#that's kind-of a major point of that story in rots

[antianakin]

Just so everyone knows, it is ALWAYS fair to blame Anakin Skywalker and his stupid family drama for the galaxy's problems.

Always.

Because it's made VERY explicit that Palpatine would have lost if Anakin hadn't chosen to side with him in Revenge of the Sith. Anakin is a Child of Prophecy, but in that moment in Palpatine's office, he defies his own fate out of selfishness and greed and sides with Palpatine over the Jedi. If Anakin had just chosen differently or not shown up at all, Palpatine would've lost. Bada bing bada boom, no Palpatine, no Emperor, no Empire, no Death Stars. The Clone Wars end on the side of the Republic, the Sith lord running the Republic Senate is gone, the Sith lord running the Separatist government is gone, so there's an opportunity for the galaxy to find some way to end the conflict peacefully and regain a certain amount of balance going forward. Unfortunately, Anakin is the dictionary definition of a colossal failure and instead he throws the entire galaxy into a fascist dictatorship.

Sure, Palpatine was building an Empire without Anakin and if Anakin had just not existed at all, you could MAYBE question whether he would've been able to succeed. But there's just as much of an argument that he wouldn't have, that Mace would have killed him in his office anyway like he was well on his way to doing before Anakin decided to be a selfish greedy little bitch.

So while Luke and Leia obviously do end up doing a lot to SAVE the galaxy, it's their parents' stupid family drama that means they HAVE to do a lot to save the galaxy that Anakin and Padme broke by being horny young people who couldn't just do their jobs and keep it in their pants at the same time. Luke and Leia inherit the damage of their parents' stupid family drama.

I think it's ENTIRELY fair to lay the blame at Anakin's feet for the problems in the galaxy. He's a Child of Prophecy, the entire galaxy's fate literally turns on Anakin's choices and whims. Anakin decides to side with the Sith, the Sith win. Anakin keeps serving the Sith, the Sith stay in power. Anakin decides to turn on the Sith, the Sith die. Anakin's choices determine EVERYTHING because of what he is, so his stupid family dramas literally cause the galaxy to implode.

[absentlyabbie]

saw a reply on that post about a subway worker refusing to service to some dudes wearing hate speech shirts and claiming they were being religiously discriminated against that said "as a christian, i don't claim them."

okay but do claim them, actually.

inconvenient and embarrassing and even frustrating as it is, your religion, your faith, has become all but synonymous with hatred and vicious oppression. that didn't happen by accident. it wasn't unearned. it's not new and it's not a perversion of the good true pure christianity when it's the core and foundation, in fact.

are there good, kind, compassionate christians who refuse themselves to harbor this kind of hatred? denominations that are more progressive, welcoming, loving, and inclusive? absolutely, and that's great and all.

but they have not been the ones defining the story of christianity ever, at any point in its history. you don't get to retcon the narrative. you can't "no true scotsman" your way out of association wth the vast majority, the most vocal and politically driven majority of your shared faith.

your religion historically, traditionally, and most commonly shelters and cultivates bigots and oppressors, hateful, vicious people who want to strip others of their rights and their lives and legislate them into being officially lesser-than.

claim them. own that. it's necessary if you ever want christianity to be seen as better than the worst of your lot, because the worst are the loudest, the most powerful and wealthy, the ones who've been steering the fleet for centuries.

if you want christianity to actually be the faith you strive yourself to live and exemplify, you have to reckon first with what it is, what is has long been.

those christians would claim you're not real christians, but you both are. you can't change or take control of the story if you try to pretend you're on page one. you have to straighten your back and acknowledge it.

if you want to clean house or even rebuild, you have to admit the rot is there, first, and that it's still your house anyway.

[diamonddaze01]

Love: Best Served Hot

pairing: chef! kmg x gn!reader genre: tooth-rotting fluff, established relationship, slice of life wc: 2.7k

summary: even when he’s exhausted, mingyu wants to care for you. 

a/n: this was supposed to be a 300 word drabble idk what happened // i love chef mingoo!!

The door creaks open, releasing a gust of chilly air that carries with it the rich, savory aroma of sautéed garlic and fresh spices. The warm glow of the kitchen lights flicker to life as Mingyu steps inside, his cheeks flushed from the cold and his hair slightly tousled from a long shift. He kicks off his shoes, leaving them haphazardly by the door, and stretches his arms overhead, letting out a dramatic sigh that echoes through the apartment.

“Guess who’s here to save your taste buds!” he announces, though the weariness in his eyes and the slight slump of his shoulders tells a different story.

You look up from your phone, a grin spreading across your face. “Don’t you ever get tired of cooking, Gyu?” you tease, leaning back against the counter, arms crossed, the familiar warmth of the kitchen enveloping you.

He feigns offense, placing a hand on his chest as if you’ve just insulted his entire culinary career. “For you? Never. I’m making you gourmet ramen from scratch. The kind that makes you forget your ex. Trust me; it’s a glow-up for your palate.”

“You said that yesterday about the ribs,” you point out, watching him glide across the kitchen with practiced ease. The overhead lights cast a soft halo around his figure, and the way his hair flops into his eyes adds an adorable charm to his focused expression. “And the kimchi jjigae last week, and the burgers the time before that.”

“Shhhh.” He reaches around you for a cutting board, dropping a soft kiss on your lips to silence you. The warmth of his lips lingers as he pulls back, a playful spark in his eyes. “I’ve never met someone who complains so much about getting wined and dined.”

You roll your eyes, crossing your arms with a mock pout. “I’m not complaining; I’m just keeping you accountable. I need to know if your cooking is really as good as you claim.”

Mingyu laughs, a rich, warm sound that fills the kitchen and dances around you; it makes your heart sing a little, like a schoolgirl with a crush. “If you’re so worried about it, maybe you should just let me cook in peace.”

As he focuses on the task at hand, the slight sheen of sweat forming on his brow catches the kitchen's light, his movements slowing just a fraction. His fingers are steady but the small tremor in his hands gives away just how long he's been on his feet. He brushes his hair back with a frustrated tug, eyes closing briefly as if savoring a second of relief before diving back into the task. It’s in these small, unguarded moments you realize just how worn he is—the dark circles under his eyes, the set of his shoulders that normally stand so proud, now sagging ever so slightly. But even through the exhaustion, there’s a determination in him, the same kind you’ve come to recognize every time he puts your needs before his own.

“Hey,” you say, your voice softening. “Are you sure you don’t want to take a break? You’ve been on your feet for hours.”

He glances over his shoulder, a smirk playing on his lips. “And what, exactly, have you eaten today, hmm?”

“Uh…” You falter, feeling a familiar flush of embarrassment creeping in.

“Here, let me help you.” He sets down the knife and taps his foot expectantly, whisk in hand. “Knowing you, you probably just subsisted on iced lattes all day because you were too busy to get a real meal, right?”

You huff, your indignation flaring. “I’ll have you know that I had a Pop-Tart and a bag of Skittles! Those are major food groups, you know.”

Mingyu bursts into laughter, but you catch a glimpse of concern flickering behind his playful facade. “Riiiiight,” he says, amusement dancing in his eyes. “So now, you’re going to shut up and watch your gorgeous, incredibly talented, hot chef boyfriend make you a meal that has an actual vegetable in it.”

He gets like this sometimes, when he's frustrated that you don't take care of yourself. It’s been a cause for many an argument in the past—his insistence that you need to eat and your stubbornness that you know how to take care of yourself. Those conversations often swirl around the kitchen like a storm, but there’s a gentleness in the way he brushes off your concerns that tells you he cares deeply, even if he masks it with humor.

You watch him chop vegetables, let yourself get lulled into dreamlike trance with the rhythmic sound of the knife against the cutting board. He moves with precision, his brow furrowing slightly in concentration as he glances over to check your expression. His dedication tugs at your heartstrings, a reminder of how he loves: by placing food in front of you even when he’s on the brink of falling asleep standing up. You’ve learned that his love language isn’t just about the meals he makes; it’s in the way he basks in the glow of your compliments, how your smile lights up his tired eyes like a spark in the dark.

You take a step closer, your fingers absentmindedly grazing the cool countertop, the warmth of the kitchen offering little comfort against the concern gnawing at you. It’s moments like these that make your heart ache —the way he pushes himself, never stopping until he’s done taking care of everyone else, even when he should be the one resting. A small, tight knot forms in your chest as you watch him, the way his brow furrows with each precise chop, his body moving with a practiced ease that can’t fully mask the heaviness of his fatigue. You wish you could stop him, take over for once, but you know he wouldn’t allow it. Still, you try to lighten the mood. 

“You know, you could just let me make dinner once in a while,” you offer, though your voice softens with unspoken worry.

He shakes his head, a grin breaking through his feigned annoyance. “And ruin my masterpiece? Never.”

The way he leans into the task, the sheer determination on his face, makes you fall in love with him a little more each day. It’s not just the food—it’s the way he pours his heart into everything he does, even when it means sacrificing his own comfort for yours. You can see it in the way his shoulders relax when you compliment his cooking, how he laughs more easily when you’re around, and how the corners of his eyes crinkle with joy when you taste something he’s prepared.

“I just want you to eat something real, not just sugar and caffeine,” he continues, a hint of worry creeping into his tone, finally letting his humorous facade fall for a second.  “I can’t have you turning into a human-sized Skittle.”

You can’t help but laugh at the image, feeling the tension of the day slip away. “I’ll have you know that I’d be a delicious  human-sized Skittle, thank you very much.”

He rolls his eyes playfully but then yawns again, the gesture drawing your concern back to the surface. “See? That right there—no more yawning until you’ve eaten something substantial, got it?”

He feigns a mock salute, but you can see the hint of exhaustion etched across his features. “Okay, okay, Captain Concerned. I promise I’ll eat something as soon as this ramen is ready. Just… give me a minute.”

You nod, the sincerity behind his words warming you. As he stirs the bubbling broth, you can’t help but admire the way his brow furrows in concentration, how he occasionally glances your way to ensure you’re still there, still watching.

“Alright, but you’d better not fall asleep in front of the stove,” you tease gently, your voice light but your heart heavy with concern.

He nods, the corners of his lips twitching into a smile. “No promises,” he retorts playfully, but the warmth in his gaze tells you that he appreciates your worry, even if he’d never admit it outright.

“Just keep your gorgeous, incredibly talented hot chef boyfriend awake, alright?” he says, a teasing lilt returning to his voice.

You can’t help but smile, feeling your affection for him grow in the warmth of the kitchen, surrounded by the scents of his hard work. “Deal. But you’d better make that ramen quick, or I might just have to find a way to fuel you with caffeine and Skittles.”

The kitchen hums with quiet, the only sounds coming from the bubbling broth and the soft scrape of Mingyu’s knife on the cutting board. You don’t need to fill the space with conversation; just being there, your silent presence, is enough. It’s always been enough for him. After a long day of being barked at on the line, of rushing orders and chaos, this is what he craves—your calm support, your quiet companionship. You don’t need to ask him how his day was; the tension in his shoulders, the way he brushes his hair back in frustration, tells you everything.

You watch as he works, each movement slow but precise, his exhaustion barely hidden beneath the surface. And still, even in his fatigue, there’s a quiet grace in how he prepares your meal��chopping vegetables, whisking broth, his fingers moving with the kind of ease that only comes from years of practice. He flicks the pan to stir the ingredients and adds garnish with a flourish—and looks over at you for validation.

Even though you’ve seen him do this hundreds of times, you still smile when he meets your eyes.  It’s a dance you’ve perfected: him cooking, you watching, the back-and-forth that fills the space between you. It’s more than just food—it's the way he pours himself into each meal, hoping to see that spark of happiness in your eyes, that subtle nod of approval that tells him, once again, that he's done well, that you love what he’s made. And it never fails—you always smile, and in that moment, it’s like he’s won an award.

“That was slick,” you murmur with a grin, watching his tired eyes light up like you’ve just given him a standing ovation. 

In return, he leans in to press a kiss to your forehead, gentle and warm. “Only for you,” he whispers, but you know it’s true. It’s in the way he offers you spoonfuls of broth to taste, holding the spoon up to your lips, watching carefully for your reaction. When you hum in satisfaction, the tension in his shoulders eases, his tiredness momentarily forgotten.

Every compliment you give is met with a kiss—sometimes on your lips, sometimes on your nose, sometimes just a gentle press to your forehead. You know that this is his love language, this silent back-and-forth of care, and it’s how you love him, too. Just being here, watching him, letting him unwind at his own pace. You don’t need to talk for him to know you’re there, supporting him. He knows you’re here, watching him, feeling the weight of his exhaustion, without needing to say it. It’s in the way you linger nearby, always close but never overbearing, allowing him to move at his own pace. Sometimes, just your presence is enough to ease the weight of the world on his shoulders, the sound of your breathing in sync with his, the gentle hum of the kitchen filling the gaps. 

You sit at the counter, content to let him work in silence, knowing he’ll fuss if you hover too much. But, true to form, he turns around every now and then, his eyes narrowing like he’s assessing the situation. “You’re going to eat, too, right? Not just stare at me?”

“Obviously,” you tease, though the warmth in your chest says otherwise. He’s tired, you can see it in the way he brushes his hair back, but still, his concern is always you—making sure you’ve eaten something other than sugar and caffeine all day. “I had a Pop-Tart, remember? And Skittles,” you add.

He rolls his eyes, not even trying to hide his amusement. “Yes, of course, the epitome of gourmet food. You need actual food, not whatever sugar rush you’ve been riding on.” There’s a playful tilt to his voice, but beneath it, the care is genuine, the worry etched into his furrowed brow. He doesn’t have to say it, but you can feel it in every movement, in the way he insists on feeding you something real, even when he’s on the brink of exhaustion.

When the ramen is finally done, the kitchen smells like a cozy hug, and he brings the steaming bowl over with a satisfied smile, his usual swagger dimmed slightly by the long hours he's endured. But instead of sitting down at the table, you slide onto his lap. His arms wrap around your waist without hesitation, pulling you closer, his body melting against yours in a sigh that carries all the weight of the day. You can feel the tension leave his shoulders, the stress ebbing away as you press yourself against him. 

“Eat,baby,” he murmurs, pushing the bowl toward you. But when you don’t immediately take a bite, he reaches for the chopsticks, bringing the noodles to your lips himself.

You chuckle softly, but he’s serious, his eyes fixed on you as you take the first bite. “Good?” he asks, as if he isn’t already sure of the answer.

You nod, chewing slowly, savoring the warmth that spreads through you. “Perfect.”

Satisfied, he presses a kiss to your shoulder, but before he can relax completely, you grab the chopsticks from his hand and lift a bite of ramen to his lips. “Your turn,” you say, watching as his expression softens.

He laughs under his breath but doesn’t protest, taking the bite with a small nod of approval. “Good,” he hums, his voice lower now, sleepier. But as tired as he is, he still won’t stop fussing, making sure you take another bite, and another, before he lets himself have one too.

The silence between you is comfortable, filled only by the occasional murmur of approval or the clink of chopsticks against the bowl. Every time you compliment the ramen, he preens a little, leaning in to press another kiss to your cheek, your nose, your lips. And with every bite, you fall a little more in love—not with the food, but with him, with the way he cares for you in the smallest, quietest ways. Even when he’s exhausted, even when he should be the one resting, he’s still making sure you’re taken care of, that you’ve eaten, that you’re loved. And that’s how you know he loves you—because he can’t help but put you first, even when his eyes are heavy with sleep.

You sit there, nestled in his lap, feeding him and being fed, the two of you wrapped up in the warmth of the kitchen. This is how you love him—by just being here, letting him rest in the silence, your presence enough to soothe him after a long day. And in return, his way of loving you is by feeding you, taking care of you even when he’s exhausted. No words are needed; the quiet between you speaks volumes.

“You don’t have to always do this, you know,” you whisper, your fingers gently tracing the edge of the bowl. The ramen is long gone, and he’s running his fingers up your arm, goosebumps erupting in their wake. “Take care of me, I mean.”

Mingyu’s chuckle rumbles in his chest, the vibration sending a warm ripple through your body. “It’s not about having to. I want to,” he says simply, his voice low and sincere. “Besides, you’re terrible at taking care of yourself. Someone has to make sure you eat.”

You can’t help but laugh, even though you feel a lump forming in your throat. His love is always like this—quiet, unspoken, wrapped in the warmth of small actions rather than big words. It’s in the way he insists on feeding you, the way he pulls you closer when he’s tired but still makes sure you’re taken care of.

“I love you,” you whisper, almost instinctively, the words slipping out before you even realize.

He doesn’t respond right away, but you can feel his grip tighten ever so slightly, his arms drawing you closer as if he’s pulling you into the very core of him. Then, softly, so softly you almost miss it, he presses a kiss to your hair and murmurs, “I love you, too.”

[storiesoflilies]

moments in twilight

synopsis: oh, innocent child of blood and bones. you cry as if your heart bleeds fire. has nobody ever taught you to burn them all first? w.c: 13k.

pairing: heianera!ryomen sukuna x f!reader

warnings: childhood friends to lovers, major character death. mentions of cannibalism, violence, and slight gore. ANGST! sfw, but mdni!

a/n: this was requested by this enthusiastic nonie! i hope you enjoy this and that it’s everything you wanted <3 a massive shout to @spookuna for being my biggest supporter and cheerleader, because i genuinely couldn’t have done this without her!

divider / art / ao3 / @ficsforgaza

the first sight of her fate didn’t seem real, like something out of a dream.

she couldn’t understand what – or who – she was looking at.

perhaps it was a fully materialized specter born somewhere from the deepest recesses of her imagination, unknown even to herself. it certainly seemed that way to her; she was only six and knew nothing of the horrors of the world, except for those that came to life in scary stories.

her ghost was digging feverishly into the earth, its fingers curled like claws, like it was searching for something. it was a dirty, scrawny little thing, wearing no clothes except for a soiled fundoshi that looked as if it was strung together by luck and willpower. every so often, it would pull something stringy and limp into its mouth, devouring it rabidly, though she couldn’t make out what it was.

why would her imagination come up with something so… awful?

it wasn’t a pretty, or kind looking ghost to be sure, and she scratched her arms as an uncomfortable itch settled into her skin.

the specter paused, like a fawn that had been discovered.

and turned.

no… it was a wolf, but it was really just a boy.

a boy that stared at her with a basin full of blood in his eyes. a garden that should have been filled with a gorgeous array of ruby roses, was instead full of violence and malice, of death and root rot. this was not a normal, or happy, sort of boy like the boisterous ones in her village.

she still thought she was dreaming, still believed the boy was just a ghost.

because what else could he be? real boys didn’t have a second pair of small eyes beneath their normal ones. even if his were closed, his two pale lids shut tightly like an oyster.

would there be precious little red, red, red pearls underneath them?

a gentle gust of wind swept through the trees, ruffling the boys matted locks of hair, and he vanished from her sight like a puff of dust.

surely now it was a dream.

real boys couldn’t just disappear.

until she felt all the air knocked out from her lungs as she crashed backwards into the earth, sharp fingernails digging into the soft skin of her forearms, and the boy’s crimson eyes were consuming her in his fire.

she knew then it wasn’t a dream, because dreams couldn’t hurt her like this.

she kicked and struggled, her ears ringing from the force of her head knocking into the ground, screaming until one of his dirty hands covered her mouth. she stilled immediately, tears pricking the corner of her eyes, and sliding down the apples of her cheeks.

“you can’t steal,” the boy hissed, his voice sharp and pointed like nails, and he shook her roughly as he repeated like a mantra. “can’t steal, can’t steal.”

she whimpered and nodded frantically, as sharp stones from the earth pierced her skin, adding to her misery. the boy licked his lips, a snake tasting the air with its forked tongue, and bent down closer to her ear.

“i’m hungry” he whispered, a dusting of glee coating his words like powdery snow. “i want to eat you.”

the sky was haunted with the last light of the sunset, like the cries of a mourning mother, swirling with hues of orange and purple. she wondered if she was going to become a ghost that could only existed in her own mother’s dreams.

for the first time in her meager existence, she felt her childish immortality slipping between her tiny fingers.

something uncomfortably hot and wet spread out from beneath her thighs.

the boy sniffed once, twice, with his nose upturned.

then he cried out angrily, his red eyes flashing in the twilight hour, and shoved her roughly into the ground before releasing his grip on her, recoiling defensively infront of his hole of dirt. she scrambled up ungracefully to her feet, her chest heaving, wincing as she tasted bitter soil and salty tears on her tongue.

“yucky! dirty, dirty!” the boy spat indignantly, hypocritically, as if he wasn’t more soiled than she was.

he was rolling in the dirt now, rubbing his face and body with it as if it were soap, as if the coarse earth could wash her touch away from him. she took two steps backwards from him, feeling an eerie charge of energy settling into the edge of the forest.

like the spark of a flame that could ignite into a wildfire.

she took another slow step back.

and then another.

and another.

until she turned and fled, like a squawking bird escaping the grasp of a hawk, her short legs crying out as she sprinted faster than she ever had in her life. she ran all the way from the edge of the forest, up the slight incline of the main pathway through her village, and finally crashed through the doorway of her home, startling her mother who was scrubbing away at dirtied clothes in a bucketful of soapy water.

her mother gasped loudly, alarm rising like a looming mountain, always there and ever present. “whatever happened to you? you’re all scratched.”

lie.

she wailed loudly, messy snot dribbling down her nose and chin and right onto her mother’s worn, muted robes. her mother shushed her gently, bundling her child into her arms and pressing comforting kisses to her forehead.

“what happened, my dearest love?” her mother repeated, whispering softly and soothingly.

lie.

she somehow knew that if she told the truth, it would only invite chaos and misery into her home.

“i p-played in the forest a-and falled,” she finally hiccuped, her bottom lip pouting and wobbling.

her mother cooed, wiping away her tears with a warm, rough thumb. “you fell? my sweet, you’ll be alright. oh, oh. why have you wet yourself?”

more mucus ran down from her nose, and she wiped it messily with her palm as she shrugged her shoulders and said nothing. she let her mother fuss over her, completely unresponsive as she dunked her tiny body into a wooden bucket, washing away the touch of the wolfish, snake boy.

until all that remained of him were the little scratches dotting her arms – rough and ridged, lines carved into the trunks of trees.

she thought of him all through the night, even when her mother had tucked her into bed and tenderly kissed her brow. everything was unknown to her now, nothing was certain. was he actually like an animal, capable of following her scent and finding her here?

would he gorge on her until all that was left of her was red, red, red?

༺ ✤ ༻

the boy had taken over her life – he was everywhere, in everything.

haunting her.

taunting her.

filling her mind with paranoia and warped visions of his red eyes staring at her, always. she saw him in between the boards of the walls and floor, and in every bite of food she took. the wispy tendrils of his hands possessed hers, eating right alongside her. he was in the blood of her scrapes, which always seemed to reopen whenever she bathed, and in her tears as she whimpered quietly, unable to sleep as she hid beneath her blanket.

as if that could save her from him.

it was in the boy’s nature to haunt her with his hunt, to frighten and consume her every thought.

she couldn’t expect anything less than that; it was who he was.

she’d seen it in his eyes, a peephole into the true nature of his soul, and it was full of violence and cruelty and…

sadness.

… and beauty.

he was really just a sad, beautiful little boy.

a boy just as old as she was. a boy who had somehow been put on a path of loneliness, without light, kindness, or love.

it had to be some sort of twisted fascination she harbored for the boy, the same way she couldn’t tear her eyes away from the blood trickling from his scratches, or stop listening to the stories of ghosts and monsters in the night.

maybe it was his strange power that was possessing her, gripping her like quicksand and sucking her further and further down into his madness.

yes, that had to be it.

because why else would she be heading straight towards the edge of the forest, to him?

she tightly grasped a small bowl of rice and vegetables between her little hands, swiped from her own dinner right beneath her mother’s nose. it had long since cold, and she hoped the ghost wouldn’t mind. it was an offering, a desperate plea to break free from his curse that haunted her.

snap!

snap! crackle, snap!

a few twigs snapped loudly beneath her feet – a damning announcement.

she froze, nearly dropping her bowl, breathing quick and shallow puffs of air.

snap!

another one, this time from behind her.

she whirled around, and there he was.

the boy stood beside a thick tree trunk, his head cocked to the side and his eyes widened into full crimson moons. he was even more disheveled than he was a week ago, with mud caked to his skin and hair like dried, flaky clay. his ribs were more prominent too, scarily so, and his cheeks were gaunt like a skeletons.

he was weak.

far too weak, she realized.

she immediately extended her arms out, the bowl teetering on the edge of her fingertips, and breathlessly said, “yours.”

the boy grunted, “huh?”

snap! snap! crackle!

he’d taken a few steps forward, carefully, ever so fearfully.

she squeezed her eyes shut, turning her head up towards the twilight sky, her heart beating against her ribcage as if trying to escape, and tried more clearly, “food, for you.”

he was in front of her in a flash, his breath brushing over her cheeks. she cracked open an eye to peek at him, watching as he eyed the bowl with suspicion, sniffing loudly. he gagged offensively when his nose wandered too close to a vegetable, his tongue stretching far out from his mouth.

she half thought he was going to smack the bowl to the ground and lunge for her instead.

he’s going to eat me.

until he snatched it from her instead, retreating back behind the tree trunk.

she blinked, her lashes butterfly wings fluttering in a breeze.

there were the sounds of scoffing, rabid breathing and snuffling noises, and then nothing at all.

hiccup!

had he finished all of it already?

the boy’s face peeked out from behind the trunk, peering at her owlishly.

“why you back?” he asked simply, a touch of softness in his voice, the edge of a knife chipped and dulled.

she shrugged her shoulders. “you’re hungry.”

“but, what if i eat you?”

“tomorrow i’ll give you more, then you can’t eat me.”

he fully revealed himself, crouched low to the earth like a cat, staring up at her with his pupils blown. “you promise?”

she gulped. “i promise.”

“if you don’t, then i eat you!” he exclaimed, lips pulled back over his fangs in a threatening snarl, his hackles raised and shaking.

oddly, she didn’t feel afraid.

the ghost didn’t have the same malice as before; she could see his vulnerability in the way his fingers trembled. she felt it travel through the mountain air, settling onto her skin like a layer of dust. it wriggled like maggots, burrowing into her flesh and making her skin crawl.

her chest constricted painfully.

she felt so unbelievably and overwhelmingly sorry for him.

the boy scrunched his nose. “why’r you sad?”

“i’m not!” she replied quickly, a touch indignantly. she knew he would probably get angry if he knew how much she pitied him.

it was silent for quite some time as he stared at her, and she fidgeted in her spot. she knew she had to let him do this, to stay perfectly still like a rabbit in the reeds, as the wolf made its mind up whether it was hungry or not.

it seemed to work.

the boy huffed and collapsed to the ground in an ungraceful heap, his legs splayed out before him as he seemingly ignored her – a begrudging acceptance of her existing in his space.

she lowered herself to his level, the ground scraping beneath her legs, while maintaining that somewhat safe distance between them. her hands began to search for and pick up various rocks and twigs to play with, because she didn’t know what else to do to pass the time. the boy had his head held to the side, a shade of confusion painted over his cheeks as he clocked onto her every move.

she pretended he wasn’t there, ignoring the rising wave of bitter panic in her throat, and the fact that he was slowly inching closer to her, crawling to her like a prowling panther.

he sat beside her now, clearly observing how she sat with her legs crossed, then glanced towards his own legs kneeling into the dirt. she never stopped playing, pretending to be in her own world, watching from the corner of her eyes as the boy moved his body to mimic her posture and sitting position.

a giggle threatened to bubble out from between her lips.

the boy picked up a twig from her small pile, then retracted, looking at her with wonderful apprehension.

she gave him her full attention. “you can play too.”

another head tilt, and his pink lips curved downwards.

“…play?”

oh.

“have you never played before?”

“no, show me.”

and she did, without knowing how to really explain it. she told stories of how the twigs could be birds soaring between the gaps in the clouds, or the rocks could be fish darting in between the strands of a kelp forest. all the while, the boy was transfixed, and she began to really understand him for what he truly was.

scared and lonely, with an insatiable curiosity for new things – especially for her.

she only hoped she could live up to it.

༺ ✤ ༻

she discovered the boy’s name a fortnight later.

ryomen sukuna.

a strange sensation ran down her spine when she heard it for the first time, like a delicate lash from a whip made of fire.

she decided to ignore it.

they played together everyday since then, against the deep backdrop of the forest, and always during the duskiness of twilight. she would still sneak him scraps of whatever food she could spare, feeling guilty as her mother, who was none the wiser, always praised her for finishing her meals. her father would raise a questioning brow at her whenever she asked to play so late in the day, chiding her for being reckless, even if she passionately justified – albeit, borderline erraticly – that her imaginary friend would be very lonely without her.

“but why now? why can’t you play during the day with your… friend?”

“because he only comes out when the sun goes down.”

maybe sukuna really was a ghost.

she liked to hold onto that superstition. it made her lies a little less white, because he definitely wasn’t a figment of her imagination.

but it was still a lie, a pearlescent river of alabaster, and it had continued to flow strong for three years now.

she was nine years old, and during their time together, sukuna had only revealed glimpses of himself in little tidbits. it was like a sweet bite of plum on a hot summer’s day, satiating her for a time, but always leaving her hungry for more.

“where do you sleep?”

“i dig a big hole, you wanna see?”

“why do you only come after the sun?”

“i’m here all the time, you just don’t see me.”

but sometimes.

just sometimes, and only if she timed her questions right.

then sukuna would indulge her in just a little more.

“why are your eyes red?”

ryomen paused, a wickedly sharpened two-pronged stick in his hand, and shrugged nonchalantly. “i was hungry in my mother’s tummy, so i ate my brother.”

(there was a great clap of thunder somewhere far away, and the great sinful cut of the world bled just a little more.)

they were quiet for a long time after that.

he’d resumed stabbing the earth with his wooden weapon, completely unperturbed.

as if what he’d said was the most normal thing, like it was as easy as drinking the rain that fell from the pine leaves.

sukuna often said twisted things – things that reminded her of who she was really dealing with. although he had somewhat softened around her, he was still as wild and unforgiving as the mountainside he lived on.

she could never ever show him that it put her on edge.

still, much to her own shock, she was growing used to the depravity.

not that sukuna was always wicked, no. he would always ask her things, and she’d try to assume an air like her mother, knowledgeable and benevolent, as she guided him. when he wanted to know how she ate without using her hands, she took a pair of chopsticks from her kitchen and showed him how to use them. he’d sniff her hair, alarmingly too close, and asked how it was so much softer than his.

so one evening, she took him to the river where some of the villagers bathed during the day, and taught him how to wash himself.

“show me,” he’d ordered, his characteristic head tilt an open book of confusion.

he was more perplexed when she became flustered and refused to do it.

the ensuing conversation, in which she explained why she couldn’t just do that, was extremely awkward to say the least.

but she was even more surprised the next day when she came to play, and he was awkwardly standing there, his cheeks as pink as the once-hidden peaches in his hair. she’d stopped straight in her tracks, almost not recognizing her ghost without all the grime and dirt covering him.

he’s so beautiful…

ryomen blinked slowly, catlike, staring at his unusually clean feet with something akin to bashfulness. “what?”

“nothing,” she smiled, gentle like the summer rain that had just started to fall. “let’s play.”

༺ ✤ ༻

it was autumn now.

the leaves of the maple trees had turned into molten gold and burnt orange peels, and the remaining blooms had already died out petal by petal. there was a chill bite in the air, a promise of snow and piercing cold to come. she hated when the weather was like this, she worried about sukuna living in the wild in such conditions, and it only made it harder to go out and play with him in the evenings.

he, however, enjoyed it whenever the weather turned cold – it soothed the fire in his blood.

or so he said.

sukuna was lying down beside her, saccharine on the grass whilst looking up at the sky. he was wearing some washed-out linen clothes, a size too big, that she had managed to steal one day from the village boys bathing in the river. the deep plum wine in the skies mixed with the blood in his eyes – all four of them – the two colors swirling and teasingly touching each other.

two nights ago, the wind had been howling like wolves, screaming of murder and spilled blood in the darkness. there had been a strange heaviness in the air, a sort of static, like lighting biding its time to strike.

when she saw sukuna the next morning, he had a proud grin on his face, his teeth and mouth speckled with blood. all his eyes were wide open, staring at her as if to say ‘look at us, look at us!’

she knew that he had committed some sort of depravity in the night to have earned the transformation.

but he never told her.

perhaps she was never meant to know.

they were always alert, darting between everything and anything that moved even in the slightest – from the leaves rustling high up a tree, to the birds soaring high up in the sky, and to the blades of grass tickled by the wind.

and her.

one always rested on her.

“ryo,” she started, ripping fistfuls of grass. “do you like to play in the snow?”

the eye fixed on her rolled in annoyance. “no, and stop calling me that,” he huffed.

she rolled her eyes, blowing a hot-pink raspberry at him. “yes you do, liar! i know you do.”

she knew that sukuna loved to be teased, but only when he was carefree and relaxed. during moments like now, with the ghost of the permanent scowl sewn into his features unraveled into wispy threads of gold. he was seriously mulling over what she had just said, something she knew he also enjoyed – untangling mysteries and puzzles in his mind, a satisfied gleam in his eyes when he finally figured them out.

“i don’t… like anything.”

she stilled.

a blade of grass fell from her grip, and she gnawed on her bottom lip.

why did she feel so embarrassed?

he wasn’t really referring to her at all – and yet, it all felt so personal.

“okay,” was all she could muster weakly, barely a whisper, resuming her onslaught on the grass like nothing mattered at all.

maybe none of it ever did.

sukuna turned his head and stared at her strangely, but said nothing.

thwack!

he was grinning wildly now. “let me chase you.”

she wiped away the raindrops that had splattered onto her cheek, a slight sting on her thigh from his smack. “i don’t wanna play.”

“but… you like this game,” sukuna frowned, head tilted, rolling over with his elbows digging into the grass. “why not?”

“i jus-ow! stop hitting me!”

“start running then.”

so she did, quite begrudgingly.

her footsteps crackled loudly against the forest floor, as the dark grey clouds darkened even more and the rain fell faster, and the sun dipped further behind a neighboring mountain. sukuna was hot on her trail, and she knew how easily he could catch up to her in an instant, but he never did. it was as if he switched off whatever made him less human during their games. maybe it was to give her a fighting chance, or perhaps it was entertaining to him to know he could always win whenever he wanted to.

if she got to the village fast enough, she would win today.

she swung herself against a tree trunk to propel herself forward, imagining she was an agile deer leaping between the trees.

get to the village.

win.

run, you can wi-

her leg gave way beneath her, sliding up in an arc as she slipped backward. her head hit the ground, and stars and minuscule black moons danced in her eyes amidst the silver clouds.

sukuna appeared above her, his face upside down, all of his eyes on her with what looked something like panic in his irises. it made her heart skip a beat, followed by a swarming terror of bats and a throbbing swell of pain in her left ankle.

and then… sheer, crippling embarrassment.

she started to wail loudly.

big salty droplets squeezed out from her tearducts, running to her temples and mixing with the rain in the dirt. sukuna's face contorted painfully, his mouth pulled into a grimace, his eyes darting over her like a hummingbird flitting between flowers.

"s-stop doing that," he tried to order harshly, but was cruelly betrayed by the shaky wobbling his lip.

snot messily dribbled down her nose as her ankle started to throb more intensely. "it h-hurts!"

"stop crying!" sukuna exclaimed, his fists clenched and shaking. "just stop."

she made the mistake of moving her leg, and cried out as fiery pain licked a smoldering trail straight up to her head. "ryo! please. make it stop, make it stop, make it stop."

his face fell, crumbling into pieces. with a tenderness she had never known, and the sleeves of his shirt falling over his hands, sukuna gently held the sides of her face.

she stilled, a drop of crystal suspended in time.

he hushed her, soothingly. "it's okay. just... please. stop crying."

she sniffled, broken sobs stuttering out from her lips, until they fizzed out altogether. all the while, sukuna never let her go, their foreheads brushing against each other, his peach frizz blowing in the wind. oh, how she wished she could see his face. she wanted to know that he wasn't faking this level of care – of emotion – if nothing really mattered to him.

sukuna lifted his head, his blood eyes glossy and pained, and whispered, "does it still hurt?"

her bottom lip trembled dangerously and she nodded. sukuna sighed, his hands leaving her face and scrunching his hair.

"i-," he paused, nervous. "let me try something."

sukuna looked at her expectantly, eyes widened and pleading. she nodded again, not sure exactly what she was agreeing to, he moved slowly, cautiously, as if any sudden move would set off her pain again. all the while, his gaze was trained on her, settled and pooling on her already swelling ankle.

he breathed out shakily, placing a rough palm over her warm skin, and she whimpered as a piping hot sensation seeped through to her bone. it was nothing like pain, but it felt like sukuna. it was a strange feeling, like little bubbles popping on the skin he touched. she knew then what she was feeling – his power. sukuna was concentrating hard, little grunts escaping his lips every so often, his brow deeply furrowed into a valley of ridges.

the power rose, a tidal wave of fire and blood, and then collapsed into nothing.

he hissed in frustration, sharply pulling his hand back from her ankle, head bowed almost… shamefully.

it was quiet for a heartbeat longer before sukuna muttered, “i’m sorry, i can’t fix you. i’m not strong enough.”

her heart swelled, and she smiled weakly. “it’s okay, ryo.”

he looked up at the dark sky, mouth opening and closing as he chased his words and settled on, “its going to be night soon.”

she looked up too, watching the veil of the silver crescent moon lifting. “mhm.”

she sat up slowly, sukuna immediately turning to watch her. “i-i don’t think i can walk, ryo,” she mumbled. “how can i get home?”

“but… you can’t stay here.”

“i know.”

“the bears will hunt you.”

“ryo, i know!”

his head tilted and a spark lit in his eyes.

“i can carry you!” sukuna blurted out, his chest puffed out proudly. “i’ll bring you to where i sleep. it’s warm there, and then the bears can’t eat you because i’ll be there.”

“… you can fight a bear?”

“what do you think i eat now? i told you I didn’t need your stinky vegetables anymore!”

she blinked three times.

“okay, and then what?”

“and then… i can figure it out in the morning. i’ll keep trying to make you better when you sleep so you can go home.”

without hearing another word from her, sukuna swept her into his arms, eliciting a startled yelp from her. he settled into a brisk pace, taking them both much farther away from the village. the light darkened considerably this deep into the forest, the trees hugging each other so tightly that hardly any of the sun’s waning light could pierce between the leaves.

suddenly, he stopped.

sukuna hunched over, her cheek squishing against his chest, and gently placed her down into a cavernous burrow.

"you really weren't joking when you said you sleep in a hole," she half-heartedly joked, looking around.

he scoffed, crossing his legs and sitting beside her injured side, halfway turned towards the entrance to the burrow. "you don't like it?"

"i never said that! it's just... different."

"not all of us live in a nice home."

the air turned slightly sour, lemons tainting his softness, and they were completely silent. the sounds of the night became louder then; strange animal cries off in the distance, and the rain pelting down from outside, steady drip drip drip of droplets falling from the entrance. sukuna was right, his burrow was reasonably warm. almost, dare she say it, actually comfortable.

he was still beside her, a hand pressed lightly to her injury, his power ebbing and rushing forward like a wave against the shore. as the night grew longer, sukuna seemed to be getting more and more agitated, hissing lowly as he failed at every attempt to heal her. she couldn't sleep regardless of his noises; the enormity of the situation she was in was too jarring. what if a bear discovered their sanctuary? what would her parents be thinking right now? sukuna had to be hungry, as well tired from expending his power. could he really fight a bear if it came down to it?

"ryo?"

"go to sleep."

"but i-"

"shut up, or i'll let the bears eat you."

"ryo! i just wanted to ask you something."

he groaned in annoyance. "what then?"

"earlier, when you said you didn't like anything. did you mean it?"

"well... yes. i don't lie."

"oh, yeah. i know."

sukuna tilted his head, both left eyes rolling towards her. "why did you get sad when i said that?"

heat rose to her cheeks. "did not!"

"you did so! i felt you get sad! you’re getting sad again now"

she fidgeted uncomfortably. "because!"

"because?"

"because, because- ugh! because then that means you don't like me, okay? and that hurts my feelings.”

red eyes flashed in the dark. “why do you care if i like you?”

“because we’re-you… you’re my friend. of course i care if you like me.”

“but, what if i don’t care?”

her heart dropped, and a fresh tear prickled the corner of her eye. “you don’t?” she mumbled quietly, a drop in an ocean of naive, childish feelings.

sukuna’s face crumbled again, and he gripped her ankle just a fraction tighter. “no! i mean, yes! i do care.”

he bashfully looked away, mumbling under his breath before he said a bit louder, “i like you.”

she perked right up at that. “you do?”

“mhm.”

“you promise?”

a low grumble. “promise.”

༺ ✤ ༻

for five days and five nights, she was in another world.

a world where all the memories of her past were washed away by the swirling green of the deep forest. it was an almost cathartic experience, a transition from one plane of existence to the next – one drawn in dripping red ink, a solitary existence that belonged only to ryomen sukuna.

or, at least, it was easier to imagine it that way.

otherwise, the painful pangs of guilt would strike her violently whenever her thoughts strayed to her village and family. if she paused and closed her eyes, she could feel the steady thrum of her mother’s grief, like an earthquake reverberating across the distance between them. it was all too much for her young mind to bear.

and so, she willingly slipped through the doorway into a new reality, where it was just her and her crimson ghost.

during that time, she had learned how to read him.

his anger was a lashing snake hidden between the rocks – wickedly sharp and quick to strike her with venomous words. they would spread quickly though her blood, making her huddle into herself, perfectly still, like a mouse meeting its most unfortunate end.

fortunately for her, she was only bitten once, and the snake had only acted out of hunger, not genuine malice.

if sukuna’s anger had been real, she doubted she would have lived to see the next sunrise.

his apology came much later after he had returned from the hunt, a satiated tiger slow to act. the only acknowledgement of his remorse was a silent head pat with a bloody palm.

his fear was iron claws scratching against a rock, piercingly grating and scraping at the walls of her heart. if sukuna was fearful, she knew it by the way he stalked and paced outside the burrow, a whip strike away from pouncing on anything that moved even slightly out of the ordinary.

“there are more people in the forest,” sukuna would mutter darkly during those fearful fits. “they're shouting your name.”

“did they see you?”

he responded with nothing more than a pointed look.

but above all, it was his kindness that was most present.

she first noticed it in the way sukuna corrected himself around her, protecting her from certain aspects of his lifestyle. for instance, when she saw the blood on his hands after a kill, or saw how horrified she was when he offered her raw, dripping meat from a deer he had just killed. it was in the way he had immediately changed his ways – washing his hands after a hunt, and skinning and butchering his kills far from the burrow so she wouldn’t see a thing.

it was also in the way he pretended he wasn’t purposely foraging berries for her, dropping them onto her lap like he had just randomly stumbled across them. it was in his stubborn refusal to give up on healing her every night when he thought she was asleep, and in how he treated her like precious sugar glass – so very careful in how he handled her.

it shouldn’t have been so surprising to discover that ryomen sukuna was neither cruel nor mad.

he was still that lonely boy from all those years ago, still learning how to be kind while yearning and searching for love.

one day, she saw him play with fire between his fingertips as if it were nothing extraordinary.

she saw how the blood in his eyes came alive, like dancing waves of a turbulent red sea. when he looked at her, she didn't expect him to smile so gently as he started a small fire and cooked her meat for her.

after sukuna had shown her more of his power, the cracks in his soul seemed to split apart, and his fire teemed and spilled out uncontrollably. he finally began to open up to her, telling her things she had always wanted to discover, along refreshingly childish ramblings.

“you know, i actually didn’t mind eating your stinky vegetables. yeah.”

“deer aren’t actually that pretty, but watching them when they’re still is… relaxing?”

“yeah, i lied before. i do like playing in the snow, especially throwing it at you.”

but some of the worst things would also spill out – things she would have preferred to never know, because they were dark and cruel enough to change the way she viewed the world.

“i didn’t mean to eat my brother, but i was just really hungry in my mother’s tummy, and she wasn’t feeding us.”

“she called me a demon for what i did.”

“no, i don’t know know where she is now, and i don’t know about my father too.”

“i do… feel a bit bad about eating my brother, because he was hurting.”

there was a stretched, almost foreboding silence before sukuna finally asked the question that must have been on his mind since the day they met.

“are you afraid of me?”

the fire spit and fizzled, and she hissed as a spark danced dangerously close to her skin.

“no, ryo. you’re my best friend.”

“really?!”

“well, duh. you saved me.”

he shuffled ever so slightly closer, their arms just about to touch, and mumbled, “so did you.”

she really believed she could have stayed with sukuna forever.

but her new world was shattered on the morning of the sixth day, as if the cosmic rulings of the world had decreed that they'd both had enough of a good thing.

still, it was all her fault – it had to be.

she was the one who insisted that she was too cold, that the chill in the air was day beyond what she could tolerate. she felt the wet tears clinging to her lashes were about to freeze over, and sukuna could not stand to see her cry. so, despite his own warnings, he lit her a fire for her during the day and watched nervously as the smoke rose high above the trees.

it wasn't long before the hunters came.

they came silently, prowling and closing in on them both.

and sukuna knew it.

he was bristling defensively, his neck hairs rising, eyes closed, and head bowed in the direction of a bush that had rustled unnaturally. the hunters crept forward cautiously, eyeing the boy with barely concealed suspicion, while beckoning for her to come with them.

she stayed put, pretending she was a statue of ice that couldn’t understand a thing.

a hunter tightened his grip on his bow.

another nocked an arrow.

and sukuna opened his eyes.

chaos erupted, a whirlwind of metal and feathers and red, red, red.

the hunters charged forward, consumed by a fear they could not rationally explain – of demons and monsters possessing their hearts and minds. but sukuna was faster than all of them, disappearing in a flash, and reappearing to hurl a hunter against a tree.

the poor souls had no clue what they were up against.

she knew sukuna could – and would – kill them all.

"no! no! no!" she screamed, heaving and desperately clawing at her face. “please.”

somehow, he could understand her amidst the shouts and cries of anguish from the men who had come for her.

(he always did, he always would.)

the boy of blood and fire stilled, dropping his hands to his sides, and the wolves descended upon him instantly.

she screamed once more as a hunter seized her, dragging her away from the fray of madness. all the while, sukuna remained curled in a fetal position, all of his eyes locked on her retreating figure as he endured the the blows to his body with stoic silence.

only his eyes betrayed his pain.

༺ ✤ ༻

her heart was weak.

it could only beat with half its strength, as if it couldn’t be bothered to do what was expected of it.

when she was returned to the village, to the nearly suffocating embrace of her weeping mother, she was hailed as a miracle – a little girl who had somehow survived a demon. she was cherished and fussed over by the whole village, her family showered with gifts of millet and rice, plenty of dried boar to survive the winter, and stone amulets for protection against the evil that had touched them.

meanwhile, sukuna had escaped.

the hunters had said the demon vanished into the highest peaks of the mountains, where they could not follow. they bowed low and deep to her mother, their knees buckling as they vowed vengeance on the scourge of the mountain. but she knew it was all for show. they were completely terrified of him, too proud to admit it, and so the mere memory of sukuna was spat on and desecrated by the other villagers.

oh, if only they knew the truth of it all.

it took a fortnight for her heartstrings to stop aching from the pain of being ripped apart from sukuna, and even longer for her piercing wails to cease every night before she slept. her tears burned, tears of fire and salt, made from sukuna's precious blood that had dripped down his face as he was beaten.

all because of her.

her parents couldn't fathom her sheer anguish, perplexed and frightened by its intensity, and only able to explain it as the effect of a demon. all they could do was pray for her recovery, and the rest of the village did the same.

in the beginning, when she had exhausted all her energy from wailing and crying, she would peer into the darkness of the room. through the gaps in the walls of her home, she willed and prayed so fervently that she would one day see four red orbs peering back at her.

but twelve winters and summers came and went without sukuna, and she began to wonder if had all been just a dream. an elaborate tale of an imaginary friend her mind had tricked her into believing was real. a ghost that was never meant to be, one she ought to bury in the deepest recesses of her memories where he could finally rest.

but, oh, how lifeless her world was without him.

nobody could understand or see how the anguish swirled beneath her skin. she didn’t even have the words to describe it to herself anymore, other than she was not doing well at all and felt sick all the time.

how very isolating it all was.

she was fifteen now, and all her parents could talk to her about was marriage.

“you are a young lady now!” her mother would gush loudly, almost nagging. “one who survived a demon, and every man who passes through the village wants your hand.”

she tried not to think about it at all, but it loomed larger and larger over her head as the years passed, and she doubted she could remain as she was for much longer. in those moments, her thoughts would always stray to sukuna, and how if she could have married anybody, then it would have been him.

it was the only thing that felt right.

she tried not to dwell on that for too long.

but trying not thinking about ryomen sukuna was like telling the sky not to cry.

there were often tales from afar that the traveling merchants told the villagers as they stopped for respite and to sell their crafts – stories full of horrors and atrocities. entire villages, along with all their inhabitants, were found burnt to cinders or encased in a tomb of ice, with no rhyme or reason why, simply there one minute and gone the next. there were accounts of cries and calls from strange creatures in the night, born from suffering and pain. some spoke of certain people being able to wield magic, only to be found mangled and nearly destroyed by others of the same power.

she would think of sukuna after hearing those stories and wonder what kind of life he was living.

was he just as lonely as she was?

or was he happy indulging in the violence of his nature?

then, one fateful day, her father placed a hand on her head fondly and said, “tonight is your omiai, dearest. you will finally meet the man the nakodo has chosen as your husband.”

and that was that.

that night, she stared into the eyes of the man she was to marry.

they were kind, warm – so very plain. he spoke a little to her, mainly about how he could offer her a better life than what she had now. something more comfortable, with a better house, more food, and even kimonos made of silk.

it all sounded… safe.

reliable.

her family was happy she was marrying such a man, and assured her that they would come and visit her in her new home once she had settled in.

she didn’t care about that at all.

all she could think about was red, red, red, and how it felt like the ultimate betrayal.

she could do nothing but nod placidly at them all.

really, she should count her blessings that she was about the same age as her soon-to-be husband, and that he seemed likely to treat her with kindness and respect. maybe, if she tried hard enough, she could convince herself that she would find some measure of fulfillment in her marriage.

she could learn to accept it all, even force herself to be happy.

even if a part of her could never be scrubbed clean from all the red.

the day before she left for her betrothed’s village, she went to the clearing in the forest where it all began. it was midday, the sun high in the air, and the sweet bite of winter kissed her cheeks as she stood there clutching the white silks that had been gifted to her.

“things are going to change for me,” she whispered to the trees that had long watched over her and sukuna, her head bowed low. "and i do not believe i will ever return here.”

desperation gripped her in a suffocating hold, hooking its claws deep into her spine. she wondered if there was a string that connected her to sukuna. a red-stained one, dripping in their blood. would he feel it wherever he was in the world if she pulled it hard enough?

if she tried, would he come for her?

(a gust of wind, a spark of flame, and a ripple of blood.)

she had realized some time ago what she had felt as a child.

but it was still a terrifying thing to admit to herself, even now, in this quiet corner of the world, that she had once been in love with ryomen sukuna.

it was best to bury it here with the trees.

tonight was the eve of her wedding, and all she wanted was to have just stayed there.

it was supposed to have been a night of solitary peace.

the last one she would ever have, with only the sound of the herbal bathwater rippling and the scent of yuzu in the air to keep her tethered to this world.

it had all been overturned in an instant.

the monsters came swiftly down from the mountainside in the night, slaughtering and tearing their way through every home in the village. the night was full of brutal screams, blood moons and snow falling from the weeping clouds. she could see them, but others weren’t so lucky. that brief look of terrified confusion was haunting – blood bubbling from their mouths as their throats were slashed by something they couldn’t see.

she stared at her fiancé, both of them trapped beneath a wooden beam, as his eyes, wide and lifeless, had not a single trace of the kindness they had once held. death had never been so close to her before, she could almost feel the cold kiss of its blade against her throat, beckoning her closer to the other side.

their assailant was a thin creature, broken and bent, with a feminine form. it licked the dripping blood of her betrothed from its wickedly sharp claws, unperturbed to the rest of the carnage unfolding around it.

“i miss you, i miss you,” it hissed in a low, screeching voice. “i love you, i miss you.”

the demon turned to her, eyeless, with only a mouth full of teeth and a thousand tongues, as if it could smell the life and heat fading from her blood. it crawled sideways towards her, its scraggly black hair brushing the ground in front of her face.

it paused, dipping its face down towards her, its reeking, snarling breaths close to her ear.

she screamed weakly as it sank its teeth into her shoulder.

soon, all our ghosts will dance together.

pale pink rose petals fluttered from the sky, falling along with the snow.

how beautiful is death?

“hmph, idiot.”

a flash of a thousand blades, and the world turned red and then black.

༺ ✤ ༻

it was the smell of incense that coaxed her back from the dreams of death.

honeyed rays of light danced behind her closed eyelids, their warmth caressing her brow and lips in golden life. when her eyes finally opened, she was convinced that she must have already been reborn. her body was wrapped in opulent silk sheets, delicately embroidered with intricate gold and silver flowers. a byobu depicting a blooming cherry blossom tree stood a few paces in front of the bed.

this was a bedroom of royalty, dripping with extravagance.

she felt as if she didn’t belong here.

but when she pinched the skin of her forearm, felt her legs moving and toes wriggling, and heard the sheets rustling loudly, she knew that this was all very real. all the blood that had been spilled was real, the kind man who would have given her a good life was truly dead, along with his entire village.

“you're awake then are you?”

she froze.

that voice.

it can't be.

so intimately familiar, yet it belonged to the strangest of strangers – deep as the oceans she had never seen, mysterious and smoky like the swirls of incense wafting through the room.

this was the voice of death.

she felt like she had heard it before, as if she should know who it belonged to.

because it was too beautiful to forget.

“sukuna?” she called out in disbelief, her voice fragile and trembling like leaves.

a low chuckle followed. “you still know me.”

oh my.

“h-how are you here? where have you – but y-you disappeared.”

the outline of shadow loomed large behind the byobu, and she gulped.

“i’ve been everywhere in this country. there’s nowhere i haven’t seen.”

it’s him, it’s really him.

sukuna hummed again, his figure swaying. she could make out the shadow of the bridge of his nose and his lips, as well as the elaborate layers of clothing he wore.

“do you remember what happened?” he finally asked after a prolonged silence.

she clenched her fists tightly. “yes.”

“good. and before you accuse me of it, i had nothing to do with what happened to you.”

“i-i wasn't going to.”

“how quaint. it’s rare that i’m not accused of causing wanton violence.”

she watched his shadow reach over and pour a liquid into a cup, followed by soft sipping noises as he drank from it.

“those... those things,” she began tepidly. “is that what you are?”

sukuna snorted. “no. i'm nothing like those low-grade cretins.” he sipped from his cup again. “although, it’s good that you can see curses. next time, you should run instead of just stand there.”

she was starting to remember him again.

she knew that he was nervous; it was evident in his sharp jibes toward her. sukuna always acted like this in unfamiliar situations, when he was unsure of how to act around her. so he would poke and prod because, at least, he understood pain and anger.

she chose to ignore it.

“i went back to the village,” he said, clearing his throat. “it hasn't changed much.”

a flash of terror struck her like lightning.

“but imagine my surprise when i discovered that something had actually changed,” sukuna’s voice had taken on a goading tone, and she could tell he wasn't pleased in the slightest. “you had left to go and get married, of all things.”

my family.

he scoffed, as if he sensed her shift in emotions. “oh, don't worry. your parents told me quite willingly. they were smart enough to know they couldn’t keep me from you.”

a trail of ice and fire ran down her spine.

oh, how much more dangerous have you really become, ryomen sukuna?

dread settled onto her bones like melted lead, and despite her better judgement, she sputtered out, "why now, after all this time?"

silence.

maybe he didn’t even know why.

sukuna's silhouette swayed back and forth behind the byobu, like beech trees high up the mountains, struggling to stay upright during a blizzard. like them, he was battling, but always against himself. his perpetual internal war against that small part inside of him that was human; full of his pain, fear, and kindness. sukuna’s cup was overflowing, even if he didn’t realize it, spilling and pouring everywhere – but she knew it.

she’d known it for the longest time.

“ryo,” her voice cracked like splintering glass. “answer me.”

he sighed, exasperated, “its been so long” – a sharp exhale – “but i can’t stop bleeding!”

utterly perplexed, she frowned. “bleeding? wha-”

sukuna’s shadow rose like a bonfire, erratically pacing in front of the byobu, and she could have sworn she saw the dancing shadows of four swaying arms.

he snarled, the words wrenched from between his fangs, "they tore you from me, and it made my heart bleed. it hasn’t stopped bleeding, because of you."

bang!

his heavy fist struck the screen, and she flinched frightfully.

“i-i don’t k-know what you mean,” she stuttered fearfully, her breaths coming out in rapid, little puffs. “i don’t understand what’s going on.”

he groaned, collected himself, and rolled his shoulders back purposefully. when he spoke again, his tone was calm, with none of the previous fire that had been spitting out from between his teeth.

“it doesn’t matter,” sukuna said, moving away from the cover as his silhouette disappeared. “you’re here now.”

the hidden implications were not as subtle as he thought. he was just as possessive as he had ever been, and it seemed that ryomen sukuna would not be letting go of her again.

she was still his, and had been for all these long years.

“you must be hungry,” he said, swiftly changing the subject. “come here.”

her heart quickened.

slowly, she rose from the safety of the bed, each step as momentous as it was absolutely terrifying. after all this time, she would see sukuna again. the boy who had once protected her, coveted her, and shielded her from the worst parts of himself. the one who wanted to change his ways and be softer for her.

she rounded the byobu.

and there he was.

her bones shivered as her mind froze her in place, stopping her from moving a single step closer.

sukuna was sitting perfectly cross-legged in front of a low table, his eyes widened ever so slightly and his lips parted. a hand was frozen mid-air, suspending in bringing his cup closer to his mouth.

oh, how much he had changed.

sukuna had grown significantly in height, could quite easily tower over her if he stood. he was no longer a boy, but a man – big, broad, and dangerous. and she had not been mistaken before; he had four arms, adorned with strangest black markings, just like his face. if it hadn’t been obvious before, it was now. sukuna was everything taboo in this world, an embodiment of death and fury itself.

“sit,” he ordered, breaking his gaze and motioning in front of him.

his words were in a refined tongue, the kind spoken by highborn royalty and nobles spoke in – those who were educated and understood things beyond the grasp of people like her. she obeyed, feeling the urge to be as well-spoken as possible.

she had never felt so small or so common in all her life.

there was an array of different foods on the table, each more richly presented than the next. elegant bowls held freshly cut fish, arranged to look like the petals of a flower. at the centre of the table sat a lacquered bowl of sekihan at the center of the table, the red bean rice a sharp contrast to the earthy tones of the pickled vegetables around it. mochi of all colors and shapes were delicately wrapped in oak leaves, and chopsticks of pearl and gold were laid beside each of their settings.

sukuna cleared his throat. “so, marriage.” she nodded silently, picking up a piece of mochi. he continued, “i’m assuming it was arranged.”

“yes. he-uh, arrived one day in the village, he was a merchant. my father and the nakodo approved, and that was it.”

he hummed thoughtfully, a fearsome blaze in his eyes. “and did you want this?”

dangerous territory, tread carefully.

“n-not really, but he seemed… kind.”

a flash of red fury crossed his face, and sukuna pursed his lips. “i see. is that what matters most to you, then – kindness?”

careful, careful, careful.

“well… i did not want to end up with a man who would hurt me.”

a dry chuckle. “and do you believe that i will?”

a flash of a memory – of a burrow, of shared tears and painful farewells.

never.

“no,” she replied firmly, picking up another piece of mochi and chewing.

he seemed to approve of her answer, watching as she continued to eat. “good.”

they were silent again, the only sounds coming from the distant chirping of birds and the gentle trickle of a fountain outside. sukuna’s smaller eyes remained fixed on her, while the rest of his attention was on his meal and sake, his expression intensely contemplative and serious. his earlier heat had subsided into a brooding stillness, and he seemed just as amazed as she was that they were finally in each other’s presence again.

she bit her lip before tepidly trying his nickname on her tongue again, “ryo?”

he stilled for a moment, his eyes glistening with a hint of vulnerability before it vanished, and then made a questioning noise.

“what exactly do you expect from me here?”

“you will receive an education, i will not allow you to remain illiterate. you will learn to read and write, and study the arts and poetry. that is all i ask in return.”

“in return for what?”

“for residing in my residence with me. you will not return to the mountains or the village, and you will never see your parents again.”

this was it.

her childhood dream of staying with sukuna was finally here. perhaps he had really felt her pulling on their red string, felt her desperation and fear, and had come to save her. he wasn’t entirely human, after all; maybe he could have sensed her from so far away, and known about that deep hole within her. and so, he had taken her away from it all, demanding only that she say goodbye to everything she had ever known.

but things were different now.

they weren’t little children anymore. there was a taste of change in the air – something tantalizing and liberating. their dynamics had shifted, whether they wanted it or not. adulthood had brought new possibilities that couldn’t have been there before, the kind that made her heart race and chest flutter.

in the way sukuna’s eyes flashed, she felt that he knew it too.

it was her fate after all, she had just been too young to comprehend it.

so be it.

“alright.”

༺ ✤ ༻

the ink was blacker than raven feathers.

drip! drip! drip!

as beautiful as the depth of midnight, it shouldn’t be wasted.

she bowed her head, pensively holding her brush. the words were right there on her fingertips, straight from the centre of her heart, but she didn’t know how to say them.

or rather, if she could say them correctly.

biting her lip, she lightly pressed her brush to the page, the words flowing out with every stroke. when she was done, she leaned back on her heels and looked expectantly at her teacher.

“your brush technique was incorrect,” uraume chided emotionlessly, their icy aura ever present. “but you were close. try it like this instead, see?”

sukuna’s second had been tasked with educating her and showing her the finer ways of noble life. under uraume’s tutelage, she learned to draw the beautiful curves of hiragana and the straight, angular lines of katakana. she was introduced to the golden literature of her country, where she delved into classic and more modern texts, and learned to appreciate the hidden depths beneath the surface of grand tales and poetry.

once, she had been jealous of uraume. it was unnerving to see how much confidence sukuna placed in the ambiguous and frosty figure, and it hurt to know he trusted someone other than her. but she soon came to realize that uraume’s sole desire was to serve sukuna, and sukuna harbored nothing for them other than respect that surely had been well earned.

“try it again,” uraume suggested, returning to their position behind her and watching over her shoulder as she picked up the brush once more.

moreover, uraume was neither cruel nor haughty about her illiteracy and never treated her like a lowborn. they always guided her with a gentle coldness and a detached tone of instruction. she wondered what they thought about the nature of her relationship with sukuna, and if perhaps uraume had ever been jealous of her. she liked to think they hadn’t been, and if they had, they never showed it or asked any questions. for that, she was grateful.

what she had with sukuna wasn’t something she could describe easily.

he was there now, one of his eyes watching the way her hands moved with the brush. it wasn’t unusual that he was present; sukuna often observed their lessons, seating himself a distance and quietly reading a book or scroll. he never lavished her with praise, such was not his nature, but offered more subtle compliments in her progress: a tilt of his head, a single nod, and a hum of approval.

she would be lying to herself if she said it didn’t thrill her to hold his attention.

they only grew closer as time went on, building new little routines with each other. every night after they dined together, sukuna would tap his fingers rhythmically on the low table, completely silent, as she either read poetry from a book or recited it from memory. these were moments of softness, sukuna's strange way of drawing closer her, as the red thread connecting them weaved them closer to each other with every passing night. his gratitude was silent too: a heavy hand on her head, a quick press of his fingers to her cheek, and a small smile as he left.

it was easy to imagine sukuna as changed in those moments, a regal lord always composed and calm.

but that wasn't the reality of the world.

she was frequently reminded of it.

"i need to go," he would suddenly say, abruptly pulling her from her focus.

she closed her book and peered up at him through her lashes. “where?”

sukuna smirked, a wild gleam in his eyes. “to quench my thirst.”

he would then disappear, but never for more than a few days at a time. she liked to hope that his brief absences were because he disliked leaving her for too long. when sukuna returned, he was like a predator satiated from the hunt – more at ease, prone to teasing and sending her into a shy fluster. she realized quickly that he was still as he had been when he was a boy; always acting upon his desires and impulses without a shred of restraint.

although, sukuna kept her well away from any glimpse of that side of him.

she was relieved to be spared from it. even though she had accepted his nature, she was far more content to remain his tether to a calmer side, always ready to pull him back into the peaceful river of soothing milk and honey that was her company. yet, she couldn’t help but wonder if that was all she would ever be to him.

she had to wait three years for the winds of romance to finally shift.

the day after her eighteenth birthday, sukuna began leaving things for her to find.

sometimes the gifts were small, such as delicate hairpins, vibrant silks, or rare fruits from distant lands. they would enjoy the fruits together, her laughter filling the room as she watched him scowl at their unfamiliar taste. other times, the gifts were more extravagant: a retinue of handmaidens to attend to her every need, opulent jūnihitoe crafted by the best artisans, the emperor’s most exquisite jewelry, and the rarest art.

but perhaps the most precious gift of all was his poetry.

she didn’t know why she had assumed sukuna had no taste for poetry. after all, he had ensured she studied it, and seemed to enjoy listening to her recite it. she had thought it was to encourage her to uphold the traditions of noble women studying the arts, to refine herself as a proper lady. given his impulsive nature, she merely thought he lacked the time and patience to write his own poems.

but oh, how he had a way with words.

it wasn’t in the more traditional styles she was used to reading, but it was uniquely sukuna’s. he was never one to follow the rules anyways. they had started off expressing the calming joy he felt in her company, with gentle musings about her being like a light summer rain or the soft morning glow of the sun. those early verses were lighthearted, designed to make her heart flutter with silly little butterflies.

and now?

now they could make her heart melt into a puddle of its own blood, making her body run hot with feverish, burning emotions.

with every poem she read, warmth would spread through her cheeks and chest, her bones shaking from the intensity of it all. it embarrassed her how obviously and hopelessly in love she felt. sukuna, however, was completely unruffled, a knowing smile playing on his lips as he watched her stumble over her words.

“any particular reason why you have that stupid smile on your face?” he’d tease, ostentatiously chewing on a piece of fruit.

she looked away petulantly, a slight pout forming on her lips. “stop it, ryo!”

it was blatantly obvious he savored this.

how could he possibly expect her to act normally around him after reading something like that? these poems were a gateway to his soul, a window straight through his eyes and into his heart. she could hardly contain herself any longer, and it was almost cruel that sukuna was keeping her in suspense for even a moment longer.

but did sukuna even want marriage?

he never liked being bound to anything, always pursuing whatever he desired whenever he wanted to. perhaps he wanted the benefits of courting her without ever becoming tied to her. she wasn’t sure if she could ever accept the idea of being his concubine. after all they had been through, it would crush her soul.

they were taking a stroll together in the gardens after one of her lessons, but the air was tense. sukuna stood unusually close to her, completely silent as they moved together, stopping occasionally and waiting as she admired certain flowers blooming. she tried hard not to be too flustered, and attempted to diffuse the palpable tension between them by talking about all sorts of things.

“oh, ryo! don't you think this flower is gorgeous?”

“hmm, yes. quite.”

“the weather is so pleasant for this time of year, isn't it?”

“yes it is.”

“look, the koi! aren’t they pretty?”

“for fish, sure.”

she gave up after that last attempt. it was obvious she wasn't going to get much out of sukuna today in terms of conversation – he seemed completely and utterly wound up.

they stopped underneath the shade of a tree, and she gracefully tucked in the layers of her clothes beneath her before sitting down. sukuna stood pensively beside the tree, his side profile solemn as he clenched and unclenched his fists. his movements were slow, methodical, almost like it was the only thing grounding him in that moment.

and then, in a flash, he was crouched right in front of her.

“i have something to say,” he announced, his voice like stone.

she swallowed thickly. “then say it.”

sukuna exhaled, and she heard the sound of his knuckles cracking and snapping before he continued, “i recognize that we two are… different in many ways. i have been bound to you from the moment i first laid eyes on you, and i will forever be yours.” – a sharp inhale followed by a shaky exhale – “however, while i may accept this, i understand that you might not outside the ties of marriage.”

this is it.

“you are the one good thing about my soul,” he whispered, his voice trembling with a vulnerable softness that shook her to her core. “please, say you will accept me?”

she didn’t hesitate for even a moment.

“i have always been yours, ryo, and i always will be.”

༺ ✤ ༻

love was infinite.

it transcended time and space, indifferent to who it dragged into its otherworldly domain, filled to the brim with whiteness and the saccharine scent of roses.

being ryomen sukuna’s wife meant crossing that threshold into another world, one that he had forced to turn into the brightest shade of red. his love was ferocious, nearly crippling in its intensity. loving him meant baring her heart to him, exposed and vulnerable, ready for him to consume it completely. he was a deprived man who had finally been given the key to her soul, and now he was able to come through and show her how deep his love for her coursed through in his veins.

“i want to bury myself into your skin,” he murmured into her ear, his arms wrapped around her bare body. “and settle into the spaces between your ribs.”

and yet, sukuna was tender too.

he would crave the moments of quiet, when it was just the two of them, whispering in the dark about how much she meant to him. wherever they were, a part of him was always touching her – whether it was his head on her shoulder as they sat in the garden, or pulling her onto his lap during her lessons. all the while, his eyes were memorising every little thing she did; the way she laughed, how she breathed, and every different sound and expression she made.

sukuna was immensely proud to be her husband, always devoted to providing for and protecting her.

she never wanted for a single thing.

and yet, he was still larger than life, a force of strife and bloodlust.

she knew what sort of reputation he had, that he was something of a living legend. there was no doubt that history would remember his name, spitting on it and sending shivers down people's spines at the mere mention of it.

“the king of curses,” uraume revealed to her one day, a hint of pride in her voice. “that is what the sorcerers call him.”

and that title did not come without a challenge.

on an unassuming autumn morning, sukuna abruptly interrupted one of her lessons. “i must go,” he said abruptly, clutching his trident like a god of old, a hint of glee in his words. “the fushigawa clan must be brought to heel.”

and heel they must have.

for when he returned, sukuna's face had split into two, with a mouth comfortably situated at his midriff. she knew then that unspeakable atrocities must have been committed, because her husband’s body did not evolve unless he had killed and sinned in the most horrific ways possible.

sukuna averted his gaze from her, his skin drenched in blood that was not his own. `'you cannot love me like this."

“and yet,” she whispered, standing on her toes and cupping his bloodied cheekbones. “i still do.”

she had never expected his true nature to change once they were married. to deny it was to deny him – and his love for her. as long as he kept her far from the sight of it, what more could she ask for?

in those moments, it was easy to forget how quickly darkness could overwhelm a fire.

the twilight moon cast a gentle light as a pleasant breeze wafted through the air, brushing against her cheek in a tender caress. it was one of those quiet, soft evenings, where the world slowed down just enough for husband and wife to savor each other’s company. they sat by the koi pond, watching as the silk ribbons of gold and white fins traced elegant patterns in the water. sukuna’s head rested on her lap, a pair of his eyes closed, as she gently stroked his hair.

nothing was out of the ordinary.

save for the strange man with starlight hair strolling towards them.

her husband sat up, and they both turned to watch the man approach them. the stranger carried the aura of a man assured in his own destiny, radiating confidence in the self-righteousness of the path he was on. when he lifted his head and met her gaze, she couldn’t help but gasp at the sight of his eyes, which held a beauty that well surpassed even that of the heavens above.

she knew then that this was no normal man.

“you were stupid to come here,” sukuna huffed, barely sparing the man a glance as he helped her to her feet. “i prefer not to kill in front of my wife.”

“and yet, you will die all the same,” the man retorted, his hand glowing with a threatening iridescent aquamarine light.

boom!

there was a deafening thunderclap, followed by the loud creaking and crashing of tumbling wood. before she could blink again, she found herself somewhere far from their home, surrounded by trees and nature that seemed to stretch for miles. her husband’s expression was calm, a perfectly still lake amidst the tumultuous whirlwind of emotions inside her.

sukuna softly touched her cheek. “this will all be over soon, my love.”

he pressed a tender kiss to her brow.

don’t leave me, please.

and then, he was gone.

a strong fear settled in the pit of her stomach amidst the eerie silence. she flinched each time the sky lit up in hues of red and blue, once with purple, and she could have sworn that she heard the sound of her husband’s untamed glee carried on the wind. every rustle of the trees set her teeth on edge, and she wrapped her arms tightly around herself as the coldness of the night began to settle in.

snap!

she whirled around.

another stranger emerged, this time with hair as black as the night. shadows pooled beneath his feet, ominous snarling and snapping noises of hounds coming from its depths. with a sharp gesture, the man hushed and silenced the shadows, and the hounds ceased to be. he tilted his head curiously at her, as if he couldn’t fathom why she was here alone in this place.

but what struck her about him were his eyes — they were as green as the forests in the mountains.

it made her strangely homesick.

“my husband will never stop hunting you for this,” she finally said coolly, despite the terror coursing in her blood.

“you think that terrifies me?” he scoffed, instantly shattering the image of warmth she thought he had. “no matter what, history will forever remember as the sorcerers who brought the king of curses to his knees.”

a silver blade gleamed wickedly as the man grinned maliciously.

“meanwhile, you are irrelevant.”

she didn't say a word, understanding all to well what was about to happen and why.

would death be kind?

she shook her head, turning away from the man and looking up at the crimson twilight sky, unwilling to face the man or the cruel blade that was to be her end.

(a drop of blood in a firestorm, a scream of agony)

it doesn’t matter, so long as sukuna cannot feel it.

༺ ✤ ༻

death was abysmally cruel.

ryomen sukuna once believed that it would have given him the sweet relief he always craved deep down – something that would have finally extinguished the ceaseless fire blazing in his veins. it was a release he had always longed for, yearned for, and thought he had always been ready for.

especially when the curse, kenjaku, found him suffering amidst the wreckage of his vengeful rampage for the love that had been stolen from him.

“you had your chance, once,” the curse purred, his forehead stitches starkly contrasting with the pallor of the body he had taken. “but you knew that already.”

no, death had hurt him beyond measure.

it was a hailstorm of ice and sleet, beating down at him, surely dousing his fire, but so very slowly. even though his memory now was hazy at the best of times, he would always remember that pain. how he smashed and ground his teeth together, silent as stone as kenjaku worked to preserve his essence into every one of his fingers, because he refused to cry again.

all sukuna could remember was pain.

and her.

he would always remember her – the pain of loving her, and the pain of losing her.

and how he cried for the first and last time when he saw her crumpled body lying there in that forest. how he wanted nothing more than to hold her bones in his arms for the rest of time, to die right there and then with her, and let their skeletons be burned into ash together.

love had made him sick with desire, with hate, with yearning.

it terrified him.

because ryomen sukuna did not like to feel.

he then swore to himself that he would never repeat his mistakes. love was never to be touched again, and he would burn the world before it had the chance to hurt him once more.

and finally, here sukuna was, reborn and made anew, ready to enact that vow.

only, he hadn’t planned on being stuck inside this miserable, pretentious annoying brat.

no matter, this isn’t permanent.

“how you feelin there, yuji?” asked satoru gojo in an irritatingly perky voice.

sukuna’s vessel rubbed his chest tentatively. “i guess it kinda hurts a litt- ow! okay, never mind, it hurts a lot.”

satoru smiled. “well, lucky for you, i know someone who can help with that.”

sukuna rolled his eyes, grumbling under his breath. oh, how he wanted to rip the smirk right off his face.

first, i’ll tear you–

a light laugh trickled in from just outside the door.

sukuna froze.

he knew that laugh.

the brat turned around, and through him, ryomen sukuna saw what he had thought he lost a millennium ago.

for a moment, there was nothing but white noise.

sukuna was entranced, captivated by the way her lips moved, the graceful way her figure leaned against the doorframe, and how every single feature of her face had remained unchanged and untouched despite all the time that had passed.

is this some sort of joke?

“ok yuji,” she said warmly, a kind smile on her face as she placed a hand on his chest. “this won’t hurt a bit.”

sukuna felt the ghost of her hand touching his own skin, familiar and warm, and he gripped his throne of bones tightly.

yuji frowned. “will it hurt you?”

“oh no, don’t worry about me. i can absorb as much physical pain as i want without feeling any of it myself.”

“that’s so cool! but, do you really not feel anything at all?”

she bit her lip, an ancient sadness in her young eyes. “well… sometimes i go blind for a while, and all i can see is the color red.”

“what? hell no, what if you go blind because of me? no way.”

yuji shied away from her touch, and she reached out to grasp his hand.

“no, i promise i won’t!” she practically begged. “please. yuji. i–something happens when i go blind, like something is trying to show me what’s missing inside me, and i need to find out what it is.”

so, you don’t remember a thing.

sukuna leaned forward, bones crunching beneath him.

“okay…” his vessel answered, apprehension and concern woven into his tone.

she smiled gratefully.

i think i understand what you were to me after all this time, my love.

༺ ✤ ༻

©storiesoflilies 2024, all rights reserved. please do not plagiarize, translate, or repost any of my work on other sites! i only post on ao3 and tumblr.

[candlewaxandp0lar0ids]

jealousy, jealousy || Lee Know x Reader

Summary: "Sure, Minho missed an opportunity to spend more time around you in a relaxed setting, but is he upset about it? Does he get annoyed when he hears you talk with the guy behind him? Does hearing you chuckle at the guy’s stupid jokes, probably just to be polite, ‘cause he’s not that funny, make him want to claw the dude’s eyes out?

Well. Yes."

Or: You're working with a different partner for a group assignment, and Minho's totally chill about it.

Word count: 4.9k

Genres: college AU, coffee shop AU, strangers to lovers

Warnings & Tags: jealousy, kissing, minor language, tooth-rotting fluff, seriously this is so fluffy, reader is implied to have social anxiety, Thunderstorm

series masterlist

A/N: This is the second story I've written where Lee Know's a barista and cats are involved. It probably says something deep about me, but what? I hope you'll enjoy the fic, please consider letting me know your thoughts and reblogging the fic if you do~

Minho doesn't know exactly when he noticed you, or when you started appearing in his life. It’s kind of annoying actually, because he knows he noticed you because he kept seeing you around, but he has no way of pinpointing it. What he does know is that you started showing up at the coffee shop where he worked, twice every week. That wasn’t that big a deal, you were far from being the only one the only one, but it was a shop that was pretty out of the way, near an old building that was only used for a few classes, as far as he knew, so it wasn’t that frequented.

In fact, you could almost say that the people who bothered to come here were the weirdos who wanted to avoid the other permanently full coffee shops on campus. Which was fine by Minho, who wasn’t paid enough to deal with that sort of crowd.

Anyway, at some point, Minho’s brain had to have put together he was seeing you around quite a bit, and finally he managed to figure out that it was because you were in one of the classes he was rudely forced to take outside of his major. In his defense, it took him so long because he didn’t really like people, as a rule, and he paid as little attention to them as possible. His friends were enough of a hassle to deal with already.

It makes it all the more frustrating that he can’t tell what it was about you that caught his attention. It has to have been something. Once he starts trying to understand it, more things come to light. Like the fact that your lips move but your voice doesn’t come out when you thank him for giving you your order, or the sigh of relief you always seem to heave out when you let yourself fall at your favorite table, the one in the corner, where you sit with your back to the window.

Actually, from what he can see, you appear to do your best to stay out of people’s way. It’s a multitude of little things, from how you always sit in the middle of rows in the amphitheater and wait until everyone’s cleared out to leave, to how you keep close to the walls in the hallways, eyes usually on the floor, to how, on the couple of occasions when your voice can be heard in class, it’s only after the professor’s been waiting for an answer for an increasingly embarrassing amount of time.

The first time it happens — the first time Minho notices it happening, anyway — he has to make you repeat yourself louder, and it seems almost painful for you to raise your voice.

Then there’s that time when someone accidentally backs into you and the books and papers you’re carrying spill onto the floor.

“Shit, sorry,” they say, and you reply immediately, like it’s a reflex, “Oh, it’s nothing, don’t worry about it”, but afterwards, as you kneel next to the papers, you let out a defeated sigh, just staring at the mess for a few seconds. And that’s when Minho can’t stay in place anymore.

“Oh, thanks, you don’t have to do that,” you say, again, with that cadence that makes him feel like these are sentences that pour out of you without you getting much of say, so deeply ingrained in you that you can’t control them.

Then you glance up at him, and your eyes widen, little mouse caught in the cat’s gaze. He feels his lips curving into a grin. You recognize him, and you’re being very obvious about it too.

Cute.

“Thank you,” you repeat, taking your stuff from his hands and dipping your head to stop looking at him once you get control of yourself again.

“Vanilla latte, right?” he asks, and he probably shouldn’t be this amused by the way your head snaps back up and you freeze, but it’s— It’s kind of adorable. Though you’re obviously trying to reign yourself in, there is something so sincere about it that he can’t help but be enticed by it.

“Um,” you say. “Yes.” And then you visibly search for something to say next, rolling your lips together as if they’ll figure something out of a list of socially acceptable answers. As fun as this is, Minho decides to put you out of your misery.

For now anyway.

“I’ll give you a discount on the next one,” he says, and then he’s gone before you can start saying “You don’t have to do that”.

He actually slides the next one to you over the counter and tells you that it’s ‘on the house’. You hesitate for a few seconds, and he thinks you’re going to refuse, before you bow your head politely and thank him for it. You don’t quite look up at him after that, but a bright smile has spread on your lips.

Cute, he thinks, again, and then he doesn't think of it much at all. A part of his brain was intrigued by the novelty that you represented, and that part has been satiated now.

At least, that’s what he assumes.

You get his attention again a few weeks later. It’s fairly early in the morning and, as Minho does whenever he gets a chance, he’s behind the half abandoned building near the café, setting up some food for the cats that have taken residence here. It’s something he’s not really allowed to do, but also he’s never asked permission, so no one's told him that yet, which means that he’s not not allowed to do it either.

Still, when he hears footsteps approaching as he’s surrounded by a chorus of meows, there’s a part of him that considers making a run for it.

But then he’d have to run.

Which he doesn’t like doing.

You appear at the corner of the building before he’s made his decision. When your eyes meet, he half expects you to turn around and pretend you haven’t seen him. He’s pretty sure you’ve done that after a class, recently. You swallow, but you keep walking towards him, kneeling by his side and petting the cats as the braver ones rub themselves against your legs.

Whoever said that the surest way to a man’s heart was through his stomach clearly wasn’t obsessed with cats, because liking cats is maybe the most important requirement for Minho.

“Hi,” you say, at a surprisingly normal volume, and then, cadence a little too fast, “I have some cat food.”

Is it weird that he finds that attractive? It’s probably weird.

“Have you been stalking me?” he says more than he asks, vaguely aware of the fact that there’s something ironic about him saying those words.

Your eyes widen and you quickly shake your head.

“No! I— have classes in there,” you point at the building, “and I’ve— seen you come around here. We’ve been told we couldn’t feed the cats,” you add with a slight pout. “We still do it when we can get away with it, but it's good that someone is also taking care of them.”

And you break the law for the sake of cats. Isn’t this amazing.

“I can help you buy food,” you say. “If you’d like.”

He doesn't reply right away, and when the silence stretches a second too long, you start speaking again, faster and your voice lower now.

“Or not, you know, I don’t want to impose anything, I mean, I didn’t want to intrude—”

On the one hand, that seems more like you, based on the glimpses of you he’s been getting, and on the other, he’s not sure how to shut that down. The truth is, he can barely fit the expenses in his budget. He literally can't afford to refuse your help — but he doesn't think he’d do it if he could.

“You can help,” he says, interrupting you in the middle of a sentence where you’re basically apologizing for existing, and that seems to knock the breath out of you.

“Oh,” you say, “that’s good.”

He wonders if you walk into interactions with a prepared set of sentences and panic when anyone goes off script. That sounds kind of exhausting.

“I’ll bill you,” he adds, and the feeling he gets when you let out a light laugh is one he can’t quite explain. There’s a sense of pride in it, but also some much deeper satisfaction at the feeling of having gotten you to let that guard slip, even for just a few seconds.

“I have to go to class,” you say, getting up while you rummage through your tote bag to hand him a package of dry food. “But I’ll, uh, see you around?”

There’s an expectancy to your tone, a hope even. He wonders if you’re aware of it. Either way, that sincerity, which he’d noticed before, remains pleasantly refreshing.

“Sure,” he says.

The next time you show up at the coffee shop, Friday a few minutes after six, like always, he has your vanilla latte ready.

After that, Minho finds it fascinating to see how differently you react to him, depending on the situation. Every now and then, you meet him behind the building, usually early in the morning, before there are too many people around. They would probably recognize you, and then you’d get in trouble, you explain. Your voice is lighter then, your body more relaxed. You manage to chat with him, to make small talk.

‘Manage’ really is the word for it, because your behavior is worlds apart when he sees you in class. It’s clear by now that this just isn’t your element, so you stick to your script, and Minho just isn’t a part of it. He doesn’t take it too personally, considering that no one else seems to be either.

It’s obvious to him that you get there with the objective of being in and out of the building as efficiently as possible, and with as little interaction with others as you can get away with. He does approach you still on a couple of occasions, one of them being when the classes before yours ran late and everyone was waiting in the hallway. You're focused on your phone then, and you jump when he says your name.

“How are you doing?” he asks, leaning against the wall next to you.

“Oh,” you say, which he thinks is just your filler word to give yourself time to figure out what to say next. “Um. Good. How are you?”

“Good.”

Someone else would bristle at the awkwardness of the exchange, but Minho is mostly amused by it. After a few seconds of very visibly searching for something to say, you come up with “…and how are the cats?”, though your tone is hesitant, unsure.

“They’re good too,” he grins. “Went to visit them this morning. Also, I might have found an association that could them spayed.” He certainly can’t afford to pay for it.

“That’s great,” you say.

This time, he’s the one who takes it upon himself to save the conversation, casually pulling his phone out of his pocket.

“Wanna see my cats?”

You light up at the question, and Minho feels the same sort of pride he does when Dori jumps into his lap to ask for pets — instead of ungratefully evading him like the little shit he is.

It doesn’t last long, the class before yours ends soon, and after that you get back to your ‘just getting in and out’ state. It’s almost physical when it happens. The smile disappears from your lips as you press them together, you straighten your back, but the most impressive change is the way your eyebrows tighten, a small line forming between them. Minho almost wants to reach out to wipe it from your forehead, but he doesn’t. Baby steps, that’s what you need, not him invading your personal space by that much.

He doesn’t ask himself, even for a second, why he’s willing to go through that much trouble to get closer to you. He just goes with the flow, as he always has, and that works fine for him.

He doesn’t sit next to you in class, thinks it would only stress you out more, make you too aware of his presence and of how you react to it. Instead, he takes a spot right in front of you, where he can’t see you but can easily check on you if he wants to — which he does. He refrains from doing it too much though, because on more than one occasion, he caught you looking at him, and you averted your eyes quickly, acting a little too invested in your note taking.

He still thinks it’s cute, but he doesn’t want to make you go in hiding, so he holds himself back.

Which comes back to bite him in the ass, rudely, when the teacher announces that he wants people to work in pair for an assignment.

He turns around to ask you to work with him, and sees, right in front of his eyes, as the guy sitting next to you asks you the same thing in a casual manner. You reply too fast, one of your knee-jerk answers, he can tell, but it’s still done before he even got the time to open his mouth. He also knows, instinctively, that you’ll feel embarrassed if he asks you now, so he doesn’t, turning to his own neighbor while holding back the strange urge to hiss at the guy.

…maybe he spends too much time with cats, actually.

Minho’s fine with the situation. He is. He still gets to be around you some mornings, and you now look him in the eye when you place your order at the coffee shop. You also don’t recoil as much as you used to when he leans over the counter, ostensibly to flirt with you — though he’s like, 98% sure you haven’t realized that’s what he’s doing. He’s making progress in getting you to feel more comfortable around him.

Sure, he missed an opportunity to spend more time around you in a relaxed setting, but is he upset about it? Does he get annoyed when he hears you talk with the guy behind him? Does hearing you chuckle at the guy’s stupid jokes, probably just to be polite, ‘cause he’s not that funny, make him want to claw the dude’s eyes out?

Well. Yes.

He’s been moody about it for days, to the point that Jisung pouted at him, asking him “what was wrong with him these days”, and Changbin looked him dead in the eyes to ask him if he needed help to get a girl, because he clearly needed to get laid.

A conversation he got out of by replying “do you want to die”, which is a card he’s maybe been playing a little too much these days.

He’s been in a good mood today, though. He’d seen you in the morning, and you’d helped him try to make a small shelter for the cats, because it had been announced that there would be heavy rain over the whole week-end. It had been a fun time, and maybe he’d used the opportunity to get closer to you than usual, enjoying how flustered it made you. Just brushing against you as he grabbed some planks you’d sneaked out of the building, totally accidentally touching your hand when you handed him something, that kind of things.

He had somewhat ruined the effect by accidentally dropping a plank on his foot, but that had made you laugh, so, it was— No, it still wasn’t worth it, he didn’t enjoy pain, but it made him slightly less annoyed about it.

So, as he waited for you in the coffee shop, as the skies outside darkened and fewer people than usual showed up, he wasn’t in as bad a mood as he’d been lately.

It started to rain at around half past five. He would have loved to run to get you with an umbrella, but he, unfortunately, needed his job. He did get a towel ready to hand to you, in case you didn’t have anything to protect yourself from the rain.

And then you came in.

Under an umbrella.

Which was in the hands of the one guy that was your partner in that one class.

Violent thoughts of murder flash before Minho’s eyes.

“Hey,” you say as you walk to the counter, giving him a bright smile, “this is Jooyeon, he’s in—”

“Class with us,” Minho completes with a smile that’s very much fake, “yes, I recognize him.”

Actually, technically, Jooyeon hasn’t done anything wrong, but it doesn’t help that he’s been looking at you and following you around like a damn puppy. What annoys Minho the most is probably the fact that you seem a lot chiller around him, a lot more natural than you are whenever Minho’s around. That’s— upsetting. He wants to see these sides of you, too, and not just from afar.

One vanilla latte and an americano later, you and Jooyeon sit by the window, in your usual spot, and Minho can’t stop himself from glaring. Jisung, or anyone, really, would call him out on it in a matter of seconds, because he’s not being subtle about it, but there’s no one around right now. The room, which is rarely full, is emptier than usual because most people rushed to get home to try to avoid the downpour.

That means that there is nothing to distract him from the intrusive thoughts that are trying to convince him to just throw something at Jooyeon. Anything would do.

When it starts becoming a little too tempting, and considering that he doubts anyone would brave the rain that’s falling at the moment, as thick as a curtain separating the coffee shop from the outside world, he decides to grab his computer and try to get some work done.

Of course, because some divinity out there must have decided to target him today, he’s just getting started and finding his rhythm when the lights flicker above him. He glances up. In the distance, the thunder rumbles.

There’s a flash outside.

And everything goes dark.

Fuck. His. Life.

With a sigh, he pulls out his phone to turn on his flashlight. At least, in this day and age, most people in the shop have the same idea, and soon enough he can see what’s happening.

“It’s probably just a power cut because of the storm,” he announces loudly, because it’s his responsibility to reassure the clients — if that had been something they’d tested for when he was interviewed, he would never have gotten the job. “Lights might come back on soon.” Or not, how would he know. “No reason to panic.”

He scans the faces of students, though he’s not sure what he’s looking for. Some people look worried, others, no doubt those who know that this happens semi-regularly on campus when there’s a storm, because why would your tuition pay to ensure that you have reliable electricity in here, just seem prepared to wait it out. Someone’s already gone back to tapping on their keyboard, though the sound of it is swallowed by that of the rain.

But then, he does a double-take, just to check on an impression that he had, and that confirms what he thought.

You’re not in the room. Most likely explanation is that you’re in the bathroom, but he has to imagine that it’s a pretty freaky experience, when all the lights turn off without warning and you’re all alone.

So, without thinking much about it, he makes his way in that direction. He’s hesitating in front of the door when it pushes open, and he’s suddenly blinded by cellphone light.

“Sorry!” he hears you apologize before he can make out your face. “I, uh, is the power out?”

“It looks like it,” he answers, and then his tone softens. “Are you okay?”

There’s a few seconds of silence, and he can’t quite discern your expression, because you’ve both lowered your lights. He resists the urge to reach for you, to inspect you to see for himself that everything is fine.

“I’m fine,” you answer. “I just—”

Then there’s the crack of thunder, and you jump, gasping, before closing your eyes in obvious annoyance.

“Fuck,” you say, and he wonders if it’s the first time that he’s ever heard you swear. And if it’s weird that he’s kinda into it.

“You scared of storms?” he asks, trying his best to contain the amusement in his voice.

“No,” you protest, a little defensively. “I don’t like being surprised— Fuck!”

Minho knows he shouldn’t laugh, that making fun of you could ruin the trust he’s been trying to build this past month, but at your annoyance for letting yourself be taken by surprise, and considering your obvious lack of fear, he can’t help it. It comes out higher than his usual pitch, a little airy. You roll your eyes at it, but you don’t seem to miss the humor in the situation, because a smile forms on your lips as well.

At that point, because he isn’t one to let an opportunity slip, he reaches out to take your hand in his. Your palm is soft, if somewhat calloused on the spot under your fingers, and after the first moment of surprise, you squeeze his hand in response.

“It’s okay,” he says. “It should be over soon.” Then a pause. “Or maybe we’ll be stuck here until we have to decide who we’re going to eat.”

You laugh at that, brief and light, and as cliché as it is, Minho thinks that is quickly becoming one of his favorite sounds in the world. Especially when he’s the one making you laugh, and not that jackass Joo— Ah, the kid hasn’t technically done anything, and it feels silly to blame him when you’re here with your hand in his.

So he’ll let it go. For now.

As much as he would like to stay here with you, in the dark, away from everyone else, Minho unfortunately has stuff he needs to take care of right now.

“Wanna go back with the others? I think I have to keep an eye on them.”

“Sure,” you say. You don’t attempt to take your hand from his, and so he pulls you along with him. He’s not going to let go if you won’t.

Things in the café are still quiet, and people don’t pay a lot of attention when the two of you come back, except for Jooyeon, who gets up from his seat.

“That must have taken you by surprise,” he says with empathy. “Everything okay?”

“All good,” you reply warmly, and there’s a pinch in Minho’s chest again. “I think we’ll have to postpone the session though. I’ll let you know when I’m free, if that’s okay with you?”

Ugh. Minho tunes Jooyeon’s response out, only waiting for an opportunity to whisk you away. He probably shouldn’t feel this strongly about it, is aware that you’re entirely within your own rights if you want to pick Jooyeon over him, but from his perspective, that doesn’t mean he has to let it be an easy decision to make. He’s not the type to lie down and just watch as that happens.

So the second Jooyeon’s eyes flick back to his computer, Minho’s taking you towards the counter with him. He checks the register once he’s there — which he definitely shouldn’t have let unattended without verifying that it couldn’t be accessed without electricity, oops, his bad — and after having confirmed that everything’s fine, his eyes go back to you.

The spike in his heart rate when he finds you already staring at him surprises him a little. He supposes that he can’t be that jealous without also having that sort of reaction to you. It’s not… unpleasant, actually, though the strength of it surprises him. It’s not the kind of emotion he usually welcomes, he’s used to them feeling less sharp, duller. But he doesn’t reject that one.

Gently, he rubs the back of your hand with his thumb, enjoying the feeling of your skin against his.

“Is there an issue between him and Jooyeon?” you ask, voice soft.

Ah. For someone who’s so completely oblivious about his interest in you, you were sure quick to notice that.

“You could say that,” he replies, and you frown.

“I didn’t know that,” you say, words coming out slow, like you’re figuring out what to say as you go, instead of defaulting to your usual pre-built answers. “Can I ask why?”

Minho raises an eyebrow. Then, wordlessly, he shifts himself so that you’re against the counter, with him standing in front of you. It’s interesting, because he’s almost exactly in the spot where he is every day, and every time he steals glances at you to make his day marginally better. He puts his hands on either side of you, hears you take a sharp breath.

“Is it okay if I kiss you?”

His voice comes out soft and muted, and as he asks, he feels something squeeze at his heart. Maybe because he’s not sure of what you'll answer. Maybe because he could have misread you, thought that you were oblivious when the truth was that you weren't interested. He could be keeping you away from your one true love, Jooyeon, who you’re going to go on to marry and have three k—

“Yes,” you squeak.

Ok, never mind.

Technically you’re in public, but it’s not like anyone’s looking your way, or like they'd see something other than silhouettes when he leans towards you.

It feels so natural when he kisses you. You lift your arms to wrap them around his neck, his hands find their place on your hips. Much to his surprise, you’re the one who presses yourself into him, lips moving softly against his, and it sends a jolt of electricity through his body. Suddenly there’s urgency running through his veins, desire, and his fingers dig harder into you. He kisses you with more intensity, like he’s trying to get rid of any space left between the two of you, and the soft sigh you let out only spurs him on further.

He’s seconds — fractions of seconds — away from doing something stupid when laughter and claps fill the room.

He parts from you, feeling his ears and cheeks turning red already, and discovers that the lights treacherously turned back on, and everyone is looking at the two of you. Protectiveness rushes through him, and he’s about to say something snappy, thinking that you’d be uncomfortable with it, when he realizes that you’re doubled over in laughter. Yes, you look a little embarrassed, but mostly, you seem fine with it.

Which is good, because otherwise he thinks he might have lost the shop a number of customers.

Everyone looks amused and happy for the two of you. Even Jooyeon’s grinning, though the look he gives Minho says, essentially, “Oh that was your problem”. It doesn’t capture people’s attention very long, but there’s something very sweet and human about the moment and how happy it seems to make everyone. Some regulars even exchange glances that seem to mean ‘I told you so’. Ha, he didn’t think he’d ever become campus gossip.

Once there are fewer eyes on the two of you, Minho leans towards you.

“I’ll take you on a date anywhere, as long as it’s not to get coffee.”

Your face lights up.

“I’d love that.”

Working at a coffee shop is not something that Minho finds very fun. Someone who enjoys human interactions more than him might, but it just feels very repetitive to him. Doing the same movements, asking the same questions, having to deal with the same issues from asshole customers who are different but also fundamentally the same person. The ding of cash register, the one of no contact credit cards, the buzzing of the coffee machine. It’s repetitive, but in a way that fills and numbs the mind.

There’s just one sound that he minds a little less now, and it’s the one the door makes when it opens.

Because, every now and again, it means that you’ve just come in.

“Hey,” you say as you reach the counter. You’re smiling so bright, and he loves it because he knows that it’s another one of those things that you can’t help. You’re smiling because he makes you happy, and isn’t that the best thing in the world?

“Dating the barista doesn’t entitle you to free coffee,” he says as he slides your vanilla latte over to you, though he has used his employee discount on everything you’ve ordered lately and he would very much give it to you for free if you didn’t insist on paying for your own stuff.

“We’re still on for tonight?” you ask, taking the coffee from the table.

“You think I’d let you get out of it?” he replies, and you laugh, before taking off to go to your usual table.

After that, he keeps going, keeps doing the same movements, asking the same questions, hearing the same noises. But sometimes, he glances in your direction and finds you focused on your computer, biting your lower lip as you’re deep in thought, or looking at him with a smile, and it makes it all more bearable.

Because you give him something to look forward to.

Taglist: @lethallyprotected @jisuperboard

[madockisser]

Locke and Cardan parallels/ their relationship w Jude and eachother short assumptions!

someone sent me an ask abt Locke and i wanted to post this first so i could get my thoughts straight!

1st of all, cardan and locke both stole jewelry from Jude. Locke, who stole the earrings that Jude was going to give Taryn on her wedding day. And cardan, who stole Jude’s ring that madoc had given her.

Now think, the motivations behind the theft. Firstly, Locke stole from Jude only after ANONYMOUSLY attacking her.

Cardan on the other hand did it to her face, mockingly as he pressed her hand to his lips.

I love that this totally says that Locke and cardan are opposites, not just their motivations, but their mannerisms and behaviors.

Jude from the start thought that Locke was kind and charming, and that cardan was cruel and awful. But things totally switch around as the books progress. It becomes reversed, where Locke is cruel and awful, and cardan is charming and kind.

and notice how i emphasized “anonymously” because (and i may be reaching) locke hid his true intentions the entire series. Him being a major op who got Jude kidnapped was actually pretty wild.

Now the entire series, Jude thinks cardan is this totally mysterious and cruel, ready to lash out sorta faerie, and that’s only half true. But Jude was always pretty blind about him, when he was kind to her, she assumed it was a trick.

but cardan was himself with her for the most part, especially as the series progress. locke on the other hand was- i guess you could say “wearing a mask,” like when he stole from her.

The second parallel would be the dresses.

In the cruel prince, Locke carelessly gives Jude a rotted dress, and she thinks that its a very kind gesture, since the dress was his mothers.

Perhaps she thinks that because faeries are so rarely kind and give things away, but Locke acted very dismissive, saying that the dresses were rotted.

now me personally, i think that he really just wanted Jude to play along so he could further fabricate this tale that Jude was very fond of him. I dont think he saw it as a kind gesture, just an opportunity to further torment cardan, who Locke knew wanted Jude at this point. Locke knew since the tournament.

Anyway, cardan on the other hand, and i almost feel like this was a response to jude wearing locke’s mother’s dresses, had a beautiful royal gown made for jude, with gemstones and personal details (Jude’s balcony)

Now i LOVE this, for several reasons besides the obvious.

Cardan took lockes idea of giving jude a dress and made it not just his own, royal and princely and perfect, but he made it JUDES own.

Whereas Locke just gave jude his mothers dress. It’s to be noted that lockes mother died horribly, after becoming a lover to both the high king and the high kings son.

Which honestly feels intentional, but i could be reaching.

Locke is aware that his mother died because he presumed that she had the high kings baby, and that he didn’t want it born. Or someone didn’t want it born. we don’t know the details of lockes knowledge, BUT we know that Locke has access to the ghost, and I’m not sure that the ghost was physically able to tell Locke WHO was responsible, but Locke seemed to just blame the royal family (the high king who got her preg, then cardan who was convenient to torture instead of the high king)

It’s like he is torturing cardan by taking the tale of his mothers death and twisting it onto Jude. Making himself the high king in the story, and Jude the victim/lockes mother- and mayybbbe trying to make cardan out as the villain, like cardan is the one that offed lockes mom in the story, even though Locke was actively hurting Jude? (idk abt this one guys but I’m just trying to think from his perspective here!)

to him, he’s totally tormenting cardan by doing so (for his little story!) of course, cardan knows the truth of lockes mothers death, so he was probably just irritated that Locke had her in his house w him in the first place lol

anyway I’d have to go back to my books to know the exact details (so i might be totally wrong here) but I’m too comfy rn lol

BUT what I’m trying to say is that Locke and cardan seemed to be activley competing for Jude (this is lowkey super cute lol even if it’s fucking evil of locke) Locke, who was competing to charm Jude to torture her and cardan, and cardan who was just trying to win jude over.

anyway idk, this was a hot fucking mess so my bad, but if you managed to understand the weird shit i just spewed, great! feel absolutely free to add on or correct me! 🫶🫶🫶

[mothsakura]

Thinking of Watcher DLC...

It's been 4 months and I am still thinking of Watcher DLC, so I am just gonna yap here- this is mostly my speculation. i need watcher dlc to come out auughhh i neeeed it i neeed it i need more rain world I NEEED MORE RAIN WORLD !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THE HYPERFIXATION IS HYPERFIXATING !!!!!!!!!!!!

Trailer details:

First, the trailer

I want to bring attention to 3 things: -poleplant -rot -void theme/watcher coming out of the shadows First I'll start with the pole plant as it will be easiest to explain. This most definitely takes place before saint's campaign, as I have not seen pole plants (I believe they went extinct?) in saint's campaign. Further details about the timeline are with the blue lizard's typical appearance (lizards look slightly different in saint's campaign), which too suggests that this is at least before saint. (Also lack of snow but I think that is too obvious) The rot is another thing I wanna focus on. We only see rot originate from two things: the iterators, and failed purposed organisms. The rot is also not specific to pebbles, as iterators have already known about the rot before pebbles got it. We can assume that we are either near an iterator district, or directly in it (judging by machinery and pipes in the background.). Now who is this potential new iterator? I am unsure, but I know it's definitely not pebbles' and moon's district both due to the screenshots on the steam page, and the fact that we've already explored all major plot points in pebbles' and moon's stories, adding more to their stories would be a rather bold move. Last thing, void themes and seemingly watcher's ability to come out of the shadow. I believe these two are connected. Although I have no clue what watcher's ability is, and what it has to do with void, but perhaps watcher can camouflage themselves in the shadows similar to how white lizards blend into their environment? Perhaps this ties into the void theme somehow? Although really I am unsure for this one.

Steam page, specifically the description:

"Rain World: The Watcher is a DLC expansion of Rain World. Journey beyond to something, somewhere only ever glimpsed. When the world beneath your feet cracks and crumbles, will you hold on to all you once knew? Or dive into the unknown?

The wilds that await will be unlike all that's come before.

Unknown creatures stalk and climb and dive and hunt. New breeds rip and pluck and burrow and hide. Predator and prey redefined. And through the middle of it all, a lonely lost slugcat trying their best to outlast the ravages of a warped world."

"Journey beyond to something, somewhere only ever glimpsed." caught my attention first. This further proves that this will not be in pebbles' and moon's district. However the last part, only ever glimpsed, suggests we know about this new place at least by some extent. Perhaps we have heard about it in character dialogue? Perhaps it is one of the districts of iterators we already know (NSH, Suns, UI, CW, SoS, and all the miscellaneous broadcast ones)? I believe that the latter is the case, especially with UI (close to pebbles, justifies the rot? also I am coping because UI has no lore), NSH (unsure how rot will tie in to him, but we have definitely heard a lot from him) or Suns (once again unsure how the rot will tie in, but we have heard from them a lot too). "The wilds that await will be unlike all that's come before." too shows that we are definitely gonna be in a new place. Another thing, the "when the world beneath your feet cracks and crumbles," this can either be a metaphor for a major change, or quite literally some kind of collapse or disaster. Honorable mention to warped world, also playing into the major change metaphor, or some kind of disaster.

"Unknown creatures stalk and climb and dive and hunt. New breeds rip and pluck and burrow and hide." I believe there will *definitely* be new creatures as well, some perhaps using the sand (and... salt... i think?) to burrow, and jump out at ya' like a dropwig or stalk ya' like a white lizard, or swoop down at ya' like a vulture! Except it's gonna be new variants or perhaps some new creatures altogether!

Screenshots:

I do not have much to say about this except for "this isn't pebbles' or moon's district", which has become more and more clear by now. I am very curious about this pink place however:

Why is it so pink? Is this iterator machinery or some kind of mast / tower / tall place ? Why can we not see any fellow iterators. I believe, the regions shown in the screenshots are still wips to some extent, so if this is the case, perhaps video cult and the dev team have yet to add iterators.... if not, I wonder where exactly this place is? Is it far far away from iterators? Is it facing somewhere an iterator cannot be built? WHY IS IT SO PINK!!! I unfortunately do not have much else to say about screenshots aside from they're very funky and I cannot wait to play Watcher DLC................................... I need watcher dlc omfg I need more rain world this hyperfixation is no joke......... I hope this ramble has been at least to some extent comprehensive, and that I did not make myself sound like a fool trying to seem too smart XD If ya'll have anything to add on, or speculate on other details, please please do in the notes or comments!!!

[atopvisenyashill]

Why do you think Jaehaerys sexually assaulted his own daughter?( I'm genuinely curious)

I have two dedicated tags to this if you want to dig in a bit more - "gael and the bard" and the newly added "jaehaerys the cruel" tags, with this meta here being the kind of jumping off point into that whole theory/analysis. gael and the bard is more focused on gael targaryen herself and the mystery surrounding her pregnancy and suicide; there's a lot of bael the bard imagery surrounding her, being called the winter princess, gael being one letter off from bael, the father of her baby noted to have been a singer, and her status as like, an eternal maiden because of her relationship with alysanne. the jaehaerys the cruel moniker is just a reference to maegor the cruel - i think the play between maegor being outwardly monstrous and jaehaerys being privately monstrous is very interesting! but also it's not like a fun tag name lol so i might change it, haven't decided yet!

but i guess to break down my thought process here - i have never liked that man lmaoooo, i am an og jaehaerys hater. my lil journey here is, i read this series in high school, roughly around the winter of 2012, but i didn't read twoiaf when it came out in 2014, i read that just before i started this blog, so like....idk 2 years ago, roughly, but i was Aware Of Its Existence (they didn't have it at school, the library was kind of far, and it felt like a stupidly expensive book to ask for at the time). i had kinda skimmed over the short stories the princess & the queen and the rogue prince (don't ask me when they came out, icr), and had read all the twow preview chapters so it wasn't like i wasn't up on all the asoiaf world stuff, i just hadn't been able to get my hands on twoiaf, which I do think impacted my view of jaehaerys because the thing is...i just didn't understand the jaehaerys appeal. i won't get into the wanky aspects of fandom (i mean i will if someone asks but idk if you care lol), but i would say in the like 2010-2014 era the fandom was p staunchly and loudly pro targaryen, and not just in a "i love the rot" way but in a "they are the promised heroes" type of way and i never jived with it. i did not enjoy the vast majority of dany's chapters on my first read, nor did i enjoy this weird "well if you like the starks you're a NORMIE" takes that i was constantly seeing, and the sansa v arya war was insane (i'm blocked and have blocked just so many people lol).

i say all that because everyone was UP jaehaerys' ass. i won't name names but i remember a common rebuttal to the "well george is kinda critiquing incest-in-fantasy here and i'm not sure this series is going to end with an incestuous targ restoration" stance was "well if incest is so bad why do jaehaerys and alysanne exist huh? check AND mate incest hater" and it was like............alright, so this is a fandom of deeply unserious people who like to think they are the Expert On Themes instead of just another schmuck with a blog like everyone else. it was just a very condescending tone, always, and it turned me off the targs but especially turned me off jaehaerys.

and it was also like....but what has he done to be so beloved in this fandom??? again, this is pre twoiaf, and then post-twoiaf but pre f&b, so all we know about this dude is that he was called the conciliator because he pardoned the people who sided with maegor, he "protected the faith", he married his sister who gave the watch the gift, he abolished prima noctus, he built a dirt road, he was besties with barth. okay? i always thought the move with the gift was annoying and goofy behavior & i feel very vindicated on being right there esp if aegon’s dream was real, and i’ve always thought the marriages for his kids were kinda weird once we got those in twoiaf and WHAT DO YOU KNOW. like, pre twoiaf everyone was hyping him up as this great king, this paragon of valyrian supremacy, oh he’s so smart and politically minded but he’s not overly cruel, and it was like. we know little about this man in his day to day life though. we know damn well whatever good robert did as king was largely jon arryn's influence so Why are we pretending like just because jaehaerys passed a few good laws it means HE was the one responsible for those ideas (and again I WAS RIGHT). is what he’s doing even that good??

AND THEN FIRE AND BLOOD CAME OUT. and everyone was crying screaming throwing up about how stupid he is, how cruel he is, how weird he is about his daughters, and then people started saying “well you’re being unfair if you don’t like him because-“ i don’t give a shit because i’m validated for not liking that man’s vibes thanks!!!! like…yeah he IS a paragon of targaryen supremacy and this is not a good thing! and especially when you factor in how often the patriarchs of the series have these deeply rooted, very disturbing flaws, i thought the backlash to f&b re: “he ruined jae & aly!” so silly. of COURSE he was weird about his daughters, he eloped with his 12 year old sister and when confronted over it basically said “i do what i want fuck you” that’s not romantic it’s INSANE BEHAVIOR and i’ll stand on that forever!!! marrying your siblings is deranged and idgaf about what magic or political reasoning they have ESPECIALLY when jaehaerys himself refuses a valyrian marriage several times over when it makes more political sense to go that route (in both his own marriage and in the marriages of his grandchildren).

so! i always thought he was boring and weird, then f&b came out and i was vindicated. the thing is, as i read, i guess i was also like. but what is the fuckijg POINT of this guy! he dominates the f&b narrative when there’s way more interesting characters, he has no redeeming qualities, every good thing he does is usually overshadowed by his reasoning being heinous and disturbing, but this book is pushing this idea that he’s the good one, he’s the blueprint, so is it JUST an exploration of like, what ~being a good person~ really means and how reputations & history are very malleable depending on who is recording it??

And then i really started to dig into Saera. Her isolation, her drinking, her sexually tormenting the court fool, the way jaehaerys is always giving her gifts and "indulging" her, the way she's brought before the throne instead of in a private room because what she did is considered like, treasonous basically (what she did being, of course, having sex without her father's permission, lmao!), her very hysterical confrontation with her parents, Jonquil Darke forcing her to watch her boyfriend be murdered, Jaehaerys' insistence on refusing to forgive her and calling her a whore, and of course this weird exchange:

“What have you done?” the king said, when at last the princess ran out of words. “Seven save us, what have you done? Have you given one of these boys your maidenhead? Tell me true.” “True?” said Saera. It was in that moment, with that word, that the contempt came out. “No. I gave it to all three. They all think they were the first. Boys are such silly fools.”

"They all think they were the first." they all think it. i don't think any of those three boys were the first - i think she'd lost her virginity well before she started fooling around with them and when I first read that part my first thought was "I think Jaehaerys knows damn well who she lost her virginity to" and I started spiraling from there.

I decided to do a write up of Jaehaerys Being Deeply Weird Towards His Girls and while there's some things I would change - in particular, I think I'd add more to the Alyssa, Viserra, and Gael sections - there's a reason that the Saera section in particular seemed to really spark off a lot of conversation (not to toot my own horn here lmao) and that reason, imo, is that a lot of people read about what happened between Saera and jaehaerys and go "now what in the goddamn hell is THAT about." Saera more than any of Jaehaerys' kids is imo the canary in the coal mine, so to speak - whatever George intended with F&B, I do think he meant for us to look at the way Jaehaerys talks about Saera and go "this guy has some fucking ISSUES." I don't know that he meant for it to go all the way up to "Jaehaerys is molesting his own kids" route but I do fully believe he meant something in that realm of "Jaaehaerys is cruel to a sexually abusive point to his children" the same way that like, Tywin and Cersei sexually abuse Tyrion but don't outright rape him themselves. I think Jaehaerys was always meant to be aman who is remembered fondly but was an absolute monster in his private life, in contrast to both the kings he succeeded (maegor and aenys) and as a point of comparison to our "modern day" patriarchs who have their own hang ups surrounding their daughters in Tywin, Doran, Ned, Robert, Jon, and Hoster.

[demodraws0606]

WxS THEORY : Rui is driving himself into a corner

Ok I needed to make a big rambly analysis post again because I just read this post that absolutely rotted my brain (pls check it out) -> https://www.tumblr.com/sankatsuka/741871319388389377?source=share

I kinda want to share my overall thoughts on how Rui is being written overall and what I think it could possibly lead to.

Introduction.

So okay... we can agree how colorpalet writes Rui is weird as shit right ?

Like, this is very obvious when you look at Rui's two most recent events Backlight and Curtain. Both of them actually end on cliffhangers, leaving things open ended with hints at future problems. In fact Curtain Call's consequences haven't been fully addressed yet as Rui still hasn't talk about Asahi to WxS and we know he's coming back.

However, it's not just that that could be pointed out as strange, in fact, in both of these events Rui fails.

In Curtain Call, he fails to understand his own feelings as he accepts to join Arcland.

In Backlight, he fails to understand how to fix the issue in the movie

Not only that but those events both show Rui isolating himself from WxS (with varying levels of severity) trying to figure out the problem and fix it. Often to the point where WxS get mildly concerned for him and want to help him (again with varying levels of severity).

Both of these events seem to show that Rui is stuck on something, there is a reason why he can't seem to solve the problems that he's facing weither major or minor.

So, clearly there is a reocurring problem right ? If Rui seemingly keeps on failing then colorpalet has to be setting up something.

With Curtain Call it seemed like what they were setting up was some kind of confrontation about the disbandement but Rui is weirdly set aside in the Emu's event. Which it doesn't feel like a mistake considering they chose to make it an Emu event instead of Rui on purpose when they couldn't have it be a Tsukasa focus.

In Happy End, Rui's communication with WxS is very limited. His feelings never get personally confronted as he mostly just attempts to try and fix the situation until he's met with rejection to which he just very much gives up. It's only when Emu's brothers offer an olive branch that Rui finally jumps at the opportunity to speak.

However, despite it being a hopeful step forward...it doesn't fix Rui's issues here. In fact he withdraws from even speaking about his situation with Asahi which for me is the baseline of Rui being honest with his feelings.

Sure, he does end up helping in Happy End and his feelings are reafirmed but...he also fails here. His first plan to keep them together fails because he didn't communicate with them, it's Emu's brother that truly end up coming up with a solution at the end.

So what is Rui's problem ? What is the red flag that colorpalet keeps waving ?

2. A concerning pattern

Post-Curtain Call helped highlight a very clear pattern with Rui.

It's a toxic mix between his abandonnement issues and self sacrificing nature.

Rui gets insecure a lot about how his potentialy missgivings could affect WxS, to the point where it's become a concerning pattern.

-Dazzling Light Event (and Nene Canary Event) : Rui gets insecure over not being able to be a suitable director for Tsukasa and hurting his acting in the process. This insecurity comes back again in Nene's fourth event in Rui's side card story.

-Shibuya fes with Mafurui : He almost hurts his fucking leg because he couldn't bear the idea that he could inconvenience WxS

-Disbandement Arc : He refused to talk to WxS about his feelings and still hasn't talked fully about them with Asahi. He literally isolated himself to make a plan to keep WxS together behind their back.

All of these show that Rui still has this fear that he could do something that would set him apart from WxS and that often influences his actions.

Rui's issue here is a lack of priority and a self sacrificial nature that borderlines on self destructive at some poiints. Everything he does is motivated in some sense by WxS.

Recently when he mentions his dreams and ambition like in Tsukasa's most recent event, he wants to make WxS shine. It's the subject of one of his early second art stickers.

"I'll bring out your strength"

Which... let's talk about Rui's dreams and amibitons.

3. Rui and his dream

A lot of people characterise Rui as extremely passionate which is true....or is it really ?

Okay here me out, I don't think we can deny he definitely has a lot of passion for what he does but we can't deny there is definitely something going on.

First of all, Rui is the only character where we don't really have an event of him trying to progress towards his dream, backlight is the first one and it shows him failing.

Second of all, Rui is the only one to have been ready to compromise his dream for WxS which has not been the case for anyone else in WxS. Sure Emu left Pheonix Wonderland, but she knows she'll come back eventually.

Which like leads me to this realisation with his second event specifically it's name, Revival My Dream.

The event where we see Rui at his happiest, fully comfortable in where he was compared to now.

His dreams has never just been to bring people smiles, what he always wanted was a way to connect with people with shows to have a group of friends that actually liked him and didn't reject him for being weird.

But he was bullied into accepting that he didn't actually care about other people, he rationalised that maybe accomplishing his dream alone would make him happy but his friends are part of his dream.

It's this conflict between his dream and his relationship with WxS that is fucking him up especially post-curtain call.

He has to support WxS, he has to be the reliable one, he has to figure out how they can still stay together...

But why ? Why does he put that responsibility in himself

Even then in the Backlight event he's so obsessed with finding the answer himself

Because he's still on that mindset, similar to wonder-halloween just a lot less severe. WxS saved him and they mean the world to him that he'll just allow to be trampled just to make them happy. In fact you see that with even more simpple fun moments with how he ate Touya's rancid cupcake just to make him happy, it's shown time and time again he will sacrifice his own needs for the needs of others to a dangerous point.

4. What it means for Rui's future

I think all these things will end up catching up to Rui

We saw this with Tsukasa, we saw his ups and downs of trying to improve and fight his insecurities led to him having a breakdown.

All these things just keep on building up and colorpalet is very unsubtle with how strange they are with his sad expressions in the tetrad 2dmv and his trained cards (which i can go deeper into).

This could go again in different ways but eventually WxS will have to confront him about it, finally make him communicate his feelings for once.

Again we still have Cyberpunk Deadboy and what it could signify for the future of Rui's arc which I already talked about

It's all just really strange and weird there are even stranger things that i could talk about but i'm eepy so i'll leave it at that lol

[this-acuteneurosis]

A 3-in-1 set of questions for Don't Look Back if you don't mind?

1) Is Duty Bound the last fic in the series? It's already heaps longer than the previous parts, and I'm wondering if it'll just keep growing and how close we are to the end of the AU story. (I kind of hope it's a while away because I just want to keep getting new chapters ;) )

2) Where about are we right now in the timeline relative to AotC and RotS / how long since the war started? I'm having a hard time keeping a sense of in-fic time.

3) Fun one: What is Shmi dressing like nowadays? I'm pretty sure she's not in her TPM grey dress, but what has she become comfortable wearing? Does she try different hairstyles or stick to her practical braided bun? For that matter, what does Leia wear when(/if) she's not in formal Senator's Assistant garb?

Good questions!

Duty Bound is not the last fic in the series. There is one more story after this with a current working title of We Will Not Wear Chains. I am desperately looking forward to the end of this arc and the start of the next and if I could just get my A plot to stop rewriting itself I might actually be able to get to part 4. Don't worry, there are plenty of chapters of this fic left.

We're close to 2 years since the start of Like Fire, give or take. This means literally nothing in terms of the timeline of the original canon since I've scrapped not only the majority of AotC and RotS plot canon, but also 98% of TCW. Time is an illusion. Mostly the important things to know are Leia showed up just barely older than Padmé and several years older than Anakin and every second she is in this timeline is a second that Sheev is that much closer to death.

Alright, general answer, but I will need to get back to you on this one because @saltkettling is my fashion consultant for all my stories and helps me keep my character's clothes and hair in line and I need to review notes with her one more time to refresh details. Essentially, both Shmi and Leia will have been impacted by Naboo dress standards, Shmi more by middle class ones with a bit of Tatooine flair, and Leia more by Padmé at this point. But Leia also has all of her historical clothing influences in her repertoire, including not only her Alderaanian influences, but also people she was very close to the last few years before her time travel shenanakins. She dresses very differently for anything where she's a representative of Padmé's office than for her personal, practical business.

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #38 – Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion

Didion is one of those canonical authors I always feel like I should already have read at some point (isn’t that what high school English class was supposed to be for). Of course this was a very vague feeling, and not attached to a single scrap of actual information about her and her work beyond the general time period and cultural milieu – so I grabbed this from the library and started it entirely blind (partially my own fault for skipping the introduction by a different and much worse author tbf). Fascinating book, artistically successful and emotionally affective, but not one I’m able to say I really found enjoyable, or even necessarily beautiful (it’s no Giovanni’s Room, to compare another bit of canonical latter-20th century high literature).

The book follows Maria Wyeth, an (increasingly former) actress in 1960s Hollywood, through her slow decline from up and coming starlet and wife of a prestigious young director to an enforced retirement as an isolated upscale sanitarium/hospital resort. Which is hardly a spoiler – the book starts at the end and jumps through the timeline freely, and in any case the whole thing feels telegraphed to the point of inevitability. Maria’s life in LA is contrasted with how she grew up in a tiny desert town in Nevada, so small it at some point stopped existing, and in the process more or less gives you the narrative of her life.

Which is as close to a plot as the book has, really. Maria and her internal monologue are the near-sole focus, and her view of the outside world and what’s happening around her basically always says more about her than the world. Watching Maria’s life falls apart really is watching a car crash in slow motion – you’re never really surprised at any point, but the shearing metal and flesh are hard to look away from.

The book’s very much capital-l Literature, here meaning that the style and prose is at least half the reason to read the book. The story’s told through short vignettes (I’m not sure a singe chapter was more than ten pages, whereas the vast majority were two or three) and the deliberate, generous use of white space, both figurative and literal. Maria is pretty relentless in her self-deception and lack of self-awareness, and in any case is quiet elusive and vague with descriptions of people and events – reading between the lines is quite necessary. This overall really does work for me - the imagery is vivid and memorable, and Maria’s head is a compelling and believable place to be.

It’s also just intolerable. I have no particular issue with deeply unsympathetic, tragically unselfaware, or wince-inducingly self-destructive characters, but Maria sure is all three of those to a degree I rarely see. More than that, she is just profoundly passive. It is, for me at least, far easier to be invested in operatic delusion and hubris leading to ruination than a just resolutely thoughtless and pettily cruel person letting her life rot around her. Which is a failure of literary empathy on my part, probably, but did make this a somewhat frustrating book to read. You’re left want to scream at Maria to just do something (anything!) that she isn’t led to by people around her like an ornery goat to water.

This is probably exacerbated by the supporting cast. Who are all very much portrayed as hopeless, clueless gamblers and unprincipled, hypocritical Hollywood decadents,, absolutely – but despite that, keep trying to reach out and offer her lifelines or support. Which is mostly surprising because she might literally not say a single kind word to another human being in the entire book, is relentlessly caustic in her internal monologue, and sure isn’t doing favours or advancing the career of anybody. The real tension of the book ends up not being whether or not she’ll destroy her life and more how long before everyone around her just lets her.

It’s a blisteringly cynical novel overall, really – both in its portrayal of individual characters and of society as a whole. I joked while reading it that it felt like American Psycho without a Patrick Bateman, and while that’s a bit too far – everyone’s still very recognizably human, most of whom do care about at least a few things besides status symbols and dick measuring contests – but the portrayals of Hollywood and Wall Street certainly feel like they rhyme.

Though the implicit politics of that cynicism do feel do feel very different here. Very possibly because the back cover called it something like ‘a blistering satire of the excesses of the ‘60s’ (paraphrasing from memory), but the book definitely ended up feeling very (socially) conservative, full of worries about broken families and marriages of convenience and just generally decadence. The whole plot where Maria gets a motel-room abortion to deal with the consequences of her affair which almost kills her, sends her spiralling into months of total, life-ruining depression, and destroys her relationship with both her husband and her paramour feels like something you’d only see coming out today in explicit pro-life propaganda, for example; certainly it’s a trope I’ve seen complained about more than (until now) I’ve ever actually seen done. The fact that Maria’s foremost redeeming feature is always her love for and desire to be with her (disabled and permanently hospitalized for vague reasons), and that the climax of the book is a suicide directly caused by infidelity, also. None of which should exactly be surprising, really – a book almost as old as my parents has dated opinions on social issues! - but for some reason I always expect canonical authors to have been free-wheeling libertines and bohemians.

Speaking of being written nearly sixty years ago – the time capsule quality of this book is positively fascinating. Which I say whenever I read something from before the millennium, but still – the ‘60s are still so profoundly mythologized I do love the chance to see anything written about them at the time, if only for ‘the past as a foreign country’ tourism reasons. The Hollywood of exploration, drug abuse, meaningless sex, vicious gossip and every combination of the above feels like it could almost be written about today, right up until the point where an easy divorce means finding an amenable judge and finding a witness to corroborate the husband’s admission of wanton emotional abuse (which becomes a stark reminder of how horrifying even a historical five minutes ago was when you consider what happens if you can’t meet any of those conditions). The illegal abortions, the utterly casual homophobia, the auteur theory being a hot new thing, the cult of the open road. It all adds up to an interesting effect.

Speaking of the cult of the open road – Maria’s only real sense of peace, happiness and self-control in the entire book is when she’s spending all day cruising the highway at dangerous speeds just for the sake of it, without itinerary or destination. No real coherent point to make, just that there’s something truly and incredibly American about that? The descriptions of the Nevada desert and highways, too.

But yeah, an expertly written novel that’s positively lovely in places (the opening monologue is near-sublime, for example), but not one that really awed or oved me the way some other literature has.

[cherrylng]

Green Day Interview - Warning era [ROCKIN'ON (September 2000)]

"Don't think rock is just dormant at the moment. I'm sure there's some energetic rock out there somewhere, properly, I'm sure. I'm sure it'll wake up and bite us in the ass again - and yes, if you still love rock ‘n’ roll, we've got some great stuff for you."

How will the ‘immortal little bastard punk spirit’, which has seriously entrusted its troublesome life to punk and continues to take on troublesome rock for life, manifest itself in this year 2000? We meet Green Day just before the completion of their new album ‘Warning’ and just before their Summer Sonic visit to Japan, with an undercover studio report and interview!!!

Interview & Text=Kenichiro Yanagi Interpretation/Photography=WILLIAM HAMES

"And I feel forgotten Feel like rotting (Do you feel the same?) Adolescence Just can't make sense" ‘Road to Acceptance - 39/Smooth’

Ten years have passed since Green Day sang this on their first album, released in 1990. I think it's quite a long time for everyone, and for Green Day, too, because when I subtract ten from my own age, it makes me laugh. Anyway, since 1990, ten years have passed, and now it's the year 2000.

Ten years. I've passed through my adolescence, when I was completely ‘out of touch’ but had a strange sparkle in that aspect, and I've said to myself, "It's been a long time since then, but I feel like nothing's changed," and then someone might say "The fact that you're saying things like that means you've gotten older," and I'd say, "I see," and think about it again, and then the next day I say to myself, "I'm not young anymore." That's a long enough time for that kind of flow to take hold. And in fact, most people live with it.

But the band Green Day seemed to be a bit different from us. They started their rock ‘n’ roll career with the idea that ‘maybe that trend can be managed with a driving beat and a melody?’ That was the starting point of their rock music. I think that was their way of rock, running so fast that you can't see what's in front of you, and staring at the scenery as it flows by. I think that's why they sang "Every time I look in my past, I always wish I was there" and "I wish my youth would forever last" [from the song "16"] on their first album. If you wish that, you might actually get it, haven't you ever wondered that? I think their early work was like that, and their first major album Dookie, which was full of that wish, sold a huge 10 million copies.

But that wish did not come true. It was a failure. It's no surprise. It is impossible to break the timeline in a strict time flow. It's good that they ran forward with such a wish and became popular, but as time passed, they stumbled, they were troubled, and they got tired. That's the kind of Green Day I was attracted to. They were rejected with comments like "You're not punk, you're going to go to the majors and try to sell yourself!", but at the same time they were praised with comments like "You're the punks! Our real punks!" - it fits the 'me' and 'you' who had no idea who they were. "There's no point in looking back at the past!" they said in an interview, but "I look into the past and I want to make it last / I was there" ("I Was There") - yeah, that's ‘me’ and ‘you’ again. Moreover, they continued to behave too honestly, even more than ‘me’ and ‘you’. Yes, Green Day were too honest a band to be labelled as "young punk." Their second album was full of negativity with the title ‘Insomnia’, and their third, "Nimrod", crawled out of it and returned with musical breadth and verve. Green Day, as a band, had created a clear passage of time - a band story. In the end, Green Day seem to me to be the band that has bitten off the passage of time more than anyone else. That's why they were proud to be ‘our band’.

This year, they will release a new album, their first in three years since "Nimrod". I was very interested in this news, as it seemed to me that with "Nimrod" they had put some of their own drama behind them. Green Day have run, stumbled, and bounced back - what exactly are they going to show us of themselves next? Although I was only allowed to listen to six songs at the moment, I applied for an on-the-spot interview and headed for Los Angeles.

Los Angeles, a certain day in June. As I arrived at the hotel and was preparing for the interview tomorrow, I got a call from a record company representative. "They say they're doing a live studio today. They might play a new song, so let's go and see it." I rush out by taxi to a studio in the city, but it turns out to be a recording for a programme called "MTV Influence." The show is about artists who talked about the artists who influenced them in their music, and then played covers of those artists. On a table outside the studio was a random CD. It was Hüsker Dü. Well, that's interesting, isn't it? I say hello to the three members of Green Day. The drummer, Tre, was drinking beer, joking around and messing with the staff whenever he had the chance. He suddenly took the cigarette from one of the staff, a very fat guy of KONISHIKI's size (but with a bullet wound in his shin), climbed up the ladder, and jumped onto the roof of the studio. Then he grins. "Take it if you can, fatty," he said, just like a little kid (but in the end, the fatty man manages to climb the ladder and take it). I saw the ‘marijuana’ tattoo on Mike's arm with my own eyes for the first time. It looked strangely dazzling. Billie is, as I thought, nothing but mischievous looking, but he still has a great deal of thoughtfulness about him.

But basically, all three of them were still giving off the same ‘fuck-you’ vibe, which made me irresistibly happy. But I also thought they must be getting a bit older (as you can see from the photos in this issue).

The three of them played "Don't Want To Know If You Are Lonely". Well, it's a sad song to begin with, but even more so when performed by Green Day. Even the title of the song seemed to have a sadness that had Green Day's stamp on it, and it was very moving.

After the recording was over, we all looked at the TV in the studio and saw a car on fire. And so is the crowd. It's a riot. "Where are we?" "Hey, downtown. The Lakers won today, and this is what happens when they win," said the staff member. Billie was staring at the TV screen, but when he looked at us, he said in a tone that it was hard to tell if he was joking or serious: "Welcome to Los Angeles!" I should have laughed, but for a moment I thought of his history as a street kid. I felt as if he was seriously telling me, "Well, this is what California is all about", so I couldn't really laugh.

I left the studio and returned to the hotel, but Los Angeles was in a state of chaos everywhere because of the Lakers' victory. The roads were filled with cars and honking horns in celebration. The asses of the girls were dazzling, and the men hanging out in the streets would only say "LAKEEEEEEERSSSS!!!!!" when they opened their mouths. I'm a complete Asian country bumpkin, silently turning on my 8mm camera. In the end, the horns didn't stop honking until late at night. "Welcome to Los Angeles!"

The next day. I headed to the office, which was 10 minutes from the hotel. After listening to six new songs, we moved to the studio and interviewed the three of them.

It's been 10 years since you released your first album. Well, maybe it's not really a milestone because it's been 10 years, but I think there must be some kind of emotion to it. Billie (B): 「It makes me feel like I'm getting old, hahahaha. But we made our debut so early. I was only about 16 when I started this band. So…… Yeah, we've changed a lot since we started, it's true. When you're a kid, it's like time stands still, you don't really think about the next day (laughs). So we really had no idea how long this band would last back then. All we knew for sure was that we wanted to be in this band now.」 Mike (M): 「We've always tried not to look too far into the future. And now we're trying not to look too far into the past.」

But in 10 years, I went from being a kid who listened to Green Day to now coming to you for an interview, looking like a big shot. Tre (T): 「So you're old now, too, hee hee hee hee hee.」

Hahahahaha. Now that you've been together for such a long time, what do you think of each other? Do you think you've changed? T: 「We still have a perfect relationship, like spoons lined up in a spoon holder in a cupboard.」 B: 「Hahahaha. But I think all three of us have grown as individuals. And we've started to want more time away from each other. That's what happens when you get older, you know? You want to do what you like, how you like it.」

I see. You mentioned ‘doing what I like’, but in terms of ‘doing what I like’, I think the situation in the American music scene has changed a lot in the last three years. B: 「There have been so many different bands that have come out over the past three years, and there have certainly been quite a few that I don't really understand. But on the other hand, there are also a lot of bands that are working hard and making energetic music. For example, the Foo Fighters and Red Hot Chilli Peppers. They've been doing it for years and they're still growing, you know? But to be honest, we have to concentrate on our own work. I think it's quite a narcissistic idea that we can control the whole music scene (laughs). You have to accept that there are good bands and bad bands. For every good band I find, I find another I don't like. You just have to think of it that way.」

That said, it's been said that rock music is getting smaller and smaller, with hip-hop, teen bands and pop tunes with female vocals all being embraced. Do you think this is a very sad situation? B: 「"Rock's shrinking stature"? I think it's just dormant. Besides, I'm sure there's a vibrant rock band out there somewhere. I don't think rock ‘n’ roll is going away, I think it's just hibernating like a bear at the moment and it'll wake up and come back to bite us in the ass. Well, if you like rock ‘n’ roll, leave it to us. We've got some great stuff for you.」

But why do you think hip hop and teen pop are so popular? B: 「Well, I don't know. I think it's the same reason as when Run-D.M.C. became big. It fits in with the times, and hits the key points of American culture. I think that's what it's about. And I think the American music scene is always cyclical in all its styles. Every ten years a really good rock ‘n’ roll band comes along and explodes in popularity, and every ten years another really popular hip-hop band comes along.」

Cyclical. B: 「Yeah. At this very moment, there's a cool band playing in a garage somewhere with a cool sense of humour and cool opinions. Nobody knows they exist at the moment, but one day they'll burst onto the scene and show us what rock ‘n’ roll is all about again. It's just a matter of time, so we can't get fed up with what's going on. Once you're fed up, you'll end up not being able to see what's on the other side of all the crap that's trending right now.」 M: 「But I'm sure when we were kids there were a lot more rock’n’roll bands. So the music that people are influenced by now is probably different from when we were kids, and I think it's even different when you're younger.」 B: 「Oh, and I think a lot of bands these days are very conscious of self-marketing. Compared to those who were active in the early 90s, for example, they have a totally different mindset, really. They're on TV all the time, and they're always praising themselves like it's a telephone shopping show.」

Yeah, and there are bands that just sing "I'm pissed off!" and don't know what to do next. B: 「I've thought about that too. I think you should always have a sense of humour no matter what.」 M: 「It's no fun to perform. Especially when you call yourself an ‘angry band’.」 T: 「People who get angry easily seem to get pissed off at everything around them. It doesn't matter what they're angry about. Of course, we're not a bunch of chumps or anything, but, you know, when it comes to ourselves, we have to look at it fairly objectively from all angles.」

I see. So, let's talk about the new album… B: 「Great! (laughs)」 M: 「Thank you! (laughs). All the songs are tremendously inspired by all sorts of things. We took a break and waited for Billie's moment of inspiration to write new songs to come naturally. We practised all the time, but we didn't force him to squeeze out new songs. So it just happened naturally. Everyone wants us to explain everything, like, "What did you write? How is it different from before? What's changed? Have you grown?" But all we can say is, "Listen, this is our next album, it's a Green Day album, it's a rock “n” roll album".」 B: 「We're really proud of this album. I think I'm at a good time in my life right now, and……. And we all worked really hard on it, so I think we deserve to be proud of it. But I don't want to hype it up or sell it. I don't need to say anything, the music and the lyrics will speak for themselves. So…… yeah…… Anyway, this time it's just the three of us and we produced it ourselves, so it's a real, how can I say……」 M: 「Personal.」 B: 「Yes, it's definitely a personal work, and the whole album is full of uniqueness and hope and humanity, and the songs are about personal issues. And it's also…… It's also a fun album.」

You say that you produced such an album yourselves. How did that come about? T: 「Because we're the best producers in the world.」

……You say you produced it yourselves, but then again, why? B: 「(laughs). We had a lot of producers' names on the shortlist, you know. Just…… this album had too much weight to bring in outside influences.」 M: 「Yeah, in the end, when you want your car to run properly and you're there and the guy who made the car is there, and someone else comes in and says, "The body colour should be like this," how would you feel? Well, maybe they're right about the colour, but in the end, the car won't run properly without the person who made it. In other words, we're the mechanics on this album. That's what we wanted to do.」

So it took you three years after "Nimrod" to start work on this album, and the reason you didn't start immediately was to prepare for that? B: 「…………I was burnt out. I felt like I was going to hate the music too, so I needed to get away for a while before that happened.」

"Nimrod" was a great album, but were you too tired to maintain the energy you showed on that album and go straight into the next one? B: 「We just needed time to get back to normal life. The difference between "Nimrod" and this album is that last time it was like our lives went through the making of the album, but this time it's like the making of the album went through our lives. Do you see the difference?」

Yes, I do. B: 「We've been able to experience friends, family and all the elements of normal life over the last three years. If we kept living 24 hours a day all immersed in music …… I thought we'd end up neglecting ourselves and our music. If I could give one piece of advice to every band, it would be to put the guitar down and go away for a while. Before the guitar crushes you.」 M: 「Then by the end you'll be so desperate to play the guitar that you'll jump at the chance to play it. That's when you get the most incredible inspiration. So for the last three years I've been so preoccupied with life that I even forgot to play the guitar for a couple of days. Then I'd suddenly wake up in the middle of the night, or in the middle of dinner I'd suddenly think, "I'm not hungry. What's going on? I know! Let's play the guitar," and I'd jump at the guitar.」 B: 「The “Nimrod” tour was too long. So, we all felt that after that cycle, we needed to go home and experience a bit of “life”. We had to get a life so that we could write songs that had something real to say, instead of just writing about rock star woes while we were still on tour. No one wants to listen to that rubbish, and no one can relate to it, right? nd most of all, I can't relate to those songs either (laughs).」

(laughs) So you needed time to face yourself and reassess the situation. B: 「Yes, I just wanted to be able to write songs about what I experienced. And in order to do that, I needed to get away from music for a while. Because, you know, when you think about how many years we've been a band and how many times we've toured and made records for how long, a year off isn't long at all (laughs).」 M: 「Plus, we hadn't really taken a break up until that point.」

You took a year off? M: 「Yeah, but we only didn't play together for two months. And after those two months, we were back to practising five days a week. But I enjoyed that pace because of the break. We didn't try to force the songs.」 B: 「Yes, I didn't want to force it. So if I couldn't think of a song, I didn't force myself to write it. Anyway, the band was becoming a source of depression for me, so I needed to do other things…… Like having time with my family.」

The huge sales made you famous whether you liked it or not, but in the past, you guys were very resistant to your fame, weren't you? Has taking a break freed you from that? M: 「I still don't think we need fame. To be honest, I have a lot of fun, but the truth is, I'm both very outgoing and very shy at times, so it's hard when I want to be alone……」 B: 「I don't think there's anything wrong with being famous or successful - as long as you're doing it your own way and not anyone else's.」 T: 「And there are different kinds of fame. There's fame like Green Day, there’s fame like Macaulay Culkin, there’s fame like Shirley Temple…」 B&M: 「(laughs)」 B: 「Well, unlike those child stars who were totally controlled by their parents, we had freedom of choice and we're happy with the way our band is and what we're doing. We don't care what other people think of us or what they say about us or anything like that. But kids don't, do they? They don't have a choice, to be frank.」

So it sounds like you guys have learnt to deal with fame in your own way? M: 「Because, you know, nobody wants to hear you whine like that, do they? In fact, I don't want to hear myself whining. That's why…… When I realised I had learned how to cope with it. And how we cope with it is that we go home for a while and get completely away from it all and get back to ‘reality’. We go back to the world of friends, music and family. That's how you give yourself substance again…… You refill your water.’

With all that in mind, I think this "Warning" is a wonderfully balanced album that truly values ​​both "changing" and "staying the same." Well, I've only listened to six songs, so I don't know yet. M: 「(laughs). So it's like, you change your shoes but not your underwear?」 B: 「Same right! That's so cool! (laughs) ……Well, I mean, this album isn't about growing up and getting older or growing up and becoming an adult anymore. It's simply about growing up, that's what this album is all about. Always remember your roots……」 T: 「We'll play better music.」 B: 「Yeah, with the feeling that we're going to be a better band.」

I also thought that the album showed a very natural side of Green Day. B: 「It's a lot better than the “unnatural” Green Day of old, isn't it? (laughs)」 T&M: 「Hee hee hee hee!」

(laughs) I mean, before "Insomniac", you guys used the punk format to show us the sensations and ideas you'd acquired to survive on the streets. And with "Insomniac", there was an attitude of "If you're going to be negative, then go for it!" But with "Nimrod", you recovered from that kind of negativity and scaled up your expression by using strings and horns. But this time, I felt like it was Green Day's natural punk, in a way that was rather free from that kind of approach or storyline. It's not just about rushing, it's about punk. There were a lot of songs with an acoustic feel. B: 「First of all…… I don't think of Green Day as a punk band. I don't think it can be categorised in that extreme. I don't know, I just think we're a cool rock ‘n’ roll band. I don't really know what else to call it…… Well, we don't really care what other people call us, seriously, we've been called all kinds of things. We believed every single one of them at first, then we ignored every single one of them…… We just want to live. Seriously, as long as they let us live, that's all we want (laughs). But…… I'm sure I learnt from punk that it's about ‘being yourself’. So it's up to the person who goes through punk to decide what to do afterwards. And now we're just……. We're in the process of trying to grow up freely, without putting ourselves into genres or anything like that…… I think that's what this album is about.」 M: 「We are crazy punk guys, but at the same time we are very normal people. I think that part of us will continue to show up in our songs for a long time to come, just like it has in the past. We might be a little weirder compared to the old guy sitting next to us on the bus, but at the same time we might be more normal than the guy sitting at the back of the bus…… That's who we are.」

I see. The way you guys interact with music these days seems fresh in this 2000 era. T: 「That makes me happy.」

You mentioned above that the theme of punk is ‘to be yourself and live the life you want’, and that's also what you sing about in “Minority” on this album. B: 「Yes, “Minority” is about individuality, about being yourself. People don't belong to a country, they are who they are.」 M: 「That's what I've been trying to achieve in the last three years of my life - to be myself.」 B: 「Yeah, the songs on this album, “Deadbeat Holiday” is a song about not giving up on life, “Misery” is a story about people living miserable lives. And “Castaway” is…… I think it's about starting a new adventure. And “Macy's Day Parade” is about commercialism, about outside forces selling you things, but what you really want is hope for a better tomorrow. I think there are a lot of songs like that.」

…….That's amazing. B: 「That's what we're trying to do (laughs).」 M: 「It's a tough world out there (laughs).」 T: 「You have to live positively (laughs).」

(laughs) But, you know, I think you have a lot of depth when you can sing about things like that so honestly. I guess you guys really love people now. B: 「(laughs) Hmm, yes……」 T: 「Yeah, yeah, we're having sex with everyone one by one.」

(laughs). You know how? M: 「(laughs) Well, I've become a bit more tolerant, or maybe I've slowed down to the point where I can smell the roses.」 B: 「In the end, it's all about how you deal with your anger. Do you look for a solution, or do you hide in your shell and let the anger smoulder? That's what's changed a lot since before. And also in terms of how you channel your anger. Do you channel it in a positive way and make your life, and sometimes that's more important - other people's lives, better, or……?」 M: 「In short, are you going to find a proper solution or are you going to continue being an asshole (laughs)?」 T: 「Hahahaha.」 B: 「But there are times when I just want to be an asshole, of course. Like, I don't want to be in a good mood (laughs). That's seriously still there. But I think we've all become better at dealing with anger, especially in the last couple of years. I don't mean stop being angry. That's not what I want. I don't want to give up my anger. I just want to channel it in a positive way.」

I see. That's a very good state of mind. It's like all three of you are able to do punk independently of each other. M: 「Yes. —So for the next album we'll evolve even more and release a record for each of us. See, KISS did that a long time ago, right? We'll make a Billie album, a Tre album, and a Mike album like that.」 T: 「Hahahahahaha!」 M: 「And of course, the Mike album is the easiest record to listen to.」 T: 「And it's a two-disc set, right?」 M: 「Oh yeah, a two-disc set!」 B: 「Gahahaha!」 T: 「The discs are all poetry readings……」 B: 「Gahahahahahaha!」 M: 「Yes, yes, of course, the first disc is all poetry readings……」 T&B: 「Disc 2 is also a full-length reading series! (laughs)」 T: 「Hahahahahahaha! And the title will be “A truly enigmatic and brilliant man, his name is Mike”!」 M: 「Hahahahahahaha…… And also “Mike's Quick Guide” (laughs).」

(laughs) That's enough. M: 「(laughs). I think that as time goes by, we tend to lose sight of what we want most as individuals in life. But anyway, I believe that if you just keep moving forward, in the end you'll find out what you really want. That's why we took a break along the way. Not only for ourselves, but also for the people to whom we dedicate our music to. I think that's how we felt that we could keep going forward and not burning ourselves out.」

I have a feeling that you guys are trying to keep rocking out in your own natural way, while protecting your punk roots in a good way, so what do you think about that? M: 「Yeah, we're certainly at a point in our career where we can take it easy and not get too uptight.」

Do you feel you're moving forward in your career with confidence? B: 「I think so〜〜」 All: 「Ahahahahahahahaha!」 B: 「No, no, no. I don't have any confidence!」 M: 「Yes. As for us, we just have to keep working as hard as we have been working so far. That means first of all, we do what we are happy with. We always think that we are our own biggest critics, but at the same time, we are the ones who are the first to praise others and say, "Well done! You did well!"」 B: 「Well done, Mike!」 M: 「Gufufufufufufu (laughs).」 B: 「Well done, Tre!」 T: 「Billie, you too! (laughs)」

(laughs) I guess we should wrap up the interview then. So here's the last question. You are finally coming to Japan for Summer Sonic 2000, can you tell us how excited you are? M: 「It's great to be able to play at a festival.」 B: 「Yeah, yeah.」 T: 「We couldn't make it to Fuji Rock in 1998, so this time we're going to……」

Right (laughs). B: 「So, this time, we're going to give you a show that's so intense you won't be able to say a word! You guys can expect the best moment of your life at Summer Sonic.」

……Um, does Fuji Rock in '98 still have an impression on you? B: 「Yeah, I think it was terrible for the crowd. A lot of people got buried in the mud.」 M: 「And in the end we couldn't play.」 T: 「Right?」 B: 「Right? We had no choice but to stay in the hotel and shoot the people around us.」 T&M: 「Bwahahahahahahaha!」

……………………Oh, that's right. What's your hair colour going to be? B: 「I haven't decided.」 M: 「Me, I'm thinking of going for emerald green, but then again, I'm still on the fence about this one (laughs).」

Translator’s Note: KONISHIKI (originally named Saleva'a Fuauli Atisano'e, nowadays going by his naturalised name Konishiki Yasokichi) is a retired American-born Japanese professional sumo wrestler and still a celebrity in Japan. He was also at the time the heaviest wrestler ever in sumo, at a peak weight of 287 kg (633 lb), earning him the nicknames "Meat Bomb" and, most famously, "The Dump Truck".

Despite the journalist trying to hide when Green Day was having that particular episode of MTV Influence filmed, because he didn’t hide when that particular riot happened thanks to the Los Angeles Lakers winning the 2000 NBA Finals, I easily found that the day of the recording was done on June 19th, with the interview being done on the 20th the next day instead. So you’ve tried, Yanagi-san.

As mentioned in a previous translated post, there are at least 3 different accounts on what happened with Green Day when the first Fuji Rock Festival was cancelled back in 1997. Yes, it's 1997, not 1998 like Yanagi-san had mistaken here. The first ever Fuji Rock Festival was held in 1997 and subsequently cancelled because of how bad the location and weather was.

Do support me on my Ko-fi! ☕

[myuiis]

sally park: a missed opportunity

this is probably going to rot in drafts for a WHILE but i needed to scream into the void about this so let me rant to YOU (yes, you) about how ptj fucked up sally park's writing and purpose in the story so much that she is now just a bundle of missed opportunities. the same could also be said about other characters like crystal choi, luah lim, etc. but i just reread hunt for hostel and i have a lot of insane thoughts that need to be screamed about.

as a character who was the center of attention during her introduction arc, she has been reduced to simply an eli enabler and warren's love interest, who gets about 3 panels to really shine, and then is demoted back into window dressing.

warning: mild eli hate ahead but i do NOT hate eli, i just hate ptj for making everything hostel related eli-centric, when sally is arguably just as important.

so. lets start at the beginning.

from the very beginning, the eli jang arc was told from sally's perspective especially based off the narration, and her character during the majority of the eli jang arc BANGED. initially introduced as a classic demure, feminine savior figure for bad boy warren in the first chapter of the eli jang arc, it's then shown that she isn't as naive or one-dimensional as she may seem.

in fact, shes shown to be fiercely independent and self-sufficient, learning to live by herself and deal with her own problems without anyone helping her, while simultaneously grappling with her grandmother blaming her over her dad's death (side note this plotline, which could've added so much depth to her story was NEVER picked up again)

on my first read of the eli jang arc, this sequence actually punched me in the gut and sally became an instant fav

but i digress. continuing back to the main point, sally was a tremendously well written character (or as good as we're gonna' get when it comes to female characters by ptj) in the eli jang arc, whether it be her narration (scenes like "sometimes i think if i hadn't introduced them to eli back then, our story wouldn't have been such a tragedy"), or her actual actions in the story.

she was integral to the story. in fact, i would say that she was MORE central to the heart and soul of hostel than eli jang was (at first, before she got butchered by ptj and forgotten about) because it was HER that was providing for her family with HER own money, until eli stepped in months later. she was the one that everyone wanted to assist and protect because she was who was holding everyone together through her sacrifice and love.

LOOK AT HER!!! just LOOK AT HER!!! she is so noble and tragic and she does everything for the sake of her family, including starving herself! she is so tremendously loving and sacrifices so much for her family, which is why everyone unites around her to help her!

in fact, the reason warren, eli, and others devolve into crime and stealing is to help her get more money for food, as they can't bear to see her starve herself. while this does come off a little bit white knight-ey (oh a big strong man has to save the sweet damsel), the point is that she has this kind of power over the people around her through her genuine leadership skills

not only that, but she was actually also the one who came up with the idea of using their old building to provide for more homeless kids, showing that she really should be credited with the creation and management of the runaway fams, far more than she is in the story.

even though, immediately after, its shown that she didn't think enough about the financials of the situation, and eli gets his time to shine by coming up with the point organization stuff, the way its framed portrays both sally's idea and eli's financial proposal of the financial system as equally important things. this scene makes me think that, at the very least, sally and eli's importance should be on equal footing: sally is the passion, the heart, the core, while eli is the figurehead, the brains, the fighter.

in summary, sally was the person who united the original hostel A through her leadership, kindness, and sacrifice, and had so much soft power over everyone that the entirety of her family would do anything to help her. she also came up with the idea of helping runaway families, demonstrating her kindness and generosity.

not only that, she was still actively managing the runaway families and making money while eli fucked off to j high to become a barber, allowing her to get closer to the runaway fams and inspire them with her leadership.

with all that said, it's clear that sally should be a three-dimensional girlboss who uses her charisma and good personality to gain soft power and lead the people around her as one of the figureheads and hearts of the hostel crew, right?

well. no.

after the eli jang arc, she becomes close to useless.

i dont remember much of 2A outside of the big deal stuff, but what i do remember is that sally does nothing, wins a singular rock-papers-scissors game, and then becomes a damsel in distress again that warren needs to save and gets to show off his cool fighting skills in the process. (this may not be accurate, feel free to correct me if im wrong)

but my BIGGEST gripe is the hunt for hostel arc. the hunt for hostel arc was very much centered around eli, warren, and even jerry, more than it was sally, despite how much of an integral role she played in the formation of hostel. during the entire arc, she does basically nothing but watch on the sidelines

... and then ptj pulls this on us. they all unite because they admire and love eli jang so much? only eli jang? not warren chae, gangdong's mighty? not max and derek, the two uncles? not sally park, THE big mama?

i cannot emphasize how ironic it is that sally, the big mama, quite literally gave birth to the idea of the runaway fams, and yet nobody mentions her again afterwards, and only ever eli jang. like... what did eli ever do for you? give you a shitty haircut?

and when warren and eli leave, i FINALLY thought that ptj was going to give sally a moment to shine and show her by herself again, like she was all that time ago, and how she figures out how to save her family despite being unable to fight...

but no. we get this sick ass panel and then she is completely irrelevant again

the next example of the sally erasure comes when eugene is talking to eli about him joining workers. he tries to convince eli that this is the ONLY thing that he can do to protect his family, and that, now that he's here and so is warren, hostel is weak and helpless because the MEN that get everything done aren't there anymore and "oh no, what can sally park and the girls do?"

like fym "what can they do"?! sally is a LEADER and she has POWER and INFLUENCE (or at least, she should). but no, the narrative doesn't prove him wrong, and sally does next to nothing in the narrative.

i cannot emphasize how much more of a leader figure she is than eli btw. she took all the runaway kids under her wing. it was her idea to build an organization for these kids in the first place. she was the one singlehandedly raising money for all 7 high schoolers in her family before eli stepped in. she STARVED HERSELF and CUT HER OWN FINGERS trying to make food for her family. she was THE big mama. EVERYONE wanted to protect her and respect and love her. and yet ELI is the main character of hostel that is oh so important and that everyone will unite under????

"oh no without you how will anything get done, eli jang?" stfu

and even when she does do things, later on, it's really more of an excuse for vasco to shine. while she was the one to get heather's mom to forgive eli, as well as the one that got vasco to save eli in the first place, 1) her major role in this part of the story is entirely sidelined and given no narrative weight outside of being the reason that eli's healing arc can happen and 2) the only agency we've ever seen her having since hostel arc is in relation to eli. she only ever acts on her own to save eli. she PROBABLY did stuff outside of that to help hostel, but that is entirely offscreen and not focused on at all, so her leadership and agency when it comes to things outside of a MAN are ignored.

in chapter 478, i thought that she was once again given a brief moment to shine when she looked sad and all wondering what they would do once they didn't have the income workers supplied them with, and i was hoping that she'd get a chance to creatively problem solve around it to show a good character moment for her and the rest of hostel... but who am i kidding this is ptj of course he wouldnt do that. nah, it was just a scene so that vasco could introduce jay again and be like "hey guys jay is actually relevant to the story and he's a nice person, just so you guys dont forget that he's still there! and also ignore this deus ex machina ass solution to a conflict that could've been a really interesting character study!!"

so yeah. that's basically it. in conclusion, i think sally park is a HUGE missed opportunity for ptj to finally write a good female character. kind, compassionate, charismatic, smart, sally's got it all. however, just because she is a soft character doesn't mean that she's a pushover and she held tremendous power and authority because of everything she did for her family. however, ptj decides to do nothing with her and turn her into an eli enabler and a warren love interest instead, ignoring her leadership skills and influence.

and once again, no hate to eli, warren, jerry, jay, or any of the other character i just shat on to make a point!! i like all of them, but i just think that sally's character assassination to allow them to shine was an infuriating decision on ptj's part

[use-your-telescope]

Together by this Christmas Tree

Summary: The Avengers have an annual tradition of a Secret Santa Gift Exchange, and Theo’s life becomes a real life Hallmark Movie when she draws Loki’s name and has to get him five days of gifts. Because shopping for a god and a prince, especially one that you have a massive crush on, is easy, right?!

Author's Notes: HELLO AND HAPPY HOLIDAYS! This is a one-shot set in the WEMTBB world with our favorite sorcerers, however you do not need to be caught up on (or even have started) WEMTBB in order to enjoy this story! For those of you who are reading WEMTBB, this takes place in the future, when these two are in their “mutual pining idiots” stage; you will absolutely spot some easter eggs, but there are no major spoilers here.

This is for @sarahscribbles Christmas Collection, because I’m strolling in five minutes late with Starbucks for Christmas by posting this the day after Christmas. If you're a regular reader of WEMTBB, I am still planning to update it on Sunday (12/31).

Content: Absolute tooth-rotting fluff, Secret Santa, LOADS of mutual pining, Wanda being a very supportive friend, some pranks along the way, Loki in multiple sweaters, and lots of Loki getting the love, kindness, and attention he deserves.

Word Count: 8,104

Read on AO3 | When Everything's Made to be Broken Masterlist

—

When Steve first made the announcement, at the end of a mission debrief, Theo swore he was joking.

The idea of the Avengers making a point to celebrate Christmas seemed a bit strange - beyond the fact that there were two Norse Gods on the team, it seemed presumptuous to assume everyone else was Christian. 

Theo’s feelings about the winter holidays were, at best, ambivalent. Sure, she liked the holiday lights, and she was a sucker for a good holiday song. She enjoyed showering her niece, Katie, with presents - after all, what kind of auntie would Theo be if she didn’t absolutely spoil her niece? And any time Theo could visit Mémère for longer than an hour or two was a blessing in its own right.

But the holidays also reminded her of the family she lost, and being the single friend at every holiday party got tiring (especially when her well-intended friends kept trying to set Theo up with people that Theo had absolutely no interest in). It had reached a point that Theo often volunteered to work the holiday shifts, as chaotic as they were, just so she had the excuse to avoid awkward gatherings.

However, when the other Avengers lit up like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree at the announcement of the Secret Santa gift exchange, Theo kept her mouth shut. She was still relatively new to the team, and it wasn’t the first time she had been subjected to workplace celebrations for holidays she didn’t celebrate. 

But of course, this was a group of superheroes celebrating, so it wasn’t a basic Secret Santa; no, of course not, because nothing about them was basic. It was five days of secret Santa. 

At least the rules were simple: each person drew the name of another Avenger. Then, you had to give the person whose name you drew a series of gifts with clues about your identity leading up to the final day, when you would give them a gift and a final clue. Then, each person would try to guess who their Secret Santa was. Regardless of whether or not they figured it out, each person would receive one final gift, something a bit more special.

Steve closed the announcement by informing the group they would draw names the following Monday, and would have approximately a month to pick out gifts before they completed the exchange. A certain buzz filled the air as everyone left the conference room, with some reminiscing about funny moments from past exchanges, while others pondered over who they might end up with.

It wasn’t until after the meeting that Theo had the foresight to ask if the Secret Santa exchange was meant to replace getting everyone their own gifts, or if it was in addition to getting everyone their own gifts. Wanda, ever the MVP when it came to explaining unwritten Avengers’ rules to Theo, explained that it was in addition to getting everyone else gifts. 

Theo spent the next two days praying she would get someone easy to shop for - after all, she already had to get gifts for a dozen Avengers, plus her hospital colleagues, and her family. She wasn’t sure that she had enough mental capacity to figure out gifts for someone she wasn’t as familiar with.

Of course, some deity had it out for her, because she drew Loki’s name.

Loki, the prince and ‘most powerful sorcerer in the nine realms,’ who could buy or conjure pretty much anything he wanted in the snap of his fingers.

Loki, who, besides being Theo’s best friend among the Avengers, happened to be the person Theo had a massive fucking crush on.

It wasn’t like anything would ever come of the crush - Loki had a firm rule that he did not date. He had no interest in relationships whatsoever. It was a tidbit of information Theo learned early on in her tenure as an Avenger, amidst a conversation about the love lives of the Avengers as a whole. Loki would spend one night with someone, but never allow it to become an ongoing thing - in his words, “everyone has certain needs to satiate, but courting someone is no interest of mine.” 

So, despite Theo’s unbidden thoughts of channeling her inner hallmark movie to reveal her feelings to Loki, she needed to figure out how the hell to navigate getting him Secret Santa gifts, a normal gift… oh yeah, and his birthday gift, because that was a week before Christmas.

Inevitably, once they finished drawing names, Theo immediately dragged Wanda down the hall by the sleeve of her red hoodie and into Wanda’s suite, since it was closer than Theo’s.

“What’s going on?” Wanda half-laughed as she closed the door and glanced, worriedly, at Theo, who had started to pace the room. “Are you okay?”

“I need your help with Secret Santa — What the hell do you get someone who could have anything they want for Christmas?” Theo flopped on Wanda’s bed with a dramatic sigh, her mind reeling with how to handle her predicament.

“That depends –” Wanda answered slowly, eyes narrowed as she approached Theo. “Why do you think they have everything?” 

“Because he’s a prince and a God who can conjure anything he damn well pleases with the snap of his fingers!” Theo tossed her arms up in the air, gesturing exasperatingly at nothing. 

Nothing - just like the ideas she had for Loki’s gifts. 

Nothing.

“So you have Loki for your Secret Santa?” Wanda sat down beside Theo, smirking at her.

“Yes!” Theo buried her face with her hands. “I had a hard enough time figuring out a birthday present, and I still haven’t figured out what to get him for a normal Christmas gift! But now I also have to give him a Secret Santa gift?!”

“Gifts, plural.” Wanda reminded her, smirk widening into a rather evil-looking grin. “Remember, it’s a week of lead-up to the final gift, because the goal is to try and have them guess who it is.”

“FUCK.” Theo let her arms drop to her sides. “This isn’t fair—“ she whined, earning a poorly stifled laugh from Wanda. 

“Oh come on, it’s not like he’s the only one who is hard to shop for,” Wanda attempted to sympathize, but the giggles that slipped out as she replied did little to help. “Can you imagine having to buy gifts for Tony?”

“Simple, get him booze.” Theo scoffed, propping herself up on her elbows. 

Wanda rolled her eyes and adjusted her ponytail, one auburn lock falling aside to frame her face.

“Look, half the fun is writing the little cards that go with each gift to give the person clues about who the gifts are from, and then trying to figure out the identity of your Secret Santa,” Wanda pointed out. “Besides, other than Thor, I’m willing to bet that no one knows Loki as well as you do!”

“That only makes it worse,” Theo complained and flopped back a second time, rolling over to bury her face in Wanda’s burgundy comforter. “Because I know he’s a picky bitch and nothing will be good enough for him.”

The snort that came out of Wanda did nothing to ease Theo’s concern, but it sounded ridiculous enough that even Theo laughed. 

“I think that he’d like any gift you give him, simply because it’s from you.” 

“That’s cliché as hell.” Theo pressed herself up enough to look over at Wanda, who, despite Theo’s whining and dramatics, still wore a small, knowing smile.

“And true.” Wanda shrugged. “You are, without a doubt, his favorite person on the team, and probably on this planet.”

“Yeah, for all the good that does me.” Theo grumbled to herself, but sat up all the way. “It’s not like I can tell him on day one that I’m his Secret Santa, so the gifts have to be good. No, they have to be perfect.”

“You’re overthinking this.” Wanda chuckled softly, then rose to her feet and held out a hand for Theo to grab onto. “How about we go shopping and see what is out there? Maybe you’ll get some inspiration that way.”

The petulant child within Theo wanted to complain for a bit longer about her predicament, but deep down, Wanda had a good point. If nothing else, it would give her a chance to get out and clear her head before the inevitable descent into holiday madness.

“Right. That’s probably a good idea.” Theo accepted Wanda’s hand and allowed her to pull Theo onto her feet. “I need to get gifts for my family anyways, so maybe i’ll knock it all out at once.” 

“Only if I can help you pick out gifts for Katie,” Wanda winked at Theo as she opened the door. 

“Deal.” Theo didn’t have to think twice before answering. “Do you have plans for this afternoon? I’m not working, so we could go today…”

Wanda held up her purse and grinned. “Let’s go!”

—

Shopping with Wanda, unsurprisingly, proved to be a fruitful venture. 

Sure, the pair went absolutely wild with gifts for Theo’s niece. Would Max kill Theo when he saw just how much stuff Theo got? Absolutely. Did she care? Not a bit; after all, she had to maintain her reputation as the coolest aunt.

More importantly, Theo managed to put together a list of ideas for gifts that referenced inside jokes from the time that Theo and Loki had known each other. Even better - the conversation between Theo and Wanda as they shopped, though wide-ranging and lively, gave Theo the inspiration for her final gift.

In the end, the gifts required some careful planning, calling in some favors, and a lot of sneaking to make it happen - not to mention a few sleepless nights as Theo put the finishing touches on certain details - but she managed to pull everything together, just in time for the first day of gift-giving.

Pepper had really outdone herself with the holiday decorations. On a normal day, the common areas within the tower could be described as minimalist: clean lines, lots of metal and glass, neutral tones everywhere, no knick knacks or soft touches to be found. Not even a throw pillow or blanket could be found in the common areas - whenever Theo wanted a pillow or a blanket, she had to bring it from her suite.

Yet, when everyone filtered into the living room after going out for dinner, they may as well have walked into a luxury ski chalet at Tahoe. In one corner sat a massive, lush evergreen tree trimmed with glistening tinsel, soft white lights, and a collection of beautifully coordinated ornaments in burgundy, cream, gold, navy, emerald, and eggplant. 

The fireplace had a beautiful garland of eucalyptus, cypress, and cedar draped across the mantle; tucked among the greenery sat pillar candles of varying heights in burgundy, navy, emerald, eggplant, and gold. Elegant, cream-colored stockings with each Avenger’s name embroidered at the top hung in front of the crackling fire (plus stockings for Pepper and Happy, since they were pretty much unofficial Avengers). 

Blankets and accent pillows, some in plaids that incorporated the colors of the ornaments and candles, others in solid colors, all made of luxuriously plush fabrics, found homes on the various seating throughout the living room. 

Even the coffee tables had coordinating centerpieces.

Theo quickly found her usual seat, but continued to gawk at the living room’s transformation. When the hell did Pepper (or, Theo supposed, whoever Pepper hired) have the time to decorate the living room? Just that morning, when Theo left for work, the living room had been its usual, minimalist styling. Maybe if she had stopped back in her suite before meeting the others at the restaurant she would have seen the living room decoration in progress.

Hardly a moment later, Loki sat down beside her. Dressed in a forest-green crewneck sweater that perfectly framed the planes of his chest and black dress pants that highlighted his long legs, Loki somehow managed to look holiday appropriate without even trying. His raven curls, just slightly disheveled from the wind and snow outside, framed his elegant features so perfectly; combined with the warm glow of the fire and the soft light of the christmas tree he appeared downright radiant, particularly as he grinned at something Thor said. 

“Quite magnificent, is it not?” Loki leaned over and nudged Theo with his elbow, interrupting her train of thought. Theo had to stop for a moment and consider whether he was referring to the himself, or the living room.

“Yeah,” Theo agreed, her cheeks growing hot as she realized Loki caught her staring. “Compared to when I left this morning, it is a night and day difference.“

“I suspect Miss Potts takes great pleasure in decorating for the winter holidays.” Loki offered Theo a soft smile. His soft eyes caught the flicker of the candles atop the coffee table as he studied Theo, and for the second time in less than a couple minutes, she found herself speechless.

Luckily, Dum-E saved the day when he dropped a present on Theo’s lap, and in doing so brought both sorcerers’ attention to the larger group. As it turned out, Dum-E distributed everyone’s gifts - all wrapped in the same paper, to make sure that the gift wrap didn’t give anything away - and as soon as he finished, it was time to open the first day’s gift.

They started with Bruce, then worked their way through a randomly generated list that Steve put together. The soft lights of the Christmas tree, glow of the fire crackling in the hearth, and joyous laughter as each person read their clue and opened their gifts filled the room with such warmth. It was the kind of holiday scene you’d see on a postcard, especially since snowflakes drifted past the tall windows and into the city below.

As they drew closer to Loki’s turn, Theo’s hands began to sweat. What if he didn’t like her gift? Sure, it was kind of corny, but it was a fun reference to how they spent much of their time. He didn’t seem overly thrilled by the idea of Secret Santa in the first place; what if her silly little gifts only made him hate the game?

Well, she didn’t have to wait any longer to find out, because it finally reached Loki’s turn.

Loki picked up the small box, turning it over and inspecting it. He tossed it into the air and caught it in one hand, lithe fingers curling perfectly around the container. 

“It is quite light, and rather small,” he observed. “Whatever is in this box does not jostle when moved, so it either fills the box or it is carefully packed in place. Let us see what is inside.”

Loki methodically removed the ribbons, then carefully tore away the gift wrap. He removed the lid in a graceful motion and set it aside, all the while peering into the box. He hummed.

Seeing the fabric folded and coiled inside, he reached in and tugged on the cloth, pulling it from the box. The fabric unfolded as he lifted the gift into the air, revealing the first gift: a pair of crew-length socks - black, with an emerald green heel and toe. On one side of each sock, placed so it would be visible while wearing shoes, was the design of an apple car driven by a worm, as well as text which read: “I’m on my way to the bookstore!”

“Aw, those are cute!” Wanda winked at Theo as she said the words, to which Theo casually agreed. 

Loki maintained a relatively neutral expression, though he let out a rather amused hum. He set the socks in his lap, then opened the card. As his eyes scanned over the text, one side of his lips curled up, then the other, until he wore a sheepish smile. He read aloud: 

“I know you love the bookstore,

We’ve been there a time or two,

But since I can’t buy the whole store,

I got you a pair of Crew… socks!

Sorry, I know you like poetry, but your Secret Santa isn’t a poet.” Loki chuckled, shaking his head, then continued: “These socks are from Out of Print, which has donated over 5 million books to communities in need and supports a variety of literacy initiatives.” 

He looked up from the card and glanced around at the group. “Well, thank you to my mysterious Secret Santa. I quite enjoy a whimsical piece of attire, and I am certain these will be put to good use.”

Next to Loki, Theo let out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding. 

First day was not a failure.

Only… four more to go.

—

The second day of gift-giving arrived, and with it came another day of second-guessing whether or not Loki would like his gift.  

This time, the idea came from a conversation early in their friendship. After falling asleep in Theo’s suite, Loki joined her for coffee on her balcony, at which point Theo explained a sudoku to Loki. At the time, he commented that there were “some puzzles he was still learning to solve.”

From that morning on, Theo couldn’t help but notice the way Loki approached briefings and missions as puzzles to solve. So when Theo found a pair of rather clever puzzle books (many of which provided a formidable challenge, even for her), she knew that it would be a perfect gift.

Yet, as the day crept on and the gift exchange grew near, Theo felt the seeds of doubt taking root once again. What if he thought the puzzles were stupid? He was a god, after all, and insanely intelligent. The puzzles might have been a challenge for Theo, but they were probably child’s play for Loki. 

Still, it was too late to turn back, so by the time Theo sat down with the others and the gifts were distributed, she simply hid her sweaty palms in her sweater sleeves and acted like it was any other night in the tower.

Loki, for what it was worth, seemed perfectly relaxed when he took his usual seat beside Theo; this time, he opted for a plain gray t-shirt and a black cardigan, paired with what were (secretly) Theo’s favorite pair of dark, slim-fit jeans. When Loki crossed one ankle over his knee, Theo noticed his emerald green and black socks and her heart skipped a beat - he wore the socks she gave him.

That was a good sign, right?

Once again, Dum-E distributed the gifts, then each person took their turn opening their gift and reading the card; this time they started with Yelena, but otherwise the order was the same. After what felt like ages, Steve finally gave Loki the go-ahead to open his gift.

Like the first day, Loki went through the same routine of examining the box, then peeled away the wrapping paper. 

For the sake of maintaining a bit of mystery (and making it slightly less obvious that the gift was a pair of books), Theo put the set into a clothing box and padded the sides. It wasn’t that sneaky, since the box was heavier than it would have been with apparel inside, but at least Loki wouldn’t know until he opened the box.

He opened the box and removed the first book. 

“The Master Theorem - Book of Puzzles, Intrigue, and Wit,” he read the title, then held it up for all to see, then held up the second book and read off the title. “The Master Theorem: Elite - Book of Puzzles, Intrigue, and Wit.”

He returned the books to his lap, pausing for a moment to flip through the pages and glance at the contents. 

“You gonna open the card?” Tony nodded towards the card that came with the box, which barely poked out from beneath the pair of books.

“Ah, yes, apologies.” Loki offered a half-smile, then retrieved the card and read aloud:

“While the identity of your Secret Santa is, well, a secret, it’s no secret that you, Loki, are pretty smart - like, ridiculously smart. And you’re a quick learner… Plus you’ve got a knack for problem solving. With that in mind, you seem to be a master when it comes to puzzles; even though you once told me there are still some puzzles you are learning to solve, the way you light up when you encounter a good logic puzzle or mystery makes me think there are few things you enjoy more than a good challenge.

“This series of puzzle books is notorious for its difficult logic puzzles - the New York Times called the first Master Theorem book “Mensa’s evil twin,” and the Elite edition is supposed to be exponentially harder. But with your sharp wit and attention to detail, I’m sure you’ll have it figured out in no time… And by the time you finish, maybe you’ll figure out the identity of your Secret Santa as well!”

Loki grinned as he folded the card and set it aside. “Thank you, my mysterious benefactor - I imagine I will be entertained for quite some time.”

For the rest of the evening, whenever Theo snuck a glance at Loki, she caught him flipping through his new books with a subtle smile and a twinkle in his eye, only half-paying attention to the others as they opened their gifts.

Day two: rousing success. Only three more days to go.

—

For the third day of gift-giving, Theo took a bigger risk.

At one point in Theo and Wanda’s shopping adventure, they stopped at a bakery to grab a snack and some coffee. While they waited for their drinks, they got on the topic of how, earlier that morning, Thor offered Loki a frosted pop-tart. In response, Loki nearly disintegrated the thing on sight, calling it an abomination to pastries everywhere.

And that was from Loki, the guy who was notorious for his sweet tooth. 

The conversation gave Theo an idea.

Ever since Loki roped Theo into his pranks, Theo had wanted to find a way to turn the tables and prank him. And what better way to prank him than to bait-and switch some sweet treats?

With a call to Theo’s favorite Bodega cashier, Carlos (who still hadn’t gotten up the courage to ask out that girl, but had at least he learned her name was Liza), Theo managed to get her hands on one of the big cardboard boxes that they shipped pop-tarts in. Importantly, it said pop-tarts all along the outside, so when Loki saw the box he would initially think it was a whole case of pop-tarts.

Instead of filling it with pop-tarts, Theo convinced Mémère to bake up all sorts of traditional Aneterran holiday treats to fill the box. Given Mémère already planned to make the treats, it was easy for the family matriarch to accommodate the request. However, when Theo explained her plan, a knowing, almost devilish grin spread across Mémère’s face; the next thing Theo knew, there were treats that Theo hadn’t seen since she was a child. 

Packing the treats into the box required quite a bit of attention to detail - it had to have the weight and heft of a case of pop-tarts, and it had to be packed tightly enough to not move around, but she also didn’t want to crush the treats. 

There may have been some enchantments involved to make it work, but hopefully Loki wouldn’t notice.  

Not wanting to make the prank too convincing, Theo made sure to leave clues that the box had been altered somehow; knowing Loki, realizing the box had been tampered with would make him curious enough to look inside.

When everyone gathered for the third night of gift-giving, the laughter and merriment from the first two nights returned almost immediately. But when it came to Loki’s turn to open his gift, Theo’s confidence from the day prior collided with her nerves, to the point that she clutched her mug of spiked hot chocolate so her hands wouldn’t shake. 

Just like the first two nights, Loki inspected the wrapped gift, lifting it up and giving it a gentle shake. “Much larger, and rather heavy,” he noted. “Yet, there’s a card that indicates I ought to open it before the gift. I suppose I ought to follow my Secret Santa’s request.”

He set the gift back in his lap, and quickly opened the card. 

“Heard you have a sweet tooth…” Loki read aloud, then glanced down at the gift and hummed. “Well, let us see what is inside.”

Loki started to tear away the wrapping paper, but paused part-way through; his face twisted into something unreadable when he saw the writing on the box. 

Theo bit her lip to not give herself away.

“Pop-tarts?” Thor exclaimed, cocking his head to the side with curiosity. “Brother, I did not think you to be a fan of the Midgardian pastry.”

“I…” Loki trailed off, face falling as he unwrapped the rest of the box. “Interesting.”

Theo’s heart stuttered in her chest - what if he didn’t think to open the box? Would she give herself away if she said something? Oh god, he looked like a kicked puppy — she should have realized that he might take it wrong because Thor likes pop-tarts and he’s the popular brother, shitshitshit—

“Loki, maybe you should open the box,” Bruce suggested, “There’s a weird wrinkle by the cardboard seam that makes me think it was opened, then closed again.”

If it wouldn’t have given her away, Theo would have leapt to her feet and hugged the man for his suggestion.

“Yeah, that box looks like it has been messed with,” Sam agreed, “and I think everyone knows you hate pop-tarts.”

The kicked-puppy expression softened as Loki took a second look at the box and noticed the obvious tampering that Bruce and Sam pointed out. A hint of pink rose on Loki’s cheeks - if Theo didn’t know better, Loki looked almost embarrassed at the realization - but he went ahead and opened the box. 

Theo held her breath, all of her attention trained on Loki as she waited for his reaction. 

Peering into the box, Loki’s shoulders suddenly dropped and relief flooded his features; he reached in and retrieved a treat similar to a chocolate scone, as well as a second card.

“Pleased to report that I was mistaken; it appears the box is filled with a variety of homemade treats, as well as a second card.” He let out a soft, almost hesitant chuckle as he opened the note and read aloud: 

“HA! Nearly got you, didn’t I?!” Loki laughed a second time, this time a little louder, and nodded his head. “You’ve pulled off some of the best pranks, but your Secret Santa is known for a good prank or two. 

“Jokes aside, did you really think your Secret Santa would do that to you? Of course not - I know you have a discerning taste when it comes to sweet treats (far more discerning than your brother, of course)! These are some of my favorite holiday snacks from growing up; I think you’d like them too. If nothing else, I promise they taste better than pop-tarts.”  

Loki returned the note to the box, then unwrapped the treat in his other hand. He took a bite, and his face almost immediately lit up. He chewed for a moment, then swallowed, and cleared his throat to speak. 

“Well, mysterious Secret Santa,” he said, “I will confirm that this treat is quite divine. However, you best watch yourself– “ Looking around at their teammates, a dark, sinister grin curled over Loki’s face. “– I am known as the Trickster god for a reason, and you may very well have started a war.”

When Loki briefly locked eyes with Theo, her heart skipped a few beats; in just a few moments he went from beautiful to downright devilishly handsome, and his threat should not have been nearly as hot as it was. 

Sweet baby Jesus, she needed to get her shit together. 

“Any guesses on who it is?” Bucky asked, tapping his vibranium fingers along the side of his still-wrapped present. 

“I’ve a few contenders,” Loki smoothly answered, the earlier signs of discomfort completely gone, “but I will wait to put forth any claims.”

“Who cares! The real question is are you gonna share!?” Shuri pointed at the pastry in Loki’s hand, then held out her own hand. “That looks amazing!”

“Maybe once the Secret Santa is revealed, they can bring us all some treats.” Wanda replied, though she gave Theo a pointed glance, to which Theo glared back - after all, she didn’t want Wanda to give her away. “But for now, I think Loki should get to enjoy all of his gifts.”

Loki, who was busy searching through the rest of the box, didn’t seem to notice Wanda staring at Theo. 

Shuri glanced at Wanda, then at Theo, then grinned as she made the connection. 

“Fine, but they better bring me some extras,” Shuri relented. “That thing looks amazing.” 

Theo smiled and rolled her eyes, just in time for Steve to inform Wanda that it was her turn to open her gift.

Day three, though nearly a bust, worked out. 

Only two more to go. 

—

After the scare of the third day, Theo went into the fourth day feeling more comfortable about her gift. Sure, Loki may shrug at it, and there was a chance he wouldn’t use it. But at least she wouldn’t run the risk of upsetting him by making him believe his preferences were the same as his brother’s.

In some ways, the gift seemed particularly timely: a winter storm raged outside the tower, with howling winter winds and heavy snow that made sitting in the living room feel like they were inside a snowglobe. Even with the heat on and the fire roaring in the hearth, everyone bundled up in sweaters and plush blankets, sipping on mugs of cocoa and tea in between opening gifts. 

On the fourth night, Loki’s turn to open his gift came even earlier. Similar to the first three nights, he inspected the box - small, slender, almost like a fancy box for a fountain pen. 

After making quick work of the wrapping paper, he glanced at the lid of the box:

“Museum of Modern Art Design Store,” he read, then shrugged and removed the lid of the box.

Nestled among chic black packing material sat a stainless steel tea infuser. Its design was what drew Theo to the gift - long, slender, with a hook on the top for easy removal, it looked downright elegant. And with the amount of tea Loki drank, an upgrade to his usual steeping methods seemed like the perfect sort of gift - thoughtful and useful.

Loki hummed, carefully slipping the tea infuser out of its packaging and inspecting it. The stainless steel glowed beneath the Christmas lights and reflected the smile curling over Loki’s face. He twisted the cap off, then closed it again, nodding to himself as he set it aside and opened the card. Like the first three days, he read the message to the group:

“A tea infuser that combines form and function?! It’s almost as stylish as you are (almost)! As the resident tea expert on the team, it seemed only appropriate to give you something for making your favorite (non-alcoholic) drink - after all, you’ve brought me, your Secret Santa, more than a few drinks over the course of knowing each other!”

The hint, in Theo’s opinion, was almost painfully obvious; Loki brought Theo drinks all the time. Coffee at the hospital when he knew she had a long day. Whiskey or wine when she needed to unwind. Tea when it was late and neither of them could fall asleep. Water when Theo just used her inhaler and needed to rinse out her mouth. Throughout the entire time she had been an Avenger, Theo never saw Loki bring anyone else drinks quite so often - not Thor, not Wanda, not anyone. However, the clue made so much sense, and there was only one more day, so it wasn’t like she had to keep the secret for much longer. 

What Theo didn’t account for, however, was almost every other person in the room making the connection between the clue and the identity of Loki’s Secret Santa. Over a dozen pairs of eyes all trained in on Theo as Loki glanced down to set the card and gift aside; the heat of their stares nearly made Theo lose her composure.

When Steve asked if Loki knew who his Secret Santa was, he simply smirked and replied “I’ve my suspicions, but I find I rather enjoy the suspense and anticipation of the grand reveal.”

Somehow, she held it together, but just barely. Sure, Theo was grateful that Loki seemed to enjoy the gifts up to that point, but “suspense and anticipation of the grand reveal?” If Theo was under pressure before, now she was on the verge of being crushed under the weight of expectation, and the whole damn team knew it.

Theo shot a terrified look at Wanda, who only sent back an impish grin.

Shit.

One more day to go.

—

The final day of Secret Santa arrived, and with it, the grand reveal. Apprehension loomed over Theo’s head like a storm-cloud; after all, the pressure was on - not only to give the perfect gifts, but to set up the perfect reveal as Loki’s secret Santa.

Despite the overall success of the first four days, by the time the last exchange began, Theo was too nervous to sit down. Instead, she leaned against the kitchen island with her mug of hot chocolate and whiskey clutched in both hands, offering little more than one-word answers whenever someone tried to ask her something. The only time she even considered sitting down was when Loki asked if she would join him on the couch, but then all the potential ways she might make a fool of herself flooded her thoughts and she politely declined, claiming that she needed to stretch her legs a bit.

If Theo didn’t know better, Loki seemed disappointed that she didn’t want to sit by him, but it was probably her mind playing tricks on her; after all, Theo was the one with the crush, not Loki.

At least from across the room, Theo could easily admire Loki in his thick, fair isle sweater - seasonally appropriate, of course, but like all of his attire, it fit him perfectly and highlighted his long, lithe form in all the right ways. Between her nerves about the gift and how distractingly handsome Loki was, she barely noticed when the first two Avengers opened their gifts and found out who was assigned as their Secret Santa.

For the final night of the exchange, Loki was the third person to open his gifts.

While Loki focused on the large box in front of him, everyone else stared at Theo. If she could have, she would have melted into the floor; instead, she stood by the kitchen island with her mug of hot chocolate and whiskey in both hands, shooting dirty looks at the rest of the group so they wouldn’t give her away.

… Not like Loki hadn’t already figured out that Theo was his Secret Santa, because he likely knew. If he didn’t know, he was about to figure it out, but that was beside the point. 

Of all the gifts Theo chose, today’s were the most nerve-wracking because they were the most personal: the pre-reveal gift referenced something Loki gave her when she ended up in the hospital with an asthma exacerbation and pneumonia a few months prior. The post-reveal gift referenced the time all the Avengers visited New Asgard, and Loki took her on a late-night walking tour of the community.  

The note on the card was, well, maybe a bit too sentimental - in hindsight, maybe she should have saved the message for a later card that she could have given him in private. But by that point the card was taped to the box in Loki’s lap, and Theo couldn’t do a damn thing about it, other than brace herself for the inevitable fallout. 

At least she had the sense to write a disclaimer at the top of the note: “You might want to read this to yourself first, then decide if you want to read it out loud.”

After four days, Loki’s examination of the gift box had become a routine: turn it all around, lift it up in the air, give it a shake - and once he seemed satisfied, he peeled away the wrapping paper. 

“Well, I do not have any guesses as to what is inside this box, so I suppose I ought to open it.” Loki remarked, tugging away the last bit of wrapping paper. He conjured a dagger to cut the tape sealing the flaps at the top of the box, though he was careful not to cut deeply and risk damaging the contents inside (which was good, because that dagger would have sliced through the gift like hot butter). 

Unlike the previous days, where he immediately looked inside the container, this time he made a show of looking at the others as he reached inside. Theo watched Loki’s arm muscles tense through the wool of his sweater as he grabbed the gift, while his brows furrowed with confusion.

As he turned back toward the box, he slowly pulled out the present: a snake squishmallow, in green, of course - after all, green was his color.

“That’s cute!” Natasha commented, though Loki didn’t seem to notice. He held the plush toy in both hands, turning it side to side as he gave it a once-over. Theo swore she could spot the gears turning in Loki’s head as he tried to make the connection between the toy and his Secret Santa. 

“Yeah, but why? I don’t see the connection.” Yelena added, pointing at the card. “Open the card. I want to know what it says.”

Loki slowly set aside the snake, as if still thinking about the gift, and pulled out the note. 

Theo watched as Loki methodically scanned the note. At first, he read with heavy brows drawn tightly together; after a few moments, the light from the christmas tree reflected off his sea glass eyes, glittery and shining amidst the soft glow. A shaky, small smile grew as he made his way through the message until it practically took over his face.

“Well, what does it say?” Natasha asked, craning her neck to try and read what was written on the card.

Loki, however, ignored her. Without warning, he closed the card and rose to his feet. In a couple of long strides, he stood before Theo, who could no longer bite back her nervous smile as he drew near. 

Theo barely had a chance to set down her mug before Loki scooped her into his arms and crushed her in an embrace, the strength of which forced a small “oof!” out of Theo from the impact. She didn’t waste a moment before returning the embrace, selfishly nuzzling into his chest and drinking in the scent of cologne on his sweater - cedar, bergamot, and smoke - as they stood, arms wrapped around each other and swaying gently from side to side. 

Loki leaned down, his nose brushing gently along Theo’s hair, then drew a deep breath.

“Thank you,” he whispered in her ear. “Truly. Thank you.”

Theo’s heart damn near exploded. 

“Elsa, I really hope that Rapunzel’s your Secret Santa,” Tony, ever the troll, interrupted, “or this is going to get awkward.”

“Yeah, Tony, it’s me.” Theo laughed, her mind reeling as Loki shifted -  if Theo’s mind didn’t deceive her, his lips brushed against the crown of her hair. Still, he hadn’t let go, and as long as Loki held on, Theo had no plans of going anywhere.

“Now I wanna know what she wrote on that damn note,” Sam complained between shoving handfuls of caramel corn in his mouth. “Because damn, I don’t think I’ve ever seen Loki react like that.”

“Can we let him open the other gift first?” Theo asked, still hugging Loki as she looked over at Sam. “After all, there is a part of the message that won’t make sense without seeing the final gift.

“Fine, but afterwards I wanna read the damn note.” Sam grumbled and leaned back in his seat while Bucky leaned over and snatched some caramel corn from him. 

Theo begrudgingly pulled away from Loki, silently lamenting the lack of warmth that came with his touch. She rounded the Christmas tree and crouched down to where she hid the final box - a thin, rectangular box that was a bit larger than a poster - and brought it over to Loki, who had returned to his original seat. Theo sat down beside him, nervous but excited to see how he reacted to the last gift.

This time, Loki didn’t spend a moment examining the package - he went straight to tearing off the wrapping paper. With paper crumpled up and tossed aside, he carefully slid the lid off the box.

Centered on a bed of white tissue paper, was a painting - a canvas covered in thousands of small dashes of paint, the result of more than a few sleepless nights as Theo raced to finish the painting on a tight deadline. During the day, Theo hid it beneath a stack of other canvases so if Loki stopped by her suite, he wouldn’t notice; the moment night fell, Theo was elbows deep in oil paint as she added layer after layer of color.

“It’s New Asgard!” Thor exclaimed as he peered over Loki’s shoulder.

“Those are the gardens…” Loki breathed, one hand hovering over the canvas as if he wanted to touch it and prove to himself that it was real. 

“The gardens that you created, and that your people and countless tourists adore.” Theo added, her cheeks slightly pink. 

Loki’s focus went to the bottom corner, where Theo scrawled her name. It was tiny and borderline illegible because of the paint, but if someone had ever seen her handwriting, they would know instantly who it was. Loki traced his fingers over the letters almost meditatively.

“You made this?” When Loki looked up at Theo, she caught the slightest shine in the corners of his eyes, though his expression was nothing but pure awe. “Was this from memory?”

“God, my memory isn’t that good - I mean, yeah I painted it, but it wasn’t from memory,” Theo rubbed the back of her next, heat rising on her cheeks as Loki continued to gape at her. “I got Val to send me some pictures for reference, and then I worked on it every night after everyone was asleep. I wasn’t sure it would be done in time, if I’m honest, because oil paint takes forever to dry, but it dried just in time. The paint is still going to need some time to fully cure, so I’d be gentle with it.”

For the second time in minutes, Loki pulled Theo into another heartfelt embrace. 

“I am… I am speechless. I’ve no words, truly.” He laughed, a rumbling sound that Theo felt as much as she heard it. “Thank you.”

“Okay now we need to know what the hell was on that card.” This time it was Shuri, who looked like she was one step away from snatching the card and reading it out loud herself.

Loki unfurled his arms from around Theo so he could set the painting on the table in front of them, then retrieved the card.

“I think you ought to read it,” Loki held the card out to Theo, his cheeks now flushed with crimson. “I imagine it will sound better in your voice, since you wrote the message.”

Theo rolled her eyes, but accepted the card. She got the sense that Loki felt a bit sentimental himself, and was probably a bit out of his comfort zone; re-reading the message aloud might be more than he thought he could handle. So, despite her heart still fluttering like a goddamn school girl, Theo tried her best to steady her breathing, then cleared her throat and began:

One of Thor’s favorite stories to tell is when you were children and turned into a snake to trick him. One of my favorite things is watching the little smile you get every time he tells the story, like you know you shouldn’t think it’s funny and it makes the story even funnier. I bet you’re making that same smile right now as you think about the story!

This clue will probably give me away, but you once gave me a gift much like this - a plush toy of an unexpected creature, because you realized that the creature shared a connection to my sister. You didn’t make a big deal out of it - telling me you “happened to pass by a shop window and it just seemed like something I would like,” but it meant the world to me; to this day, it is easily the best gift I’ve ever received. 

In many ways, that gift is such a great example of why I am so lucky to have you as a friend - you are so incredibly thoughtful and kind, and when you sense that someone is having a tough time you go above and beyond to help, all without making a big deal about it… God knows you did that for me constantly when I first got here! There are, obviously, other reasons that you’re an amazing friend (your sense of humor, intelligence, and patience in putting up with me are also high on the list). 

I know none of my Secret Santa gifts have been big or flashy so far, and your final gift isn’t exactly big or flashy either. If I’m honest, I panicked when I drew your name because, well, what do you get someone who could have any gift they wanted? But the more I thought about it, the more I came back to just how lucky I was to have the gift of your friendship (yeah, corny as fuck, sorry - you’re the silvertongue, not me!). I can’t ever give you a gift that would compare, but I can at least make sure you know just how grateful I am for you and how much of a difference you make. Without a doubt, my life is better because you’re in it, as are the lives of many others. 

So, for your final gift, I made you something that I hope will remind you of not just the impact you’ve made on me, but the impact you’ve made on countless others, every time you see it. 

Merry Christmas Loki. 

Yours,

Secret Santa. 

P.S. I hope you can forgive my sentiment. Not all of us can be as cool as you.”

By the time Theo finished reading the message aloud, her entire body felt like it was on fire from the combination of her nerves and the others’ burning stares. With trembling hands, Theo slowly closed the card and set it on her lap, eyes focused downward the entire time.

“I didn’t realize it was possible to win at Secret Santa… ” Peter finally broke the silence, beaming as he looked at the pair. “... But I think Theo just won Secret Santa.”  

“I think everyone’s going to want you as their Secret Santa next year,” Steve chuckled, nodding along. “Still, we aren’t done with this year’s Secret Santa - I believe Wanda, you’re up next?”

With that, the attention shifted away from the two sorcerers sitting side-by-side on the couch, and onto the rest of the festivities. While Wanda made a scene trying to deduce clues about her gift, Loki casually slipped his hand over to Theo, interlacing his fingers with hers. In turn, Theo leaned her head on Loki’s shoulder and settled into his side.

By that point, she was only-half watching as Wanda opened one last gift. Frankly, Theo hadn’t heard who Wanda’s Secret Santa was, but she wasn’t that interested. 

“Merry Christmas, Loki,” Theo whispered, giving Loki’s hand a squeeze.

“Merry Christmas, Theo,” he murmured, turning so his lips brushed Theo’s temple. “I think this might be the first year that I’ve understood why one might enjoy Midgardians’ holiday festivities.”

Cozily tucked into Loki’s side, amidst the golden glow of the holiday lights and the spirited laughter of friends, Theo had to agree: maybe the holidays weren’t so bad after all.

[deadend-if]

This is just to give you guys a better idea about the game!

Where is this taking place?

The MC, A, and S will start in the city they live in together. M will also be there, but you won't meet K until Chapter One starts (sorry). Once Chapter One starts the rest of the game will be in the underworld!

The underworld? Which one?

Great question!!! All of them!!! I have taken my inspiration from... so many things. I'm sure there is a depiction out there similar to mine, nothing is original or something? It will get explained in the game but it can't hurt to give a little summary of it! The underworld is surprisingly easy to reach if you know where to look. The old doors are deep within catacombs and cave systems, but in the modern world, it becomes a problem to bring massive amounts of souls down twisting tunnels and tight passageways. So, when the subway system was implemented in big cities around the world, the denizens of the dead decided it worked for them, too. The underworld became the city of the dead, built with skyscrapers that reach toward no sky, and streetlights that have no stars to outshine. At the lowest level, souls are in turmoil, writhing in memories of people and tasks they left behind. The highest point is occupied by misty, formless wisps who have left behind everything they knew and loved to seek an audience with the Council of Rot. It's a crooked city of souls that linger on the cusp of something new, or something old. Hardly anyone knows what happens after the dead are done being, well, dead.

What kind of customization will the MC have?

You'll be able to choose your name, pronouns, gender identity (trans or not), hair color and length, eye color, height, college major, room/apartment decoration/general style, and smaller details like tattoos, freckles, glasses, etc. MC will also have different job options, though limited, along with some choices on their backstory, mostly focused on death and family dynamics. You can choose why S has a rivalry with MC, one-sided or not. I am also adding a childhood pet choice! And if you ever have an idea on something small to add to the customization feel free to let me know! I'll do my best to accommodate it, but I'm still not great with twine lol...

What are the non-customizable features of MC?

There will be limited choices for your background, job, and rivalry, but I'm hoping to leave a lot of options on the table for your MCs. That being said, your MC will always have a neutral-to-good relationship with A and a neutral-to-bad relationship with S at the beginning of the story. You will also have a set age (27) for various reasons. There might be more later, but I want to keep a lot of options on the table for you guys. The ending may seem a bit rail-roady (I don't know 100% yet) so I want to leave a lot of wiggle room for other things.

Personality Stats? Skill checks?

Yeah, so there won't really be "skill checks" in the typical sense, whoops. This story will have personality choices and some other variables that will change the game, but there won't be any failing/passing checks or rolling dice. MC's personality stats will affect flavor text and it will be the classic types like stoic, cheerful, shy, bold, etc. Your most game-changing stats are going to be MC's feelings on death and attachment to living. You determine A's fate, and maybe everyone else's, too. Who knows? :)

On the topic of NSFW and RO asks

The main reason I'm not including NSFW in this IF is because I genuinely don't think it would fit well in the plot at any point. That plus the fact that I, myself, am asexual... I don't think I could even begin to do it justice lol. It would be just... cringe guys, you wouldn't even want it. I can't really say anything though, I'm writing romance while also aromantic :/ I intend to keep this blog and the story away from anything NSFW. While I, personally, don't care about those asks, I want to create a space without NSFW topics. I'm also wary of people asking NSFW questions about asexual characters (Mortimer/A). Romance/SFW asks/scenarios/prompts about worldbuilding or ROs are totally fine, and I will be sososo happy to answer them.

Updates and Timeframe

Guys... I hate to break it to you... but I may be slow on the updates (shocking, I know). I want to write as much as I can, but I am also a college student writing this on a whim. I love this story, I've been thinking about it and scribbling ideas for it for about 2 years now. I don't want to abandon it, but there may be long stretches of silence sometimes. I WILL say something if it goes on hiatus or goes dark completely, I won't leave you hanging! This story will go through a lot of changes, I change my mind about things all the time, so you may be getting a lot of random updates of me changing (seemingly) unimportant things, sorry in advance. Lowkey might take years to write this :)

This will update with time! :D

[candescentdibromoindigodreams]

Just a couple of reasons why Izzy is NOT

RICKY doing that?? Pshaw, they didn't even meet until this episode! From the narrative POV, this doesn't make any sense. Izzy supposedly taking his own life off-screen was more likely.

not enough stakes. That WE'RE GOING IN, BOIS scene almost didn't have any at all, not even to the level "someone gets hurt", definitely not to the level of "someone gets killed off". That scene was "Successful heist" vibe, not a "We're gonna look Death in the face" vibe. Izzy getting shot was like a random thing - which COULD have been poignant in a different show (about how life is tragic and unpredictable, yadda yadda), but it's really out of place here.

Izzy touched Stede's leg in the bar. This wouldn't have happened if the continuation of their relationship was not planned (and I mean plot threads getting forgotten about is a thing, but it doesnt seem to be a thing in this particular show). Teaching Stede is one thing, that can be interpreted as part of the "Izzy accepts the crew as a family" narrative, but keeping your hand on someone's knee? Not really familial and also would have been random if that was the intention.

We were shown this very same type of wound basically being easily survived by both Stede and Ed. Stede also moved a lot after getting stabbed (more blood loss, same as Izzy). Still both survived. Ed treated getting skewerd like a scratch and was not shown to be even slightly affected by it. If now this wound would suddenly be fatal that would be illogical in the context of the show.

Izzy didn't die from rotting leg infection, didn't die from the blood loss when getting a leg amputated (major surgery done by complete noobs), didn't die from pain shock, didn't die from a bullet to the head (thanks to luck but still), didn't die from a severe head trauma (I assume a bullet ricocheting off of your nogging hard enough to leave a scar would give you one. Ed definitely agrees), didn't die from subsequent alcohol poisoning while his health was very much impaired. "Indestructible little fucker" indeed, so why would he die here.

on the topic of "indestructible little fucker". The show spells out a lot of things to us with words. Sometimes also repeating them kinda incessantly (count how many times a variation on the "turn toxicity into positivity" was mentioned). So pronouncing Izzy as such is basically a spell (during a storm and lightning to boot! STYLE), it's the point of him now.

Ed and Stede getting this type of wound has made it symbolic. It would be a different wound if the creators just needed to kill Izzy off. Giving him this exact one does not give the situation a "time to go, bud" meaning, instead it connects Izzy more to the guys - and again, not in a familial sense but specifically a romantic one.

the show didn't spend nearly enough time on grieving given what Izzy is to the story. Instead, that was the only time of broken pacing and vibe tbh, it was a bit jarring (he dead. okay, now wedding). I mean, Im not expecting the SPN-final-death levels of time spent, but still.

There was no narrative sense for Izzy to die after the journey he had in S2. That was a character on the mend, having ALREADY paid off all their sins. A second punishment like that (and by cinema rules death is always either a tragedy (not that type of show here), a joke (not that type of show or situation) or a punishment) is undeserved and illogical.

By the end of S2 Stede was not being his best, but rather kind of an asshole. This character clearly has not finished his journey yet to settle in an "inn" or whatever. Which means that the guys are there only for the purpose of being close to the grave for when Izzy gets back.

If we assume that removing Izzy was important for BlackBonnet - why? To make them closer? What is he, their child or parent (not even really a friend), why would his death make them closer? Plus, they already got to that point without his help. It would make a bit of sense if he was Ed's pronounced romantic ex who was still a threat that needed to go but that's not the case. It would make a bit of sense if he was Ed's pronounced past / the Blackbeard that needed to die - and to be clear, he was (WAS) that to a certain degree in S1 and the creators tried to use that point - BUT Ed ALREADY both rejected his past/BB persona (via Jack for instance) AND also accepted and embraced that part of himself. The narrative tells us that Ed learned to use his "darkness" for relative good, to protect those around him or as means to achieve something good. Izzy did not need to be cut off for this plotpoint.

It would make sense to write the character out if the actor needed it. But we know for a fact that Con loves playing Izzy. So not the case either.

S2 specifically established with Ed's "gravy basket" situation that none of those idiots know how to certify someone's death.

Izzy somehow being back after this gives (more) purpose to the whole Buttons Burb situation. Introing what, real magic (??) into the show was a weird point in itself (and it was not refuted in the show as, say, Ed's confusion) but also a point that went kinda nowhere. But it's not "nowhere" if it was needed for S3 Izzy return!

The only kinda one real point towards Izzy really being gone is

cinema rule number whatever: they show the character's dead face with open eyes. And the show did do that… But again, freakin Bird Buttons flew on his grave. So Izzy definitely comes out of it.

But thank you for giving us a chance to enjoy Con's impeccable dying acting!