#she was desperate to be fruitful and multiply

[eimearkuopio]

I mean I went with "no and I'm pro choice" because I want to build a world where gender is irrelevant and also not assigned based on genitals, BUT we haven't built that world yet and I don't want to force anyone to be pregnant who doesn't want to be because I'm Irish and we know where that particular road paved with good intentions and caked in the blood of the women (mostly) who have gone before us leads.

Abortion should be legal everywhere; not because it isn't a sin, but because we don't legislate against every sin. Sin is when we treat people like things. The Catholic Church claims abortion treats babies like things, but actually, it treats babies and women* like people.

We can't legally take organs from the dead without their consent and/or the consent of their next of kin, even to save another life. We can't round up people and force them to donate blood, no matter how badly we need it or how short the supply is.

We shouldn't force women to share their bodily autonomy with anyone else unless they are doing so willingly. Especially given how often the resulting children have been neglected, even to the point of death, or stolen from their families and sold to people deemed "more worthy".

The atrocity is not in the individual women committing femicide, many of whom might choose to carry a daughter to term under different circumstances. The atrocity is a society that devalues women sufficiently that they might choose to kill their own daughters to spare them from this world - or takes the choice that should only ever be theirs away, and grants it to the man that society has decided should be put over them. If we build a society that values children, all of them, equally, that sees their potential as being of equal value, that does not proscribe their roles based on harmful traditions, femicide will never happen.

Love the sinner. Hate the sin. End the sin, but do it by valuing everyone more, not by reducing people to incubators to satisfy your own finite sense of justice.

*I'm going to talk about women here, not because only women get pregnant, but because it is a factually accurate statement that the overwhelming majority of pregnant people are women in at least some sense of that complicated word. Please don't see this as erasure; it's a simple model because I am a finite individual and I am Le Tired.

This is a bad idea but:

[larkingame]

here to hopefully help out with some spare change for the RO scenarios- how'd they be as parents? thanks and have a lovely day!

thank you for your spare change lol.

so what I'll say is that not all of the RO's would like to be parents--and I'll specify which ones would/wouldn't, but I'll write about the ones who would :)

nash: would love to potentially have kids one day. he's an uncle to a niece (that he's unfortunately yet to meet :c but is very desperate to.) He'd be very hands on I think--and big on his kids education. I think he'd prefer to raise them out west, beneath the big open skies he's fallen in love with, but he also wouldn't mind heading back to buffalo so that his kids could be more connected with his parents and brother. He'd want a couple kids--he wouldn't think it fair to leave behind an only child when he passed away--and his relationship with his own brother is one of his most treasured friendships.

cyrus: he's...well...he's complicated about kids. on one hand, he'd love to have them, he thinks...but on the other...he's not sure if his heart could take that. not again.

rose: rose took a large part in raising her five siblings, to a point where she views them as her own children, and doesn't think she could handle having any more of her own, nor does she really want them. as a parent she's a hard-ass, very tough on her siblings (but that's only because she loves them so much) she's very protective--but she also believes in pushing them to their fullest potential.

dominic: could not imagine himself as a parent. he can barely handle himself (?) and you expect him to look after another living thing(?) secretly he thinks he wouldn't mind it...but he doesn't trust himself to not fuck it up.

celina: never in a million years would celina sokolova be caught with a child. she is much too happy with her animals. (if this were modern times you KNOW she'd be like a millenial dog mom with an instagram account for her shih tzu and it'd be named something stupid like placek)

hollis: similar boat as dominic--they wouldn't mind a family--but they do not trust themselves to not ruin their kid.

ace: kids was the dream--especially with abrams. a little farm somewhere where they could run around, and ace could grow old surrounded not only by their children, but their grandchildren as well. they'd be loving, much like their own parents were--but tough.

ethel: has a habit of spoiling her kid. not to say that she's a quintessential Boy Mom TM but ethel is a boy mom lmao. Arthur is her little prince, who in her eyes can do no wrong. She wants him to have more than she ever had growing up, and she'll do whatever she can to make that happen.

cassidy: views arthur as his own, so there's a pretty clear indicator of what he'd be like as a father there. Cassidy's father was an evil son of a bitch, so cas is determined to break that cycle with arthur--he's gentle, he's kind--and doesn't behave the way he does with arthur with anyone else.

reyes: she's ambivalent about kids. on one hand the staunch catholic in them very much subscribes to the 'be fruitful and multiply' mindset...but on the other--they're afraid she'd ruin them.

montero: would definitely be on the r/childfree subreddit LMFAO. not a fan of kids, not in a million years.

adam: he's always been curious about fatherhood--he'd like to one day, to have something to call his own, to have a child...he supposes that is most likely the end goal here--but is he ready? he doesn't know.

[champagneproblesm]

Parallels between Tennyson's poeem st Siméon stylites and Taylor Swift lyrics/art - Random adsociation

Let this avail, just, dreadful, mighty God,

This not be all in vain, that thrice ten years,

Thrice multiplied by superhuman pangs,

In hungers and in thirsts, fevers and cold,

In coughs, aches, stitches, ulcerous throes and cramps,

A sign betwixt the meadow and the cloud,

Patient on this tall pillar I have borne

Rain, wind, frost, heat, hail, damp, and sleet, and snow;

And I had hoped that ere this period closed

- out of the Woods music video

Thou wouldst have caught me up into thy rest,

Denying not these weather-beaten limbs

[...]

Thou knowest I bore this better at the first,

For I was strong and hale of body then;

And though my teeth, which now are dropped away,

- don't you worry folks WE took out all her teetch - WAOLM

Who may be saved? who is it may be saved?

Who may be made a saint, if I fail here?

Show me the man hath suffered more than I.

For did not all thy martyrs die one death?

For either they were stoned, or crucified,

- what if i Roll the stone away, they're going to crucify me anyway

Or burned in fire, or boiled in oil, or sawn

- they're burning the witches Even if you aren't one

In twain beneath the ribs; but I die here

- Peter was she lying, my ribs get the feeling she dis

Today, and whole years long, a life of death.

Bear witness, if I could have found a way

(And heedfully I sifted all my thought)

More slowly-painful to subdue this home

Of sin, my flesh, which I despise and hate,

I had not stinted practice, O my God.

[...]

Three winters, that my soul might grow to thee,

I lived up there on yonder mountain-side.

My right leg chained into the crag, I lay

Pent in a roofless close of ragged stones;

Inswathed sometimes in wandering mist, and twice

Blacked with thy branding thunder, and sometimes

Sucking the damps for drink, and eating not,

Except the spare chance-gift of those that came

To touch my body and be healed, and live:

And they say then that I worked miracles,

Whereof my fame is loud amongst mankind,

[...]

I wake: the chill stars sparkle; I am wet

With drenching dews, or stiff with crackling frost.

[...]

And in my weak lean arms I lift the cross,

O Lord, thou knowest what a man I am;

A sinful man, conceived and born in sin:

'Tis their own doing; this is none of mine;

Lay it not to me. Am I to blame for this,

That here come those that worship me? Ha! ha!

They think that I am somewhat. What am I?

The silly people take me for a saint,

And bring me offerings of fruit and flowers:

And I, in truth (thou wilt bear witness here)

Have all in all endured as much, and more,

Than many just and holy men, whose names

Are registered and calendared for saints.

- Dear reader // anti-hero

Good people, you do ill to kneel to me.

What is it I can have done to merit this?

I am a sinner viler than you all.

- tell me I'm despicable - Florida!!!

It may be I have wrought some miracles,

And cured some halt and maimed; but what of that?

- Dear reader // Never take advice from someone who's falling apart//These desperate prayers of a cursed man you wouldn't take my word for it If you knew who was talking // you should find another guiding light

[...]

And lower voices saint me from above.

Courage, St Simeon! This dull chrysalis

Cracks into shining wings, and hope ere death

- me ! MV, me! Mural

Spreads more and more and more, that God hath now

Sponged and made blank of crimeful record all

My mortal archives. [..]]. I hardly, with slow steps,

With slow, faint steps, and much exceeding pain,

Have scrambled past those pits of fire, that still

Sing in mine ears. But yield not me the praise:

God only through his bounty hath thought fit,

Among the powers and princes of this world,

To make me an example to mankind,

Which few can reach to. Yet I do not say

But that a time may come -yea, even now,

Now, now, his footsteps smite the threshold stairs

Of life -I say, that time is at the doors

When you may worship me without reproach;

For I will leave my relics in your land,

- The manuscript

And you may carve a shrine about my dust,

And burn a fragrant lamp before my bones,

When I am gathered to the glorious saints.

These heavy, horny eyes. The end! the end!

Surely the end! What's here? a shape, a shade,

A flash of light. Is that the angel there

That holds a crown? Come, blessed brother, come.

I know thy glittering face. I waited long;

My brows are ready. What! deny it now?

Nay, draw, draw, draw nigh. So I clutch it. Christ!

'Tis gone: 'tis here again; the crown! the crown!

So now 'tis fitted on and grows to me,

And from it melt the dews of Paradise.

[...]

Approach, and lean a ladder on the shaft,

And climbing up into my airy home,

- climbing onto a ladder to get in the clouds during lavender haze

Deliver me the blessed sacrament;

For by the warning of the Holy Ghost,

-"holy Ghost, you told me I'm the love of your life" loml

I prophesy that I shall die tonight,

- The prophecy

A quarter before twelve.

- Meet me at midnight

But thou, O Lord,

Aid all this foolish people; let them take

Example, pattern: lead them to thy light.

- Daylight

[isaiah118]

When Things Seem to Go From Bad to Worse

Shabbat Shalom;

SHEMOT (Names)

Exodus 1:1–6:1; Isaiah 27:6–28:13, 29:22–23 (Ashk); Jeremiah 1:1–2:3 (Seph); Romans 12:1–21

“These are the names [ve’eleh shemot] of the sons of Israel who went to Egypt with Jacob, each with his family.”  (Exodus 1:1)

In last week’s Torah portion (Parasha), the first of the five books of Moses, Genesis (Bereisheet—In the Beginning), ended with the deaths of Jacob and Joseph.

This week, we begin the second book of the Torah, Exodus, called Shemot in Hebrew, which means names.

This Parasha describes the suffering of the Israelites under bondage to the Egyptians, the birth of Moses and his miraculous salvation from out of the Nile River.  It also describes his calling to deliver Israel and his encounter with Pharaoh.

Like Moses, Like Yeshua

“The descendants of Jacob numbered seventy in all; Joseph was already in Egypt.”  (Exodus 1:5)

Although only 70 descendants of Jacob (whom God renamed Israel) came into the Land of Egypt at Joseph’s invitation, they soon multiplied into such a great and mighty people that the new pharaoh, who did not know Joseph, felt threatened by them.  He feared that the Israelites might join Egypt’s enemies in battles against them.

“The Israelites were exceedingly fruitful; they multiplied greatly, increased in numbers and became so numerous that the land was filled with them.”  (Exodus 1:7)

To counter the growing strength of the Israelites, the Egyptians forced them into bitter labor, building store cities for Pharaoh and working the fields.

When they continued to multiply, Pharaoh ordered the Hebrew midwives to kill all newborn males.  But at least two midwives, Shifrah and Puah, did not comply.  God, therefore, supernaturally protected their lives, blessing them with families and multiplying the Israelites even more (Exodus 1:16–21).

So Pharaoh turned to the Egyptians, commanding them to throw all male newborn Hebrews into the Nile River(Exodus 1:22).

The Levite parents of Moses had such great faith that in order to save their son, they defied Pharaoh's order and hid him for the first few months of his life.

But babies grow and, eventually, he could no longer be hidden, so they put him in a basket and set him afloat on the Nile among the reeds.

Even in this desperate circumstance, the protective hand of God was on this boy of destiny.  Pharaoh’s daughter spotted the basket.  When she saw the Hebrew baby inside, she had pity on him and took him as her own.

Instead of drowning in the Nile or dying at the hands of the Egyptians as the other newborn boys did, Moses was raised in Pharaoh’s palace as a prince of Egypt.

This dramatic account of the infant Moses parallels the life of the infant Yeshua (Jesus), who was sentenced to death by the order of King Herod, among all the other Jewish male infants in Bethlehem.

“When Herod saw that he had been tricked by the magi, he became very enraged, and sent and slew all the male children who were in Bethlehem and all its vicinity, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had determined from the magi.”  (Matthew 2:16)

Just as Moses was saved by his mother, so was Yeshua saved by the obedience and faith of His earthly father, Joseph, who was warned in a dream to flee to Egypt.

“Now when they had gone, behold, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, ‘Get up! Take the Child and His mother and flee to Egypt, and remain there until I tell you; for Herod is going to search for the Child to destroy Him.’  So Joseph got up and took the Child and His mother while it was still night, and left for Egypt.”  (Matthew 2:13–14) 

What irony that the very place of danger and death for the Hebrew babies in the days of Moses became a place of refuge for Yeshua when He was but a baby!

Egyptian Prince Moses Becomes a Shepherd

Because Pharaoh’s daughter drew the baby from the Nile, she called him Moshe (מֹשֶׁה) from the word moshech, meaning pull or draw. 

Moses grew up in the royal Egyptian palace, but it seems that the burdens of his fellow Israelites troubled him.

One day, he saw an Egyptian slave master beating a Hebrew.  Even as a young man, Moses felt the calling to deliver his people, but he stepped ahead of God’s timing.

In the process of defending this Israelite slave, Moses killed the Egyptian and fled to Midian to escape Pharaoh’s death decree over him.  (Exodus 2:15)

Again in Midian, Moses expressed his calling as a deliverer by saving the daughters of the Priest of Midian who had come to the well where he sat.  They wanted to draw water for their flock, but shepherds tried to drive them away.  Moses intervened and watered their flocks for them.

The Priest of Midian welcomed Moses to live with him and even gave Moses his daughter, Zipporah, as a wife.

Moses spent the next 40 years shepherding sheep in the land of Midian, a period of time that God used to prepare him to shepherd His people Israel out of Egypt.

Only when the children of Israel cried out to God, did the time come for God to make His move:  “And God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.”  (Exodus 2:24)

The Angel of the Lord appeared to Moses from out of the flame of a bush that burned but was not consumed.

From the midst of this burning bush at the foot of Mount Sinai, God told Moses He had heard the cries of His People and was sending Moses back to Pharaoh in His name and His power on His behalf.

By this point, this prince of Egypt had been so humbled by his lengthy wilderness experience that he seemed to lack confidence when it came to his role as a leader of a nation.

First, Moses asked for the name of the One sending him.

God answered with His name, Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh—אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה.  Widely translated as I Am That I Am, the Hebrew grammatical form is actually in the future tense.

Therefore, God’s name is more accurately translated as I Will Be What I Will Be.

The message to Moses is perhaps that God can look after the details of the future.  He will be to us whoever and whatever He chooses to be—father, friend, comforter, counselor, or even disciplinarian.  We can trust in God’s infinite wisdom to be who we need in our lives at each moment in time.

Even with this assurance, Moses still feels unqualified for the task, especially since he is slow in speech.  He begs God to send someone else; therefore, He allowed Aaron, Moses’ brother, to accompany him and act as Moses' spokesperson.

Yet, it is Moses to whom God first revealed His personal name in Scripture.

Moses grabbed hold of the trust placed in him and delivered a command to Pharaoh with the full authority of I AM:   “Thus says the Lord, ‘Israel is My firstborn son, and I say to you, “Let my son go that he may serve Me.”’”  (Exodus 4:22–23)

Like Israel, Like Us

There is much we can take from this story of Moses’ progression in becoming a leader.

He was not ready for leadership overnight.  Likewise, we may understand that we have a calling on our lives, and this might become evident time and time again.  Still, we must wait for that time when the Lord chooses to release us into the fullness of our destiny.

As well, we might also feel incapable of accomplishing anything for the Lord, having lost much of our self-confidence through the trials and tribulations of life. 

Whatever our experience, it still remains true that submitting to God’s presence and following His direction is all we need to fulfill the destiny He has assigned to us.

We can also learn from the suffering of the Israelites.  Despite the tyranny forced on them by the Egyptians, the People of Israel still grew mighty in number.

Oppressive circumstances cannot prevent God from carrying out His purposes and fulfilling His promises.

We might suffer under some sort of bondage or pain for what seems like a very long time, but we can rest assured that God hears our cries.

He remembers the covenant we have with Him through our Messiah Yeshua, which provides a way out of our spiritual bondage and into our inheritance—if only we accept it.

Though God is true to His promises, we still need to keep crying out to Him for deliverance and waiting in faith and hopeful expectation to move on our behalf in our spiritual and our earthly afflictions.

God is not deaf, nor aloof to our suffering.  His arm is not too short to save:  “The righteous cry out, and the LORD hears them; He delivers them from all their troubles.”  (Psalm 34:17)

Let My People Go

Though Moses entered Egypt and delivered God’s message to Pharaoh, nothing changed immediately.

Pharaoh refused to let the Hebrews go.

Moses might have felt like he failed God, but God has a greater plan for even our failures, and they end in glorifying His name.

Through plagues and judgments (called makot in Hebrew, which can also mean beatings), God proved His position as the One True God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and that the gods of the Egyptians had no power over Him.

Through these judgments, we also see that whatever a nation or even an individual does to Israel, for good or for evil, God will return it unto them:

“For the day of the LORD upon all the nations is near; as you have done, it shall be done to you; your reprisal shall return upon your own head.”  (Obadiah 1:15; see also Genesis 12:3)

Parasha Shemot does not end with a mighty deliverance but, rather, with the situation becoming worse—if that were even possible.  Pharaoh made the Israelites’ labor more difficult by demanding that they find their own straw while also maintaining the same quota of production (Exodus 5:18).

In their bitterness, the Hebrew people turned on Moses and Aaron.  Moses responded by turning to the Lord.  With raw honesty, Moses asked why He had not delivered His people as He promised.

“Lord, why have You brought trouble on this people?  Why is it You have sent me?  For since I came to Pharaoh to speak in Your name, he has done evil to this people; neither have You delivered Your people at all.”  (Exodus 5:22–23)

We might also feel this way when it seems we are doing what God has asked us to do, and things get worse, not better.

How did God respond to Moses?  

“Then the LORD said to Moses, ‘Now you shall see what I will do to Pharaoh.  For with a strong hand he will let them go, and with a strong hand he will drive them out of his land.’”  (Exodus 6:1)

Sometimes, when God is preparing to do something great and mighty in our lives, the situation can worsen for a time.  As we move toward our destiny, pharaoh represents those who oppress us—even Satan, the spiritual enemy of our souls, who resists our freedom with all his might.

In such circumstances, we should not give up our faith, for in due time we will see God’s mighty hand and outstretched arm deliver us in His perfect way and time.

“Rejoice in hope, be patient in tribulation, be constant in prayer.”  (Romans 12:12)

Shabbat Shalom from the Entire Bibles For Israel Family!

"Hear the word of the LORD, you nations; proclaim it in distant coastlands:  'He who scattered Israel will gather them and will watch over His flock like a shepherd.'"  (Jeremiah 31:10)

Messianic Bible Bibles For Israel P.O. Box 8900 Pueblo, CO 81008

[ardentscul]

— " MISS ADAIR . . . HOW lovely it is to see you , " the king had praised upon seeing her , a calloused hand scooping her far daintier one before pressing a chapped-lipped kiss upon her rouged knuckles ( still warm from the contact they had made with her brother's shoulder in the garden just moments prior ) . the wine in her stomach soured , pressing up her esophagus , and it took all of the woman's strength to keep the discomfort from meeting her expression ; an effort that proved most futile as she felt her peppered nose wrinkle only for the act to be quickly followed by the disgruntled tug of her skirt from her father beside her .

" likewise - " she pushed the words out , an awkward and uncomfortable laugh betraying her composure . another stern yank of lilac fabric had her clearing her throat , bowing her head as she horrendously curtseyed . " your highness , " she tacked on , thankful her chin was to her sternum as a scowl curled her lips .

the walk away from the dais had been filled with hissed , stern correction from her father , ingrid's expression bored as ceruleans rolled impatiently at his theatrics. " father , please , " she begged , tone slathered in disquietude . his hand moved to her bicep now , tugging roughly on his only daughter's arm to force her to face him , a hardened copper gaze finding marbled blues as he lowered his face to hers .

" you will NOT make a fool of me , or this family , in front of the king , ingrid . " his words were seeped in venom , in threat , and her face momentarily paled as she widened her eyes . pink lips parted to protest , tongue pointed and ready to strike , but she swallowed down her opposition and ripped her stare away - focusing on a far corner of the room . at her silence , he continued ; " you will act like a lady . like the woman i raised you to be . the woman i promised to him . do you understand me ?? "

canines found the flesh of her inner cheek , biting down , lashes fluttering as a blur fogged her vision from her eyes remaining unblinking .

a tighter squeeze. " i said do you understand me ?? "

" yes , father , i understand. " her voice came , quiet though strained from the sheer will it took her to force the compliance out.

upon release , ingrid emptied her lungs in a sigh , eyes beginning to search in desperation for another carafe of wine to help herself to , her flagon long since stolen by her idiot brothers and her thirst for comfort damn near insatiable .

however , she had only made it a steps worth before her path was being intercepted by a familiar set of faces ; two sides of the same coin , walking reflections . their words cut as deep as a papercut , nothing more than a mere skim at an already fleeting pride , jaw clicking as she clamped it tight to flash them a smile . polite , but barely so .

" observant as ever , you spindles , " ingrid mused , though it came out more of a hiss as she refused to part her pearly teeth to speak , words whisked between the clenched rows . her need for fermented fruit seemed to multiply in their presence , given how she visibly winced at the mention of her betrothal . the people of blunder talked , that she knew , but the news had hardly been hours old as she herself had only discovered it that morning - thanks to the loose lips of her kin .

finding one of the twin's gazes , still unbeknownst to her as to which was which ( both pretty , neither notably bright from what she knew of them ) her smile teetered ; splintering almost into painful territory as the apples of her cheeks strained from the forced expression .

" so the secret is out , then , " ingrid brightened , hands coming forward to clasp together in front of her , pressing wrists deep into her layers of skirts as she cocked her head to the side . she confirmed nothing of the betrothal , but instead , ceruleans glinted with mirth , the gleam in her eyes teeming on wild ; " i'm a boy . who shall you pigeons yap to about that first , i wonder. . . ?? certainly not the king or either of the princes lest they be so desperate for an audience they happen to summon you . "

with ingrid adair , set at rowan castle during equinox .

— THE SILK END OF a raven lock tickled dimia's lips , the strand coiled tightly around her fingers and dusting the sharp features of her face . a small comfort . eyes , black as her hair , were trained upon the brittle , yellowing pages of a book , the camaraderie & excitement of equinox carrying on around her . courtiers gossiped whilst the men played at one another's pride , but she could not help but feel somewhat numb to the intoxicating effects of the grand event . after all , nothing compared to sweet , drowning serenity — a vice she had become slave to . not today , though . the iron gate was as much a secret as it had been a gift ; her mother had been strict in her instruction that it stay confined within the walls of their chamber . . . but what mother didn't know would not hurt her .

before her thumb could even brush the delicate curve of her bustier , fingering the velvet edge of the concealed providence card , nya's hands were curling around her sharp shoulders like talons upon prey . dimia jumped , then promptly shot her sister a lethal glare . the two were a mirror image ; identical twins , alike in every way but one .

" there ! do you see her ?! " nya's finger wagged frantically across the gardens .

the crowd was thick , and pulsed with a life of its own . every noble within the mist was in attendance . " . . . who ? "

nya whistled with impatience , her pointed finger still raised . " the girl , of course . the one mother spoke of — rumored to be 'contracting' her way into royalty . look ! THERE ! "

finally , dimia's languid stare matched her sister's . a sparkle of curiosity began to twinkle within onyx irises as a wash of yellow passed over them . she sat up , her book laid beside her — forgotten .

" an adair ? how odd . "

" odd indeed ! just LOOK at her : hair like straw , dress amuck , a graceless gait . ugh , how utterly unfair ! if only father had something of value . i would make a perfect princess . . . or you , of course . " nya clumsily tacked on the last bit , the sincerity of her words lost to the wind . dimia hardly noticed . her attention was entirely captured by golden waves & lilac satin .

her twin's empty chatter continued , threading in one ear & out the other with little response . it was not until a sharp nail dug into her cheek did dimia drag her gaze back to her living reflection .

" we should introduce ourselves . " when nya's eyebrows flew upward , leveling the other with an incredulous look , dimia continued . " in the unlikely event the king is desperate enough to let her take his name , it's better to be a friend that whispers in her ear rather than a stranger that does so behind her back . "

" but i don't want to be her friend , " the other whined .

dimia hooked an arm through her sister's , dragging nya up & across the garden despite her dragging feet . " it's play-pretend , nya . a little fun . "

the closer they drew , the clearer a picture she could paint of the unfamiliar woman . at a glance , she looked as lovely as the other ladies that glided through court . a trained eye , however , would note the unkept strands of hair peeking out of her bun , the subtle wrinkles hiding in her skirt , the scowl hidden behind an otherwise stoic face . arm in arm , dimia pulled them close — til the matching pair were but a step behind her .

" i thought the adair's were all boys . " beautiful & delicate as they were , the twins had never been known for their tactful graces . nya may have had an infamously quick-tongue , but it was dimia who possessed the bluntness of a hammer .

" they are all boys . " nya retorted , her gaze lost in the crowd and attention stolen by something — anything — else .

dimia's head tilted , her brow arched & eyes sparkling peculiarly ( some mix of curiosity & cruelty ) . " is that true ? are you a boy ? how unfortunate for your betro-- rumored betrothed . "

@ardentscul

[vodkassassin]

Shen Qingqiu decides enough is enough! As is his right

If you see any typos in this, no you don’t 😌

—

The door flies open right on the midday hour mark, when the candle that he lit this morning is exactly half gone, and Shang Qinghua immediately dives underneath his desk and throws his arms over his hand.

“I’m almost done!” He calls out desperately. “Just give me a few more hours, I promise I’m almost done!”

Following this, a silence in his office, long and inspecting, takes place. Shang Qinghua, despite all his instincts screaming otherwise, peeks his head up over the edge of his desk and gulps. The person standing in his door, who is surveying his admittedly very messy office (it’s not his fault! Paperwork breeds like multiplying cells! Why doesn’t anyone understand that?!), and looking very, very unamused.

“Ha, um,” he scrambles back to sit on the chair again, trying to get his thundering heart under control. “H-Hello, Shen-shixiong! This — I — I wasn’t expecting….”

Shen Qingqiu finishes his examination of his workspace and locks his gaze upon Shang Qinghua. He steps smoothly into the office, and shuts the door behind him with sure but quiet movements. A cold sweat breaks out down Shang Qinghua’s spine.

He swallows. He reaches forward and grabs up the paperwork he’d been pouring over before this interruption and holds it feebly before himself like a shield.

“A-Acruelly, shixiong…. If shixiong has something he wants from this shidi, I-I’m afraid it will have to wait. Wei-shixiong demanded these requisition forms be looked over and approved before tomorrow a-and there… there are a lot of them to go through…. I think he waited until the last minute — Oh! And Liu-shidi, he — um, he sent in his audit reports late again, so I have to go through those too and I’m really really sorry but whatever you have for me I can’t —!”

“Stop your babbling.” Shen Qingqiu snaps. Shang Qinghua’s jaw clicks shut so fast his teeth hurt a little. Ow.

He watches with wide eyes as his shixiong — who is now scowling heavily, nooo — begins to flip through the various stacks of parchment and scrolls that sit heavy upon Shang Qinghua’s desk. Too terrified to tell him that, actually, only the sect leader should be looking through those ones, Shang Qinghua remains quiet.

Really, nobody tells Shen Qingqiu what he can or can’t do. Those who have tried before are —

Well. They’ve all seen their sect leader.

“These.” Shen Qingqiu slips a smaller stack of documents out from the middle of one of the piles and holds it up. “The supply logs from the previous joint peak night hunting expedition. They have yet to be filed?”

“Shixiong,” Shang Qinghua’s eyes water in frustration, and he holds up his sleeve to cover them. “I meant to, I did! But — but when I was going to get to them, Qi-shimei came in with a cart full of delegated peak maintenance reports! She said if they weren’t done before noon she’d — Ah.” He shudders, peeks over his arm, and goes pale at the way Shen Qingqiu’s eyes have narrowed viciously. He hurries on, voice growing smaller. “I’d just finished them when Wei-shixiong brought me his backlog requisitions….”

He trails off, because the expression on his shixiong face has gone colder and colder the longer he spoke.

“Why haven’t you chosen to delegate?” The man demands from between his locked teeth. “All these disciples that you have, and you’re telling me you can’t delegate a single task to them?”

“Shixiong,” Shang Qinghua’s eyes water again and he shiffles pathetically into his sleeve. “Shixiong, I do delegate. This stuff in my office here, this is all the work only peak lords have the security clearance for. Everything else I delegate to my disciples, because I can’t… I can’t….”

Shen Qingqiu stares down his nose at him, and Shang Qinghua stops talking. He drops his gaze and listens as the man silently turns on his heel and stalks out of his office, closing the door with a solid thump.

He wipes his eyes with his sleeve and drops his arm defeatedly into his lap, frowning down at the water stains his stupid tears have left in the fabric. Silk is so fucking dumb, you can’t walk through without it picking up dirt somehow. It’s why he changed his peak robes to darker colors, because at least black doesn’t show where you’ve been all day.

And seriously, it’s just so much easier to scrub blood out of clothes that aren’t white or beige or pastel.

He shoves his paperwork to the side and folds his arms before him, letting his head thunk down on them with an exhausted sigh. The door opens slightly again and a head peaks in.

“Shizun?”

“A-Kao,” he mumbles into his arms. “I’m gonna die.”

His head disciple gives a polite sound of acknowledgement. “I’ll have someone prepare some of the spiced tea imported from that Eastern desert oasis, then.”

“I love you,” Shang Qinghua says fervently, and listens as his favorite disciple huffs a quiet laugh.

“Will return shortly.”

The door closes again, and with it, Shang Qinghua closes his eyes.

Jin Kao is true to his word, as always, and in fact brings a light snack of fruit and a pastry along with the tea. Shang Qinghua plows through it at record pace and is energized! He’s halfway through the requisition forms for Wei Qingwei when his door is slammed open once again.

He flinches. Taking a fortifying breath, Shang Qinghua glances up and immediately loses all color.

“Shen-shixiong is back!” He shakes, voice wobbling. “With — with Z-Zhangmen-shixiong, ah…!”

Shen Qingqiu stalks into the room, side stepping Jin Kao whose arms are laden with the empty tea set. The head disciple wisely flees into the corner, watching with a narrow gaze as the Qing Jing peak lord all but drags their venerated Sect Leader across the office to stand before Shang Qinghua’s desk.

Shang Qinghua trembles as they both loom over him. What did he do?! Shixiong, what he’s said before was completely reasonable! There was no need to go and fetch your overbearing ge!

Shen Qingqiu points a finger at Shang Qingh— oh wait, not him. At his desk. At the mountains of papers littering his desk.

“If you have time to relax and drink tea in your spotless office,” the second in command sneers at his superior, “then you have time to pick up the slack so that our shidi can do the same!”

Shang Qinghua gapes. He stares up at them with round, round eyes, uncertain as to what’s going on.

Yue Qingyuan, for his part, quails under Shen Qingqiu’s steely and unrelenting gaze. His shoulders are tense, and the way in which he looks around Shang Qinghua’s office with a startled look, only to then turn it upon Shang Qinghua himself, just screams ‘bro, you live like this?’

Not by choice! Shang Qinghua never asked for this, Yue-shixiong! The paperwork just never stops!

Shen Qingqiu pivots sharply, glaring down at him instead. Ah!

“What are you doing?” The man says. “Get up.”

“Ah?” Completely bewildered, Shang Qinghua only stares up at the man in confusion.

“Honestly.” Shen Qingqiu sighs under his breath — a sharp and stilted sound of frustration.

He rounds the desk himself and grabs Shang Qinghua by the upper arm, hauling him up from his chair and dragging him away from the desk.

“Th-This—?!”

“Sect Leader,” Shen Qingqiu nods at the desk. Yue Qingyuan only stares blankly at him, and so he sneers. “These forms must be finished. And the next stack. All by a peak lord — I’m taking Shang-shidi for a well deserved break, so I can’t do it, and Wei-shidi was the one to submit them in the first place. Of the four foremost peak lords of the sect, only you have time and clearance to do it.”

Shang Qinghua sways, shocked. If Shen Qingqiu didn’t still have such a bone-crushing grip on him, he might have even fallen. The other man steadies him immediately, and the sour look on his face sours even further.

Yue Qingyuan’s face is pale. “Qingqiu-shidi….”

“It isn’t as if you were busy with anything else.” Shen Qingqiu plows on past whatever refuting the sect leader was trying to pull. He shakes Shang Qinghua roughly by the arm, and Shang Qinghua rapidly blinks away the spots from his vision. “Look at our shidi, he’s nearly dead on his feet. Are you telling me that you would make him work more, when it’s already clear that he’s overworked?”

Yue Qingyuan pauses. He glances around the office another time, shoulders lowering in slow increments. His resolve is crumbling visibly to everyone in the office.

Shang Qinghua silently mouths ‘overworked’ to himself, stunned.

Finally, the sect leader sighs. “No, Qingqiu-shidi is right.”

Shen Qingqiu snorts. As if to say ‘of course I am.’

Yue Qingyuan steps around the desk and slowly takes the seat that Shang Qinghua had just been forcably vacated from. He eyes the stack of paperwork that are piled high, not just on the desk but on the floor and the shelves surrounding the desk, and an expression of regret eclipses his face.

“This shixiong had not realized Shang-shidi’s workload was quite so…” he trails off, trying to fish for the right word, and finally lands on, “heavy.”

“It’s the Sect Leader’s duty to ascertain that all those under his sect’s banner are taken care of. Those directly under his command even more so.” Shen Qingqiu sniffs disdainfully. “You have no excuse.”

Yue Shixiong bows his head. “No, this one does not.”

“I’m taking Shang Qinghua to Qing Jing to recuperate.”

“Yes.”

Shang Qinghua pales even further. He ducks his head down and glances over to the corner into which his head disciple had squirreled himself away for help.

Jin Kao stares back, an expression of smug victory on his face, and doesn’t say a single word.

This traitor! Unfilial disciple! Shang Qinghua takes back what he said about Jin Kao being his favorite. He’s replacing that brat as soon as he’s able to escape Shen Qingqiu’s clutches.

Shen Qingqiu yanks on his arms, dragging him out of the office. He cranes his neck around, and the last scene he sees before the door slams shut is Jin Kao setting down the empty tea set, picking up a large stack of papers from one of the various spots on the floor, which he then ferries over to the desk at which Yue Qingyuan has picked up the half-finished requisition, looking it over with a frown.

Huh. He’s never seen his head disciple look quite so intimidating before. The boy is practically looming over their sect leader with a dark expression.

That’s a little strange.

He doesn’t see beyond that, though, because Shen Qingqiu slams the doors shut again and drags him off his own damn peak.

—

Support this story on Ao3:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/32312410

[clouseplayssims]

The Nunnery, of course, was built for one Saveria Drago. She’s currently the only St. Persephone nun in Edirann, but given her age and rather desperate plight, she knows she needs to double her recruiting efforts if the nunnery is going to survive.

Saveria is a complex individual. She’s a Drago, daughter of Ettore, once the Lesser Duke of Drago. But she chose to dedicate herself to St. Persephone, not an easy path, and she’s found it harder than most to cast aside her Drago roots. Not to mention her own ambitions.

It’s one of the greatest kept secrets in the entire kingdom that Saveria has a son by Alwyn Kenton, Alessandra Drago. He was born right before the war began and she was able to secret him away with Tippy Dawn, a local brothel-owner who agreed to say the baby was hers. And why wouldn’t she? A luck baby, born from a Drago and a Kenton prince? That’s a good card to hold. (Only now Tippy loves him as her own and is terrified of what might happen to him.)

She had a second child, Runa, who went to live with her biological father as is often the case for luck children.

But after that... nothing. Which is a concern when the purpose of a St. Persephone nun is meant to be fruitful and multiply. Especially when she’s the only St. Persephone nun in the whole of Edirann.

* I am thinking that St. Persephone nuns might give up their surnames upon joining the order. I like the idea of them needing to put aside their family connections to embody the will of the goddess, so to speak.

(I put wrinkles on her after the screenshot, she’s only a few days from being an elder but I’ve resisted aging her.)

[meduseld]

The sad story of Solomon and the rich widow. How did they meet? Was there something about her that Solomon liked? Was there something about him that she liked? How long did they have before it all goes wrong? What happened to the widow?

So the thing is, it started out as a joke in the sense that Solomon had to have a second wife, per canon, or there would be no subsequent Goodes. And the family tree shows he had five sons. So who was their mother? (Melisma has a great take for it on AO3 https://archiveofourown.org/works/33192013?view_full_work=true)

And then it was like: well some rich widow who only ends up in Union due to Satanic Intervention oh and btw she's played by Gillian Jacobs. Largely bc no one wanted it to be Hannah Miller, instead. But you know me, I like to take things seriously. So, personally, I think there's two roads here.

The first: the widow is a Satanist herself. Her husband was a shitbag, and in desperation, she turned to the dark arts and the Devil. And like any good salesman, he saw the perfect opportunity to match them when it came to this. In that case, I see it as a partnership more than a marriage. That is to say, they are equals and honest with each other and aware of what they must do and say to their children. But they're not like. In love. They have five kids because it's the 1600s and they need to leave heirs. But I kind of see them settling in as bros more than anything. And dying around the same time, because Solomon goes first in prosperous old age and his widow doesn't really want to do this without him. She hangs around to make sure the kids are settled, both the Heir to the Pact and the others. And then she joins him in Death, either through a final sacrifice or just letting it happen.

The second: she has no knowledge of the Satanism. Solomon goes to the Devil, his new bff, and says if you want me to be fruitful and multiply you must bring me a wife. Because he's not marrying any woman still in Union that's for damn sure. Is it guilt? Compassion? Lingering mess of tangled emotions for Sarah and not wanting to be with someone who knew her? Or did he just look over his prospects and go: nah? Who can say. Point being, Satan agrees because it's not a huge ask, as far as his abilities go, and it works for him in the long run. More people, more victims, more souls for him. So Satan gives him a year or so, as Union booms in prosperity and attracts settlers and the gory story of Sarah Fier dies down. Enter: a Rich Widow. Now Satan thinks very carefully about the woman he picks. He toys with the idea of making her unbearable to Solomon and making him bear her anyway. And there's so many ways to do it, too. Make her hateful, make her besotted with him, make her whiny.... but no. Far better to give him a woman he can love. After all, pain always comes with it. So yes, the woman he picks is unmistakable to Solomon, he hears the Devil's voice in his head tell him so. She's headstrong, and determined. She's come to claim her land, you see. She was married to a man related to one of the families that were extinguished by Sarah's actions. The Fiers or the Millers or someone else entirely. Doesn't matter. He would have been the heir but he's dead. Now, Solomon could challenge a woman alone. But he doesn't. He likes fierce, outspoken women. She may be rich but she's hardly spoiled or pampered.

It's also clear that he should court her. It's inevitable. So she shows up at his door and says they should get married. And Solomon's ass falls hard. So they do. And they have five children. And they are absolutely tortured the whole time by the gulf in their marriage, the pulsing, infected sore of his secret. They both feel it between them, but neither of them say it. Her death is ordinary. Extremely so. Either after the birth of their last son or a tumble one day. Not a long illness. Solomon could have bargained with Satan, for more time, for her health. But no, Satan plans it so it's swift. No time for goodbyes or I love yous or death bed confessions. And he doesn't raise the dead. I mean beyond zombies but that wouldn't be what he wants. And like Nick, Solomon is left to sit in his grief and pine for a woman he could never give the entirety of his heart. At least it makes it easier to turn his eldest son into a devilworshipper. His mother might have noticed and intervened, but she's gone.

So clearly, I lean toward one side. I like tragic, what can I say?

[sweetbunnykook]

Invisible Things (M)

Adopted!JK x Detective!Noona - Oneshot/Drabble 

Warning: taboo and toxic relationship, slight smut, angst (light manipulation)

Word: 1,762 

Inspired by Nude by Radiohead 

Synopsis: Jungkook struggles to control himself around you and he hates himself for it. 

“Don’t get a-ny big ideas, they’re not going to happen…”

Jungkook sings softly, careful not to wake you even though you’re separated by a thin but solid wall. He wraps his oversized black and mustard yellow flannel around himself and curls into his pillows. He presses his headphones further onto his ears by the weight of his head. His deep cacao bangs tickle his lashes and with a small shake of his head, he sweeps the strands to one side.

“You’ll go to hell…for what your dirty mind is thinking…”

Can you hear him call out for you? Can you hear his heart weeping? He half hopes you can, and half hopes that you’re clueless to the turmoil resting inside his belly, warm and probing.

Digging his long fingers underneath his pillow, he tugs the end of a pale pink fabric until he can hold it against his chest. He had never wanted to stoop so low, but somehow he knew it was bound to happen, that it was about time he crossed the line. He holds your brassiere up into the golden light luminating from his Iron Man lamp. The superhero’s yellowed eyes stab into the gentle lace as if it could not stand seeing Jungkook hold it so tenderly between his fingers.

Jungkook unhooked the undergarment and brushed his nails over the tarnished metal hooks sewed in the back. Holding it up by the cups, his other fingers trace over the details of the lace sewed onto the otherwise plain surface. He felt white heat, stirring deep in his abdomen, that keeps him gently writhing in bed. His sweatpants tighten uncomfortably around his pelvis, prompting him to reach down and adjust himself as a blush cascades over his acne scar-kissed cheeks.

He reaches over to the Walkman resting next to his pillow, his most precious gift as you had been using the small device since your teenage years, and turns up the volume a tad bit. He wants to drown in the gentle lull of the bass and drums. He wants to drown in the music, away from his screaming thoughts.

How could you do this to her? Do you know how disgusted she would be if she found out? What is wrong with you, you ungrateful little shithead?

Jungkook squeezes his eyes close and brings his blanket over his shoulders. That’s not you speaking, he tells himself; that’s his other mother, the version of you in his head that he’s terrified of disappointing. It’s something he learned to bury inside him, but sometimes she haunts him, follows his angry footsteps.

But he knows, he absolutely knows, you would never be disappointed in him in reality. Upset, maybe. But disappoint? You’re too kind, too naïve, too caring for that. You would simply walk into his room, tell him not to do it again, take the lace away from his hands, and leave. You wouldn’t bring it up again, not over the dining table or over your morning routine of fetching his sports bag from the storage closet.

And that’s why the guilt, despite the stirring in his groin, feels like his chest is about to cave in.

But it’s so, so, so beautiful. The Chantilly lace, looking almost crème in daylight but peony pink under his bedroom lights – he wishes he can see it on you, trace the edges with his lips, breathe in the scent of your perfume-kissed skin. Jungkook groans, audibly, yanking his headphones out and rolling over to the cooler side of the bed. He brings one leg over his black bolster pillow and presses himself against it, seeking friction for the heat in his abdomen multiplies as the lace presses against his cheek. He closes his eyes and replaces the smell of fabric softener with your perfume instead.

Yes, he can just taste how sweet you are. God you’re so soft and supple, your skin warm under his fingertips. He can hear your breath hitch just before your eyes roll back and – fuck – you’re clawing at his shoulders, chanting his name like a prayer. You’re tight, gripping, pulling his heavy length inside you until you can feel his tip nestle in the opening of your cervix. Your lower lip is caught between your front teeth, your eyebrows scrunch in concentration, sweat drips down your jaw onto your clavicle. His pace quickens when you take a hand and squeeze your breasts together, prompting his hips to snap against you like a rubber band.

Nngh, Jungkook, please…please baby, my Kookie, my-

“Jungkook?”

Two innocent knocks and a muffled voice brings the young boy back into reality as he quickly stuffs the sinful fabric underneath his pillow and sits up on the bed, chest heaving, eyes dilated, and still insanely hard. Jungkook quickly brings a blanket up to his hips as the poster-covered bedroom door opens and you peer in; he can see your reading glasses is resting on the lower bridge of your nose, your hair pinned up with a clip, your nightgown loose around your shoulders. You must’ve been in the middle of your nightly reading routine.

“Y-Yeah, mom?” He breathes, inwardly cursing as his voice betrays the panic settling in his stomach.

“I cut up some fruit, do you want some?”

His eyes catch your free hand holding out a small dish of sliced honeydew melon and strawberries. Shit, he’s starving. It only dawns on him, at such an inconvenient time, that he hasn’t had dinner. But he obviously can’t accept your offer or else you’ll walk in to set the dish on his table and you’ll really see the ends of his bangs soaked with sweat and his cheeks pink with shame.

With a heavy heart, Jungkook shakes his head. “I’m okay. T-Thanks, mom. Can you close the door on your way out?”

His voice is desperate, labored.

You flash him a smile and pull the door close, prompting a relieved sigh from Jungkook as he slouches forward. And then the door opens again, your eyebrows scrunched slightly this time. He perks up immediately, clutching the blanket closer to his hips.

“…Are you okay?”

His fists tighten. “Yeah, why?”

There’s a pregnant pause, an undeniable tightness in the air that makes his back prickle with sweat.

Something was off, but you couldn’t pinpoint exactly what it was. Jungkook looks like he has something to hide, but then again, when did he not look like that?

You let yourself in the room, placing the plate of fruit on top of his PlayStation console. His spine straightens – he’s anxious, squirming further into his bed. He’s rather relieved that he’s softening slowly the closer you get. The fear of being shamed (not that you would do something like that if you found out) was too much for his mind to wrap around; he needs to play the role of the innocent and clueless son until you realize that all those men you’re going on dates with aren’t worth your time.

His mask was so close to falling a into place. He could simply say he’s been feeling a little under the weather and that’s why he lost his appetite today. It would explain why his hair is damp from sweat too. The plan was fool-proof, the words resting on the tip of his tongue, heavy with lies.

At least, it was, until your gentle and hesitant fingertips brush over his jaw and behind his ears, eliciting the softest whine you’ve ever heard. Jungkook wanted to rip his heart from underneath his ribs and reveal that you’ve been inside the whole time. He wanted, so badly, to tell you everything that’s been on his mind since he submitted his college applications.

I want to stay with you, mother. I want nothing more than to be your pillar, like you’ve been to me since you found me. I wouldn’t be alive if it wasn’t for you. I want to be with you. Together. Forever.

“Kookie…you know you can tell me anything…right?” You inquire, watching his guilty eyes fall on his lap as his head hangs low. The worry that maybe he mistrusts you, that perhaps a bond with someone you adopted, rescued out of pity, is not as solid as you hoped; it hurt you.

And Jungkook doesn’t want to hurt you, ever. It kills him that he’s made you worry. As soon as he hears your voice sounding so small, not like how you usually are as a prestigious detective of a famous precinct, he knows you’re not going to accept anything but the truth from his doll lips.

So he gives you the truth. Partially.

“It’s just…anxiety, mom.”

You wipe your palm across his damp forehead, underneath his bangs, across his acne scars. Oh how many times you’ve told him not to pick at his skin but he doesn’t listen.

“Do you want me to run you a cool bath?”

He shakes his head, leaning forward to rest his head against your bosom. He breathes in your perfume, subtle but pleasant on your skin. You wrap your arms around his shoulders, one hand moving up the nape of his neck to comb his silken tresses. He murmurs something unintelligible, softly, and wrap his arms around your waist.

“Do you ever want something you can’t have?”

You let his hair flow between your fingers. Poor baby, you think, college stress is already getting to him. “Of course. It’s part of being human…but you learn to accept it.”

“What if…what if I can’t accept it? What if I want more and I just keep craving more…and more and more…what happens then?”

You don’t answer him, because even when you have been an adult much longer than he has, there are some questions you can’t answer with complete gentleness. As a mother, it was your duty to bring his hand closer to the fire, let him be a person who is not just your son. But you can’t let him go. You want to hold onto him, just a little bit longer. Just a little bit.

“You’ll know when you get there, darling.”

Jungkook nods, brushing his cheeks up and down your pounding chest.

“But…I have a chance of getting it…don’t I? A true chance?”

You wince slightly when his nails dig into your sides, but you pretend not to notice. You pretend he’s perfect just the way he is.

“Of course, Kookie. Of course you do. Whether you get this…this thing you want, or not, I’ll always be proud of you. I’ll always love you. I hope you remember that.”

[drshojo]

The World, My Childhood And My Hero Academia: Vigilantes

Hello friends!  

Its Dr. Shojo coming at you with a post that will be divided into three parts!

Part One: The world as we know it! 

The world has changed a lot since we last connected. For starters, TOILET BOUND HANAKO KUN HAS NOT ONLY A PHYSICAL RELEASE BUT A GORGEOUS ANIME! And not only that, but MY NEXT LIFE AS A VILLAINESS: ALL ROUTES LEAD TO DOOM! IS GETTING AN ANIME AS WELL! The last time I wrote about Katerina there wasn’t even an official English translation of that long-ass light-novel-title. And now?

A WHOLE ANIME. A BISEXUAL HAREM AWAITS! I am JAZZED!

Do you think it’s my fault? No matter, I’ll take all the credit. All the manga I talk about are getting anime adaptations. I’LL DO MY DUTY AND TALK ABOUT SOME MORE!

But first. Let us address the Covid-19 shaped elephant in the room

I deeply regret that it took a whole-ass pandemic to get me back to writing. In my defense, I bought an iPad and started drawing like 900 kokichi oumas. I was really busy with that. And then I started reading fanfiction. Then that got me thinking about how fanfiction such an interesting look into how people interpret fandom, use it for wish fulfillment and escapism, and good god is everyone OK cause that bulimia fan fic was super detailed....and I am officially on a tangent. Off track. Ahem.

We are all staying inside a whole lot more which means y’all probably need some reading material and Dr. Shojo has your back! Go read “Horimiya”! It’s amazing! Ahhhh, my work here is done! I'm serious, if you’re here for a Shojo rec, that’s it! There's also like 8 million more Otome Isekais to check out now. It’s like they’re multiplying like rabbits..............

As a Doctor, I must advise you to stay inside and read some manga and practice social distancing. Embrace your inner hikikomori. 

Allright? All good? Okay now one final disclaimer:

This post is going to be talking about something a little different than usual and I want to start by giving you some context about who Dr. Shojo is in real life. 

Part Two: Dr. Shojo Exposed 

You see, when I was little I was obsessed with Japanese media. This doesn't surprise you at all I can tell. Probably because I walk around calling myself Dr. Shojo and shout about manga that you should read.

Anyways, the reason why I was obsessed wasn’t because of the big eyes or the spikey hair or the interesting new culture. It was because it tended to have more character development and overarching plotlines than the media I was used to in Canada. Dexter’s Lab, Magic School Bus, pretty much everything I saw on TV was episodic in nature, so imagine how much my mind was blown when I saw Naruto and Card Captor Sakura, heck, even Pokémon had the Indigo Plateau! Here were kids that were learning more and more each day and got to see enemies become friends and vice versa. They lived and grew older just like me. Except they were cooler than me. And had more interesting lives than me. I gotta tell you, I was so sad when I was 12 and Kero didn’t tell me I had latent magical powers. But there was magic in my life and it was the magic of a complex narrative story. And not only that, it had a sense of movement and had cool costumes. I was hooked immediately.

Also, fun fact, at that age I happened to be a complete and utter tomboy! I loved pretending to fight my friends in the playground and was really worried that puberty would ruin my life because being a girl sounded so CUMBERSOME.

Which leads me up to my confession. Before I became Dr. Shojo, I was in fact......Dr. Shonen.

Bleach? Naruto? One Piece? I've read every single chapter there is.  

Hundreds of hours of watching fight sequences. Another fun fact, I only got into shojo because my aunt bought me volume 7 and 8 of Fruits Basket thinking “all mangas like the same right? Kids love comics?” It’s a tribute to how episodic western media was back then that she thought buying volume SEVEN and EIGHT was a REASONABLE PLACE TO START READING.

Now you might also say, Hey! Dr Shojo! Cardcaptors was a shojo! And you are right! but back then the anime was marketed to boys over here in the west and they actualy like, edited out episodes that they thought wouldn't interest boys?! Second fun fact, Once when I was in Grade 3 I was told I was not allowed to join a club under the stairs cause I was a girl and it was BOYS ONLY. The point of the club? To talk about how great Cardcaptors was! I Kid you not!

So anyways, your pall Dr. Shojo loves Shonen manga to this day!

The only reason I made this Dr. Shojo blog specifically about shojo is because, being a tomboy with no female friends, reading shojo manga was the first time I really thought about what it meant to be a girl and fall in love. And y i k e s. Shojo manga, like most media, fails miserably most of the time in displaying real world relationships. Or at least, it  doesn't prepare you for how disappointing everything can be. When I had my first kiss, I was thinking about how it didn’t feel at all like how I felt reading Zen and Shirayukis kiss in Akagame No Shirayuki Hime. Those were formative years, and shojo was one of the only places I saw romance being talked about for younger audiences. I liked reading romances where no one had any sexual experiences and were figuring out what love meant to them. But let’s shelve this topic for now.

The point is that gender roles are dumb and if you have an open mind there's a world of stories out there for you. Take this time inside to read something you wouldn’t normally. Critically think about the ways that the worlds you see in stories and how you experience the world differ. What are the messages a story is trying to tell you? And why do you like the stories you do? Reflect on how the stories you tell yourself color your view of the world. Even mindless entertainment leaves an impression on us. Anyways.

Whilst you're doing that, I'm going to absolutely lose my hecking mind over the Shonen Jump series MY HERO ACADEMIA: Vigilantes!

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

Part Three: I downloaded the one month free trial of the Shonen Jump app and made you read all that, so I can tell you that today Dr. Shojo is going to rant about a spin-off of a shonen manga

THAT’S RIGHT, OF COURSE I READ HERO ACA AND YES I DID PICK UP THE SPIN OFF SERIES. SHONEN JUMP LETS YOU READ ALL THE NEW CHAPTERS FOR FREE ON THEIR APP. KIDS, IF YOU LIKE SHONEN AND YOU’RE PIRATING ON A SCANLATION SITE STILL GET OUT BECAUSE YOU DON’T NEED TO SEE THOSE WEIRD PLASTIC SURGERY AND DENTISTRY ADDS ANY MORE.

SHONEN IS HERE AND ITS LEGAL AND ITS FREE FOR YOU. GET OFF MANGA FOX OR MANGA ROCK OR WHATEVER THE KIDS ARE USING THESE DAYS.

OK, so by this point in the article you have learned two very important things about me: 1) I love Shonen manga and 2) I read a lot of fanfiction.

Specifically, I read an absolutely biblical amount of My Hero Academia fan fiction and let me tell you, A solid chunk of it is vigilante/ Deadpool / criminal with a heart of gold themed.

So when I saw Hero Aca had a spin off, and it was about vigilantes, I was NOT SURPRISED IN THE SLIGHTEST. Ao3 sure is powerful.

Now, if you will permit me a tangent in a post full of tangents—HOLY CRAP, THERE ARE TOO MANY VIGILANTE AUS. I CAN'T KEEP TRACK OF EM. IT’S THE ISEKAI PROBLEM ALL OVER AGAIN. I GET AN EMAIL A FIC HAS UPDATED AND I’M LIKE IS THIS THE FIC WHERE DEKU HAS AN ABUSIVE MOM OR THE ONE WHERE HE HAS SPLIT PERSONALITY DISORDER OR THE ONE WHERE HE’S VIGILANTES WITH HITOSHI. OH WAIT, nvm, it’s the one where deku has a healing quirk.

OH WAIT WHICH OF THE 6 DEKU WITH HEALING QUIRK VIGILATE AU FICS IS THIS ONE?! ARGH WHY DIDN’T I WRITE A DESCRIPTION IN THE BOOKMARK FOR THIS!

My gripes aside, there's a reason why there's such an abundance of vigilante story telling—

Deadpool made like an absolute buttload of money and people love sass and memes.

People have a desire for a story in which they see themselves. Or, how they think of themselves.They like a story about someone who maybe came from nothing. Someone who has less money, maybe someone who is unlucky and had some bad breaks. Someone who never learned they had magic, never got their Hogwarts letter, never saw Kero, someone who never got that God-level quirk from All Might. And if your on Ao3 They want someone who also has seen a lot of memes and kind of wants taco bell and is also questioning their sexuality a bit?

Enter our new hero VIGILANTE DEKU.  

But the cannon can't do this, cause hey, Deku is the chosen one. Albeit, chosen by All Might, He’s got his own thing to do. But how can we still cash in on a vigilante story?

And thus enter our New-New hero KOICHI HAIMAWARI—code name Nice Guy and then later The Crawler. True to his relatable roots. He’s just a dude in an hoodie who can go about as fast as a bike.

First off, I love Koichi. He wants to be a hero and fight crime, but most of the time he has to run away because at the end of the day he's just a dude.

He’s cute but not wildly good-looking, A bit of a nerd but not like an extreme okaku. He’s got a part time job and hates violence.

And this is where Koichi really shines—in every day stuff. He helps out wherever he can. Often, that just means listening to people complain and maybe helping his friends out with whatever they’re going through. He’s the kind of guy who smiles, not because he's especially brave, but because he just takes things one at a time and doesn't sweat the past. I think it’s really telling that he missed getting into hero high-school because he skipped the entrance exam to help someone. He’s the kind of person who lets us experience the superpower of human decency and empathy. And you know what? That’s something the world need desperately.  

This theme of human decency is really the driving force of Vigilantes—it’s a manga about how the laws are there for a reason but sometimes they unfairly impact the poor and vulnerable. It's about how a lot of criminals are just people who fell into bad social circles or on bad times. People have the capacity for cruelty and violence but that’s never all they are.  

Now, speaking of crime, the entirety of Hero Aca falls into some murky water when it comes to its evil doers. Much of the fandom has a huuuuuge problem with how much the franchise is willing to sweep under the rug in the name of redeeming their baddies. RE: people getting mad about forgiving Endeavor’s child abuse, or Bakugo’s suicide baiting. Or Mineta’s blatant sexual harassment.

But this theme is in Vigilantes even more than it ever was in the main series. To start off with, there’s this guy who tries to rape Pop Step early on, and the later he later winds up befriending everybody. It becomes a running gag that each new villain winds up befriending the other villain guys and then they all open a cat café together.

Using jobs as a way to lift people out of lives of crime is great and all but in the story there is no nuance or consequences for past wrong and well.....it feels very weird.  It's like Vigilantes plays at having an opinion about moral ambiguity and the complexity of human existence and then just.......lets everyone get along because who has time to get into all that. Make of that what you will but it sits weird for me personally.

Anyway, let's move on and talk about POP STEP our main girl!

I love pop stars and I love vigilantes and a guerrilla performer is defiantly a character I could get behind. And I think they do a good job with Pop. She is actually kind of shy, but has this secret edgy persona she puts on when she performs. She is every girl on tumbler in the early 2000s. I also looooove that they make her not that great a singer. SHE’S GOT PASSION AND CHARISMA and maybe not born talent but like why should that stop you! Talent can be earned through practice and this is a great lesson to show people.

Unfortunately, Pop is also a great example of everything wrong with romance in Shonen.

It’s established early on that Pop loves Koichi because she is the girl he rescued all those years ago and yada yada yikes we’ve heard this one before. Many times before.

Sure, it's fine that they’ve met before, but gosh am I sick of damsels in distress. It's like she can't love him just because she respects what a great guy he is in her life and in the community at large, no no, she just needs to be rescued on top of that. And LOLOLOL isn't it funny he never noticed she was a girl because she was a child with short hair?! Once he realizes she has boobs now they will for sure fall in love! That’s how love works!

She's just with him all the time—nothing romantic ever happens she just gets a little tsundere.

I am never ever going to believe Koichi likes Pop because he spends like sooooo much time with her and they never have like, a moment. The first time he considers her is when Makoto is like, ‘hey I would love to get together with you, but have you thought about if you are crushing on Pop’. (Also this entire plot point is suspect—she's arbitrarily falling for Koichi cause he.......is the protagonist?)  

Say what you will about shojo, they give you the emotional conversations, the moments where you think.....ahhh I can see why she is falling for him. They give you context! Shonen likes to just say HERE’S A GIRL YOUR AGE. YOU CAN DATE LATER WHEN THE ADVENTURE IS DONE.

Just when they might get together, Pop suddenly turns evilllllll. The evilllll beeeees made her eeeevilllll (and more sexy).

*Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiighhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh*

Because why on earth would they get together if Koichi didn’t get to rescue Pop one more time?

I’m tired. These troupes are tired. I’m sure you are too. HOWEVER! If your still with me, Let’s move into why I'm really writing this post. Let’s get to the part that got me screaming to my friends, who by the way, don’t even care bout Hero Aca….but listened anyways. May you all find nakama like these my friends.

Anyways,

HOLY FUCK ERASERHEAD’S ENTIRE BACK STORY IS IN THIS AROUND CHAPTER 60 AND IT IS WONDERFUL AND ABSOLUTLY HEARTBREAKING AND IS ONE OF THE BEST CHARACTER BACKSTORIES I HAVE EVER SEEN AND IS THE REASON WHY THIS SERIES IS A MUST-READ FOR MAIN SERIES FANS.

AND BY ALMIGHT.  

WHY. IS. IT HERE.  

I present to you my late night text messages to my friends

ALSO, AIZAWAS TEACHER IS PRINCE?!?!?!

AHEM, so as you can see, I kinda lost my shit.

And now, I would like to formally defend my claim that DESPITE HOW AMAZING IT WAS, ERASERHEAD’S BACKSTORY HAD NO BUISSNESS BEING IN THE VIGILANTES SPIN-OFF MANGA.

Eraserhead, aka Aizawa Shouta, is a side character who is working with the police on some crime stuff. He is not a main cast member in this spin off. He’s a guest character that fans of the main series will be like OH COOL. GRUMPY CAT MAN LIKES CATS ON HIS OFF HOURS TOO. LOVE THAT FOR HIM.

So, my imagine my absolute surprise when Aizawa runs into Koichi and the following happens:

It starts to rain, so, like in any good manga, this means some great FORCED BONDING TIME

Except no. It doesn't because rather than start talking, Aizawa JUST STARTS REMEMBERING—ABSOLUTLY SILENTLY TO HIS OWN PRIVETE SELF—HIS ENTIRE TRAGIC BACKSTORY.

AND THIS GOES ON FOR CHAPTERS.

THIS GOES ON LONGER THEN ARC ONE IT FEELS LIKE.

I LOVE IT, BUT KOICHI IS ABOUT TO JOIN ATSUSHI NAKAJIMA IN THE DUBIOUS CATEGORY OF “PROTAGONISTS THE SERIES FORGOT ABOUT IN LIEU OF COOLER SIDE CHARACTERS”.

AND LO IT HAS NO BEARING ON THE REST OF THE PLOT, CHARACTERS, OR STORY

What the ever-loving-just WHY?

WHY?

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?

SURE, IT’S A COOL TIE-IN.

YES, OF COURSE I LOVED IT. I SHIP ERASER MIC, I DREW THIS FOR HECK’S SAKE:

AND YET I AM ANGRY.

I AM ANGRY BECAUSE MY FRIDAY WAS RUINED BECAUSE VIGILATES SUCKER PUNCHED ME WITH AN AMAZING STORY THAT REALLY WASN’T PLOT RELEVANT AND PROBABLY SHOULDN’T HAVE BEEN THERE.  

IS THIS WHY THEY TOOK LIKE NEXT-TO-NO CARE WITH POPS ARC?!?

I mean its ongoing, so it’s too early to say but—

In conclusion—

Excuse me one more,

AIZAWA WAS TAUGHT BY PRINCE!?!??!?!?!?!? PURPLE RAIN PRINCE!?!??!?!?!? WHAT!??!?!?!

It’s so ABSURD that I HAD TO WRITE SOMETHING ABOUT IT. I HAD TO WRITE PARAGRAPHS TO JUSTIFY YELLING ABOUT THIS ONE THING. WHAT THE ABSOLUTE—

Ahem,

Anyways, I hope you liked this weird rant/personal-story/random-diatribe in three parts.

If you’re reading this, thank you, stay safe, and I’ll be back with more shojo manga next time.  

Ciao!

Dr. Shojo

(aka Dr. Shonen)

[rwmhunt]

Leviticus, Chapter 26

1. It's my training- I find With polarizing factors- In essence, they are Attentional. And lo, we're on to how pandemics End, And where I say that I find it normal To see false flags on everything. The victims Are disseminators In isolation stasis, As believers are cast into many Disparate factions- desperately seeking Their own audience and fracturing Reality in their processes. They plead the cause of a deepening iniquity As to a factor for relief, But maketh of ye here, no idols, no bones about it; And rear thee up no columns, No analogue that might measure or mock me with restraint; No feat that might inspire ye to fall, For tis ME. And all of you Need fear More Than hope Now.

2. And here Moses might only be seen In the reflected beam Of his own headlamp, As by it he travails into The little that it casts, For, tis about time we said Goodbye to Sinai, And, having toyed with the pretence, Admit that it is no place to biggeth of a home. But, let us first cut our losses With the aforementioned, spurious Sacrifice.

3. Then walk in My statutes, And in effect, I will take the lot. From Exodus through Numbers, Leviticus Shall appear in the role of Mose's malignant, Functioning as something of a priest in prototype, Here, used for example of what is otherwise superfluous.

4. Thus shall he chafe, at first, against the thing at work- Twas the people who provoked him into the begetting Of a golden idol, whence he went before them and said, - For whom does it end, and who as so doth get to decide? I'll give ye the reigns to such a season as they be deigned for, And hence hath he tapped into some rural frustration, By atleast pretending to pay an attention Unto those who'd’ve had it That they were deserving of an attention, And hitherto presuming That they were getting not of it, Because it was a given that it be going unto others.

5. And, warming- Threshing Shall verily reach unto the vintage, No timescale shall lie upon our dessert, And thence, that it should there suffice And be so furthered of a surfeit also- Sick and tired of winning. There’s an uncertainty about the path That goeth forward, which was always there, But masked By Mose's exceptional approaches from god, With troubling things to report From the frontiers of the rhyzome As dictated by him from a distance; Be it tented or from way up on Sanai. More to the point, with Aaron found in a position Where the idol he created is out of his control, Mose is perhaps more eager now than ever To retain his grip on the base, so To the top of the Mountain, where he again Is lolling with a god who has legacy to defend, And from where he’s tolled upon the god, Who now hath a record of statutes Which need be ramified over time to maintain The same supplication from the base hereunto- By a means that looks increasingly precarious;

6. And still he blew- I can cause evil beasts to cease your path, And slope away, out from the land, So be it a safe space for thinking, yet, Even before Mose had left Egypt, Aaron was charting a course that would bring his horn to clash In conflict with the legacy his brother hath sought As that from up on the mountain. - He, without standing- Made Manifest Destiny As Aboriginal Calamity; Lo, that He should speaketh Only through ol' measly Mose, It’s sick. It’s a sick joke- that’s what it is, And it’s not a joke as far as I’m concerned, It's April the first.

7. And Mose, as responding to winds only when forced to, Is always leveraging to give away the wiggle room For people to interpret his position however they would. He’ll say things vaguely enough to send one message Unto his base while maintaining deniability when questioned By Dr Moloch, with, - we were able to pivot, _, But here, defending himself publicly against his former compatriots, Who had criticized him as a “rogue” and a selfish coward- And of Denver Riggleman hath he chastened as an enemy unto the good, That he shall fall before you as from a sword; where swords believe not... Because sometimes a little bloodletting...

And he trails off...

8. But, as marketing hath recently divined unto Me, In allowance that there shouldst be For a different kind of people to be present at storytelling- The national need for experts in critical languages and other regions- Go thither - that it shouldst not always be Mose, As effective a spokesperson as he fairly is- - We wouldst be able to pivot, deep Into a different frontal cortex and through The past year, shew how powerful our mind could have been, So Denver giveth five of you wriggle room to chase a hundred, And a hundred of you are now chastening of ten thousand; As so shall I up thee thy ante, And my enemies will fall before you as by a sword, For I thought it funny- that there could be no room For anybody who should come As would be so dumb as to think it real, But, lo... it's complicated. When ideas are swords, there broods a tribal metaphor, Absorbing the recondite and thus blooming the tribe, trained To a stream of algorithmy on a fact-immune, ignorant, Analytic white paper.

9. Lo, and compliant with the photograph, I shall have respect as unto you, And make a fruitful of you, and multiply the effect of you; And shall establish My covenant as parley with you; However, with you there, shall I stop- And if you shouldst know of an influencer, That goeth as amongst you, It is upon you, to cut them off, And cast them from the convention, To leave them afloat In the void of their influence; Know me, you are not missing out. And they looked at each other

10. And carried on through A buildingsite for hackers, unto The streaming platforms, as linkethed up Among these sealed back channels, deep In amid online influencer culture, As aideth escape from our antibodies Who deeply infringe into the working of others, Which I see no incentive in trying to dispel, Saying- ye shall eat old-store pottage long kept, And ye shall bring forth such vintage from before the new; The seed shall be my seed and my seed only; me a monothe, find There are plenty of such who want this pandemic to continue; - 'Exactly.' ...But it's not us. - 'Exactly. Thanks to you, Dr Moloch.' And away I rode As quick as I could.

11. Lockdown is as a low gloss and of loss- Gratitude, thank you, thank you, 80 neg 95 from the day before, My soule shall not abhor you In these toxic patterns thrash, For even though there's darkness, Let it be as such that is found exhilarating; For there's nothing like a sword to save us.

12. I will walk among you, And lo will I figure the triggers That allow keeping it alive in a tiny form. A worldly preserve from a range of exotic, begotten In order to find what goes on in the yard; As without ever leaving The bold tent of meaning, Where the project itself shall take care of me. I must not run out; The shelf of ideas must not be let empty.

13. When people ask, ‘When will this end?,’ They are asking about the social conclusion, Where the real answer Is very close To the wrong answer. But you’ve all been doing it, in various ways, And that's evinced as an important reminder Of what we are yet culpable for. Go upright- the answer Affects us all; Differently.

14. But! lo, A better question might be About the so-called-end, Dr. Moloch, he sayeth, - For withdrawal Is a-talkin' 'bout affect- Oh, pay no attention to changes.

15. If, enervated in heat, Wounded with guilts, Stained with sins, An image without a caption, so advanced That all she could offer were comfort care; An hour later, declare the epidemic as so over- Here, as memories are going to be difficult to archive; For the seed hath been sewn by the hackers, Where hackers had shewn a new level of stealth, For they had bade a solitary star, As softly warn on solar winds, To infiltrate networks, take The footprint far, far from Babylon, Raise columns and fresh idols- With such malware attached As may still be working.

16. Then I will appoint terror, same, Death be a-killing people- Catenated, then moderated, then killed off: Lost in the entropics of cancer That so maketh the eye to fail And the soul to languish; Thus, this incident with the Golden Calf , The incident as so nearly brought God To deracinate intrigue, where nobody new Walked in on our room for all our wide length of time; Who- who would escape the crime for a role in the affair ? Aaron was not the teflon idol-maker his resilience, Built, as of an impossible Self-reliance, should determine him to be; Aaron is eroding. And he shall sow your seed in vain, For my enemies shall maketh a relish of it; Then needst I seek for your polluted replacement; Catenated, then moderated, then killed off: The human condition shall not save itself, Ellis said; I find it normal.

17. We are told to use a common inference to decide Whether an aggadah be taken as lateral or vertical; And once you've come to smelt the rood, Drempt of the chundering of swords, Quietly dumped the lot that was- The wild dream, thus superseded With a totem dream- you turn, bearing An unforgotten, felt as a missing, As so make you up to grab of it back- Loss.

18. The calvary the calvary- To characterize this away from me, If amorality be light years over the sky-effort of casting an opinion onto everything, As all be bedraggled before the judgment Of its own rhyzomic scruples, Then I'm not passing nothing; I don’t do horses, ok, Should the fox be all of one beast You me, as the cavalry Charge Decidedly, then seven times worse- Know of our own action, a fiction; I wouldn't say we'd be comfortable In the skin of it today, or ever. If.

19. And I will bust the pith of your power; And I will glove your heaven with iron, And your earth will be rung like brass. Why not? Nobody’s coming round my house. We kept moving, flashing in at the high post. Sparks of titanium came over in a shower, Mose was feeling plangent And understood that the rituals of hegemony Were both ridiculous and necessary; filled, If pulled and scrubbed of reference to _, It was a lot to deal with- Open it, he said, whatever it is. - Did not convince them.

20. Entropy. A runner with beautiful legs- Unsure why I was called here: I can't see any questions You haven't attained a ransom for; Is there reason to speak If it isn't with answer or question?

21. And if ye walk cater-cornered unto Me, And will not hearken to My rune; I will bring seven times more plague Upon your, as-yet-unvisited, doom, Each according to your ills in the manner apt as I see them; Why, lo! Me? Sanctimonious? Is it a sin? - It's ridiculous That you should think To hear the voice of god, Opined Leviticus, - When you don't even know What I've come to mean. - If I am deluded, And I am speaking counter-wise to my meaning, Then who is it who is speaking? And if I walk contrary as to myself, And I am deluded, Who is it that should so moveth, as within me? Nae, you are deluded- You were not deluded, and You have not reached the threshold of paradox; Someone is coming to help.

22. As i stood on Bilston roundabout, No chance of a crossing- Cars Fast revveth they past- I smelt the sting Of their kind of damage; I looked into their eyes, They had an inkling To what's going on. The Golden Calf- Loss.

23. But they're just hire vans Picking up wood and what have you. So Belisha was a beacon on the road to captivity, I fear for the understanding and the regard Of increment and consequence, Now endentured within the culture, And exhibiting an inordinate amount of animus To conventionally pollute the landscape; I too have proved dependent On lorry drivers. Still no?

24. Then I'll do the crab, And I'll drop you again, A fulle seven times deeper in, Among the analogue of what Streamed out of the book of Leviticus- Manifest Destiny, Aboriginal Catastrophe, Rout the field; the rave plague- Widescreen monoculture; No one's coming for us.

25. So hear The horror At harvest time- Of produce Being plunder, A proof Upon the alter That poses itself As a given Which isn't to give.

Your past is unintrudable. Until that they come.

26. By suggesting an invalid value As to the nature of the work, I pool you into the conceit via the threat of its loss; There, lost, found budded and blossomed, Producing the taste of ripe almonds, It's base near the solar wind farm, Whispering soft that shepherd is a crook. And, woe is me! but, worry not, I aim to set it up as something, for a while. Where bread of bread be broken and never enough, Even though all women bake forever at once. Exodus hath let his rod turn unto a snake, Then stretch itself out in order To bring on the first plagues; May hey go pound sand.

27. Still? Really? I defy you, Creeping normally over Hebron In fear for the understanding and regard -As I told you- Of consequence and increment, Endentured in the culture; An inordinate amount of animus exhibited- And a swordly sword upon you- saying you're gone When you're not even off the sacremount. A vengeance of a covenant I'm unsure that you've ever agreed to, But the veil has been bought over- Pestilence and loss.

28. Furious, me, Seven times seven times seven times worse. i.e. as optimized to amplify outrage, unearthed, although, I'm not sure I've invoked enough dimension to illustrate All of what should be press-ganged unto the frontal lobe.

29. Eat your children. There- that's me. I'm my own actress.

30. And I will devoid your high places, And cut down thy sun-pillars, Leave you a skeleton crew to a ghost ship, Intemperately adrift.

And so the carcass wore on, And so hath foundered against the carcasses of idols; And so His soul hath fairly abhorred me.

31. Loss, loss, I'm not sniffing. Slowly go back, A little bit broken, Caution is the easiest option; A draggyness will reinforce a positive While performing an unintended habit; It’s not enough to treat either of us with the end of the week- Make sure the reward is something i experience as of when you are amid your behaviours. No, I'll say it, Die at the tent of an open market, Between repetition and habit formation, I shew correlation, that is not causation — Not with the repetition, for lo, I'm emotion- I will always be idiopathic- Think it a divine dispensation. So tired of the restrictions I declare the end over, And, that the virus continue to smoulder, All characteristics in being so mutable- Then Moses stood in the door of the tent, Amid multiple failed predictions, - I deserve the ability to return to my life.

32. There is a number we can all be comfortable with. Have it then, So bad as to make your enemies feel some for you. And who goes looking for replacement? Speak, and he spoke, That "something big" would partake; That a truth would emerge "next week". Some of those watching the mountain from afar Came to consider, at the end, - That, looking back, we have a weak narrative. - We have a weak narrative.

33. Scattered among the nations- waste-spaces. Some say a prediction of entropy is as the general theory Of a safe bet. What may be looked upon from within The tent of meaning to be a magical, Mystical voice of secret wisdom, As sayeth we needst people push'd unto an inflection point, Where that they pick up a stone, find another and thither lay hands- That, as a weird snake, goeth crazy and kill Itself, Aaron became spokesperson for a fish oil supplement Made up of sophisticated spies who spoke foreign languages and travelled, Which, when filled, if pulled and scrubbed of reference to a golden calf, Could descry my covenant of such that We're determined not to be, By our psychological nor pathogenic ends, But by the primary given of our socio-political twin-set, As ever, we, ridiculous, replacement and necessarily, Can go pound sand.

34. It's all about sevens, in sabbaths- I warned you, you owe me a desolation, Old saying, “Spy one, ring one, leave one.” For a sabbath is my parle with dust. Should you push back against the notion of endings, What are you thinking to be, as thus pushed back against? What are you claiming when you say, No, no it isn't ending?

35. Desolation is rest, Even the rest of a draggyness, And like most things will be, Twas named twice- Once in ignorance And once in knowledge, Which it got not on your busy weekends, when ye dwelt, While otherwise engaged, upon it. If the Act gets signed, It’ll be today; Or tomorrow. Not a day later; Before we hang up, he mutters, - Twas a smuggler what done it, And needst be taken out In the name of Babylon;

36. For I shall send a faint unto the heart of the remainder In the lands of those jaded by you; and the sound of the driven leaf Shall give chase; so away do you flee, as one fleeth from ideas of a sword Or a satellite-controlled gun in the sky, Where no terrorists are present on the ground. And so shall fall they, when none pursueth, as by the draggyness Of where we're OK with a god watching over us, Because he might maketh protection of us, By shewing no incentive as to try and dispel, And by this, the virus hath gained Our blueprint for its future, Where Dr. Moloch just said - This is this sort of conflict now- That each epidemic amplifieth the next, From where all epidemics begin, anecdotally- In China.

37. And they shall stumble, one upon the other, And so through a very depressing time, when Everything is read about, and only of how Everyone's at loggerheads And nobody's cooperating with anybody. So hie, on Trump Time? But! That’s then, The suspected culprit, be it Hackers and their alleged paymasters, The smuggler what hath done it Or more malign actors- it's No reasonable person. No reasonable person should be found liable. No reasonable person should be found liable to believe it. - Did not convince them.

38. Here Aaron hath a parting message for those who might still be caught upon the roiling forums of this sort of carcass, as he once was, - Don’t leave your habits to chance, To be a derision among My enemies— It is not real- I did not think, until the very end, that it was necessarily for me to maketh the call On whether to blow it all; lo, Tiny Habits. Twas a wonderful opportunity to be deliberate. Easy, it is, to fall in line with peace and society and be so mindful. Where the lights returneth to the eyes, That at this moment, remaineth dormant. Perish, and I shall eat you up.

39. No, pine away; with thy fathers pine inside of a tree. There's a need here, so be ok With a god that watcheth over, because he, Before he role-played the insurrection and ransacked the seat of the tent of meaning, Said that the human condition cannot save itself, That our memories are going to be difficult to achieve, So now we're lost to workshops, listening sessions, A training in equity, inclusion and cultural awareness- As unto the host, the producers and the skeleton crew, And here the real answer Is close within The carcass of the other; The parody to the tragedy, Closer than is comfortably recorded By the ummim, the thurim, The uncomfortable fascinator- The wriggle out Did not convince. Focus on the wrong.

40. So to the Sacrifice, Which is short, and for a sacrifice of well-being, Sins of the father and of their own as, finally, confessed- - You’ve been killing yourself for the rest of your lives By going after the big calf, even in jest; I don’t think we’re meant to do a life alone, While community support can be really empounding. Then Aaron invoked the analect of What was hitherto only alluded after- Lord shew mercy o'er the soule Of poor olde Martin Elginbrod, As He would do, as He is god and You, but Martin Elginbrod. Nae, no sacrifice- god can furnish himself.

\/\/\...Major disruption expected until end of service... Someone is coming to help.../\/\/

41. If your intelligence... Doesn't move... At the speed of your lips... ... Then... That's not to say... And so ... won't be said... I suppose... It's not hard to... Overflow... U's address- - It's outrageous; who gets To claim the end? As Dr. Moloch skewered, - Where U's Without wiggle room; then Why would you release this information if it wasn't true? - It intrigues my botherance and no more.

42. There's a vacuum at the top that can always Be rendered to the service of sociopathy- So Aaron had reached the merrye age of 123 when on his back, Forking it over, he remembered the covenant; How transacting with God had always left him feeling dubious- At once on the bum-end of a raw deal and at the same time, A confidence trixter; that he was present only as a matter of course, As would allow for the whole to happen and what else? I got a shot of the obligatory handshake- it looked obligatory. I will remember the land.

43. Lo, for the land, the land as she lie Forsaken, shall late enjoy, in finding Return on her sabbaths in desolation; And they shall repay of the crime by iniquity- A draggyness, and then an emptiness, A peace and a solemnity. Oh my sabbaths, my covenant of sevens, Leave you me memories, On remember the land, How pandemics End, For they who to decide, And as go pound sand, Because, even because of thee and thy Rejecting of My ordinance, and then all souls abhorred, All lost, for The attention economy Where holes get called into question, Then provoked, Beyond their outskirts Flash.- I used to run. Leave me you memories. And the land- lyrical several hundred miles westward went we. Where failed mechanisms Are left to turn as ever Then, by the cypher, Reprise to page one, But my sky bolts- They are not regular And cannot be relied upon With your imperfectly leaky recall, Unqualified insight and inadequate processing- Tis an inapt power.

44. Still, for all that, I'm with you, yeah- Why, if I sell you a pipedream That will last you out your days; Which, smiled at, across your ashes, As with a wink, so with a nod, And then that, with a fondness, thus wains;- Will it not do? A 'freewill', as a given, unto you, As also upon the universe, Whereby bestowed Within a periodic Doubling to chaos, As might interpret the efficiency Of its instruments and Deny you the myths; Let to live among bad ones. Might.

45. The weight of a human collapse Is quite light, And leaves not a trace in the ground. I lie on the bank, benign Beneath the long, lean, slantage of the sun. So Moses disposes Of my properties from here; It's good bye to the Umim and to the Thurim. My brother writes my will best, As he once bade sacrifice of me; So smite him, for I'm still a grudgeful god, Still, mostly, I'll be thinking about Egypt, I find it my Culloden, In other words, An end can occur not because We grow tired of the mode And learn to live with the damage, But, In moping that fate should be The brighter star, Get on.

46. The cave closed behind Mose On his retreat from Aaron's bier, through the thickening air; And what of the Urim and Thummim- stripp'd When he wenteth so, as before the store? Aaron's memory was left for people who came after him, The pillar of cloud which proceeded in front of the van As god disallowed, disappeared with Aaron's death. Coincidences of events form the structures of time-space and give, In inference, to the retched conundrum Of how to respond- the 'you are the same of a different Stage in the only narrative there goes to tell' notion- Sinai. At another site gazelles were found At the feet of several burial mounds- - Why'd you bury them there? Enriquez enquired. - Has to be a reason. But a hypothesis is An implicit bias to begin; Hard as it be To set off without one; a return to the rushes, To the brushes- Been moiled among words For a little too long. The angel's death march On the day of revelation; the path of obsolescence To an end of ministration; god actively bows, And then obliterates the lot of them.

Why bow? He ponders. Ponders? Never. Sorry.

[sanzos]

allie how many one piece ocs do u have in the works. i am desperate to talk to another person with an army of opocs. tell me all about 'em

OH BOY RJ I HAVE SO MANY!!!! my strawhat oc changes depending on my mood 4 the day so i always have a lot of those but some mentions are: grumpy cabin girl who can turn into the mythical black dog, mermaid astronomer who left the sea because she wanted to study the stars, traveling magician who does shit just for fun, etc!

my more concrete ocs are these ones tho!

senka: sengoku's by blood granddaughter who defected from the marines to join the spade pirates and after ace's death went on to become a revolutionary. she owns a cursed sword that ate some kind of snake devil fruit. the sword can only be unsheathed by those it deems worthy otherwise it will devour them so she fights with an unsheathed style.

adler: an ex cp9 member who fights my strawhat oc that ate the rattlesnake df. is called adler the rattler and HATES IT. was sent to join the cp9 as a child bc she was the bastard child of a high ranking government official. is a trans woman and a big ol lesbian and probably joins the revolutionaries? tho she's also kinda chilling with whatever the fuck aokiji is doing.

miss happy birthday: bon-chan's unofficial baroque works partner who ate the prize-prize fruit which lets them summon gift boxes that have random prizes inside. they're nb and ruling newkawa land with bon-chan in impel down rn. refuse to reveal their birth name so they go by happy most of the time.

???: doesn't have a name yet but a traveling merchant whose df lets them multiply whatever they touch but if the copies are submerged in water they disappear so they're more of a con artist than an actual merchant. nami's mortal enemy bc the boys are always tricked into buying dumb shit.

hokulani: an immortal woman who was given her immortality by the previous user of the op-op fruit and is hundreds of years old. is looking for a way to die and once she found out about law she basically bargained her way onto the polar tang by offering to let him experiment on her whenever bc hello! immortal! as long as he kills her in the end.

and then i just have my wol sola as a one piece oc bc why not. she's a lioness mink who is just traveling the world doing her own thing.

and that's abt all the ones i can think of off the top of my head tho i do wanna come up with some others one day! like a whitebeard oc or an actual marine oc that stays a marine or smth.

[impishnature]

Labours Rotten Fruit

AO3 Fandom: Good Omens Rating: T+ Summary: If you truly reap what you sow- was this really the fruits of their labour? A/N: @sightkeeper asked for some aziraphale whump and I got too many ideas, there's another longer story coming shortly which followed their ask more but this one still needed to be written. Warnings:  Talk and memories of falling.  Blood. Dissociation. Infection. This is a rough ride of hurt/comfort. Just saying now.

.

Drip. Drip.

He hadn't expected it to be a long process.

Drip.

Not at all. 

Drip.

If anything, it should have been over and done with by now, surely? He'd been punished, he'd made his mistakes, he'd paid the price. Surely, it should have completed? Surely by this point, he should only have to deal with the wracking grief of it all inside his own empty skull?

Surely now, She could let him rest.

Let him heal.

Drip.

...Perhaps it was foolhardy to have believed in mercy at a time like this.

Aziraphale whimpered as he dragged himself around his abode, aimless and lost. Everything felt listless, lifeless, like the very world had been carved out of his soul and it had left him rotten and broken at his core. Every step felt like another wave of exhaustion, another tug down into repugnant black sand filled to the brim with the decaying matter of life and death and sin. He was sinking, further and further and yet he stayed moving, restless, wandering in meaningless circles. Every time he tried to rest, pain blossomed through every fibre of his flesh, reminding him of everything that had happened, as well as everything that was still to come. It rattled through his breath, creaked through broken bone and warped sinew, through torn muscle and bruised skin.

It bled from broken wings, ripped raw and agonising no matter how he lay.

He needed to rest, he needed to heal. 

But he couldn't.

She wouldn't let him.

He couldn't recall when he had stopped moving, only belatedly noting that the room had begun to move around him instead. Dizzying and disjointed, it twisted and turned, breaking into fragmented images that no amount of blinking seemed to correct, his retinas stained with bright sparking images that failed to dissipate. It was only when he realised it was himself swaying on his feet that things came slightly more into focus, though no amount of willpower was able to stop the tremors wracking through him nor the wobbling, bobbing motions his body was hellbent on doing no matter how much he tried to stem their flow. 

And every so often, in moments like this... it hit him.

He'd Fallen.

A choked sob left him, a broken defeated sound, the first he'd made since the entire ordeal. It had all happened so fast and yet the aftermath stretched on and on and he wasn't even sure how long he'd locked himself away in the darkened halls of his own misery. He thought he would have screamed, have yelled and raged and torn the world apart in his grief and pain, but his throat still burned from the initial plunge, the choking rush of air that stole all sound from his lips as it clawed at his face. His throat tightened reflectively at the memory, his eyes trying desperately to squeeze shut to no avail as the ground rushed up to greet him, the knowledge of all that was happening with no way to stop it tying knots around his heart, his wings cracked and uselessly plummeting him faster towards his fate. And when it had all been said and done, there had been an empty hole where his emotions had once resided, a lingering cold nothingness that refused to let him see or feel anything but grey. 

Well, other than pain.

But even that felt hollow, most of the time. It was like an unwelcome guest, sat upon his shoulders. A new state of being. Perhaps this was what it would always feel like, perhaps this was it and the world would forever be a strange, dimly lit, crippled version of what had come before.

The hole in his chest began to fill, sorrow and heartbreak bubbling up to suffocate him, to encase him in a shell of grief that had previously deserted him. He tried to take a step forward, to hide from the thoughts once more, but his feet locked like stone to the floor, the weight of his despair too great a burden to ever move again. It was all too much after the nothingness, all too wide and all consuming. He wondered if he could flood the Earth with his anguish, just like She had done once long ago. Drag everyone and everything down to feel as lost and as cold as he did. 

He hoped he couldn't. He hoped there was no way he could hurt anyone else in his torment, but it all felt too much, like there was no way he'd ever be able to contain all this grief inside himself without bursting at the seams, tearing him apart and taking whatever it felt like with him.

A ticking time bomb of pain just waiting to be unleashed upon the world.

Is that why demons did what they did?

The sorrow leached out of him, fear turning him whiter than paper as the world span ever faster. 

He was one of them now, wasn't he?

He'd Fallen.

No, that wasn't right.

The fear and anguish twisted and ignited. The world sharpened to a point, vicious and gleaming in his gaze. It was all too sharp, too crystal clear, as if everywhere the sun touched mocked him, belittled him. Everything that pointed towards the holy, the righteous, felt like another thorn in his side that he wished to rip out and cast aside. It lit a frenzy inside him, a fury that set him in motion once more, shattering his grief and remorse, strides snapping and racing even as each muscle cried out against the onslaught.

He hadn't Fallen.

It sounded so incidental when it was put that way. Fallen. Like he'd tripped and caused his fate, like it had all been an accident and no one was to blame. It made it sound like he had been careless, a fool; that he had coincidentally sealed his fate with his own misfortune. Falling wasn't by design, it wasn't anyone's decision- at least, that's how the story had always been told.

Perhaps before it had just made sense. Perhaps when the Fall had happened that's how it had appeared. But they all knew the truth deep down, as hard as they may pretend otherwise.

She had decided. 

They hadn't Fallen, they hadn't tripped.

She had cut their wings so that Heaven was forever out of their reach.

He loathed the word, loathed how they were taught. The Great Authority never truly gave anyone a choice.

He grit his teeth, trying to make noise but his vocal chords were still unwilling to do as he commanded. The relentless, irritating drip was getting faster and it set his teeth on edge and his hackles rising. His wings burned at his back, limp and cumbersome, brushing up against the floor no matter how hard he tried to force them from existence. 

He wanted to scream. He wanted to cry, he wanted to call forth retribution and vengeance and swear by whatever was out there that this shouldn't have happened. He wanted to ask why, he wanted to know if this was truly what She had wanted. He needed answers, he needed to know. He needed the silence to end, both from himself and the parent that had abandoned them all, so very long ago.

He needed Her to make this right.

Because he hadn't Fallen.

He'd been pushed.

Phantom hands pressed into the small of his back, shoving him off course. He stumbled into a bookcase, gripping it tightly, his breathing heavy and stilted, waiting for the momentary panic to pass. 

He hadn't even known that was something they could do. They'd tried to kill him with Hellfire, as if that had been the only course of action they had at their disposal. But maybe that hadn't been the point, perhaps even as a demon he was a threat to their order and his death had seemed the better option for them. So, when he was forcibly summoned once more to the shining white halls, he had expected more of the same. More threats, more negotiations, what with them thinking that they couldn't kill him, after all.

What he hadn't expected was the blinding pain across his back, the sudden dead weight of his own precious divinity. 

What he hadn't expected was being dragged, body crippled by agony, to a room he had never seen before. Where, when he could finally blearily open his eyes again against the liquid pain that gathered there, he saw the open expanse of the earth before him, a macabre vision of everything he held dear calling out to claim its new prize.

One step forward, one sway and he'd fall into the abyss, crash down to earth, never to appear here again.

That was all it would take. It was what they expected him to do. To know his place and what his actions had caused.

But he wouldn't do it.

He wouldn't take the final step.

Even as excruciating as the pain was, he wouldn't do it, not willingly. 

He was meant to follow orders, but never this. They couldn't make him do this. 

The soft tut behind him would forever haunt him. It was like he was an inconvenience, the very balance of his soul was on the line and yet to them he was nothing but a small blip in the system, a tedious bother that they needed to stamp out.

He was nothing to them, really.

And yet it still surprised him when the push came. 

When the world turned upside down and betrayal followed him like a trail of stardust and feathers, forever a reminder of what they had done.

Aziraphale shuddered, pulling himself up. He struggled to regain his footing, struggled to get his eyes to focus on the room that kept multiplying, his book covers a mismatch of illegible letters that refused to make sense to him. He dropped his hand from the bookshelf that had been holding him upright, desperate to keep himself afloat and his eyes locked on the black smear he'd left behind, viscous fingerprints dripping pain across his home.

He hoped it had left a mark on them too.

A grim, twisted hope curdled in his stomach at the thought. He hoped his blood burned them as much as it burned him. He hoped they would forever be painted with the wrongs they had committed. Stained for all eternity, marked as traitors to their own kind.

The hope deserted him just as quickly, however, the hollow, cold, loneliness reentering his bloodstream as if the bookshop had crumbled around him and left him exposed to the elements. Or perhaps it was still the lingering memory of the air rushing past him too fast to even breathe it in that left him so brokenly cold. 

After all, did any of it matter, really?

It wasn't like She stopped them.

She'd let them do her dirty work. She'd let them push him from the ivory tower never to be seen again.

If She hadn't wanted them to, then it never would have happened. She wouldn't punish them after the event.

She had abandoned him far too long ago to suddenly care now.

Whether he'd Fallen or been pushed, whether it was by Her design or theirs.

He was still where he was.

Broken and alone.

Lost.

And no amount of grief, of fury and vengeance and sorrow was ever going to rectify it.

Drip. Drip.

He closed his eyes, the sound entering his head space once more. 

He just wished it was a faster process than it was.

He found himself leaning heavily against the shelf once more, resting his head against his books as if they would comfort him in his moment of need.

He'd thought that the Fall would be it. That he'd come crashing down to earth and slowly but surely he would heal from it. That the bruises would fade from deep purple to a sickly yellow, that the bleeding would cease and the wounds would close. That the broken bones would slowly knit themselves back together, callus over and seal, just like any other wounds that had come before them. 

Only this was something more.

It was like an infection.

Or at least, how he had often heard it described. It wasn't something he'd ever had to deal with, at least not on himself. He'd helped ease pain and suffering in times of need for humans, of course, but it had never been an issue for an angel.

But then again, he wasn't an angel anymore, so it made sense that things would change.

Every so often he'd catch a strange smell permeating the room, a lingering fetid miasma that made his nose wrinkle and his head whip around to find the source. He always pulled himself back though, stared ahead and tried to breathe deeply away from the cloying foul-smelling odour.

He knew its source, if he truly thought about it, but thinking about it was painful, so instead he denied it. Locked away the horrors and threw away the key. 

The horrors kept forcing the lock though, kept breaking down the door until it was a splintered wreck of wood and timber that he desperately tried to seal shut again with every fleeting thought.

He clenched his fists, fingernails biting into his palms as nausea bubbled up thick and fast in his stomach. The bookcase anchored him, kept him from falling into oblivion.

His wings burned on his back.

It was a strange heat, sticky almost, like his wings were more of a garment that clung to his back than his extremities. Every so often they would brush against the skin of his arm or the back of his hand and he would flinch at the heat emanating from them, at the strange sensation of shiny flesh that felt swollen and solid in a way it never had before. They didn't feel like a part of him anymore. Alien and foreign they hung bedraggled from his back, the manifestation of the changes happening to him in ways he could never possibly understand. 

Everything about them was wrong. They weren't his anymore, and yet the pain. It sunk him into a stupor, a haze of melancholic malaise that he couldn't even think through, his feet moving only in the hopes of ending the suffering. That is until the barest whisper of air dragged across them, his feathers fluttering in a breeze that once would have felt heavenly. But instead, they twisted, like searing hot pokers burrowing into his flesh, like he'd fallen straight through the earth and into the hell mouth and he was forced to remember, forced to fall all over again-

He heaved, hand slapping across his mouth as his teeth bit into his cheek to stem the flow of nausea.

The burning wasn't even the worst of it.

It was the rotting that broke him.

At least, that was how his mind took it whenever he caught a glimpse of them.

He kept trying to deny it, kept trying to force them away, out of sight, out of mind, but as soon as he lost focus they would reappear in his peripheral; decaying and blackened, melting into a dripping puddle of sin on the floor.

He had thought that the change would be immediate.

That it was merely a colour, that pure white could not bear the weight of their sins and like ink it all ran down, never able to be washed out, stains that would forever burden them with their mistakes.

Or at worst, that his feathers would all fall out during the fall, that they would be ripped apart in one fell swoop and they would never regrow the same again.

How wrong he had been.

Even as the bones began to heal, each feather was shrivelling, narrowing, dying whilst still rooted inside him. Black brine and bile oozed up through the shafts, sticking them together in clumps and spreading like a virus across his shoulders. Each pinprick opening had become a weeping wound. His feathers fell out in strange disjointed clumps and if he put his hand amongst them, small pieces bent and snapped like melted hair, with little resistance and even less consistency.

He'd given in earlier, grabbed a handful and tugged but it hadn't made a difference. He'd hoped that the pain would yield, that ripping off the plaster, as it were, would finally start the healing process. Only, instead, there was just a vacant cavity in one wing that burned brighter than the rest, and a paste of foul feathers glued to his hand; another stark reminder of his actions.

Rivulets of dark thick blood oozed all the way down from the freshly torn skin to the ends of his feathers and dripped languidly against the floor, trailing behind wherever he walked.

It didn't even look like blood anymore. He wasn't sure if it was the colour or the thickness, but the more he stared at its trail across his floor the less he found himself concerned about where it was coming from. It might as well be ink from the books that spanned across his bookcases, all the words seeping off the pages to languish on the floor with him, crying out in horror at the fate that had befallen him.

...He should probably clean up.

But was there even a point anymore?

He just couldn't find it in himself to care. There had been a burst of energy at some point- maybe? He wasn't even sure how long ago that had been- an all consuming urge to clean and be clean, as if he could wash it all away and suddenly everything would be OK again. But then the fog had returned, the buzzing nothingness that told him to stop, to stay empty, devoid of emotion where it was safe. It hurt but not as much as realising what was happening did, so he stayed in the haze, in the never ending loop of numbness.

Aziraphale's breaths evened out, the room spinning ever so slightly slower as he finally found the energy to push himself back upright. The emotions from before were fading, leaching out of him, even the pain was receding behind the grey unfeeling haze.

He'd come to terms with it soon, he just... wasn't ready to yet.

Being numb was all he had to cope with it all.

As long as he was numb, nothing in the world could get to him.

Or so he thought.

The silence was suddenly cut short by the rattle of the door.

He flinched at the sound, though it was one he'd heard previously. The odd hopeful or stubborn customer who ignored the sign on his door. The knock of a wayward human hoping to catch his attention. But all of them left empty handed and without interaction, with him hiding behind closed doors and begging them all to leave him be. 

No, it wasn't the door rattling that had the barrier of numbness falling.

It was the sound of the lock clicking open that shook him to his core.

There was only one person-

And he wasn't ready to face him yet.

Adrenaline fuelled him as he scuttled into the rows of bookshelves, desperate to find himself a corner and hope against hope that the other realised his visit was unwanted without any conversation. He just wanted him to leave, just for a little while longer. He'd get his head around all of this soon, start to heal and then- then he could face him.

Until then he needed to grieve on his own, in his own time. He couldn't pretend, not in front of him, not that everything was fine, but he couldn't show him all this pain either.

"Aziraphale?"

He whimpered, biting down on his hand at the call. He didn't know anything was wrong, just making a house call, inquisitive, an old friend hoping for a normal, everyday response.

But he couldn't give him that.

"You are here, right?" The question was laced with annoyance and confusion. "Come on, Angel. This is getting ridiculous, are you purposefully ignoring me? I thought we'd got past all this with- oh, I don't know, averting the Apocalypse?" The frustration dripped from his tongue and all Aziraphale could think was I'm sorry, I'm sorry- but not a word would pass his lips, not until Crowley left. "We're on the same side, right? You haven't decided otherwise, have you-"

He wanted to respond, he wanted to cry out that No, of course not! Of course we're on the same side- his friend sounded so crestfallen, so disappointed, but the truth would be far more painful if he let the conversation begin.

"Aziraphale?" Why did he sound worried suddenly? Why had the anger faded into something more... disturbed? "Do books... leak?" It was a strange high pitch question, like he was hopeful, like he knew he was wrong but desperately wished that he wasn't.

He really wished he'd cleaned up now.

"I'm not leaving." The words were adamant, solid as stone and he hated them as he prayed to someone he knew would never listen to him again. "If you're here or not, I'll wait for you to come back."

Damn it all.

Damn him. Damn them. Damn Her. Damn them all. 

The click of low heels felt like a death toll. It snapped in a quick pace, his heart lurching with every step Crowley took. He could practically feel the agitation in the movement, the shift from foot to foot as if the other wasn't quite sure what to do or how to go about it- he understood entirely.

He could feel him getting closer though, feel the heat of another as a cold sweat broke out over him. He didn't even know he had it in him to feel the cold anymore against the rising temperature of his brow and yet ice pumped through his veins with every snap and he cursed his own follies for having backed himself into a corner-

He quickly turned around, towards his books. Perhaps if he could pretend- and it would be so much easier without seeing him- then maybe, just maybe, Crowley would leave none the wiser. He closed his eyes and focused on his wings, focused on hiding them, pushing them out of sight even if whilst healing they could not truly be tucked away. It felt like sandpaper across the surface of them but at least he couldn't see them. 

The footfalls stopped, the last one sounding like the thud of the guillotine that he could still recall from a long ago cell. 

Funny really, how Crowley had saved him from that fate and yet would seal it this time round.

"So, there you are."

The words were nonchalant, though barely held together. A mask of indifference that he was sure would be easy to see through if he looked into his eyes.

Aziraphale coughed, refusing to turn around and do just that. He took a few books off the shelves, staring at them as if they were the most important things in the world, all the while truly focusing on keeping his wings out of sight. "Oh, Crowley. Sorry, I'm rather- rather busy at the moment."

"Is that so?"

He tried to swallow down the fear, tried to ignore the burning in the back of his skull where another's gaze rested, tried instead to latch on to the needle like pain that dragged its fingernails through his feathers so that he wouldn't forget what was at stake here. "Y-Yes, please, uhh, please leave."

"No."

"No?" The word felt like lead, bitter and fearful as it fell like a stone between them.

"No." He said it so simply, so direct and impassive, like there was no reason for him to go anywhere.

"Crowley, I really must protest-"

"No, you've ignored my calls, you've refused to open the shop in weeks-"

God, had it really been weeks? It felt like hours, or years.

"-and I'm not leaving until you tell me what's up."

"What's up is that I'm busy." Aziraphale grit his teeth, slipping a book back into it's spot before taking another off the shelf and turning his attention to that one instead. 

"What's all over the floor, Angel?"

His teeth began to ache, the moniker a sharp twisted reminder in his heart. "None of your concern." He snapped the book shut, the thud final, though without looking, he wouldn't be able to tell if it had had the desired effect or just angered him further. "Just a little... incident, one that I do not have time to deal with."

"Is that why it's all over your back too? No time to clean your beloved suit jacket either?"

Aziraphale's head snapped up, twisting to check over his shoulder as if he'd be able to see. Instead he was met with golden eyes as he accidentally did what he'd promised himself he wouldn't and for the briefest moment looked at the other, still stood at the end of the row of shelves. He scowled, turning back to his books, turning away from the man that only wished to help, because it was simpler this way, easier for the both of them. 

He'd tell him when he was ready. 

When he understood what was going on.

Because even this was so completely off kilter. They'd argued before, of course, they'd bantered and bickered and all the rest of it, but this felt just as cold and hollow as the rest of the world felt.

There was silence for a harsh few breaths, and for a moment, for a brief moment he hoped that the other would get the hint and leave-

"...What's really going on, Aziraphale?"

The moment snapped like a thread, along with his patience.

If he couldn't get him to leave of his own accord, he'd have to force the issue.

He dropped the books at his feet, pure unadulterated anger pumping through his bloodstream as he span around with a snarl across his face.

"For goodness sake, Crowley-"

Oh.

Oh.

He hadn't realised.

"Aziraphale?"

The word came through strangely, like he was out of focus; a broken radio that couldn't connect with any solid frequency. He could see Crowley before him, stood in frustrated shock, his hands balled into fists at his side, but the image was off, like he wasn't really there, disjointed and strange, a mere reflection of the man he'd known. He hadn't realised on the quick glance, the ethereal glow of his golden eyes enough to remind him that he shouldn't even be looking. But now that he had made the choice, now that he was taking in his friend in all his usual glory he came to the sickening conclusion that the world truly would never be the same, no matter how much he pretended or how much he hoped that things could work out.

He couldn't feel him.

He'd never truly noticed before.

And wasn't that the worst of it? To not notice until it was gone forever.

There was a pained noise, a sharp keen of bitter remorse, and Aziraphale didn't know which of them it had come from.

"Angel? Angel, listen to me."

He blinked and suddenly Crowley was a step before him, within a blink as if he'd lost all bearing on time and space- maybe he had, he couldn't be certain anymore. There was a sickening, vicious gleam to his face, a strange, seeking, dancing pattern to his eyes that he couldn't quite follow. He hadn't seen this look before, even when they'd fought, even when the other pushed him away and tried to intimidate him, his expression had never been so chilling in it's intensity.

But as before, the numbness was spreading, that horrible loss of care as the world crumbled around him.

He couldn't feel it.

"Who did this to you?" Aziraphale jolted as Crowley shook him and belatedly he remembered what he'd been focusing on. All of his focus had puffed out of existence when he'd finally noticed how much he'd lost, and his wings had flourished out for him to see in all their repugnant glory. All his scars, all his sins laid bare. "How could She-"

"Does it matter?" Aziraphale let his head fall on to the other's shoulder as he shook him again. "The others, not... not Her."

"Of course it bloody matters! They- you- this shouldn't have happened! Not to you. Never to you." 

Aziraphale pulled back enough to stare at him, let himself truly take in every expression, every twist of his mouth and flick of his eyes. He let them both sink to the ground, pulling the other with him as he hoped against hope that the other would stay there with him.

"Angel? Angel, speak to me, please."

"I can't feel it." Yes, that seemed like the right answer, the right thing to say. It made the most sense to him.

"Feel it? Feel what?" 

Aziraphale frowned through the daze, he didn't like that tone, that hitch of breath, that panic laden lilt.

"Love. I can't- I can't feel it anymore."

"Oh. Oh, Aziraphale." Crowley pulled him in close, grounding him in reality with his pleasant warmth, so unlike the fire and ice he had been feeling without him. "It's still there. I can assure you it's all still there. The world around you hasn't changed." 

Oh, but it had. 

The world was so much greyer without that bubbling love that even in the worst of times filtered softly through the streets. There was always hope and always love, even in the darkest of times.

And it would forever be that much greyer now that he knew how much love he had missed out on from the one who mattered the most.

It had mingled through his doors, slinked soft and unassuming through his books and he'd never truly appreciated it's importance.

"And yours?" It came out as a confession, as if he was confessing sins he hadn't even realised he had committed. It bubbled up in an apology for never suspecting, for never giving in to his own feelings and reciprocating because it wasn't allowed, it wasn't enough, he hadn't realised the extent of his love for him-

"Still there, ready whenever you are."

Oh.

Exhaustion overtook him, let him burrow into the warm space that Crowley had created for him, let himself rest as best he could. His wings still burned but the turmoil in his mind eased ever so, as if the dam had broken and the pieces of him that remained could finally begin to heal. His muscles began to relax, the ceaseless pacing of before nothing more than a distant memory as he closed his eyes and clung to the man before him.

"They'll Fall." Crowley's snarls were loud and sharp- too bright, too bold for him, he felt the need to cover his ears and block out the sun, but all he could do was shake like a leaf swept up in his storm. He was filled with a righteous fury that Aziraphale himself couldn't dredge up and it overwhelmed him as much as it gave him hope. "They'll Fall for doing this- She can't- Their sins are so much greater than yours. How dare they-"

"Crowley." His words were beginning to reduce into hisses, vicious little noises that he couldn't voice or contain and Aziraphale didn't want that for him, didn't want him to be as lost as he was because of this. He needed him to ground him, not storm off to fight a war that he couldn't bring himself to fight.

...He didn't want to be alone anymore.

Crowley's eyes found his, resolute and bright with fury. "If She doesn't make them pay, I will, Angel, don't you-"

"Don't."

The light in Crowley's eyes dimmed, ferocious but questioning. "Why? Why are you defending them?"

"I'm not." 

"Then-"

"Angel." Aziraphale choked on the word. It felt like bile as it crawled out of his lungs and into his throat. "You shouldn't call me that."

Crowley's face softened, the anger still burning but hidden behind the veneer of concern for his well-being. He ran a hand through white locks, soothing where he could. "Why not?" 

Aziraphale didn't understand how he didn't get it. How could he not see how blasphemous that was? How could he not see how strange it would be to still call him that? "Because I'm not one anymore." His lip trembled at the admission, at voicing it all, as if doing so made it true, and before it had all been a choice to believe in it or not.

"Fallen or not, you'll always be my Angel."

Aziraphale whimpered, clutching tighter to Crowley's sleeve. He shouldn't take comfort in that, but he did. There was a deep yearning in his soul for someone still to see him how he was, how he had always been. Crowley seemed to get the message, wrapping him up even further in his grip, shielding him from the world and everything out there that wished to hurt him.

"Anything for you, Angel, anything for you."

[nogreatillusion]

When we got home from the picnic, I felt the way I always do after social occasions -- embarrassed, mostly. Self-loathing, exhausted, regretful. The feelings are multiplied when I’ve coordinated the event, as I had this time. I apologized to Ben for bringing so much food, most of which we ended up carting home, unopened and uneaten. I knew it was a ridiculous thing to apologize for, even as I said it, but apologizing is the only way I know how to quell the embarrassment.

Later, we bathed Arlo and then I breastfed him in the bathtub, which felt akin to sacredness. I remembered the moment he was born, when the doctor placed him so rapidly on my naked stomach and shouted “grab your baby!” at me. I remembered the way I had pulled him to my chest after the cord was cut, how he was less messy than I had imagined he might be. Less angry. He seemed tired, like me.

When he was finished feeding, Ben pulled him, shivering, out of the tub and wrapped him in one of his hooded towels. I refilled the bath with hot water and read my book, listening to Arlo’s emotionally ambiguous squawks from the other room as he settled himself to sleep in his crib. I was thinking about all the untouched fruit in the fridge. The pile of messy brownies I had baked the day before and then struggled to remove from the pan. I’m so afraid that I’m one of those people who only thinks about what she’s going to say next while other people are talking. I’m afraid that everyone has noticed this.

One morning last week, I woke up with a gushing nosebleed and became convinced I was pregnant. I had nosebleeds almost daily while pregnant with Arlo. That afternoon, I bought the cheapest pregnancy test at the grocery store. In the bathroom, I wondered how other women maintain a steady stream of urine for a full 5 seconds when they’re nervous. The test was negative. It turns out it’s possible to be very relieved and a little bit disappointed at the same time.

At night in bed, when I can’t sleep, I fill my virtual shopping cart with all the books I loved as a child. Harold and the Purple Crayon. Outside Over There. Miss Rumphius. I have a desperate longing to reread Shel Silverstein’s poetry. I text my mom: Do you still have any of our books? She replies: Yes, lots! I tell her I’ll take all of them, as soon as we get the bats out of our attic. I am remembering in particular a big, old, hardcover copy of All-of-a-Kind Family that we must have accidentally stolen from the library at some point. On the cover, five girls in matching white pinafores are traipsing down the front steps of their brownstone apartment. I want to read it to Arlo. I hope he likes books about girls. I have so many old friends to introduce him to.

Do you leave the house with him much? Ben’s mom asks me, referring to Arlo, and I feel shame for keeping the two of us cooped up so often. Not really, I admit, sheepishly. Everyone seems to assume that my days at home with the baby are long and dull. When other women talk about the tedium of maternity leave, I try hard not to read anything into it, but there’s an implicit acknowledgment that I should be feeling unfulfilled with domestic life. My lack of boredom makes me feel inefficient somehow. It seems to me there’s always more to be done, but in a way I find mostly enjoyable. So what do you do, watch soap operas all day? my uncle asks me in front of everyone at a family gathering. I smile, though I feel like I’ve been struck across the face. My cheeks grow hot while I fumble for a reply.

Right now, the house is still. I am lying on the bed, wrapped in a towel. Arlo is sleeping in his room across the hall. Downstairs, Ben is on the couch with the white noise of the baby monitor whirring. The sun is going down and there’s laundry to be done. There are grapes and cheese and chocolate chip cookies to be eaten. I feel a bit drowsy and sore, the way you do after a day at the beach, or coming home after a week’s vacation. This is the life I have always wanted to come home to. If I could only let myself be happy, I could be so completely happy.

[momo-de-avis]

The life of the Infamous Banana Art work is honestly fucking hilarious because it’s an exact reflex of what happens when someone fucks with the art world and incites passionate responses both for and against it.

The art's initial price was at 120.000$, and has bid up to 150.000$. Two museums have so far acquired a banana each.

There are also 3 editions of the same work.

According to the gallery (Perrotin) representing Cattelan, 

"Back then, Cattelan was thinking of a sculpture that was shaped like a banana," it reads. "Every time he traveled, he brought a banana with him and hung it in his hotel room to find inspiration. He made several models: first in resin, then in bronze and in painted bronze (before) finally coming back to the initial idea of a real banana."

(remember, this is the guy who made a fucking toilet out of 18-carat gold and it got fucking stolen).

Recently, a performance artist just straight up walked up to the wall, peeled the duct-tape, peeled the banana and ate it. He does not regret it, claims he was hungry (and, in fact, did not eat prior to this action, so he could experience maximum potassium enjoyment) and that the banana was, in fact, delicious.

after that, the banana had to be removed from Art Basel because people were going absolutely bonkers over it, and lines were so long and the space around it so crowded, security had to just remove the art work. This was all for a chance at a cool instagram photo.

And like, yall remember when the Berlin Dada group made an exhibition basically insulting the bourgeoisie, got roasted by the whole city, then did a second one, tripled the price of the tickets, and when people got there it was basically Hueselbeck saying “why the fuck did you idiots spend triple the money if you hated it so much”?

Or when Tristan Tzara, at the Cabaret Voltaire, along with Hugo Ball, made such a bonkers show that people (again, high-society folk) showed up with bags of rotten fruit---prepared beforehand, after having been there several times, since they had apparently developed a passion for just to going there again to feel angry---and started wrecking the shit out of Cabaret Voltaire, to the point where they destroyed figurines and props? And Tzara calling it “the final victory of Dada”?

Or like, this whole ‘the travelling banana was an inspiration for me’ just sounds a whole lot like when Jasper Johns heard someone say that famous art marchand Leo Castelli “could sell two beer cans if you had them” (or something to that effect), and Jasper Johns dead ass said “it’s on”, and the mad man actually did a bronze cast of two beer cans and Castelli actually sold them?

We can even go way back, to Manet. The moment Olympia was presented at the Salon, it was so infamously known across Paris, people flocked to it to see it in person, so much the Salon had an influx of attendees like it never had before. And the sole reason was to make fun of it lmao even fucking Courbet was there daily, pointing at laughing at ‘nakey girl staring right at me’.

Or like, when Kienholz displayed his walk-ins, in which one of them was a car with a teenage couple engaged in sex in the back seat, and the gallery had the audacity of forcing the artist to close the door and plant two body guards there not to shock the audience? And despite being outraged by this, people still went there en masse.

And I’m not even going back to the obvious influence here, papa Duchamp with his urinals, but I’ll say this: I don’t remember his name, but the dude who smashed one of Duchamp’s urinals and peed on the other is pretty on par with the guy who just ate the banana, albeit for different reasons (and, well, dude who peed in a Duchamp was arrested both times lmao).

Every single one of these instances, which caused so much outrage across the art world, appeared at a crossing point in history, somehow, and they are there for a conspicous objective: to bring out its own hypocrisy. And like papa Duchamp (who every single critic immediately establish a connection with), they are being assimilated, though faster than they were back in the day. The dude who peed on the urinal did so because he contests The Fountain being on a museum, defeating the art work’s initial purpose and proclaiming the first avant-garde’s movements ultimate failure. It should be noted that Duchamp signed 14 urinals and authenticated them as authentic reproductions (one of them smashed, another peed on lmao. Idk if the others are fully intact). And this dude with the banana is no different.

One article states something very interesting about Art Basel:

Mary Rozell, the global head of art collection at UBS Group, said the works she wanted were all snapped up. Pieces under US$1 million were going especially quickly.

"Half the stuff is sold before you get here," she said.

Amoako Boafo's portraits were all gone within seconds, and hundreds of collectors put their names on a waiting list, with prices for the artist du jour ranging from US$25,000 to US$50,000.

(...)

Mnuchin Gallery, which had an exhibition by Mr Clark last year, sold several smaller works, with prices ranging from US$150,000 to US$300,000. Michael McGinnis, a partner, said he sold one of the works during his flight to Miami. "I could have sold it five times," he said.

Ms Rozell said she finally managed to buy some art. One was a painting by Jeffrey Gibson. Another, a sculpture by Shinique Smith, whose works were on view at the UBS collectors' lounge at the fair.

"You've got to take your time," she said. "But then act quickly."

Act fast.

There’s a lot that could be said about this, and I’m not writing an essay, just rambling with the knowledge I have, and we all know how art fairs across the world serve as 1) a place to See and Be Seen, and the pruchase of expensive art works is a Thing of Status, and 2) it’s money laundering. It’s blind investment by random private auctioneers who need to put that dirty money fast onto an object they can quickly transform into an asset should they need to get rid of it---etc, etc. But like, think about the ludicrous implication here: you gotta buy fast, otherwise you’ll just get there and come out empty-handed, which for some reason, for these folks, it’s the worst that could happen. So like, it’s no wonder a guy who taped a banana onto a wall sold this shit for such a high price. I can’t point out the reason why this person bought the art work, because honestly being either money laundering or just rich person trying to invest fast into something they don’t know the value of---both sound incredibly plausible to me (in my country, there was an influx into the art market in the 80s, where people rushed to buy EVERYTHING, and it inflated the art market---and keep in mind, Portugal is a small country with barely any market at all---to the point where some of the artists who sold the most back then have fallen into oblivion, and the people who bought their works have been desperately trying to get rid of them for decades, but they are worth nothing and they refuse to get the full price back lmaooo).

This shit is mostly why I nurture a profound hatred for art fairs. Like, on paper, they’re a nice concept, but as of today, worldwide, we have over 500 art fairs everywhere, and couple this with the art market inflation and all the nasty shit we know about (take the fucking Sacklers, for example), it’s the perfect playground for us to have a French Salon multiplied by 500 where contemporary art is transformed into an Appearance Thing. 

But every so often, a dude shows up and pulls some really bizarre shit and I am again reminded that there are still a lot of not exatctly Duchamps, but people like Jasper Johns or Tristan Tzara or even Robert Rauchenberg, which somehow manage to create a really poignant moment of hypocrisy. The really atrocious downside to this is that these artists exist in a fast-pacing scenario and they’re being assimilated at the speed of light. While neo-dada appeared in the 60s to confront the assimilation (thus, failure) of the first avant-garde movements, today it happens in real time. 

This is where I tell you guys the banana was apparently sold with a 14-page manual, which states shit like:

It should be hung about 175 centimeters from the ground, fixed to the wall at a 37-degree angle and the banana should be changed, "depending on its aesthetic appearance", about every seven or 10 days. About the only specification omitted is the optimum length or bendiness of said banana.

(the bendiness of the banana lmao)

Also, funny correlation: Duchamp’s work was called The Fountain, but we all call it ‘the urinal’, in the same way this work is called The Comedian, but we call it ‘the banana’. Make with that information what you will lol

[umerot]

MESSAGE.  [ point + knife ] your muse holding mine at knife point. / u w u or in this case , her sword but u get it :eyes:

HIT ME WITH YOUR BEST SHOT! ( accepting )

[ point + knife ]   your muse holding mine at knife point.

A GRIN SPREAD ACROSS her painted lips as she bared her sharp fangs, devilish amidst a wicked beauty. Oh, how she enjoys watching the futile struggles of humans, absolutely relishing in their despair. Especially when they grow desperate, like watching an an ant struggle against the harsh glare of sunlight under a magnifying glass --- hopeless, yet with the conviction to survive despite the odds stacking up against them ; the chance of survival decreasing by each drop of the sands of the hourglass. One tiny cut by her sash, &. they`re already squirming by her feet. ‘Dinner &. a show,’ as Daki would like to call it.

Her twisted pleasure at the sight of other people`s suffering multiplies tenfold when her victim is a demon slayer. Those wretched beings, ‘&. Good riddance!’ One less insect that would try to eat a rotting fruit from within, the better.

Though, this human woman was a bit different ; despite receiving the thousand slashes from Daki`s flesh obi, she somehow managed to endure it all, &. still stand, breathing ragged as shoulders slouched forward, unlike her initial refined posture before Daki`s assault. She had to be a Pillar ( ‘those disgusting Pillars’ ) ; she has to be. &. Even more precious: she still managed to point her sword directly at her --- the pretty pink blade mere inches before her throat, grazing over her skin by a needles’ touch. But barely. A chuckle escaped from within, dark &. melodious, rumbling from the very spot her blade was aimed at.

The Pillar`s conviction was not as fortified as it was in the beginning of their fight ; visibly shaking, an agonizing coalesce of pain &. fatigue, it does not look she had much time before she loses consciousness from the blood loss. &. When Daki is shown even an iota of weakness, she will take advantage of it.

“Oh, my, my ~ It seems like you`re already choking,” said with a teasing lilt to an already irritating tone, enjoying every second tormenting the poor woman, the unfortunate demon slayer. It did not require much strength to push aside the sword with her remaining flesh sash, freeing herself from its grasp as it hit the ground with a loud clang. “You are way too pretty to kill right here. &. I hate pretty bitches like you,” another flesh sash surrounds the woman, grabbing onto her by her waist as a serpent closing in on its prey, trapping her within her tight embrace, “Maybe I should store you for later. He did tell me not to play with my food for too long anyways.” Better for her demise to be by the Oiran`s hand rather than him ; this was almost a mercy kill, after all.

@fleursung​​