe. 

A tenuous fallacy, now. 

But they risk everything—even themselves—for it, and the proof of their commitment, the dedication to the cause, is smattered across his torso for you to see. 

The exploratory tips of your fingers, dripping reverence and featherlight, ghost over his flesh, over the blemishes that decorate his body, taking them in, feeling them. 

Some are baby–hair soft, silky sateen; they sit in thick, raised welts of scar tissue clotted over each other. Others are rougher than sandpaper, gritty like stripped lath. They feel like tree bark under your fingers. Scabs. Fresh, new. 

You wonder if he remembers each one of them—how they happened, where, by who; which ones hurt the most, and which ones took longer to heal. He might, you think. 

(It's him, after all.)

Catalogued pain organised and filed away. Locked in a safe box inside the enigma of his head, and kept there for safekeeping. 

But it's not gone, not put away. 

(It's always within reach.)

Phantoms congeal in the corners of his eyes sometimes when you happen to touch one, to reach out and grab him by the arm, or the hand, the wrist, and you see the brief flash of recognition in cut slate. A distant fog simmers up from the depths; veiled blue. A past you're barred from touching, knowing. 

It's not pretty, kid, is what he told you when you asked. Not like you. No sense ruining something like you with all that ugly. 

It was the end of the conversation. Locked away for good, and brassbound with a warning sign, rusted and aged, that read: do not enter.

So, you don't. 

But sometimes, like now, you like to take them in. To see the contrast between your blemishless skin in comparison to his. Worlds apart. A cosmic chasm of experience and life needles between you, and yet—

You brush your fingers against the marks, and have never felt closer to him, despite everything inside that tells you you're wrong. 

You place your hand flat over a cut over his breastplate, right where his heart thuds against your palm, and wonder what near–miss he escaped from that caused this. The other slides to his stomach, his muscles flexing, rippling, under your touch, and you brush your thumb over a circular hole under his solar plexus. 

You think, then, of the years you spent underground, running through the barren safehouses that dotted the landscape, only to come away with minor cuts, abrasions. The worst of them all is a small scar near your wrist where you burned your skin with cooking oil. 

You've never met the end of the blade—not until him.  

"What are you thinking about, kid?" 

His hand lifts—skin littered with small knicks and cuts, a burn on the back of his hand that almost matches yours except his was caused by a Molotov cocktail and not youthful ignorance (a world of difference, a chasm)—fingers sliding over the curve of your cheek. His slate–blue gaze is fixed, unmoving, on you. 

It was those eyes—cenote blue—that drew you to him in the first place. Teal in tenebrous. They haunted you for months. Wordlessly following your every move, drinking in the expressions that flitted over your face. Taking stock of you. Measuring you. Your accomplishments. Your worth. Assets.

Survivability.

("Pretty low," Merrick says, plain and brutal, and the rawness of it rumbled through the hollow crevasse you found yourself in. Low. Lower than low. So low it was almost a miracle you survived as long as you had.)

Keegan said nothing at the time. He stood back, hand gripping the butt of the rifle, eyes fixed on you, unwavering. Unforgiving. 

It was easy to take his silence as cold. Distant. Bundled up in thick layers of muskeg, in icy separation. 

You did—at first. 

An active war zone was not a place for a civilian. Merrick told you as much when he found you, taking refuge in a dilapidated home split in two, and welding only a metal bat you'd grabbed on your travels. Your only protection against an enemy that has no qualms in murdering innocents. That uses guns and heavy artillery to decimate the soldiers, the allies who jumped oceans to fight alongside the troops. 

You lit a lantern one night after settling down in a broken home, and woke up to the barrel of a gun pressed to your temple. 

It was Ajax who saved you. 

"Hey, uh. You're American, right? What are you doing in a place like this?" 

You didn't trust them. 

Didn't trust anyone. 

You'd spent too long cutting through the thickets of the surrounding overgrowth, hopping from one ramshackle house to another to lay low, to hide from the people who wandered past, looking for survivors, hostages, to give into that part of yourself that longed for people. For normalcy. The road jaded you a little. Isolated you. 

It was safer. 

The people you stumbled across either tried to pick you bare, taking the meagre belongings you scrounged together until there was nothing left but the thin skin covering your body, and your will to live. 

Or they tried to kill you. To use you. 

Hostages. Civilians used against the threadbare resistance. Their safe return in exchange for more land, for surrender. 

So, you hid. Got good at it, too. 

("Too fuckin' good," Merrick hissed, shaking his head. 

The only one who was ever able to spot you was Riley. Keegan, sometimes, through the lens of his rifle.)

When they found you, you tried to run, to fight. Enemies. All of them. 

It was Ajax who stopped you, who talked you off the ledge. 

"Come on, we're not gonna hurt you."

"Heard those words before."

"How long you been out here for, anyway?"

"When did ODIN destroy New York?"

"Jesus, kid."

"Stupid," Merrick said. "That's what you are, Cali. Stupid as hell." 

And Keegan—

Said nothing. Nothing. 

He doesn't like you, was your first thought when it all added up, stacked together. The avoidance, the distance. He wasn't cold, but he didn't try to get close to you, to get to know you. He just—

Watched. Waiting, you thought, a touch bitter, for you to die. Like they all expected you to when you said you weren't going to the safe zone. That you were staying, and you were looking for them—your brother, your father. 

Then—

Stay behind me, always, kid. You got that? 

If you can't see my back, you wandered too far. 

Eat. You need it more than I do. 

Watch your step. You'll fall into a crevasse if you're not careful, kid. 

The second: he likes you too much. 

And now—

Your hips flex. A slow, teasing roll against his pelvis, and it's that indelible sight of sky blue eyes shuttering out of view when his lids lower, lashes fluttering, that nearly sets you on fire. 

The press of his cock makes your nails dig into the constellation of scars on his chest, clinging to him as licks of pleasure flicker up your spine. Nerves smouldering at the stretch, the feel of him seated so deeply within you. 

"Thinking about you," you murmur, breathless. Raw. 

You wonder if he remembers the rainy days in San Francisco, the sunrise in Los Angeles, huddled under the waterlogged crater of what once was Pacific Avenue and Venice Boulevard with the same touch of halcyon fondness as you do. 

You think, then, of the fusillade following you in the ruined husks of the streets, enemies on every corner, of the six-day hike between the cities to reconvene with the others, lost somewhere in the decimated coast. 

A little part of you still hopes he does despite the stress, the tension, the danger; the separation, the distance, that cracks between you, louder than a thunderclap. 

That he thinks back on that time when it was just you and him, and no food, no shelter, and feels something more than the gritty reality of everything falling apart around you. 

Of death, and the stench of rot, and decay, and the overgrowth of vegetation that sometimes felt like it was trying to reclaim you along with its land. The vines that curled around your ankles when you idled, or slept—shackles that refused to let go. Gunshots in the night. Predators roaming wild and free in what once was a metropolis. 

Then, softer, you add:

"Always." 

You speak it reverently, as if the word, the sincerity in your voice alone was enough to somehow shade the gossamer of calamity and horror you faced together into something pink, something roseate. Something fond, and wonderful, and good despite all of the ugly and the bad that stacks up, deeper than the hole punched through San Diego.

(Down so deep you sometimes think you can see the eerie glow of molten rock below.)

Keegan says nothing, gives nothing away, but you catch something in his gaze shift, relent.

Another inch off the thick veneer that keeps him from falling into you fully, that keeps him from letting you in. 

It's the slow erosion of his defences, the ones that make him say, yeah, kid, whatever you say when you bring up the smouldering ruins of Death Valley, when you slipped your finger in the cut of his mask, and tugged it down below his chin. Your nail caught on the bridge of his nose, but he didn't flinch at the thin white line you left behind, the sting. He didn't move. Didn't blink. 

Didn't push you away. 

He let you. Let you press your sun-chapped lips to his for the first time with nothing more than an easy, kid—don't start something you can't finish before he gives in. Kissed you against the grainy sand that scorched your skin. 

You used to think he was cold. Unfeeling. 

But now—

Shadows dance over his face when the clouds drift over the milky moon hung in the indigo aether, but you catch the rubicund smear over the bridge of his nose when they part. Pretty pink dusted in soot. An ethereal chiaroscuro etched into his flesh. 

You feel his chest shudder, expanding with his rippling inhale. 

—You know that, sometimes, he just feels too much. 

You hitch your hips again just to watch him flinch beneath you. The breath stutters out of his chest, lips parting on a grunt when you grind over him. The pinched knot between his brow is stained with bliss, and deep like the crevasses ripped through the earth. 

The hand on your cheek jerks, tenses. His fingers curl around the back of your skull as his eyes crack open once more when you settle. Heavy lidded, stained the residuum of soot and grease paint the lukewarm water wasn't able to scour off. 

You meet his cobalt stare, and feel the breath catch in your throat. 

Keegan looks good like this. Laid out, bare; skin stained with the bites of your nails, the nips of your teeth, nestled evenly amid the smattering of battle wounds and blemishes that colour him in a rich history wrought with gunfire and calamity.  

When you whisper this to him, his hips jerk again, flexing, under yours. 

"Fuck, kid. Don't go starting something you can't finish."

His words nudge something inside of you, and the slow simmer of competition roils through your chest. 

"Can't finish, huh?" You murmur, and keep your eyes fixed on his as you lift your hips. The drag of his hardened cock sliding against your walls has pleasure liquifying your core. 

When it's just the tip you clench around, you pause, a small smirk curling over your lips. You'll make him break. Make him eat those words. 

But Keegan can read you like an open book. 

His hand lifts from your hip bone, sliding up the flesh of your torso until his fingers are perched in the gaps between your ribs, holding you steady. 

"Easy now, kid," he whispers the words low, voice breathless, humid. "Don't bite off more than you chew."

In response, you sink down an inch. 

It makes him choke a little. A wet noise spills out from his mouth, teeth flashing when they burrow into the plush give of his full, pink lips. The tendons in his neck strain, pulse throbbing in tandem with your heartbeat. Linked, you think, a little delirious, even like this. 

(You often tell him that the two of you are kismet.

He says Momus just has a sick sense of humour.)

His fingers tighten on your ribs. The other hand falls, palm swallowing your breast, fingers digging into the flesh once before sliding down, pinching your nipple between his calloused thumb and forefinger. It sends shocks of pleasure ricocheting down your spine, and you arch into his grasp, eyes dropping. 

"That feels good—"

"Yeah?" He husks, lips curling into a rare smile, a grin. "Like that, huh, kid?"

The raw timbre of his voice coils over your flesh, and you shudder at the liquor-rich sound, eyes blinking open to drink him in. 

The spark of pleasure that glimmers over his expression, eyes dark, eclipsed, and saturated in bliss, makes something coil low inside of your belly. A molten heat that leaks into your bloodstream until it bubbles, froths. 

Keegan is a slow burn. A steady crescendo of pleasure that builds and builds in evenly spaced increments until your head is molasses-thick from the endorphins that saturate your synapses. 

Keegan is always so giving, so quiet with his affection; picturesque stoicism even when he has you bent over, battering his cock into you as you lose it amid the unrelenting waves of euphoria that bloom inside of you, singing hymns in his name, and only just lucid enough to round the vowels out. He rides you through it all without cracking. Without rupturing from the pleasure that thickens the air between you until it's syrupy and heady with the scent of sex. 

And it's good. Always. 

You love the way he handles you; love the way he splits you apart atom by atom until you're an impending explosion, leaking bliss into the warmth of his mouth when you breathe his name. Raw, exposed. Bare and flayed by his scorching hands, and hungry lips. 

Keegan touches you with the same delicacy as he does the rifles in his arsenal. A finely tuned weapon, honed and perfected in his hands. He drags only the best out of you, and knows where to press, to nip. He knows your body like he knows the inner workings of each gun he carries. 

He's adroit in combat, and it bleeds over into the soft, plush give of your body beneath him. 

It's often thoughtless—done purely on muscle memory, and instinct alone. A primal switch in the back of his head he commands at will, one now grounded and circuited into making you tremble, gasp, and moan his name the way you know he likes best. 

Keegan leeches his own release from the aftershocks of your pleasure, pounding desperately into you as you clench around him, back arched and toes curled. He fucks you through the remnants of your climax until his own takes hold, and spits his bliss into your body, groaning low in your ear. 

But everything—everything—is for you. 

He takes where he can as he fractures you into pieces, into fragments of yourself. Crumbling in ecstasy under his touch. Broken, shattered. Rendered into a trembling mess of pulp beneath the bulk of his body.

He's a lesson in patience, in tenacity. 

Usually.

But now—

You set the pace. Control the motions. 

(And you want to see him break in the same splintered pieces he leaves you in.)

"Just sit back, and let me make you feel good."

He draws a sharp breath, eyes fluttering, widening slightly at your base command. 

Something gnarls over his exposed face, a frisson of affection, and softer than anything you'd ever seen before. 

It's rare you get to see him so bare, so open. 

"You do," he rasps, words sticking between his teeth. "More than you know."

He swallows thick, eyes skirting away from you as if to gather himself together, to calm the racing of his pulse that beats against the pale skin of his throat. 

Comfort is taken in composure, in distance, and you can see him grasp for it, reaching for that same phlegmatic control even now. 

You don't let him find it. Won't. 

You take a quick breath to steady yourself, fingers sliding down his damp chest, nestling in the messy smear of hair that sticks to his skin, grainy and gritty from salt and dirt, and then you drop. 

The blunt head of his cock bludgeons into a fleshy spot behind your navel that has your ears ringing, head tipping back in pleasure. It's good—so, so good—and you can't stop the whine of his name, broken and fraying at the edges, when you sink down to the base, swallowing him whole in the right clutch of your cunt.

White noise, static, flashes behind your eyelids, catching in the pale moonlight. A slurry of soporific pleasure spools inside your head, saturated with bliss, and edging into that indelible equinox of pleasure and pain when his head kisses the seal of your womb. It flexes against your mettle, pushing the limits of what you can reasonably take, but you grit your teeth against the strain, and breathe. 

You won't break first. 

Not when his eyes roll back a little as you shift in his lap, brow furrowed into a deep ruck of pleasure at the feel of you around. 

The overwhelming feel of him buried deep behind your navel notches into too much, and the ache of it pulses like a heartbeat in your sternum, knocking the breath from your lungs, but you hold steady amid the waves that crash over you, that threaten to consume you. To drag you under. 

White-hot pleasure lashes at your spine. Congealing inside the pit of your lower belly. A molten puddle of nirvana that steadily thickens into a coiled knot, gnarling within you. A spool of bliss, slowly unravelling under the stretch of him, the grind of his pelvis against your throbbing clit..

It thrums in your veins, your bones. Madness bleeds in at the edges; blurred lines of so good and too much too full and you find the equilibrium, the perfect zenith, when he groans your moniker, Cali, out between gnashing teeth. 

The brassy rasp of his voice centres you. Grounds you. You inhale the tang of him until your lungs begin to burn, to ache. You feel them pressed taut to your ribs where his fingers sit, nestled between the gaps of your bones. Firm, steady. 

You exhale in slow, measured increments, feeling the way he throbs against your walls, in your throat. You take it all in, all of it. Him. The firm press of his body beneath yours, thighs spread to fit him in the seam, makes you relax, ease into the press of him. The fill. 

Keegan's hands twitch. His hips lift slightly, an unconscious movement. An accidental proxysm. His ironclad resolve, the honed stillness of an expert sniper in perfect control, command, of every limb, every muscle, every movement, and breath, crumbles like papier-mache with the tight clench of your pussy around him. 

It edges into delirium, into that burning sense of conquest when he grunts, and rubs a spot inside of you that feels like heaven itself is nestled behind your belly button. 

(A fissure. A crack.)

The steadying breath he takes draws your attention back to him, to the sheen of sweat drenching his brow, the smear of charcoal he couldn't scrub away. It stains his skin permanently, now. A tattoo of battle grease, war paint, that he can't be rid of. 

(You tell yourself it isn't jealousy that congeals at the base of your throat when you see the blemish on his skin, and wish, so desperately, that you could brand him the same way. Mark him, too. 

To crawl inside the brackets between his ribs, and suffuse your atoms to his until every pump of his heart sends blood roaring through your veins.

It sits there, bitter and acrid, when you try to swallow it down, refusing to budge. 

Stupid. Stupid—)

You take it all in. The racing of his pulse, the slow, deep inhales, and the way he reaches out, struggling to control the impulse, the instinct, the want, to greedily take more and more from you. 

"Keegan," his name falls between your teeth, breaking in the middle when you roll your hips, and catch the flash of gritted teeth. 

The thin strands of sangfroid he managed to snag in his grasp are released when your voice crests over his name, cracked open and wanting, and desperate. 

It tastes of victory when he groans yours in return—not kid, not Cali, but the one you whispered to him that first night he found you in a desolate husk of what was once someone's home—and bucks into you in a stutter. 

You meet him again, pelvis kissing his until it suctions the air from your heaving lungs, and you can feel him pulsing in your sternum. A red-hot blade snug against your jugular.

The thin skin of his eyelids crinkle when he squeezes them shut against the feeling, the overwhelming pleasure, of being buried balls deep inside of you. 

Your ribs ache. His fingers burrow into the flesh that separates each rung, clinging to you, and keeping you perched on his lap as he struggles to catch his breath. 

It rips open something inside of you—something deeper and fuller than sex, than shattering his ironclad resolve—and the sight of him, chest heaving, eyes heavy and black with desire, and the soft way he crumbles in your hands, makes you think of the morning rays of the sun brushing over the broken landscape. The moments of peace in the midst of war. 

You think of him, and the tick in his jaw, the gleam in his eyes, the same shade as crushed bluebonnets, and think of kismet once more as you pant out his name. 

"Ah, fuck—," sweat drips down his brow, and you follow the droplet until it falls, soaking the jaundiced pillow below. "You keep that up, kid, and you'll be tapping out soon enough."

It drags a huff from your chest. "It was once. And you made me run through San Diego for hours before, and—"

"It was fifteen minutes. We ran a block," his hand falls from your breast, palm swallowing the side of your thigh. "You lasted five minutes on top before you begged me fuck you instead. Said you were tired."

"I was," you whine, muscles flexing when you lift off of him again. You feel the ache in your muscles already, the burn of exertion from sitting atop of him like this, knees wrenched apart to accommodate his bulk between them. "But I wanna make you feel good, Keegan."

The sharp sting of his nails catching your flesh makes you gasp. "C'mon, kid. Easy now." 

The low commands roll off of his tongue with practised ease, and you slip a little further into that inky madness that smells of fir boughs, sticky spruce sap, and ripened satsumas. You breathe him in and taste dusty pomander balls, and pinyon in the back of your throat. 

"Keegan—"

His hips lift, pushing into the soft, wet clench of your cunt. "That's it. Nice and steady."

He guides you along—a maestro stroking the keys of a piano as he plays his grand requiem. You struggle to keep up with his pace, the way he pistons into you, notching his cock into that soft, sensitive place inside that makes your eyes brim with unshed tears of bliss. 

Each deep thrust makes the head of his cock kiss the plug of your womb—just a brush, just a tease—but the burning sensation of blistering pleasure and wisps pain, of too much and too full, have you spiralling down the precipice faster than you expected. 

It's a dizzying descent, but you match his tempo as best as you can, determined to ride the torrent of ecstasy that runs down your spine in a thick, dulcified rivulet. 

Still. Still. You can't help but bask in the way he melts in your hand, rendered into malleable polymer with just a twist of your hips, a clench of your cunt. It's electrifying. Addicting.  

The high of it all brims deep in your head, blooming like a sickness that clots along the seam, noxious and heady. 

You can't stop the satisfied curl of your lips from growing, slowly and languid, when you bear down on him, taking him to the root. 

His grunt reverberates through his chest with enough of a punch to rattle your bones. 

Seeing him desperate is intoxicating. 

"What happened to your composure, Keegan?" you mewl, heading rolling back. "My big, quiet soldier is so talkative now—"

Rough palms sear the flesh of your hips when he grabs you tight in his unyielding hold, keeping you fixed on him. 

You try to move, but he tightens his grasp, refusing to let you budge. 

Frustration curls inside of your chest, and you glower down at him through glassy eyes brimming with tears. "Keegan, I wanna—"

Your words dissolve into a low keen when his hips lift again, battering into your cunt in an unrelenting wave of thrusts that force the protests from your lips. 

"Talkative, huh?" He grinds the words out from between clenched molars. "That was your goal, eh, kid? Break me?" 

He punctuates each word with a brutal cant that feels like a battering ram to your skull until the weakened bone splinters, shatters, and he punches through. 

"Kee–ah, ah, fuck—!" 

"That's it," he husks, tone liquid. His fingers spear into your flesh, tight enough to bruise your bone. "Just like that, kid. You wanna see me break? Lose control?" 

Heart in your throat, all you can do is whimper around the pulse in your esophagus, and struggle to find purchase under his unrelenting onslaught. 

His hand lifts, falls to your shoulder when he stills, keeping you locked tight to his pelvis, cock jerking inside of you. His fingers curl over the ledge, gripping bone, and then he tugs, pulls. 

You fold easily in his grasp, lowering your chest until it rests over his, sweat-slicked and warm. The scrape of your sensitive nipples over his coarse, damp chest hair makes you moan, clenching desperately around him at the sparks of pleasure roiling through you. 

When you settle over him, his hand moves, slides to the back of your skull, and wrenches you even closer to him, until your forehead meets his, and the soft bump of your nose catches on the bridge of his, right over the thin line you left on his skin. Healed, now, but you wonder if this is intentional. If it's—

Keegan breathes heavily through his open mouth, breath mixing together with yours, a humid coagulation against your lips where condensation gathers on the dip of your chin. 

He says nothing, just stares. Bare-faced, naked. Still smeared in the residuum of his battle grease, the armour he wears to keep himself hidden from the Federation, from discovery, and the freckles of black on his ivory skin look like an inverted night; the endless yawn of the heavens above. You wonder if you can map a new constellation in the dirt left behind, but the notion is pushed down, dissolved, when your gaze lifts, finding his own. 

He hasn’t looked away from you at all, and the intensity of his gaze makes you dizzy, breathless. Too many emotions ripple through the mercury depths for you to grasp, but they're soft. Tender. Your heart thuds when you see the endless flicker of them hidden inside, tightly sealed under a rusted lock without a key. 

"Keegan—"

He doesn't let you finish. His chin lifts, mouth hooking on yours in a blistering kiss. His tongue slides between the gap of your parted lips, stealing the words that spool behind your teeth. 

Keegan kisses you with a deep, almost methodical precision. It's a contrast you can't keep up with; an ebb and flow. He starts fast, harsh. A demanding press of his mouth to yours, unrelenting and eager. It's all tongue, lips, the clash of teeth until yours are stinging and bruised, and then he pulls away until his are just a brush. A ghost of a touch, a whisper. 

He holds it there, teasing, taunting, until your lips bloom in a soft pout, eyes turning downward. 

"Keegan, please," you whimper into the firm seal of his mouth, so close and yet, so far away. Out of reach. Held there until whatever he wants, whatever he seeks, flashes in the glossy puddles of your eyes. 

And then, he gives. 

Gives, gives. His mouth devours yours with a steady ferocity like the howling winds echoing through the wizened fir boughs in the desolate forest. He holds you close, a hand fisted against your skull while the other plinths your jaw, thumb stroking the bubble of your cheek. 

The pressure of his hold, of his hands, oscillates between firm, unyielding, and keeping you afloat, soothing you. 

You need it, you think, when he kisses you like the sudden approach of an avalanche ripping through the thicket, and barrelling down the vertiginous mountain he keeps you locked on. 

An ebb and flow. 

When your head swims, dizzy with hypoxia that inks across your vision like a Rorschach, he pulls away. Peppers small kisses, nips, over your stringing, swollen flesh, and soothes the ache he left behind. 

"I know," is all he says to you before he starts to move. “I know, kid.”

Keegan keeps you locked to his chest, one hand bracketing your skull, kissing you in tandem with each roll of his hips. His other hand settles against the swell of your ass, holding you steady as he bucks into you, bludgeoning his cock into your cunt. 

Your hands drop to the pillow under his head to stabilise yourself, pushing firmly into the mattress in a futile effort to keep the brunt of your weight from pressing against him, but he notices. 

Always. 

His grunt of displeasure is barely heard over the roaring in your ear, the lewd slap of his wet skin on yours, the grind of his cock into your cunt, but you feel it rumble through his chest, reverberating over your lips. 

His hand trails up from the curve of your ass, and over your spine. 

"C'mon, kid," he murmurs, teeth scraping over your stinging bottom lip. "You're not gonna break me."

His sly words make you huff, and you clench your muscles around him in retribution. There is something blisteringly intoxicating in the low groan that leaves his chest, the pinch between his brow, the flutter of his lashes, lids cresting in pleasure. 

It's a small win, a minuscule victory despite losing the war. But it is a double-edged sword that leaves you just as breathless, just as aching, as he is. 

You acquiesce to his insistent prods, and slowly, hesitantly, melt into him. With your full weight settling on top of him, Keegan breathes in deep, and murmurs a quiet, hushed: that's it into your lips. 

His hands are on you, tugging and pulling until you're flush on his body with a muted groan. 

Your arms bend at the elbow, hands moving to cup his jaw in your palms, feeling the scratch of his rough stubble over your life line. 

Kismet, you think, and taste salt on your tongue, a humid breeze on your skin. It reminds you of Los Angeles, of the hole you sunk into with him. When you decided in the ramshackle remnants of what once was that, despite everything, all of it, you would follow him anywhere, everywhere. 

A confession in the shambles of normalcy, where the cracked Macy's sigh hung suspended on wires, and reinforced by nature. Thick webs of wisteria kept the relic from a bygone era arched over the collapsed ruins of the Beverly Centre. A macabre chandelier: a poignant piece of what is now history. Gone. Erased. Decimated by a weapon meant to protect. 

The rest was felled into a deep cavern, karst, destroyed by the beams of inert energy that spliced the world you knew in half. Water leaked in—from the burst pipes, the broken aquifer at the bottom, rainwater, the ocean, and, you think, from when they razed the smouldering husk of the cities on fire with a deluge of water, back when everyone still clung to the belief that everything was going to be okay. It pools at the bottom, a murky abyss of cracked rock, steel beams, and dead wires. 

On the surface, something floated past. A bag, maybe. Waterlogged and aged. You fish it out despite the soft rumble from Keegan to stay away from the cenote. 

"Currents might sweep you under. Not a place you wanna fall in, kid." 

When you dragged it to the linoleum ledge you sat on, the broken logo made you snort. 

"Never could afford designer," you muttered and tossed the Balenciaga bag aside. 

It doesn't matter. Not anymore. Not here. 

You know it doesn't, feel it deep in your polluted bones, and yet—

You stared at the shattered heap of luxury, and couldn't help thinking about those days in the past when you'd wake up after a long trip on the road with your dad, your brother, and the world would feel so massive, so empty. It felt like you were the only ones left. The only survivors. 

It eats at you now. 

You cried that night. Broke for the first time in months, years. Sobbed into the corner of what was once Macy's or Gucci or some other relic you used to scorn in your youth, and the whole time, Keegan said nothing. Nothing at all. 

He just held you when you stumbled into him. Kept you tight to his body as your sobs echoed through the chamber. 

Through it all, it was Keegan who kept you grounded. Who stood in front of you, sniper ready, whenever the bushes around you rustled, or the ground trembled with the aftershocks of the lingering explosion that decimated your home. Your world. He was there, his hand on the small of your back, eyes sharp, wary. Kept you alive, fed. Safe. 

Safe.

You can only sleep when he’s around. Even when they left you in the safe zone you clawed out of, you couldn’t sleep. Nothing quelled the anxious needling in the back of your head but his presence—solid and steady. An unshakeable rock. Your foundation amid a shattered sense of security. 

You turned to him, then, when the moon drifted over the open crater punched through the earth, and whispered the words he refused to return. 

Even now.

But it doesn’t matter. None of it does. 

Not anymore. 

“Thinkin’ too much,” he husks, nails leaving trails of white when he scrapes them over your skin. “What happened to breaking me, kid? Give up already?”

There is no way for him to know you taste algae in the back of your throat from when he pushed you deeper into the cenote as you ran from the Federation soldiers. When they closed the gap, he shoved you into the murky blue of the grotto below, too quick for you to close your mouth, to not panic when you hit the pool with a splash that echoed on the slick, mossy walls. You breathed in the stagnant water filled with bioluminescent algae, and as gunshots bounced off the jagged limestone, and you drifted down below the buried rubble, you wondered if you’d glow so bright he could find you at the bottom of polluted blue. 

(He did. Always.)

Still. You swallow down the tang of salt, and breathe him in, saturating yourself in the loam scent of him—thick musk; burning lignin and scorched evergreen—and let it sit in your throat until all you can taste is him when you swallow. 

“Thinking about you,” you say. 

He says nothing, but you catch the shudder in his chest, the tremble in his hands, when he slides them over your flesh. Reverent. Halting. The fingerprints he leaves on your skin are stained in chiaroscuro. 

He grabs you tight enough to bruise sometimes; holds you so close that you often think he’s trying to absorb you into him. To keep you safe and secure in the bulk of his body where nothing can hurt you, touch you. 

Not even him.

So, he pulls away. It’s not distance that pitches itself in the recess of his piercing gaze, but something close to it. Kin. Fear, maybe.

Of this, of you.

The fear started when Ajax went missing, but it was Keegan who held you together.

("It's gonna be okay, kid. We'll get him back.”

Empty promises. Broken pinky fingers.)

You broke when they brought Ajax home and laid him to rest as best as they could, and the marker that signified his resting place—a coded message only they would ever know—was all that remained of the man he fought beside, the man who made a pinky promise to never leave you in a the empty shell of a Walmart parking lot when you told him about the camping trips.

A scrap of fabric. A blood-drenched mask. 

You held Keegan as he whispered sorry, kid. Sorry. We tried. We— 

Gone. Gone. You think of rubble and the scent of rock dust. The crushing weight of cinder blocks and beams, and what it feels like to stumble when the earth breaks into pieces beneath your feet.

Elias. 

And now—

All he has left is Merrick. Hesh. Riley. 

Logan—

(“Missing,” the radio crackled a few days ago. “Gone.”)

—and you. 

He holds you at arm's length, even now, after coming back to you, after finding you again, because what you offer is different, more dangerous, than theirs. 

And despite what they say, Keegan isn’t a man who feels nothing at all.

No. 

He’s a man who feels too much. 

And he knows this. Knows it like he knows the world is in shambles, knows what the Federation is capable of. 

What you're capable of. 

You wonder if he's thinking of that now, as the shadows leak back in. They flood the corners of his eyes when he gazes through you, lost in those lour thoughts that rush by in quick succession. Too fast for him to cling to any. 

They cut into the crease. The ones that make you think he’s somehow omnipotent, all-knowing. That he can chisel inside of your head, and read the want, the greed, that festers in the rucked divots. 

And he isn't sure how to handle it. What to do with the bold, bare-faced sincerity of what you offer him. What you want from him. 

Before, Keegan would get so lost inside the maze of his mind that you didn't know how to bring him back. He'd speak only when necessary—just short, clipped words, commands (over there, inside, stop, eat)—and the silence would grate at you. Somehow quieter than he usually was; oppressive. 

It lasted for days, sometimes. 

It never sullied his ability to aim, to shoot. Survive. Protect. 

It was just—

An introspective silence. A storm cloud over blue. 

He was thinking too much, and wasn't sure which option to pick, which outcome was best.

You never knew what to say to bring him back. To ground him. All you could do was wait it out until the gyre would fade from his eyes, and he'd turn to you again, clear blue. 

Now—

“—You’re thinking too much,” you murmur, mouth trailing loose kisses over his stubbled jaw. 

“Just waiting for you to come back to me,” he volleys back, eyes cresting. A tendril of that unknowable something snakes through the gloom of blue, and you reach for it with curious, wanting fingers. 

“I’d never leave you.” 

Keegan swallows, and you trace the bob of his Adam's apple. A part of you expects it to retreat, to flee back to the safety of its bivouac where nothing can get too close. Nothing can hurt. 

But it doesn’t.

He huffs, and the soft expel of his breath, the sinking of his chest, feels a little bit like victory. 

“Wouldn’t survive without me.”

It’s as close to a confession as he’ll offer, and you take it with eager, greedy hands, cupping it in the plinth of your palm where it sits, safe from harm, from the world that crumbles around you. 

“Neither would you.” 

It’s a lie, of course. Keegan is dampening his own chances at survival by keeping you close to him instead of doing what everyone said he ought to, what he tried to do: leaving you behind. 

He pushed you away once. You wonder if he thinks of the separation. The distance etched between the two of you. Slowly relearning each other in broken husks that were once homes.  

"Drop Cali off at a safe zone, and then come find us, Keegan."

The intention, you know, was to leave you behind permanently. To keep you locked in the safe confines of a safe zone in Oregon, where they pitched tents in an expansive field, and lived off of pipe dreams. Where they pretended they couldn't fear the gunfire in the distance, or smell artillery smoke in the air. 

Direct orders passed down through the chain of command, from Elias himself, and yet—

He came back.

("Just gonna do whatever you want, kid. We're headed the same way, anyway.")

“That so?”

"It is."

Keegan swallows. Something yields, breaks. 

His palms are balmy on your skin, firebrands. You stare into his eyes, counting the deep ravines of inky black cutting through sapphire blue, and the gyre of those hidden things, locked away and kept at a distance, seem to tremble. Wobble. The edges blur. 

A frisson passes over his face, illuminated only by the milky light spilling in from the tattered curtains, and something cracks. Splinters. The fracture makes him flinch, makes him heave under you, chest expanding with the deep drawl of his breath. 

With another sigh, his hand slides down the heated flesh of your back, spreading over the swell of your ass. Before you can say anything in response, his middle finger dips into the valley between each cheek, brushing over the skin of your perineum before dipping lower, brushing over the wetness gathered there. 

He drags his finger higher, brushing over the soft skin of your ass. The feeling of it, the red-hot heat of his flesh, makes you keen, tightening around him. 

He huffs into your neck, lashes fluttering over the soft skin of your throat when he blinks. "Like that, huh? Want me here, too, kid?"

You gasp when he presses against the rim. "K–Keegan—"

"Not ready yet," he murmurs, and you try to stifle a whimper when he pulls away, heart thudding in your chest at the thought alone. 

He catches it, anyway.

"Fuck, kid—," it's a jagged husk; ripped up and shredded under barbed wire. Raw, wanting, and dark. You'd never heard his voice so low, so gritty. When you peer down at him, all you see is the endless ocean in the blanket of night. Midnight blue. It makes you shiver. 

You feel feverish when he groans again, when he rasps your name in a way that sounds like it was wrenched up from the recesses of his chest. Buried under soot and ash. 

"Gonna take you there," he pants, and you know him. You know Keegan. It's not a suggestion. It's a promise. "Soon."

The thought of it makes something ugly gnarl inside your chest. A possessive thing, out of place in such a moment. Between you and him, and this awful, awful world, greed has no room to grow. To burrow its roots in deep, and yet—

Yet. 

You crave him in ways that are unattainable. That belongs to a world that no longer exists in the land you roam. 

His fingers pull away, and settle on the tight flesh of your raw cunt stretched around the thick of him. His thumb brushes over your chafed, red skin, eyes softening as he coos at you. A gentle tut when he feels how wrecked, swollen you are from the brutal pounding he's giving you. 

You think he might be lenient. Merciful. Might let you pretend you have control again. But when you lift your gaze to his, eyes blurry and lachrymose, all you see is a deep, unrelenting satisfaction cut into deep slate. His pupils ripple. Deep puddles trembling in pleasure. 

"Fuck, kid." 

He punctuates his words with a slow, full roll of his hips. Slick drenches the tips of his fingers as he feeds you the thick of his cock, feeling the way you swallow him down to the base. To the root. 

"Takin' me so good."

His words are slurred, drunk off the spread of you in his lap, taking him into your willing cunt. Eyes flashing with something that prickles across your skin. It should be a warning to you, a siren. You know him enough to tell what those little flickers in his eyes mean, the shadows hidden in the canyons of blue, but he moves before the thought can take root inside the syrupy haze that clots over your thoughts. 

His legs slide up, knees bending, spreading, as he plants his feet firmly into the mattress. 

"Hold on." 

It's all he gives before he pushes up into you, cock sliding in deeper than before. 

You gasp, eyes snapping shut when he cudgels against something inside of you that has pleasure blooming in your lower belly. 

The angle is different, deeper and fuller than anything you'd ever taken before. Even riding him, sitting flush against his hips, it didn't hit that soft bundle of nerves that has fire licking at the base of your spine. 

You moan his name again, low and broken, and Keegan responds with a sloppy snap of his hips that makes your back arch in his hold, toes curling as batters into that place that makes Nirvana bleed over your synapses. 

Keegan's hand settles on your thigh, holding you steady as he bucks into you. His other hand tangles in your hair, cupped on the nape of your neck. He tugs, his nose pressing into yours. 

"You feel so good, kid," he breathes, sliding his hand down to cup your jaw in his palm. "Squeezing me so tight. Missed your pretty pussy—"

"—Feels so good, Keegan, feels so—"

His lips steal over yours in a searing kiss. Biting, blistering. He devours you whole until nothing remains but the taste of him on your tongue, in the back of your throat. It clogs all of your senses—a brutal assault of Keegan: rich, earthy. 

Like this, locked to his chest as he pistons into you, you have very little choice but to take everything he gives you. All of it.

The sounds your bodies make when he's seated in deep, the slap of his pelvis, the wet squelch of your pussy, make you dizzy. Make you keen. Whine. Your mouth drops. Toes curl. Eyes roll into the back of your head. 

The cacophony of him fucking into you over and over again fills the empty space around you, sticking to the walls, and the moss-covered floor. It bounces against the lining of your head until it throbs, pulses, and threatens to split you in two. To halve you down the middle where Keegan presses taut to the seal of your womb. 

All you can do is cling to him, hands sliding to grasp his thick, rippling forearms as he batters into you. It's sloppy, unrefined, and you've never seen him lose it like this before. 

It edges into that precipice of pleasure and pain, both admixing into a heady cocktail of bliss that roils through you. 

He trails kisses across your blistering cheek, down your neck. His breath is warm over your skin. The flash of teeth makes you gasp. 

"You're gonna cum." 

It's not a demand, or a request. It isn't a plea, a bargain. He says the words like he's relaying the time, coordinates, his position. He isn't unaffected—his voice crumbles a little over the vowels, wobbles on the syllables—but this isn't him asking you. He's telling you. 

Keegan knows your body like he knows the intricacies of his rifles, his weapons, and he knows, knows, you're going to cum around his cock soon. Can feel it in the way your nails find purchase in the firm muscles of his shoulders, the way you tighten around him like a vice. The sound of your voice when you get closer to that looming precipice he holds you over. 

He knows. 

You moan his name as liquid pleasure leaks into your marrow, and that vertiginous edge grows closer and closer. You want to warn, to tell him, but Keegan knows. 

He hushes you, mouth moulding to yours, and devouring the whimpers that seep out. His hands tighten, holding you steady as he fucks you through it, slowing his pace to the easy grind of his cock against the seal of your womb, dragging over that soft spot inside of you that makes your head spin, and eyes cloud over with bliss. 

You moan weakly into the kiss when he slides his hand back, fingers pressing once more against the taut flesh stretched around him. It's too much—the added pressure, the feeling of him bucking into you, brushing over the seam where you swallow him down—and you tilt your head back with a whimper of his name. 

"I know, kid," he grunts, teeth catching on your chin. "Gonna cum for me, yeah?" 

You can't speak, can't talk over the rush in your head, the thick spool of pleasure clotting inside your head, behind your eyelids, in your veins. Molten, liquid. You fall into him as the world around you shatters once more, erupting into white noise, static. 

Everything that isn't him—the solid press of his body, unyielding and supine under you; the weight of his hands on your flesh; the painful crescent of his nails sinking into your skin; the stretch of his cock wrenching you open, and filling you deep, deeper than you'd thought possible; the burning heat, white-hot and balmy, that soaks your being from base to empty, empty skull—is sucked out through the broken shell, and into the vacuum of nothingness where it dissolves into embers, ashes. 

All you can think, feel, is Keegan. 

He works you through it, hand still pressed against the rim of your spasming cunt, feeling the way you pulse around him. 

He moans low in his throat, the noise cutting through the gossamer of pleasure liquifying your joints into sticky molasses, and you know he's close, too. 

You push back into him, into the sloppy cants of his hips as he leaches the lingering aftershocks of your climax for his own taking, his own rapture. 

His chest shudders. Fingers tremble when they run along your skin, grasping, clenching. Keeping you tight to his body where you fit like a puzzle, and he, in turn, fills all of the empty, barren cavities inside of you, leaving no crevasse, no fibril, untouched by him. 

You want to give him everything. Everything. 

You buck into his thrusts, meeting him in the middle where he sinks home with a grunt that echoes through the hollow spaces of your ribs, and you tremble with him. Satiate yourself on his scent, his taste, the noises he makes, the feeling of his body on yours. Sweat-slicked and fever hot. You douse the burn heat of his in the inferno of your own; incandescent with the molten press of him everywhere. 

Your head drops, nose pressed to his cheekbone as you breathe in him in greedy gulps that make your lungs quiver. Filled to the brim with him. Gorged on his taste. Saturated in his scent. 

It's good. You're delirious. Mad with it. Drunk on the elixir of his briny skin, and the way he leaks into your pores, into your being.

You push yourself tighter against him until you feel his heartbeat pulsing inside of your ribcage. 

His name is ripped from your throat in needy gasps drenched in the potency of your devotion. Shrill hymns that fans over his skin until it prickles, dampening with the humidity of your breath. Stained, then, with you. 

"God, Keegan, you feel so good inside of me—" 

Slurred words tumble from your sore lips, dipped in euphoria, in bliss, as he batters clumsily into you. 

You'll ache tomorrow—already feel like one massive, liquified contusion. He might have to carry you from Yosemite to Coarsegold where Merrick and Hesh are waiting. 

They'll know, of course, when you can't stand properly without feeling the stretch of him anew. When your knees wobble and your legs shake. 

(But a part of you wants them to.)

"Gonna cum for me, Keegan?" You mewl, nails scratching at his shoulders when he grunts your name like it's salvation. Purpose. "Want you to, baby, want you to—"

His cock jerks, twitching within you, and with a choked, guttural moan, he cums inside of your fluttering pussy. Saturates you in his release that spits, plumes of warmth, against the battered, bruised seal of your womb. 

He rumbles your name again, a shattered husk of vowels, consonants, and the ecstasy that paints his timbre sends you spiralling down into an abyss of endless blue. 

Keegan's stomach flutters. The skin pulling taut as his muscles clench, seize. You feel the drag of his flesh over your quivering belly; the constellation of scars rubbing over your slick skin. Your hand falls to his shoulder, pressing against the bullet wound left behind when he perched himself in front of death for you. For you. 

His eyes slide open slowly, heavy-lidded and bone weary with the shuddering tremors of euphoria that dance between the rucked 

The tip of your nose slides over the bridge of his, and when his skin wrinkles at the featherlight touches, it feels a little bit like the scar over his heart. 

"Fuck, kid," he rasps, eyes misty and lidded. Heavy pools of mercury you could fall into if you tried hard enough. "You have no idea what you do to me."

He grabs your hand, fingers lacing through the empty brackets until every part of you is filled with him. 

Your nail catches the burn mark—a molotov cocktail when the world wasn't in shambles. His thumb brushes over yours—hot oil, perogies, back when your dad took you around America on grand adventures every weekend, and your brother would sneakily eat your fries from the McDonald's bag. 

The other snakes up your spine, tangling in your messy hair, and then his lips are on yours. Messy, wet. He gasps into your open mouth as you rock against him, working him through his undoing, his breaking. 

You hold his shattered pieces in your hands, clutched tight against your sternum, and wonder, once again, if this is what they mean when they talk about kismet. 

"Never gonna leave you again," he rasps, the words clawing up his throat. 

The raw, pulpy mess of them sits heavy between you. A promise. Promises. Broken, flayed. A crumpled heap of everything you once were in shambles. 

You think of the anger you felt before, when the heels of his palms dug into your shoulder, and he pushed. Pushed you out, away. The bitter resentment, the festering rage. 

The agony. The sorrow. 

You missed him. His stupid face. His stupid voice. Stupid hands. Stupid humour—soft, witty, and drier than Death Valley. His stupid touch, his kisses. Him. 

The loneliness carved a hole inside of you, a crater where only he could fit. 

(You sleep better when he's beside you, anyway.)

"I won't let you."

Your lips crook into a small smile, a dawning blitz over a ruined landscape, and you lean down, pressing your lips to his pulse, sliding up until you catch his lobe between the seam. 

"Still broke you," you murmur, skimming your teeth over the downy soft hairs that cover the shell of his ear. "Still won—"

His hand moves, braces against the back of your skull, the base of your spine, and then he flexes his hips beneath you. It's quick. A fluid motion. Keegan bucks you off, and rolls you under the bulk of his body within a blink. You barely have time to choke on your gasp when he's already nestled above you, eyes shining in the milky light spilling in from the moth-eaten curtains. 

"What—?"

His hips jerk into yours, cock sticky, tacky against your skin, but you feel him thicken with each slow roll he makes into you.  

He leans down, bracing his forearm on the flat pillow above your crown, eyes burning embers that spark in the dim light bleeding between the wisps of broken fog that shroud the moon. 

"My turn, kid." 

[luimagines]

Hello Pinky I hope you missed me and my Lynel Farm!

I got an idea which would be hilarious! Reader is a Link! But not any Link no they are Wild and the Link from TotK! And they are a MENACE! Why?

Well, Reader can use glitches like Bullet-Time Bounce or clipping or Wacko-Boingo. They also wear the Tunic of Wild. But they came after TotK to the game and they can duplicate everything! And everything is maxed out of capacity they can't carry a single drop more. Their Purah Pad is about to explode! But then just imagine their meeting.

Legend: „Seriously does anyone know where the fuck we are?!“

Wind: „It looks like a forest.“

Reader used BTB and yeeted themself above the group with their shield on their feet just to shield surf the hill down with speed.

Sky: „What was that?“

„I want that too!!“ with that Wild shield surfed the hill down too.

Twilight: „I will go and get him...“

But the whole group follows as Reader is obviously someone who knows where to go. But as they see Wild and Reader standing there face to face. They are just stunned. They look the same! But Reader is missing an arm and has a mechanical arm instead. But these two seem to get along. This is how they learned that Reader is Wild practically but instead of doing all the Beast, gathering memories and the shrines to pull the sword. They instantly went after Ganon. They fought in their underwear and some Weapons they found on their way and sticks against the Calamity. They don't even know what a Master Sword is! They did the shrines after the Calamity.

But even if they are so bubbly and well wild. They don't talk about their journey and to Twilight. They felt betrayed by him. They needed him as they woke up in a shrine without any orientation or knowledge where they are and what happened. They just needed Wolfie by their side and to help them with their upcoming panic attack. They also don't trust the Chain immediately. They could be Yiga or puppets, sorry for Spoilers, like the Zelda which they chased after in the present. And if someone asks about their journey they only tell the stories of The Hero of Wild not the Hero of Ruins, who they are now. They turn cold and say with an icy tone „It's not your business!“

But Four should never see their weapons or he gets a heart attack. They got so many cursed weapons. But Reader is also freaking strong! Lifting a claymore is hard enough but a claymore fused with another claymore, that's heavy! They fused two Biggoron Swords together or two Dusk Claymores. They also hear the poes in the Depths and that's how they got the weapons. Thanks to the talking statues.

Reader also talks more to their horse and this one isn't small! Even Ganondorf's stallion is smaller than that. It's a giant white stallion and it stomps on everything that comes across their way! With the beautiful name "Thunder" because this thing has loud stomps! But since it's so tall it also takes great maintenance and that's Reader's therapy. When they take care of their giant, they don't feel the phantom pain of losing their arm or hear the whispers of the dead. Just the snorts of their horse and the brush. They also sleep with their horse but mostly on fields or caves as forests can have Evermeans and they want to sleep one time without an ambush from everything that wants their death!

Wild and Wild obviously are all around their giant horse. Four is all about their Lynel Sword collection, swords fused with lynel horns. Twilight tries to mend the bridge while they both are carrying about their horses. Legend and Hyrule ask about the sages and their abilities. Warriors and Time tries to get them comfortable enough so they share their journey. Sky teaches them about the Master Sword but they turn off as soon as he begins with Hylia. They are an atheist they don't believe in her.

The rings from Rauru as they lost their arm are built into the artificial arm as the sages gave them an oath of loyalty.

I feel like I understood about 50% of this because I know so little about Totk.

I know about the arm of course and the the cursed weapons! XD

Four would absolutely lose his mind about them. He freaked out when Wild broke his sword on a rock- just wait until that Reader attached a rock to their sword.

I don't know if they would even know who Wolfie is. If he was never there for them since BotW, then would they even know that Wolfie was someone who would have had to there anyway?

So it would be more like-

Wild: Wolfie was a great help to me when I needed him most the first time around. Reader: ...Who? Wild: The wolf... the wolf that followed me- us- you (?) around? Reader:.... Nope. I don't have a clue who you're talking about.

And another note, I do think that they wouldn't trust the chain off the bat though. You're right. They could be yiga in disguise. A new threat to the the land or to Zelda. There's just something off about them that Reader wouldn't have been able to tell what it was.

Especially since they might not even have all their memories anyway. If they did the shrines after Ganon, then who's to say they would have bothered with doing them all anyway? They coudl have just checked out a few, got bored and left it at that.

They might not have any of their memories and are perfectly fine that way.

[sunniedesi]

Future Diary x Detective Akechi Crossover TL

Before anything, I want to thank @syrpai for providing screenshots and information about this crossover after my first post regarding the subject (seriously, you're the goat). I was correct about this story not being in the original manga, though I made the glaring mistake of assuming Shonen Ace didn't digitalize their releases. Turns out they do! And this crossover was featured on their March 2018 issue:

So in conclusion: the crossover between Future Diary, Detective Akechi and Esuno's other works was made after ending volume 2 of Detective Akechi, to commemorate its release, and it was featured directly on Shonen Ace's next issue. With this in mind, I'll leave you with the TL.

Though first, I have to share some important context to understand the story: "Detective Akechi is Berserk" follows the story of Mayumi, a high-school girl who is being possessed by the spirit of acclaimed detective Akechi Kogorou to solve mysterious crimes involving "phantoms," who are criminals from a gang that Akechi is pursuing. The end of volume 2 (the volume that precedes the Future Diary crossover) introduces a new character named Grimoire, a kid and member of the phantoms who lost her dad to a murderer, and later lost her mother to an illness while walking with her in a mall. Grimoire lost consciousness during this tragic event, so her mother got taken away from the scene before she could say her last goodbye. Grimoire used to roam the mall, searching for the place where her mother passed away, until Mayumi helped her find the spot, thinking that Grimoire was nothing more than a lost child. From this point on, her and Mayumi became acquainted, though Akechi doesn't seem too fond of Grimoire... (Mini-spoiler: we also learn at the end of volume 2 that Detective Akechi was likely the one who killed her dad, meaning Akechi is probably more of a villain than a hero). Btw Grimoire is a girl but people refer to her as a boy because she looks more boyish.

The eeeeend!

A few things to note before ending this post:

The quality of page 2 is a little wonky because I accidentally did the cleaning for that image on a version that was a lower resolution, and since I had to redraw a great portion of it in order to clean it... I didn't wanna redo it (sorry!).

The ending here is certainly a bit... confusing. Considering Esuno's three magical girls are, well, magical, it makes sense that they'd dodge bullets with ease. So I guess that explains that part of the ending. Everything else is left a bit more open-ended, which isn't too surprising considering this is probably more of a gag story than something to take as canon. Still, my favorite chapter of Detective Akechi lol.

I know that the majority of people reading this have not read Detective Akechi, so sorry if me dissing this series comes out of left field. I'm not planning on reviewing it, because to be quite frank, I don't think I totally understand the plot lol. So, instead, I'll leave you with my personal thoughts: It's just... incredibly bizarre, and the fan service didn't help. I originally stopped reading after volume 2 because of a particularly distasteful scene where Akechi possessed Mayumi to assault another girl (because he's a huge creep btw), and essentially assaulted both of them in the process, which is just... I think my brain genuinely tapped out after reading that, like how the hell do you come up with that? I decided to read over the series again to write this post, and it just gets weirder and weirder. Including, but not limited to, Mayumi having an Eiji and Sena moment with her brother (iykyk). Out of complete nowhere too. As I mentioned in my previous post, I generally don't have an issue with nsfw topics in stories, in fact, some of my favorite stories do cover nsfw and unhinged plots. As long as it's done with a purpose and isn't mind-numbingly dumb, I don't necessarily mind. Detective Akechi though is just weird, horny, and weirdly horny in ways that detract from the story. This is a personal opinion of mine, but I think it's quite funny that Esuno's favorite topic to write about, which is supernatural detectives, isn't exactly his forte. Something about the Future Diary formula, which probably wasn't intentional, managed to combine his bizarre plot points with the broken psychology of his characters in a way that just worked, though he unfortunately hasn't been able to recreate it since :/

[sterlinggalaxy13]

[marvelmusing]

Keep Your Judgement

Chapter Two

Pairing: Aleksander Morozova x Fem!Reader

Summary: Settling into the Sanctuary, an old house fashioned into a safe place by the General, you find yourself recruited by the man himself to free some of your fellow Grisha.

Warnings: canon level violence, death and blood, limited season two spoilers.

My Masterlist • Series Masterlist

Life almost feels normal again.  

The Sanctuary is an old country house, with peeling wallpaper and worn-out furniture, long abandoned by whatever nobles of the past had been inhabiting it. Every day, the halls are slowly being filled with Grisha as the General regularly takes small groups out to liberate your people from the First Army camps.

Durasts aren’t typically involved in field work, especially not for a mission that is combat orientated, so you are often left in the workshop not far from the General’s own rooms. Mostly, you keep your head down, beginning work on a treatment for the effects of merzost that have been ailing the General.

Genya had shared her concerns for him with you, telling you she struggled to heal the scars on his face, or the fragment of the stag embedded in his hand. A young Alkemi, Vladim, had joined you a few days ago and the General had asked for him to work on a remedy, although his results so far have all been temporary. 

Yesterday, the tidemaker that had been accompanying the General for the majority of these rescue missions, Fruzsi, had been injured. A bullet wound to the leg that had been healed incorrectly during the journey back by an unexperienced heartrender. Once they arrived back at the Sanctuary, she had received the proper medical attention, but she could not assist the General in the field for the next week.

At lunch today, you had heard several Grisha speculating over who would be joining the General on his trip this afternoon to a camp along the riverside over an hour away from the Sanctuary. Which is why you’re confused when the doors to the workshop open, revealing the General who strides towards your desk purposely.

“Can I help you, moi soverenyi?” you ask him.

He says your name smoothly, a quick glance over the notes you had been writing before his gaze runs up towards your face. Then he nods.

“You are to accompany me this afternoon.”

Setting down your pen, you nod slowly, not meeting his gaze as you ask,

“Alongside?”

He waits until you lift your eyes to his before he responds,

“Just us.”

That makes you hesitate.

“Are you certain? I haven’t seen official combat.”

The corner of his mouth curls slightly, as if he has found something amusing, and you straighten yourself. He links his hands together in front of himself, rolling his shoulder slightly as he looks down, and the shadows around you ripple.

“You are forgetting my nichevo’ya.”

“Of course not, sir. I only mean to say that, not many would rely on a durast as their counterpart for a mission such as this.”

He regards you for a long moment, tilting his head in a manner that has you feeling as though he intends to study you.

“The camp we are travelling to is only small.” There is a pause before he adds, “And you are no ordinary durast.”

Leaning back on the balls of his feet, the General looks towards the windows reveal a clear view of the foggy grounds surrounding the Sanctuary, meaning he doesn’t see the frown on your face in response to his words.

As he steps backwards, a half-smile tugs at his lips.

“Besides, you’ve proven yourself more than capable of self-defence.”

His words remind you of the moment he had arrived to free the Grisha in the camp that held you, only to find you had freed yourself and many others before taking on the First Army soldiers, picking them off one by one.

Some nights you wake with a jolt, phantom wire pulled tight against your throat in your dreams, and you sit up in bed gasping for breath as you push away thoughts of jeering soldiers and your friends being thrown into the Fold.

As those memories return to you now, you shake yourself, raising your chin towards the General as you ask,

“When do we leave?”

»»---------------------►

The plan is simple enough.

While the General engages with the First Army soldiers, you slip unnoticed over to the cells holding your fellow Grisha captive. Unlocking cages and unclasping shackles becomes instinct, a familiar synchronisation of your hands and your power.

With each person you free, you give them the same instructions. Any healers are to tend to the wounded at the meeting point you had agreed upon with the General. The crack of the Cut in the distance reassures you that he’s still fighting as you unlock the last set of shackles.

Searching through the rest of the camp, you grab a few bundles that contain food and first aid supplies, fright halting your actions every time a shot rings out.

As you head towards the meeting point, your eyes scour over the people tucked carefully behind the bushes, searching for a head of dark hair and a black kefta to match. He isn’t here.

“Where’s the General?” you ask.

Met with frowns of recollection and contradicting stories of his last sighting, worry stirs within you. Something doesn’t feel right. He should have disposed of the soldiers quick enough to have returned to you long before now.

“Wait here. If I’m not back within the hour, head north, the horses will take you back to the Sanctuary.”

Carefully, you make your way through the almost silent camp. Following the sound of fighting, you peer out from the side of a tent, just in time to see the General take a punch to the face that makes you wince. The scars on his face are newly healed, you can’t imagine how much pain he must be in from a single punch.

There’s four soldiers, though the General seems to be holding his own despite being outnumbered. A billowing plume of shadow curls around the feet of one of the soldiers, but the General’s nichevo’ya appear to be resisting his call.

From the pain wracked expression on his face, you realise that his body is resisting the request for more merzost. He might have the capability for more power, but his current pain level isn’t allowing him to summon it. With a frustrated cry, he slices one of the men in half with the Cut.

As you step out from your hiding spot, clasping your hands together to join the fight, someone grabs you from behind. Frustration and fright fills you. How has this happened to you again? The sound of several guns being clicked into position, including the one pressed to your cheek, has you stilling instantly.

The General has been manhandled into a half-kneeling position with his hands behind his back. Dark blood, stained with merzost, trickles down his forehead, blooming from the scar there that had reopened.

A large figure holds onto the General, pulling a knife from his belt and holding it against the General’s side when he struggles to free himself. The man holding on to you hisses against your ear,

“Hands where we can see them.”

Then he shoves you forwards.

The General’s eyes lock on yours, widened slightly with surprise at the sight of you. Something flickers over his features, too fast for you to identify. Was he annoyed that you hadn’t stayed at the meeting point? Was he concerned for you? Or disappointed that you had been caught?

Rousing yourself from your spiralling thoughts concerning the General’s opinion of you, whatever it may be, you focus on how you’re going to keep both of you alive.    

The man standing behind you moves forward to get a closer look at the General and an uncomfortable feeling crawls over your skin as you stand with your hands raised in surrender.

“I know where the rest of them are,” you say quickly, drawing his attention away from the General. The man raises a brow at you. “The rest of his Grisha, I know where they are.”

Taking a deep breath, you lift your chin as you stare at him.

“You let me go and I’ll tell you.”

There’s a brief moment of consideration before the man nods.

“Alright then.”

“There’s an old country estate.”

The General struggles against their hold, his eyes ablaze with an anger that chills you to the bone.

“No,” he demands and the desperation that leaks into his voice makes you ache. Unable to pull your gaze from his, you say,

“It’s south west from here, around ten miles from the nearest town.” The complete opposite direction of the Sanctuary.

The intensity in his eyes shifts into something you can’t identify, but the General doesn’t miss a beat at the sound of your lie, his voice low with warning as he hisses,

“Traitor.”

There’s enough heat in his tone to make you shiver, a prickle of shame in your chest as if you had actually just sold out your fellow Grisha instead of bluffing.

The man turns towards his friends, putting his back to you. Just as you expected, the other two soldiers raise their guns to put you down at the nod of his head. Pressing your pointer and middle finger together, you reach for your power, seeking out each bullet that they intend for you.

The mechanisms within the guns shift as the triggers are all pulled in succession. Twisting your hands together, you bend the path of the bullets, sending them hurtling back at the soldiers.

For a few seconds, they all stand stunned. Then they collapse, one by one, including the man who had grabbed you.

Now only one remains, the one holding his knife against the General’s side. He grips tightly onto the back of the General’s neck, steering the both of them backwards as you step in their direction.

“Stay back,” he warns you.  

Seizing the blade with your power, you hold it still in his hand, unable to be moved anywhere closer to the General.

“Drop it,” you order him.

He shakes his head, looking down at his weapon as he attempts to stab the General, his arm shaking with the force of his effort. His determination makes your own hands shake with exertion and you know this stalemate won’t last long.

A dark thought crosses your mind, something you have never considered before, but you’re desperate, so you push your power up from the knife to seek out a different material. Jerking your dominant hand in a harsh motion, you release your power and there’s a satisfying snap.

The soldier cries out in pain, dropping his knife and clutching the newly broken bone. Instantly, you lunge forwards to retrieve the knife. He becomes aware of your sudden movement, staggering in your direction with anger twisting his features.

With as much force as you can muster, you land a punch to his jaw. He stumbles back, caught off guard, and you slam the knife into his chest. As he falls onto his back, you cling to the handle of the knife, twisting it as you land over the top of him.

Blood pools over your hands, droplets spurting over your face as he chokes out his final breath, lungs and throat clogged with the thick red liquid.

It’s then that you realise you had been holding your own breath, body heaving as you take in air, recoiling shakily from the body. This wasn’t the first death you had caused, but pressing a knife into a man’s heart is completely different to redirecting bullets.

The sound of someone saying your name pulls you back to the present. 

Somehow you manage to lift your gaze from the blood drying over your skin, and the General’s eyes are dark as they scour intently over your face. 

“Are you alright?”

The nod you give him is weak, though the sight of him wincing as he moves to stand helps you to shake away the daze and focus on finding some first aid supplies.

He thanks you rather curtly when you offer him a pot of ointment that should help his scar heal again before he disappears into one of the tents to deal with it himself.

Genya had told you he had insisted on her healing his scars, instead of a healer, so you suspect he feels somewhat self-conscious about them. Whenever you see him, you try not to stare at the dark lines that spread over his features, but the thought of how he gained them always tugs slightly on your heartstrings.

While the General is tending to his wounds, you clean your hands, scrubbing with the harshest cloth you can find to scrape at your skin forcefully. The General finds you as you’re drying yourself, wincing slightly at the drag of the rough towel over the raw skin of your hands.

He pockets the ointment you had found, giving you a small nod as you discard the towel.

Silently, you walk through the camp, and it’s only once you’re half way to the meeting point where you had left the other Grisha that the General speaks up.

“You broke his arm.” Not looking at him, you nod. “How?”

Shrugging lightly, you share your reasoning with him.

“Everything contains matter. Bone is just another material.” 

As you step over a puddle, a quote from a Grisha theorist comes to mind.

“Aren’t we all but things?” you muse quietly.

The silence stretches between you.

“Thank you,” he says softly.

»»---------------------►

marvelmusing Tag List: @dreamlandcreations @blanchedelioncourt @idaofinfinity @slytherheign @ellooo0ooo @vixenofcourse @dumb-fawkin-bitch @jane-arthur @ilikefictionmen @budugu @watersquirtpewpewboomm @mysweetlittledesire

Aleksander M Tag List: @nyctophiliiiiaaa @jazmin2211 @wooya1224

BB Characters Tag List: @rachlovesactors @noortsshift @aikeia @weallhaveadestiny @two-unbeatable-beaters

KYJ Tag List: @tartiflvtte @weepingwitchofthewest

[bennydwight]

A dialogue snippet that turned into this:

Standoff (TGAMM Oneshot: Spoilers for season 2)

Summary: Half-feral, trapped in a snare barely big enough for his fluctuating form and Oliver Chen's gun trained directly at his head, Scratch is out of options.

So why isn't Ollie taking the shot?

Intrinsically, Scratch was a pretty simple, lazy guy. He liked an easy routine, a familiar path. The hardest work he did most days was figuring out how to avoid hard work. He didn’t have the patience for strategy (why, when cheating was faster and easier?) and trying to think in multiple directions at once just sapped his strength and made his head hurt. All that variety, all that junk humans did to ‘better their mind’ was just so hard.

Astonishingly, it was made ten times harder when he was near bursting out of a containment unit, a wide barreled gun trained directly between his eyes.

He couldn’t even pinpoint where everything had gone wrong, too much focus funneled into clamping down on a base instinct: trapped in a snare barely large enough for his normal size and his afterlife on the line, Scratch’s scare form had started to take over.

He strained against the effort of keeping his ectoplasm intact, phantom breaths coming in rapid huffs even as his teeth lengthened, spines burst from his arms, his shape swelled and pressed dangerously against unyielding steel and electrons. Somewhere, quietly in the back of his mind and underneath the screaming need to SCARE SCARE SCARE SCARE, he realized dimly that he’d never been afraid of being crushed until now, after he’d gained the ability to phase through objects at will. Well, most objects. Go figure.

So it was here, desperately trying to reign in his higher processes, that through an animalistic red haze Scratch glowered into the eyes of his captor. Ollie stood mere feet away, that biohazard-yellow gun a shield between him and his helpless prey, and Scratch acknowledged a terrible gleam of satisfaction as even now the weapon trembled in the boy’s hands.

Across the other side of the warehouse, behind the orangey shimmer of the Chens’s forcefield, Molly lay prone, the tiny movement of her breaths the only reason any of the Ghost Chasers were still alive. Esther knelt next to her, first-aid kit in hand, expression one of barely-contained terror. Not his doing, but he’d take credit. Maybe next time she’d learn not to chuck a knockout bomb at a child. Well, at him. Molly had taken the metaphorical bullet (not a pretty mental image, given the circumstances), and if anything happened to her then Scratch was going to make all their lives a living hell.

Provided he got out unscathed. Somewhere, out of the thick of battle, Andrea fought to take the snare’s electronics offline, and no doubt June was blocking every attack with equal fervor. And even with legs as long as Libby’s, it would take too much time for her to reach the McGee’s house and bring back Pete and Sharon. Time Scratch didn’t have.

Imprisoned, half feral with the urge to survive, and one finger twitch away from total erasure, Scratch was out of options. Just him and Ollie, and the trap and the gun.

And the father.

Ruben stood, face and hands pressed against the forcefield, vibrating with adrenaline. His attention laser focused to his son, caught on the opposite side with the enemy (that was Scratch, he had enemies now), the shouts of excitement and encouragement died at Ollie’s hesitation and veered distinctly into confusion and urgency.

“Finish it, Ollie, it’s trying to take attack form! End it before it escapes!”

Ollie’s only acknowledgement was the hitch of his shoulders, eyes locked with Scratch in a way that felt like he was missing context. Scratch had seen this boy’s hatred firsthand, he put things on the internet that should not be there, so what stopped him now?

A memory flashed to mind: Molly throwing herself in front of the knockout bomb, and someone shouting ‘NO’ nearby, and Scratch swelled painfully against the snare as a fresh wave of rage tore through his ectoplasm like the hiss from behind his fangs.

Ah. So now he knew.

“We’re so close, Ollie,” Ruben continued to not shut up, voice like fingernails down Scratch’s strained self-control. “Our family’s whole legacy has led up to this! You can give us everything we’ve ever dreamed, just pull the trigger!”

The monster was caged, and still fear shone like a beacon behind Ollie’s eyes. Everything they’d worked for at his feet and he still didn’t move. Didn’t look away.

Scratch was not a smart man on the best of days and now, claws scoring uneven grooves in the ground as their length oscillated with his concentration, he was grossly, hilariously far from his best. “Do it kid,” Scratch snarled, sucking harsh breaths from between gritted teeth. “You know what it’ll cost ya.”

“Do it, Ollie! This is our only chance!”

A long beat passed.

Ollie’s hands shook, but his trigger finger didn’t waver.

From outside, a roar, and then a scream. Good old Geoff. The Chens’s heads whipped towards the door, and their combined fear-smell nearly whited out Scratch’s mind for good.

“Go help June!” Ollie’s voice pitched high with terror, and something else that tugged Scratch’s mind back to clarity. Surprise registered through the darkness clouding his mind as his parents obeyed, gathering a limp Molly into their arms, and a strange quiet settled over the warehouse.

And then, there were two.

Most of the threat and the fear-smell were gone, but Ollie still had a gun to his head and Scratch was still angry. His hue shifted, deepening to a sickly green, mouth stretching wide in a grotesque grin. “So what’ll it be, Ollie? Gonna finish me yourself? Or gonna make your daddy do it for you?” The snare creaked ominously as his growth strained the limits. The ropes of plasma burned fierce red lines through the green, but he barely registered the pain. “Either way, she’ll never talk to you again. Won’t even look at you. She thought better of you, y’know. Tried her darnedest to change your mind. You want her to wake up and find out she failed?”

Ollie’s eyes hardened, and Scratch’s temperature dropped several degrees. He really should’ve known better by now than to make calculated risks, this one might’ve just cost him his life.

Ollie’s hand moved, and Scratch bit back a flinch before watching it dip into a pocket and emerge with a square device. As he pressed the giant, terrifying button right in the middle, Scratch braced for pain.

Instead, the pressure around him retreated, and Scratch floated up into the air. Free.

Free, and alone with the Ghost Chaser, who kept the gun trained on his head even as scared tears pooled at the corners of his eyes.

They stared at each other in a stalemate, Ollie unwilling to put down his weapon and Scratch wobbling between forms as he considered whether to put his uncomfortably pent-up scare energy to good use. Or at least entertaining use.

“Run,” Ollie whispered, and Scratch couldn’t tell if it was a threat or a plea.

The instinct-induced haze lessened. If Ollie took the shot, he’d be disappointing Molly. (Who was he kidding, life without Scratch? He’d be devastating Molly!) But if Scratch proved the Chens thoughts on ghosts right, he’d be doing the same thing.

Ollie hefted the gun higher, looking no keener to use it. “Run,” he repeated.

The easy way out. No lie, Scratch had considered it immediately. Molly was safe enough with the Chens, and all he wanted was to disappear into a dark corner and forget this whole nightmare ever happened. He could run, and they’d be more careful, and this whole debacle meant Molly would stop hanging out with Ollie, and Scratch’s life could go back to normal. Save being on the run. Forever.

(Or until the Chens died out, and with Scratch’s luck this would absolutely turn into a multigenerational blood feud.)

Facts were: he was outed, and so was Molly’s connection to him. They’d never be safe, not while the Chens were determined to cleanse the world of ghostkind.

Scratch took a deep breath and thought of his family, and the last of his spines smoothed and his colour returned to its natural blue and his shape stabilized. It might’ve been easier to go underground, but even these past few months of avoiding their (many, many) ghost traps had triggered an exhaustion that would’ve been called bone-deep if he’d had bones. He didn’t want to put his family through that, and frankly, Scratch was just damn tired. All he wanted was to sleep for a century.

He'd finish this first.

“Look, Ollie,” he started, relieved to find the bass in his voice had returned to normal. “As far as ghosts go, I’m a pretty lazy guy. Rather take a nap, y’know? All that exercise ain’t good for you.”

Ollie’s eyes darted to the side, face screwing up in that ‘um actually’ wince that Molly liked to adopt whenever she annoyed him enough to bring up the flat-earth theory. The first flicker of character he’d shown since this whole standoff started. “Not how that works, but what do you mean?”

Scratch smiled at his mortal enemy, and somehow it felt natural. “Means I’m tired of running, kid.”

 END

[asmolbirb]

For the WIP ask game, i am contractually obligated to ask about the one where they fuck in the crevasse 💕

ajdkakdlalfls it’s such a funny WIP name that it’s been hyped up a ton and now I’m terrified I’m gonna disappoint people whenever I actually finish and post the fic =w=

it’s a Temeraire fic, Tharkay/Laurence, set during a scene in the last book where Laurence and Tharkay are camped out on what is described as an ice ledge within a yawning ice crevasse accessible only through a small gap in the Alps, all while Laurence is recovering from a Serious Injury TM. it’s an incredibly funny premise but it’s also a little heartbreaking. and because im incapable of being normal about things, I looked at that and went “okay, now add sexual tension to the equation”

it’s also the first story I’ve written in like 3 years, so im experiencing a lot of growing pains. like I have to write every paragraph 4-5 times before I get anything salvageable. but I am having fun with it, and that’s what really matters, I think

here’s another unedited excerpt that i’m pretty happy with! uhhh spoiler warning for references to injuries that these two morons sustain later in the series:

Laurence did not know how long he’d sat like that, taking inventory of the myriad sounds comprising the silence of the crevasse, when a new sound filtered into his awareness: a methodical susurration, hushed and unfamiliar.

It was easy enough to divine the source, once Laurence had mustered the energy to search for it. He had only to turn aside to find Tharkay rubbing his hands together, ostensibly seeking respite from the aches of his own injuries. A sympathetic twinge flashed through Laurence, not just in his bullet wound but deeper still, through the lashmarks on his back, his once-wrenched leg. He knew well the phantom aches that accompanied a sudden turn of the weather or a sharp drop in temperature. He imagined Tharkay’s hands ached fiercely, shot through with cold as they must be, and imagined, too, how little relief his stiff motions might be yielding him.

He recalled another Tharkay, hunched miserably in a sickbed half the world away–a Tharkay whose fingers, still bruised and splinted, had been unable to apply the healing salve he’d been prescribed, and for whom Laurence had carried out that task so imperative to his recovery. Driven by the memory, Laurence shifted to sit on his heels so that he might face Tharkay more fully, reaching out even as he said, “Here, allow me–” Before the words had half left his mouth, he had caught Tharkay’s hands in his and begun sweeping his thumbs across the skin in familiar motions.

[wonderfulworldofmichaelford]

Psycho Analysis: Manfred von Karma

(WARNING! This analysis contains SPOILERS!)

The Ace Attorney series has no shortage of iconic prosecutors going up against Phoenix Wright in court, but most of them aren’t really Psycho Analysis material. Edgeworth, Franziska, Nahyuta, Blackquill, and even Winston Payne are all simply antagonistic and ultimately are revealed to be good people when it comes down to it, while Klavier Gavin is outright a nice guy—it is his defense attorney brother who’s an irredeemable monster. There are only a small handful of legitimately villainous prosecutors who will be covered, and one of them is the epitome of an anti-villain. But this guy here that I’m reviewing now? He is easily one of the biggest bastards in the entire franchise.

Manfred von Karma is a prosecutor obsessed with the idea of perfection, and he seeks to achieve it both in and out of the courtroom. He’s ruthless, unscrupulous, and will do anything to achieve victory, be it by manipulating and destroying evidence or orchestrating an over-complicated revenge scheme. And on top of it all, he is one of the single most important antagonists in the series; in fact, he kickstarted the entire plot with his actions.

Motivation/Goals: Von Karma is absolutely obsessed with the idea of perfection, and to this end he concocted the most absolute, perfect revenge against the family that tarnished his perfect prosecution record. Gregory Edgeworth got him penalized back in the day, so von Karma seized upon a golden opportunity and murdered him in cold blood, which turned into the DL-6 incident—something that pretty much set the stage for the whole series.

But that’s a bit too mundane for a man like von Karma, so he didn’t stop there! He took in the son of his most hated rival, warped him into becoming a ruthless prosecutor, and then on the eve of the statue of limitations running out on DL-6 manipulated events to get his protege framed for murder, be it that of Hammond or his own father. Von Karma is just incapable of settling for something simple and clean, the man wants to completely and utterly decimate the Edgeworth name’s respectability for the slight against him.

Breakdown: Befitting the final boss of the game, von Karma’s breakdown is absolutely spectacular. Once you finally reveal him as the killer of Gregory Edgeworth because of that bullet he carelessly left embedded in his shoulder, he lets out a massive screen-rumbling roar as images of DL-6 flash onscreen.

Then he smashes his head on the wall, all while ranting about Edgeworth. It is incredibly satisfying to watch this smug bastard fall apart after being so thoroughly trounced by our rookie protagonist, and it really seals the deal on Wright's character development over the course of the game alongside Edgeworth's.

Final Fate: Von Karma is in a very small pool of Ace Attorney villains we get a definitive word on the ultimate fate of, with most others only getting ambiguous demises at the hands of the judicial system or otherwise imprisonment. By the time of the third game, he is explicitly stated to be “gone from this world.” Whether he was executed, killed himself, or simply died from natural causes is of course left to your imagination, but it’s still reassuring to know the bastard is dead after everything he put the heroes through.

Evilness: On the surface, Manfred seemingly pales in comparison to later villains like multiple murderer Dahlia Hawthorne, professional killer Shelley De Killer, or international espionage master “The Phantom,” as he only ever killed a single person (albeit a very important person, with the killing done out of spite). A single murder isn’t really enough to get a high Evilness score, no matter what the reason is.

But then you think about his decades-long prosecution career where he did literally everything he could to get a conviction. How many innocent people did the Demon Prosecutor send to an early grave despite their innocence? And look at how he adopted the son of the man he killed and warped him into his antithesis just to get one over on the man who put a mark on his perfect record; that shit is beyond diabolical. That’s not even getting into how he treated his own daughter.

I think it’s honestly wild how even with all that to consider, he’s still not the most evil guy in the franchise. He’s a 9/10 on the evil scale, a truly nasty, monstrous piece of work who is theoretically responsible for dozens upon dozens of deaths of innocents, and is most definitely a warped, vindictive bastard.

Final Thoughts & Score: Von Karma is one of the best Ace Attorney villains, but I think he kind of suffers from how the game he appears in is structured. Like this dude is monumentally important to the entire plot, the whole series wouldn’t have happened at all without his actions, and yet he appears in one single case at the end of the game, which doesn’t leave a great deal of time to expand upon him the way the other prosecutors of the series get expanded on. By all accounts, he should be just as pitiful as Redd White is

The thing is, though, that von Karma manages to cram so much personality into his limited time onscreen that he becomes unforgettable for all the right reasons. Unlike White, we get several courtroom segments where we have to contend with his manipulative antics and none of the battles with him disappoint—fitting for the man who taught Miles Edgeworth. And again, unlike White, von Karma manages to have a meaningful impact and presence beyond his only appearance; his daughter is the antagonistic prosecutor of Justice For All, and he pops up in a couple of cases in the Investigations games, one of which is a flashback to the case where Gregory Edgeworth gave him his one and only penalty.

I think what really helps von Karma stand out is just how vindictive he is. Frankly, the sheer insane lengths the man goes to for his revenge is utterly disturbing for something so incredibly petty. So many killers do the deed for equally petty and self-servng reasons, but outside of Kristoph Gavin none of them are as terrifyingly shallow as von Karma and none of them go to the same insane, absurd lengths he does to crush those who he views as having wronged him. He is one of the single pettiest bitches in the entire series.

I think von Karma manages a nice 9.5/10. He’s really only held back slightly by his extremely limited screentime, but he certainly makes the most of it whenever he appears. It’s honestly pretty amazing that the first game managed to have both an excellent significant plot-relevant villain and a pathetic significant villain who barely makes a splash, but any flaws White brought to this game are easily forgotten when Manfred shows up. He’s just a great final boss, plain and simple… or he would be if it weren’t for the bonus case. But that’s a Psycho Analysis for another time.

[violetlunette]

Runaway Chapter 10: Phantom

Summary: After searching for so long Lilia finally finds Silver. But is it too late?

Previous Chapter

Master List

Ao3

Notes: *Twst spoilers for Chapter/Book 7

Lilia continued the search. Yet, while the vines became thicker, there was still no sigh of the rumored specter nor a clue to confirm that his son was here. Lilia was starting to lose hope.

‘Did I choose the wrong place?’ He growled as he clutched the ring around his neck.

“Argh, fuck! Stupid piece of shit!” he cursed, using his other arm to swipe at his tearing eyes. It served Lilia right, though. What was he thinking following a dumb--

“Urk!”

Lilia was nearly choked as the chain suddenly yanked him forward by the throat. He was so surprised that he ended up tripping down the large hill.

“FuuuhhhAhhAhahAhhh!” His cries went up and down as Lilia rolled.

Crash!

WHAM!

Lilia's body hit a large boulder at the bottom of the hill.

Upside down, the world continued to spin around him as the fae's mouth, bones, and muscles all groaned.

“Ughhh! Of course!” it was just Lilia’s luck, wasn’t it? Shit, was all this bad luck that Leprechaun king’s way of getting revenge for tricking him that one time 300 years ago? Cause if so--

Whoooosh~

The area turned gray, layered by a strange mist that slowly filled the air. Around Lilia, the vines began to move like snakes  cricking  and  cracking  as they did so.

“ Ah, ah, ahh, ahhh, ahhhhhhh~... ”

The notes of a song drifted overhead and fell like raindrops. A song that was both strange and familiar...

It tugged at Lilia’s heart, springing tears to his eyes as his breath caught in his throat. Then he remembered.

It was one of the songs he used to hum to Silver when the lad was a baby, to calm him after a terrible nightmare.

A song he nearly had forgotten…

A shadow fell.

Then he saw it.

Lilia’s gaze widened in horror.

“It can’t be…” Above him was a  phantom .

Despite living long, Lilia didn’t have an extensive experience with Phantoms. Though recently they had become more frequent, for a long time, they were rare.

Yet, despite his lack of knowledge, Lilia felt confident in saying that no Phantom was as beautiful as this one.

Its form was that of a Princess in sorrowful blue, floating upon a swirl of black mist. Like all Phantoms, it had an ink bottle for a head. This bottle was in the shape of a heart with a green light glinting off the glass. Atop the odd head, it wore a tarnished crown. It reminded Lilia of the ring that led him here. Yet what gave the Phantom its true beauty was its golden halo of hair. It hung in ringlets around the Phantom’s doll-like frame. Despite the green glow around the specter, it gave off no light, only a nimbus of darkness. 

It sang a haunting tune like an old music box created to lull a child to sleep.

What held Lilia’s attention, however, was the figure she carried between delicate arms.

The man’s mouth fell agape, eyes growing twice their size as his brows pulled inward. His body began to tremble as the cold of winter plunged down his spine.

Through quivering lips, he muttered, “It can’t be... Silver! ”

Ink smeared across skin pale as the grave. The black streamed from closed eyes like tears, making it seem as if he were a boy crying in his sleep. The silver hair, for which he named, lost its moon-like shine and had become a dull gray, frayed like cobwebs. But none of that was what lit the terror that made Lilia’s old muscles turn to stone, nor made his heart stop dead as if shot with a bullet or turn his blood to ice. What did that was the blade. Said blade stabbed through Silver’s heart. The sword also pierced the Phantom, pinning him to its breast. The Phantom stroked the teen’s hair like a child, singing her lullaby. Lilia felt his mouth dry as he whispered, “It can’t be…” He then cartwheeled himself upright, turning as pale as the moon as his irises nearly vanished. His breath began uneven as he began muttering to himself, “No…It can’t…Please, no...” The chant became more and more desperate till it became a prayer. Mentally, he begged his mind to tell him his eyes were playing tricks. That it was all an illusion or a bad dream. Otherwise, the reality would be that his son was dead and that—that thing was cuddling his corpse like a doll. ‘No…’ he told himself. Lilia forced his panic back, and his rational side took over. ‘Silver could still be alive, just under an enchantment. Or could that…’ Could be his Overblot? It was difficult to see as the Phantom and the blade blocked most of his form. Regardless, Lilia knew his first step; freeing Silver from-- The Phantom turned an eyeless gaze upon him. Lilia crouched, clenching his jaw to stop his teeth from chattering from the chill going through his bones. Watching the foe closely, his hand moved to his clever, ready to pull and fight when-- It vanished.

Lilia blinked. He blinked again. Once more to be sure. Then his mouth dropped open.

“Huh? What...no...No!” Confusion turned to horror.

Silver was right there.  He was right there!  Dead or alive, Silver was right there before Lilia! And now he was gone!  Again!

“Silver! Silver!” Lilia ran to the spot where the Phantom had disappeared, swallowed by the mist of the late noon.

“Come on, come on, come on!!” Frustration filled the fae as he clawed through the mist as if the action would reveal his lost son.

Alas...

“Augh!”

The anguished cry tore from his throat as the father fell to his knees.

S L A M !

He pounded a fist into the dry soil as his legs hit the ground. “FUCK!”

As the man's fingers dug into the dirt, a few tear drops escaped his eyes, his body shaking from frustration.

He was so close!  He was so close,  and yet—and yet…

Hick, sob, hick…

Lilia slumped forward, over weighed by grief.

“F--fuck...”

~*~

Once he regained himself, Lilia called Idia. Well, sort of.

He called Sebek, who took the phone to Idia, apparently breaking his door down to do so. The other was not at all pleased.

“Sorry about that!” Lilia apologized, cutting short the complaints. Had he not been so emotionally exhausted, Lilia would have laughed or found some amusement in the situation. “But I had something I really needed to ask.”

Lilia then went on to explain the appearance of the Phantom and its odd actions. Lilia wasn’t familiar with Phantoms, but he knew them to be aggressive. Silver’s Phantom, on the other hand, took one look at him before fleeing.

Idia sighed sadly.

“So, even Silver…” he mumbled. He trailed off before returning to the topic.

“It’s rare, but it’s not, like, unheard of for Phantoms not to attack,” Idia explained. “There are some who are, well, cowards and will choose to run instead. From what we can figure, it depends on how the person who blots over handles stress.

“Like, Riddle has a temper, so when he's pissed, he lashes out at everybody.” Lilia heard the story of Riddle’s blot from Carter and how it acted like a large child throwing a tantrum. Even Malleus’ Phantom had lasted out like a beast in pure rage. But Silver wasn’t like that.

Yes, the teen got mad and upset. He would occasionally yell as well, as rare as it happened. But when he was truly upset to the point his heart broke he ran.

‘Just like when he found out we weren’t related…’ Lilia closed his eyes as he recalled the memory and the child’s broken expression.

“ So… you’re not my father?”  Lilia had been so stunned not by the question but by the torment on Silver’s face as the words were muttered through trembling lips.

Lilia flinched as a metaphorical dagger pierced his soul. That same anguish was on his face in the dream world, his body shaking like it had as a child.

“ Father… I—I…”  Lilia’s heart broke.

‘Oh, Silver…’ After everything that happened, it was no surprise that Silver was distraught to the point where he must have felt like he was drowning. However, it took more than an emotional state to blot everyone over.

The teenager would have had to have used a lot of magic. The broom ride would have been tiring but not enough—

Then Lilia realized; ‘Meet in a Dream.’ Silver Unique magic.

Silver used that spell for who knows how long to save everyone. He also took travelers with him to several dreams. So, even though his body was resting, it must have taken a toll on his mental state and mana. And then with everything he had discovered and gone through…

A knot twisted in his stomach as his chest became heavy.

‘The reason Silver blotted over was…’ Because of him. Because Silver wanted to save everyone from his mistakes--

Lila’s grip shook till he tightened it on his phone.

“Then what about the Phantom in this case?” he asked Idia, keeping his voice firm. “Are you saying it’s not dangerous?” It wasn’t Idia’s voice he heard next.

“Well?! Answer him!”

“Eep! Stop shaking me!” Ah. Lilia forgot Sebek was there. From what he could hear, Sebek had become quite emotional about Silver’s state. Knowing Sebek, Lilia was surprised Sebek held back this long.

“Sebek, control yourself,” Lilia ordered. “Idia; is the Phantom dangerous?” There was an exasperated groan from the other side as Idia attempted to pull himself together.

“Uggghhh...Diasomnia...can’t deal…” He took another moment to compose, but Sebek barked something, and Idia jumped into his answer finally.

“Eep! Kinda?!” He (and Lilia) made Sebek back off before going into more detail. “They’re usually pretty harmless till cornered. Then they lash out like a trapped rat, ya know?” Then the Shroud sighed heavily as if something heavy was dropped on him.“The real issue is that while it's running the life is still being drained from its host.” Lilia’s skin nearly went transparent.

‘ Shit! ’ He forgot that. He forgot that a phantom drained its host of their life force.

Which meant that even if Silver was alive now--

“You mean… Silver’s going to die?” Sebek’s question turned the whole world static. He didn’t even hear Idia’s response.

Die, die, Silver? His Silver? His son? No! No, no, no!

“Hey, Lila? Ortho’s contacted STYX officers. They’re sending over a troop. It would--” Lilia hung up, his heart racing in his ears as he started running.

His jaw clenched as he breathed hard through his nose, his eyes growing wild. He didn’t know what would happen from here on out, but he knew this;

Silver was NOT going to die!

--

Next chapter

[ernestinapickman]

Ok so, this is the Hyori Ittai theory of Hunter x Hunter.

It’s more of a literary analysis-type thing than a lore/worldbuilding theory, but that’s what my background is in. It’s also at least 30% a joke.

Spoilers through the end of the anime ahead!

The Hyori Ittai theory of Hunter x Hunter states that there are just two characters in Hunter x Hunter: Gon and Killua. Every other character in both the manga and the anime can be categorized neatly as either a Gon or a Killua.

There are a few ways to identify what category each character falls into, but the simplest version (imo) is this: Killuas have suffered in the past, but generally speaking, both morally and in terms of their personal happiness, things are looking up for them over the course of the narrative. Gons, on the other hand, generally start in a better place than they end up; things get worse for them before they get better. They also tend to travel in pairs: for every Gon, there are almost always one or more Killuas.

Other potential traits of Killuas include:

All-consuming devotion to their friends and allies

Risk-aversion

Better at verbalizing their feelings, either in their own heads or out loud

Plan before they act

Direct foil to Killua

General deuteragonist energy

Other traits of Gons include:

Act before they plan

Inexplicable amounts of charisma

Ruled by emotion

Tend to avoid verbalizing their feelings, or don’t understand them

Direct foil to Gon

General protagonist energy

Sometimes whether a character is a Gon or a Killua might be obvious (Hisoka is obviously a Gon, and Illumi is obviously a Killua), but sometimes the parallels are a little less obvious. For example, despite surface-level similarities to Killua, Kurapika is actually a Gon. This is most obvious in his prequel chapters of the manga (see the post I just reblogged), and when you look at his relationships with Leorio and Melody (gee Kurapika, how come Togashi lets you have two Killuas?).

This is also why Kurapika gets to be the protagonist of multiple arcs. He’s the Gon in situations where Gon himself is absent and/or less relevant!

Other notable Killuas include:

Kalluto Zoldyck - While Kalluto’s arc hasn’t finished yet, the fact that they’ve moved away from the Zoldyck household and into the Phantom Troupe (who are shown to be very devoted to one another) points to Kalluto being on a Killua-type trajectory (to paraphrase Sylvi Bullet, this kid could get Killua’d about friends).

Mito Freecss - She was Ging’s first Killua, and was very devoted to him.

Kite - Very much the mild-mannered counterpart to Ging.

Palm Siberia - While I waffled a bit on this one initially, she’s very much a Killua foil who ends up in a better place than she started.

Shoot McMahon - Obviously.

Biscuit Krueger - The two are both transmuters, and while we don’t know much about her backstory, the way she latches onto Gon and Killua is similar to how Killua latches onto Gon during the Hunter Exam.

Komugi - I also waffled a bit on this one, but her nasty home life is what solidly put her in the Killua category for me.

Other notable Gons include:

Chrollo Lucilfer - Chrollo is a direct foil to Kurapika, and therefore by transitive property this makes him a Gon as well

Isaac Netero - A lot of Gon’s counterparts could be described as “if Gon went sour”, and his fight with Meruem pretty directly parallels Gon’s fight with Neferpitou.

Uvogin - Nobunaga was right on the money with this one.

Knuckle Bine - Knuckle is the opposite of Ging, Hisoka, Netero, and Uvo: he’s a Gon that’s doing okay for himself.

Ging Freecss - Ending D proves it, unfortunately.

Menthuthuyoupi - He’s the most straightforward of the royal guard, and the only one who isn’t a direct foil to Killua.

Meruem - Like Komugi, I waffled on this one, since although he’s got major protagonist vibes and dies badly, like Killua, his morality and happiness improve over the course of the story. However, I think he does get worse before he gets better therefore making him a Gon.

A few more notes: first, there are more Killuas than Gons in this story, which makes sense because you almost always have more supporting characters than protagonists. Second, you might be wondering if there are any characters who do not fit into either category, or if there’s overlap.

Yes and no. While there is overlap in some cases (see Palm, Komugi, and Meruem), all characters tend to lean one way or the other. There are a few who have not received enough page time to sort them, especially characters who are newer. For example, Pariston’s position in the narrative slots him into the role of one of Ging’s (or Netero’s) Killuas, but his personality is much more Gon-like. Likewise, Alluka seems to have started out in a Killua-like position, but I could easily see her developing into a Gon should she ever return to the story and get her own arc.

Finally, there is one character who is neither a Gon nor a Killua, and that’s Gon’s unnamed great-grandma. Good on her for being the only normal person in the whole story.