#that must have been rough

[leahaart]

Soon after his escape, Edwin starts to learn about the things he’s missed.

[fircyca]

[kiwiaok]

saw this on tiktok and thought about neil’s last year at collage and trying to exist without any of the original foxes

[cobaltfluff]

「僕は君と会うために生まれてきたんだね」

mini crossover: mecha edition (1/3) ryomina x evangelion

[uhbasicallyjustmilex]

me stubbornly forcing myself to drink green tea and rest from my THIRD COLD THIS MONTH

[front-facing-pokemon]

[champagnemoon]

My cousin took internet screen time completely away from their kid after reading about the effects it has on developing brains and it’s been wild watching the change of behavior in real time now that he’s watching little bear on vhs and not like prank fight neon toy 1 hour unboxings

[ah-bright-wings]

Sound - A Triduum Story

Malchus can feel the heavy gazes of the others. He ignores them. His own eyes are pinned to the door they guard, listening to the drip of water condensing and dropping onto the floor. There is no rain, but the air is damp, as if the heavens are drawing out the wet stores of the earth in preparation for a storm. 

Customarily, the chill would make him wish for his bed. He’d grumble with his fellows about the weather, about the work, peppering complaints with a few stout curses. But there is no discussion tonight. Malchus sits hunched forward, forearms braced on his thighs, and he waits.

What are they waiting for?

Cold fingers touch the lobe of his left ear. He turns to see Jesse, who’d touched him, withdrawing, fingers curling into his palm. The apology is gruff. “Just wanted to see.”

That’s a lie, thinks Malchus, turning back to the door. They’ve already seen tonight. What’s left is to believe.

Malchus doesn’t ask permission before he rises, taking the flask which hangs on a wall hook, and the keys there beside it. The eyes of the others follow. He unlocks the door and slips in, shutting it behind, and then pauses, palm flat on the wood. He takes a breath. 

Drip.

Drip.

The Nazarene’s hands are chained so that he must stand. His head bows, forehead resting against the bruised back of his right hand. He lifts himself when Malchus enters. His lips, which had been moving silently, still.

Malchus holds out the flask. Then, as an embarrassing afterthought—the man is in chains—he uncorks it. 

“It’s just water,” he assures when the man doesn’t move to drink. He tips the flask close enough to meet the cracked lips. The Nazarene swallows twice and then pulls back, chains jingling. His face is wet. Tears, Malchus thinks, until he hears the drip of water dropping onto the man’s head. It slides down his temple and dirty cheek, carving a clean track through the crust. Malchus re-corks the flask.

It’s not quite fear that he feels. He had felt fear on his knees in Gethsemane, blood down his neck and a howl on his tongue. The world was silent, then, and shrieking, dizzy with pain and the terror of new loss. When strong hands cupped his face, he clung to them. He grabbed hold of words he could not hear but lips he could see moving, breath he could feel on his face, brown eyes he could see.

And then, he could hear. 

It was as if he’d never before heard sound, not true sound, but only echos, half-formed, half-heard, until that very moment when he heard truly. Each noise was crisp and new. Around him were the night birds stirring in the trees, the puffed breath of the disciples, the crackle of licking flame, the creak of leather belts. He heard them all, and he hasn’t stopped hearing since. Creation is vibrating, uncountable voices overlapping in the same tremulous song. Even the breeze seems to have a voice, and the water running on stone. Even his own heartbeat. They cry out when the rest of the world is silent.

“What did you do to me?” Malchus asks, voice barely above a whisper, for everything is new and he cannot make sense of it. 

The Nazarene’s smile isn’t mocking. It’s as quiet as his voice, and it crinkles the corner of his good eye. “I know how long you’ve waited to hear.”

They’ve never met, of course. Of course not. This man doesn’t know him. How could he? Malchus has taken great pains to hide his gradual loss of sound. Each year, the muffle covers his ears a little more, stealing his senses, deadening the world to him. If he misses a call, he plays it off. If he cannot hear his wife calling, he feigns captivation by his task. He does it well, he thinks, well enough. Perhaps his wife suspects. But only he knows, only he and his God. And this backwater Nazarene with an accent pulled from Galilee’s fishing waters—because Malchus can hear the accent now—cannot know Malchus. How could he? No, he does not.

But he knows. 

Malchus is sure, standing before this man who made him more than whole, that he is known. Known, and known truly. And here stands Malchus, his jailer. His enemy.

“How could you know?” he asks, eyes searching the Nazarene’s. The water drips, drips. A rat scritches at a bit of stone. “I can’t do anything for your case. They’re bringing you to Pilate.” His grip tightens on the flask—his only offering—and the stale water it holds. The words pour out of him. “I’m a guard. They told us to go, so we went. I had no stake in it, see? See, we were told to go. I was told to go. I never intended—”

“Malchus,” the man says softly, almost fondly, as if he is interrupting a brother and not one walking him to his death. “Will you pray with me?”

The request startles Malchus out of his own thoughts. He pauses, wary of some trick. Without meaning to, his hand rises to touch the warm outer shell of his ear, tracing the connecting point between the cartilage and his skull. There’s not even a seam to show where it had been severed.

Mouth dry, Malchus finally nods, and the Nazarene closes his good eye. The water slides again down his temples. His words fill the damp space, and Malchus recognizes them at once, joining the recitation:

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb,

and naked shall I return.

The Lord gave—”

The man breathes in, and Malchus breathes with him.

“—and the Lord has taken away;”

Their breath stirs the stale air of the room. All has finally gone quiet. The Nazarene opens his eye and tips his head to look up, past the stone roof, past the courtyard and the trembling earth, to the heavens, spread out over them like a tent. The water no longer falls. The rat is silent. 

“Blessed be the name of the Lord,” he says.

[willowedspirits]

More @anbu-legacy doodles! So many mixed emotions in this arc ahhhhhhhh I love it!

Traitor Mission arc here we come! One of my favorites >:)

[briefobservationdreamer]

Kingdom Hearts Redemption Arcs: Isa/Saïx

To begin with, there are a few things to consider about Saïx when looking at his actions in the original Organisation. Firstly, he became a Nobody when he was a teenager, before critical parts of his psyche had fully matured, and because he was heavily groomed and gaslit into believing he couldn’t ever feel emotions while he remained a Nobody (more so than any other member), this guaranteed that this part of him would remain stunted. Secondly, he was suffering an unbearable amount of pain at the time that he clearly could not cope with and had to deal with inwardly on his own, but due to Xemnas’ gaslighting likely didn’t have the self-awareness or emotional intelligence at the time to understand what he was feeling and realise he was deceiving himself. Thirdly, he had been possessed by Xehanort for at least a good while before the events of Days and 2, possibly for years, and unlike Xigbar he was not even aware of it, let alone consensual of it. The details are very unclear as to how exactly this affected him, all we can know is that he became a much colder, crueller person who was still driven by Isa’s personal motivations and capable of consciously working against Xemnas. These things don’t lessen the pain he caused, but they are so intertwined with him that it is impossible to separate him from these influences to clearly determine how reasonable it is to expect self-control or for him to be any different, and therefore how much responsibility he has over his actions, let alone how much atonement he must do. Of all the atoners, his situation is easily the woolliest.

As for his actions, Saïx is a character with very clear reasoning and consistent motivations he never truly wavers from, so it’s fairly easy to understand why he did everything that he did.

The Castle Oblivion situation is a very tricky one, since we don’t know for sure how much of what happened came from Xemnas, Saïx or Axel’s own initiative. All we know is that Saïx gave Axel orders to eliminate some traitors that were sent to Castle Oblivion, which ended up being Marluxia and Larxene. However, since the founding members of the Organisation are either complicit in or directly responsible for keeping Saïx and Axel captive there since they were children, the plot against them can be justified as an act of self-defence. The only apprentice Isa is shown interacting with since the end of the original Organisation is Even/Vexen, and the two would have had to work out any differences for cooperation to be possible in their plot to betray Xehanort in KH3.

Taking Kairi away from Axel, imprisoning her and using her to antagonise Sora was all done on Xemnas’ orders as part of the plot to control Sora and have him complete Kingdom Hearts, and it is made very clear that openly defying Xemnas is tantamount to death. His final scenes in 2 imply that he never even really wanted to toy with Sora in the first place, he would much rather take his revenge on him in proxy of Roxas for taking his best and only friend away and instigating events that ruined his life (more on this in a bit). Isa has yet to properly interact with Sora or Kairi post recompletion, and so has not had any opportunity yet to apologise and personally make it up to them beyond his contribution to Xehanort’s defeat in 3.

Manipulating Roxas and Xion into killing each other was definitely messed up, but again was done under orders from Xemnas once it became clear the two couldn’t co-exist due to Xion’s out-of-control powers. Neither of which was Saïx’s fault. The pair can’t really blame him too much and say he shouldn’t have done it without expecting him to at least risk getting dusked or destroyed for them. It doesn’t make their situation any better, but it is understandable that Saïx would choose goals and a friend he sacrificed everything for over a decade over a couple of kids he didn’t even know and one of which he thought wasn’t a real person, accepting their fates as unfortunate and unavoidable collateral. 

Making Axel choose between a friendship with him and a friendship with Roxas and Xion was also complicated. While he was definitely trying to get Axel to choose him, Saïx wasn’t the source of this conflict, the situation itself was. Axel couldn’t help earn Xemnas’ trust and carry out Saïx’s plans to take control of the Organisation, find Subject X and get their lives back while he was deliberately defying Xemnas to protect Roxas and Xion. Jealousy was at play here, but Saïx was also laying out a cold hard truth that their interests were mutually exclusive, and by nobody’s fault. If we’re also including their confrontation in the manga when Axel tries to rescue Kairi, I fault Axel more than Saix here. Not only was Saïx at his most possessed here, he was also in Berserk form with limited awareness and memory, driven only by a desire to take out anything considered a threat, and Axel put Saïx’s life at risk the moment he turned his back on him and put him in a kill-or-be-killed situation.

Lastly, the main one people think of, his unnecessarily cruel treatment of Roxas and Xion. This is the only one not motivated at least partly by some form of preservation or ulterior motive. One big point to get out of the way is the fact that Saïx was fully aware of Xion’s nature from the get-go and she only ever looked like the white featureless animated mannequin Vexen showed him in the lab, no more human-looking than a Dusk, just dressed up in a black coat, and was likely under the impression from Vexen that she was merely an imitation of life. It’s understandable that perceptions like this would influence his treatment, though it was still a horrible way to treat someone regardless.

Sadly there is much more to it than that. His main reason for this is lashing out from suffering a colossal betrayal from Axel. He was forced to watch the three form bonds of friendship and get their hearts and humanity back while his own friendship with Axel crumbled and he remained empty, when out of all the organisation members, Saïx was the most desperate to get those things back. The only friend he had - and a friend he constantly risked his neck for - ditched and replaced him when he needed him most. Despite warning Axel that their interests were mutually exclusive, Axel still chose to abandon Saïx and an entire decade’s worth of goals Saïx had sacrificed everything for and did nothing to stop their destruction until it was almost too late, all to protect Roxas and Xion. He lost everything he still had and cared about in the name of the trio’s friendship, and he became a hollow broken man and a brainwashed slave trapped under the command of an abuser he hated with almost no hope of escape or happiness. To make things worse, at no point does he ever understand why his life has gone so horribly wrong. His treatment of Roxas and Xion was reprehensible, completely undeserved and unfair regardless of how much control he had and unjustified for as much control he did have (to Roxas and Xion at least, feelings of rage and betrayal towards Axel is completely justified), but I am sadly not surprised in the least that this was enough to drive him beyond breaking point.

What he did to make it up to the three though is something that often gets overlooked because of how subtly it was implied in game (and possibly some wilful ignorance and denial from Saïx haters), though Re:Mind helps a lot with this. As soon as he became more himself, he self-reflected, recontextualised his actions through his original values, felt remorse for what he did, put all his rage and jealousy and pain and pride aside, admitted his flaws and vulnerabilities, corrected toxic behaviour and saved the people he hurt. The idea to have Vexen and Demyx create and deliver the replicas for Roxas and Xion was his. He planned to bring back Roxas and Xion, betray Xehanort and orchestrate his defeat to save the world and craft the brightest future, and he risked his life to make that a reality. There is literally nothing more he could have done for them by this point in the story. The only thing I can fault with this is that it could have perhaps been made a bit clearer, an official apology is still owed and it wouldn’t have taken much effort to briefly add one during his “death” scene even if there is still a lot of talking out to do, though Isa is a man who speaks with actions more than words, and his actions spoke loud and clear. Overall, a great redemption that I can only fault for not getting quite enough spotlight.

(Interestingly his story has a lot of parallels with Riku, but with some critical differences. Riku was manipulated and possessed for a few weeks altogether, Saïx went through years of it, and secondly Riku turned against Sora after mistakenly believing Sora would abandon him and Kairi, while Saïx was absolutely abandoned by Axel when Axel turned against him.)  

[frnkiebby]

horrendous news, i can’t send any franks today as i reached my post limit literally 25 minutes after getting out of jail, so naturally i went to spam online mutuals asks boxes with mcrimages, APPARENTLY THERES A “IMAGE UPLOAD LIMIT” I WAS UNAWARE THIS WAS A THING

so now i cant upload images today😭

that is such an unfortunate and horrific way to spend your day~🎃

[sirtvdreamer]

Hello!! So this is a Welcome Home + The Wonderful Wizard of Oz AU. I’m still working on the overall AU but I have a couple of character designs atm to show.

So first up, in the world of this AU - Sally Starlet happens to be the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz!

I’ve had this AU idea on my mind for a while now, and I finally got around to making some doodles for some of it!!

I’ve always loved the the world of Oz that Frank Baum created and I thought it’d be rlly fun to mix it with Welcome Home which I also really adore.

I’ll get around to showing off everybody else and what I’ve got in store for this AU in due time.

[sercphs]

Coming Tomorrow, to a Neu near you.

[irish-urn]

hi i’ve read a couple of your dasey fanfics and omg your such a good writer!!

im wondering what your take is on emily and her and casey’s friendship? personally, i always saw her as a bad friend to casey. she seemed to be really embarrassed by casey most of the time (ex: remember the klutzilla episode when derek had to tell emily to go be by casey’s side). she cared more about popularity than casey.

also the truman situation also really showed how bad of a friend she was. she went on a date with him after he voted casey a 6 and a 1/2. there are so many other instances where she wasn’t a really good friend to casey, but these are the first to come to mind.

Ohmigosh, hi!!! Thank you so so much!! I'm so pleased my Dasey fics are to your liking.

Oof. Emily. That's a... That's a subject. As a whole, if we take the average, no, I don't think Emily is a very good friend to Casey. But... I don't think Casey is necessarily an easy person for Emily to be friends with; by which I mean, the things that Emily cares about are rarely the things that Casey cares about, and a lot of times Casey loudly goes and does her own thing because she feels she's in the right. Because Casey is our narrator, we're kind of biased in her favour, but from Emily's pov, it might feel like she and her advice are being blown off.

I think too, another thing we need to remember is that for a good deal of the show, Emily has a crush on Derek, and that flavours a LOT of her actions. I remember having a crush in high school (although I was in massive denial for the majority of the crushing period): you do stupid things, you say dumb words, and sometimes you hurt others just for the chance of being noticed by your crush. If we consider that Emily has a big crush on Derek, and a significant portion of Casey's actions are either directly or indirectly going against Derek and his wants, then Emily is in a tricky position. She wants Derek to like her, but Casey expects Emily to be on her side. I can see why she falters a lot.

Also: Emily is clearly smart and a decently liked person, but she's very insecure. She feels like a wallflower, and she's standing next to Casey, who draws a lot of attention (even if it is often accidental). She doesn't want to be pulled into the spotlight this way; she wants to control the way she'll come into being.

All that being said, I think there are parts of Casey that Emily must admire because there are numerous times where she ends up joining and helping Casey, despite her earlier reluctance -- see when Derek asks for her help in manipulating Sam and Casey, see when Casey tries to run for class president, etc. However, again, you're right: there are lots of times where she falters as a friend.

So, much like the majority of the LWD characters, I think Emily is rather complex. I think she has a lot of flaws and a lot of good points. I DON'T think she's a good friend to Casey, but I also don't think Casey is a great friend to Emily either. Honestly, they seem more like friends by proximity than anything: they're neighbours and close locker mates (if I remember correctly; I might not), they're both smart girls with big dreams and uncertain of how to achieve them. I think Casey deserves better friends, which is why I try to give her a couple in my fics, but I also think Emily deserves better than she got too.

[rainbowbarnacle]

How Summer Started VS How It's Going

[waitineedaname]

im reading the shen jiu extras and realizing just how jarring the new sqq must have been