#plus some irrational part of me feels very abandoned

[urbanfiltered]

why am i crying lmao

[dendrograna]

Respite Hereafter Pt. III

I've finally decided on a name for this series !! I'll update the other parts with the new title now hehe

Btw I plan on making this a pretty damn long series, focusing on each nation at a time. You arrived in Mondstadt, so the first chunk of the series takes place in Mondstadt. I'm gonna try to give each character at least a mention before going to the next nation so you don't end up travelling all over the place. Liyue and Inazuma will get some love soon tho <3

Pt. I

Pt. II

Pt. III

tw // panic attacks, past violence, trauma, paranoia, fire/burns, eye damage

Your acolytes were not the only ones who were horribly traumatized. You yourself had endured months of torture, living in abandoned camps, starving and freezing during the nights, being hunted down like an animal by the very ones you held dear. The disgusted, hate-filled looks they hurled at you seared into your memory, as well as into your dreams.

You regularly woke up from horrible nightmares screaming, and while your maids tried to help you, you very rarely let them get very close to you when you got like this. Paranoia often took hold of you during the nights, terrified they would try to hurt you again, that this had all been some sort of trick and they were just waiting to pull the rug out from under you. When morning came you always realized how silly it was, that your maids were so traumatized themselves they could never even think of hurting you, yet it never stopped you from doing the exact same thing the following night. The darkness brought out your most horrifying, albeit irrational, thoughts and fears.

Your maids were concerned for you, though. Your acolytes began to notice the dark circles under your eyes and the drowsy way you stumbled into things sometimes, but you always brushed them off. You were okay, and even if you weren't, telling them as much would only worry them.

Your maids did something that pleasantly surprised you after a few weeks of sleep deprivation, though. Three of them came to you while you ate your breakfast one morning, bowed in greeting, and timidly asked if they might suggest something to help you sleep.

"Perhaps having someone else you trust in the palace might help you sleep better," they said. "You've grown pretty close to a few of the Knights, Your Divinity. Would you like us to request that one of them spend a few nights here to help calm your anxiety?"

You yawned, considering the idea for a moment. "Like a slumber party," you said with a giggle. "I'd hate to put this on anyone else..."

"You need your rest, Your Grace!" one of them said suddenly before covering their mouth. "Ah... I apologize for my sudden outburst, please forgive me..."

You chuckled tiredly, smiling at them. That was a good sign, they'd started feeling more comfortable with you. "No, you're right. I think this is starting to affect my cognition. Plus, I don't think I have anything urgent that needs to be done today... You know what, slumber party it is. What abouttt... Kaeya, Albedo, and Amber?"

"Would you three please ask them for me? I don't think I'll be able to get all the way there and back with how exhausted I am," you said. They all bowed with a little "yes, Your Holiness," before they left you to finish your breakfast.

---

You spent the morning getting through a little bit of the day's work: signing your approval for new trade routes, working on some paperwork, and drafting the plans for a new festival you'd proposed to be sent to Jean. You still had a lot to do, but you decided it could wait until you were in a better state of mind.

Your guests arrived a little after six, meeting you in the foyer as all your guests did. They also kneeled and bowed in greeting as a lot of your guests did, too. You chuckled as you approached them, pulling them all up to their feet. "You guys don't have to do that anymore, remember?" you teased them, smiling. While it was true you'd gotten to know them each pretty well, this was the first time you were seeing them outside of their work with the Knights.

Albedo cleared his throat, handing you a rather large portfolio bag he had over his shoulder. "I believe it is customary for guests of the Divine One to bring them an offering, yes Your grace?" he said.

When you opened his portfolio bag, you found a delicately painted portrait of you inside, glancing over your shoulder with your hair ruffled in the wind and a bright smile on your face. The landscape of Mondstadt in the distance behind you was silhouetted against a brilliant rising sun. You covered your mouth as you admired the beautiful picture, gasping. "I've been working on it for quite some time, so I made sure to have it completed for you, Your Holiness."

Kaeya and Amber both nodded, offering you the gifts they'd brought. Kaeya, of course, brought some expensive dandelion wine, and Amber had a replica Baron Bunny for you.

"Don't worry, this one won't explode," she said with a big smile. "I thought maybe he could help you sleep a little better, Your Grace."

You couldn't help the smile that crept onto your face, or the tears stinging your eyes. You carefully sat their gifts down on a nearby table, pulling them all into a big hug. "Thank you guys, these are all so nice! I'll find somewhere to hang the painting and get a corkscrew for the wine. Why don't you meet me in the dining room? Our dinner should be done soon."

One of your maids assisted you in placing Albedo's painting in a frame and hanging it on the wall and another took Amber's plushie to your bedroom for you. When you met your guests in the dining room and took your seat at the end of the table, they greeted you with a small bow.

A maid brought out your food on a tray, placing each plate in front of you and your guests with one in the middle to split. "Northern smoked chicken with Liyue-style golden shrimp balls, Your Grace. Allow me to pour your wine for you," they said.

The rest of your night with your guests went by fairly smoothly. After you finished eating, you requested that they play a few card games with you and you taught them how to play a few they'd never heard of. You improvised a few games of Uno where the kings were draw fours, the queens were draw twos, the jacks were reverses, and the jokers were skips, and they picked it up surprisingly quick. Amber in particular really liked it.

After that you gave them a tour of your palace, starting with the ground floor and working your way up. The ground floor was all your guests usually ever saw: the dining room, kitchen, living room, bathrooms, an indoor pool, and a library. On the second floor was your personal space, such as your master bedroom, bath, walk-in closet, office, balcony, and a few guest bedrooms. The third floor was for the maids with lots of bedrooms and an extra room for laundry and cleaning supplies. Finally, on the fourth floor was your throne room. Should anyone have requested to meet with your impostor, this was where they would meet them. You, however, rarely used it anymore.

They were in awe of just how huge the place was. Your impostor had been incredibly demanding, insisting on the most luxurious palace Teyvat could offer them. You decided to sit with them on the balcony on the second floor for a while to watch the sun set over Liyue's mountains in the distance, thanking them each for coming.

"It's an honor, Your Divinity," Amber said with a smile. "I just hope our company can help you get some rest tonight." Albedo and Kaeya voiced their agreement.

You yawned, leaning against the railing for a second. "This world is beautiful," you said, closing your eyes to relish in the calmness of the moment. "So many beautiful places and beautiful people."

Your words seemed to comfort the three a little bit. Your impostor would never have said something like that. They'd described Teyvat as a world full of disgusting animals, waiting to be put out of its misery. They regularly contemplated genocide, whether the people of Teyvat were deserving enough to walk the same planet they did. The impostor received so many offerings in large part because the people of Teyvat were terrified of what they might do if the gifts and worship ever stopped.

“It’s getting pretty late, Your Mercy,” Kaeya said, "would you like to head to bed soon?"

You stretched your arms above your head and yawned before nodding. "Yeah, I think so. You guys can take any of the extra bedrooms on this floor. I'm gonna turn in for the night."

After you said your goodnights to your guests, you headed to your luxurious bedroom. Pushed against one wall was your bed, translucent silk curtains framing the sides with an intricate gold-plated headboard. Floor-to-ceiling windows framed by thick gold curtains lined the side wall, and doors to your bathroom and walk-in closet laid opposite the windows. In the bathroom, a huge circular tub sat against some tall bay windows and some folding screens sat beside it. You made your way into your closet and picked out your pajamas made of silk, got changed, and finally crashed in your bed.

---

Fire. All you could see around you was fire.

Your feet ached and your lungs burned, partly from smoke inhalation and partly from screaming. Your once-beautiful luxurious palace was burning around you from every angle, the windows and doors boarded up. You were on the fourth floor, desperate to escape the fire now creeping up the stairs, staring out the large windows.

The ones you'd trusted the most stood around it, cheering as it burned with you still inside it. And there your impostor stood, a smug, satisfied look on their face. You couldn't recognize very much of what they were saying, but the words "blasphemy," "fake," and "sacrilege" reached your ears intact.

Your breathing quickened and your fists pounded against the stained glass windows, the sound of your own screams drowned out by the crackling fire that was coming closer and closer to you. Your stomach turned and it seemed like every fiber in your body was aching. It was all a trick. A cruel trick designed to make you suffer the most.

The last thing you saw was your impostor's sadistic, twisted grin before the smoke on the windows made it impossible to see out.

You screamed for help- for someone, anyone, to save you. Tears streamed down your face and you squeezed your eyes shut, flames licking your ankles as you pressed yourself closer into the corner. Your lungs burned, as did your legs, and each breath in felt like the fire itself had invaded your body. You screamed with all the air left in your lungs, praying that someone who cared might hear you. You heard the floor creak loudly, a quickly repeated knocking sound, and you knew this was it. If the flames and the smoke didn't kill you, the fall you were about to take would.

You were awoken by your own screaming, as well as the sound of a frantic knock at the door. You huddled into yourself on your bed, pressing your legs to your chest and sobbing. You were frustrated, upset, scared. Why did this have to keep happening to you?! The horrible things your own mind conjured up were far, far worse than anything you'd ever experienced.

Your head snapped up when the door swung open, your vision blurred by tears. "Your Holiness, are you alright?" a soothing voice said. You frantically shook your head, trying to back away from them. "No! No, no get away from me," you sobbed. The person obeyed, taking a small step backward. "I'm here to help you, Your Mercy, remember? What can I do for you?" they asked, their honey-like voice easing your paranoia just a bit. As the tears rolled down your face, your vision cleared slightly and you were able to process who you were talking to. Kaeya.

You took a deep, shaky breath, closing your eyes for a moment. It felt like your heart was being crushed, and you were gasping for air. You'd experienced this before, but never to this degree. "W-Water," you choked out. You didn't think you could manage by yourself though, so you quickly added, "the maids, have them get water. Stay, please."

He obeyed, peeking out the room and relaying the request to one of the maids running up the hall. He dragged a chair up next to your bed, sitting beside you. "What else can I do, Your Holiness? Is it okay if I touch you?" he asked, and you nodded. He grabbed your hands, his cool touch soothing you a little bit.

One of the maids came running with a glass of water, helping you take a drink. Kaeya assisted you in a few breathing exercises and techniques he'd learned over the years. When your breathing had finally evened out and the death grip on your heart finally released, you took a deep breath and pulled him into a tight hug.

"Thank you, Kaeya..." you said quietly. You glanced up and noticed everyone else was there too. "You all can go back to sleep. I'm sorry for waking you up like this," you said with a shy smile. They all offered you their own version of "it's okay, goodnight," before turning to the door and leaving. Kaeya stood up to leave too, but you grabbed his hand.

"Wait. What if... What if I have another one?" you said. His expression turned to one of pity and sadness, sitting back down in the seat. "Would you like me to sit with you for a while longer?" he offered.

"Sleep here," you said, pushing to the opposite side of the bed and pulling the blankets back. "If... You'd be comfortable with that, I mean."

His face flushed a darker shade. "Your Divinity... I could never," he gasped, averting his gaze. "To lay in the same bed with you would be... Sacrilegious, would it not?"

"Pleaseeee? Wouldn't it be even more sacrilegious to say no?" you said teasingly. "If you don't wanna sleep here I won't force you, but... I don't think it's sacrilegious at all."

Kaeya considered it for a moment before he sighed, pulling the blankets up and laying beside you. "If you insist, Your Holiness."

You grinned and hugged him tight, giggling. "Yay! Thank you, Kaeya," you said. He chuckled, and then it was silent in your room.

After a moment of silence, you spoke up. "Kaeya?" he hummed. "...Venti told me what happened. To your eye. I'm... so sorry. I just wanted to tell you that... I'm here for you if you ever wanna talk about it or need someone to listen," you said quietly.

Kaeya looked away. "Thank you, Your Grace," he said, barely above a whisper. You rested a hand against Kaeya's right cheek just below his eyepatch and he closed his eye, leaning into the affection. You leaned forward, pressing a gentle kiss against his good eye.

A part of you wanted to be angry. A part of you wanted to rage and scream and be upset for what they did to him. Yet all being angry had managed to achieve so far was scaring your Venti. They were already dead, and being angry now would achieve nothing. You pulled him a bit closer to you, resting your chin on his shoulder. All you could do now was be there for him.

"Would you mind?" he asked, "If I wanted to talk about it, Your Holiness?" You nodded.

"...I was sent here to meet with them on behalf of the Knights. We'd been having problems with the Fatui and they sent me to urge Their Grace-" he cleared his throat, "I apologize. They sent me to urge the impostor to keep the Fatui out of Mondstadt's business."

"I looked up at them on your throne and we made eye contact. Immediately, they... they drew their sword and swung it at my face," he said quietly. "They said they were being merciful, that I deserved a far worse punishment for involving them in such trivial matters. The next time they saw me... they said I looked nice with an eyepatch."

Your stomach turned as he told you the story and you pulled him into a hug. "Oh Kaeya..." you said quietly. "I'm so sorry... I wish that... I could've stopped this sooner." It wasn't until now you noticed the deep scar running up his right cheek under his eyepatch. You traced the mark with a light touch. "You didn't deserve this at all, Kaeya. They were cruel and sadistic, and now you don't have to worry about them anymore. If I could take all of this away from you, I'd do it in a heartbeat," you said in his ear.

"You're far too kind, Your Divinity," he said, tears clinging to his eyelashes. "And far too forgiving. Have I not drawn my sword on you as well?" he whispered, remembering that he himself had tried to execute you under the impostor's orders. "Why are you... Allowing me this close to you?"

"Because I trust you," you said, running your fingers through his blue hair. "You'd been following that monster's orders your whole life, and you would've been killed yourself if you tried to protest. I'm just happy everything worked out the way it did, because that meant that nobody else got hurt. Please don't feel guilty, Kaeya, what happened to us is nobody's fault but that impostor's."

He smiled slightly, nuzzling closer to you. "Thank you, Your Grace," he said.

"Sweet dreams, Kaeya," you said, pressing one final kiss against his cheek. You had a feeling you weren't going to be having any more nightmares tonight.

"Goodnight, Your Grace."

---

@tanspostsblog @laurafaye13-blog @karmawonders @samsmidnightthonks @uchihaeirin

[swamplatibule]

🙉 Hollister, 🌋 23, 💥 Iara, 🖍️ Maggie , 🕷️ Alastor , 💧 Wilson, ☄️ Rosalind. Content for some of the classic favs as well as information about some of the ones I'm less familiar with, that was my goal here. <:

WOOO HELL YEAH :DDD HELLO FRIEND

🙉 HEAR-NO-EVIL - what is the worse thing your oc could hear from someone?

The best answer here is the most obvious one - hearing someone say she isn’t good enough. She’s been told that her whole life, and it never really stops stinging. She acts like it doesn’t bother her, or like she’s above it, but every time she hears it just cuts a little deeper, and her need to always impress people has a heavy affect on the way she acts, whether she knows it or not. Everything has to be a competition so she can win it and prove herself and maybe then someone will decide she’s worth caring about. Even when people do care about her, unconditionally, she’s still running that little imaginary countdown in the back of her mind until they get fed up and abandon her. My traumatized little scrunkly <3

🌋 VOLCANO - how bad is their temper? is it a slow boil, or a instant explosion?

23 is very easily angered, but she’s been trained not to let that show, so when things do irritate her, she’s forced to just bottle it up and smile her little Cheshire-cat smile through it. With the way it builds up, though, there’s always bound to be a point where it explodes, and when it does, she is an absolute nightmare to be around. 23 gets very violent when she’s angry, and while she usually winds up taking it out on some punching bag in the gym, that doesn’t do much to satisfy the bloodlust. It’s part of the reason why she loves being on the job so much - beating up a person is much more fun than a punching bag. Fun fact! When she’s just frustrated but not too angry, she paces a lot and does this weird little clawing motion with her hands, which if you look closely enough is just her strangling a little imaginary person.

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

Adams is usually very good at dealing with their emotions, but there’s one that always gets the best of them no matter how hard they try. Guilt. And they have a lot they feel guilty for, a lot of lives they weren’t able to save. Adams feels personally responsible for the safety of every one of their agents and everyone they’re supposed to protect. Every life lost feels like a failure on their own part, even if they had nothing to do with them. They can push down almost any other emotion to wait for later, but every time guilt hits, it always gets to them.

🖍️ CRAYON - what advice would you give to them?

Honestly, I almost wish she would give me some advice, but that’s irrelevant. Uhhhh. I think the best advice I could give her is that her self-sacrificial tendencies hurt the people around her more than help them. She faked her own death to keep Wilson safe, which affected him for the rest of his life. Plus, he got those tendencies from her, and we’ve seen how well that went. Her constant need to take the bullet for someone else more often than not winds up causing more pain than the original situation would have, and it screams “trauma” that her first instinct in a life-or-death scenario is to throw herself in front of someone rather than just. yknow. Using her shield, maybe??

🕷️ SPIDER - what is their biggest fear? do they have any irrational / mundane fears?

HOHOHO my guy. Alastor’s worst fear is simply being forgotten. Everything he does is an attempt to make a mark on the world - he just doesn’t care whether than mark is good or bad. He cannot fathom the idea of his own existence being entirely unimportant in the grand scheme of things, and all his scheming shit and assholery can really be chalked up to him trying to claw his way into some kind of significance before he dies. A high-ranking member of the IBW, maybe someday it’s leader. One of the Society’s greatest enemies. The man who created his own human superweapon from nothing. He thinks he deserves to be remembered long after his death, and he has no problem being remembered for all the awful things he’s done, so long as he makes an impact. Spoiler alert: he doesn’t get that :)

💧 DROPLET - random angst headcanon

Wilson has awful night terrors. Horrifying. They’re mostly relived memories from his childhood or nightmares about losing people, but either way, they cause him an insane amount of stress, but he plays it off like it’s not a big deal. Like. Buddy don’t try to be slick with me I know you’ve been avoiding going to sleep for days on end we can all see the bags under your eyes. Lying next to Fox helps most nights after they move in together, letting Wilson focus on that warmth rather than his intrusive thoughts and memories, and Fox is always there to comfort him on the occasions that the nightmares come back, but you know those few weeks where everyone thought Fox was dead? Haha! Those were not fun.

☄️ COMET - what do people assume about them? are they right?

It’s Rosie time baybeeee~ When out in public, Rosalind likes to fake the whole “dumb blonde” thing. Then, people severely underestimate her, making it much easier to manipulate them, and by the time they figure out what she’s doing she’s already got a gun pointed at their head. She doesn’t get to do this much anymore - she was one of the DoA’s assassins before she took over as it’s leader, and she doesn’t get the chance to interact with outsiders too much - which is a shame, since she always found it very funny when people figured her out. She does still pull that trick every time she meets someone from outside, though. She’s probably the smartest person in the whole paracosm, and she knows it.

Ask game

[addictedtostorytelling]

Hi

In the earlies seasons Sara was so dominat and confident about herself, so head strong, she even challenged and mock Grissom a lot of times, she was like his equal but then she was this scared little girl, so submissive, so fragile and insecured around him that made me hate Grissom for changing all about her, he literally make her afraid of even talk to him, he make her insecured and sad. He was like "I can't have you, so no one can have you either, so I'm gonna be so jealous and irrational rude to you and make you miserable as long as I want, and I will call YOU when I'm ready to be with you" agh

Poor Sara, she didn't deserved that from Grissom.

BTW I love your account 💓

hi, anon!

i have a couple of old metas here and here on the subject of how grissom does at times mistreat sara during the early seasons of the show, if you're interested.

elsewise, my thoughts are under the “keep reading,” if you’re interested.

__

while early on grissom is oftentimes unfair to sara and his behavior does sometimes hurt her, i don’t think we can blame sara’s s4 and s5 depression entirely on him.

as i talk about in this post, the situation is a lot more complicated than just “grissom is a dick to sara, and it breaks her.”

for one thing, many of the traits you identify in sara—i.e., her being dominant, confident, headstrong, etc.—were only a kind of false bravado on her part to begin with. 

the truth is that the sara of the early seasons of the show is very much scared and fragile on the inside due to the trauma she’s experienced throughout her life, but she doesn’t want to be perceived as weak, so she masks what she actually feels with a very affected type of stridence; she’s vulnerable, so she tries to pretend that she’s anything but.

—and that fear and that vulnerability were in her before anything ever happened with grissom.

those traits stem from her childhood abuse and from never having secure attachments, as well as from her being nearly constantly abandoned by the people who should have loved, cared for, and protected her throughout her life. 

as an adult, she has fairly low self-esteem, so she covers by talking a big game.

however, in actuality, she very much doubts herself and struggles to consider herself “worthy.”

certainly, grissom’s repeated rejections of her during s3 and s4 do not help her mental state in this regard at all—and don’t get me wrong: i’m not trying to “let him off the hook” for how he treats her; he definitely does do her wrong on multiple occasions—but the rejections are just one factor that contributes to the kind of “turning inward” that we see in her in s4 and early s5.

at that point, she’s broken up about more than just boy troubles.

at the heart of her depression lies her trauma. her parents’ abusive relationship and her mother murdering her father plus the time she spent in foster care (never being subsequently adopted) have left her with some very deep wounds, and for years she’s been just “soldiering through” with them rather than doing anything to actually heal them. she’s refused to be open about her problems with anyone or even really to face them herself, and after thirty odd years, the repression has caught up with her; her mental health is at an all-time low, to the point where she can longer function. she’s starting to struggle with her job and her friendships. she feels very hopeless and bleak, like nothing will ever get better in her life.

the fact that her boyfriend of over a year cheated on and humiliated her certainly doesn’t help matters, and neither does her sense that she’s stagnating in her career (unable to secure the kind of advancement that she wants). 

of course, grissom’s mistreatment of her is also a precipitating factor.

however, even without his missteps, she likely still would have hit a wall sooner rather than later.

there’s only so long one can put on a brave face, you know?

something had to give.

it’s not all his fault.

—and especially not because while he does do things that hurt her to start out, once he realizes what’s happening, he 100% course corrects and does his best to undo any damage he has wrought with her.

in s1, s2, s3, and s4, grissom does oftentimes act unfairly toward sara and play games with her emotions. however, he doesn’t do so purposefully; he’s just fumbling with his own feelings, not knowing how to navigate between his fear and his love. that so, all of the mistakes he makes are ones he comes by honestly.

of course, whether he intends to or not, he does end up hurting her, and the fact that he doesn’t necessarily mean to doesn’t mitigate that he does, so that’s not to handwave away his actions. regardless of what his motivations are, it is shitty of him to constantly put her off for three years and then begrudge her when she finally “takes the hint” and gets another boyfriend. it is harmful when he “punishes her” for asking him out at the end of s3 by denying her professional opportunities and generally acting cold to her throughout s4.

that’s not open to debate.

that said, it does count for something—and even for a lot—that as soon as grissom realizes how badly he’s hurt sara and how much his actions toward her have had the unintended consequences of “wearing her down,” he immediately changes tacks and from the events of episode 04x23 “bloodlines” on does everything in his power to validate her and build her up and make her realize that he does indeed value her (despite his previously aloof behavior).

like.

he’s not heartless. he’s not a villain.

he’s someone who made mistakes because he honestly doesn’t know any better, and then once he gets a clue that his behavior has been harmful, he genuinely changes and does better.   

—and the fact that he does is crucial, because, honestly, without the loving support and constancy he shows to sara in s5—without him being there for her enough that she comes to trust him with her full story—she likely never would have really healed in the way that she does throughout s5, s6, and s7.

like she talks about in reboot episode 01x04 “long pig,” grissom steps up and is there for her when she needs him.

having a real friend like that—and later a boyfriend and husband—does so much to stabilize sara. by opening up to him about her issues, she finally starts to really confront them for the first time in her life, and while her path to trauma recovery is not totally linear (in s8 and s9, things get worse for her before they actually really get better, even with grissom in the picture), just having that source of unconditional love in him does so much to help her. she starts to be grounded with him in a way she’s never been before.

and it’s from this grounding that sara actually starts to develop confidence in earnest.

the sara we see nowadays in the reboot has such a genuine ease to her and is so comfortable in her own skin, and that’s so different from how she was in the early seasons of the original show. all of the anger and sorrow that used to underlie her stridence back then is just gone now; she’s so much more at home in herself than she ever was before.

and, of course, just like we can’t entirely blame grissom for sara’s “brokenness” in s4/s5, we also can’t entirely attribute her “wholeness” in her later years to him, either—because naturally sara is herself responsible for that change more than anyone; she did the work to process her trauma and saved herself.

that said, we can acknowledge that grissom is ultimately good for her and that he does help her. for as much as he fucks up early on (and even sometimes in later seasons, like during the divorce), once he figures things out, he becomes her rock and really commits to being everything she needs.

so all of the above said, while you’re certainly entitled to hate grissom all you want (and especially to hate his actions toward sara in the early seasons of the show), i do think that it’d be reductive to say that grissom is the sole cause of sara’s downward spiral in the early seasons of the show AND that it would be unfair to ignore the way he shows up and is such a stalwart for her later on.

there’s much more nuance to the story than that.

anyway, thanks for the message! i’m glad you enjoy my account. please feel welcome to send questions any time.                     

[beauregard-s]

Take The Wheel (Richie Tozier x Reader)

Pairing: Richie Tozier x Reader (aged up)

Word Count: 3.8K

Warnings: NSFW. Sex, Oral (fem receiving), cursing and light dirty talking. Also mentions of alcohol.

Anon said:  “ alright for whatever reason I can only ever think of Richie concepts but that's okay he's my boy :0 Anyway, So like a Richie x Reader smut where Richie is teaching the reader to drive in an empty parking lot and he sits them in his lap so they're both in the drivers seat. And he gets a boner and then car sex boom that's the concept ”

A/n: I must say it’s some *chef’s kiss* concept. I really liked this one, and had a lot of Cigarettes After Sex’s help to write it lol. Hope I fulfilled your expectations, my dear anon.

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“Come on, doll, it’s your eighteen!”

“I already said no, Richie.”

It’s been years since you both realized you were too big to share the old hammock anymore, but you acted like it wasn’t an important detail. You and Richie had spent the afternoon laying there, he previously napping and now smoking a cigarette while you went through a thriller book Ben had lent you a couple weeks before and you were taking too long to return to him. 

Richie had his long hanging down, foot on the floor and here and there he’d swing you both from side to side, softly, in a way the had your eyelids fighting not to shut close. 

“What are you doing when I’m not around, then?” He teased once more, and it was enough for you to softly hit his ribs with your bare foot, since you two were so tangled in such little space that your legs rested by his sides.

“You’ll always be around, Trashmouth.”

“Maybe I won’t...” He blew smoke through his parted lips when you shoot a look, narrowing your eyes at him from over the book. The little lopsided smile he had made your insides tingle. 

Next week you’d turn eighteen and, until present days, you had not learned how to drive. That’d be a result of very strict and overprotective parents, alongside a not so irrational - in your thoughts -, but for sure overscaled fear of taking the steering wheel. 

Usually, Richie was the one driving you around on his beat-up truck, blasting Tears For Fears, an arm slung out of his window. Sometimes it was Stan or Bill, Mike and Ben were busier but they were always down to give you a ride if you needed it. Beverly was a heckin' reckless driver, but she was the one who usually took you shopping and even Eddie had rebelled against Sonia Kaspbrak to get his license. 

You were the last “baby” among the grown-ups.  

“Come on, y/n, I can teach you. I’m the best driver-”

“Stan is the best driver,” you corrected.

“Stan is bullshit!” he went, now pointing at you with his lit cigarette. “And you shall never say such fallacy again.”

You laughed his fake offended tone off, but, yeah, he was right. Stan could be the most prudent one, but he was too prudent even for your coward standards. Richie was, indeed, the best driver. Reckless, but not too reckless at the point of almost run over people on the street - like Bev did at least a couple times -, also he was surprisingly skilled, but had some worrisome courage, for sure. And he had got a few speed tickets, yeah, but he always knew what he was doing. 

Those facts, plus the way he kept looking and expecting at you made you roll your eyes and break.

“Fine, Tozier,” it was enough for his smile to widen up “but don’t blame me if I shove your car through a wall or something.”

He laughed and tickled your feet by his side, what made you jump on your place and kick him harder than the last time, earning a grunt of pain from him.

“Don’t worry, toots. I got you.”

**

It was an empty and probably abandoned parking lot behind the library. What on Earth could go wrong?

That was exactly what you thought when Richie set things up the last day, but, now, when you looked blankly at his truck parked there, with its doors opened, just waiting for you, it didn’t seem such a good idea anymore.

“Richie...” 

“No fucking way, doll, it’s the tenth time you call out for my name, not that I’m complaining.”

You threw him a pissed look, but of course it wouldn’t do any harm on those mocking eyes of his. But you looked better at Richie, right there under the golden hour light. His dark curls messed by his fingers and by the breeze that gently hit you, glasses always full of fingerprints on its lenses, but not hiding his narrowed eyes due to the clarity. He seemed more freckled than ever.

All of that made you tingle inside, again. Had been like that for a while now, and every time it’d happen, every time you’d feel that weird sensation, you’d just turn away from his view, not that bold to face whatever it was.

“Come on, toots, it won’t bite you! Let’s go!”

He placed his hand on the small of your back, gently pushing you to the driver’s side. You hopped onto the seat and Richie was so damn tall you felt you were miles away from the wheel and couldn’t even dream about reaching the pedals. He helped you adjust the seat to your height and ran around the car while you buckled your safety belt. 

“Fasten your belt.” You enjoined, the second he closed his door and looked up at you with expectation.

“For God’s sake, y/n, we’re just driving around the lot,” he scoffed, and you rolled your eyes. “Easy now. It’s no big deal, come on, start the car.”

Maybe you’d be able to focus and make your legs stop shaking, but Richie’s hand reaching for your thigh to supposedly soothe you down didn’t make it possible. And he stayed just like that when you turned the keys and the truck roared.

“Okay, now let’s switch the gear and loosen the handbrake...”

You had no idea of the amount of work involving getting a car to move. Richie kept instructing you and, for your disbelief, yes, he was a good teacher. He was clear as water when he told you what to do, and his voice went down to a soft and patient tone that made the tingling feeling hit you wave after wave. But even like that, you couldn’t put the thing on the road. The engine kept dying and you just weren’t coordinated enough to get it to move.

Richie and you switched places and he tried to teach you through visuals, letting you watch him as he drove around. And you really tried to. You focused on his hands but you wouldn’t absorb his moves. You’d just absorb how he firmly gripped onto the wheel and how skilled he moved the gear around. You tried to learn from his feet pressing the pedals, but your eyes would trail up to his sculpted side profile in the fading, cold light. How his lips looked soft, talking to you and dictating how you’d have to switch the gear every time the engine roared in en specific pleading way.

But you were fucking drooling over how handsome Richie Tozier was.

Before you had a chance to actually start paying attention to the mechanisms, he stopped the car like it all was the easiest thing. “See? Just like learning how to ride a bicycle.”

You tittered, not sure if you couldn’t keep up with all the steps on properly driving because there were a lot of them, or only because you just could take your eyes off Richie himself. 

“I don’t know... I mean, I think I just can’t coordinate enough,” you shrugged.

He shushed you immediately.

“No fucking way! You’re learning how to drive, and I’m teaching you, doll!” he raised his brows, his determination making you laugh again. Richie bit down his lip for a while, sitting sideways on the seat so he could face you.

“Do you want to sit on my lap, then? So I can help you?”

You slowly raised a brow and your brain sent off the red alert with a neon sign of “bad idea”.

“How messed up could this be?” You sneered.

“Not messed up at all, that’s actually how I first learn how to drive,” he smirked.

“Richie, you were ten, and no, pretending you’re driving isn’t learning how to drive,” you laughed.

You remembered that story very well, how Mr. Tozier would put Richie on his lap while driving around safe places when he was a little boy. But now this was a whole, dissimilar situation. 

Richie rolled his eyes, leaning in towards you, and you swore you were all hooded eyes at him. 

“Come on, doll, just like the truck, I won’t bite you.”

The red alert in your head went off even louder, but, still, with him that close and with the evening’s darkness engulfing both of you, your lips had a different plan than your mind.

“Okay...” it was what scaped through them.

And the way Richie smiled at that answer warmed your heart beyond what was acceptable. 

You unbuckled your belt as he pushed his seat back and even like that, fitting in between him and the wheel was a difficult task. You propped yourself up from the passenger seat, passing a leg over the gearstick to sit it between his. You both were a mess of legs and arms.

“Okay, toots, careful now-fuck!”

“Holyshit, Richie, did I hit you?”

“No, just my thigh. Big Richie’s okay...”

“I hate you.”

You managed to settle down to his lap, not too comfortably, but enough to access everything around you. To feel all of him beneath you.

“No way, sugar, you love me,” he whispered from behind, very close to your ear.

With a simple turn of neck, you could see Richie over your shoulder, and there was where he rested his chin. He took your left hand and placed it on the wheel, under his own. Your right hands together met the gear stick. 

“I’m starting the car now,” he warned. His hand left yours just for a moment, and his truck roared again. It vibrated slightly and that way you couldn’t help to friction down against Richie’s lap.

You thought you felt him stiffening up, but soon enough his hand was back over yours and he helped you switching the gear. 

“Now can I speed up?” You asked, trying your best to don’t look back at him, or else your lips would almost touch.

“Yeah, slowly. And keep those beautiful eyes on the road, toots.”

You did as he told you, slowly pressed your foot down the accelerator, and the truck slowly and finally left its spot under your riding.

You couldn’t help but smile. It was something really childish to do, but it was unconscious. Richie kept his right hand over yours, helping you through the gears correctly, his left one was supposed to guide the wheel with you, but as soon as he heard your giggles he let go, his arm resting lazily on his open window.

You only sped up to an acceptable speed to keep during a parking lot training, but it was enough for a breeze to blow through the open windows. You felt somehow proud, even if you have been strolling for five minutes in circles behind the library. You didn’t even notice Richie letting go of the bare control he had, but you were pretty aware of his hands falling down to rest on your thighs.

And you were pretty aware of the forming hardness underneath you. You could feel him, and every time you made a turn your hips would be dragged around due to physics causes you never understood while in high school. Every time that happened you could hear Richie sighing really close to your neck.

His thumbs traced circles against the skin of your thighs, right where it met the hem of your skirt. You were already relaxed back against him by now.

“I’m so sorry, toots...” You heard both a certain embarrassment, but also some guts in his voice. He was also pretty aware of what was happening, but you wondered if he was aware of the growing heat inside your chest, and the wetness inside your panties.

Or if he was aware of the way you “helped” physics by dragging your hips down onto his.

“Don’t be, Rich.” You muttered.

His hands went for yours again, and his feet took the place yours once had. Richie himself stopped the car and as soon as he turned the motor down you noticed how silent it was because he didn’t turn on the radio earlier, probably because he didn’t want to distract you.

But he ended up doing way more than that.

It was starting to get dark, maybe a little too dark. Dark in a level that’d be perfect to do hidden things and they’d remain safe under its cover. Maybe that was why you felt it was safe enough to turn your body slightly to the side, just enough to face Richie, and you two kissed in the dim light.

No words needed, not a single trace of hesitation because you both knew you'd been aching for this for a long time now. You parted your lips under his tongue insistence within time, tried to fought him for dominance. Absurdly unsuccessful that was. Richie had a hand through your hair, slightly pulling it so you couldn’t turn your face away from him. Little did he know you wouldn’t do that anyway. 

He was the one who pulled away after a while. You could tell he was smirking, eyes on yours, and then down to check on your already slightly kiss-bruised lips. He leaned in then, his nose softly brushing all the way up your neck, sending goosebumps through your spine just so he could talk lowly in your ear.

“I want you in the backseat, y/n/n.” 

You didn't know if it was how he sounded deep, or how he called you by the nickname that only he’d call you, nothing generical, but he made you whimper untouched. You just nodded and Richie pushed you off his lap gently, helping you to pass through the front seats.

You didn’t think car sex was comfortable at all, having experienced it in other guys’ sedans, but Richie’s car got some valuable space. It was enough for you to be dragged into Richie’s lap without your head bumping into the ceiling, as soon as he joined you there, kissing you as his life depended on it.

Richie smelled like smoke and tasted like mint chapstick and cola, and the way he held you so tightly against him was driving you insane alone. Slowly the darkness was taking over and you couldn’t see much of him, but you could feel him everywhere. Hands on your hips and crawling up your sides, underneath your top inch by inch. You couldn’t help to grind your hips down against his, earning yourself a low grunt every time you did that.

It was happening, and you couldn’t believe it. Richie and you've been friends over the time, but you’d be lying if you said you never looked at him in a messed up way, here and there. Mainly when you’d get drunk together in parties and he started to get extra flirty towards your horny self. And now, what you have fantasized about was happening.

“I want you down on me so bad...” You moaned.

You widened your eyes because it wasn’t meant to escape your lips like that. But it did and made Richie pull away from the spot he had been kissing on your neck, looking up at you.

You expected him to laugh or scoff, but he raised a brow slightly, lips curving in a way that had your legs weak.

“Don’t ask me twice, doll.” He mumbled.

Richie held you by your thighs before pushing you down to the seat. You propped yourself up to rest your back against the side of the car, ready to push shoes and clothes off, but he got different plans. Richie made his best to fit properly in between your legs, hands pushing your skirt up so it was lumping around your waist.

With no warning, Richie just pulled your panties down your legs, taking them off skillfully and shoving them in his pocket. With a smirk, he leaned himself down on you, drawing a bold lick all the way up from your slit to your clit.

You moaned louder than would be safe. Just the vision of Richie in between your thighs like that was enough to make you purr like a kitten, but the way he kept his eyes up just to watch what he was doing to you was top-shelf.

His hands were on your thighs, keeping you as spread for him as the space allowed, tongue flicking through your wet folds. And the motherfucker dared to hum against you.

“Fuck, y/n/n... How can you taste so good, doll?”

Your chest weaved up and down as you panted, a complete moaning mess. Your hands went for Richie’s curls, messing them up even more as he took turns closing his eyes to savor you, and then looking up at your blank pleasured face.

“Richie...” You cried out.

He pulled away for a second, thumb still rubbing circles on your clit to keep your pace.

“What, babe, are you gonna cum for me?”

You did. As soon as he reattached his lips to your heat again, you came by his mouth only.

Richie smirked satisfied at the way your legs were shaking and your eyes shut closed, still lazily licking you down your high, and as soon as your breath calmed down he was sitting back up, pulling you into his lap again, holding you so close you lost your breath.

When you and Richie kissed again, you could still taste yourself on his lips. Your hands fumbled with his jeans, unbuckling it quickly because you needed more of him. He groaned at your eager manners, immediately bucking his hips up so you could pull his pants and underwear down to his thighs.

“Holy fuck, Richie...”

You couldn’t hold it back when you looked down at his cock, fully hard for you. Richie didn’t praise himself for nothing. You felt like some stupid depraved girl, but Richie seemed to like it judging by the melodic laugh he let out. A laugh that quickly turned into a deep moan when you took him in your hands, pumping slowly.

The way Richie’s mouth hung opened when he breathed out heavily and the sounds that came outta there made you clench around nothing. You didn’t delay much before aligning yourself over him, slowly lowering your hips.

Richie cursed out loud, hands gripping onto your waist for his life as he threw his head back. Now you were the one observing how his chest went up and down fast, how he licked his lips with eyes closed in bliss. You had all of him inside you, every inch. He was stretching you out, yes, but he felt too good filling you up like that.

Richie finally looked at you, all hooded eyes and hands going for your shirt. He lifted the fabric enough to expose your breasts, mumbling something about loving that you didn’t wear a bra much often before attaching his lips to your nipple.

Your hands on his shoulders for support must have squeezed too tightly, but he didn’t seem to notice it under the loud moans you gave him. Richie’s lips slid from a breast of yours to the other, taking a time to kiss the valley between them.

“Ride me, doll...” He softly demanded, and you did.

You held tightly onto him when you started to bounce up and down very slowly, trying to adjust to him, but as soon as you picked up your pace the previously silent and dark truck was filled with both your moans. Richie was loud and it was something you expected and now his hoarse groans only drove you closer to your high.

He gave you a hickey on your breast, right before his lips escalated to kiss and mark your neck as well.

“How good you feel around me, y/n/n...”

You melted more in his arms every time he'd fill you up, every little nibble he’d plant on the sweet spot of your neck. You felt your muscles tensing, clenching tightly around Richie’s cock right before you came undone once again.

As soon as you reached the peak, your loud moans were muffled by Richie’s hungry lips on yours. When your legs went numb, he kept thrusting up into you, hands grabbing handfuls of your ass until he came.

Richie came moaning into your mouth, while you drifted away from your orgasm and your fingers caressed back the curls that covered his face. You could barely see him by now, but the few traces you could discern made you smile numbly.

Holy shit. You were in love.

You fucked Richie in his car, and now you were in love.

No, you’ve been in love with him for a long time but only now, when the facts were spread right in front of your eyes, you admitted it. Only now, feeling the numerous small kisses he was spreading all over your shoulder and collarbone, and how his cold hands cupped your breasts gently, only now you admitted it.

Things were silent for a while, while Richie had his face buried against the crook of your neck and you still cockwarmed him. You didn’t want to leave him, you were afraid that as soon as you put yourself together, he’d check you out off his hook up list and drag you back to the friend zone.

“I fucking love you, y/n/n.”

You still breathed heavily when he whispered that, but you immediately felt like your lungs stopped working.

You pushed Richie away from you, making him look at your face in the dark, although you could only see the little reflection of his glasses.

“What the hell did you just say?”

“Nothing, I-Shit...”

“Richie.” You were serious, and that made him bite down his lips, thinking he had messed things up with you.

“I’m fucking in love with you, doll.”

You kissed him.

The second he finished that phrase you took his face in your hands and kissed him. A long, slow, and breathtaking kiss.

Richie’s arms wrapped around your waist and his glasses were for sure getting dirtier touching your face, but he didn’t care about it and nor did you.

Only your lips parted away a few moments later, but you kept your foreheads together, eyes closed and hearts going a mile a minute.

“I’m fucking in love with you too, Trashmouth” you mumbled.

You smiled in a cheesy way and somehow you knew he was doing the same.

“Although you’re a bad a drive instructor who ends up fucking your learner”

“Shut up, y/n.”

You laughed together and Richie hugged you against him. That was for sure a not recommend spot to be parked at that hour, but none of you minded that. He was still inside you and you'd keep him like that for at least some moments more because you needed your legs to stop trembling and you also needed to feel more of him against you like that.

"Rich..." You furrowed your brows lightly, curled into his chest. "Where the fuck are my panties?"

He chuckled.

"They are safe, toots. And, by the way, those are mine now."

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

chin fucking up, amigo.

Titans 3.02

... eh?

SPOILERS ahead.

1. you know that music video for billie jean where michael jackson would dance along the pavement and the tiles would light up under his feet in different colours? yeah? me too.

titans hasn’t met a table top or a support arch that it doesn’t want to light up in a headache-inducing blue like the world’s most boring nightlight. i mean, i’m not an expert on lighting or cinematography or just... colour by any means, and the quality of the video i’m watching is poor given that i can’t access hbo max, but all the orange and teal and neon is making it very difficult to really differentiate between say, the batcave and the gotham police department and hell, the titans tower. i feel like there’s oftentimes a gap between idea and execution with titans, with gotham being this almost otherwordly hellscape with an aesthetic pulled from a gothic horror novel, but the colours and design just... leave it flat and dark and dull.

1.5. like what really frustrates me is that titans has a delightful mix of tones--the fights often remind me of schumacher-era batman camp, with the contrived quips and the start-stop rhythm and krypto just sallying in and ending the fight with a fucking SuperBark (tm) but in the same episode you have red hood just casually pulling out severed heads out of a duffle bag and desperate people blackmailed into killing themselves out of drug overdoses. I MEAN. it’s wonderful! but it looks all the same. it sounds Absolutely Bonkers on paper but on screen both Quip and Murder happen in the same washed-out blue and i wanted to be excited about the batcave, dammit!

2. things re: red hood have happened at such a breakneck speed that it feels like there’s so much that’s happened off-screen that we’re not privy to. a real proper mystery! 

things that are intriguing about the red hood arc so far:

a) what was that chemical he huffed just before going to fight the joker? is it a regular old performance/adrenaline booster or is it something more lazarus-juice adjacent? if it’s the latter, i can’t imagine he got that much information from a lone chemistry textbook. and where is he getting the resources to set up his little chemistry lab? is somebody else orchestrating things behind the scenes?

b) the red hood persona, costume and mask, plus the elaborate plan he’s putting in place to both string along gotham’s rogues and enact his revenge against the titans seems too... fully-formed and elaborate to have been concocted in just a few days. how long do you think jason’s been planning this? just... stewing in resentment and building rage, dismissed and passed around and underestimated and realising that the power he thought he would get by being robin is no power, no protection at all, but something that’s left him even more vulnerable than before? 

c) do we think that the scarecrow is at least partly behind this transformation? because yes, it was batman that set up this whole hannibal lecter-esque situation with him, and he would be irresponsible enough to have jason-as-robin go talk to him regularly regarding “~profiling~” criminals. it’s not too far of a leap to assume that scarecrow could’ve been manipulating jason at a very vulnerable time, and that he could’ve passed along some of his chemistry know-how, too.

d) ... or fuck, i wouldn’t put it past titans to introduce ra’s al ghul in a fucking ten second aside

e) anyway, the thing that won’t leave me alone is jason seeking out the joker not necessarily to fight him, but to orchestrate his own death. the whole thing has to have been part of a bigger plan. he broke batman with it, after all. and he’s starting to break the titans, too.

f) i love it! i mean, it does re-tread some of the storybeats we had with deathstroke last season (turning the titans against each other as revenge, etc) but it’s... tighter, this time, and at least for now seems better-executed. and as a red hood story it’s different enough to be really interesting, and i appreciate the ways in which its reframed the revenge story to focus on the titans rather than just the batman. like fuck everything up, i say! turn it on its head! slash the innards out of that sacred cow and strew it like garlands in the path of the Story You Want To Tell!

(and yes i am fully aware that by the time i post this review, there will be a whole lot more information out but if i come across like a fool then goddammit i will be a fool!)

2. i love how every season of titans starts off with, ‘oh dick, you thought you were settling into a role and a life and a pattern of relationships? well fuck you, here’s a terrible and traumatic thing, tons more responsibility, and circumstances that will lead you to uproot your entire life and move somewhere else.’ and dick’s just like, ‘well, ok. fuck you, but all right’.

can you imagine? the man was just settling into leading a team in sf and smiling for the first time in years, and now he has to deal with jason’s death, bruce experiencing a full fledged breakdown, coming back to a city that represents more bad memories than good, red hood, and a frightening new case that seems to be targeting him and his team. it’s a testament to dick’s growth that he’s not reacting to this stress like he did last year, shutting everybody out, making irrational decisions and experiencing sharp, short bursts of anger. (not to mention a full fledged psychotic episode.)

2.5. but i’ve also talked about dick performing a fair amount of unwarranted emotional labour for his team(s) in that he just lets them take out their frustrations on him and... does nothing. be it his team exploding at him for jericho (both in flashback and present-day) or donna and hank needling him for handling deathstroke poorly or barbara berating him for not handling the bank situation as well as she thought batman would though just the previous episode she had talked about how fucked up it was that bruce just expected dick to step up and replace him in gotham without any real notice. i mean it’s all perfectly understandable and sympathetic from their end--and i’m not trying to bash them here!--but hank, my man, the same chin you’re asking your amigo to keep up is the one that you punched last year and never apologised for. just sayin’.

2.75. @superohclair did a wonderful breakdown of what the ‘fear’ contract could imply here and there’s not too much i could add to that. it’s just really interesting that fear ended up being such a defining feature of their lives, albeit it’s the fear of seeming less than invincible in the face of bigger, more tangible fears. am i making sense?  dick feared loss, and abandonment, and the more existential concept of turning into something that he didn’t want to. bruce so feared being alone that he’s scouting kids to replace robin within days of jason dying. 

it also goes some way in explaining the tense sort of... restraint that bruce and dick show in the wake of loss and tragedy, like anything less than complete control of your emotions can lead to tragedy. it’s conditioning that dick couldn’t shake off when he was at his lowest in detroit, hating his legacy but unable to let it go either.

2.775. but i definitely appreciate the softness that dick displays with his team now, checking on them after a mission-gone-bad, welcoming back old members with no caveats or resentments (and kory’s delight in seeing hank back! hank and dick hanging out together and hank trying to prop dick up!), and appreciating their teamwork in solving cases. that’s always been the essence of dick as a person, and the beating heart of this show: flawed and traumatised people coming together to a place that will always be open to them, where they can be their worst and be supported still, allowed to make mistakes and grow from them. that’s family.

2.8. coming back to bruce for just a sec, it’s interesting how that gotham rogue was so certain when he said that ‘batman doesn’t kill’ but it’s not a rule that either jason or dick put much store by when they were robins. the ‘no-killing’ rule clearly didn’t mitigate dick’s fears about turning into batman and jason’s never been seeing giving two shits about it. it seems to me of a piece with bruce’s distant, second-hand sort of parenting that we see in dick’s flashbacks from s1 where the fear was never about personally disappointing batman, but taking lessons from him on finding a place in gotham’s hellish ecosystem and surviving.

3. kory having waking flashbacks! i don’t buy the bullshit parasomnia episode explanation from fake!HPG (because c’mon, justin has to be some sort of tamaranean ruse) because for one, you have to be actually asleep for that diagnosis. 

(and here i was, hoping against hope that HPG would actually end up as the team’s therapist)

curiouser and curiouser! i wonder if these flashbacks are from the time between kory landing on earth and the beginning of season 1, when she was completely amnesiac? it’d be cool if the show was considering repercussions from that time, and if kory hasn’t gained all her memories back. 

4. i just love the vibes between gar and conner and kory. gar Having Things To Do is only one part of my wishlist for him, however: other parts include having an actual story arc, and actually bonding with members who are not conner and kory. (dick! dick! hank! dick!)

anyway. time to move on to watching ep3 and seeing this family bond and nothing terrible and tragic happening at all, nope, nosiree. 

[ashleyswrittenwords]

How to be a Queen [Part 26]

Summary: Princess Zelda is at a loss. Her handed royal responsibilities have begun to weigh heavily on her and she is eventually backed into a corner. Live a life she loathes or run away from everything she’s ever known? Navigating life is hard, and Link forces her to learn that she doesn’t have to do it alone.

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Part 1

How To Be A Queen

I hated this.

She stared at me. My own staring had long turned to a steady glower; eyes squeezed almost shut as I tried to pick apart every stitch for some inkling of an answer. Maybe the real problem is that I didn’t have a coherent question.

The fire in my father’s mantle crackled to fill in my silence and illuminating my balled-up place on the carpet. I should be asleep right now, that was the plan anyway, but it was thwarted earlier in the day when my last bedroom was deemed a “risk”.

Still, I hated it all the more. The doll was in the same useless state where I placed it – a slightly slouched perch on the velvet loveseat. It intensely reminded me of when my tutors would make me find symbolism in a storybook where there obviously wasn’t, making me conjure some flowery explanation for why the author used this phrase or that description.

With my knees up to my chin, I fiddled with the hem of my night gown and wondered and wondered and wondered because a head full of pointless thoughts felt better than nothing at all.

There was commotion – arguing, then the door opened and I was met with the burning sight of Urbosa. In her hand was a page, crumpled by her fist, and I understood before she spoke.

“You can’t be serious!” she glowered. Urbosa was a woman who schooled her expressions masterfully yet now she was untamed.

My face reddened, embarrassment probably. “I can explain.”

“Explain what exactly? This man has threatened my life, my countrywomens’ lives, and now yours… and you want to give him a platform to speak on?”

She was outraged, flailing Ganondorf’s letter as she spoke. I pressed my lips together and let her rant on about what I had mentioned to Impa before. My toes pressed deep into the carpet.

“Your anger is something I can understand,” I finally said, frowning when she caught my gaze. “But I’m not a child and this is not an entirely irrational reaction.”

Urbosa watched me for a tense moment and stepped away to pace the room in an attempt to air out her feelings. When she did, I saw Impa accompanied her with a careful presence. I steeled myself for whatever it was she wanted to say.

My father’s quarters weren’t where I expected to be tonight, but at least he was in a safer (and more inconspicuous) part of the castle. If anything, the familiar setting was a slight comfort even if it wasn’t my own room. It was an airy space and not much had changed since the war started. I rose from my spot, trying to gracefully slip the doll into my gown’s deep pockets and perched myself where the toy once sat.

“Okay,” the Gerudo leader breathed again, sitting on the cushions with Impa across from me. “Okay, then explain it to me.”

I breathed in deeply. “No doubt you’ve read what he’s wrote, but I’ve read it more than you have. Let’s talk about it.”

The half impatient nod my way with born out of pure frustration. I could completely understand it, but it didn’t make the feeling of pressure any lighter.

“In his words, he wants to declare a form of parley,” I spoke, slowly choosing my words. “Meaning a temporary truce in war to sit down and discuss negotiation – or the start of them.”

I swallowed as I mentally scanned through the letter word-for-word in my head:

I doubt that my reputation holds well in your circles and it would be foolish to give a nobody’s word any weight.

“Traditionally, it would be held by one party sending an ambassador of sorts to the opposition. We would discuss terms at a distance, however he is willing to travel to Hyrule Castle himself.”

Urbosa scoffed, “That’s even worse.”

“It means he’s going in place of someone expendable. It was the whole point of ‘parley’ as a concept and he is willing to give us leverage to make this happen.”

I could tell there was more she wanted to say, but she chose not to. Impa spoke up instead.

“I realize that I haven’t told you this before,” she said. “But you should consider your image.”

My brow furrowed, “My image?”

“To history, Zelda, there has never been an enemy like this within the castle walls unless force was taken. No other ruler has offered an invitation like this before. Don’t you find that troubling?”

I felt my frown deepen. The fabric of my gown twisted around my fingers. I took another deep breath of the burning applewood in the hearth before saying, “The conflict we’re currently in has surpassed the amount of casualties in any other war I have lived through in half the time. Pray tell, do you find that troubling?”

They didn’t reply; they didn’t have to.

“I am afraid,” I spelled out. “I am afraid to see the country being torn with violence and bloodshed. To consider that I am assumed its leader is another type of fear I haven’t grasped yet, much less what historians will jot me down as. Better yet, let’s discuss how someone I know very dearly is out there; contingent to the choices I make.”

Roughly, I swallowed. My gaze went to the ceiling where engravings of old legends escaped the firelight.

“Let us discuss what I know will be his vehement disapproval of my consideration. My goal here is to mitigate as much as I can and if that means buying time at the cost of my reputation, then so be it,” I conceded. Impa stared at her hands and I could only feel shame, weak. I wonder if that’s what she had in mind. “Horrible rulers have preceded me and I don’t expect to be the last.”

There was a long moment of quiet that made it awful to resist squirming in my seat. I didn’t like our options either, but pride was my father’s forte. I wasn’t about to inherit it now that an opportunity like this is tangible, even if it came about through unconventional means. I’ll let them move me into the royal quarters and I’ll let them squander more of my personal time with increased security – I won’t let them pass this up without a single consideration.

Urbosa and Impa stood, I expected them to leave immediately but instead Urbosa said my name and took my hand in hers. Worry was in her eyes.

“You know I would never give you up,” I said softly. “I really hope you weren’t expecting me to abandon you so quickly.”

The sofa dipped slightly as she took a seat. “Tamen non obliviscar tui et filiae.”

At my slight confusion she merely smiled and said, “It means: Never forget your daughters. We say that when we underestimate our children after they’re grown. I am scared, Zelda.”

Our hand hold slipped into an embrace. She continued, “I worry constantly for you. As much as I want to, I don’t have all the answers. None of us do and maybe that’s why I reacted the way I did. I forgot that and, more importantly, I forgot you.”

  The next days brought sleepless nights. I wasn’t sure if I preferred them because in the darkness was the chilling vision of what Link had become. That dream wouldn’t fade as the days wore on, instead sharpening in the parts that struck me the most. In the mirror of my room, when Anju would prod at the dark circles under my eyes, I would see his eyes staring at me.

“It wasn’t real,” I muttered, almost angrily.

Anju grunted behind me with bobbypins caught between her teeth. “What wasn’t?”

“I had a dream,” I said. “And it wasn’t real, but I feel like it was and it’s ridiculous.”

“Well, ya look tired enough,” she replied with a nonchalant drawl, watching me in the mirror a moment before shrugging. “Everyone has nightmares, Zelda. Even Her Royal Grace Majesty Herself.”

The smile I tried to suppress fought hard. “It was about Link.”

“You’re worried! Welcome to the club. You already know the things Aryll writes to me, halfway between gloating and going stir crazy,” she laughed. “His next present to her has to be twice as shiny as the last.”

Her hands paused in their tugging. “If it’s bothering you, you should talk about it.”

I sighed, relenting quickly because she’d prod further if I hadn’t. I left out the odd parts about the strange man and the dancing and focused more on when I saw Link.

“It was probably me projecting…” I groaned. “But he seemed driven mad, Anju! And I caused that. The only reason why he isn’t with his family or living more peacefully is because of me.”

She considered it, seeming to weigh my words as she viewed me from the front. Her nose crinkled, “Zelda, you know that boy. I know that boy. When we were kids, he would always be the lead troublemaker leading the charges. Shocking, believe me I know, but you must be raving mad if you think he wouldn’t force himself into this mess regardless of your decisions.”

“With or without me?”

She hummed in thought, “Reckless is a word I would use  – no, wait – organized recklessness. But he has always needed help picking up the pieces. It used to be Aryll with scrapes and bruises.” Then, there was a glint in her eye that made me laugh, “I wonder who it’ll be now?”

  “There is no guarantee that the negotiations will come to anything,” Fierlin grimaced, reading through Ganondorf’s letter. “Though I won’t disagree that a truce, no matter how temporary, is a plus.”

He stroked his beard with a raised brow and met my eyes. “Do you… know how to send news to your right hand?”

We were in my father’s study with a long list of staff sitting on my desk, each with a detailed list of any possible connections to the opposition. I pushed it away.

“I have consulted every consultant at my fingertips at the moment; written out the pros and cons,” I said. My head rested on my fist in a dull way to help my sore neck.

“Well,” the man leaned back in his chair as old worn men tended to, “I know the tenacity and unwillingness to quit. I’ve gotten well acquainted with that side of him when he was my captain. Don’t get me wrong, Your Majesty, Link will follow any order you give him… but he will fight and kick every step of the way.”

“That’s only because Admiral Whitehurst is with him right now.”

He raised a hand to negate me. “Not necessarily. Link’s a fine remediator. He doesn’t show obvious favor to anyone under him and is constantly listening. He’ll tune out whatever sees fit. Any resistance you saw came from him alone.”

I glanced down at one of my desk drawers that contained some of Link’s letters and closed my eyes.

“I want him to travel back to the castle if we go through with it.” When, really, but it was hard to believe what was happening myself.

The look he gave me wasn’t remotely hopeful.

“I wouldn’t count on it. It’s not likely he would abandon his men because who is to say this truce lasts more than a day? We don’t know the temperament of this ‘Ganondorf’ and he is largely unpredictable in much else.”

“Will Link resent the idea that much?”

“I predict he will…” Fierlin stopped himself, then sighed. “He will have some complications with it.”

  That night, crumpled papers littered desk. They were filled with words that didn’t string together properly and thoughts that weren’t quite complete. The first letter was a formal inquiry of Ganondorf’s arrival. On the closed envelope, I pressed my father’s insignia with more pressure than necessary.

I kept it in a closed drawer because the second letter was both an order and request for counsel.

In this, my thoughts were far more frayed and there were countless drafts that kept the wick of my candle burning. It was a constant debate on whether I should even forgo pairing the first with it. I recalled his reluctance to retreat and the disappointment that came after. The ink pen felt heavier in my hand.

This was when I realized that this was what Impa was fearful of.

My hand dragged down my cheek and I forced myself to sit up straighter.

She has told me more than once, no matter how indirect, that whatever Link and I had would eventually conflict with my duties. Especially with the dynamic at play now, he was my Commander General and I was his Queen. I have asked the opinion of all my resources both past and present, why should my consideration of his opinion be so weighty?

It had grown to the point where I could barely put pen to paper.

An obstruction of my duties, that is a phrase Impa would say.

The words I ended up writing were addressing him formally. Though I was sure word had been sent about what had happened, I reiterated the events from what Lord Ibauna shouted about to the letter within my room. After that, in the most political way I could muster, I told him I was considering it with the counsel in mind. This time, I wouldn’t slip an additional note because I couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t me trying to influence him.

I bound the two letters and sent them the same night. Once I get the General’s counsel, I will make the final decision and either order him to send a messenger… or not.

  This is grossly miscalculated.

Urbosa was speaking, but it was difficult to truly listen to her. She was walking beside me. I want to say that her gentle suggestions to coax me off the ledge were helping, but it only pushed me to push my nails deeper into my palm. The sharp pain helped me more to keep my mouth shut.

“He was only trying to assert another option.”

Immature

I glanced to her and said through gritted teeth, “What he was trying to do was insult my integrity.”

My steps were heavier than they usually were when going to attend meetings with the admirals. On any other day, I would approach it with a cool head. It was a war room, I wanted to be as even keeled and level-headed as I could.

Rash

Now, I couldn’t stop seeing red.

Just barely, I turned my head towards her. “He acts as if he has had lifetimes of experience already,” I hissed, pausing briefly while passing a couple of maids with bowed heads. “Link is barely any older than I. Ridiculous.”

Urbosa and I bounded a set of stairs and before I entered the war room, I requested an ink pen and parchment as well as the awaiting messenger. It hadn’t been two days before I got a reply from Link. A set of officers stood when I entered the room.

I wasn’t exactly surprised to see Admiral Whitehurst return almost immediately after the letter arrived. His face was still red from his traveling and I politely acknowledged him.

“Your general isn’t happy,” he said. “He made the carriage ride through the night, gods willing my back is still intact.”

“Oh, no,” I uttered out, splaying the several pages Link had written me onto the table. “He surely is not.”

The admiral blinked considerably. I had never acted this way in front of them, but at this point I didn’t have the luxury to care. The only reason I took a seat was to keep them all from standing awkwardly.

“Groveling at the enemy’s feet, he says,” I glanced at the pages with a casted hand. “How, exactly, is he coming to these absurd conclusions?”

I feared that he would have tried to influence Link more in my disfavor, but I did trust what Fierlin had told me and the handwriting on the correspondence was unmistakably Link. Why he had sent John Whitehurst was a mystery to me altogether, perhaps in an effort to sway me even more?

Well, good, I thought. Maybe the one he is receiving will beat some sense into him.

Whitehurst grunted as he sat back in his chair and took a moment to adjust.

“General Forester is doing what he was appointed to do, fight to win. If we pause, especially in the terms he has relayed to me, I believe that he believes you have given up.”

I reeled back, “When has lessening the toll this war has taken meant ‘giving up’? Did he say those exact words?”

He looked uncomfortable. “Um, yes, perhaps, Your Grace.”

I breathed in deeply. Slowly, I counted from ten.

Tyrant was a bad look on anybody – more so me.

“Okay,” I said finally, calmer. “I think we can now say we have received all the insight we need to make a decision.”

A guard who was outside the door brought in a pot of ink, a pen and parchment. I thanked him quietly.

“I wanted to convene one more time before I decide to send this order,” I said, taking the pen between my fingers. The correspondence on the table, which Urbosa was now leafing through with Whitehurst, was missing the final page. It was burning in my dress pocket.

Reconsider, Zelda.

I caught Urbosa’s gaze while the officers and the sparse admirals had a last discussion about weighing the final options, or their lack of. She watched me with a solemn demeaner. Then, she nodded.

I will not be there to help you.

I don’t need his help.

“Is it decided, gentlemen?”

Delicately, I folded the paper twice just in time for the messenger to walk through.

My only words to him was an order to send my acquisition across enemy lines.

[suncatchr]

Heyo if u wanna talk abt ur ocs can u tell me abt the newest ones (or at least the ones that r new to me which is all of them on the last pic of ur oc post I think?) :3

omggg thank you for asking :3 this is long sorry i haven’t organised my thoughts about them yet ahjfklsa but here we go

before i can talk abt rain n evie i have to explain the universe with kes, amaya, and rio. im sure you remember them :3 but umm you said they were based on pacific rim and i don’t know anything abt pacific rim fhjlafnj sooo i made a bunch of stuff up. soooo there’s a parallel universe/alternate dimension full of people and like, monsters. the alt. universe people r testing ways to break into our dimension and open the door permanently so that both dimensions are their domain. the... city...? that the story is set in is like a capitalists’s dream, split harshly between rich and poor with no middle class. the poor faction of the city that will be named soon is the one responsible for keeping the other-dimension-ers out of our dimension, most if not all of them are responsible in some way for keeping their area safe from those tears in the ozone layer. they in return are given technology, money, and supplies from the rich faction. those guys do next to nothing, they operate like any other city where everyone has jobs and pays their dues to the government. they are very strict about who they let into the city; they don’t want outsiders to know about their dimension problem lest they stop the warriors from doing their jobs or do something to make the tear bigger etc etc. they also don’t want poor people in the city, even if they’re responsible for everyone’s safety. I’m thinking of making the story a really obvious allegory similar to older-fashioned dystopian novels like animal farm and brave new world because i’m obsessed with those in concept. so i think supporting characters will be one-dimensional caricatures of types of people in society, and only the MCs will have nuance. this also makes it easier for me to write side characters ;3

so kestrel and amaya are siblings mostly born and raised into monster-fighting. you know when there’s a factory or whatever in town that most people in that city work at? there’s one of those but it’s like... a firehouse for monster fighting. they mostly live and sleep there, they’re fed and clothed here for free so long as they fight and they’re both content with that. I’m not sure what happened to their parents yet but they’re probably dead. not everyone’s parents are dead, some people have families that they live with at the... compound, these two are just tragic and whatnot. families are encouraged to fight together in duos or trios so that loyalty makes them fight smarter and harder to protect each other. when they’re not at the compound, like if they have shifts off or whatever, they live in an abandoned subway station and steal power from the government who’s unaware that that track is unused 😌

so as far as them as individuals, i kept the planets that u based them off of :3 kestrel is based off mars and mars is the planet of action, energy, motivation, temper. kestrel is moody and temperamental, but their choices are never made without careful consideration. they’re a quick thinker and that makes them confident, so they never back down from a challenge. they have a hard time masking their emotions and it’s easy to see what’s going on in their head. they’re hard to embarrass, though, and they’re very confident in most of their assertions. they’re impatient and crabby, but they aren’t at all shy.

amaya is based off venus, so she’s more emotionally rounded than her sibling and more interested in the poetry of life. she’s very expressive and polite, and she has a thing abt maintaining her image. she’s a bit materialistic and self-centred, focused on her looks and her space, but she’s realistic in her material n sensual desires because al things considered she lives in a subway station. she knows what to expect from life, or at least she thinks she does, and is just as confident in her own assertions as kestrel. she’s stubborn and argumentative for that reason, but her confidence makes her a natural leader and people flock to her for advice and assistance. she loves this.

and adrion, based off earth, comes into their lives later. rio used to live on the rich side of town until a second dimension creature escapes the notice of the warriors (i swear they won’t actually be called “warriors” forever 😭) and destroys his part of the city. his family is alright, but the destruction makes him feel like he could do a better job than whoever’s currently there. he leaves his family to join up with the. the compound, and when asked to find a partner to fight with, chooses amaya and kestrel because they’re a top-of-their-class team who are always talking about how things could be better. at first, they don’t want him bc they’re lone wolves and they do not like to be told what to do. but he’s a tough fighter and he’s got the motivation to be good, so they let him stay on the team. as far as personality, rio is really chill and understanding, often willing to let other people’s faults slide. as long as he’s allowed to do what he wants to do, other people can have their way. he’s cheerier than the other two but he’s quieter and more in-the-background. his strong will makes him sensitive and he refuses to change his mind often because he’s quite naive and gullible, making him easy to trick and take advantage of which makes him insecure. this makes him prone to snapping when people put pressure on him.

now for rain and evie. i originally created them as prototypes for their own narrative but the story seemed really similar to my other stuff so i scrapped it BUT i thought the characters themselves worked in this story instead so i kept them :3. rain and evie are brothers who were initially raised in a fighting ring. they live on the poor side of town but they never worked for the compound. they make a living by gladiator fighting, people pay to come in and bet on them and obviously they’re paid for winning fights. rain is an extremely adept fighter and usually manages to beat opponents with brute strength. evie is smaller and less physical and usually fights by using the opponent’s strength against them. they’re simultaneously popular and unpopular in their neighbourhood as they’re like. cool for being good in the ring but they’re really weird otherwise. they’re aggressive, angry and irrational, they act like they’re always in the ring. rain is more sociable and capable than evie, who tends to be reactive and angry. he doesn’t want to be here, but rain is more content in his abilities, so he handles mostly everything so that evie doesn’t have to be responsible for anything. they end up moving on from the ring after evie takes on an opponent that rain tried to tell everyone that he could never beat. evie takes a violent blow to the head that leaves him comatose, and rain spends a huge chunk of money for a piece of technology that replaces the damaged areas of evie’s head and functions in its place. no one tells rain, though, that the thing he put in evie’s head is technology from the other dimension. after the two leave the ring, they decide to make themselves useful and fight the monsters that forced them into this life in the first place.

personality-wise, rain is a laid-back, go-with-the-flow kind of guy. he likes to let things take their course and he isn’t much concerned with proceedings outside of himself and evie. he purposefully denies himself negative emotion and usually tries to fake that everything is good all the time. despite this, he’s emotional and reactive and extremely defensive. he doesn’t like to be challenged or made unhappy and in his dream world he and evie are always just hanging out doing what they want and not having to answer to anyone. people often find him charming bc he’s able to finagle most situations into him getting his way, he’s exceptional with people but he doesn’t like them.

evie is more sullen and droopy. he almost always lets rain do all the talking and he usually appears unconcerned with most goings-on because he’s letting rain evaluate the situation. he’s usually inside his own head, daydreaming or fussing. most of his interactions with others are verbal or physical fights bc he’s unsure how to manage himself without rain around and is often willing to fight for whatever he thinks rain would want. he’s independent outside of that, doesn’t like to be told what to do or how to act. not even rain can calm him down when he’s on his soapbox because he truly believes that if he had to grow up a fighting dog he should be allowed to do whatever the fuck he wants. in downtime he’s usually a little bit more uppity than rain but still similarly laid-back and willing to act like things are okay.

the five of these characters r in the same universe and they go on missions together often, though kes and amaya don’t really get along with rain and evie because they’re all so stubborn.

next are niko and andre, who i got from sammy! we got urban fantasy going on here, and i’m thinking of setting it in like. the mid 1800-s. i’m feeling spicy. umm so i think the key thing about this universe is that “hunters” are a species of humanoid monster. this world is spinning with vampires, werewolves, faeries, demons, etc. pretending to be human in order to survive, and hunters are a mimic species that look human but just... aren’t. they have an insatiable desire to hunt and kill (used to be for food but humans make food more easily accessible), but killing humans makes them vulnerable to being found out. killing other monsters is the perfect substitute, plus humans praise them for it. they’re onto each other but they can’t make scenes in human society so they have to dance around each other to do all of their killing in secret.

andre is a hunter living in the shadow of his older sister, angel. she’s a better, more ruthless hunter than he is, with stronger instincts and a greater prey drive. she’s popular with people in town and generally just more charismatic. he really wants to be like her, but he’s klutzy and insecure and his instincts are poor cuz he overthinks them. one day he comes across niko in a bar and, perceiving him to be human bc he has 0 instincts, they get their flirt on. until niko says something that makes andre realise he’s a vampire. embarrassed and ashamed of his attraction, andre tries to turn his feeling of betrayal into murderous instinct, and he can turn that anger into his first solo kill. niko keeps chasing after andre trying to catch his non-murderous attention because he actually really likes him and doesn’t want to let what they are get in their way.

personality wise, niko is a noisy little wisecracker who likes to be popular. he’s a genuinely nice guy and is famous wherever he goes for being wise and helpful. he’s usually pretty optimistic and very charming, especially in bigger crowds where he can fit in. he can be purposefully oblivious and is very good at disguising his feelings and intentions. he’s witty and sarcastic, often masking negativity for the sake of keeping it light.

andre is a straightforward intellectual type who likes to work and create and achieve. he’s intelligent and steadfast and always strives to do his best (which is why being terrible at hunting is upsetting for him). making achievements kind of replaces his understanding of himself, and not being good at things really digs at his self-worth. he’s not much of a people person but he’s not really shy, either. he’s polite and good-natured, though his feelings are quite fragile.

next generation, same universe, next is honour (whose name HAS to be spelled with the u), journey, and solace. resident throuple. honour and solace are hunters, and journey is human. honour was raised in a big home with lots of hunters under the iron fist of like, the mean nursemaid from annie. they hunt monsters as an organised group, but its a violent institution that doesn’t believe in autonomy nor the worth of human lives. humans exist as something to blend into while they exterminate all other monsters. honour stops believing this when she gets older, mostly due to meeting journey. she assumes journey is just going to be vapid and goofy bc he’s a human, but he ends up being a really cool dude who’s just as in-depth as her and she begins to realise how terrible the lessons she was raised on are.

journey’s family were aware that they were often surrounded by monsters and as such were very protective of him and his siblings. journey never gets to go out and do things, and being stuck in the stuffy comfort of his home is not what he wants to do with his life when he knows there are monsters out there. when he and honour hit it off, they decide to run away together, deciding to shed their upbringings entirely by changing their names to the things they want most.

i set this in the 1800s JUST so that i could have honour and journey use the train to run away. not nice public transit trains, i mean they are riding the dirty rusty rails to seek a better life. they intend to ride a long time to make sure that they’re never recognised. on one of the trains they catch to head north, they come across solace, helping him onto the train as he got there a split second too late to catch it. despite his initial gratitude, solace is unpleasant to ride with. turns out he’s been on the run for most of his life and is just trying to find a place to stay where no one will care that he’s a hunter. in human-only societies hunters are known as mimics and are heavily discriminated against if you’re suspected of being one and straight up killed if you are. after living an uncomfortable life and seeing his father killed, solace decides to go from town to town until he finds a place that’s mostly hunters. when honour reveals they’re looking for the same thing, solace decides to go with them. he’s hesitant to give up his name because it was given to him by his parents, but ultimately he wants to leave that life behind and embody comfort and. yk. solace.

haven’t quite figured these three out personality-wise bc i only finished their designs and names in time for posting the art, rip

and lastly my warriors ocs! I decided to make regular fanclans as opposed to using my existing ocs in an au mostly because i didn’t wanna add in random npcs (as it were) to fill the nursery and elder’s den even tho those r important to clan life. so, i made separate ocs, they live in the arctic! summitclan in the mountains, tundraclan in the plains, and glacierclan by the. glacier. the story so far is a murder mystery, cats of all clans are being killed and going missing and no one knows why. while most warriors assume there’s a bear or fox hanging around the territories, the apprentices saw something while they were hanging out that made them decide to investigate deeper...

our mc is snowpaw, a repurposed rp oc fjdkfjld;af. he’s a summitclan cat and he’s known to be strange and standoffish. he seems cold and apathetic about almost everything and it’s hard to see what he enjoys and dislikes. his secretiveness makes it easy for him to investigate the murders, no one ever questions where snowpaw is going or what he’s doing. with his friends and family snowpaw is a little more jovial, he has very dry humour and is also always trying to help

crowpaw is a tundraclan cat. he’s stuck up and big-mouthed, very arrogant little know it all. don’t ever tell him that, though, bc he’s very sensitive and he will cry. he likes to be seen as the best at everything so he dedicates excess time to learning and is actually a very curious and adventurous cat underneath.

swiftpaw is a glacierclan cat. he’s very mature and is often rumoured to be a great deputy choice when he’s old enough. he’s calm and level-headed, a quick-thinking problem solver with a bit of a superiority complex but not one that anyone in his life would be aware of bc he’s so darn polite. the warrior code is important to him and so are rules of daily clan life that reduce conflict in any way.

teapaw is also a glacierclan cat. she, like snowpaw, is a little bit quiet and secretive, the kind of person (..?) that kinda lurks in the back of important things going on rather than offering her voice. she’s a healer’s apprentice and takes a lot of pride in being effective and efficient with all her duties. she’s curious and observant, and shes good friends with her clan’s seer, deadhawk (i split the medicine cat position into two for these clans, healers do doctor stuff, seers talk to starclan), so she tends to be up to date w what starclan says, which helps her and her friends w their mystery.

and finally, breezepaw! he’s a summitclan cat and snowpaw’s bff. he’s kinda clueless and distractable, very much a follower personality as he likes others to decide what’s important for him to do. he’s a quiet cat, but he’s not afraid to speak his mind when the time comes. kinda a goofy jokester dude, but he knows how to read a room and keep quiet when he doesn’t know what to contribute and jokes won’t help. he likes snowpaw because snowpaw’s always confident in what he’s doing and never clowns on breezepaw for not knowing wtf is going on

[xx-ingie-xx]

Forgotten 14 Excerpt (oh, and hi)

Hi everyone,

I know, I know, it’s been f-o-r-e-v-e-r. And things have really changed since my last post. I hope everyone is safe and well and working to protect themselves and others through social distancing. I’m doing all right—I’m fortunate enough to have a comfortable home, and since I live alone I’m pretty used to solitude. The worst part is being unable to visit family and friends, or enjoy spring activities after a long winter. But it’s important that we all do our part to flatten the curve—reading the news reminds me of that every day.

In my last post I mentioned that I’ve struggled to find motivation to write, and that hasn’t gone away. I’m still not nearly as productive as I’d like to be, but I have started to push myself more. Social distancing has certainly given me more time to wrestle with this, so we’ll see how it goes. 

Thank you so much to those of you who have reached out to see if I’m doing okay. I haven’t been answering messages, but please know I really do appreciate your concern for me and your interest in my work. I hope my lack of activity here hasn’t worried or offended anyone.

I have managed to complete the first scene of Forgotten’s next chapter, so I thought I would post it here. There are only two chapters left, including this one (plus an epilogue). Who knows, maybe I can find my groove and finish this thing before summer.

Thanks again, and I hope you enjoy it!

---

His eyes shone in the firelight, more indigo than blue, and his face bore an unspoken longing, one mirrored in her own gaze. Time slowed as a wordless invitation passed between them, an unspoken plea to abandon caution, to defy convention…

.

A spray of water soaked her back, and she whipped around to meet his playful grin. Feigning offense, she approached the bank and kicked up a splash of her own, shrieking when he caught her foot and pulled her in… 

.

Fierce, icy winds whipped about her, veiling the dark pines in swirling gusts of white. Again and again she called to him, too focused, too terrified to heed her numbing toes and aching lungs…

.

He turned from the window, his bruised face shifting from annoyance to absolute shock at the sight of her. Raindrops streaked the glass behind him, obscuring his view of the mourners below…  

.

She left the temple with heavy steps, her face a somber mask beneath the circlet which newly adorned her head. He waited at the base of the stairs, as close as the priests had allowed, beaming with pride as he moved to embrace her… 

.

He lay on a black altar in a shadowy chamber, chained down by heavy, rusted manacles. His hair clung to his forehead, damp with sweat and blood, and his dirtied face twisted in pain as he labored for breath—

.

Zelda woke with a start. 

The images retreated, scattering like dust on the wind. Only fragments remained, all of them dim and distorted. The emotion was gone, the significance lost. 

Slowly she sat up, blinking as a tear slid down her cheek. She brushed it away in a daze, taking slow, deep breaths as she waited for the sensation to pass. The fog soon began to clear, allowing her most recent memories to surface...

Link.

“Oh, thank the Sisters…"

Zelda looked up to see Impa rush to her bedside. Gently she felt Zelda’s forehead, her face drawn with motherly concern.

"How are you feeling?" she murmured. "Any pain?"

"No… I'm all right."

She did have a rather nasty headache, but she barely noticed it. It was nothing compared to the deep sense of loss she felt inside, as though some part of her had been pried loose and torn out. 

“Where is Link?" she asked, meeting her guardian’s unwavering gaze.  

Impa sighed. “He isn't here. He’ll be away for several days, I'm afraid."

“Away?" Zelda breathed. "To where?"

"He didn't say. He was… beside himself." 

Zelda stared at her, slowly piecing together the gravity of the situation. Guilt churned in her stomach as she remembered her confrontation with Link. 

"This is all my fault,” she whispered.

"Ne'lear, no," Impa soothed. "It was inevitable. This is something he must face alone, in his own way."

Zelda shook her head and threw the covers aside. “No, I can't leave it like this. I must go to him."

Impa caught her elbow to stop her. "You're not going anywhere until Maddox has examined you."

"I don't need an examination, Impa. He didn't hurt me. He would never…"

That, she realized, was the strongest revelation she had gained from her exposure to the bond: the truth of his love for her—or rather for his Zelda. It was tender and fierce and pure… Her recollection was vague and dreamlike, but she ached to feel it again—to receive such love and return it, without the burden of uncertainty or regret…

"You were out cold when Link brought you to me, and he was beyond shaken. You will not leave this bed until I understand what happened between you two."

Zelda glanced down at her hands, saddened by the thought of him in such a state. Gently Impa lifted her chin, her face reflecting Zelda’s sorrow.

“I want to help him too,” she murmured. “I want to help both of you. Watching you struggle through this… it hasn’t been easy for me either. Please... tell me what happened.”

Again Zelda hesitated, wondering how she could possibly find the words. 

"We… connected. Our minds were… joined somehow…”

Impa’s expression did not change. "Can you describe it?”

Zelda closed her eyes and focused on the memory, trying to extract more detail.

She remembered feeling lighter, as though some unknown burden had fallen away. Another presence caressed her own, warm and hauntingly familiar. She had rushed toward its source, sighing with elation as their spirits joined together… 

But the pleasure vanished as soon as it came, smothered in a flood of anguish and disjointed memories. It was a consequence she had failed to consider, and one he had dismissed. With the bond, there were no defenses, no separation. 

Only truth. 

"It was so brief,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “But… in those few moments, I knew him. I knew everything, felt everything, as though I were him—or a part of him. I can’t remember much of it, but I know it was incredible and painful and… just so much all at once…"  

“Too much,” Impa murmured. “I did not expect him to go this far. He’s shown such control until now."

“No, Impa, I asked him to do it—I practically begged him. Don’t blame him for this, please."

And I kissed him, she recalled, her heart quickening. And he kissed me back… 

It was something she had been waiting for, even yearned for, since her return from Zora’s Domain. Yet it seemed so small in retrospect, eclipsed by her experience with the bond, ruined by the pain she never meant to cause.

That kiss wasn’t for me, she realized with a pang of disappointment. I should have known better. He was tired… and vulnerable.

“You were not ready for that exchange, Zelda. Telepathy alone is still very new for you, but this…” Impa glanced toward the window, breathing a weary sigh. "He regrets it, that much is certain."

Zelda looked up, startled from her thoughts. "But I don’t want him to regret it… He’s miserable as it is, and I…"

Her heart sank as she remembered the more intense emotions she had felt in the bond. His emotions. Some had been directed at her—feelings like frustration and disappointment. But the darker feelings, like shame and loathing, he held entirely for himself.

He carries them every day, along with all his uncertainties, all his responsibilities…

“I’ve only made things worse," Zelda said bitterly. "I didn’t understand; I—I thought I could help him move on. At least, that’s what I told myself. But now…"

"How could you understand?" Impa soothed. "No one can truly understand another's grief, even with all their memories intact."

"But I've been pushing him… You asked me to consider his happiness when I made my choice, and I��� I can’t say I’ve done that. I’ve had so many dreams, Impa. I’ve seen things, felt things I can’t explain, things I know I should ask him about. But those things scare me, and I… I wanted him to accept me, as I am now…"

Her face burned as she gave her confession, but Impa’s gentle gaze held no judgment.

"Even now," Zelda added, her voice thick with sorrow. "Nothing has changed for me. The thought of… yielding to her and vanishing into obscurity… it still frightens me. You said it's irrational, and maybe it is. Link thinks me selfish, and maybe I am. Maybe I have been blind and stupid in letting my ridiculous feelings guide me…"

She buried her face in her hands, unable to hold back her tears. Impa held her close, shushing her gently, comforting her like she had when Zelda was a child. 

“You have the right to choose your own path,” she murmured. “We will love you just the same. Even Link will make peace with it… in time." 

Zelda sniffled, too overcome to speak. 

But why? A small voice spoke in her head. Why put your fears above the needs of those who love you?

With that thought, Zelda felt something deep within her click into place. Her tears slowed as her emotions calmed, giving way to a single, clarifying thought.

Why give into fear?

Slowly she lifted her head from Impa’s shoulder, blinking as she processed her newfound clarity.

"...You may be right," she murmured. "Maybe I could stay like this. Maybe it would  turn out all right in the end.”

Zelda paused to wipe the tears from her face, her expression solemn when she met Impa’s gaze.

“But there would be damage. To you, to Link, to anyone who’s ever cared about me. You will all remember the person I was, and you would wonder what might have been, had I chosen differently. That sadness would never leave you. Even I might come to regret my decision, when it’s too late to change it…”

Determination swelled in her heart, and her voice grew stronger as she sat up straighter.

“All this time, since I woke without my memories, I've been ruled by fear. I did not feel seen, and I wanted control over my life. I can’t control my past, so I rejected it.”

Zelda sighed, feeling another stab of shame. "...But that was an illusion. And I didn’t understand how much pain it caused. Not truly. What I felt last night, in the bond… I’ve never known that kind of pain.”

“You have,” Impa said gently. "And your experiences are imprinted on your soul, whether you remember them or not. They will stay with you, one way or another."

Zelda fell silent, considering her words. “But, without my memories,” she said slowly, “none of that would matter, not to me. Those experiences might as well belong to someone else.”

Impa studied her with concern but offered no reply. 

“I can’t be afraid anymore,” Zelda said. “I need to believe that embracing my past is the answer, even for me. I have to trust in you, in Link, and in the person I was… even if it scares me.”

A rare emotion crossed Impa’s face, and she drew Zelda into a tighter embrace.

“My brave girl,” she whispered. 

“I used to be,” Zelda said, pulling away with a weak smile. “I’d like to think that much hasn't changed.”

Impa shook her head. “It’s ingrained too deep, ne'lear. But all of this can wait. You should rest and reflect on your decision, on all that's happened. Meditate on it."

"Meditation won’t help me. I was joined to the bond for only a moment, and I gained more clarity than I have from weeks of meditation."

Impa looked skeptical. "Those were Link’s memories, Zelda… Link’s feelings. You need to explore your own."

"But there has to be some way he can guide me. The bond is powerful magic… I can’t achieve that on my own.”

"Link has yet to master his telepathic abilities. Everything he knows, he learned from you. Using the bond might not be the best approach, for either of you."

Zelda gave a resigned shrug. "I won’t rest until I try.” 

Impa sighed. “I don’t suppose you plan to wait until he returns.”

“Not if I can help it. I assume he took the Ocarina... Is there no way to reach him?”

“I’m sure we can track him down… but we’ll need a little help.”

[caligobeltrao]

I for one would love 2 hear ur thoughts on the hannibal novel 👀👀 - bloodybrahms ☺

ahhh thank you BB!! <3 I’m gonna throw it under a cut bc I know people aren’t gonna want my ramblings clogging up their dash lol. 

Edit after I’ve written it: Holy shit this turned into a monster but tbf I did say I was going to rant. I think I miss writing college essays...

Also, I would like to note bc I’m about to bitch, I do still love Hannibal and Clarice and all of the franchise. Hell, I even love book Hannibal because I’m garbage and want to be special. So yeah. It’s a fond bitching. 

Okay where to fuckin begin man... This novel was a fucking Shit Show, my dudes. It was like baby’s first fanfiction. 

Let’s just jump in, shall we? 

So by now, having read both Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, I know Harris injects of lot of sexual shit into his novels, fine whatever, but the amount of pedophilia is insane. Like, Red Dragon with the grandmother threatening to cut his dick off by holding it in between scissors????? And then we have Mason Verger, worst human on the planet. Like jfc I’ll go into him specifically more later but just. Men. Why does it always have to be sexual. 

Like that time Clarice wasn’t wearing a bra and she wanted to prove to Paul Krendler she wasn’t wearing a wire so she flashed him her tits?? Unnecessary, Harris. Bullshit on all counts. 

Next, poor Ardelia Mapp. So he clearly wrote out her accent in Silence, which frankly reads racist since to me it seemed like he did it every time a character of color was met but he didn’t for Clarice’s Southern accent except for this book when she was talking to Ardelia. Now, that’d be a cool way to show how close they are, sure, but it just... She didn’t show up enough to warrant that reaction from me, plus all the other casually racist shit he throws in. 

Ardelia’s literally there as the wise Black best friend to help Clarice along. She doesn’t feel like her own character, she’s only there in conjunction with her, or doing something for her. She was the fucking valedictorian for Christ fucking sake, she also works at the Bureau but if her department was mentioned it was only once in passing. She was not a full character which fucking blows because she could’ve been so cool. 

And real quick before I forget, I hate how she’s treated in the end. I do like she gets a reference and that brainwashed Clarice sent her an emerald ring and a note saying she was okay, but Ardelia was abandoned by her best friend (that she had lived with) with not even a phone call and they will never see each other again and I think Ardelia knows it. It sucks and I’m heartbroken for this woman. 

I’m gonna touch a little bit on the racism too. Now I’m white and not the most qualified to talk about this shit, but I do wanna mention it because it makes me mad. There’s just so many unnecessary slurs, any POC is more of a background helper character to Clarice than anything or a foil. 

For example, Evelda Drumgo. She starts us off. Badass Black woman who runs a drug cartel. She chooses to shoot at Clarice and risk her baby’s life, and we have Clarice wash the baby off and save his life. Then Evelda’s mother is written as irrational when she slaps Clarice for visiting the baby in the hospital; I get Clarice’s impulse, but that woman just lost her daughter because Clarice killed her. I would’ve slapped Clarice too, even if it was a totally justifiable shot. 

The baby himself is used as a foil throughout other parts, most notably to me when Clarice goes to visit Mason the first time. There are two Black boys from a foster home playing in a room with a camera so Mason can watch them, and it shakes Clarice up a lil bit because of the baby, but it says she’s getting more used to it.

Now this is half and half well written and shoddy to me. It’d be a cool moment, if the whole incident wasn’t nearly completely forgotten for the rest of the book shortly afterword. It could show growth, if Clarice had any growth to show. 

And then the Romani people who are literally just used and thrown away. Sickening. Also very broadly used the stereotypes we hear which Sucks; the three we meet in any sort of depth are pickpockets, one was already in jail and Pazzi used his leverage as a police officer to get her to do what he wanted and threatened to have her baby taken away from her permanently, like it was just bad. And then the man got killed. Pazzi let him bleed out. Asshole. 

The slurs. I could take out all of them and pretty much have the same damn thing. Like I get showing negative aspects of characters and just because a character’s racist doesn’t mean the author is, but with the characters already being as shitty as they are, fully didn’t need it to make them worse. Entirely unnecessary. Racism or the character being racist has no impact on the plot is the major thing, I think. And you can replace that with anything along those lines, like sexist, homophobic, transphobic. It didn’t impact the plot, they can still be shitty, you just don’t need to use them. 

This also goes in reference to Margot being a lesbian. And the transphobia holy shit, it was disgusting. Harris had Clarice think something so cruel and unnecessary it’s like my guy why was that even remotely something we needed to hear. We didn’t. I wanted to stop reading because that’s not my Clarice, first and foremost, and second, this is supposed to be the character we LIKE. And now I don’t like ANYBODY in this damn book. 

And he treats Margot like shit too, and Barney. 

Their friendship was beautiful and great and finally for once something nice was happening in Margot’s life and I was happy reading it, and then FOR SOME REASON Margot goes to shower in the same room as Barney after a workout, which makes no sense, and then Barney tries to force a kiss on her (and he was hard, Harris made that very clear) and she had been sexually assaulted by Mason her brother and ruin the whole damn thing and none of it would have changed any other piece of the novel if you removed it!!!!!!!!! Entirely unnecessary!!!!!! And Barney had the gall to say well I couldn’t help myself like none of that was realistic in the slightest, she never would have went in the same room to shower with him. 

Something you need to do is basically get some suspension of disbelief from your reader and maintain and stretch that as you go, right? Well mine was gone at that moment.

Also side note Margot is basically just there to show how shitty Mason is for the umpteenth time. Her whole thing is lesbian sexual assault victim.

Also heavily implied she was a lesbian because of the sexual assault. And we rarely see Judy, her girlfriend, so. Bad. Bad all around. 

Circling back around to Clarice and how disappointing she is in the books as compared to the movies. Well, Clarice is also a poorly written character. She’s 1000x better in the movie. Hell, she’s even better in this book than she was in Silence, but that’s not fucking hard. 

Pretty much all the characters are so flat they don’t even classify as two dimensional. 

Like sure, maybe we wanna say Clarice didn’t really solve much in the first book and was just handed everything because she was a trainee and that’s what Hannibal wanted. 

Like if you remember the John Mulaney sketch of Delta Airlines where he’s just going “Okay!” and running to the next place he’s told, that’s Clarice. 

Okay so why does she get goaded into all this shit now? She should know better. She should know how to handle herself better. Like she messes up basic fucking shit like clearing a room before untying Hannibal, which was stupid, she seems oblivious to some of the politics at work even though she’s been in the FBI for like 7 years now, she would at least have more fucking contacts than Brigham who died in the beginning and Jack Crawford who died at the end by rolling over in his bed to his dead wife’s side and Ardelia who would be near the same level as Clarice I guess but I still don’t know her damn department???? Like you fucking network. 

Plus after her final fall from grace with the FBI, we meet or are told of random side characters that go no where and do nothing just to say “hey look at my special little girl, everyone likes her and looks up to her!!” Why? Because she caught Buffalo Bill 7 years ago and then never got a promotion or even worked with the BAU? Again, it does not make sense. People may pity her? But a random girl in the lab wouldn’t be fangirling. Starling herself said her career had gone nowhere because of the politics and not sleeping with Paul. You need to show me why she’s likable in her actions not others words. 

We spend more time away from her than with her anyways but Jesus. 

AND HER IN THE ENDING. She was fucking BRAINWASHED????? Bull FUCKING SHIT. He completely ruined anything he even remotely might’ve had in this cluster fuck of a novel. 

Case in point, difference from the movie, Hannibal spends weeks (possibly? it’s left purposefully vague and I’m guessing that’s because Harris didn’t know the ins and outs and wanted his novel done) meticulously brainwashing Clarice, he had stolen her father’s bones and she’s so far gone at that point she doesn’t care, and the whole scene where Paul is getting his brain eaten? Yeah, she happily indulges and when he insults her, she asks Hannibal for more. Fuck you, Thomas Harris. 

And Hannibal’s a Gary Stu, fucking fight me. 

In the movie he either is or he’s tap dancing on that line, don’t get me wrong, but in the novels it’s insufferable because it doesn’t seem earned. The pigs didn’t attack him because they didn’t smell fear on him. No. He’s easily able to drug and brainwash Clarice and take her as his lover. No. Go away. He’s so smart and one step ahead and can manipulate anyone and everyone into doing what he wants and blah blah blah shut up! A character being perfect isn’t interesting even if he’s evil!! We all know he’s never truly in danger because of how Harris writes him and that’s boring!! 

And I personally have a pet peeve where the villain is described as a monster or unstoppable. That’s boring and I no longer care about your story. I know 9 times out of 10 your main character is going to find a bullshit way around the impossible and kill it. Or it’s just like a default personality and nothing else is added to it. And that’s Hannibal. 

I’m on Hannibal Rising now and, spoiler alert, he’s very bland as a character. (Also Harris switched some details in the novel which kinda annoys me like get your own canon right my man but whatever.) The plot itself is pretty fun? I guess? Like there’s action and stuff and I’m enjoying that. But it’s the same set up where Harris’s Gary Stu always wins, like he was 13 in the book when he killed the butcher. Let. Your. Characters. Lose. 

Also even more racist shit but what did I expect really. 

Anyways, I have no idea who I’m supposed to root for in the novel because all the characters are just kinda shitty. It really just boils down to Harris not showing any redeeming qualities or actions from any of his characters. I liked Margot for a while out of spite but she never really went anywhere and the way she killed Mason (btw she sodomized him with a cattle prod to get his semen bc side plot and then stuffed his Moray eel down his throat and somehow I still don’t think that’s the worst part of the novel) just. No thanks really. 

All the random little side plots were also pretty not great. How many time does Harris have to say Pazzi of the Pazzis? Like I fucking get what you’re going for, even if I hadn’t watched the movie I’d be like, “Oh this dude’s gonna get hung outta that window, dope,” the literal first time. Stop treating your readers like idiots. 

And then Margot’s side plot was that the will their father left said she needed a biological heir to inherit because he was pissed she’s gay and we needed the homophobia I guess, so Mason got everything, and she was helping him with the Hannibal shit because he’s pretty incapacitated duh, and in return he would give her his jizz so Judy could be artificially inseminated and they could have a child and get some of her inheritance. I don’t care. It was all very gross, and Mason kept saying shit like suck me off you’ve done it before, I won’t be able to feel it anyway, maybe Judy’ll suck me off you think she’d like that. It’s all gross. 

And I guess this is a good a time as any to finally start on Mason. So a great rule of writing to make everything work better and give your story more depth is to give everyone both positive and negative traits right, even and especially the bad guys? Like, rules can always be broken if you’re a good enough writer, but I believe I have established that Harris isn’t quite there yet, to put it nicer than I have. 

Mason is one bad trait after another. It’s like when Harris was bored of constantly writing about plain ole pedophilia, he threw a dart at a board of horrible things and landed on topics such as: pedophilia but make it incest, extreme sadism, sadism but against children now, and good old fashioned racism! Fucking Cordell was supposed to collect the children’s tears after Mason would make them cry and put them in martinis for him. Realism went out the goddamn door real fast with this novel y’all. Like a fucking Scooby Doo villain over here. 

And he loves talking about being a sadistic pedophile, he will literally not shut up about it to Clarice when she first gets there telling her about his trip to Africa and this portable guillotine he has and just. I get it was probably like trying to make her uncomfortable on purpose because he’s a Freak, but it went way too far if only because it was annoying, not even uncomfortable for me as a reader. I was bored real quick. Get to the shit I actually wanna know. 

And it sucks because of the weird, over-the-top way of how he died, I got zero satisfaction from his death. I couldn’t even be like, “Well at least Margot got her revenge,” because that’s not how she originally wanted to kill him!!! She wanted someone else to extract his semen for the insemination but couldn’t find anybody to do it for her, and then Hannibal, whilst tied up, said use a cattle prod and you won’t have to touch him and when you kill him you can blame it on me, and I’m pretty sure even if she hit his prostate right every time and he COULD cum from that alone in addition to how his body is Fucked Up now, it would’ve been a lengthy, gross, and re-traumatizing experience for her because all she wanted to do was avoid seeing and touching her brother’s private parts again, which I think is a totally fair and rational desire. 

So I have to live with the fact that she was desperate enough to not lose the house and business because of her homophobic father to go through her childhood trauma again. There’s no place in this book that has a somewhat positive conclusion. 

Even the very last bit where Barney has a girlfriend and a ton of cash from Margot, all he wants to do is see every Vermeer in the world right? Well, because Hannibal and Clarice are in Buenos Aires where one of them is on display, Barney gets spooked and has him and his girlfriend leave before he can see it and it ends that bit with he never got to see it ever so he didn’t even complete his dream!!! 

Also for good measure, Harris throws in that Hannibal and Clarice enjoy having sex regularly. For no reason. Just letting us know. 

I know this seemed like just a bitch fest, because it was, but I kinda sorta enjoyed it? It kept my attention at the very least. It’s really disappointing because like I said, I love the movies, all of them, and have since I was little. To see the original not stand up to that image in my mind is a little heartbreaking. Especially Clarice. She was a strong female role model to me, but turns out she’s... just kinda there. And her ending is that of her no longer being herself and getting that agency taken away from her. 

There is a reference to her waking up from a sleep, if she is asleep (that’s kind of how he worded it), that kinda let us draw our conclusions on whether she was just brainwashed into being good for him or if she was willingly going along with this and was in love with him I guess and it felt like a slap in the face. She turned from a hardworking, modest country girl working her way up to the FBI into a female Hannibal. Which on the surface sounds kinda cool because we love luxe serial killers, but that’s not what she wanted or who she was set up to be. And to insinuate that she would even remotely consider choosing that path for herself is at its best an insult to her and at its worst a complete erasure of her background, what little character Harris did set up. It also completely erases my own connections to her, as a girl from a small town myself who has bigger dreams than this and also... a good, strong set of morals. He just tossed that out the window. 

Obviously if you’re on this blog, you like slasher x reader shit, and this is a novel with a slasher x a person, right? So why am I so mad about it? Because the whole point of this blog and reader insert fanfiction in general is that you are taken as you are and loved wholly as yourself and that you are worthy of that love (in a fictional setting, not really loving people who are like this, which I think we understand but I want to clarify). She was not taken as she was. He is not in love with her, she is not in love with him. She was transformed into what he wanted out of her. He couldn’t get her to be Mischa, his first plan, so he made her like himself. And the fact that he was so easily able to do it makes me upset, and even more so is that it’s not written like it’s weird or wrong. It’s written like they’re in love and this is a good thing. 

He may have been going for the classic “everyone is capable of doing bad things” stuff we see a lot, but we got that from Margot already. And Barney, for stealing Lecter’s stuff and selling it. And Paul, and the entire FBI for turning on Clarice, and the kidnappers, and Pazzi, and random shitty side characters. And none of it was particularly well written or made some sort of strong statement. It just was. And that’s not a good enough basis for a novel. 

Anyways, if you made it this far holy shit you’re a saint and I love you, let’s be friends?? <3 Have a good day y’all, thank you BB for giving me permission to ramble. 

[blackcatmanor]

RWBY V7 Episode 12 Photo Review (Spoilers)

..................WUT

I mean….I can’t really process what happened

 So let’s get this part out of the way:

The Good: 

Penny and Winter are the true BFFs

Penny becoming more human is endearing to see, and it’s been interesting to see her struggle with understanding emotions against Winter, who also struggles to understand them, in a way. Penny challenging Winter but never abandoning her to join RWBY is nice, and their light conflict is very well done because it shows Penny’s growing humanity struggle against Winter’s much chillier perspective.  I really like the dynamic between these two and hope they continue on in the next volume (If Winter dies too this volume I’ll ragequit RWBY), and to be honest it’s become more of a cute bond than Ruby and Penny this volume. Don’t @ me 

The fights

Although a lot of the “fights” in this volume were done off screen, when there is fighting this volume it has been extremely good. The camera moves around a lot less so we get a better sense of what is going on, and the moves feel more deliberate to whoever is doing the fighting, such as Ruby and Harriet who dart around a lot, delivering only occasional blows (and Ruby taking more of the blows because she’s not as good as Harriet in hand-to-hand), while Yang and Elm go all-out lady brawl (and it’s nice to see Yang’s semblance again)

Exception: Weiss. 

Weiss’ over-reliance on Summoning is making her boring to watch in fights. Seeing the 300 different ways the animators show her spinning around and waving her sword like a magic wand is getting OLD. If you’re going to have her summon all the time, fine, but stop focusing the camera on her. Just show her very distantly in the background waving her sword/wand and focus on how people fight whatever she summons.

 The meh:

RWBY vs Ace Ops- welp… I didn’t think the Ace Ops were gonna lose, I thought RWBY would flee and barely get away because the Ace Ops were supposed to be the best of the best. I guess I’m glad they didn’t just go down like total chumps (except Vine- sorry dude), but apparently if you train with the Ace Ops for 6 weeks, you’re as good as them. *Shrug* Who knew? It’s like Fitness Bootcamp- Train with a soldier on an obstacle course once and you’re basically ready to become a member of Seal Team 6, right?

 I wish they would have explained this a little more- maybe looping back to the discussion they had in Episode 4 about being friends vs teammates. Maybe RWBY’s personal bond gives them more incentive to win, while the Ace Ops are just going through the motions because it’s just a job to them. Plus I think Elm and Marrow’s inner conflict also maybe helped tipped the sales towards RWBY, perhaps they weren’t trying their hardest, but I wish this was a little more clear

 JNPR vs Neo

It’s kind of weird that Neo didn’t incapacitate Oscar, if she was planning to try trapping JNR as well… Or maybe Oscar barely managed to get away? Regardless, Neo had the lamp, so why stick around and wait for more people to show up? The plan was for her to get the lamp FROM Oscar, not necessarily grab Oscar as well. Maybe Neo has her own agenda, which would be cool, but from this episode it looks like she completed her objective but then waited around to fight some more. Maybe getting the lamp was too easy and she likes a challenge...? Who knows (I am saying that a lot for this episode, huh?)

 Cinder vs Winter and Penny

This is obviously meh because not much happened, and it’s just set up for the big final fight. With the Ace Ops incap’ed, hopefully RWBY can come in as well to finally fight Cinder directly after dancing around her in V5. I think most of this will go down probably in the Relic room because a grand fight in a cramped hospital room is hard, so I think Cinder will be able to Grimm-snatch the Winter Maiden powers and go down to the relic room, or she will incapacitate whoever does get the powers and drag them there, only to be stopped by RWBY for a big battle. However I don’t think it’ll be Winter Schnee getting the powers since it’ll take too long for the transfer device and they are out of time. I KINDA think now it might be Penny- a girl with an aura/soul- somehow she’ll receive them and it’ll be part of her becoming a real girl (like Pinocchio).  Who knows? At this point who gets them is totally up in the air.

  The Ugly:

 I guess I was right about Tyrian escaping custody again, but it wasn’t because of Salem intervening with Grimm like I thought. It was because Robyn is a terrible person!

Robyn- Please kindly f- off:

 I officially HATE Robyn the most. After teetering on a “meh-leaning-towards-general-dislike” feeling, I loathe her now and I hope she gets killed off quickly. She’s a one-dimensional generic hothead character with no personality that is purposely stuck in to create conflict. She is the good guy’s Tyrian- but Tyrian has a reason to be chaotic: He’s an insane zealot. Robyn is just a poorly written idiot. 

Robyn just does stupid things that get in everyone’s way all of the time, and actively works to undermine the hero’s at each turn. She prevented the launch of Amity by stealing all the supplies, and now she is going to try and fight in the middle of a cramped ship, risking Tyrian’s escape rather than waiting 5 minutes to duke it out with Clover once Tyrian is safely in jail. The entire time they were squaring off on the ship I kept thinking “Uhm Tyrian’s right there….Tyrian is RIGHT THERE! He’s gonna get out!” Robyn is a liar. She doesn’t care about the people of Mantle, because she’s doing things that could (and did) lead to a serial killer who killed Mantle Citizens escaping.

Not to mention she could have taken Qrow’s advice and talk to Ironwood first! Literally 2 episodes ago you were saying the General had your support and now you’re like “I’LL FIGHT ANYONE, ANYWHERE. Forget talking to people to get the full details and actually following through upon that trust I claimed I had in Ironwood two episodes ago, I’m gonna risk everyone’s lives to fight this out RIGHT here!” She’s the worst! 

  Confrontation with Qrow and Clover- 

This falls under the Ugly because, despite some good dialogue between Clover and Qrow, with Qrow expressing that he feels manipulated while Clover tries to explain his own point of view, every decision made from here on Qrow’s part is inexcusable and totally irrational. 

Tyrian joins the fray and inexplicably Qrow agrees to team up with him to take down Clover because THAT can’t possibly fail spectacularly. 

Tyrian suggests “putting the kid to bed” but the entire time I knew Tyrian would betray Qrow and go too far with attacking Clover because OF COURSE HE WOULD. But I thought he would sting Clover as a chance to get away, because Qrow would have to focus on getting Clover help. However, what we got was…much, much worse. 

Qrow’s questionable decision making

Hey DUMMY- Why not team up with Clover first to neutralize Tyrian again, and then you and Clover can duke it out. Or you and Clover can go talk to James like you wanted to 10 minutes ago!

Oh right…because “You got a score to settle” with Tyrian because this is now a cheesy western where your ego is more important than logic.

I think his bad luck semblance is really just an idiot semblance- like occasionally his semblance makes him do stupid things, leading to horrible outcomes but he mistakenly chalks it up to “bad luck.” It’s also frustrating because this volume they were setting Qrow up to grow into a good character- someone with a lot of anger from the past who learns to cope with it, and learns to accept friendship from others. I guess that’s all over. 

So, sadly, Tyrian then murders Clover. It was shocking I will say that...I actually GASPED, and it led to this really cool shot: 

But the shock was partly for the wrong reason. Like I said before, I thought Qrow being a dumb-dumb would lead to Clover being injured, sure, but KILLED? Yikes! Qrow’s idiocy leading to Clover being injured would be frustrating, but not unforgivable narratively and he could learn from it. He would learn to not treat his friends as transactional, and automatically write them off when one hint of struggle happens. Qrow’s idiocy in teaming up with a serial killer and getting Clover killed kinda makes Qrow unforgivable in my book. Does CRWBY want me to hate Qrow? I guess so, especially because Clover’s dying scene didn’t exactly stick the landing and alleviate my anger towards Qrow either.... 

So poor dying Clover is lying there, and a visibly shaken Qrow kneels next to him. So the thought is Qrow is going to realize his horrible mistake, and dive down a pool of self-loathing: tearfully blaming himself, blaming his bad luck,  APOLOGIZING, upset about how it’s all his fault, etc. Instead, he delivers (with a straight face) the weirdest line ever about James taking the fall. UHHH- WUT? You teaming up with Tyrian led to this. WHAT IS HAPPENING?!

  This sucks. On several levels. Clover’s death was just plain poorly done and a good character was wasted. I really liked Clover. I thought Qrow was going to actually get a break from being shit on this entire series and finally get, at a minimum, a friend that would continue to help him grow and develop as a character, pushing Qrow to see the best in himself and stop continually hating himself. With that cut short, I of course felt super sad and emotional about Clover’s death, even to the point of almost crying.

However, I can’t pretend like a significant part of that isn’t pure frustration anger about how this episode played out. Not only did Clover’s death came about in the dumbest way, but his final words with Qrow were wasted by the weird “James will take the fall” bit. 

Qrow should have blamed himself and his semblance (I mean...it actually kinda is his fault, not gonna lie), and Clover could have maybe been the ultimate friend to him, telling Qrow that it happened because Qrow was fighting for what he thought was right, and even though the outcome was horrible he shouldn’t stop fighting for what he believes in…? I dunno….ANYTHING other than “GRRR James will pay”

 I can’t help but remember a mere few minutes ago.....

This episode.....woof. 

 In a long series, you want your hero’s to sometimes lose just to keep it interesting, and to give them something to have to crawl back from. However, what’s interesting is seeing the characters try their best, make reasonable and decent decisions and still suffer a loss, because it makes us want to continue to cheer them on and watch as they make a triumphant comeback. Seeing hero’s simply choke and fail because they make the dumbest, irrational decisions with no logical reason is just frustrating and excruciating to watch, and seeing those moments lead to other characters suffering makes your “hero’s” unlikable. 

This argument was made for the V6 climax- that RWBY made a dumb decision and others suffered the consequences, making them “evil” to some hateboner watchers, but I thought this assessment was over dramatic. You have to take things in context, and literally nothing came of RWBY’s decision to steal an airship: the universe was the same as it was before with some filler in the middle. No one was injured or killed, and even the damage to the city was minimal (one roof). Clover, though, is full-on dead and that is entirely Qrow’s fault. I just can’t believe the writers put this down on paper, re-read it, and though- “yea....Someone who totally make the decision to team up with a murderer to subdue their good friend....this is gonna be GREAT.”

But who cares about the story- NEW MERCH DROPPING SOON AMIRITE?! 

Ok that was a low blow, but the writing and characters inexplicably took a logical nose dive this episode, after having a lot of thought put into last episode. The characters (especially Qrow, but also Robyn and to a lesser extent Clover) could have made some reasonable and logical decisions and Clover still could have died, which would have had way more impact and made the situation seem way more hopeless. Instead we got Robyn kicking off the shitshow by being just the worst, and Qrow taking the shitshow torch and cranking it up to 11, effectively un-doing all of the development we’ve seen from him this season. 

Lastly, even if you are going to have the characters completely fail at making decisions and it leads to a horrible outcome, at least stick the landing and don’t have them go off on some odd tangent about how this is someone else’s fault. *facepalm* 

Overall I’d give this episode a very generous 2/10.

The 2 points is because of the decent fight animation and occasionally decent dialogue.

I’m tired... 

[portraitoftheoddity]

A Fic Writer’s Guide to Cold Weather Whump

Maybe you got “Hypothermia” on your hurt/comfort bingo square. Maybe you want an excuse for your OTP to cuddle together for warmth. For whatever reason, you’re writing a fic where the cold is the enemy for your characters. But... maybe you aren’t especially familiar with the perils of cold weather.

I rambled a lot about hiding tracks in snow in this post and got some feedback from folks who had never encountered snow, which made me realize that this guide might be handy for writers who live in warm climates!

(Please note that I am not a professional and this information is presented for writing purposes, not actual medical or survival advice)

What Are We Dealing With - Exposure Conditions

The two biggest dangers for characters stuck out in the cold are Hypothermia and Frostbite.

HYPOTHERMIA -- the condition of dangerously low body temperature. Normal body temperature is around 98.6 F (37 C). Hypothermia occurs as your body temperature falls below 95 F (35 C). Usually hypothermia is a danger in freezing temperatures, but it’s possible to get it in the 30-50ºF range if you’re wet or not dressed properly for an extended period of time. Basically, any time your body loses heat faster than it produces it, hypothermia can happen.

Three main ways to lose body heat (apart from regular heat loss through radiation) are:

Direct Contact with something cold -- A character chained to a cold stone wall, or a block of ice, for instance. If you’re in contact with something that is very good at conducting your body heat away from you, rather than insulating, you’ll chill down faster. (Important for characters with cybernetics or metal limbs! Lookin’ at you, Winter Soldier...)

Water/Moisture -- a character taking a dunk in ice water, even for a matter of seconds, is in a serious situation. You can freeze to death very fast in cold water, and even if you’re just wet, moisture conducts heat away from the body. Clothes made of cotton that are wet from snow (cotton is the enemy in winter!) or damp from sweat are also going to contribute to heat loss; a character that’s been sweating from exertion will get chilled quickly once they stop moving. 

Wind -- Wind whisks warmth away from your body, cooling you down faster. In cold climates, you often have a weather forecast that includes windchill. This is because, even if the ambient temperature is, say, 25ºF, with 25 MPH wind, you could lose body heat as fast as if you were standing in an ambient temperature of 9ºF (this would be a windchill of 9ºF).

So your character locked in a walk-in freezer will lose heat through radiation, but it will take them longer to become hypothermic than say, a character who fell through the ice of a frozen lake, or a character wandering through a snowstorm with no coat -- even if the actual temperature is the same in the freezer, the water, and the snowstorm.

Other risk factors for hypothermia include age (young children and the elderly may fall victim to hypothermia faster), exhaustion, malnutrition, and alcohol (booze makes you feel warm, but it also makes your blood vessels expand so you lose heat faster!).

So, what happens when you’re hypothermic?

Symptoms of mild hypothermia (core temperature of 95ºF) include shivering, and rapid pulse and breathing, minor clumsiness. Your character may also start to experience low blood sugar, exacerbating other symptoms as they develop.

As your character gets colder, moderate hypothermia symptoms may include confusion, slurred speech, and loss of coordination. At a core temperature of 91ºF (33ºC), amnesia/memory loss can happen.

No longer shivering, and decreased heartrate, pulse, and blood pressure are signs of severe hypothermia. Reflexes may no longer be present, eyes are dilated, person is incoherent/irrational, and hallucinations can happen. At 82ºF (28ºC) a person will likely lose consciousness, and can expect a heartrate of 30 beats per minute.

Below 70ºF (21ºC), profound hypothermia occurs, and potentially death. (The record for the lowest body temperature at which an adult has been known to survive is 56.7ºF (13.7ºC))

In moderate-to-severe hypothermia, paradoxical undressing can happen -- this when someone abruptly feels warm and starts to pull their clothes off, often speeding up the process of hypothermia to a fatal conclusion. Another strange behavior that happens in severe hypothermia is terminal burrowing -- a primitive, instinctual urge to find and curl up in an enclosed space like a hibernating animal in some last-ditch effort to survive.

A severely hypothermic character may appear dead. They may be rigid, blue, and curled up in a fetal position. Another character can determine if they’re alive by trying to open their arm up from the fetal position; if it curls back up, the person is alive. Dead muscles won’t contract!

Because hypothermia inhibits brain function and causes confusion, people with hypothermia often don’t realize they’re hypothermic, and then proceed to have poor judgement, further endangering themselves. If you think that REALLY STUPID decision to go back out in the blizzard is out of character for your protagonist -- not when they’re hypothermic, it’s not!

But cold weather danger doesn’t stop with hypothermia. When you’re cold, your body will prioritize keeping your brain and your core warm by shutting off circulation to your extremities. This increases your chances of survival, but it also puts you at greater risk of:

FROSTBITE -- tissue damage caused by extreme cold, either from the formation of ice crystals within tissue or loss of circulation. Frostbite typically affects fingers and toes, though it can also affect ears and the tip of one’s nose.

Frostbite is a risk when a character is exposed to severe cold for a long period of time, when a character is out in the elements and there’s cold plus wind, or if they’re at high altitude. If you’re committed to realism but don’t wanna have to write your characters dealing with frostbite, consider giving them adequate gloves and boots!

First degree frostbite, or frostnip, is a mild condition that is reversible without lasting damage. When you have frostnip, your skin turns white or red and cold to the touch, and may begin to feel numb or experience a prickling sensation. It hurts like a bitch on rewarming (you might have some swelling and redness for a while), but it should be fine within a few hours, as long as there’s no further exposure. It’s possible to experience peeling, such as with a sunburn, in the following weeks. If your character is out in extreme cold that they aren’t dressed properly for, frostnip at the very least is likely (I’ve gotten it just from trying to dig my car out of the snow with bare hands for 10 minutes on a really cold day).

Second degree frostbite, or superficial frostbite is more serious. Skin might start to change color, turning red, or very pale and waxy, or even blue-ish. The area might be hard to the touch and swollen, indicating the formation of ice crystals in the skin (you know how your body is 70% water? Guess what water does when it gets real cold!). Rewarming is painful, and will result in some really nasty fluid-filled blisters, which are at risk for infection. You can recover fully from superficial frostbite, though it’s also possible that the affected area may have enduring cold sensitivity, pain or numbness.

Third/fourth degree frostbite, or deep frostbite, is when we start losing body parts. At this stage, not only is the skin affected, but also the underlying tissues. Skin will look blue-ish and mottled, the affected area will likely be numb and not move properly. This is when tissue death and permanent damage happens. On rewarming, there’s a risk of blood clots, and the frozen area will be black and hard and may require eventual amputation. Severely damaged/dead tissue may fall off on its own (auto-amputation) within a couple months.

Frostbite is treated with rewarming, but only start rewarming if the tissue won’t be refrozen again! More on treatment below.

(Side note: if you ever find yourself with either second or third degree frostbite, please seek medical attention immediately!)

Cold and Other Injuries & Illnesses

What if your character is already hurt before they wind up in a winter not-so-wonderland?

Well, hypothermia is a pretty big deal for trauma patients, and adding hypothermia on top of a serious injury reduces survival rates significantly. Part of this is due to the double-whammy that the body’s vascular system is now enduring, with stress from injury & blood loss as well as from cold. Another part of it is that hypothermia can impair clotting mechanisms, leading to more internal bleeding. A character who has suffered from physical trauma is also more likely to develop hypothermia before an uninjured character, as shock impedes the body’s ability to control temperature.

The stress of cold on the body can also exacerbate sickness. Frostbite and hypothermia weaken the body and its immune system, so a character already dealing with illness or infection will likely get worse, even if the cold itself isn’t going to make them ill outside of hypothermia. (Being chilly isn’t going to spontaneously give you pneumonia).

Surviving in the Cold - Staying Warm & Alive

So the temperature is getting pretty cold. What should your characters do?

If they’re prepared, they should be wearing layers of appropriate warm clothing and have plenty of gear. But since we’re talking about fic and we’re all here for the drama, let’s just assume these idiots are unprepared and are therefor gonna be having a bad time.

If they’re outside in the elements, their priority should be finding shelter. They want someplace ideally warm, dry, and out of the wind -- though I’d recommend starting with out of the wind above all else. If they’re in the wilderness and there’s no convenient abandoned cabins, a natural cave, or a pine tree with lots of low, thick branches might form a shelter. If it’s snowing, they can also build a snow cave or snow shelter -- fresh snow is actually a really good insulator, and while a snow cave isn’t exactly toasty, it’s a lot better than being out in the wind!

Once shelter is achieved, your characters will probably want to make a fire, if possible, to warm up by. However, if there’s nothing dry and flammable around, a fire might not be possible, and if bad guys are chasing them, either the light or smoke from a fire might give away their position (though if they need rescue, that might be a good thing!)

If your characters aren’t in the wilderness, they’ll still want to look for shelter that’s out of the wind if they’re outdoors, and any possible means of insulating body heat. Layering as much as possible is good -- if they don’t have enough layers of clothes, they can layer newspaper or plastic bags between what clothes they have to create extra insulation. Plastic is a good insulator, and also protects them from getting wet (though they wanna be careful about wrapping too much of themselves in plastic in case they start to sweat -- that’s also dangerous!). I’ve definitely worn plastic bags as liners inside my boots to protect and insulate my feet in winter. If your characters need to sleep in the cold, finding some insulation between their bodies and the cold ground will help them.

Your characters are also going to have to worry about food and drink. The human body uses up a LOT of energy trying to stay warm, so your characters may be suffering from low blood sugar on top of everything else. Dehydration is also a concern. Melting snow is an easy enough source of water, but you’ll want to have them melt it before drinking, instead of just eating snow. Eating snow chills you from the inside and uses up valuable energy!

Warming Your Characters Up - Treatment

Once your poor frozen darlings are out of the elements, they’re gonna wanna warm up!

If your characters are in wet clothes, they’re going to want to get out of those -- if possible -- to dry them off. Wet clothes -- especially cotton -- leech away precious body heat. (If your face just lit up at the idea of getting your characters nekkid, my friend, it gets better!)

Getting a hypothermic character out of the cold is step one, but warming them up is step two. Placing them somewhere warm and dry and wrapping them with blankets to trap their own meager body heat against them will help -- google “how to make a hypothermia wrap” for directions on how to turn your character into a toasty blanket burrito. If their own body is seriously chilled, adding external warmth might be needed (note: warmth, not heat. Too much direct, intense heat can cause a shock to the system! Hot baths are a BIG NO)  --

If they have access to warm hot compresses/chemical heat packs, placing those in the groin, neck and chest areas will help rewarm a person.

Consider giving one of your characters a metal canteen or water bottle -- they’ll be able to fill this with snow and then stick it in their fire to melt the snow and warm it for drinking and a source of heat they can hold to their body. Sipping warm water will help them warm up internally!

In absence of other options: NAKED CUDDLING. Another person’s direct body heat via skin-to-skin contact will help warm up your character (and makes for great UST).

If your characters have been hospitalized and have severe hypothermia, they may be treated with blood rewarming (pumping the blood out of the body, warming it up, and pumping it right back in) or warm intravenous fluids.

Hypothermic characters should also be kept awake, if possible, until safely warmed. Feeding them is also going to help! Give them calories to burn, and hydrate them up!

If they are severely-to-profoundly hypothermic and are struggling with their breathing, rescue breathing timed with the hypothermic person’s breathing can provide supplemental oxygen and, more importantly, heated air going directly into the person’s body core (rather then the cold environmental air).

For characters with frostbite -- there’s the temptation to have them rub warmth back into their extremities since we seek heat from friction, but they may damage themselves further this way. Rubbing a frostbite-affected area will cause additional injury. The best way to warm frostbitten skin is with lukewarm water, though you can also warm frostbitten fingers by tucking them into your armpits to warm them with your own core body heat, or blowing warm breath on them. Intense direct heat from heating pads or a fire are NOT a great idea. Since the tissue is numb, frostbitten patients may experience burns from direct heat sources without realizing.

If your character is frostbitten badly enough to have blisters, they will want to loosely and gently bandage the affected area if possible.

Frostbitten skin should only be rewarmed if there’s no risk of refreezing, since freezing and thawing repeatedly is gonna really hurt your character (or, I dunno, maybe that’s part of your whump plan, in which case -- go for it!!)

Obviously, you can write your whumpfic as realistically or as unrealistically as you damn well please, and you can choose to have your characters make bad choices that go against conventional wisdom and medical recommendations. This guide mainly provides suggestions if you wanna incorporate realistic details one way or another, but ultimately, it’s your story to tell however you want. Have fun, and stay warm!

Additional Resources:

Windchill chart:  https://www.weather.gov/media/safety/windchillchart3.pdf

Frostbite calculator: https://public.tableau.com/profile/adam.crahen#!/vizhome/BabyitscoldoutsideWindChillFrostBite/Brrrrrr

How to Build a Shelter: https://adventure.howstuffworks.com/survival/wilderness/how-to-build-a-shelter.htm

[hahanoiwont]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Undertale (Video Game) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Papyrus & Sans, Frisk & Sans, Alphys/Undyne, Papyrus & Undyne, Frisk & Everyone, W. D. Gaster & Papyrus & Sans Characters: Sans, Frisk, Papyrus, Alphys, Undyne, W. D. Gaster, Gaster Follower(s) Additional Tags: playing with the FUN mechanic, The Void, Magic, Determination, spacetime shenanigans Summary:

Shortcuts are an exact science.

Shortcuts are an exact science. They move through the Void—an infinitely-collapsing nothing dimension that takes up no space and time, but at the same time is uniform all across whenever it is accessed. The Void is a constant, while Sans and anyone following him and the starting point and the destination and a couple other environmental considerations are the variables. Most of the magic cost of a shortcut comes of enforcing regular six-dimensional reality onto the Void long enough to use it as a path to a regular six-dimensional destination.

If it’s just Sans taking a shortcut, he can cut out most of the cost—a relative second or two in the void won’t remove him from reality like it would most folks.

Sometimes he remembers why that is, sometimes he doesn’t. But he always remembers that the Void will hesitate to destroy him. The Void is as safe for Sans as…well, a relatively safe space in a dimension of infinite entropic constants. If he’s gonna have trouble with a shortcut, it’s gonna be in the world of variables, in himself or where he pops out or what he did wrong in his calculations.

Sans is very fast and very accurate in his calculations. He hasn’t shortcut himself into a staircase or table since…he can’t remember when. There was one time in particular, he thinks…

He’s pretty sure it’d scared…someone…Papyrus(?) so bad that he’d gotten a strongly-worded lecture about respecting the seriousness of his studies and not using highly advanced, theoretical magic to save ten seconds of walking. And the dangers of the Void, which always makes him snort when he thinks about it.

Come to think of it, he’s pretty sure he remembers Pap also being there for that conversation, saying he’s sure Sans knew what he was doing, and Sans wouldn’t endanger himself carelessly, so it must have just been a mistake, right, Sans?

That had actually made him feel worse than the lecture.

And then Papyrus had taken him quietly aside later, and asking him Could You Have Fallen Down If You Did A Mistake? in the way that meant Tell Me You Care More About Your Life Than This, I Know You Are Better Than This, I Am Already Impressed By Your Accomplishments And Wish You Wouldn’t Show Off If It Could Hurt You. If Sans recalls correctly, he’d said something like…

“nah, paps, i was just—i was just being dumb, wasn’t thinking, forgot we moved that table, didn’t even hurt, right? just felt weird for a bit, it’s, uh, um.” He’d let out a breath and hung his head, unable to look at his brother’s increasing distress. “sorry. i shouldn’t have been showing off. i was just…yeah. that was stupid of me.”

He’d just been having fun with having a part of his studies he could show off to Papyrus and ****** without having to practically write a thesis to explain what it was and why it was kinda cool. Theory is great—Sans loves theory—but it was fun to have a practical application, and a useful one at that. He’d just gotten kinda carried away.

He’d thought he was being all responsible, owning up to what he did wrong (at least to Papyrus; he’d taken his brother’s out in front of ******) and apologizing for it, but Paps had seen right through him.

“That Was Actually Pretty Cool, Though,” Papyrus had said. Sans had perked up entirely, forgoing scuffing his shoes on the floor in favor of basking in his brother’s admiration.

“right? isn’t it? i can teleport!” he’d said. “i mean. maybe i should have…tested it out a bit more. it kind of was an ‘irrational and dangerous misuse of untested theoretical physics,’ and all. lab safety is cool. that was…kinda not that.”

Not to mention how the shortcut that had taken him halfway through a table in the lab hadn’t been his first shortcut—he’d shortcut straight to Papyrus once he had a decent idea of how to balance out his equations for it, and spent most of the afternoon tweaking his technique and teleporting circles around his brother. That had been the opposite of lab safety. Especially when he left the lab to do it.

Somehow, Sans had figured he was just smart enough that nothing would go wrong. “You’re never too good to make mistakes” is a lesson he’d learned later.

“I Was Not Really Encouraging Good Science Habits, Either,” Papyrus had admitted at the time. “It’s Very Cool That You Have Discovered This Neat Way To Use Your Magic! But! In The Future! Maybe We Can Make A Corner Of The Room That We Don’t Put Things In? And Then? You Use Your Cool New Magic To Go There? And Not In A? Table???”

Sans hadn’t said it then, because he’d had some sort of hang-up where he didn’t say it out loud, but that had been one of the many times that Papyrus had been so cool. Even when Sans had been, in hindsight, kind of insufferably proud of his scientific leanings, Papyrus always let him know that he thought what Sans was doing was cool and impressive, and that he was proud of his brother’s accomplishments.

Sans can remember that incident most of the time, even though it doesn’t really make sense with the memories he also has where he never told Paps about his interest in science, and told him he was going to dentistry school instead. The dentistry story is the one he always remembers, though, so that must have…ugh. It always gives him a headache to remember this stuff.

Not worth the effort. He’s never gonna get that past back anyway, so why bother sorting out what really happened? Better to take what he has now: the coolest brother in the world, some pretty good friends, some pretty bad jokes, the sky. The Surface.

He’d never been as impressed by the idea of the Surface as other monsters seemed to be—seemed like it couldn’t be that great when Sans already had everything he needed underground with him. Not worth risking that for some world they’d been cut off from for thousands of years, right?

Stars, he’s never been happier to be wrong.

What he has now is everything he’d ever had underground, plus an ever-widening world of friends and family; sights to see, foods to try, things to avoid doing. He sure is glad he did absolutely nothing while Frisk did all the work of getting the Barrier down.

At least, he assumes he did nothing. Frisk won’t say what happened, and no one else remembers.

There are a lot of things Frisk won’t say. And it’s not just because they don’t talk much.

Doesn’t stop them from being a curious kid, though.

Today, Sans is relaxing, enjoying his escape from Alphys’s “SELF-ESTEEM TRAINING!!!” with Papyrus and Undyne, when Frisk trots up to him and stops, staring down at him insistently.

“‘sup, buddy?” he asks. “you find a cool rock somewhere?”

Frisk sometimes brings artifacts back from their adventures—clothes, tools, toys; almost always human artifacts that they seem to pick up from where no human had any business being in the first place.

Doesn’t look like that’s what’s going on now, though. They just have their stick with them, and the locket they picked up somewhere Underground. They’re clutching their shirt hem.

“…home?” they ask, craning their head to look behind them. They scan the surrounding buildings and trees at the edge of town before they check on Paps and crew.

Sans scans the area, too. Frisk hadn’t gone far—he’d been keeping an eye socket on them, or at least their SOUL; they hadn’t been out of his sight for more than a few minutes.

Then again, they do get nervous when they haven’t seen Toriel or Asgore for a while, even after years have passed and their new parents have failed to abandon them. Maybe they’re just antsy?

Undyne suplexes a dumpster unexpectedly, and Frisk whips around to face the noise, one hand outstretched like they would shield Sans from Undyne’s reign of terror against his fellow piles of garbage.

A tense moment passes. Frisk stares at Undyne, who is attempting to suplex Alphys, who is being carried by Papyrus. It looks like they’re playing some sort of keep-away game.

“pretty jumpy there, buddy,” Sans notes. Frisk glances at him, before going back to scanning their (still perfectly normal) surroundings. “makes a guy wonder. what’s rattling your bones?”

Not even a huff. Frisk just shrugs uncomfortably.

“come on. you can trust me, right? tell your buddy sans what’s wrong.” He winks his right eye.

Frisk squirms. They’ll break in a second, Sans is sure of it. Just a little more pressure…

Frisk’s eyes dart away, focusing intently on nothing, and their body twists to follow their gaze. They trot towards it two paces without even seeming to realize it, before their movement is arrested.

They reach up to clutch at something—hard to say what, from Sans’s vantage point on the ground behind them. Their collar, maybe?

They back up a half pace, making the tiniest conflicted noise. They shake their head.

“uh. frisk?” Sans asks.

Frisk glances at him, turning to keep both him and the point of nothing that’s caught their attention in their field of view.

Sans doesn’t know a lot about human eyesight, but if he doesn’t miss his guess, they’re focusing far away. Are they looking at the end of town or past it?

He can’t see anything there, but Frisk sometimes knows things he doesn’t. He’ll have to come back here later and see if he can rustle anything up.

“Home,” Frisk insists. “We shouldn’t be here.”

They reach down towards Sans, and Sans forgoes jokes for a moment to let them pull him up. Frisk doesn’t seem like they’d take the old whoopee cushion joke too well right now.

Normally that wouldn’t stop him, but he doesn’t want to be the shout that causes the avalanche. Frisk is pretty fearless normally. Whatever’s spooked them could be pretty…spooky.

They don’t let go of Sans once he’s on his feet, choosing instead of grab his sleeve and tug insistently. He lets them propel him along, taking an arcing path towards the others.

If the kid’s keeping an even radius from whatever’s scared them, that puts it past a stand of trees. Nothing he can see right now, and they shouldn’t be able to, either.

Sans stares at the back of Frisk’s head. what’s going on here, kiddo?

Frisk doesn’t seem to notice, focused between Papyrus and the trees, until they glance back at him again.

“Do you…” they start. Then they shake their head, apparently deciding that whatever it is, he doesn’t.

“oh, yeah. all the time,” he says vaguely.

“No, no. Nothing. Nothing,” Frisk says. “It’s—did you ever—work with—nothing. Never mind.”

“i’ve had a few jobs, kiddo, i’ve worked with a lot of people,” Sans comments. “maybe a name would jog my memory?”

It’s not a joke, but Frisk snorts, only a little off-beat.

“No, it wouldn’t. Never mind. You should go home. Bring everyone. Game night.” They tug Sans forward and push him the last few feet, to Papyrus, Undyne and Alphys.

The training crew has politely paused midway through a game of catch with Alphys as the ball. Undyne sets her down by the head as Sans and Frisk approach.

“What’s up? Here to join in our EPIC TRAINING SESH?!?” she shouts.

The force of her passion generates a gust of wind that goes right through Sans. Frisk, on the other hand, has to cling to his hoodie to avoid being pushed back, at least until Papyrus’s blue magic anchors them more firmly to the ground.

“Brother! I Am Glad You Have Finally Chosen To Join Us, Instead Of Sitting Under A Tree And Being Lazy All Day! I Am…Surprised You Have Finally Chosen To Join Us! Shocked, In Fact!” Papyrus says. His eye sockets narrow. “…This Wouldn’t Happen To Be A Jape That You Are Concocting With Frisk, Is It? Human! I Have Told You Not To Succumb To My Brother’s Lazy Trickery! You Should Join Us In Training Just To Block Out His Tomfoolering Influence!”

Sans cuts in before he can get on a tangent—normally he has fun egging his brother on, but Frisk just might try pushing them all home if they dawdle too long, and funny as that would be, Sans doesn’t want to know what lengths Frisk would go to to get them all settled into a relative “safe” area.

“frisk just wanted to head home a bit early. too much fun out here, figured we’d ask who’s up for game night,” Sans says.

Frisk lurches and looks at him strangely, even though he’d pretty much just said what they had. Unless “too much fun” means something different to humans. Sans should remember to look that up some time after he stalks Frisk’s encounter with whatever’s out there.

It’s not stalking if you have parental consent, right? It’s, uh…temporary…guardianship. That promise he made to Tori all those years ago counts for that, right?

Welp. Too late to be quibbling over moralisms, anyway. Sans is in this deep, and it’s not like the kid is gonna let anyone else know what’s going on.

Papyrus hesitates, a bit thrown by the sudden plan change—they have a game night already scheduled for tomorrow, tonight was supposed to be relatively free so he could prepare a Meal of Epic Proportions for it—but Alphys is perceptive as Sans knows her to be.

After being placed on the ground, she’d gotten her bearings and read some part of Frisk’s frantic discomfort off of their posture. Their face has resumed a blank expression, but their free hand is clutching their locket, and they’re standing half-hidden behind Sans closer than usual.

Or, from the perspective to the point they’re avoiding, Sans is half-hidden behind them, with Papyrus and Undyne grouped behind them both.

While Papyrus is talking, Alphys makes a subtle gesture to Sans—??—and he shrugs one shoulder and tilts his head back—dunno, but i’m going along with it.

This is not the first nor the last time Alphys will be frustrated by Sans’s staunch refusal to get overtly involved in a puzzling situation, but she does trust him, and she knows him well enough to know he’ll be doing his own investigation later. She pipes up in support.

“I-I think th-” The weight of everyone’s attention makes her flinch, but not as bad as she was during the worst of the amalgamates mess. She steadies after a moment. “I think that that would be f-fun. We c-could bring over something to…”

Frisk’s grip on Sans’s sweater, still there, tightens a fraction—again on the word ‘fun.’ Their stick shifts against his back. Where they’re holding it it’s sort of like a weird seat belt, or some kind of really ineffective shield.

Frankly, if anything were to get through the human at his back, there’s not a lot that would make an effective shield, except maybe magic. Given that Frisk only has DETERMINATION, a stick is as good as anything else, Sans supposes.

Sans shifts slightly, not even enough to be adjusting his weight, and moves his hand a bit. nope. Hopefully Alphys’ll get his meaning—Frisk said they should go to Sans and Paps’ house, and they seem to want to keep everyone together. Whatever is suggested needs to fill both of those conditions.

Jeez, this is really straining his teamwork muscles. It’s been forever since he and Alphys have had to be this in sync. Last time they worked together on something sensitive was…uh…

“Actually, I think! We left off right before the series finale of Kissy Kissy Mer-mew! And even if it’s not! As good as the original! Th-that’s still at your house! So we can watch that! And try making popcorn again!” Alphys quickly course-corrects, and Frisk relaxes. Sans nods, and Alphys relaxes, too.

Oh, he is really not getting out of this without explaining something to her later. He owes her several favors for this one.

Well, maybe one less, with the popcorn suggestion. She has essentially sacrificed his kitchen.

“Good,” Frisk says, pushing at Sans again.

Undyne and Papyrus, watching this interplay like a particularly subtle ping-pong match, decide it’s not worth questioning. Except…

“Hey, isn’t you guys’ house that way…?” Undyne points back to their house, snowy roof clearly visible, a hundred or so feet from the Dreaded Copse of Evil Trees.

“don’t worry.” Sans winks. “i know a shortcut.”

Frisk jerks his shoulder back, and-

Sans takes a shortcut. Taking four other people with him is a bit more costly, magically speaking, than he usually prefers; but whatever’s intimidating Frisk will probably be disconcerted by the Void, right? Home field advantage.

He makes up the calculations for his shortcut on the fly, like he always does. It’s a short trip spatially, and he has a good grip on everyone’s magical signatures to pull them with him. It should be an easy trip. Something he’s so accustomed to at this point that it’s barely math, more intuition. He knows what the hit to his magical reserves will feel like, he’ll be a little hungry and a little sleepy; he knows where he’s going; he knows he’s going to dump Frisk in a snowbank because they could use a laugh.

It should be totally forgettable.

Instead, the Void bucks and writhes, around him and through him like a living thing, like drowning or being crushed or ripped apart into infinitude, and in that endless instant of travel, he grasps every atom, every scrap of energy that makes himself up, and desperately scrabbles for something to keep it together. What shape is he supposed to fit together in? What is he? He’s—

Magic. Magic, that’s what he’s doing. He’s using magic to travel, and he can use it to hold things, move things, can’t he? A stray photon attempts to escape form him and he grabs everything near him, everything he can feel, with blue magic, drags it to him—

Sans. He’s Sans. He’s Sans the skeleton, whole and in the corrupted void—it acts almost like a physical space, right now, flashing lights that he experiences as numbers and words, FUN on a little graph that spikes up and up. If he looked deeply into it, he’s certain that he would understand what went wrong, what happened, how it all works; the void could show him so many things he doesn’t understand.

Instead, he reaches out with his blue magic. someone, anyone.

Falling apart in the same way he was, he can feel his friends. He grasps for Papyrus first; he’s similarly resilient against the Void normally, but Sans isn’t sure “normally” applies right now.

It’s the work of an hour, the work of an instant to crush Papyrus’s magic back into a workable SOUL, and in that infinite moment he gathers his brother’s flaking dust and forces magic and light into it. Intense blue gravity fuses dissipating particles back into one being, and he reaches for Alphys. She’s the least DETERMINED, therefore, most vulnerable to harm.

His magic falters. It’s been a long time since it’s had this kind of workout. He grits his teeth and pushes harder. Time doesn’t work in the Void, so technically, he hasn’t spent any of that magic yet, right? He can use it simultaneously with himself. He’s only experiencing this in linear time because his mind is trying to make sense of what’s happening to him. As long as he doesn’t die or anything, he can reuse the same magic and the same moment. Right?

Sans is clumsier this time as he reaches blindly, messily towards Alphys’s relative direction. Her own magic should keep her alive as long as she’s not actively disappearing into the Void, right? He pushes her magic and dust into a general shape with a crack! and moves on.

Oh. That crack might have been him, actually. Ouch.

…so, turns out he does still have limited magic in nonlinear time.

Undyne isn’t falling apart so much as getting…gooey. Her DETERMINATION is trying to keep her together. Good, he just needs to get her out of the Void and hope it’s not too little, too late.

With effort, Sans searches for the other end of his shortcut, the inevitable finish to the calculation he’d based their path on, but…the Void is twisting, jerking around him—he can’t find it without looking through the Void, and once he looks, he’ll be lost.

Sans blindly tears a hole with a SOUL-deep tug that tell him he’s reached the end of his energy. Weakly, already falling back into physical reality, he turns back to find Frisk—

--who’s watching him, reaching with wide, wet eyes, as he and the others are saved, just a touch too far away to reach them.

Sans, out of magic entirely, reaches his physical hand back towards them, knowing already how futile it will be. Frisk’s mouth sets as they see something in his expression. He’s able to see an echo of their immediate future, how their hand will drop, how it will be taken up be an off-color afterimage of them, how both humans—human-shaped beings—will hold on to one another as they watch the tear in the Void close without them. Abandoned.

And then that future vanishes like a puff of smoke that someone put a bullet through, as someone else’s blue magic scoops Frisk up, sending them crashing into Sans and then both of them to Papyrus.

Sans’s brother is so cool.

Sans is able to see through his darkening vision that they’re falling through a dizzying expanse of gray and white, or at least that’s how it looks to him, before he passes out cold.

Paps can stick the landing for them.

(read it on ao3)

[hyperfixus]

ATTACH AND DETACH

I’d have to count using over two hands to calculate the amount of people I’ve cut off in the past twelve months. Is it due to my own sanity, my pride, my selfishness, my shame, or my patterns of growth? It’s difficult to identify. Or maybe it’s all of it.

With every person I’ve cut off comes a different circumstance. I refuse to name and shame on my blog however I will go into a vague explanation behind each purge - I have felt violently betrayed. Each and every time. Funnily enough, whether this is coincidental or the universe sending me tests in human forms, the majority of these people have been identified by me in my life as one of my “best friends”. Do I have a problem with keeping people around? Am I too overbearing?

Many people with borderline personality disorder will experience an extreme fear, perhaps phobia-like outlook, of abandonment and rejection. We thrive on your love. We put you on the highest of pedestals. We will take extreme measures to keep you around if we feel the smallest inkling that you might walk out. And believe me, I sure as hell am not proud of that nor am I okay with the fact that I can go to such lengths to claim somebody as something so special when they pay just a crumb of attention to me.

A vast majority of people who live with BPD will have developed the condition from a traumatic event, predominantly during early childhood. However I cannot recall a childhood trauma that would have set off something so superlative in a tiny part of my body that is in control of every thought, action and emotion I have. (Trust me, I am very grateful for that.) I believe my BPD has stemmed widely from the intensity I’ve felt from the rapidly-fluctuating emotions I’ve coped with while living with ADHD, anxiety and depression. (What a mess.)

Back to the point. I’m fittingly and stereotypically floating away from the main topic.

A part of me is frightened that the decision I make to discontinue relationships so suddenly (whether platonic or romantic) is irrational. Don’t get me wrong, I am perfecting the right to emote when I am uncomfortable or unhappy, but on the other hand, it’s how I emote it. Recently I shouted at someone I considered a best friend (ha ha ha, continue) because of something I was uncomfortable with. I have this constant worry in my mind that my expressions are all wrong. Maybe I was out of line. No, I am entitled to be upset. Why didn’t I calm down? But you’re allowed to be frustrated. But

Don’t. Lose. Your. Temper. Nobody listens when you’re angry, I learned that the hard way.

Living with borderline is a continuous road of irrationality, whether that be my thoughts, actions or emotions. It’s a learning curve. Luckily it’s not a learning curve that every person has to experience, but it’s charged my empathy, compassion and respect by a mile, which I guess I could consider a plus. I’d like to think I’m not bad at maintaining relationships. I have friends that have stuck around for over a decade. You know what it is that makes life with BPD easier? It’s those who are willing to have an understanding for irrationality, intense mood swings, fear of abandonment and rejection, and who have genuine care for you as a person despite your disorder. Some people are either blind sighted or outright refuse to understand for their own personal reasons - but remember kids, that is not your problem. If somebody you have a relationship with is trying to understand but isn’t quite there yet, give them time; they care enough to want to understand how you function on a daily basis (and don’t let those people go. Show them love and gratitude). If somebody you have a relationship with is unwilling to understand, that has nothing to do with you. You are worth so much more than those who ignore your beautiful, functioning self.

Never be afraid to express when you are unhappy, despite how irrational you think your feelings may be. Your feelings are real and should not be dismissed. And if anybody does...dismiss your relationship with them.

[kyattokyatto]

The Half Breed - Part 2 (ACOWAR)

(Artwork by @phantomrin)

Kiril’s glare only magnified when he put two and two together. Not only did he have to be in the same room as Rhysand but the information that the beautiful woman next to him was his mate infuriated the young fae to no end. Her hair was a soft brown like the brown of a tree’s bark with complimenting sky blue eyes, she was pretty… Prettier than he deserved or at least that’s what Kiril thought.

It was a slight shock when even a sliver of guilt shown in those violet eyes only for his son’s sharp crystal eyes to narrow in an uncaring gesture.

“Kallias.” Rhys’ voice was smooth and rich like a fountain of chocolate at a banquet covered in the finest decoration. The night sky practically lived on his chest as flecks of gold and silver shined on a base of dark violet. Crow’s feathers nested on top of his head while an air of darkness followed him. Wings stolen from a bat followed behind the high lord as well… More idle chatter and tenseness accompanied the Night Court’s arrival but it seemed all too friendly to the Ice Prince. These people had issues with each other. Was it not months before that a woman, allied with Rhys, found her way onto the Winter Court’s lands? This anger would not be let free as the rest of the High Lords appeared and he was representing his court and father right now, not himself.

Tarquin, High Lord of the Summer Court, was first to arrive. Snowy gray strands fell to his shoulders which brought out aqua blue eyes. If Helion’s skin was roasted coffee Tarquin’s was the finest chocolate to exist, even finer than Rhys’ voice. Two similar looking Fae followed behind who were of royalty but not the guard status.

Beron, High Lord of the Autumn Court, and his all six of his sons showed in the spotlight next. In Kiril’s icy blue eyes he was a stern old man with too much time to have too many kids. The son’s sneers did not go unnoticed by him and instead of sneering back he kept up an icy facade similar to his father’s while looking back at the dark-skinned high lord that just entered. Everything about him was brown but not the glowing brown of Tarquin or Helion more of a fiery brown. The brown of smoking wood decorated with auburns and reds and vibrant oranges. Autumn was definitely a part of his person.

Things could be considered just peachy before as compared to the sudden amount of aggression and horror that radiated off Rhys’ mate as Tamlin, High Lord of the Spring Court sauntered in. Skin slightly scorched by the sun’s rays playing along with golden strands of hair. Green apples replaced his arrogant eyes as his pearly whites revealed themselves in a bloody smirk. War. It was obvious he craved war. He craved blood. Especially Rhysand’s mate. Of course, everyone seemed to have something against the girl, even Kiril who’s presence had never graced her once before. It was irrational hate. Hate that boiled wild, blistered like the cold, was deadly if put into action, and Rhysand took notice. There were so many personal issues between people in this room. Kiril and Rhysand. Kallias and The Night Court. Tarquin ignored everyone. This meeting had little chance of success.

Hybern had its representative here. It hadn’t even been a second before the debating started about Hybern and Feyre and Love. Subjects filled the room that had nothing to do with anything that was meant to be discussed.

Under the Mountain, the beginning conversation that Tamlin brought up, was a dark place Kiril had barely heard of but the things he had heard about it were of Rhysand mostly and his blind obedience, his abandonment of his people, his.. habits. It only gave the young fae more to feed his wrath that even the snowy hills of his court could not cool. It went from pointing out Rhysand’s betrayals to bringing up the fact that Tamlin himself was allianced with Hybern.

“I stand against Hybern.” His face morphed into a stone cold resolve.

“Prove it.” Helion’s deep voice immediately barked at his miserable face. Papers, reports, charts, and information of every kind slammed onto the table as so-called evidence. The words tickled the tongues of everyone in the room. What if these were fake? It seemed Helion was more than willing to speak up again and question it directly. “Noble as it sounds, who is to say that information is correct- or that you aren’t Hybern’s agent, trying to mislead us?” More accusations toward the Night High Lord were thrown which just made Tamlin himself look worse. He came to work with us but was trying so hard to prove Rhys was the bad one. Kiril agreed, he hated Rhys himself but it still remained a bit suspicious. Too good to be true he thought. Tamlin even went as far as to attempt at shoving blame on one of the Day courts royalty that accompanied Helion.

“Those who accuse often have the most guilty conscience.” This would be the only thing Kiril would say during the meeting as he had not and would not find another reason to open his mouth and use that soft voice of his.

FEYRE’S POV

His voice caught me off guard like the feathery clouds in the sky. He was like a cold star encased in ice but beautiful nonetheless. Those glacier blue eyes reflected Kallias’ in not just color but expression as well. A nest of raven braids held a pure white crown atop his head while the finest furs decorated his tunic. I would say he was related to Kallias and Viviane, possibly their son, but his raven hair almost matched that of Rhysand’s. It looked of the night sky in Velaris, yet he had blue eyes instead of vibrant violet. They were filled with certain hate though that seemed directed at Rhys himself. My thoughts portrayed enough and I didn’t even have to directly ask down the bond.

‘It’s a long story…’ I was certain that had I heard him say those words out loud they would have been just as sad as they felt. I didn’t bother pushing it anymore as a wave of regret and pure agony seemed to transmit off of him making me more miserable than I already was. The only thing that brought me back to reality was when Tamlin began to insult me again only for him to silence. It was an awkward silence but the shock came from the other high lords as they soon realized his silence was a feat of Rhysand’s power.

THIRD PERSON POV

Kiril just sat and listened with pointed ears while scoffing at any childish talk that even flowed from the Spring high lord’s mouth. His mind may have gotten a bit arrogant at that moment but it was not shown with a smirk of any kind. The posture he held stiffened and the hairs on the back of his neck stood on end as his glacier blue eyes connected with Rhys’ mate, Feyre he believed she was called. The stare given to him soon vanished into any breeze that wafted through as the childish high lord ceased his speech. That was the moment that Kiril got to see just how powerful Rhysand was, what he may be up against in the future. From there the meeting commenced into what it should have been focused on Hybern, war, and the ever great shadow of the dead that was upon them. Despite his young age for a fae and old age for a human, Kiril was not ignorant of to the shadows that threatened to devour Prythian whole.

It was no shock to the ice prince when one of the night court generals physically and magically attacked another from the autumn court. Despite the lack of shock that filled his system he still remained on guard and ready to defend, or kill, if need be. It completely vanished from view as Feyre calmed the seemingly powerful shadow user… which impressed Kiril. This meeting, if one could even begin to fathom how it could be called that, was like a series of fights which were all directed at the arrogant and ignorant Autumn Court. It was surprising that Tamlin himself hadn’t been ripped to shreds or murdered, letting his blood flow into the pond below them. The meeting all came to end after discussing a remedy for faebane, a possible plan, but at the end, six out of seven of the courts united to fight against Hybern. Relief washed over Kiril as his father, mother, and himself left to go to their room. Not even a glance was spared from him for Rhysand or Feyre or the rest of the Night Court.

Their room was extravagant with everything one might need in life. Curtains of faded sunlight framed the clear glass windows as the sun drifted into the horizon. The same plants that decorated the meeting room decorated this room. There was a bathroom carved of Sunstone and a bedroom with the finest orange sheets made of silk. They swirled together with yellows and pink as the sunset would. Kiril immediately collapsed onto the soft bed while a content sigh escaped his mouth. The crown atop his head began yanking stubbornly at a tender headed scalp. He began to fidget with it trying to get it to stop.

“Come here,” his father’s strict and deep voice suddenly entered the air causing his eyes to shoot up immediately. Kiril was feeling a bit… salty. Hesitation filled his body language before getting up, walking to his father, and looking downward in respect plus some fear he would never admit to. There was an emptiness in the air momentarily. “I’ll give you a choice. Go to dinner at Rhysand’s suite or you can eat here then train to strengthen your skills.”

“Here. I want to stay here.” Almost immediately the braided hair atop his head began to fall by his face as his father’s hands undid it. The crown on his head found its way to a vanity that reflected the story of summer.

“Very well…” His father watched him for a second before nodding and bidding him goodbye with his mother. Kiril could undo his hair by himself but he supposed it was his father’s way of saying ‘you can be a pain in my ass but I still love you’. There wasn’t any hesitation left and he knew exactly where he was going. To the kitchen then to the training grounds.

It wasn’t that difficult for him to stumble across the kitchen either… Sneaking in would most likely be the most difficult part. His eye glanced into the giant room that was home to pots, pans, foods, knives, and other utensils. Only a single fae stood within, fidgeting with some pans. She was like every other summer fae but not. Short white hair, dark skin, and even those bright blue eyes. Kiril hadn’t realized he was standing in the doorway while staring intently at her until a frying pan left her hand, aimed straight at his head. Lucky for him and his training he managed to hastily duck down while looking back at the pan, now strewn across the hallway.

“I’m so sorry, Prince!” Instinctually she bowed toward him while visible shivers went up to her spine. The raven-haired male wasn’t quite sure why she seemed so utterly horrified he’d bring his ‘almighty wrath upon thee’ but his head didn’t think too much on it. Her blue dress wrinkled a bit in that bow. It was decorated in many shades of blue and silver lines that went every direction known to man and fae alike.

“It’s fine… What’s your name?”

“Khary, Prince.”

“Just call me Kiril…” Her bright deep blue eyes shot up at him immediately as if to see if he was serious.

“Krill? Like shrimp?” Kiril did a double take for second as his eyes bore into hers. Khary looked completely innocent at that moment too as if she hadn’t suggested his father named him after a shrimp-like creature.

“No, Kiril… Kuh-rill.”

“That’s what I said, Krill!” He really couldn’t tell if her innocence was just a facade or an actual part of her personality. A groan came out of his mouth at the mere thought of people calling him Krill. He didn’t have anything against the animals but it wasn’t exactly an ideal name either.

“Right, well I came here to get something then I’m leaving.” Kiril walking toward a basket of freshly baked rolls as his cold hands gripped two without care. It wasn’t like Khary would stop him, besides if she tried he just tell her to stop. True to his thoughts Khary made no attempt at stopping him but instead continued to hang pans up in their respective places. The two barely interacted beyond that as Kiril left to train as promised to his father.

Part 1 | Part 2

[augujerdeer]

🍎👠🎃🌆👂😱💬!!! Feel free to not answer any of them!

IM CRYING BECAUSE YOU ACTUALLY SENT INE THANK YOU jnsjshdjhsdjh

🍎what are yall’s favourite foods?

I think this is gonna be a long post now that I think about it, but i’m asking everyone what their favourite food would be if they could only pick one or two (not everyone answered or can but >:0)

Mine (Jamie) would be pancakes! or grilled salmon! OR SPICY TUNA SASHIMI!!!!

Kris, Chara and Matthew immediately just have chocolate as their answer dicenksfvjk but kris says “anything” and he lives up to it sometimes

Jaiden says gummy bears and gummy worms (all he eats is CANDY)

Kobe says flowers,,,,

Sal is picking between pizza and cheesecake smoothies

Peter says he doesn’t have one yet ;;

👠how difficult is it for y'all to agree on one cohesive outfit?

So this kind of depends on how many people are out, but I usually follow whoever wants to wear something if only one person is requesting something (Like when Kris would screech and ask for me/us to wear the pink hoodie or his sequins sneakers)

But if there’s multiple people, (usually Kris, Chara, or Matthew) it might take a while ksjskjskjs but generally everyone would go rock-paper-scissors or let the other person have us wear what they want! Usually because they deserve this turn or we take turns :0

🎃how many head mates could be considered scary?

HMM,,, I guess I would say Severous first. He’s a 8+ foot werewolf man, he is a BEAR

his fur is PITCH BLACK especially at night and his eyes and drool glow white (so he has no pupils, that’s his entire eyes), so if you’re in the forest in Providence in the middle of the night, you’ll just see a scary OwO face in the dark

HE DOESNT DO THE OWO FACE BUT ITS NOT LIKE I CAN COPY IT IN TEXT FORM

he always stands on two legs unless he’s SPRINTING , but honestly??? HES BABY and we all love him, Kobe calls him “PUPPY” and even drew him a few times while fronting ;;;;;;;; He’s actually a dad to one of our littles Penny and is gay and dates someone from one of my partners’ system

Also he doesn’t speak very well? He used to speak fluently but overtime and he was recovering from being a persecutor, his ability to speak was kind of, disintegrating? So he only speaks in SUPER SHORT and almost broken english sentences. if you visit him you can catch him reading children’s books and practicing to read and speak again,,, he’s baby,,,,

Chara (from undertale) could be considered scary inspace becaus ethey can go goopy- they’re not a scary person but if they want to scare you, (especially if you don’t know who they are i mean), they will be intimidating and stuff ;; when i first met them, they did spook me, and their eyes are very bright red

Sal (from Sally Face) I guess could be considered spooky because i was drawing him in class one time (prosthetic ON of course) and my friend said he looked scary ;;;? poor sal;;; he’s not scary at all

🌆what does your headspace look like?

*clasps hands together* goodness it’s a good thing i made this map. it’s VERY OLD but it’s still the same except imagine everything is WAAAAAY more spaced Out!

honestly i need to move the teleporters and mansion higher up (and the main tree closer to them) but this is it!!!

The most common places people go to is The Mansion, The Bunker, The Farmhouse, and The Picnic Ground! People when going for walks in the forest usually stick around the Picnic Grounds-Cave Pool-Farmhouse Triangle but usually can go anywhere- the forest is SO big though (alven took me flying once and it stretches to the horizon)

The Mansion is where most of us live! Here you can find Jaiden and the kids (Kobe, Aco, and Penny– and Carla (Carla is an NPC [who is aware of the outside?] but we don’t care she is family). Alven is also here with his lab, so is Joseph and Louise!! (and their dog, Troy). On the outside, you can’t see the mansion, only two giant doors (nobody ever uses kdndckdocsl we honestly just use the teleporters to go anywhere– Also, everything you see INSIDE the meadow excluding the bunker was what our headspace FIRST looked like!!! it was the start of everything ;; Jaiden made the mansion. The mansion has two main rooms- The Main Hall, and The Tall Corridor. There’s a looooot of history here

The Farmhouse is where I (Jamie) live! But i’m not inspace a lot so it’s honestly empty until i meditate there ;;

The bunker existed and is a place some people permanently moved to because we started having some Bad Refuses To Do Good Persecutors, or just bad people. They were VERY violent so half of us went to hide- and eventually the entire system actually moved to the bunker for almost a year and a half before moving out- and then some people stayed- mainly Matthew. People who live in the bunker are Matthew, Kris, Peter, Jade, Chara, Liam, and Sal! Icari should be here somewhere but i think she’s still hiding ;;

Most of the time if we have a new person, they move to the bunker right away. There’s a teleport system almost all over the frequent spots in the headspace so they can easily leave and enter! Matthew lives one the second ground below the 1st ground below because of some bad things that happened- he never leave the bunker because being outside scares him a lot- especially with the entire headspace being a forest :( you need special access to get down there

The Picnic grounds isn’t very special to me personally but Jaiden made it so people can have picnics!! It’s honestly SUPER pretty oh goodness, and no matter what time of day (unless it’s night) the sun is always shining nicely and it’s so pretty there, and people actually go there!!

The only people that don’t go there are Joseph and Louise because we had one bad person hurt them badly in that area,

Also the Ruined City i didn’t mention because– no one goes there- but we all know it exists. Basically it’s a purely grey/monotone/greyscale land? Like the moment you enter, the world transitions to black and white (not your body but the environment) and the only things that have colour are the miss and greenery in the background (mostly grass and parks, not a lot of trees). all the buildings are collapsed or destroyed in some way- so imagine a big area with degree and rubble and standing building but there’s so many destroyed parts like one building is missing an entire second floor and another has a giant gaping hole not eh side, etc.

we also don’t go there because it’s dangerous- there are giant SPIDER robots that patrol the area- we still don’t know why, but they shook lasers! (come back to this post later because I WILL add a picture of what i’m talking about!! i just don’t have my phone on me)

ANYWAY THERES MORE BUT ITS TOO MUCH TO PUT HERE

WE ALSO HAVE ANOTHER PLANET

👂What kind of music do y'all like?

Jamie - what do you mean people have favourite music? i’m just kidding uksdeijfdkj i like indie and broadway!!! pop is pretty cool but it’s not my first choice at all ;;; rock and metal hurts my ears

Chara - they have 4 playlists on spotify! One playlist is called Soft Knives for calm music (it’s usually happy but there could be some sad ones there- but no angst songs- imagine songs you can sleep to or calm down with). Blunt Knives is for angsty or apathetic moods- and Angry Knives is for ANGRY LOUD music. The have a 4th playlist called Chara’s Classical Collection. Chara can range from Classical music to indie music death metal and rock. They usually hate pop

Kris - he loves rap and r&b! though he loves a lot of music besides those! He loves tally hall and kid bloom :0 mostly chill or music that makes you go aW YEAH (his words) he also has Classic Songs in his playlist. So if you have it one shuffle, you’re listening to some sick bops and then all of a sudden Rockefeller Street Nightcore comes on and you get whiplash. doesn’t like metal or rock. He has a second playlist called “it’s Saturday Morning” for stuff like heo soul or “music you can dissociate to but not in a bad way” (Listen to Sugarcoat by Kid Bloom or Different State of Mind (some artist) for a general idea)

Matthew - rock and stuff similar to chemical romance and panic! at the disco. they like metal and rock but he says Sal’s and Chara’s are too aggressive for his taste- and hen you find out he sometimes listens to screamo

Sal - honestly i find his playlist super weird ? Some music sounds weird to me but otherwise his playlist is full over a lot of genres ! It’s kind of wack and funky- not the genre- but the amount of variety he has. And in his 2nd playlist is death/metal and rock- a bunch of loud music that can be fast sometimes too- is not afraid to head bang in public and do air guitar

Peter - We’re not sure yet but he likes music from his time- plus old music- specifically New Wave for now!his playlist is super new and he hasn’t been here a while so we’re not sure o>o

Jade - Soft calm or upbeat and happy music

Kobe and Aco - they are babies- Kobe still sings the ABC’s everyday so

😱do your headmates have any phobias?

i don’t think any of us has phobias- because it’s defined as “irrational fear” actually wikipedia says it can be CAUSED so nevermind dkjjkfd

Honestly these feel like triggers more than phobias butnit first thendescription of a phobia so;; i’m putting POSSIBLE because we’re not sure

Chara - Possible Nyctophobia (fear of the dark, but specifically extreme pitch blackness for Chara), Possible Ecclesiophobia (fear of the church -either building or what it represents])

Matthew - Agoraphobia most probably (fear of going outdoors/leaving the house, some say wide open spaces)

Sal - somewhat Cynophobia but wants to overcome it (fear of dogs) ((likes dogs but is afraid of them honestly))

Kris - Monophobia/Autophobia (Fear of isolation and abandonment) ((this is a big one))

That’s all i can think of for now

💬free space! one cool fact!

uuHHH,,,,,, i can’t think of any, but i know one thing: i love our system and i can see everyone’s trying really hard to take care of each other or are doing a lot to process their own memories and feelings ;;;