#the memories & connection formed at these shows carry so much meaning & are truly what life is all about <3< /div> Explore tagged Tumblr posts

[radio-4-is-static]

Who Were We? | Yojiro Noda

[potol0ver]

MC with DID

DID; Dissociative Identity Disorder, a disorder characterized by the presence of two or more personalities, usually formed as a result from trauma to avoid harmful memories.

A/N; I have DID and my brain keeps wanting to write headcannons about the bros and everyone else with an MC with DID- so this is what this post is! It’s extremely self indulgent but I’ll try my best to involve as much of the differences of personal accounts with DID as possible.

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They’d all feel surprised by a condition like that. It would be a thing that’s more frequent in humans and very rare in angels and demons, they’d probably even show differently to, so needless to say they’re all intrigued in their own way.

All of them will probably ask about your alters, how many there are, how frequent (if at all) you switch alters, what personalities each alter has, etc.

Lucifer and Satan would definitely see the similarities of DID with the birth of Satan. Which leads to both of them shivering with the thought of being stuck in the same body as each other.

But for that reason they’d both feel like they have a deeper connection with you, even if it’s not the same, it’s similar enough to bond over it.

Levi and Satan would definitely find characters in their respective fiction stories that look/act like your alters.

Asmo would give your alters different wardrobes, makeup looks, and nail arts. He hast to make sure you all know he loves each and every one of you equally!

Beel would test you and see which alter likes different foods, he even makes it a game to see which alter is fronting just by what you eat.

Belphie would be the chillist, it’s not like he doesn’t care about you, he just takes it as “oh cool, that’s something I didn’t know, whatev’” although he would secretly pick up on the voice changes between your alters, even if they’re subtle. He’d even figure out which alters they belong to and call you by that alter name, just to tease you a little bit.

Mammon would brush it off as no big deal, which it truly isn’t to him, but he’ll make it his life goal to know which alter is fronting when ever he’s near you. Like it’s his right of passage as your “first”, it’s honestly just a sweet gesture. He will get mad that Belphie picked up in the voices faster than he did tho-

Satan it’d probably be a thing he didn’t realize could happen and now he’s deep diving in book and over all knowledge about DID, he hast to know! It’s intrigues him so much, besides his human has it, that’s enough reasoning for him. I can see him getting slightly worried about what MC went through to have this, but overall impressed by how resilient the human brain is.

Barbatos, Diavolo, and Simeon would think the same. They’d all secretly praise you and maybe even look up to you about how strong you are. (All if them would but these three especially.)

Luke, he’d want to draw all of your alters, no matter what they look like, and if it’s take awhile because of how many there might be. In the end you’ll have the drawings pinned on your wall collage style.

Solomon probably heard about it at one point or another, but never really looked into it. He’d become like a walking question air. He means it respectfully of course, he also wonders if it’ll have affect on your magic. Well now he knows what your next lesson will be.

All of them would help you remember stuff, I know for me I forgot small every day stuff, like the last time I showered, or if I had eaten. So they’d all remind you, maybe even have you write down when you’d last eaten and stuff on a note pad you carry around to help you. (If you’re ok with that idea of course. Knowing me I’d lose it 24/7)

If you have little alters, they’d love them to. Lucifer, Barbatos, and Simeon’s more paternal sides come out with them and definitely become a sort of parental figure towards them. Mammon would be the protective older brother towards them, Beel and Belphie would be the chill siblings to them, always down to cuddle and happily snack with them. Satan would read them books, Asmo would dress them up, and Levi would find games they both can play.

If you switch rapidly/out of no where, they’d all at first a little startled at how out of no where it could be, but it quickly falls into the normal. If you’d forget stuff between the switches, they’ll rewind a little and continue the convo like nothing happened.

Let’s be honest, there’s such a wide range of people here that your alters would come out more with certain people. So they’d all at one point realize this when you’re talking rather profoundly with Mammon and Levi, then on a dime acting similarly to Barb when he, Dia, and Lucifer come around. They’d all try to figure out which alter hangs around them more.

[gloamists]

Walking through the fog of the past: Why Cowboy Bebop is the best anime of all time

“You’re gonna carry that weight.”

Cowboy Bebop is the BEST anime of all time. I’ve watched it countless times all the way through and each time it’s like i’m watching it for the very first time again. A recurring theme i’ve noticed throughout my many times watching this anime is “the past” and the “falling action”. Every member of Cowboy Bebop (apart from Ed, i’ll get to her later) reached the “climax” of their life before finding their way to the Bebop, meaning they are now on the falling action. Throughout the series Spike Spiegel, Jet Black and Faye Valentine are all trying to deal with their past in some way shape or form.

Spike Spiegel

I’ll start with Spike. Spike is constantly living in fog of his past, never really being able to get past it. In one of my favorite episodes in the series, Spike tells Faye that he is always seeing the present in one eye and the past in the other, always seeing patches of reality but never the whole picture. I think this not only perfectly describes Spike, but the theme of Cowboy Bebop as a whole. Are you really alive if you are always living in the past?

Jet Black

Jet Black is a bit different from Spike because Jet’s fog comes primarily from unanswered questions from his past. Jet is a character plagued by uncertainty and self-doubt. Why did his wife leave? What could he have done differently? Much like Spike, Jet also can not come to terms with his past. And even when Jet gets the answer he is looking for, he is left unsatisfied. I like to think this means that no matter what, only you can make yourself move on.

Faye Valentine

Faye’s case is a bit different, seeing as for the majority of the show she does not remember her past. But also in a sense I think that makes her the most interesting. She lives her life simply trying to survive, with no memories of the connections she made in her past. However, much like her colleagues Faye is still in a sense living within the fog or her past even if she has no recollection of it. She thinks that inside her lost memories is the home she has been searching for her entire life. Loved ones she has so desperately pined for. But much to the contrary, her memories leave her with nothing but melancholy sadness.

Edward Tivrusky IV

Ed is the only character on the bebop (aside from the dog Ein) who is not living within the fog of her past. This is because unlike the others Ed has not reached the climax of her life yet. So unlike the others, Ed is not in her falling action, she is in her rising action. Which is why I believe she ultimately leaves the Bebop with Ein. Ed, unlike all of the rest of the members of the Bebop has never had a brush with death. She is not a tragic character like the rest. So she must leave, to go find a place where she truly belongs.

What does this mean?

In my opinion, Cowboy Bebop is a show about dealing with your past. Which is why the quote I put at the beginning of this post is so important. “You’re gonna carry that weight.” To truly live, you must be able to let go of your tragic past. By the end of the show, all of the characters have done this. Jet finds the answers he was looking for. Faye get’s her memories back and realizes she has already found comrades with whom she can build a true home with. And Spike finally confronts Vicious, though his ending is much more tragic.

Cowboy is an amazing, intricately written masterpiece on a level I have never experienced again since I watched it. I have never truly related to a character more in my life than Spike Spiegel. His internal struggle with his own past really resonated with me.

Carry that weight. Let go of the past. Live on. Because there is oh so much to live for.

See you space cowboy…

[sarucane]

OFMD Spiral Parallels 51: Pinocchio

Intro: What I love most about how season 2 builds on season 1 of OFMD is the spiral narrative structure. Ground is repeatedly and explicitly re-trod from season 1 to season 2, but in season 2 everything goes deeper than season 1. Meanings are shuffled, emotions are stronger and truer, and transformation is showcased above everything. The first season plucks certain notes, then the second season plucks the same ones--but louder, and then it weaves them together to create a symphony.

---

In the very first episode, Stede reads the crew the conclusion of the story Pinnochio. Stede himself is, very clearly, a stand-in for Pinnochio: he felt like he wasn't "real," in his old life, like he was made of wood. He couldn't truly *feel* when he was swaddled by comfort. As a child, Stede wasn't able to experience life authentically or choose his path because of the abuse and censure he suffered from men and boys.

As an adult, Stede felt isolated within his family, and wasn't able to emotionally engage with them either.

He was wood, and he longed to be flesh--so he went and became a pirate.

But Stede isn't the only one who resonates with the Pinocchio story.

When the crew is considering mutiny, Olu points out that they won't know how the story ends if they kill Stede. And it's a compelling argument: the entire crew joins in demanding that Lucius "do the voices." They may not realize it yet, but they've already been affected by Stede's dreaming. They're already moving along with him into becoming "real," people who are comfortable forming deep emotional bonds and expressing themselves openly to the people around them.

Stede may be dumb in the pilot, but he's actually right: the guys really are actually "sweethearts" deep down, they really are carrying around trauma and hiding things about themselves behind beards and bluster. Piracy really doesn't have to be a "culture of abuse." They don't have to be wooden men.

And then the story returns at the beginning of season 2. And it shows just how much Stede's dreams have outrgrown him.

When Ed's darkness is spreading on the Revenge like a disease, Jim lights a lamp in the darkness for Fang. They don't have to do this. They could have just ignored Fang. But they did, and they used the story of Pinocchio to do it.

It's a very different story than Stede's was. After all, Jim's speaking from memory, telling the story through the lens of their own experience (which is how folktales work, the teller as important as the tale, the context as a key shaper of the story).

And Jim doesn't tell the story well--they accidentally start at the end, after the puppet has become a real boy.

Which is, after all, how they all ended up here. In this pain. They all turned into "real" people last season, and now they have to live with all of that, both the good and the bad. It's no surprise that in Jim's version of the story, Pinocchio is turned into flesh by a dark lord. No one on the Revenge feels like humanity is a gift right now. As Jim tells the Pinocchio story, Ed himself is telling a story about how he could run away from his own humanity, avoid the pain of being a soft "real boy" by never going back to land.

But while the impossibility of Ed's story leaves him balancing over an abyss, Jim and Fang laugh and are connected by their story. Archie is drawn in too, Stede's dream of a better way to live (as a "real" person, made of flesh) growing to include someone he's never even met.

The core of the Pinocchio story--as it is told through OFMD--is hope that people can change. That what people fear is the most immutable part of themselves, their wooden parts, can transform. That they connect with each other, and be accepted as changed.

And that having transformed, their lives will be better. Which is, of course, what happens to everyone by the time these 18 episodes conclude.

At the end of S2, Izzy calls Prince Richie "Pinocchio" when he sees Richie's painted wooden nose. It's fitting: after all, Richie set out to become a "real boy" and failed. Now he thinks he's "the ultimate pirate," but he's not. He's just wood. And Izzy, with his wooden leg binding him to both the past and the future at the same time, can recognize that better than anyone.

But here's the thing: Izzy wasn't there when Stede told the Pinocchio story to his crew, or when Jim told it to Fang. The meaning of this story has deepened and deepened, until it's part of the language of the show.

And when Izzy calls Richie "Pinocchio," everyone laughs in the face of death. Where there's joy and a shared story, there is hope that no darkness lasts forever. The story can go on. They pulled off change once; they can do it again.

[legaciestold]

a breath is taken in, deep and calming as benjamin meets her gaze and then looks away. a variety of factors were at war within her mind, all of which carry their own weight. she is thankful general kerr has avoided a worse fate than being delayed and if she thinks too much upon such she may have to admit her own bias which accompanies such favor she shows upon him due to the nature of their connection. (he was not her blood but he was her family.) instead, her mind considers the soon to be ramifications of what has caused the delay, mulling over her thoughts for a moment before ben's words register within her mind.

'i am thinking far too much.'

a strange memory is sparked as she lets her gaze fall back upon the map. images of healing wounds and the soft and relieved gaze of her brother meeting her own as a man stood before them with an offer and a world much larger than they had ever known presented. centuries had passed since such moments yet now she can recall when her eyes had been opened to so much more than the provincial life she'd known. when knowledge and vampires and histories had been shown her and it had been all too much at once and not enough all the same. such had shaken and conflicted her in the moment both because of it's vastness and the simple fact her and kasper's parents had kept such larger truths from them. (to protect them, she reminds herself, though such had been harder to accept then.) perhaps it is not quite the same, yet she understands a modicum of the journey of knowledge she's set forth upon him. this was new, it conflicted in many ways with his understanding of the world prior. but he trusted her and she trusted him. that was what mattered now as the realities of the world were coming crashing back.

'i am thinking far too much, but the primary source of contention is hickey, bradford and lee. the fact that any of them are roaming free right now is an insult -- having hickey isn't enough.'

a surge of painful soreness meets her neck upon his words, a reminder of darker aspects of the previous night awakened by the names mentioned. she releases her breath unevenly, unrealizing she had held it. "i can not testify to bradford or lee." katarzyna reminds him, frustration in her tone though she is sure of their involvement just as much as she is assured of her own willingness to put an end to the three men for good in a most brutal fashion. however, this was a new world and the men were not hers, but washingtons'. she had to concede to a middle ground if this alliance was to work.

"we shall have to see what comes of our time with hickey.. though, i would much rather rid us of the three of them immediately, confessions or not." she confesses with a sigh though her tone conveys she's conceded this was not a present option.

with his shift in question her light hues move back toward tallmadge's features. "delayed is not the same as thwarted. kerr's end goal remains the same. i have no doubt word will come soon enough of his success now that his path is set. as for what this delay means... while unexpected and certainly not ideal at present, it may perhaps present us with a stronger advantage in the grand scheme than we could have had if not for how such has chosen to play out." she states then quotes in chinese before translating into english. "the enemy of your enemy is your friend."

katarzyna steps closer then, just for a moment. "i will have to teach you chinese so you can read that book i brought you in it's truest form." she's fairly certain he hasn't gotten a chance to truly look over it given the events which have unfolded since she slammed such down upon his desk. "alas, let us go deal with the traitor first." perhaps it's because she knows it surprises him when she speaks other languages, or merely because she seeks to lighten the moment for a brief second before they go out into the darkness of the day and away from the place they shared during the night, but she speaks such in latin this time.

There was a thickness in the air, curling like smoke as Benjamin made his way inside the war room. Even though Katarzyna was at his side, it felt as though there were walls between them -- not out of animosity, but because he felt lost, adrift, condemned by the curious gazes being cast their way.

A few exchanges were stated in Greek -- a familiar and welcome language -- yet out of respect, Benjamin attempted to tune out the words since he knew they were not meant for him. To his right, a soldier dressed in all black spoke to him, and he offered what he prayed to be a courteous bow.

On the table in front of them, the shapes on the map twisted and danced free of the page, and on impulse, Benjamin jerked upright. As an officer, he was trained to be prepared for any sudden movements -- he just hadn't expected to see it in such an inanimate manner.

Katarzyna drew nearer, and by instinct, he sought her warmth by taking a step closer in tandem. To touch would be inappropriate, so he merely kept his gaze focused on the other attendees in the room.

She spoke of General Kerr and a change of course and frustrations, and by the time the room had cleared, her shoulders seemed to sag beneath the weight of their meeting.

"No," Benjamin softly agreed, "nothing ever goes according to plan...my attempts at impartiality being a clear indicator." Watching as her eyes lifted to his, soft and crystalline, he smiled before looking away, no longer quite able to handle her eyes on him. "I am thinking far too much," he confessed, "but the primary source of contention is Hickey, Bradford and Lee. The fact that any of them are roaming free right now is an insult -- having Hickey isn't enough."

The brightness in his eyes dimmed. "If Kerr has been thwarted, what does that mean for us?"

[beyondspaceandstars]

While You Sleep

Chapter 8

Relationship: Bucky Barnes x Reader Warnings: fluff, mentions of violence Summary: Soulmate!AU - Throughout life, you’re given glimpses of your soulmate through dreams. As you sleep, memories flash in your mind showing you the life your soulmate has lived. Everyone around you raves about how their soulmate reads great books or volunteers in their spare time. But you can’t relate as your dreams end up being more like nightmares. Through initial images of death and violence, you come to learn your soulmate is the Winter Soldier. 

(a/n: i promise i have other writings in the work outside this fic kdsfjlajdf i maybe have part 2 of ‘Around Your Neck’ coming up............)

Masterlist | Series Masterlist

You spent the rest of your night trying to redial Bucky’s number. Every single time you just got his voicemail, eventually filling it to the max with pleas for him to call you back. You apologized countless times through texts, begging him to not feel bad and to let you two sit down and discuss it.

But he had really gone radio silence. 

The only real beacon of hope for you was that you could still feel him. You still felt that attachment, the connection of soulmates. He hadn’t totally pushed you out, at least. That was all you could see as far as positives. 

As you went to bed that night, the darkness of the situation was still encompassing you. Even the world seemed to be upset with it as the second you laid your head down, it began storming. 

You fell asleep to sounds of rain hitting the windows and thunder booming across the city. The nightmares engulfed you once more with no signs of your Bucky making appearances this time. Instead, the feelings of dread ran through your body. Bone, skin, blood, and all. It was like an old friend coming to visit. 

The images were nearly the same as well as the asset was back using his knives and terrorizing unsuspecting victims. You couldn’t fight but why would you? You felt lost and defeated as you were engrossed in the metaphorical trenches of the life and missions of the Winter Soldier.

***

You had only been asleep for a few hours when your phone started ringing. Slightly thankful the sound pulled you awake before you had to see another man slaughtered, you jumped up from your bed, diving for the phone. 

The screen shone brightly in the dark of night. It was him. You nearly cried out as you hit ‘accept.’

“Bucky?”

“Can you let me in?” His voice was slowly getting drowned out by the rain. You frowned, confused.

Heading to your front door, you popped your head out, looking down the stairs at the building’s entrance. Bucky was staring at the ground outside. “What are you doing?”

“Waiting for you to let me in.” He finally looked up, meeting your eyes through the glassdoor. It was not exactly a pretty sight. He looked tormented standing there damp from the rain. You couldn’t speak, just nodded and hung up. Without much care for your current state, draped in an oversized t-shirt and sleeping shorts, you ran down the stairs. 

Once you unlocked the door, Bucky entered the lobby without so much of a glance at you. Wordlessly, you walked back up the stairs to your apartment, letting Bucky follow.

You introduced him to your apartment, showing him the couch where he could take a seat. This certainly was not how you expected his first time in your home would be but you didn’t have much time to mourn it. 

You opted to stay standing, watching as Bucky shifted uncomfortably. He wouldn't look at you yet but you could feel the anger radiating from him. You didn’t know what to do now.

“D-Do y-you want any water or something?” 

Bucky shook his head. “I’m sorry I hung up on you.”

Sighing, you said, “I didn’t mean to make you upset.”

“I know, I know,” He insisted, sounding so defeated. He leaned back on the couch, staring up at the ceiling, contemplating. “It’s just… After yesterday morning, I thought I understood what you…you had seen but I didn’t want to accept it, okay? I didn’t want to think it was true. I wanted to believe that my fucking soulmate was learning the better things about me. Actual things about me, not...not that goddamn monster they created.”

A familiar ache came over you hearing his words. This must’ve been really a lot for him if he finally said the word. You didn’t even have time to celebrate it.

You couldn’t help yourself as you crossed the living room and took a seat next to him on the couch like something was actually pulling you to him. He was still staring at the ceiling while you turned towards him, fingers uncontrollably fiddling in nervousness. 

“I didn’t want to tell you,” you admitted. “At first they were everything in my life, inescapable. The nightmares-,”

Bucky cut you off with a scoff. “Nightmares.”

You frowned. “I’m sorry, I know that’s unfair to you for me to describe them like that but they weren’t exactly pleasant,” you said. “The nightmares were everywhere and...and the feelings, the images… Even just tonight they-,”

His head whipped towards you. “You still have them?”

“Bucky, you need to let me speak.” He nodded and you tried to collect yourself before continuing, “Everything, from the emotions to the images of those terrifying things, hit me hard, and while, yes, it’s scary and it’s been scary for a very, very long time… I don’t think it should completely matter. I can’t change them - you certainly can’t change them - and they definitely do not represent the man sitting next to me in any way, shape, or form.”

Bucky's hard expression got softer at your reassurance. You had told him this yesterday morning but you felt now you were actually getting somewhere. You were getting your thoughts out there and maybe, just maybe, he’d accept them as facts.

His tone was rough but his words were soft as he began to speak again. “I told you that while you’re with me you won’t ever be hurt or have to worry.” You nodded, remembering the promise in passing. “So it kills me that I can’t fix this. I-I didn’t know about all that, really, and it’s hard realizing you’ve had to deal with consequences from my actions. You don’t deserve this, you don’t deserve anything like this.”

You tried to muster up a small smile, trying to assure Bucky you were okay. He didn’t look convinced, though. 

“It’s not ideal, no,” you shrugged, “but it’s leading me to you, so, maybe there’s something in it. I think Fate knows what it’s doing, at least most of the time.”

A little smile just barely formed on Bucky’s lips. It wasn’t much but at least he didn’t look like he was ready to punch a wall in your already run-down apartment. 

“Besides, it’s not all bad,” you continued, wanting to at least bring something positive to this conservation. Bucky raised his brows, curiously. “I did have a nice dream that night after dinner. I saw you reading.”

He looked almost relieved. “I guess all we can do is hope those continue.” A beat. “I’m amazed you even allowed me in your apartment.” 

Your jaw went slack, unsure of where this statement was coming from. “Well of course I do. Why wouldn’t I want that?”

Bucky turned away and that rough look of his came back. Your attempts to lighten everything were taking a nosedive apparently, but you couldn’t ask him to avoid or suppress his feelings. You guessed it was better to get these things out in the open.

Bucky eventually asked, “How can you just be okay with everything?” 

This time, you looked away, turning to look out the window opposite of you two. The rain was still coming down steadily. “You haven’t really given me a reason to not be okay with everything.”

Your words were bold, the conversation was bold, and to keep with the theme, you boldly grabbed his hand to hold. You ran your thumb over the back of it in circular motions, trying to calm him. He didn’t pull away, thankfully. 

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I-I get nervous about all this.”

You chuckled softly, “Me too.”

Bucky hummed, contently. He leaned in a bit closer to you and gave your hand a squeeze. You shifted into his side, wrapping your other hand around his arm, accepting the closeness of you two. 

You decided to break the comfortable silence, trying your magic once again to carry a brighter conversation. “Why didn’t you tell Steve about us?”

Unexpectedly, Bucky chuckled lowly at the question. Your interest peaked greatly. 

“Forgive me if I just want to explore all this new territory with you and only you.” 

“New territory?”

You didn’t have to look at him to know he was rolling his eyes. “You just want me to say it again.”

You let out a fake, dramatic gasp. “James, you’re ridiculous.”

You heard him chuckle. His body shifted slightly closer to you. “I want to explore this… this soulmate thing with you. Only you. At least for now. Down the line, I have no problem showing you off but for now… It’s us.”

Soulmate. Us. 

The words rang happily in your ears. Now it really felt real. Him acknowledging it truly, wholeheartedly, and not just in the heat of an argument made shivers run through your body. 

“Us,” you repeated, a goofy grin unable to be suppressed came about on your lips. “I’m okay with that.” You let out a bit of a dreamy sigh. “You know, this all feels really new and really old at the same time.”

Bucky chuckled, “I think that’s how these things work, right?” His other hand came to lay on top of yours gently. “We feel like we’ve known each other for years because, well, I think in some twisted way we kind of have.”

You contemplated the idea, realizing you felt that very deeply. You had and had not known him for almost your whole life. While Bucky wasn’t in the exact form you learned about him in, there was something within him, the actual him, you felt you knew like the back of your hand. 

“We need to go out again,” you finally said, worried continuing with such sentiments would make you emotional for the millionth time tonight. Bucky seemed to welcome this change.

“Are you asking me out on a second date, sweetheart?”

Butterflies filled your stomach. “Well, you weren’t making any move to do it,” you shrugged, shooting Bucky a playful look. He responded with a dramatic eye roll. 

“Maybe I like a woman who takes charge,” he said, shooting you an award-winning, knowing smirk. 

You gasped, your neck suddenly getting hot. Actually, you felt much of yourself getting warm from the little innuendo hidden within his tone. Words were suddenly getting lost on your tongue as your brain short-circuited. You mumbled, “A second date could definitely be fun.”

Bucky let out a room-filling laugh at your sudden nervousness. The twinkle in his eyes told you he would enjoy making these little teasing comments to you from now on. 

“How about tomorrow night, doll? Good night for a second date, don’t you think? Assuming you actually want to see me after tonight’s fiasco.”

You nodded, ignoring his self-deprecation. You couldn’t talk it out of him so actions maybe had to speak louder. “What should we do?”

Bucky waved a hand in dismissal. “You let me handle it. I’ll surprise you.”

“I thought you liked it when a woman took charge?” Now your smirk was just as evil and mischievous. Bucky raised his brows in surprise but rolled with it. He had quite the silver tongue you found. 

“Sure do,” he said, “but a man still has to make sure he takes care of his lady, too.”

You giggled and cozied up into his side, very much enjoying the sound of that. “Fine. Take the reins, Bucky.”

[jenstar1992-2]

Here with You

Pairing: Echo x reader/ Hunter x reader

Warnings: Mentions of nightmares/ trauma, reliving a traumatic experience, Order 66 (because it’s a warning in itself)

Word count: 7,103

A/N: Well, I knew it, it hasn’t been a whole day since I saw the Bad Batch premiere, and I’ve already gotten my first writing idea (yes, this took me like two days to write because I kept getting interrupted). I just couldn’t get the image of my poor baby Echo in that med bay and seeing the trauma those damned Separatists caused him out of my head. All I want to do is hold him and never let go, he deserves the world. This was originally just going to be an Echo x reader, but it turned into a Hunter x reader as well, because I just couldn’t help myself, I love them both, and wanted both of them to get some lovins. Also, I get the sense that Omega is a smart kid, and that she’s pretty well spoken, so I tried to write her as such, while still keeping that childlike innocence, so hopefully it comes across that way.

So much had transpired within the last few days and you were still trying to wrap your head around all of it. The jedi had been almost entirely wiped out in a single day, and while you were certain their had to be other survivors besides yourself, you were unclear as to what that number was. Luckily for you, you had been amongst friends when Order 66 was given, and your men turned on you. If it weren’t for the Bad Batch, you were certain you wouldn’t be alive right now.

As you sat in the cockpit of the Marauder, the memories began to flood your brain, which caused involuntary tears to fill your eyes.

You and your men had been sent to Kaller to aid Master Billaba and her troops. However, upon your arrival, you were greeted with a pleasant surprise. It turned out, Clone Force 99 had been on planet already and had taken out a large amount of the droids before you even landed.

You had worked with this group before and had even enjoyed the experience. While your men thought their tactics and unprofessional antics were unnecessary and even a bit annoying, you found the group to be, for lack of a better term, fun. You had been around stuffy, uptight individuals for so long, it was nice to have a change of pace, and while your men were great, they tended to be sticklers for the rules and rarely wanted to take risks.

You also got along with this team rather well, enough to consider them good friends, but you were especially close with their newest recruit. You and Echo had known each other well before he joined the Bad Batch, even before his accident at the citadel, and had been friends for just as long, although as time went by and you found yourself encountering him more and more in your life, you slowly realized you might feel more for the trooper than you should, more than you’d ever admit aloud. So, when you’d heard of his survival and rescue, you had been elated, and that happiness resurfaced at the thought of seeing him again.

You exited the gunship and saw the rag-tag group of clones speaking with Master Billaba on the now quiet battlefield. They turned as you and your men made your approach. As you got closer to the group, you scanned the faces of its members before you found him, smiling brightly as your eyes connected, he did the same.

You came to stand before their leader, raising your gaze to meet the man’s unwavering stare.

“Sergeant”, you greeted him, extending a hand formally, which he took without hesitation, shaking it firmly.

“General, good to see you again”, he said with a smile.

“You too”, you responded.

You’d always liked Hunter, from the beginning he’d always struck you as a respectable man, and you admired the fact that he could allow his men to be their reckless selves while also keeping them in line, but only when necessary, it seemed. There was something else too, something you hadn’t noticed right away, but after a few more encounters with the man, you put it together, coming to an all to familiar realization, one that brought butterflies to your stomach, while also bringing about a slight anxiety. How could you let this happen, it was bad enough falling for one man you couldn’t have, but two, you were sure the universe was out to hurt you.

“General (L/N), I’m glad to see your trip was a safe one, and better late than never I suppose”, Depa said, drawing you from Hunter’s gaze to hers.

“Sorry Master Billaba, we were assisting Masters Luminara and Yoda on Kashyyyk when we got word of your need for reinforcements, we got here as soon as we could”, you said, then looking around at the desolated droids scattered across the landscape. “Although, from what I can tell, you seem to now have a handle on things.”

“Yeah, thanks to these guys”, Caleb, Depa’s padawan, exclaimed, gesturing to the group of men before you. “You should’ve seen it, they took all those droids out in a matter of minutes, it was incredible.”

You chuckled. “Yes, I’m well aware of the marvel that is Clone Force 99, and they do put on quite the show”, you said, shooting a quick glance Echo’s way. “Incredible indeed.”

Your words caused the trooper to smile shyly at you.

“Yes, well, we’re still glad you’re here, we just launched a counterattack, and the more assistance, the better”, Depa said.

You nodded. “You need us, we’ll stay”, you said before turning to your troops. “Men, a counterattack has been launched, I want you to rendezvous with Master Billaba’s troops and aid in the attack, Commander Roran, you’re with me. Let’s move!”

With that your troops dispersed, leaving you and your commander where you stood. You turned back to face everyone.

“So, how can we help”, you asked.

“Actually, I don’t think we’ll be needing your assistance after all, in fact, this war might soon be over”, Tech spoke up, causing you to give him a confused look.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, according to the encrypted comm chatter, Jedi General Obi-Wan Kenobi has found and engaged General Grievous on Utapau”, he responded.

“If he captures, or kills Grievous, the separatist command structure will collapse”, Echo chimed in.

“And most likely the droid armies along with them”, Tech finished.

“It can’t be that easy, can it”, you asked, looking to the jedi master.

“While it is an interesting theory, I would not bet our hopes on it, we should focus on the task at hand”, she replied.

“I agree, we should focus our energy on this attack, strike while we have the advantage”, you said.

Hunter nodded. “Any orders, or shall we do what we do”, he asked, directing his words at Depa.

“What do you think General, should we let them ‘do what they do’”, she asked you.

You chuckled and folded your arms over your chest. “Probably our best bet, what do you think Caleb”, you asked the padawan.

“I say we let them, but only if I can go with them”, he responded.

You looked to his master, raising an eyebrow in question.

“Very well”, she said, giving the boy permission.

“Ronan and I will tag along too”, you stated, then looking to Hunter. “Just in case you guys need a hand.”

“Hope that wasn’t a jab at me”, Echo said, coming to stand beside you while simultaneously lifting his cybernetic arm.

You immediately regretted your choice in words and stammered your defense.

“N- no, I didn’t mean, I would never.”

He let out an amused laugh. “I’m just messing with you General, sorry”, he said.

You then scowled at him before poking a finger at his chest plate.

“Not funny”, you said, but couldn’t keep the smile from forming on your face.

“I said I was sorry”, you heard him say as you began walking in the direction your troops had gone. He soon caught up and walked alongside you.

You chuckled. “Well, it’s nice to know you haven’t lost your sense of humor.”

“Nah, but I did lose a couple other things”, he said, face turning slightly serious.

You stopped walking and just stood for a moment, a sad expression now adorning your features. Noticing your actions, Echo ceased his movements as well and looked back to you.

“What is it”, he asked.

You went to stand in front of him before you spoke your next words. “Echo, I am sorry for your loss, truly I am, but honestly, I’d rather you be here and missing a few limbs, then for you to not be here at all. I’m just glad your alive, and that I get to see you again.”

He stared at you for a moment with an unreadable expression before smiling and nodding.

“I guess you’re right, and I’m glad our paths crossed again, I…”, he began, clearly wanting to say more, but stopping himself. You caught on though and decided to voice it for him.

“I missed you too”, you said, giving him a warm smile, prompting one of his own.

You both began walking once more to catch up with your comrades.

“You know, I was actually surprised you recognized me, what with the countless differences and all” he said with a chuckle.

You shook your head. “You can change all you want, I’ll still know it’s you”, you said.

“Yeah?”

“Yep, you might’ve changed a lot on the outside, but inside, you’re still the same Echo I’ve always known and loved”, you said, saying the words before they fully registered with your brain, but once they did you nearly froze in your stacks, your face instantly reddening with embarrassment. You quickly tried to back track before he could respond. “I mean, uh, well, y- you know what I mean.” Smooth.

He chuckled, amused at your obvious embarrassment of your less-than-ideal choice of words yet again.

“It’s okay, I know what you mean”, he said, giving you a reassuring smile before seemingly letting the subject drop, much to your relief.

You nodded as you carried on toward the others.

Suddenly, a wave of emotions flooded your mind, and it was as if hundreds of voices were crying out within the confines of your skull. You stopped, placing a hand to the side of your head in an attempt to stop the dizziness that accompanied the voices.

Echo noticed and came to your side, placing a steadying hand to your back.

“Are you okay”, he asked, clearly concerned.

“S- somethings wrong, I feel… death, so much death, I don’t know…”, you began through heavy breathes, but you were soon cut off by the sound of blaster fire.

You both looked to see Master Billaba’s men attempting to gun her down as she deflected their blasts with her lightsaber. Before you could fully process the sight in front of you, you heard Caleb yell for his master, seeing him rush past you, saber ignited and ready to jump to her aid.

“Caleb, no…”, you shouted, but before you could run after him a burning pain in your left arm stopped you.

You grabbed your now wounded arm and turned to see Roran facing you, blaster raised and aimed directly at you.

“Commander”, you said in confusion, but before you could get another word out, he was firing again. You were able to deflect the blasts with your saber, yelling at him as you did so. “Roran, why are you doing this?”

Suddenly, the blasts stopped as Echo came to your aid, wrestling the blaster out of the commander’s hands before knocking him out cold. He then rushed to your side once more, seeing you kneeling and clutching your head.

“General, (Y/N), (Y/N), can you hear me? Say something”, he urged, but try as you might, you couldn’t form the words to respond.

Your head was swimming in a sea of pain, death, and betrayal, most of which you were certain weren’t coming from you, more like from the force itself. You’d felt disturbances in the force before, but none like this, it was all encompassing and soon you found yourself slipping from consciousness from the intensity of it all.

***

When you finally came to, you found yourself laying in a bunk aboard the Havoc Marauder. When you tried to sit up a hand caught your shoulder and gently coaxed you back down.

“Easy (Y/N), you don’t want to push yourself, you sustained a pretty bad injury, you should rest”, a familiar voice said softly.

“Echo, what, what happened… they turned on us, why would they do that”, you asked, looking at him with confusion and sadness mixing in your expression.

“I don’t know, we’re still trying to figure that out ourselves, but you’re safe now, I won’t let them hurt you again, you have my word. Now rest”, he said, trying to comfort you, but knowing it wouldn’t help much given what you’d just been through.

“No”, you heard someone say, the volume of it startling you slightly, and you looked to see that it was Hunter, who had just entered.

“What do you mean ‘no’”, Echo asked him, confused.

“I mean, she can’t stay here, it’s not safe”, he explained, and when you both gave him a befuddled look, he continued, “It’s Crosshair, there’s… something wrong with him. I think whatever happened to those soldiers is happening to him too, but I can’t be sure.”

“What makes you think that”, you questioned, finally sitting up and turning to place your feet on the floor.

He looked behind him, making sure you three were the only ones in ear shot before bending down to your level.

“He tried to kill that padawan”, he said, so low it was almost a whisper.

“Caleb, is he alright”, you asked, fear and concern thick in your voice.

“He’s alive, but other than that, I’m not sure. He ran off after…”, he began, but the words died on his lips.

You nodded in understanding. “So, what should I do, where should I go?”

“Stay here, on Kaller, find somewhere to hide. We’ll go back to Kamino and sort this out, once it’s safe, we’ll come back for you”, he said.

You nodded, agreeing to do as he said, knowing you really had no other option at this point.

Shortly after this conversation you readied yourself to leave, Tech giving you some medical supplies in case you would need to re-bandage your arm before they returned.

Echo ended up accompanying you in your search for shelter, telling the others he wasn’t going anywhere until he knew you’d found somewhere safe to stay. You had resisted the gesture, wanting him to get as far away from danger as possible, but he insisted.

You found a cave a few miles from the ship’s current location and decided it was as good a place as any to crash for, what you were hoping would only be, a few days.

“You sure you’re going to be okay here”, Echo asked, looking into the cold, dark cave.

“I’ll be fine, I’ve stayed in worse places. Besides, it’s the safest place we’ll find in the wilderness, and it’s dark, perfect for hiding”, you said in a poor attempt to lighten the mood, you didn’t know why, force of habit you guessed. Although, all this earned you was a sad smile from the trooper.

“We’ll be back soon, just stay out of sight until then, okay?”

You gave a small smile, bringing your hand up to your forehead for a two fingered salute. “Yes sir”, you said. This actually earned you a small laugh, which at this moment was music to your ears. You lowered your hand and looked into his eyes, taking on a more serious expression. “Just… be safe.”

“I should be telling you that”, he said.

“Yeah, well, I beat you to it”, you said, half grinning.

“I will if you will.”

You nodded. “Then I will.”

Suddenly your body was moving without you telling it to, and you found yourself wrapping him in a tight hug, closing your eyes to keep from crying, and soon the gesture was returned, leaving the both of you in a long embrace.

“Don’t forget me, okay”, you said, the threat of tears evident in your voice.

He squeezed you a little tighter. “Never.”

***

Turns out, you didn’t have to hide out in that cave long at all, as they had returned to retrieve you within two days’ time, with a new crew member, but without Crosshair. You two hadn’t been the best of friends by any means, and the man’s standoffishness really irked you sometimes, but you’d always known that deep down, he wasn’t such a bad guy. So, when the boys had told you what had happened between their return to Kamino and their escape from the planet, it put a surprising strain on your heart. You wanted to be angry with Crosshair for his actions, for attempting to kill Caleb and other innocents, but you just couldn’t, especially after you were informed of the inhibitor chips planted within every clone trooper. You couldn’t be mad at him, you couldn’t hate him, because it wasn’t his fault, it wasn’t any of their faults, they were being used just like the jedi had been, if not more so, and this knowledge extinguished any hatred that had grown in you since the day that order was given.

Thinking back on all of this had you shedding silent tears as you watched the streaks of light pass before your eyes, attempting to let yourself to be swept away in the beauty that was hyperspace. This always seemed to calm your mind, but it didn’t seem to be working this time, so you simply stared and let the tears run down your cheeks.

“Hey, you okay”, Hunter asked from the seat beside you, having temporarily taken over piloting the ship in order to allow the others to rest.

You were snapped out of your thoughts by his words and quickly wiped the tears from your face before answering.

“Yeah, yeah I’m fine, still just trying to figure all of this out”, you replied somberly.

He nodded. “I understand, we still don’t have it all figured out either and with every answer comes new questions”, he said.

You hummed in agreement. “I guess my biggest question is, why now, why did Palpatine wait so long to put this grand plan in action? I mean, he could’ve done it years ago, but no, he waited… waited for us to get close to those who would eventually become our executioners, and worse, he took away their free will to do it. Those troopers, they weren’t the men they used to be, it’s like they were brainwashed.”

“Tech said they were programmed and when the chips were activated, it basically took over their minds, so I guess, in a way, they are brainwashed”, Hunter said, looking back out at the blue glow of hyperspace.

“Those poor men”, you said after a moment of silence.

Hunter turned his head to look at you, an astonished expression over his features, he then let out an amused huff.

“You are truly a wonder, you know that?”

“What”, you asked him, confused by the comment.

“Even after everything you’ve been through, and after what they did to you and your kin, you still feel pity for them”, he explained. “You’ve always been able to see people for who they really are, and forgive them for their faults, it’s commendable, and it’s something I’ve always admired about you.”

“You admire me”, you asked, raising an eyebrow and grinning in amusement.

He gave you a single nod. “Always have”, he said, giving you a soft smile.

The way he was looking at you made your cheeks begin to heat as a light blush covered them, and you turned away in an attempt to hide it, but he noticed, and his smile widened a bit as he looked back out the view port.

“I think you’re right by the way, about Palpatine waiting so long to execute his plan. I think he wanted you all to build those relationships, that trust, with your men, so that, when the time came, he could not only take you all out, but destroy your conviction as well”, he said, his voice lower than before.

“That’s a bit ominous, given our current situation”, you said, only half joking.

He turned to you suddenly, eyebrows raised in mild shock.

“(Y/N), you don’t think we’d… we’d never hurt you, I’d never hurt you, we’re on your side, I promise”, he said, hurt in his eyes. Did you really not trust him?

Seeing his reaction made your heart squeeze, you hadn’t meant to hurt him, you were just confused and scared. You felt as if your whole world had come crumbling down around you, and you were still trying to resurface from the rubble. But you knew you were wrong for thinking, even for a second, that you couldn’t trust Hunter and his men.

“I know, I’m sorry. I do trust you, all of you”, you said, trying to sound reassuring, but it only came out as sadness.

It looked as if the sergeant was contemplating something, his hands reflexively grabbing at nothing as they opened and closed on his lap. You knew he wanted to do something, wanted to comfort you, but he also didn’t want to invade your space, worried that would be crossing a line. So, you took the initiative.

You reached over and took one of his hands from his lap, holding it softly before giving it a reassuring squeeze and sending a smile his way. This prompted him to smile back, and you both just sat like that for a minute.

Suddenly, you heard a commotion from the bunks, and your name being called out by a desperate voice.

Recognizing the voice, you jumped up from your seat. “Echo”, you said, concern in your tone, before looking back to Hunter.

He simply nodded. “Go”, he said softly.

You gave a confirming nod and let go of the hand you’d still been holding, before quickly making your way to the bunks.

When you entered the room, it took you a second to assess the situation before you. Echo was laying in his bunk, breathing heavy, head shaking from side to side, and body trembling, as if he were in a state of terror. All this while Omega stood by the bunk, watching with concern. She looked back to you when you entered, then ran to you.

“I tried to wake him, but it’s not working, he keeps calling for you, you’ve got to do something”, she said in a rush, voice and eyes full or worry for her new friend.

You bent down to her level and placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay, I know what to do, you go wait with Hunter, okay? Everything will be fine”, you told her, attempting to quell her worry.

You then stood and made your way to Echo, sitting on the edge of the bunk and looking over him with your own worried expression. You really didn’t know what to do, you’d never been faced with something like this before. He was clearly having a terrible nightmare, and you wanted to help, so you just acted on instinct.

You placed a hand on his shoulder and shook lightly, softly calling his name, trying to wake him as gradually as you could, as you figured startling him awake would be counterproductive. However, this didn’t seem to work, and hearing your voice only caused him to say your name more. Seeing him like this broke your heart, and for a moment you felt totally helpless, but then you had an idea. You moved your hand from his shoulder, bringing it to cup the side of his face, your thumb instinctually beginning to rub soothing circles on his cheek, and you bent down to speak quietly in his ear.

“Echo, it’s (Y/N). You don’t have to be scared, I’m here, I won’t let them hurt you anymore”, you said, gently grabbing his flesh hand with your free one and holding it to your chest. “I’m here for you, I’ll always be right here with you, it’s okay. Wake up Love. Come back to me.”

As you spoke you could see him slowly calm, and with your final request, his eyes fluttered open, finding yours instantly.

“There you are”, you said softly, a smile spreading over your face. You were just relieved that the nightmare was over, and he seemed to be calming more with each passing second.

As he took in your presence before him, he let out a relieved sigh, but then looked to you with a strained expression.

“(Y/N), I… I was back, back with them, back to that day, I… I didn’t know how or why, and I just…”, he said in a desperate rush.

You shushed him, and let your hand continue to stay where it was in an attempt to sooth the frightened man lying next to you.

“I know, it’s okay, you’re okay now, you’re here with me, you’re safe, I promise”, you reassured him.

This seemed to work, and he let out another sigh as he closed his eyes and tried to regulate his breathing once again, coming back to a steady pattern in no time. When he opened his eyes again, he noticed the position you both were in; you were sitting very close beside him, one hand resting on his cheek, while the other held his hand close to your heart, with his clutching yours in return, like you were his lifeline, which he had to admit, wasn’t far from the truth. You were the one he could trust without question, the one he could confide in, always had been.

You noticed this too and immediately went to pull away, slowly dropping his hand as you did, cheeks now burning. You didn’t get very far though, before he grabbed your wrist with his newly freed hand. “No”, he said, and pulled the hand back towards his head, coaxing you to return it to its previous spot. “Don’t stop… please.”

You stared at him for a moment with an unreadable expression, before finally giving him a tentative nod and continuing your earlier action of rubbing your thumb in circles on his cheek. He closed his eyes and let his head fall back against the pillow, relaxing easily under your touch, this causing you to smile, glad you could be of comfort to him. You stayed like this for a while before your curiosity got the best of you and you voiced the question that had been on your mind since you first heard him call your name.

“Echo”, you said in a questioning tone. He hummed in response, not opening his eyes. “Why, why me?”

He looked at you then, confused. “What do you mean?”

“When you were having your nightmare, you, you called out for me, I was just wondering, why me”, you explained.

“I did”, he asked.

“Yeah, quite a few times actually. Was I in your dream or something?”

He looked away, a bit embarrassed.

“Not exactly”, he said.

You used the hand that was still on him to lightly pull his head to face you, speaking once his eyes were fixed on yours once again.

“Echo, you know you can tell me anything. What is it”, you asked.

“You weren’t in the dream, technically, and it wasn’t really a dream, more like I was reliving a memory, the memory of the citadel, and…”, he explained, his words dying off as he found it hard to voice them.

You placed a reassuring hand on his chest and gave him a nod in understanding.

“So, you were reliving that day, I’m sorry, I know that can’t be easy. But I still don’t see what that has to do with me, I wasn’t there, if I had been, I would’ve taken that blow for you”, you said, suddenly feeling tears behind your eyes, but you fought them back internally.

His eyes widened and he quickly grabbed your hand from its spot on his chest, squeezing it firmly.

“No, don’t say that”, he said urgently, suddenly sitting up, causing your hand to slip from his face, instead falling to rest at the intersection of his shoulder and neck.

“But…”, you tried to say, but he cut you off.

“No (Y/N), I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy, least of all on you”, he said, staring directly into your eyes. You could only nod sadly as you tried to keep your emotions in check, which was getting harder as this interaction continued. He then softened his gaze and let out a long breath. “You were there, in a way.”

You gave him a confused look, about to ask what he meant, until he continued.

“After the explosion, I just laid there for a long time, feeling everything and nothing all at the same time, I was basically just waiting to die”, he told you. Your heart squeezed at his words, as the tears threatened to rise. “But then, I heard someone’s voice calling out to me, your voice. You were telling me not to give up, not to leave you, to keep fighting, and so I did. I bared the pain and rejected the urge to just slip away, even after they took me, I fought through all of it, because I knew that if I survived, then there was a chance I’d make it back to you, and… I really wanted that.”

That’s all it took, his words hit you straight in the chest and flowed through you, causing the flood gates to release and the tears to fall. Echo looked worried then and released your hand, bringing his to cup your cheek, wiping the tears away with his thumb.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to make you sad”, he said, internally wishing he hadn’t said anything.

You shook your head. “You have nothing to be sorry for, and I’m not sad that you told me, I’m glad you did”, you said, wiping the tears from the other side of your face. “Honestly, I’m just happy your alive, and that you did find your way back to me. I don’t know what I’d do without you in my life. When I heard what happened on Lola Sayu I couldn’t believe it at first, it didn’t feel real, but once I accepted it was… I had never felt true grief until that moment, and the sense of longing was almost unbearable. All I kept thinking was how I was angry with myself for wasting the time I had with you, lying. Lying to you, and to myself.”

“What are you talking about, lying about what”, he asked, sliding his hand down to hook a finger around your chin and turn your face back to face him after you’d turned it away during your confession.

You took a deep breath before speaking next. “I lied to you before, when I acted like that slip up was just a poor choice of words, I meant exactly what I said. See, the truth is, I was upset with myself because I never told you…”, you paused, finding this confession to be much harder than you had thought it would be to get out, “never told you that I…”

After another long pause, Echo decided to take the initiative, seeing as he knew exactly what you wanted to say, as it was the same thing he’d wanted to say to you all that time ago, still did. He used the hand that had a hold of your chin to pull you to him as he caught your lips in a kiss, one that while soft, was full of so much emotion it was almost palpable. You were surprised at first, but soon melted into the kiss, feeling completely content with staying there as long as possible.

Much too soon for your liking, Echo pulled away, but only to place his forehead against yours and let the long overdue words slip from his lips. “I love you too.”

Your smile reached your ears as his words filled you with untainted happiness, which prompted him to smile widely himself. Why had you both waited so long to do this, you didn’t know, but you were glad it was finally happening.

“Why did we spend all that time hiding, when we could’ve just done this”, you asked.

He chuckled. “Because we were both cowardly idiots”, he said.

You hummed in agreement. “I still can’t believe you did all that for me”, you said in a more serious tone.

He pulled back to look into your eyes. “Of course I did… I’d do anything for you (Y/N)”, he told you.

“Anything?”

He nodded in response and you smiled again.

“Kiss me again”, you said, it was more of a request than a demand.

He smiled and pulled you close so your face was mere inches from his.

“Yes Ma’am.”

***

It had been a good fifteen minutes since the cries had stopped and no noise could be heard from Echo’s bunk. Omega was no longer worried, knowing you had it handled, but her curiosity was starting to get the best of her.

“What do you think their talking about in there, it’s so quiet, maybe I should…”, she said as she got up from the co-pilot seat, moving in the direction of the bunks, but she was stopped by a hand grabbing her forearm, causing her to turn and stare at Hunter questioningly.

“Don’t, they’re fine, and it’s none of our business what their talking about, so just let them be, alright”, he said, giving her a warning look, one that wasn’t all that intimidating to the young girl, but she listened nonetheless and returned to her seat.

After a moment she spoke again, not being able to take the silence any longer.

“So, what’s the deal with those two, are they together, or is it some secret that everyone knows about except them”, she asked the sergeant.

Hunter laughed, this kid really was perceptive, not that anyone with eyes couldn’t see the attraction between you and Echo, it had always seemed so obvious to him, which is why he never spoke on his own feelings for you.

“Yeah, there seem to be… unspoken feelings between the two of them, but I’m sure they’ll get their acts together soon enough, especially now that they’ll be around each other more often”, he told her.

She thought on this for a moment before responding.

“I think so too… and what about you”, Omega asked him.

“What about me?”

“Are you going to get your act together as well”, she asked, raising her eyebrow and grinning at him.

“What are you talkin’ about kid”, Hunter asked, wondering if she’d somehow figured it out.

“Seriously, I’ve only just got here and I can see it”, she said.

“See what?”

“That Echo isn’t the only one who has feelings for the general.”

Hunter turned to the young clone, a look of surprise on his face. Very perceptive indeed.

“Why don’t you just tell her, at least one of you should pluck up the courage to do it”, she said.

He exhaled heavily as his features returned to a more neutral expression.

“It’s not that simple kid, there are just some things you’re not old enough to understand. Besides, it’s not reciprocated so there’s really no point, she’s made her choice, and I have to respect that”, he explained, hoping that would be that. However, he wasn’t going to be that lucky.

“Your wrong”, Omega said simply.

“What?”

“Your wrong, those feelings, they are reciprocated, yeah she likes Echo, but she likes you too.” She said it with such confidence that it made him wonder if the statement was true.

“Really, and how do you know that”, he asked, an almost sarcastic tone in his voice.

She shrugged. “Female intuition.”

He raised a suspicious brow at her but decided not to think too much on it.

“Hm, well, even if you are right, she’s still made her choice, and I won’t get in the way.”

“Won’t get in the way of what?”

Your voice made both of them jump a little. You had just made your way back to the cockpit and had clearly overheard the last bit of their conversation.

“Nothing”, Hunter said, watching you come to stand beside Omega, perching your arm on the headrest of the co-pilot chair and leaning on it.

“Really? Didn’t sound like nothing”, you said, raising your eyebrow in suspicion.

Omega suddenly perked up and turned in her chair to look up at you.

“Hey (Y/N), do you think it’s possibly for someone to love more than one person at a time”, she asked.

You were a bit taken aback by the question, but figured you’d answer, seeing as how you were being very honest today.

“Yes, I do, it actually happens a lot more often than you think”, you responded, purposefully avoiding Hunter’s gaze as you looked at the child.

“And what does that person do, you know, when they realize they have feelings for more than one person”, she then asked.

“Well, usually that person then has a decision to make, and they just hope they don’t break any hearts in the process. You see, love can be a tricky endeavor. However, I think if someone does fall for two individuals at once, then there are other options”, you said, rather matter-of-factly, given the topic at hand.

“Like what?”

“Those involved could always enter into a relationship all together, I suppose”, you said, wondering just how far she was going to take this conversation.

“And that would work”, she asked, seeming almost hopeful.

“It’s possible, yes, but only if all members involved are okay with it. They all need to know that’s what’s going on, and there can’t be any secrets”, you explained.

“Huh, I guess that makes sense”, Omega said, seeming content with your explanation. Then another thought seemed to hit her. “Hey (Y/N)?”

You hummed in response.

“Have you ever been in love”, she asked curiously.

“Omega”, Hunter said firmly, giving her another look of warning.

“No, no, it’s fine”, you informed him, not wanting him to reprimand the girl for just being curious. “To answer your question Omega, yes, yes I have.”

“With more than one person”, she continued.

You raised an eyebrow at her and crossed your arms over your chest.

“What’s with the twenty questions, am I being interrogated or something”, you asked, only half joking.

She shook her head. “No, just curious is all.”

“Uh huh, well why don’t you stow that curiosity away for later and go get some rest, it’s quiet now”, you told her.

“What did you do, I mean, how did you get him to stop”, she asked as she stood from her seat.

“I just let him know that he was safe, and that there was nothing to be afraid of”, you said, which wasn’t a complete lie.

“That’s it”, she asked.

You nodded. “That’s it.”

She gave you a look of suspicion but didn’t act on it.

“Okay”, she said, drawing out the word, and made her way to exit the cockpit.

“Sleep tight”, you called after her as she disappeared down the small corridor. You then turned back to the view port and took a seat in the now empty chair, sighing heavily before finally looking to Hunter. “Well, that was interesting, care to tell me what that was all about?”

“Not really”, he said, turning back to face forward.

You raised a brow. “Seriously?”

He shrugged and kept his gaze where it was.

You sighed again and leaned back in your chair. “Alright then, but I think it’s worth mentioning that the kid knows what she’s talking about, you might want to listen to her every now and then, she’s quite intuitive.”

He looked to you then, confusion on his brow.

“What do you mean”, he asked.

You laughed. “I mean, what she said about me is true”, you said.

His eyes widened a bit. “You, you heard that”, he asked, and you nodded in response. “How much of it?”

“Enough”, you said simply.

He looked away again as he spoke. “Then you know it doesn’t matter how I feel, you’ve made your choice, and I’m okay with that, I’ll have to be”, he said, trying to keep up this act of indifference.

You turned in your seat to face him. “You keep saying that, but, what if I don’t want to choose, because how you feel does matter, Hunter. At least, to me it does.”

He turned his head to meet your gaze. “What exactly are you proposing”, he asked.

“Nothing yet, just letting you know that, I know, and that the feelings are mutual.”

He smiled at this and nodded his understanding.

“What about Echo, have you told him yet”, he asked.

“We talked, and confessions were made… finally”, you said with a smile.

You both laughed then, happy to finally air things out a bit, all the pent-up emotions were wearing on all of you it seemed, and it felt nice to not have to hide it anymore.

“How do you think he’ll feel about your non-proposed proposal”, he asked with a grin.

“I don’t know, but we’re all adults, we can sit down and have a civilized conversation about this, and… we’ll figure this all out”, you told him.

He gave an amused huff. “You make it sound so formal.”

You nodded and gave a light chuckle. “At first, yeah, but I get the feeling that once this proposal is made, all persons involved will be… willing to give it a try”, you said, taking his hand and holding it in both of yours. “Then things will get more… informal.”

He smiled. “Yeah, how can you be so sure”, he asked, leaning toward you.

You smiled back and leaned in as well, your faces now only inches apart.

“Female intuition”, you whispered, your smile turning a bit smug.

He chuckled in amusement. “You’re ridiculous”, he said, before closing the gap between you.

The kiss was sweet and felt just as right as the ones you’d had with Echo, and just like those ones, this kiss ended all to quickly, but you were content to sit back and bask in the afterglow, you didn’t want to rush things after all.

You both sat there a moment, leaning back in your seats, staring out the view port, arms stretched as your hands sat, intertwined, between you. Maybe this really could work, only time would tell.

After what felt like hours, but in reality, had only been minutes, Hunter looked to you with a soft smile.

“I’m glad you’re here with us”, he said.

You smiled back and gave his hand a light squeeze.

“Me too”, you said, and you both stayed like that for a long while, enjoying a view you each thought was much better than the one outside the view port.

Little did you know, behind you Omega stood at the entrance of the cockpit, looking on silently and grinning from ear to ear, feeling quite pleased with herself.

[innuendostudios]

Thoughts on: Criterion's Neo-Noir Collection

I have written up all 26 films* in the Criterion Channel's Neo-Noir Collection.

Legend: rw - rewatch; a movie I had seen before going through the collection dnrw - did not rewatch; if a movie met two criteria (a. I had seen it within the last 18 months, b. I actively dislike it) I wrote it up from memory.

* in September, Brick leaves the Criterion Channel and is replaced in the collection with Michael Mann's Thief. May add it to the list when that happens.

Note: These are very "what was on my mind after watching." No effort has been made to avoid spoilers, nor to make the plot clear for anyone who hasn't seen the movies in question. Decide for yourself if that's interesting to you.

Cotton Comes to Harlem I feel utterly unequipped to asses this movie. This and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song the following year are regularly cited as the progenitors of the blaxploitation genre. (This is arguably unfair, since both were made by Black men and dealt much more substantively with race than the white-directed films that followed them.) Its heroes are a couple of Black cops who are treated with suspicion both by their white colleagues and by the Black community they're meant to police. I'm not 100% clear on whether they're the good guys? I mean, I think they are. But the community's suspicion of them seems, I dunno... well-founded? They are working for The Man. And there's interesting discussion to the had there - is the the problem that the law is carried out by racists, or is the law itself racist? Can Black cops make anything better? But it feels like the film stacks the deck in Gravedigger and Coffin Ed's favor; the local Black church is run by a conman, the Back-to-Africa movement is, itself, a con, and the local Black Power movement is treated as an obstacle. Black cops really are the only force for justice here. Movie portrays Harlem itself as a warm, thriving, cultured community, but the people that make up that community are disloyal and easily fooled. Felt, to me, like the message was "just because they're cops doesn't mean they don't have Black soul," which, nowadays, we would call copaganda. But, then, do I know what I'm talking about? Do I know how much this played into or off of or against stereotypes from 1970? Was this a radical departure I don't have the context to appreciate? Is there substance I'm too white and too many decades removed to pick up on? Am I wildly overthinking this? I dunno. Seems like everyone involved was having a lot of fun, at least. That bit is contagious.

Across 110th Street And here's the other side of the "race film" equation. Another movie set in Harlem with a Black cop pulled between the police, the criminals, and the public, but this time the film is made by white people. I like it both more and less. Pro: this time the difficult position of Black cop who's treated with suspicion by both white cops and Black Harlemites is interrogated. Con: the Black cop has basically no personality other than "honest cop." Pro: the racism of the police force is explicit and systemic, as opposed to comically ineffectual. Con: the movie is shaped around a racist white cop who beats the shit out of Black people but slowly forms a bond with his Black partner. Pro: the Black criminal at the heart of the movie talks openly about how the white world has stacked the deck against him, and he's soulful and relateable. Con: so of course he dies in the end, because the only way privileged people know to sympathetize with minorities is to make them tragic (see also: The Boys in the Band, Philadelphia, and Brokeback Mountain for gay men). Additional con: this time Harlem is portrayed as a hellhole. Barely any of the community is even seen. At least the shot at the end, where the criminal realizes he's going to die and throws the bag of money off a roof and into a playground so the Black kids can pick it up before the cops reclaim it was powerful. But overall... yech. Cotton Comes to Harlem felt like it wasn't for me; this feels like it was 100% for me and I respect it less for that.

The Long Goodbye (rw) The shaggiest dog. Like much Altman, more compelling than good, but very compelling. Raymond Chandler's story is now set in the 1970's, but Philip Marlowe is the same Philip Marlowe of the 1930's. I get the sense there was always something inherently sad about Marlowe. Classic noir always portrayed its detectives as strong-willed men living on the border between the straightlaced world and its seedy underbelly, crossing back and forth freely but belonging to neither. But Chandler stresses the loneliness of it - or, at least, the people who've adapted Chandler do. Marlowe is a decent man in an indecent world, sorting things out, refusing to profit from misery, but unable to set anything truly right. Being a man out of step is here literalized by putting him forty years from the era where he belongs. His hardboiled internal monologue is now the incessant mutterings of the weird guy across the street who never stops smoking. Like I said: compelling! Kael's observation was spot on: everyone in the movie knows more about the mystery than he does, but he's the only one who cares. The mystery is pretty threadbare - Marlowe doesn't detect so much as end up in places and have people explain things to him. But I've seen it two or three times now, and it does linger.

Chinatown (rw) I confess I've always been impressed by Chinatown more than I've liked it. Its story structure is impeccable, its atmosphere is gorgeous, its noirish fatalism is raw and real, its deconstruction of the noir hero is well-observed, and it's full of clever detective tricks (the pocket watches, the tail light, the ruler). I've just never connected with it. Maybe it's a little too perfectly crafted. (I feel similar about Miller's Crossing.) And I've always been ambivalent about the ending. In Towne's original ending, Evelyn shoots Noah Cross dead and get arrested, and neither she nor Jake can tell the truth of why she did it, so she goes to jail for murder and her daughter is in the wind. Polansky proposed the ending that exists now, where Evelyn just dies, Cross wins, and Jake walks away devastated. It communicates the same thing: Jake's attempt to get smart and play all the sides off each other instead of just helping Evelyn escape blows up in his face at the expense of the woman he cares about and any sense of real justice. And it does this more dramatically and efficiently than Towne's original ending. But it also treats Evelyn as narratively disposable, and hands the daughter over to the man who raped Evelyn and murdered her husband. It makes the women suffer more to punch up the ending. But can I honestly say that Towne's ending is the better one? It is thematically equal, dramatically inferior, but would distract me less. Not sure what the calculus comes out to there. Maybe there should be a third option. Anyway! A perfect little contraption. Belongs under a glass dome.

Night Moves (rw) Ah yeah, the good shit. This is my quintessential 70's noir. This is three movies in a row about detectives. Thing is, the classic era wasn't as chockablock with hardboiled detectives as we think; most of those movies starred criminals, cops, and boring dudes seduced to the darkness by a pair of legs. Gumshoes just left the strongest impressions. (The genre is said to begin with Maltese Falcon and end with Touch of Evil, after all.) So when the post-Code 70's decided to pick the genre back up while picking it apart, it makes sense that they went for the 'tecs first. The Long Goodbye dragged the 30's detective into the 70's, and Chinatown went back to the 30's with a 70's sensibility. But Night Moves was about detecting in the Watergate era, and how that changed the archetype. Harry Moseby is the detective so obsessed with finding the truth that he might just ruin his life looking for it, like the straight story will somehow fix everything that's broken, like it'll bring back a murdered teenager and repair his marriage and give him a reason to forgive the woman who fucked him just to distract him from some smuggling. When he's got time to kill, he takes out a little, magnetic chess set and recreates a famous old game, where three knight moves (get it?) would have led to a beautiful checkmate had the player just seen it. He keeps going, self-destructing, because he can't stand the idea that the perfect move is there if he can just find it. And, no matter how much we see it destroy him, we, the audience, want him to keep going; we expect a satisfying resolution to the mystery. That's what we need from a detective picture; one character flat-out compares Harry to Sam Spade. But what if the truth is just... Watergate? Just some prick ruining things for selfish reasons? Nothing grand, nothing satisfying. Nothing could be more noir, or more neo-, than that.

Farewell, My Lovely Sometimes the only thing that makes a noir neo- is that it's in color and all the blood, tits, and racism from the books they're based on get put back in. This second stab at Chandler is competant but not much more than that. Mitchum works as Philip Marlowe, but Chandler's dialogue feels off here, like lines that worked on the page don't work aloud, even though they did when Bogie said them. I'll chalk it up to workmanlike but uninspired direction. (Dang this looks bland so soon after Chinatown.) Moose Malloy is a great character, and perfectly cast. (Wasn't sure at first, but it's true.) Some other interesting cats show up and vanish - the tough brothel madam based on Brenda Allen comes to mind, though she's treated with oddly more disdain than most of the other hoods and is dispatched quicker. In general, the more overt racism and misogyny doesn't seem to do anything except make the movie "edgier" than earlier attempts at the same material, and it reads kinda try-hard. But it mostly holds together. *shrug*

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (dnrw) Didn't care for this at all. Can't tell if the script was treated as a jumping-off point or if the dialogue is 100% improvised, but it just drags on forever and is never that interesting. Keeps treating us to scenes from the strip club like they're the opera scenes in Amadeus, and, whatever, I don't expect burlesque to be Mozart, but Cosmo keeps saying they're an artful, classy joint, and I keep waiting for the show to be more than cheap, lazy camp. How do you make gratuitious nudity boring? Mind you, none of this is bad as a rule - I love digressions and can enjoy good sleaze, and it's clear the filmmakers care about what they're making. They just did not sell it in a way I wanted to buy. Can't remember what edit I watched; I hope it was the 135 minute one, because I cannot imagine there being a longer edit out there.

The American Friend (dnrw) It's weird that this is Patricia Highsmith, right? That Dennis Hopper is playing Tom Ripley? In a cowboy hat? I gather that Minghella's version wasn't true to the source, but I do love that movie, and this is a long, long way from that. This Mr. Ripley isn't even particularly talented! Anyway, this has one really great sequence, where a regular guy has been coerced by crooks into murdering someone on a train platform, and, when the moment comes to shoot, he doesn't. And what follows is a prolonged sequence of an amateur trying to surreptitiously tail a guy across a train station and onto another train, and all the while you're not sure... is he going to do it? is he going to chicken out? is he going to do it so badly he gets caught? It's hard not to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, wondering how you would handle the situation, whether you could do it, whether you could act on impulse before your conscience could catch up with you. It drags on a long while and this time it's a good thing. Didn't much like the rest of the movie, it's shapeless and often kind of corny, and the central plot hook is contrived. (It's also very weird that this is the only Wim Wenders I've seen.) But, hey, I got one excellent sequence, not gonna complain.

The Big Sleep Unlike the 1946 film, I can follow the plot of this Big Sleep. But, also unlike the 1946 version, this one isn't any damn fun. Mitchum is back as Marlowe (this is three Marlowes in five years, btw), and this time it's set in the 70's and in England, for some reason. I don't find this offensive, but neither do I see what it accomplishes? Most of the cast is still American. (Hi Jimmy!) Still holds together, but even less well than Farewell, My Lovely. But I do find it interesting that the neo-noir era keeps returning to Chandler while it's pretty much left Hammet behind (inasmuch as someone whose genes are spread wide through the whole genre can be left behind). Spade and the Continental Op, straightshooting tough guys who come out on top in the end, seem antiquated in the (post-)modern era. But Marlowe's goodness being out of sync with the world around him only seems more poignant the further you take him from his own time. Nowadays you can really only do Hammett as pastiche, but I sense that you could still play Chandler straight.

Eyes of Laura Mars The most De Palma movie I've seen not made by De Palma, complete with POV shots, paranormal hoodoo, and fixation with sex, death, and whether images of such are art or exploitation (or both). Laura Mars takes photographs of naked women in violent tableux, and has gotten quite famous doing so, but is it damaging to women? The movie has more than a superficial engagement with this topic, but only slightly more than superficial. Kept imagining a movie that is about 30% less serial killer story and 30% more art conversations. (But, then, I have an art degree and have never murdered anyone, so.) Like, museums are full of Biblical paintings full of nude women and slaughter, sometimes both at once, and they're called masterpieces. Most all of them were painted by men on commission from other men. Now Laura Mars makes similar images in modern trappings, and has models made of flesh and blood rather than paint, and it's scandalous? Why is it only controversial once women are getting paid for it? On the other hand, is this just the master's tools? Is she subverting or challenging the male gaze, or just profiting off of it? Or is a woman profiting off of it, itself, a subversion? Is it subversive enough to account for how it commodifies female bodies? These questions are pretty clearly relevant to the movie itself, and the movies in general, especially after the fall of the Hays Code when people were really unrestrained with the blood and boobies. And, heck, the lead is played by the star of Bonnie and Clyde! All this is to say: I wish the movie were as interested in these questions as I am. What's there is a mildly diverting B-picture. There's one great bit where Laura's seeing through the killer's eyes (that's the hook, she gets visions from the murderer's POV; no, this is never explained) and he's RIGHT BEHIND HER, so there's a chase where she charges across an empty room only able to see her own fleeing self from ten feet behind. That was pretty great! And her first kiss with the detective (because you could see a mile away that the detective and the woman he's supposed to protect are gonna fall in love) is immediately followed by the two freaking out about how nonsensical it is for them to fall in love with each other, because she's literally mourning multiple deaths and he's being wildly unprofessional, and then they go back to making out. That bit was great, too. The rest... enh.

The Onion Field What starts off as a seemingly not-that-noirish cops-vs-crooks procedural turns into an agonizingly protracted look at the legal system, with the ultimate argument that the very idea of the law ever resulting in justice is a lie. Hoo! I have to say, I'm impressed. There's a scene where a lawyer - whom I'm not sure is even named, he's like the seventh of thirteen we've met - literally quits the law over how long this court case about two guys shooting a cop has taken. He says the cop who was murdered has been forgotten, his partner has never gotten to move on because the case has lasted eight years, nothing has been accomplished, and they should let the two criminals walk and jail all the judges and lawyers instead. It's awesome! The script is loaded with digressions and unnecessary details, just the way I like it. Can't say I'm impressed with the execution. Nothing is wrong, exactly, but the performances all seem a tad melodramatic or a tad uninspired. Camerawork is, again, purely functional. It's no masterpiece. But that second half worked for me. (And it's Ted Danson's first movie! He did great.)

Body Heat (rw) Let's say up front that this is a handsomely-made movie. Probably the best looking thing on the list since Night Moves. Nothing I've seen better captures the swelter of an East Coast heatwave, or the lusty feeling of being too hot to bang and going at it regardless. Kathleen Turner sells the hell out of a femme fatale. There are a lot of good lines and good performances (Ted Danson is back and having the time of his life). I want to get all that out of the way, because this is a movie heavily modeled after Double Indemnity, and I wanted to discuss its merits before I get into why inviting that comparison doesn't help the movie out. In a lot of ways, it's the same rules as the Robert Mitchum Marlowe movies - do Double Indemnity but amp up the sex and violence. And, to a degree it works. (At least, the sex does, dunno that Double Indemnity was crying out for explosions.) But the plot is amped as well, and gets downright silly. Yeah, Mrs. Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff so he'll off her husband, but Neff clocks that pretty early and goes along with it anyway. Everything beyond that is two people keeping too big a secret and slowly turning on each other. But here? For the twists to work Matty has to be, from frame one, playing four-dimensional chess on the order of Senator Palpatine, and its about as plausible. (Exactly how did she know, after she rebuffed Ned, he would figure out her local bar and go looking for her at the exact hour she was there?) It's already kind of weird to be using the spider woman trope in 1981, but to make her MORE sexually conniving and mercenary than she was in the 40's is... not great. As lurid trash, it's pretty fun for a while, but some noir stuff can't just be updated, it needs to be subverted or it doesn't justify its existence.

Blow Out Brian De Palma has two categories of movie: he's got his mainstream, director-for-hire fare, where his voice is either reigned in or indulged in isolated sequences that don't always jive with the rest fo the film, and then there's his Brian De Palma movies. My mistake, it seems, is having seen several for-hires from throughout his career - The Untouchables (fine enough), Carlito's Way (ditto, but less), Mission: Impossible (enh) - but had only seen De Palma-ass movies from his late period (Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia, both of which I think are garbage). All this to say: Blow Out was my first classic-era De Palma, and holy fucking shit dudes. This was (with caveats) my absolute and entire jam. I said I could enjoy good sleaze, and this is good friggin' sleaze. (Though far short of De Palma at his sleaziest, mercifully.) The splitscreens, the diopter shots, the canted angles, how does he make so many shlocky things work?! John Travolta's sound tech goes out to get fresh wind fx for the movie he's working on, and we get this wonderful sequence of visuals following sounds as he turns his attention and his microphone to various noises - a couple on a walk, a frog, an owl, a buzzing street lamp. Later, as he listens back to the footage, the same sequence plays again, but this time from his POV; we're seeing his memory as guided by the same sequence of sounds, now recreated with different shots, as he moves his pencil in the air mimicking the microphone. When he mixes and edits sounds, we hear the literal soundtrack of the movie we are watching get mixed and edited by the person on screen. And as he tries to unravel a murder mystery, he uses what's at hand: magnetic tape, flatbed editors, an animation camera to turn still photos from the crime scene into a film and sync it with the audio he recorded; it's forensics using only the tools of the editing room. As someone who's spent some time in college editing rooms, this is a hoot and a half. Loses a bit of steam as it goes on and the film nerd stuff gives way to a more traditional thriller, but rallies for a sound-tech-centered final setpiece, which steadily builds to such madcap heights you can feel the air thinning, before oddly cutting its own tension and then trying to build it back up again. It doesn't work as well the second time. But then, that shot right after the climax? Damn. Conflicted on how the movie treats the female lead. I get why feminist film theorists are so divided on De Palma. His stuff is full of things feminists (rightly) criticize, full of women getting naked when they're not getting stabbed, but he also clearly finds women fascinating and has them do empowered and unexpected things, and there are many feminist reads of his movies. Call it a mixed bag. But even when he's doing tropey shit, he explores the tropes in unexpected ways. Definitely the best movie so far that I hadn't already seen.

Cutter's Way (rw) Alex Cutter is pitched to us as an obnoxious-but-sympathetic son of a bitch, and, you know, two out of three ain't bad. Watched this during my 2020 neo-noir kick and considered skipping it this time because I really didn't enjoy it. Found it a little more compelling this go around, while being reminded of why my feelings were room temp before. Thematically, I'm onboard: it's about a guy, Cutter, getting it in his head that he's found a murderer and needs to bring him to justice, and his friend, Bone, who intermittently helps him because he feels bad that Cutter lost his arm, leg, and eye in Nam and he also feels guilty for being in love with Cutter's wife. The question of whether the guy they're trying to bring down actually did it is intentionally undefined, and arguably unimportant; they've got personal reasons to see this through. Postmodern and noirish, fixated with the inability to ever fully know the truth of anything, but starring people so broken by society that they're desperate for certainty. (Pretty obvious parallels to Vietnam.) Cutter's a drunk and kind of an asshole, but understandably so. Bone's shiftlessness is the other response to a lack of meaning in the world, to the point where making a decision, any decision, feels like character growth, even if it's maybe killing a guy whose guilt is entirely theoretical. So, yeah, I'm down with all of this! A- in outline form. It's just that Cutter is so uninterestingly unpleasant and no one else on screen is compelling enough to make up for it. His drunken windups are tedious and his sanctimonious speeches about what the war was like are, well, true and accurate but also obviously manipulative. It's two hours with two miserable people, and I think Cutter's constant chatter is supposed to be the comic relief but it's a little too accurate to drunken rambling, which isn't funny if you're not also drunk. He's just tedious, irritating, and periodically racist. Pass.

Blood Simple (rw) I'm pretty cool on the Coens - there are things I've liked, even loved, in every Coen film I've seen, but I always come away dissatisfied. For a while, I kept going to their movies because I was sure eventually I'd love one without qualification. No Country for Old Men came close, the first two acts being master classes in sustained tension. But then the third act is all about denying closure: the protagonist is murdered offscreen, the villain's motives are never explained, and it ends with an existentialist speech about the unfathomable cruelty of the world. And it just doesn't land for me. The archness of the Coen's dialogue, the fussiness of their set design, the kinda-intimate, kinda-awkward, kinda-funny closeness of the camera's singles, it cannot sell me on a devastating meditation about meaninglessness. It's only ever sold me on the Coens' own cleverness. And that archness, that distancing, has typified every one of their movies I've come close to loving. Which is a long-ass preamble to saying, holy heck, I was not prepared for their very first movie to be the one I'd been looking for! I watched it last year and it remains true on rewatch: Blood Simple works like gangbusters. It's kind of Double Indemnity (again) but played as a comedy of errors, minus the comedy: two people romantically involved feeling their trust unravel after a murder. And I think the first thing that works for me is that utter lack of comedy. It's loaded with the Coens' trademark ironies - mostly dramatic in this case - but it's all played straight. Unlike the usual lead/femme fatale relationship, where distrust brews as the movie goes on, the audience knows the two main characters can trust each other. There are no secret duplicitous motives waiting to be revealed. The audience also know why they don't trust each other. (And it's all communicated wordlessly, btw: a character enters a scene and we know, based on the information that character has, how it looks to them and what suspicions it would arouse, even as we know the truth of it). The second thing that works is, weirdly, that the characters aren't very interesting?! Ray and Abby have almost no characterization. Outside of a general likability, they are blank slates. This is a weakness in most films, but, given the agonizingly long, wordless sequences where they dispose of bodies or hide from gunfire, you're left thinking not "what will Ray/Abby do in this scenario," because Ray and Abby are relatively elemental and undefined, but "what would I do in this scenario?" Which creates an exquisite tension but also, weirdly, creates more empathy than I feel for the Coens' usual cast of personalities. It's supposed to work the other way around! Truly enjoyable throughout but absolutely wonderful in the suspenseful-as-hell climax. Good shit right here.

Body Double The thing about erotic thrillers is everything that matters is in the name. Is it thrilling? Is it erotic? Good; all else is secondary. De Palma set out to make the most lurid, voyeuristic, horny, violent, shocking, steamy movie he could come up with, and its success was not strictly dependent on the lead's acting ability or the verisimilitude of the plot. But what are we, the modern audience, to make of it once 37 years have passed and, by today's standards, the eroticism is quite tame and the twists are no longer shocking? Then we're left with a nonsensical riff on Vertigo, a specularization of women that is very hard to justify, and lead actor made of pulped wood. De Palma's obsessions don't cohere into anything more this time; the bits stolen from Hitchcock aren't repurposed to new ends, it really is just Hitch with more tits and less brains. (I mean, I still haven't seen Vertigo, but I feel 100% confident in that statement.) The diopter shots and rear-projections this time look cheap (literally so, apparently; this had 1/3 the budget of Blow Out). There are some mildly interesting setpieces, but nothing compared to Travolta's auditory reconstructions or car chase where he tries to tail a subway train from street level even if it means driving through a frickin parade like an inverted French Connection, goddamn Blow Out was a good movie! Anyway. Melanie Griffith seems to be having fun, at least. I guess I had a little as well, but it was, at best, diverting, and a real letdown.

The Hit Surprised by how much I enjoyed this one. Terrance Stamp flips on the mob and spends ten years living a life of ease in Spain, waiting for the day they find and kill him. Movie kicks off when they do find him, and what follows is a ramshackle road movie as John Hurt and a young Tim Roth attempt to drive him to Paris so they can shoot him in front of his old boss. Stamp is magnetic. He's spent a decade reading philosophy and seems utterly prepared for death, so he spends the trip humming, philosophizing, and being friendly with his captors when he's not winding them up. It remains unclear to the end whether the discord he sews between Roth and Hurt is part of some larger plan of escape or just for shits and giggles. There's also a decent amount of plot for a movie that's not terribly plot-driven - just about every part of the kidnapping has tiny hitches the kidnappers aren't prepared for, and each has film-long repercussions, drawing the cops closer and somehow sticking Laura del Sol in their backseat. The ongoing questions are when Stamp will die, whether del Sol will die, and whether Roth will be able to pull the trigger. In the end, it's actually a meditation on ethics and mortality, but in a quiet and often funny way. It's not going to go down as one of my new favs, but it was a nice way to spend a couple hours.

Trouble in Mind (dnrw) I fucking hated this movie. It's been many months since I watched it, do I remember what I hated most? Was it the bit where a couple of country bumpkins who've come to the city walk into a diner and Mr. Bumpkin clocks that the one Black guy in the back as obviously a criminal despite never having seen him before? Was it the part where Kris Kristofferson won't stop hounding Mrs. Bumpkin no matter how many times she demands to be left alone, and it's played as romantic because obviously he knows what she needs better than she does? Or is it the part where Mr. Bumpkin reluctantly takes a job from the Obvious Criminal (who is, in fact, a criminal, and the only named Black character in the movie if I remember correctly, draw your own conclusions) and, within a week, has become a full-blown hood, which is exemplified by a lot, like, a lot of queer-coding? The answer to all three questions is yes. It's also fucking boring. Even out-of-drag Divine's performance as the villain can't save it.

Manhunter 'sfine? I've still never seen Silence of the Lambs, nor any of the Hopkins Lecter movies, nor, indeed, any full episode of the show. So the unheimlich others get seeing Brian Cox play Hannibal didn't come into play. Cox does a good job with him, but he's barely there. Shame, cuz he's the most interesting part of the movie. Honestly, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's barely there. Will Graham being a guy who gets into the heads of serial killers is explored well enough, and Mann knows how to direct a police procedural such that it's both contemplative and propulsive. But all the other themes it points at? Will's fear that he understands murderers a little too well? Hannibal trying to nudge him towards becoming one? Whatever dance Hannibal and Tooth Fairy are doing? What Tooth Fairy's deal is, anyway? (Why does he wear fake teeth and bite things? Why is he fixated on the red dragon? Does the bit where he says "Francis is gone forever" mean he has DID?) None of it goes anywhere or amounts to anything. I mean, it's certainly more interesting with this stuff than without, but it has that feel of a book that's been pared of its interesting bits to fit the runtime (or, alternately, pulp that's been sloppily elevated). I still haven't made my mind up on Mann's cold, precise camera work, but at least it gives me something to look at. It's fine! This is fine.

Mona Lisa (rw) Gave this one another shot. Bob Hoskins is wonderful as a hood out of his depth in classy places, quick to anger but just as quick to let anger go (the opening sequence where he's screaming on his ex-wife's doorstep, hurling trash cans at her house, and one minute later thrilled to see his old car, is pretty nice). And Cathy Tyson's working girl is a subtler kind of fascinating, exuding a mixture of coldness and kindness. It's just... this is ultimately a story about how heartbreaking it is when the girl you like is gay, right? It's Weezer's Pink Triangle: The Movie. It's not homophobic, exactly - Simone isn't demonized for being a lesbian - but it's still, like, "man, this straight white guy's pain is so much more interesting than the Black queer sex worker's." And when he's yelling "you woulda done it!" at the end, I can't tell if we're supposed to agree with him. Seems pretty clear that she wouldn'ta done it, at least not without there being some reveal about her character that doesn't happen, but I don't think the ending works if we don't agree with him, so... I'm like 70% sure the movie does Simone dirty there. For the first half, their growing relationship feels genuine and natural, and, honestly, the story being about a real bond that unfortunately means different things to each party could work if it didn't end with a gun and a sock in the jaw. Shape feels jagged as well; what feels like the end of the second act or so turns out to be the climax. And some of the symbolism is... well, ok, Simone gives George money to buy more appropriate clothes for hanging out in high end hotels, and he gets a tan leather jacket and a Hawaiian shirt, and their first proper bonding moment is when she takes him out for actual clothes. For the rest of the movie he is rocking double-breasted suits (not sure I agree with the striped tie, but it was the eighties, whaddya gonna do?). Then, in the second half, she sends him off looking for her old streetwalker friend, and now he looks completely out of place in the strip clubs and bordellos. So far so good. But then they have this run-in where her old pimp pulls a knife and cuts George's arm, so, with his nice shirt torn and it not safe going home (I guess?) he starts wearing the Hawaiian shirt again. So around the time he's starting to realize he doesn't really belong in Simone's world or the lowlife world he came from anymore, he's running around with the classy double-breasted suit jacket over the garish Hawaiian shirt, and, yeah, bit on the nose guys. Anyway, it has good bits, I just feel like a movie that asks me to feel for the guy punching a gay, Black woman in the face needs to work harder to earn it. Bit of wasted talent.

The Bedroom Window Starts well. Man starts an affair with his boss' wife, their first night together she witnesses an attempted murder from his window, she worries going to the police will reveal the affair to her husband, so the man reports her testimony to the cops claiming he's the one who saw it. Young Isabelle Huppert is the perfect woman for a guy to risk his career on a crush over, and Young Steve Guttenberg is the perfect balance of affability and amorality. And it flows great - picks just the right media to res. So then he's talking to the cops, telling them what she told him, and they ask questions he forgot to ask her - was the perp's jacket a blazer or a windbreaker? - and he has to guess. Then he gets called into the police lineup, and one guy matches her description really well, but is it just because he's wearing his red hair the way she described it? He can't be sure, doesn't finger any of them. He finds out the cops were pretty certain about one of the guys, so he follows the one he thinks it was around, looking for more evidence, and another girl is attacked right outside a bar he knows the redhead was at. Now he's certain! But he shows the boss' wife the guy and she's not certain, and she reminds him they don't even know if the guy he followed is the same guy the police suspected! And as he feeds more evidence to the cops, he has to lie more, because he can't exactly say he was tailing the guy around the city. So, I'm all in now. Maybe it's because I'd so recently rewatched Night Moves and Cutter's Way, but this seems like another story about uncertainty. He's really certain about the guy because it fits narratively, and we, the audience, feel the same. But he's not actually a witness, he doesn't have actual evidence, he's fitting bits and pieces together like a conspiracy theorist. He's fixating on what he wants to be true. Sign me up! But then it turns out he's 100% correct about who the killer is but his lies are found out and now the cops think he's the killer and I realize, oh, no, this movie isn't nearly as smart as I thought it was. Egg on my face! What transpires for the remaining half of the runtime is goofy as hell, and someone with shlockier sensibilities could have made a meal of it, but Hanson, despite being a Corman protege, takes this silliness seriously in the all wrong ways. Next!

Homicide (rw? I think I saw most of this on TV one time) Homicide centers around the conflicted loyalties of a Jewish cop. It opens with the Jewish cop and his white gentile partner taking over a case with a Black perp from some Black FBI agents. The media is making a big thing about the racial implications of the mostly white cops chasing down a Black man in a Black neighborhood. And inside of 15 minutes the FBI agent is calling the lead a k*ke and the gentile cop is calling the FBI agent a f****t and there's all kinds of invective for Black people. The film is announcing its intentions out the gate: this movie is about race. But the issue here is David Mamet doesn't care about race as anything other than a dramatic device. He's the Ubisoft of filmmakers, having no coherent perspective on social issues but expecting accolades for even bringing them up. Mamet is Jewish (though lead actor Joe Mantegna definitely is not) but what is his position on the Jewish diaspora? The whole deal is Mantegna gets stuck with a petty homicide case instead of the big one they just pinched from the Feds, where a Jewish candy shop owner gets shot in what looks like a stickup. Her family tries to appeal to his Jewishness to get him to take the case seriously, and, after giving them the brush-off for a long time, finally starts following through out of guilt, finding bits and pieces of what may or may not be a conspiracy, with Zionist gun runners and underground neo-Nazis. But, again: all of these are just dramatic devices. Mantegna's Jewishness (those words will never not sound ridiculous together) has always been a liability for him as a cop (we are told, not shown), and taking the case seriously is a reclamation of identity. The Jews he finds community with sold tommyguns to revolutionaries during the founding of Israel. These Jews end up blackmailing him to get a document from the evidence room. So: what is the film's position on placing stock in one's Jewish identity? What is its position on Israel? What is its opinion on Palestine? Because all three come up! And the answer is: Mamet doesn't care. You can read it a lot of different ways. Someone with more context and more patience than me could probably deduce what the de facto message is, the way Chris Franklin deduced the de facto message of Far Cry V despite the game's efforts not to have one, but I'm not going to. Mantegna's attempt to reconnect with his Jewishness gets his partner killed, gets the guy he was supposed to bring in alive shot dead, gets him possibly permanent injuries, gets him on camera blowing up a store that's a front for white nationalists, and all for nothing because the "clues" he found (pretty much exclusively by coincidence) were unconnected nothings. The problem is either his Jewishness, or his lifelong failure to connect with his Jewishness until late in life. Mamet doesn't give a shit. (Like, Mamet canonically doesn't give a shit: he is on record saying social context is meaningless, characters only exist to serve the plot, and there are no deeper meanings in fiction.) Mamet's ping-pong dialogue is fun, as always, and there are some neat ideas and characters, but it's all in service of a big nothing that needed to be a something to work.

Swoon So much I could talk about, let's keep it to the most interesting bits. Hommes Fatales: a thing about classic noir that it was fascinated by the marginal but had to keep it in the margins. Liberated women, queer-coded killers, Black jazz players, broke thieves; they were the main event, they were what audiences wanted to see, they were what made the movies fun. But the ending always had to reassert straightlaced straight, white, middle-class male society as unshakeable. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy demanded, both ideologically and via the Hays Code, that anyone outside these norms be punished, reformed, or dead by the movie's end. The only way to make them the heroes was to play their deaths for tragedy. It is unsurprising that neo-noir would take the queer-coded villains and make them the protagonists. Implicature: This is the story of Leopold and Loeb, murderers famous for being queer, and what's interesting is how the queerness in the first half exists entirely outside of language. Like, it's kind of amazing for a movie from 1992 to be this gay - we watch Nathan and Dickie kiss, undress, masturbate, fuck; hell, they wear wedding rings when they're alone together. But it's never verbalized. Sex is referred to as "your reward" or "what you wanted" or "best time." Dickie says he's going to have "the girls over," and it turns out "the girls" are a bunch of drag queens, but this is never acknowledged. Nathan at one point lists off a bunch of famous men - Oscar Wild, E.M. Forster, Frederick the Great - but, though the commonality between them is obvious (they were all gay), it's left the the audience to recognize it. When their queerness is finally verbalized in the second half, it's first in the language of pathology - a psychiatrist describing their "perversions" and "misuse" of their "organs" before the court, which has to be cleared of women because it's so inappropriate - and then with slurs from the man who murders Dickie in jail (a murder which is written off with no investigation because the victim is a gay prisoner instead of a L&L's victim, a child of a wealthy family). I don't know if I'd have noticed this if I hadn't read Chip Delany describing his experience as a gay man in the 50's existing almost entirely outside of language, the only language at the time being that of heteronormativity. Murder as Love Story: L&L exchange sex as payment for the other commiting crimes; it's foreplay. Their statements to the police where they disagree over who's to blame is a lover's quarrel. Their sentencing is a marriage. Nathan performs his own funeral rites over Dickie's body after he dies on the operating table. They are, in their way, together til death did they part. This is the relationship they can have. That it does all this without romanticizing the murder itself or valorizing L&L as humans is frankly incredible.

Suture (rw) The pitch: at the funeral for his father, wealthy Vincent Towers meets his long lost half brother Clay Arlington. It is implied Clay is a child from out of wedlock, possibly an affair; no one knows Vincent has a half-brother but him and Clay. Vincent invites Clay out to his fancy-ass home in Arizona. Thing is, Vincent is suspected (correctly) by the police of having murdered his father, and, due to a striking family resemblence, he's brought Clay to his home to fake his own death. He finagles Clay into wearing his clothes and driving his car, and then blows the car up and flees the state, leaving the cops to think him dead. Thing is, Clay survives, but with amnesia. The doctors tell him he's Vincent, and he has no reason to disagree. Any discrepancy in the way he looks is dismissed as the result of reconstructive surgery after the explosion. So Clay Arlington resumes Vincent Towers' life, without knowing Clay Arlington even exists. The twist: Clay and Vincent are both white, but Vincent is played by Michael Harris, a white actor, and Clay is played by Dennis Haysbert, a Black actor. "Ian, if there's just the two of them, how do you know it's not Harris playing a Black character?" Glad you asked! It is most explicitly obvious during a scene where Vincent/Clay's surgeon-cum-girlfriend essentially bringing up phrenology to explain how Vincent/Clay couldn't possibly have murdered his father, describing straight hair, thin lips, and a Greco-Roman nose Haysbert very clearly doesn't have. But, let's be honest: we knew well beforehand that the rich-as-fuck asshole living in a huge, modern house and living it up in Arizona high society was white. Though Clay is, canonically, white, he lives an poor and underprivileged life common to Black men in America. Though the film's title officially refers to the many stitches holding Vincent/Clay's face together after the accident, "suture" is a film theory term, referring to the way a film audience gets wrapped up - sutured - in the world of the movie, choosing to forget the outside world and pretend the story is real. The usage is ironic, because the audience cannot be sutured in; we cannot, and are not expected to, suspend our disbelief that Clay is white. We are deliberately distanced. Consequently this is a movie to be thought about, not to to be felt. It has the shape of a Hitchcockian thriller but it can't evoke the emotions of one. You can see the scaffolding - "ah, yes, this is the part of a thriller where one man hides while another stalks him with a gun, clever." I feel ill-suited to comment on what the filmmakers are saying about race. I could venture a guess about the ending, where the psychiatrist, the only one who knows the truth about Clay, says he can never truly be happy living the lie of being Vincent Towers, while we see photographs of Clay/Vincent seemingly living an extremely happy life: society says white men simply belong at the top more than Black men do, but, if the roles could be reversed, the latter would slot in seamlessly. Maybe??? Of all the movies in this collection, this is the one I'd most want to read an essay on (followed by Swoon).

The Last Seduction (dnrw) No, no, no, I am not rewataching this piece of shit movie.

Brick (rw) Here's my weird contention: Brick is in color and in widescreen, but, besides that? There's nothing neo- about this noir. There's no swearing except "hell." (I always thought Tug said "goddamn" at one point but, no, he's calling The Pin "gothed-up.") There's a lot of discussion of sex, but always through implication, and the only deleted scene is the one that removed ambiguity about what Brendan and Laura get up to after kissing. There's nothing postmodern or subversive - yes, the hook is it's set in high school, but the big twist is that it takes this very seriously. It mines it for jokes, yes, but the drama is authentic. In fact, making the gumshoe a high school student, his jadedness an obvious front, still too young to be as hard as he tries to be, just makes the drama hit harder. Sam Spade if Sam Spade were allowed to cry. I've always found it an interesting counterpoint to The Good German, a movie that fastidiously mimics the aesthetics of classic noir - down to even using period-appropriate sound recording - but is wholly neo- in construction. Brick could get approved by the Hays Code. Its vibe, its plot about a detective playing a bunch of criminals against each other, even its slang ("bulls," "yegg," "flopped") are all taken directly from Hammett. It's not even stealing from noir, it's stealing from what noir stole from! It's a perfect curtain call for the collection: the final film is both the most contemporary and the most classic. It's also - but for the strong case you could make for Night Moves - the best movie on the list. It's even more appropriate for me, personally: this was where it all started for me and noir. I saw this in theaters when it came out and loved it. It was probably my favorite movie for some time. It gave me a taste for pulpy crime movies which I only, years later, realized were neo-noir. This is why I looked into Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and In Bruges. I've seen it more times than any film on this list, by a factor of at least 3. It's why I will always adore Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best-looking half-million-dollar movie I've ever seen. (Indie filmmakers, take fucking notes.) I even did a script analysis of this, and, yes, it follows the formula, but so tightly and with so much style. Did you notice that he says several of the sequence tensions out loud? ("I just want to find her." "Show of hands.") I notice new things each time I see it - this time it was how "brushing Brendan's hair out of his face" is Em's move, making him look more like he does in the flashback, and how Laura does the same to him as she's seducing him, in the moment when he misses Em the hardest. It isn't perfect. It's recreated noir so faithfully that the Innocent Girl dies, the Femme Fatale uses intimacy as a weapon, and none of the women ever appear in a scene together. 1940's gender politics maybe don't need to be revisited. They say be critical of the media you love, and it applies here most of all: it is a real criticism of something I love immensely.

[ireallylikejonouchi]

𝙽𝚞𝚛𝚊𝚛𝚒𝚑𝚢𝚘𝚗 𝚗𝚘 𝙼𝚊𝚐𝚘 𝚁𝚎𝚟𝚒𝚎𝚠

Written and drawn by Shiibashi Hiroshi, Nurarihyon no Mago is a manga series that ran in Weekly Shonen Jump with 210 chapters, 25 volumes. It’s about a Japan that has a massive Yokai underbelly, consisting mostly of yokai yakuza clans that run certain parts of Japan. The protagonist, Rikuo Nura, is the third heir of the Nura clan, kingpin of Kanto. His grandfather is the legendary Lord of Pandemonium, the yokai Nurarihyon, but Rikuo is only a quarter yokai, having a half-human father and a full human mother. As a child, Rikuo thinks yokai are the coolest thing, but his classmates mock him for this, not believing that they exist, and finding it even weirder that someone could admire them. Rikuo is told that it is his destiny to take on this role, and that he cannot live a human life. Hearing stories about evil yokai who enjoy making humans despair, Rikuo decides that yokai are terrible and he wants nothing to do with them. When Rikuo’s classmates are attacked by some rebellious yokai from the Nura clan, who are unhappy about their new leader being a quarter-human child, Rikuo awakens to his yokai blood and transforms in order to defeat them. He decides here that he will become the third heir in order to subdue yokai that would bring terror to humans with his “Fear,” the power system of the series.

With the synopsis out of the way, from this point on there will be spoilers. Be wary. I’ll try my best to spoil only what’s necessary in order to get my point across.

The beginning of this manga takes its time setting up character dynamics with short story arcs, as well as establishing what the yokai of the world are truly like with various examples of opinionated yokai antagonists. Some consider it boring, and I can understand why, but I think it pays off very well. The characters are incredibly likeable and fun. Even the ones that don’t have very much development are still a joy to see on the page when they show up. Rikuo himself is simultaneously a complicated character and a very easy character to follow. The first chapter takes place a couple of years before the second one, and his childish judgement to go from worshiping yokai to hating them is intentionally so. The story is about his growth. Rikuo is told that he must take on this role, he denies, but eventually accepts under his own terms, and for his own reasons. This ultimately sets up what his character arc will end up becoming, as one of his final conflicts at the end of the story sees him battling against another half-yokai, Abe no Yoshihira, who believes it is his duty to follow his evil father’s plan because of his "cursed” mixed blood. Rikuo doesn’t simply reject this title, but he also doesn’t accept out of obligation. He accepts this as an opportunity to bring about change. The change he wants slowly evolves from protecting humans to bridging the social gap between human and yokai so that they may find peace together. Fate shouldn’t be fought against or ignored, but you must make whatever you can out of it. Rikuo feels that connecting human and yokai is something only he can do as a half-yokai, so he feels a responsibility to carry this out, yet it is also what he truly believes in and wants. He is a leader because he was graced with the opportunity to bring about a better world. Your fate is only what you perceive it as. The final villain Abe no Seimei believes that human and yokai are fated to be at odds forever, and that influences his evil plan to purify the world. Both are believers of fate to some extent, the message isn’t something as simple as “defy fate” or “there is no fate,” which I appreciate. This manga is very good about exploring all facets of the themes it presents, which I will give more examples of shortly.

The power system is an interesting one. To quote the wiki, “ Osore (畏, Fear) is the term that denotes the unique skills and traits of each yōkai. It refers to the "fear" of the unknown, an emotional reaction produced when the yōkai represent themselves as "monsters". As yōkai first existed as creatures who induce fear in humankind, the general concept of "fear" revolves around being feared and respected by humans and making them feel small and weak. It involves exerting a wall of pressure to make one's presence feel larger than the actuality. When done correctly, this also creates a change in the mood and surrounding air - as seen whenever a dense fog appears when a Hyakki Yakō gathers in the series. Itaku states that Osore only applies to scaring humans.“ Fear is an inherently negative word, especially when associated with demons. However, Rikuo is proud of his fear, despite scolding yokai who scare humans. Fear in this manga is not quite so black and white. Rikuo’s form of fear is reverence, admiration. He considers this to be a form of fear, and he is indeed proud of the awe he is able to inspire within his followers as well as his enemies. Rikuo is able to use a power that comes only thanks to his human side, letting a yokai haunt his humanity while keeping control with his yokai half, performing Equip and gaining that yokai’s powers, but only if they entrust themselves to him. It is the ultimate representation of the Fear that Rikuo believes in. For the core power system of the series to have such a double meaning about it speaks to the coming complexities, and it is incredibly fitting for this story, as I hope to convey.

Fate, lineage and connection to history are the main themes of this manga. Many of the characters in the story are tied to tradition before it starts, and have to be brought out of that by Rikuo and his progressive mindset. One’s blood is used to portray this theme in an interesting way. Rikuo’s father, Rihan, describes him as a symbol of hope for the future. Rihan longed for a world where human and yokai could get along, yet he came into constant conflict with both evil yokai and evil humans, as his son Rikuo would soon come to do as well. Rikuo loved his father, and carries on his dreams. However, similar to his “fate” of leading the clan, his respect for his ancestors is well-informed by his individual beliefs, and not from any kind of feeling that he MUST do what his ancestors wished. Abe no Yoshihira failed here, becoming a slave to his perceived fate. Hagoromo-gitsune, the main antagonist of the Kyoto arc as well as Abe no Seimei’s mother, was tied to her blood relations as well. She did everything for her son, who was soon to be reborn again into this age. She had her own image of an ideal world, erasing humans and making a world full of yokai, but she didn’t consider her child’s ideals, which she could have presumed from Seimei’s suffering he received when both human and yokai betrayed him. Seimei is born and casts Hagoromo-gitsune into hell, declaring that he will purify all life from the world, as neither human nor yokai can be trusted. Abe no Seimei is the agent of fate, declaring that all living things on Earth have doomed themselves to a fate of death thanks to their own horrible and greedy nature. Abe no Seimei is a half-yokai himself and he has found solace from neither of those sides. Rikuo, however, does not give up. He equips himself with the true fear of this reality that places him in-between two worlds, unable to fully enjoy life as a human or a yokai, refusing to resign himself as Seimei did, and instead fighting against the fate Seimei enforces by bringing together humans and yokai, including Hagoromo-gitsune, in order to seal the final blow against him.

You may be wondering what it means that Rikuo was able to finish off Seimei by fusing with his mother. Well, you see, Hagoromo-gitsune is sort of, in a way, Rikuo’s mother as well. You see, before Rihan had a child with Rikuo’s mother, he was married to another woman, Yamabuki-otome. For context, Abe no Seimei is a man who reincarnates throughout generations, as does his mother, Hagoromo-gitsune. Some time after Yamabuki-otome’s death, Seimei used her to take revenge on Rihan for disrupting his plans, by reviving her as a child and turning her into the host of the yokai Hagoromo-gitsune, sending her with false memories and subliminal orders to kill the man she loved when she was alive. Once she had killed Rihan, her human self hid itself away in despair and Hagoromo-gitsune was able to take control of her body for good. In modern times, after being cast into hell by Abe no Seimei, she is revived by Nurarihyon in anticipation for the final battle. After encountering Rikuo and his burning feelings in Kyoto, she had regained her human memories before being struck down by Seimei. Upon her most recent revival, she found she had feelings for both Rikuo and Seimei, and considers both to be her children. She regrets that her feelings for Seimei had ended up being met with treachery, and she goes to confront him. When she hears his full plan, she decides to do kill him herself, though she fails. She feels it her duty as a mother to make up for not understanding his suffering earlier, as it’s now too late to reason with him. Hagoromo-gitsune’s progression comes from her ability to find love for her yokai followers, considering them to be her children all the same as Rikuo and Seimei, and learns that she should have seen this love all along rather than being blinded by her obsessions with her blood son. Once again, she values her children and the blood she shares with them, but she is only able to find happiness when she realizes that the feelings she has for them don’t have to be restricted to only them simply because they are her kin, and similarly she does not need to follow Seimei’s plan just because she thinks it’s what a mother “should” do. Fusing with Rikuo is the culmination of this. While Rikuo is technically her kin, as Seimei is, we see through her arc that she has matured and learned to spread her love. So even though without context it would seem that she simply went from one child to the other, we can see the complexities of this and see how it relates to Rikuo’s arc, accepting something not out of obligation, but from your own will. 

By coming to a true understanding with the woman that Abe no Seimei had discarded, his mother, and her doing the same, an act that seemingly defies their fates (Rikuo’s fate to be a cold yokai ruler and Hagoromo’s fate to be a slave to her child’s whims), they’re able to defeat him and sever fate itself.

The Hundred Stories Clan Arc is one that I really appreciate for showing me how truly interesting Rikuo was as a character. I hadn’t realized it up to that point, and it’s clear why. His characterization and progression is subtle. The text doesn’t tell you how Rikuo grows, the art and his actions do. When humanity told of Rikuo’s half-yokai status is convinced that he must be killed for the safety of Japan, Rikuo is forced to face the fact that the humans he wants to protect are not perfect, and have as many imperfections as yokai do. Humans can be greedy, they can do horrible things when they’re afraid. In a backstory, the leader of the Hundred Stories Clan is shown to be a despicable human from Japanese history named Sanmoto Gorozaemon, who takes control of yokai to secure his political and social power, and turns himself into a yokai in order to secure that power. When a member of his clan is assaulted by humans who don’t care about the harm they’re causing, some of them even reveling in it, through facial expressions we can see him struggling with the thought of killing these humans to end the conflict, or out of revenge possibly. Shiibashi leaves this to the reader’s interpretation and it works wonders, he has no internal monologue relating to this feeling and nobody points out that he seems crazed or anything. It’s some panels that you could easily miss if you’re reading too fast.

In this panel, we are shown his reaction to a female yokai appearing and tormenting the humans that were tormenting him and his clanmate just moments ago. Even when he showed such rage at the humans, seemingly almost snapping, he decides he needs to stop the yokai from killing them. However, the expression on his face conveys perfectly how complex his emotions are over this. Despite how confidently he’s saying he needs to save them, his face almost looks like he doesn’t want to. Of course, he overcomes this and saves them for the sake of his dream.

It’s clear to see the moral dilemma he’s going through and it’s conveyed entirely through art and subtext. This is confident storytelling, and not to mention incredible artistry. Shiibashi has a certain maturity and respect for the reader that is hard to find in Shonen Jump manga sometimes.

Rikuo’s fight against the yokai artist Kyosai in this arc is notable for being similar to what I just described from the beginning of the arc.

Kyosai has an interest in turning human women into yokai using his painting techniques, including one of Rikuo’s classmates. Enraged, Rikuo engages him in combat with his newly acquired Attack Mode, which switches his Fear from a defensive technique to an offensive one, and changes his hair from white with black underneath it to having half of his hair being black on one side and the other being white. As the fight progresses, Rikuo is continuously injured and decomposed by Kyosai’s abilities, burning his flesh and scarring Rikuo black.

Rikuo’s deteriorating mental state during this arc is conveyed visually through his design, with both the way he is inked as well as his literally evolving design, his new transformation. He’s never had to confront these kinds of humans and yokai before. This leveling of suffering is new to our middle school-aged protagonist. After Kyosai is defeated, his momentary rage subsides but he is still scarred, physically and mentally. Encho, the acting leader of the Hundred Stories Clan, betrays Sanmoto’s reincarnated brain for personal gain, confusing Rikuo who is already in a fragile mental state. He struggles to comprehend the enemy, as he had been forced to face humans that he wanted to protect, yokai that despised those humans, and even his own best friends. Once again, exclusively visually conveyed and up to interpretation.

At the end of this arc, he accepts the help of his friends, his aide Yuki-Onna, and equips with her, washing himself of the stress he’s in and covering him in a beautiful veil of ice. His design goes back to normal in order to show this, and get across just how much his friends mean to him, in a truly impactful way that really strengthens the theme by giving real weight to his connection with both his yokai and human lives.

Every arc is strong in its own way, I simply wanted to discuss the few that best show what I’m trying to say. I hope you now understand why I love this manga so much and why I think you should read it. I promise the things I’ve spoiled here are only a fragment of the whole experience, and your appreciation will only grow as you experience the full context by reading the manga. If I got across what I wanted to, then you understand that this manga cannot be explained as much as it can be experienced. There are probably more things that I never noticed, maybe you’ll discover those before I do.

This manga is an ode to the future, to humanity. We can overcome our differences and coexist. Perhaps all it takes is for one person to take the fear that we as people feel in our daily lives onto themselves. The fear that there can never be change, the fear that our road only ends in sadness. The fear that our history defines us. The fear that we must conform to our duty. The fear that accepting a duty strips us of individuality. The fear that we can never bring these conflicting aspects of our mind together and find inner peace. The fear that we can never bring the conflicting aspects of people together and find true peace amongst ourselves. Not many people can overcome that fear, but he who is truly strong is he who equips that fear. He who takes that uncertainty of the future and uses it to empower himself and push for that change he wishes to see. This review is my ode to the man who was able to understand what makes people who they are and didn’t let that fear consume him. The man who equips true fear. Thank you for reading.

[solohux]

Prompt: the knights comes back to the ship with a de aged kylo and since kylo has had a crush on hux for months, the only thing he remembers is hux = happy,safe feelings❤️

In the two brief years that Hux has known Kylo and the Knights of Ren, he has never been summoned to the hangar bay to await their arrival. It’s strange, Hux thinks as he stands at parade rest amongst the sea of busy pilots with his gaze locked onto the hangar’s opening, that the Knights’ mission to Korriban should end in a meeting with the Force-null General.

Even stranger, perhaps, is that the request for Hux’s presence wasn’t made by the leader of the Knights but by Vicrul, arguably Kylo’s closest ‘friend’ amongst the group of mysterious marauders but a stranger to Hux; their lack of connection had almost prompted Hux to completely ignore the request but the words that the Knight had spoken quietly at the end of the transmission has made sure that the General is here early.

‘Master Kylo needs you.’

Hux breathes deeply, exhaling with a lowering of his tense shoulders. He would say that he and Kylo haven’t grown into friends or even acquaintances since they became co-commanders, remaining fairly indifferent to each other despite spending a lot of time together, especially as of late. Despite Kylo not seeming like one for paperwork and admin, he’s been asking to work in Hux’s office alongside him on the more menial tasks of Project Starkiller, offering insight that Hux is embarrassed to admit is valuable. Kylo is turning into a valuable cog in the well-oiled machine of the First Order; to have something happen to him now would be most unfortunate, both to Hux’s work and his private life.

The Night Buzzard approaches from hyperspace and slows to an almost-halt as it cruises into the hangar bay, no doubt piloted by Kuruk. As soon as the ship is landed, maintenance crews come off standby and set to work on it, refuelling it and checking its status, but all Hux can focus on is the lowering hatch and the five cloaked figures who emerge.

Kylo and Vicrul are missing.

“Knights,” Hux greets, giving a polite nod to each of them before focussing on the one in the middle, Cardo. “What is so important that you require my presence upon landing?”

The Knights all share a glance as though silently communicating with each other before Cardo speaks.

“The situation is delicate,” she says, one hand flexing nervously at her side. “There’s been some trouble.”

“I assume you mean Kylo,” Hux says, having come to learn that his co-commander’s name is synonymous with trouble.

“He is…changed,” Cardo says in a quiet tone though her helmet helps Hux to hear her. “It’s going to be a shock to see him but until we can fix him, he needs to stay with you.”

“Why me?”

“He’s been asking for you since this happened,” Cardo says, turning back around to the Buzzard as footsteps approach from inside. “And you’re the only one we trust with his care.”

“Care?” But none of the Knights answer him. They all step aside as Vicrul descends the ramp from the ship, carrying something—or someone—upon his hip.

There’s no doubt that it is a child, but how? Why? Hux can only stare in amazement as he tries to put everything together, looking at the child’s pale face, dark hair and the black robes that are much too big for his little, five year old body.

When he uncurls himself from Vicrul’s shoulder and Hux sees his tear stained cheeks, he recognises those the amber-brown eyes immediately.

Hux can barely speak, “Ren?”

“Hux. Want Hux,” the child says, wriggling out of Vicrul’s hold before the Knight can set him down, running with his arms out towards Hux but he stands on his long cape and trips. Hux is quick to catch him before the boy can actually fall down.

Being this close, Hux can see that the boy’s robes are the exact same as Kylo’s, only now on a much smaller body than that of the Master of Ren. The child scrambles into Hux’s hold, wrapping his arms around his neck and his legs around his waist, clinging on so tightly that it takes Hux’s breath away for a moment. The General gingerly reciprocates the hug and stands up, sliding one arm under the boy to support him as he sits on his hip whilst the other arm wraps around him in a loose grip, rubbing up and down slowly.

“This is Master Kylo,” Vicrul says, straightening his clothes now that the boy isn’t clinging onto him anymore.

“What happened?” Hux gasps, completely in shock. Little Kylo rests his head on Hux’s shoulder and grabs a handful of his greatcoat’s lapel, sniffling quietly.

“A trap was set in one of the Force shrines on Korriban,” Cardo says. “Master leapt without looking. He’s been reverted back to a child without any memories of his life.”

“No memories,” Vicrul repeats, “Except for you.”

“Me?” Hux exhales, looking down to Kylo. “Ren and I just co-commanders. Why would he remember me?”

“Hux,” Kylo says softly, lifting his head up and blinking his tears away, some semblance of a smile forming on his face. “Hux is my friend. Hux, safe.”

Hux’s stomach twists. Is this what Kylo truly thinks of him? A friend? Of all of his memories, his thoughts of Hux have held on through whatever Force-spell caused this age regression to happen to him. Perhaps they are more than co-commanders after all. He wipes a stray tear from Kylo’s cheek using the now-oversized cowl and touches his nose with his finger, making the boy giggle. Hux wonders if Kylo’s adult laugh is just as much of a glorious sound as his childlike one.

“Hux? Want to play?” The boy asks, pouting.

“I’ll have to clear my schedule,” Hux says. “And we’ll have to find you some clothes that fit you, hm? Perhaps a little First Order uniform.”

“Yuck, uniform!”

Hux smiles, “You haven’t really changed, have you, Kylo?”

“We can play pilots,” little Kylo says excitedly. “I’ll show you how to play! Please, Hux?”

“Well then,” Hux says, clearing his throat after he’s nodded to Kylo and turned to the Knights. “I suppose the six of you have a lot of work to do to fix your Master’s problem. You have my permission to use whatever you need to on board our ship to find your solution.”

“And what are you going to do in the meantime, General?” Vicrul asks.

Hux wraps his arm tighter around Kylo, “I’ve got a friend to take care of.”

[aitarose]

FROZEN MEMORIES (T. OIKAWA) pairing: oikawa tooru x fem!reader

synopsis: tooru always spoke a million words a minute, a million words describing his everlasting love for y/n—but in reality, vows can’t always be kept, and photographs are all that stand forever.

word count: 7.0k

genre: fluff, angst, getting together, established relationship, time skip

warnings: major character death, slight ghost au

notes: lina and i were talking about planes one time on facetime and now this exists. :) writing about weddings is fun and i hope that this makes people sad—but like the good kind of sad <3 

↳ DIRECTORY

It was a simple thing, the diamond that rested on her finger.

Small, delicate, and nothing like the extravagant stigma of Oikawa Tooru. Nothing like his vibrance and charisma or the tenacity racing through his veins while on the court. There were no sprinkles of the unnecessary, no remnants of borrowed money.

Just simplicity and minimalism. A bare show of his love for her, a showcase that would be blind to the wandering eye, it was so small. The ring was all of the things that had little, if any, relation to his personality.

Throughout the timeline of them knowing one another, Y/N always knew he’d propose. Whether that was when they were in their mid thirties, twenties, or even while in high school—their love was that strong.

And she knew him best. She knew that he wouldn’t present a jewel the size of a bumblebee, or one with gems surrounding the entirety of the band. In her mind, the only option would be the bare band with a single jewel laying atop its center.

The same band that had belonged to his grandmother, mother, and now her.

It wasn’t a statement piece or trophy, but rather a reminder that their relationship didn’t have to be complicated or flashy. That the ring had surpassed generations of instability and trouble, and at the end of the day, all that mattered was their love—their love that was truly unbreakable.

Which was why it was all the more special to Y/N, why she cherished it more than any other belonging. It reminded her of him.

When he’d gotten down on one knee, professed his dreams of sharing the rest of his life by her side, the enjoyment of announcing that she would be the wife of a professional athlete never crossed her mind. 

Y/N didn’t view Oikawa as a celebrity or idol. She didn’t consider him to be on another level or above her status for any reason. In no world was he too good for her, as they were perfect for each other.

There was just something about him, a force that pulled her towards him no matter how hard she tried to resist. He was undoubtedly the other half of her spirit, the person she was always meant to connect with.

Her heart swelled whenever he was around, just knowing that he was in the same building, waiting for her at the end of the flower-filled aisle had tears dripping down her rose-colored cheeks.

She could imagine the smile on his face, the one she’d been waiting to see for over a year now. The smile that she saw when she closed her eyes, looked into her reflection, passed a shining pond.

Ambition was her most dominant personality trait, always feeling the need to reach for the sky and set new goals—but once she’d kissed his lips, she knew that he was the only goal that mattered.

And the two of them had been preparing for this day for what felt like forever, waiting in anticipation for the moment they’d be pronounced as one. However, their wishes had been interrupted by his newly honored position on the Argentinian team.

They had a month, barely thirty days to pack up his life, everything he could possibly need for an unknown amount of time, and find peace with the fact that they wouldn’t be together for every second like they’d become accustomed to.

Driving him to the airport had to be one of the most tear-filled days of Y/N’s life, other than today of course—but today’s tears were much different in every sense and form. 

She could remember the exact look on his face as they’d left the car, carried his luggage to the terminal, and said their goodbyes. Goodbyes that were, of course, temporary as no distance could ever break the bond they had.

The photo laying between Y/N’s fingers had captured that moment perfectly.

Somber looks on both of their faces, yearning for the other even though they were a mere distance away, a distance that was growing with every second the clock counted down.

Laughing lightly, maneuvering her position so her reminiscent tears wouldn’t stain the slightly marred photograph—she pushed the memory aside, instead choosing to recall an earlier one. A happier one.

A memory that was encased within the maple box that Oikawa had gifted her at the terminal. A present that he’d been putting together for nearly a decade, throughout the entirety of their early relationship.

So, while the airplane had taken him thousands of miles away, over an entire ocean and away from her—Y/N had a way to see his face. His beautiful and loving face for the times where he couldn’t answer the phone or pick up a call.

A photo box. One filled with polaroids and snapshots of moments, cherished memories of their lives that had led up to today’s date. It was her most prized possession, the story of her and Oikawa. 

The story of their love.

“Are you alright?” Y/N giggled, pushing the loose strands of hair away from Oikawa’s face. The wind was rapid, carrying them throughout the nearly empty park, and to their destination.

It was a small picnic blanket, one that he’d set up an hour earlier, laying in the center of the field, underneath one of the blossoming cherry trees. Albeit, with the roaring currents, their date spot had flown a few feet into the air.

“Hey, I’m talking to you, ‘Kawa.” She repeated, amused at the sight of his mortified face. There was never a time where Oikawa Tooru didn’t strive for perfection, and in the moment where he felt it mattered most, everything had gone wrong.

He’d been preparing to ask Y/N out for weeks. Always admiring her from afar, searching for her in the stands, smiling at her cheers and words of encouragement. Calling her a crush was beyond his feelings, she was simply his.

So he felt that their first date had to be perfect. It had to leave her hooked, left at the corner of a page, addicted and invested to turn the next—to turn every page in the chapters of their story.

Their story, that was just beginning.

“I’m fantastic, Y/N-chan!” A large, teeth baring smile grew on his lips, eyes wide with anxiety radiating out of them. He didn’t think he’d ever felt his heart beat so fast, the artery on the verge of jumping out of his chest.

“Really?” She asked with her brows raised, noticing how the blood had rushed out of his face, leaving behind a stone-cold canvas of skin. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost—no. You look like you are a ghost.”

“It’s okay. I’m nervous, too.” Y/N confessed, taking his hands in hers, her warmth overshadowing the clamminess of his palms—her touch being his salvation. “This is my first time being asked out, you know. I mean, we are only first years.”

Which was entirely true. They’d each moved from their respective middle schools to Aoba Johsai, not knowing of the other’s existence until Oikawa had accidentally tripped over her school bag while on the run from his fangirls. 

From that moment on, he’d been completely and utterly enamored by her. 

Enamored in the way that his cheeks would flush bright red at any moment of embarrassment if Y/N was around. Bright red, just as they were now, with her heart in his grasp, begging to be loved.

As he opened his mouth to speak, scripting his genuine apology for the chaos that was today, something flew right by his right eye. Something small, yellow and black—something that truly pushed him over the edge.

Oikawa ran in a dead sprint, circling the blanket, darting between trees as the innocent bumblebee chased him with glee. His shrieks were ear-piercing, inducing hysterical laughing fits from Y/N, tears brimming the corners of her eyes.

The sternness of his posture had finally relaxed, his placid expression long gone and replaced with one of the over-dramatics and the unnecessary. She felt as though the blood rushing through her veins had settled, content with the familiarity of the Oikawa in front of her.

“Protect me, Y/N-chan!” He cried out, his hands holding her shoulders with a death-grip, using her body as a shield from the barely visible bee. It buzzed around their heads in circles, causing him to duck and cover each time it got too close to his ears.

Y/N was practically out of breath, her voice hoarse from the amount of laughter leaving her throat. “Oikawa! Are you even allergic to bees?” She wondered out loud, trying to find any acceptable reason other than insanity to his reaction.

“I don’t know!” He exclaimed, taking Y/N’s hand and pulling her away from their stray picnic blanket, and towards the more dense sector of trees. “Three percent of people have a reaction, and there’s no way I’m not in the top percentage—I mean look at me!”

His skin was stained red, nearing the color of blood from how much adrenaline he’d been using. The brown in his pupils dark, almost black, large, and staring straight into Y/N’s.

Heavy breathing came from the both of them, energy on the rocks, exhausted after their marathon throughout the park. It was a strange moment, one with no words yet their feelings were communicative. She didn’t need to hear what he was thinking, as she felt the exact same. 

Oikawa began to lean in, his gaze focused on Y/N—his focus staying on her and only her, just as it would always be. Closing her eyes, preparing herself for her very first kiss with the boy that seemed unreachable, Y/N was left with no love on her lips.

Nothing but the sound of a shot snapping from a polaroid camera, and the feeling of a smile pressed against her cheek.

As her vision opened, Y/N’s jaw dropped, smacking his arm with the picnic bag that had been thrown over her shoulder. Sure, she’d noticed him packing the camera earlier, but hadn’t expected him to actually use it. 

“Are you serious?” She scoffed, amusement laced in her tone. Of course he’d pull something like that. He’d do anything to make the moment more memorable. “I can’t believe you, Oikawa.”

He grinned a shit-eating grin, forehead touching hers. If Y/N hadn’t known better, she would’ve walked out, left him behind after such a sporadic and awful first date—but she actually enjoyed the chaos. She enjoyed being with the real him.

“Well, you better believe it, Y/N-chan.” His lips were so close, a mere centimeter away. Only a centimeter between them and, still, the distance seemed too far. “And when I do kiss you, I expect to be called by my real name.”

Oikawa pulled away, saying a final wish before stalking off towards the remnants of their picnic, leaving Y/N with nothing but withdrawal and their single photograph. She rolled her eyes at him, his words racing through her head as she fell in love with the frozen memory.

Call me Tooru.

Y/N’s heart swelled as her senses picked up on the harsh sound of sneakers squeaking against the gym floor. It was a noise that would likely drive a normal person away, so wretched and foul, absolute agony for the ears—but she loved it.

She loved it since along with that sound, came him—came Oikawa.

“You two really can’t stay away from each other, can you?” Mattsun groaned, his attention brought to the entrance, bemused by the sight of Y/N and used to her inability to be without his friend for longer than two hours.

Despite the roll of his eyes, there was a light smile on Mattsun’s face. A smile that had been replicated throughout the entirety of the team, grins awaiting their captain to notice the company of his favorite cheerleader. 

In the beginning of their relationship, it’d taken the boys a few weeks turned months to warm up to Y/N. It was no secret that Oikawa was a bit of a player, never settling on one girl, always getting distracted with the next best thing—but even they could see that this time, it was different.

After all, they’d lasted for a little over two years now—and in those two years of total bliss, the whole team had picked up on the new positives to the setter’s daily attitude.

Makki noticed the way Oikawa’s eyes lit up around her, how his laugh was ten times louder whenever she was by his side. Mattsun never failed to comment on the stupid beams he’d wear, and how much effort he’d put into his appearance when he was only getting ready for a five minute video call. 

And Iwaizumi was the one who’d seen it all. He’d endured the tireless hours in which his best friend would talk about how nervous he was to see her in the hallways or how fast his heart would beat whenever she’d hand him a pen or compliment his gameplay. 

He’d been the first person to know exactly what had happened after Oikawa asked her on their first date, in which he’d been trampled by fangirls and forced to steal Y/N away into an empty janitor’s closet to get just a minute of privacy. His friend later bouncing with joy on their walk back home, babbling on and on about her accepting his confession.

The very second the setter had said his goodbye, dropped Y/N off at her home, and had one last laugh about the bee incident; Iwaizumi’s phone had blown up with text messages and voicemails—all filled with the lovestruck adoration that Oikawa held for his new flame. The flame that he hoped would burn forever.

It was safe to say that his friends loved her, that they loved them together and the safety net that was their relationship. Y/N brought the dreamer down to earth, while Oikawa taught her how to reach the sky—showed her the importance of keeping her eyes on the clouds.

Iwaizumi shook his head, letting out a low laugh as his best friend caught sight of his girlfriend and took off running in her direction, tackling her to the ground, and completely forgetting about the abandoned volleyball that he’d been juggling altogether. 

PDA was not an issue for Oikawa, never even crossing his mind as he peppered light kisses in circles around Y/N’s face. The girl was bright red beneath him, loudly giggling, and essentially forgetting where she was for a moment—distracted by him, the only person that could ever maintain her attention.

“Pack it up, Loser-kawa.” Makki called out, hands cupping his lips in an attempt to shout out over the sounds of Y/N’s squeals. Her head snapped over to the team at the sound of his calls, cheeks flushing a further scarlet in embarrassment amidst their eye contact.

Oikawa, on the other hand, showed no signs of stopping—completely ignoring the complaints of his teammates, throwing Y/N over his shoulder, and carrying her with ease towards their peers.

“Oh, come on guys.” He smirked as he set his girlfriend down and proceeded to sling an arm around her frame, snuggling her closer to his chest. “There’s no need to be jealous, I’m sure she’ll cheer for you, too—albeit, it won’t ever be as loud as she cheers for me.”

Countless volleyballs came flying in their direction, all aimed for the so-called Great King—narrowly missing Y/N’s body and hitting their target that was Oikawa’s face.

“Quit wasting our time, Shitty-kawa!” Mattsun shot another ball, smacking his captain straight in the forehead. “You two have been in each other’s business all day, save some time for us!”

“Just take a picture, it’ll last longer!”

Y/N laughed, finding the suggestion hilarious—not noticing how her boyfriend’s face lit up with delight. How he reached for the duffel bag beside the door containing their beloved polaroid camera.

“You suggested it, Mattsun!” He tossed the device, landing it perfectly in his friend’s open hands. The brown hair boy stared at the offering, not exactly sure what he’d been expecting from Oikawa of all people. “Now you’ve got to follow through!”

The setter led Y/N towards the net, placing her in front of him with a large smile on his face. His palms ghosted her’s, so close to touching with no intentions of doing so.

As the camera was about to click, he moved, a large groan escaping his throat. “Hold on!” Oikawa shouted, waving his hands in the air manically, sprinting to his practice bag. “Almost forgot something!”

The white material of his Seijoh jacket reflected underneath the fluorescent lights. He held it up with glee, returning to Y/N’s side and placing it over her shoulders with care. 

Nearly prepared for the photoshoot, he felt that one thing was missing. One thing that would truly commemorate the oh-so-momentous event that was photo-worthy.

“Oi, Iwa-chan!” The ace glared at his best friend, knowing exactly what he was asking for. With a roll of his eyes, Iwaizumi found himself between the couple, a frown on his face as they held up bunny ears above his head.

Sticking his tongue out, Oikawa was blinded by the piercing flash of the camera. “Say cheese!” He called out, pinching Iwaizumi’s cheek with his free hand and cowering as he shot him a murderous glance in return.

Y/N couldn’t help but giggle, her expression being light and carefree in the frozen moment—lost amidst her love for her boyfriend and the adoration she held for their best friend. 

Iwaizumi was always there for them—and there’d never be a time in which he wasn’t. Through hardships and breathless arguments, he was there. One phone call away to listen to any tangent or complaint from either of the two.

She knew that he was reliable, and she hoped that he’d stick by their side. She hoped that he’d be the one to walk her down that flower-filled aisle in the future. That he’d be the person to give her off to the man of her dreams.

And, little did she know, her wish would come true.

Soft hums and silent promises wafted throughout Oikawa Tooru’s bedroom. The gentle snores of his girlfriend rising and falling against his chest, pressed atop his heartbeat, filling his love for her as if his heart was a pitcher. 

It’d been a long day, one full of the tiresome stress of tournaments. Although he hated to admit it, he’d spent a majority of the past hours crying—his tears staining Y/N’s sweater, dampening the cotton fabric.

Losing to Karasuno had never even crossed his mind. Seijoh was the best of the best, he was the best of the best, that was what he’d told himself. That was what’d motivated him to continue to pursue his dreams of beating Ushiwaka for so many years. 

But they’d lost. His unstoppable team had lost to complete amateurs, infants in all senses of strategy and gameplay when compared to that of his own team’s. It was truly unbelievable—so unbelievable that Oikawa had only come to terms with it minutes ago.

He’d unknowingly played his last high school game. His final game as captain, the leader of his teammates, the face that every admirer associated with the name “Aoba Johsai”—and that was heartbreaking.

Mindlessly, his fingers graced Y/N’s back, tracing positions and numbers on repeat. It was as if his brain was still stuck on the court, glued to the placement he’d fallen in after that last whistle had blown.

“I love you.” He whispered, admiring her peaceful expression. There’d never be a time in which Oikawa wouldn’t think she was the most beautiful sight in the world. Nothing compared to her, not even the thrill of feeling the ball in his hands.

“You’re perfect, amazing, gorgeous.” An ongoing stream of compliments poured from his lips, all of them always sitting at the tip of his tongue, waiting to be released. His brown eyes bored into her closed lids, waiting for them to flutter open, knowing that she was eavesdropping on his one-sided conversation.

“I can’t wait to marry you one day.”

Her eye popped open, her iris meeting his as she fought off a smirk. Oikawa laughed at her audacity, her listening in on his professions of love whilst pretending to be asleep—a very Y/N thing to do.

“Was that a proposal I heard, Tooru?” She teased, a cheshire smile growing on her face. Though she was joking, there was a part of her that felt ecstatic. Excited for the future, their future. “Aren’t we a little young for that?”

Oikawa ignored her humorous tone, choosing to take her words seriously. Sincerity overtook his features, determination shining in his eyes. “No, that wasn’t a proposal. Not yet at least.”

“But it was a promise.” He rolled over, arms stretched out onto the mattress as he held his weight above his flushed girlfriend. “I’m not going anywhere, Y/N. Whenever you need me, I’ll be here.”

“I promise.”

Y/N reached upwards, caressing his cheek with care, pulling him down towards her frame. As she connected their lips, love flooded from their hearts. Pure love that they were so lucky to have found in each other.

Their kiss was passionate, fluid and desperate as they clung to one another in an attempt to get even closer than they already were. Oikawa’s hair brushed against her forehead, tickling her nerves amidst the act.

He cupped her cheeks in his hands, pressing further as her swollen lips were chapped and yearning for more. It was as if he was the water to her drought, the sun to her flowers, the missing half of her soul—he was everything she ever needed, everything she could ever want.

“I love you, Tooru.” Y/N was breathless, heaving gusts of air as she composed herself between his arms. Her skin was shaded pink, hair a mess, and eyes wide in adoration for her boyfriend. “I’ll love you forever.”

A scoff fell from his lips whilst he relaxed his muscles, laying down on her body, his head against her chest as he felt her short breaths rise and fall. “Don’t get your head too high in the clouds, beautiful.”

“We can focus on forever later.” With his heartbeat slowing, sleep on his mind, Oikawa wrapped an arm around Y/N’s waist. “Let’s just think about now—right now, and how amazing I just made you feel.”

“They don’t call me the Great King for nothing!”

With a groan, Y/N pushed her boyfriend off of her, choosing to sleep on her side instead of listening to his boasting. It was a common occurrence, one that she was used to and knew how to handle—feigned disinterest was always her favorite route to take.

Oikawa pouted at the emptiness he now faced without being in her arms. He wanted attention, and the only way to get her attention was to distract her from his terrible humor in the only way he knew how.

Various pokes and prods scattered across Y/N’s backside, the relentless actions being from the needy narcissist she was sharing a blanket with. Pulling the covers over her head, she peeked out from underneath, coming face-to-face with the bright flash of his camera.

“Smile for the camera, beautiful.”

The terminal was bustling with people, luggage rolling across the stone floors and towards their rightful places. Color was void on the walls, simple tones of grey and blue plastered opposite to the towering window panes.

Reunions between young children and their mothers, spouses who’d just arrived home from business trips, and pilots seeing their coworkers for the first time in days occurred in spurts—smiles of joy expressed on their faces.

And in contrast to that joy, was Y/N and her smile of sadness. 

Though she’d been expecting for this day for weeks, she knew that all the preparation in the world would never be enough to suffice the need that she had for him. The need that she had for Oikawa.

He’d been offered a position on San Juan’s professional team, his dream position as a setter for the big leagues, which meant that the move was inevitable. It meant that he’d be thousands of miles away from the love of his life for an unprecedented period of time.

The conversation hadn’t been easy, having to determine if they should carry on with their wedding plans or say their uncertain goodbyes. Countless tears had been shed, tears that had ultimately decided to part—tears that were still dripping down Y/N’s chin.

Her lip quivered, watching as Oikawa stopped dead in his tracks, staring up at the screen that flashed his flight number. He let go of the handle he’d been holding, the suitcase nearly falling over before Iwaizumi had a chance to balance it. 

Turning to face his fiancée, waterworks flooded his vision, blurring her features into a beautiful mess. A beautiful mess of rosy cheeks and teary eyes, an oil painting of agony that only he could decipher. 

“I’ll be thinking of you every day.” He said, holding her gaze as she found herself sobbing in his arms. “From the minute I step through those gates to the time I score my first point—I’ll be thinking of you. You’re all that my mind’s ever thought about, anyways.”

Oikawa cradled her head in his hands, peppering butterfly kisses against her nose, memorizing how naturally gorgeous she looked even when she was at her absolute worst. Nothing could change his view on her, the view that she was flawed perfection—his perfectly flawed perfection.

“I love you so much, Tooru.” Y/N cried, noting the little details of his face. How his irises shone gold in reflection to the setting sun. How unseen freckles kissed his skin in all the right places. How his heart was so big, so full of adoration for their relationship. “I know I say it every day, but you were my first love—”

“Well, you were my only love—and you’re always going to be my only love.” 

A pained laugh escaped her mouth as his confession deemed true. It felt like they were going their separate ways, breaking their bond although the both of them knew that this was temporary. That they’d be saying their vows on the very day he’d return.

Her hands cupped his cheeks, wiping away the stray drops that had fallen from his tear ducts. Oikawa grimaced with a tight lipped smile, bringing his own palms up and resting them over hers, feeling the cool metal of her engagement ring.

“This rock had better stay on your finger.” He commanded with a chuckle, trying his best to cement the softness of her skin against his callouses to memory. “Anyone who even thinks to hit on my girl is going to feel the wrath of Oikawa Tooru!”

“It doesn’t matter how many miles are between us,” he continued, surging forward as he captured her lips in his, saying his next few words between shows of love. “You’re my heart, and mine only.”

His kisses were gentle, soft and scarce, in great contrast to the usual tenacity and passion that he held. All the things he’d ever needed to say had been spoken, the only ones left being the promises he’d commit to at the altar. 

With the bright flash of a camera, Oikawa found himself frozen. He stared in awe at Y/N, into her devilish eyes that had finally managed to surprise him in his own game. The power of the moment was in her court, the mementos created by the push of her finger. 

“Just in case I forget.” She whispered, her forehead resting against his. Her nose scrunched in distaste for their soon-to-be goodbye, their soon to be separation. “Even though I’d never forget you, Tooru.”

“I’ll be here—loving you until the second you’re back.”

Oikawa nodded, pressing one last kiss to the top of her head, before pulling away. He took his luggage from Iwaizumi, on the verge of bursting into tears again at the sight of his sorrow gaze. 

The two boys hugged for as long as they possibly could, Oikawa’s hands gripping Iwa’s jacket, to which he responded with a slap on this back with some good natured insults. They had no shame, no concerns about their masculinity or manliness as they held each other in sadness.

Y/N had never seen them so low, always picturing their game faces mixed with determination—a stark difference to the helplessness they expressed amidst the sunsetting rays of the window panes.

“Keep her safe for me, Iwa-chan?” Oikawa requested, gesturing to the lonely girl to his left. “Don’t let her get too down on herself, okay? If I’m not there to answer a text or a phone call—you make sure you’re there for her. You make sure she’ll be alright.”

“I know she can handle herself, but she shouldn’t have to all of the time.” He grasped Iwaizumi’s shoulder, shaking it roughly with his wishes. His best friend was nodding beneath his grip, listening to each one of the setter’s asks. “Our little trio’s going to be two for a bit, not forever, but for a while.”

And with one last kiss and an offering, he was gone—lost to the sea of strangers and luggage, ripped away from his favorite people on a flight to a new country with new opportunities. Oikawa Tooru’s head was always lost in the clouds, flying high with the success of volleyball on his mind. 

But in his heart was Y/N. 

The girl that he’d wanted to marry since the minute he’d seen her laughing in the hallways. Since she’d offered to pass him some balls and cheered for him in the front section of the audience at all of his games. Ever since she’d kissed him for the first time in the back of his parents minivan. 

He lived for her, his heart beat for her—and he was itching to be back in her arms, knowing full well that it’d be months until he’d get to see her in person again. All he could hope for was that his gift would suffice her loneliness in his absence. 

That the photo box he’d been putting together for years would be enough to keep the memory of their love alive in the times when he’d be too distracted by his ambition to pay her any attention. That it’d remind her that he loved her and would climb mountains to prove it.

And he was right. The polaroids did help Y/N reminisce on all of their frozen moments, lost kisses, and happy memories that she’d be unable to maintain while he was thousands of miles away.

Thousands of miles that would disappear on the day he’d return—on the day of their wedding.

“You alright?”

Y/N jumped, dropping the box of photos in her lap at the unexpected sound of Iwaizumi’s deep voice. The polaroids fluttered to the ground, flying like kites in the wind on a sunny day, falling onto the hardwood on their final departure.

Frantically, she bent over to gather the memories, quickly snatching them up as her friend ran over to help her. The vinyl backings felt smooth in her hand, eyes glancing upwards to Iwa, who’d become stuck on a single frame.

It was one of her favorite moments of the three of them, the photo from their high school gym. The look on her and Oikawa’s faces was hysterical, them choosing to poke fun at their best friend with bunny ears and stuck out tongues.

“I still can’t believe he put all this together.” Iwaizumi wondered aloud, shaking his head in disbelief at the craftiness of his former setter. “Who knew Shitty-kawa had it in him?”

Resting her head over his shoulder, Y/N smiled, her face warming at the sight of his bright and glossy smile. She reached forward, closing his hands around the photograph. “You can have it, the picture.” 

His head snapped towards her, profusely rejecting her offer, knowing full well that that gift was meant to be hers and hers alone. “I couldn’t, really. He made this for you, I wouldn’t want to make it any less special.”

Y/N laughed, rolling her eyes whilst straightening her posture. She stood, towering over the man still kneeling on the ground and offered him a hand. “It’s okay, Hajime. I have plenty—and that memory isn’t only mine to keep.”

Taking her extension of help, he rose up, wrapping his arms around her in a large hug. The comfort that he surrounded her with was enough to bring her to tears, knowing that he’d only come in the room to tell her that it was time. That it was time for him to walk her down that flower-filled aisle. 

“You look amazing, Y/N. You really do.” Iwaizumi whispered, complimenting the dress she and her mother had selected for the momentous occasion. He raised his arm in the air, spinning her in a circle, admiring how the stunning fabric twirled around her.

She smiled, genuine gratitude filling her beam as she reflected on the comment her beloved fiancé had made about the outfit she’d been meaning to share with him. How he’d boasted about his own appearance, joking that he’d steal the show.

“Yeah, you’ll look beautiful.” He’d told her over the phone during a late night video call while she’d been rambling about choosing a dress, slowly falling asleep to the sound of his voice. “But let’s be honest, I’m impossible to outshine. Sorry, love.”

Over the past year, it’d been impossible to get his voice out of her head. Soft confessions of love, good mornings and goodnights, even arguments played on a loop, on a broken record. 

She’d missed him more than words could tell—and she knew, with how much her heart loved him, that she’d miss him every day. She’d miss him no matter how much distance was between them, whether that was thousands of miles or mere inches.

Taking notice of how her body began to shake, how Y/N’s bones were quivering with nerves and anxiety, Iwaizumi looped her arm around his. “You’ve got this.” He encouraged, knowing that she felt unprepared to present herself in front of all of their friends and family in such a way.

The look in his eyes was confident, secure with closure and acceptance for what the day was about to bring. For what the rest of their lives were about to bring to their little trio. He was ready to take the next step—and he was waiting for Y/N to do the same.

As she took a deep breath, calming her nerves into submission, she nodded gesturing to Iwaizumi to carry on, the two of them walking together out of the room and towards the crowd that awaited them.

The thick scent of camellias lay stagnant in the air, the deep red flowers surrounding the venue, strategically placed on vines and potted plants. All done by professional florists and media that had insisted that the day be perfect for a celebrity such as Oikawa.

Handing her off on her own, Iwaizumi pressed a gentle kiss to the top of her hands, wishing her luck and reassuring her that everything would turn out okay. Reassuring her that there was no need to be afraid of the future.

Her future, the new reality that was beginning at this very second. The reality that had begun at the first sighting of tears in the audience, the view of Takeru crying into his mother’s shoulder, of Makki and Mattsun silently encouraging her to go on.

“Thank you, all of you, for coming today.” Y/N began, making eye contact with each and every personality, proud of the amount of people that had shown up. Proud of the amount of people that cared enough to be there. “I know you’d all been planning on sitting in those seats since we’d announced our engagement—but really, thank you for saving the date.”

Reaching her hands out to her side, waiting to come into contact with the warmth of his palms, the loving grip that he always seemed to hold—she felt nothing but the smooth mahogany of an empty casket.

“I’m only sorry that our wedding had to become a funeral.”

She sighed, neck craned down to smooth the sparse wrinkles of her dark dress, only to look up and be welcomed by a sea of black—a sea of sorrow. An ocean that would never let her ride her final wave.

“Tooru was so excited to see all of you. He told me that every night, whether it was through a quick text message or one of our phone calls—he always talked about this day, and how lucky he was to have loved ones that cared so much.”

“He was so excited that he just couldn’t wait, he couldn’t wait the extra week and took that early flight. Took his own private jet with his crew so that he could surprise all of us, see the looks on our faces as he pulled another one of his stunts.”

A sob began to form at the tip of her tongue, a void of agony building in her stomach. Waiting to be let out in a massive scream or breakdown—but Y/N continued, fighting back her own sadness to be strong for the others. To be their rock, just as Oikawa had always been hers.

“But,” her eyes were watering, voice cracking through her next choice of words. The memory of the moment being overpowering amidst her perseverance. “There was something wrong with the engine. There was something wrong, so wrong, that—well we all know what happened.”

“His head was too lost in the clouds.”

Giving up on her composure, Y/N wrapped her arms around her shaking body, rubbing her shoulders just as he used to whenever she’d feel alone or completely broken. However, she was truly and utterly broken this time—never to be fixed by his loving grasp.

“When Hajime called me, told me what’d happened. When he told me about the phone call, and how’d he’d tried to reach me but for some stupid reason I hadn’t picked up,” Y/N gulped, breathing heavily with sorrow, “I’d never hated myself more.”

“‘Tell her I’m sorry, that I’m sorry that I kept my promise.’ That’s what Tooru had told him while the plane had been spiraling. ‘I’m sorry that I kept the promise that I’d love her ‘till the day I’d die.’”

There wasn’t a single dry face in the audience, everyone dripping with sadness, faces blue with contagious crying as Y/N made her final statement. Her final public farewell to the love of her life. The love of her life that was no more.

“But I’m going to keep my promise and live every day for him. Keep him in our lives as best I can, as often as I can until I’ve lived life long enough to be with him myself.”

A breath of relief overcame her as the audience dispersed, satisfied with her eulogy, slowly walking around the room to admire the makeshift photo boards and flowers that Oikawa’s fans and former classmates had sent. 

All alone, Y/N spun to face his casket, the casket that held nothing but a single photograph of him—there being no physical remnants to bury. It was a perfect burial for a king, her perfect king of the court. 

The burial was one that Mattsun had blessed them with, already having been in the funeral home career. There was no one else that she would’ve trusted with Oikawa, no one else that she would’ve let come near his memorial. 

As her palms ran over the varnished surface of the coffin, eyes closed in an attempt to shut out the pain. She whispered her actual promise, the one she’d told him so many times through the screens of their phones. 

“You’re my heart, Tooru—and I’d never forget my heart, no matter how far away you may be.”

And unbeknownst to her, he wasn’t far. He wasn’t far at all—as he was right beside her, his spirit always being by her side through the times she’d try to shut his memory out and pretend that he hadn’t ever existed. There wasn’t a world in which Oikawa would let her be alone to her sadness.

Watching as she cried, wishing that he could wipe away her tears, tell her how much he loves her, give her a longing kiss on the lips—all he could do was stand there and dream of the life they could’ve had. 

The life in which she’d be able to see how handsome he looked in the wedding suit he and Iwaizumi had picked out together. The life where she’d laugh and flush red at his snarky comments and cocky attitude. The life where he wasn’t buried under a trillion tons of ocean water.

But that life would never become a reality. It would never come true as he couldn’t stay with her, not even as a spirit. He needed to find his peace, come to terms with how her life would be from that day on—void of their love.

“Don’t cry, beautiful.” Oikawa cried, biting his lip to choke back his own sobs—wanting, more than anything, to brush away her tears. He took one last look at her, one last look to cement the memory of her face.

It was as if she were a photograph, his own keepsake to reminisce and recall wherever he would end up. A final gift, one being given to himself, while he accepted his inevitable fate. 

“I’d hate to miss your smile.”

© aitarose.tumblr 2021. do not copy or claim my writing, works, themes, copy and paste my words, or headers as your own

[lost-khione]

Until We Meet Again

TW: death

I finally managed to finish writing my first fanfic!! 😁

Only ARR made me write a fanfic arggg

This one is in Gaku’s POV and set in the future where Futaba is dead already. I hope I did Yura’s lines right...

I hope you guys tell me how you like it if you read it. 👉👈

Read under the cut. Enjoy~

Every morning, I have this habit of checking my neck. I wake up earlier than Brother so I can do this. I always check my contract emblem - the proof that we are always connected.

"Gaku, would thou also care to look at my neck?" Brother asks as he studies me with a teasing glint in his eyes.

"No. I only need to check mine," I reply as I hurry to fix my clothes.

"You are aware that the bell wands are safely tucked on the bookshelf, right?"

"Yes.”

My eyes automatically flit to the place on the bookshelf where we keep the bell wands with the journal that Futaba and I kept when she was alive.

There was another reason why I woke up early today. I wasn’t really able to sleep much last night because the day today is a special one.

“Gaku,” Brother’s voice breaks my reverie.

I turn to him and his eyes no longer have the teasing glint earlier which is now replaced with a serious look.

He asks, “How many years hath it been since then?”

Instead of saying the words outright, he simply poses this question. So I answer him, “120,” as I look at him blankly not quite seeing him but seeing her from my memories instead.

“Gaku,” Brother calls me again before I get lost completely in my own memories.

He carefully stands up and tugs at my hand.

“Let’s go,” he says while flashing me a sympathetic smile.

I try to smile at him as well because I know looking gloomy won’t bring her back and I know it will just make her sad.

After all these years, I tried to remember how I took her death on our first lives together. But I guess the fact that I took our relationship to the next level on our second life together made all the difference this time. I still can’t help the sadness that’s gnawing at my heart. Lost in my own thoughts, my feet continue to move on their own as Brother leads the way.

We get out of the shrine and find ourselves in front of her grave. Her father allowed us to bury her here. He said back then, “I entrust my daughter to you. I know that she will also rest peacfully knowing she’s buried here.” He was truly a wonderful person.

I look at her grave and just sat in front of it while feeling the gentle breeze. I didn’t notice when Brother left but he just got back with a watering can in hand and his flute on the other.

“We wouldn’t want them to wilt,” he says as he puts his flute down beside me.

He diligently waters the forget-me-nots that we planted there. Once that’s taken care of, he picks up his flute and starts playing a nostalgic song.

So on this day, I let my memories wander and think of her.

I can still remember our final moments together clearly.

She had been living with us at the shrine after catching an incurable disease which was rampant at the Capital. She got permission from her father to spend her final moments with me while getting some treatment from Brother; although, Brother can only ease her suffering since there is no known cure yet.

Brother and I picked her up from their house to help her with her things. She kept on insisting that she can walk but I didn’t let her because I know she was feeling weak. I managed to make her agree to be piggybacked while Brother carried her belongings.

When we got to the shrine, Brother left to give us some space saying that he’ll play with his furry friends. He said, “Gaku, my friends are waiting for me. My Lady, I do hope thou feel at ease here and enjoy the mountain breeze.”

She smiled at Brother and replied, “Thank you for letting me stay here, Yura.”

“Anything for thee my Lady. I shalt take my leave,” and he left after that exchange looking to me briefly to which I responded with a slight nod.

She got her things from Brother and took out a thick leather bound notebook.

I curiously asked, “What do you keep in there? Notes about Divine Arts?”

She smiled happily and replied, “No, silly. Try to guess again.”

I thought out loud, “I’m pretty sure you won’t bring a school notebook.” After giving it some thought, I tried to guess again, “Then, is it empty?”

“You really think my head is only either filled with Divine Arts or none at all, huh?” She looked down looking a bit dejected.

“I really can’t think of anything else that you’d write about and bring with you all the way out here,” I admitted to her.

She didn’t look dejected for long. I think she just feigned dejection at my words.

“Well, it can’t be helped. I’ll let you see what’s inside.”

With that, she handed me the notebook. When I looked at it closely, I saw that it’s not brand new and already used. I noticed that the edges of some pages had some creases that were smoothed out. When I opened it, I was surprised at the words on the first page. It says: Memories with Gaku

I felt my eyes go wide in surprise and I heard Futaba let out a small laugh.

“Was it that surprising?”

I looked at her and said, “I just didn’t expect this. Since when have you been keeping this?”

“I got it since you took me on a date and gave me forget-me-nots. I know that you are well aware that I am a different person from who I was a thousand years ago. And I also understand that you only keep bringing up our past because they hold so much memory for you and my past self. So I decided to keep a journal where I wrote about our treasured memories so that in the future, you will have something to remember me by. At the same time, when we meet again in my next life, you can show me this journal and tell me about our previous lives.”

I felt really touched with how much thought she put into this. I gingerly flipped the pages and found myself asking, “Why did you only show me this now?”

“Well, I wanted to surprise you with it, but I’m not sure when. I thought that I’d show it to you once I fill up this one notebook before I start a new one but then, here we are and it’s not even filled completely. There’s still about one-fourth left to fill. Now, I have decided that both of us will fill the rest of the notebook.

She didn’t need to finish her sentence for me to understand what she meant. She meant to say that she hopes to fill it until the end of her days.

I felt tears prick behind my eyes. Not wanting her to see me shed some tears, I hugged her frail form tightly so as to reassure myself that she was still with me. I felt her arms on my back as well. She rubbed my back soothingly like she understood what I was feeling. She probably did.

After a while, she spoke softly, “I promise I'll be reborn again and this time, I'll be the one to find you.” After a moment, she added, “I won’t forget you”

Her bold proclamation made me smile. I replied frankly, “Don't make promises you can't keep. Don't worry, I'll love you no matter who you might be in your next life.”

She pulled back from me and looked into my eyes. Her reply came almost instantly in a forceful tone, “No, I'll definitely remember. I swear. This is my wish. Before she died, my past self fervently wished to be reborn again and see all of you. I believe that's what enabled all of us again to meet in this era. But I guess I'll be a little selfish this time and wish to remember you when I get reincarnated. And maybe, I can add that I get to be reborn faster this time so you won't have to wait too long.”

She says resolutely that brooks no arguments while gripping my hands.

I could only look at her with loving eyes. And hope that her wish may actually be granted by the powers beyond.

“You know that I have waited for you a thousand years before already, right? I can handle another thousand years if that's what it takes.”

“And here I am wanting to see you as soon as possible but I guess it's only me.”

She was so cute when she pouts so instead of talking back, I just kissed her.

Despite what I said about being able to handle waiting a thousand more years, I continue to count each day and year that passes by.

I’ve kept my promise to you so I am hoping against hope that you actually kept your promise. My mind continues to unconsciously wander through our memories and now I’m remembering about my promise to her. She didn’t want me to promise that I’d find her since she said she’s the one who will find me in her next life. But instead, she wanted me to promise her something. She made me promise to keep a journal and write about myself as I wait for her so that she can read all about it when she’s back. It’s very like her and remembering that put a little smile on my lips.

I continue to sit there with my eyes closed as Brother continues to play his flute. I imagine her smiling in front of me and let my thoughts come out in a whisper, “I know I told you I can wait another thousand years for you. But I still can’t help but actually hope you’ll come back to me sooner this time just like you promised.”

I take a deep breath trying to get a whiff of the scent of the forget-me-nots in bloom even though I know they give off little scent during the day just like how I’m trying to desperately find a clue if she’s already reincarnated somewhere.

I open my eyes resolutely and fixed my gaze on her tombstone. I speak as if talking to her grave means that she can hear me, just like how I always do every year, “I hope your future self is ready to fall in love with me again because I’ll make sure that she does.”

I smile confidently and lift my head to look up at the sky just as dawn is breaking signaling the start of another day. I stand up to retrieve my hand drum and play alongside Brother with a burning hope in my heart that her wish was heard by the powers beyond.

[boldlysoft]

hourglass ink - writing of time and change

Sometimes I still feel like I did when they taught us grammar in school. It seemed incredibly confusing to have at least 3 different ways to express something that lies in the past or will be happening in the future. I´m sure I still get the grammar wrong all the time. Because instead of learning the rules I just did what felt right. And I never stopped. 

I do it every day. Doing what feels right. And when I think about time I think about the magic of it all, not the grammar.  

While I can’t lay down every single string of time that has been on my mind for you (a bit too personal and would take an eternity), I can invite you to look into some of the connections I have made for myself. 

It might not make much sense, but I love the challenge of trying to form my narrative around such a complex topic. 

So to begin somewhere, I want to tell you about the pictures in my camera roll that I go back to. I look at them regularly. Whenever I miss the time that passed. 

I have pictures from abroad, which I look at now, missing people and pictures from the summer before, which I looked at while I was gone, missing home.

In them I see friends, family, love and strangers. And myself. 

Self-centered, as I may be by saying this: It is always the strangest to look at myself in pictures. Because when I see my friends a year ago, I see their old haircut, maybe how their face changed a little since then or if they got new glasses. But they look familiar. I rarely do. 

And I spoke to one of my friends about this phenomenon, actually. About how you might see yourself and think of what went through your head at the time, how you felt and what events were going on. You don’t see your facial structure or your own experimental haircut…. You see your old self. 

And as I go back to look at my old self I see myself connected to a different place, speaking a different language, being a younger me, but still very intensely recognize this version of me.

Now, I find, my heart is not just in one place anymore. I lived so fully and so happily in another place that I couldn’t disagree with anyone saying I left a piece of me behind. 

I guess I try to do so with everything I do, and everyone I meet. To give something that stays, if only in memories that’ll fade.

I can only be true to you and myself if I pour out my love wherever I go and to whoever I’m with. 

Only then a space opens, for you to do the same so I can carry a piece of you with me. 

If you love me like I love you, we will be connected in time. If only for a passing moment. That’s one thing I truly love about time. Windows of opportunity. 

–

I recently gave my heart to someone for the first time, fully and with little fear. 

Falling and being in love has definitely changed how I feel about time as well. 

All that stuff about someone being able to stop the time when they look at you? Cringe but true. 

Time has proven to be my lucky star since I can think of it. And it is an intangible mess that I wouldn’t dare to cross or doubt. It is not in my hands nor is the future predictable. When I lay tarot cards they never show the unknown, but they enable you to ask yourself the right questions. And questions I’ll endlessly have until my time is over and I’ll move on to whatever death is. 

Do it all again? Or end?

I believe that if you’ve ever gone through depression or you’re dealing with anxiety you might understand what it means to consciously debate the concept of time with yourself. You wake up: too late, too early. You try to get out of bed and deal with life. The pressure of tomorrow and the remaining pull of Yesterdays. 

Time flowing like a river. And you’re not sure if you’re on a boat, if you can even swim and what course you’ll take, not even to mention the danger of the current pulling you under. 

Maybe we are all just living in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s world after all and his iconic last sentence in the Gatsby is supposed to make more sense to me than it evidently does: 

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The past always seemed more tangible than the future to me. But what a lose idea of giving value to memories. 

Memories fading away is scary to most. I guess, partly, it is what adolescence is about: making time `worthwhile´ and making a living, making memories that you’re supposed to store and thrive off of for the remainder of your fully adult life. Maybe that’s why fading memories, or not experiencing the “big” ones feels like missing out and becomes scary to us (I am referring to societal standards). Also because memories are often so deeply connected to loved ones and no time is certainly given, we begin to view the “making memories” thing differently. 

But then again, contrary to that I have found that the important ones will burn themselves into your brain, heart or soul – locate it wherever you want – and you’ll carry them with you in your core. 

It seems to become a trend on social media right now to discuss “core-memories” and how they consequently affect your life or your personal development. It’s a really fun topic. 

I mean, ask yourself: is the fading of memories really that bad? Or are our brains just wired to kick out what we won’t need, moving on in this stream of time that theoretically never ends and only, depending on what you believe, has one purpose for you in store?

I, myself, think of my own time as something constantly moving. Things are happening to me but I enable them. I manifest, I receive. I am one lucky son of a bitch. 

I believe my life has intersections, nodal points (for God´s sake- the German word is Knotenpunkt and I don’t know how to translate it)…and they are not necessarily fixed in time.. but they come up. I trust in myself and in … the UNIVERSE… for these junctions and cross-over moments in my life. 

They will teach me the most valuable lessons and open the greatest doors for me. 

–

One door was the one to my heart. Opened up just a crack, for me to peek out but close again really fast once I thought danger was near. Now I feel like I’m standing wide legged in the door, flexing my (nonexistent) muscles and letting through whoever I please. Feeling so confident in who I let in and who I love is pretty amazing. But I’m sure there will be moments where I forget to stand in the wide open door, protective as fuck, and instead just let in whoever wants to come and see what happens. Because this is just a metaphor and I cannot really say I fully know what is happening when we discuss matters of the heart. Because one valuable lesson that comes with this is that even the “protective little me” in the wide open door to my heart is blind. 

All of it is blind. 

It’s why it’s so hard to find words for it a lot of the time. 

God, I am a writer but I am at such a loss for words, when I want to say: LOVE. 

Because in every crease of life I find it but never with my eyes. 

And if I were to only write what I see it wouldn’t be much. Thankfully, I never run out of sexy metaphors to use and describe what I feel rather than just trusting one sense. 

–

If you follow me on instagram and you care for some reason, you may have been able to notice how I post rarely but if I do it’s a song in my story. I would apologize for not being a vibrant content creator and posting whatever shit I find interesting, but to be really honest: I just don’t care that much about my online presence and persona. 

I love writing as a medium because the frame of time is very different from the pace of input we are used to online. These days (and I do really sound like my grandpa here) everything is fast, faster and the fastest. I can scroll on TikTok the entire day and stimulate my brain with so much stuff from random people and I love it. I really enjoy it. 

But yeah, when I have to picture my own self in that landscape of modern day creation, I fear I am simply not that fast nor faster than anyone else. 

I am as slow as a snail. 

Writing is my passion but I do it slowly (and to stay within my snail comparison – maybe slimy? Like I want it to stick with you!) Words are so inherently powerful and I want to craft and tinker with them until they feel just right to me. And even that will only be a momentary tool of expression that might feel outdated minutes after I press the upload button. So you see how time really is the bright red string that webs through my daily life. 

It’s why I only ever post music to my stories. 

While I don’t think I have the gift of being able to musically express myself, the genius of others that can, is something that blows my mind daily. I find lyrics to be the most important thing to me, because I really love words in every form of art but there is much more to music than that. 

That is why I have curated a little playlist, which I’ll use as a means of connecting plot points in my own life over the past year. You can find it below this post. 

And funny enough the playlist has turned out to be a circle. You can hear it from top to bottom and or in reverse and all the lyrics, the sound and the titles of the tracks will make sense (in my opinion). 

The first and the last track are both titled “Time”. But their perceptions of it are opposites. Jack Garratt sings of time being “on your side” while Mimi Bay calls it her only “enemy”. I find both sides to be accurate. 

Further, the playlist goes into my personal journey towards love. I found deep, soft voices always more resonant when the lyrics speak of love that never subsides. I realized that distance doesn´t tear you apart but can bring you closer and I learned that I still have to “throw the fear” in many ways, which I am still uncovering. But after all, loving the right people will always be worth something. 

And last summer, when the heat of the day still simmered on asphalt, I used to listen to Frank Ocean and similar artists a lot. The layered lyrics and interchanging sound along with the rhythm encapture the memory of a summer for me, in which I felt a little lost but knew big things were ahead. 

In many regards I connect music to the seasons. And so my little collection of songs that I remember listening to periodically seems to take me through the spring, summer, fall and winter of last year up to today, where they all ring true and resonate as a full circle moment with what I am writing and thinking about right now. 

–

Yesterday, I got a tattoo. 

It turned out really well. And it encapsulates everything I just spoke of and more. 

When people ask me if my tattoos have any meaning I always have to quickly pick one answer. Because it takes some time if you actually wanted to know the layers and even then I’m not done because my body is changing, going through time, I will add more and find other meanings over time. 

I view being tattooed as my own sphere of communicating with myself over the physicality of my body. My body isn’t permanent but my tattoos are. I am in this vessel only this once. And I can damn well curate and decorate it however I want. Only it is more to me. 

I admire everyone who gets tattoos because they look cool. Because hell yeah, most of the time they do (I have my own taste and I am absolutely judging tattoos on others, just like I am being judged for mine). So how they look is one thing. But I also once read how the symbolism you permanently etch into your skin opens up another level of communication: one with yourself and the world around you, that perceives tattooed people with either understanding or stereotypical judgement. Whenever I do get a new tattoo I am aware of both, or I try to be.

Now, my new tattoo is an hourglass. I thinks it’s absolutely beautiful. (peep the instagram to see it)

When I was asked about why I was getting it I mostly replied: “Its my memento mori tattoo”. And I stand by that. It definitely has to do with my wondrous discovery and ongoing rediscovery of the conception of a life-time. 

When I told my mom about getting tattooed she was supportive, because she is the loveliest mother, and she just wanted to know if it meant something to me. I promised that it wasn’t just a phase and that I’d always put in as much thought as I could, so I wouldn’t come to regret my choices. But maybe it is just a phase, mom. Maybe some day I’ll turn the hourglass, change my mind and realize all of the ink on my body was a horrible mistake. But then I’d have to live with that and it would lead me to another point in my life. Wouldn’t that in itself prove my idea of time again? And make my tattoo meaningful even if I stopped liking it? Wouldn’t time always be there, just like my tattoo??

I like the dramatics of picturing sand running out. Some day my time will be over. But how funny is that I have an hourglass that´ll never chance, where the sand CANNOT run out, on my skin until the day I die? And beyond that? My lifeless body will be burned to ashes and only then the symbol of frozen time will disappear. My time will have ended and my hourglass becomes this hilarious pun on my own life. I only just thought of that. HA! 

And that is exactly what I mean… All this writing has again let me to discover another layer to my already double-meaning tattoo. And I’m having such a fun time. 

Nothing in life is endless and there is no static in time. 

Another thing I almost wanted to add to my tattoo but to me is entailed in it, is a line from my favorite show. Phoebe Waller-Bridges “Fleabag” is so wonderfully scripted and funny, that I can recommend it to you if the mixture of grief, love and sarcasm turns you on. So without any spoilers I want to quote the last line from the second season: “It’ll pass.” Seeing that scene was a pivotal moment for me in understanding, that yes, everything will indeed pass. 

My time in another place has passed and though I returned to my former home, time now passes different, as I am different. My body has changed and my hair is shorter but I´m growing it out again. 

But much more than that: feelings that I thought were so strong they’d never change, have passed and will continue to fade along with memories I won´t need in my core. 

Love that seemed great before will grow to be even greater. And my open heart will never be full. I have more love to give still. 

The sky is no limit and neither is time, because she is on my side and my enemy. 

Balance, formed into an hourglass on my skin, gives and you the illusion of understanding at least a fragment of what time could be. 

I have pictures in my camera roll now, where I am without that tattoo. A different person. But the same Me that runs around with my heart open wide, blindly praying for the future to surprise me like it always does. 

I am not afraid of memories or my tattoo fading. I´ll be alright. And if you´re ever struggling or unsure of that: I promise you: You will be alright. Time´s got you.

[starymintss]

Please enjoy an essay on why mitsukou has so much fucking potential and why they’re great together

by Elena~

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a connection like the one that mitsukou shares. This ship literally has true canon potential. I have hope and believe that we may be victorious in mitsukou becoming canon- I mean god dammit guys they are “SEMI CANON”-

kounene obviously won’t be endgame. In Houkago Shounen Hanako Kun (the spin-off series) they played a game in which the person who pulled a king card was able to get to command a person that was playing the game to do something no matter what. When Kou pulled his card- he literally decided he wanted his brother Teru who was there and Nene to have a romantic connection (hence- him saying and I fucking quote, “This will make senpai happy!”) He could’ve done it to his own benefit- to maybe earn a kiss or do something of his own benefit. But he didn’t, instead choosing to make his senpai happy.

Besides Hananene is basically canon already like what the fuck

As for Mitsuba he’s a gay coded character and hasn’t denied the guys aren’t his type. Some people who deem Mitsuba straight might use the scene where he tells Kou “Is this a love confession? Sorry but lame earrings aren’t really my style.” That still does not confirm that Mitsuba doesn’t swing that way. A really great piece of evidence is the bonus comics at the start and end of a manga- one titled, “Tell Me, Mitsuba Kun,” in which Kou asks if he ever had a crush on other girls- Mitsuba responding that there are simply no other girls cuter than him. In another bonus comic he says the same thing again when he tells Yokoo and Satou he wants to fall in love. When asked to name some girls he thinks are cute, he asks if it's possible that he was the cutest one of all. On the other hand, Kou has stated that he likes someone with a pretty smile (do I have to explain that) which is a pretty open explanation of his type (not denying or confirming he doesn’t like guys). Obviously as a Mitsukou shipper I can point out different actions that I’ll admit looks pretty gay.

It’s not the fact that it’s very common in manga like this that there’s the straight couple and then the other two people in the group are automatically paired together- they are so much more than that. They have a deep connection, and both Kou and Mitsuba are somewhat aware of that themselves. Mitsuba is willing to protect Kou from harm- he’s willing to stop him from getting himself hurt for others because Mitsuba cares, and he knows that he’s too reckless and caring and fearless for others in a way that isn’t healthy?

Kou likes to be everything for everyone and the reader can see in chapter 64 that Mitsuba really did try to talk to him about the behavior. Yes it’s weird to see Mitsuba actually show true concern to people--because it’s his character to be a jerk and an asshole, but that doesn’t mean Mitsuba is incapable of not having true genuine feelings for people he seems as his friends.

Obviously, Mitsuba trying to talk to Kou didn’t happen due to other events that occurred. But I think a lot of people agree that the moment would’ve been so beautifully written and truly played an extremely important part in Kou’s character development.

As for Mitsuba, Kou is generally a sweet guy. It’s stated he will give up his life for anyone, it was what he was taught growing up as an exorcist and a fighter. Those words do not fail his actions, and anyone can see Kou will die for literally anything which is really messed up. He’s 14 for fucks sake.

Someone against Mitsukou could use that as an argument but we see here in the manga that there’s simply something different about this said connection. Kou is first introduced to Mitsuba in chapter 30 something, and he remembers who he is after Yokoo tells him--what happened to Mitsuba that was ultimately the end of his life. Mitsuba does again by his rumor being changed, and being stabbed by Hanako- but it’s the fact he cries and loses sleep and just cannot let him go for anything that moves me. May I point out that he actually decided to process the photos even after Mitsubas death? He didn’t have to do that. Not at all. But he did anyways. It’s seen that Kou wants to find a way to help Mitsuba get away from Tsukasa and help him fit in more- he wants to be a friend. (Note: after he’s reintroduced to Mitsuba; this Mitsuba being a pure apparition with no memories.)

Mitsuba is deeply insecure about himself, and feels he doesn’t fit in. He’s lonely, and doesn’t have friends even as a ghost. But Kou is there. He’s there to be by Mitsubas side.

The deep connection the two of them have is strong and that’s especially shown in the picture perfect arc. At the beginning Kou first sees Mitsuba as a human and obviously it’s freaking him out because-he’s a ghost you know. But once him and Nene meet Shijima Mei, and are told they must kill Hanako (Amane) and Mitsuba, it’s disturbing to them. At this point in the series literally everyone know Hanako and Yashiro share a connection as lovers. I mean- its the couple that the series revolves around. But Kou is deeply disturbed because he doesn’t want to kill Mitsuba. Yet- Mei also reassured them that things will be alright since after all this is a fake world and there’s no need for hesitation. But it’s still affecting Kou and he’s carrying this information on his back as he learns beside Mitsuba in school and has fun with him while cleaning the pool. At night, when the two of them are walking on the school building and watching the stars from the window, Kou confronts Mitsuba about this (note: by now Kou knows that Mitsuba knows). Mitsuba goes on to reveal his true form, and uses his powers to show Kou the past. He tells him about how he learns about his past self. And he states to just feel so… “envious”

Mitsuba grows angry with Kou- because he can see how he’s looking at the true Mitsuba with such a gaze the fake Mitsuba knows he won’t ever get.

Things lead to one another and he smashes the window in fury. (“It’s that Mitsuba you want, right?!” And I dare you to tell me that doesn’t sound like a fucking quote from a bittersweet romance novel.)

Kou insists on getting Mitsuba out of there. And can I please just point out that Mitsuba says: “What are you doing?!” He asks Kou if this isn’t what he wanted- if this isnt the life they want to live from here on out where they can be happy together along with their friends. This reminds me of a direct parallel to Hananene, in which Hanako is confused as to why Nene wouldn’t want to stay here, and Nene tells him that this isn’t what she wants. Kou says the same thing to Mitsuba.

Kou drags out embedded feelings Mitsuba has as they fight, and he says quotes that are really important to their development. Things such as:

“But… who else is there?! Who else could grant my wish?! Even you, Minamoto- Kun!”

“You see… even you don’t care about me. It’s that “Mitsuba,” isn’t it?! I don't even MATTER!!”

“I’m Mitsuba’s fake, but let’s just call it real! This is a world where the “Mitsuba” you were unable to save can live happily! That’s good, isn’t it?”

“Even if it’s only in this world, be my friend, and stay by my side… I’m just thinking scary things. Over there, I’ll be jealous.”

I think the Picture Perfect arc really shows how desperate Mitsuba is to have friends- to fit in with everyone else and to just feel like he belongs and matters. Kou tries to tell him that isn’t true... he’s willing to do everything to let him know that he is so much more than what he deems himself as. He’s so much more than a “fake” of what used to be his original friend, there's so much more to do than wish wishes and hope things will just go the way you want things to go. There’s a better way than to look to evil to bend and defy the laws of existing.

There’s the famous quote Kou says- the “How about I die too. So that we can be together forever.” And how he decided right there this this fake Mitsuba- this apparition who very much will never become human- is worthy. He’s worthy of his life; this is more than the whole “I will die for every life” because Mitsuba is dead- he’s immortal as a ghost. But a human like him... in Mitsubas words someone who will never understand something as ugly and as horrifying as a apparition born from a real persons soul and lesser about to disappear spirits- Kou will give his life up just to know the hell he goes through. Even if it’s just a glimpse- even if it’s just for a second Kou will do anything to just fulfill Mitsubas wish for him to stay by his side. He will do anything for Mitsuba.

I think writing this out also makes me realize they both have their walls up. Kou has his walls up to try and hide his true feelings- his deepest fears and insecurities- feeling as if he isn’t good enough. Mitsuba has his walls up to do the same. He portrays himself as a guy that he deems will get him friends. He hides the ugliness in himself- hides the fact he’s a total fake; doesn’t belong anywhere and his deepest insecurities.

But the two of them together help each other in such a way that it’s unable to truly analyze every single moment they share together.

They help each other but teach the other to bring their walls down. That it’s okay to talk about your feelings and that you don’t have to be everything for everyone. That you don’t have to give up everything you have living- your health and your literal life- for someone. That it’s okay to feel like you don’t fit in. It’s okay to feel like there’s just no other choice of getting what you want and therefore doing the wrong things. That people will love you just for you; what happened in the past put aside.

Mitsuba and Kou are in love.

The end. 💖

[faebriel]

ok ok I'm insane and couldn't pick one so have two (no need to answer both if you don't want to)

“You talk to him.” Not kindly, but he does.

“I’m used to him,” he shoots back. “I’m the only person who is.”

That makes Niki feel something, some uncomfortable tug in her chest. She mentally kicks herself. It’s not jealousy, she reminds herself, because despite the near-cliff jumping and the long nights without food and the nuclear fallout that has punctuated her last few months, being jealous of Tommy would be the least reasonable thing she’s allowed herself to be, maybe ever.

“You don’t believe me,” Tommy says flatly. “You never - eugh.” He cuts himself off with another ragged sigh, running a hand down his face. “Look, Niki, it’s - we were all together in Pogtopia, right? But I was there first. With him. And you didn’t see the start of it, it was horrible, and I’m glad no one else saw the beginning of it either but it was still just so shit and he kept saying all these terrible things about Tubbo and Fundy and you and,” he takes a shaky breath, “then, when I died, I saw him.”

Her breath catches in her throat.

Well, the voice in the back of her head whistles. If you were still wondering about all this afterlife bullshit, if you want to know where you’re going after your third life, here you go.

and

“You didn’t even - this isn’t about L’Manberg, Wilbur!” Niki shouts.

And then he stops, breathing hard, and he looks at Niki the same way he does whenever her voice is being drowned out in a crowd - the way he does when he wants to hear her, when he wants to know what she has to say.

“What else is there?” he asks.

Niki freezes. Stock still, unable to move, unable to breathe, ice threading its way through her gut, her chest, her shoulders, chilled down to the bone. With slow-dawning horror, she can feel hot tears welling up behind her eyes, sitting in her throat, threatening to spill over into a sob. She swallows - to keep her cool, to stay calm, to keep it together -

And then, something in her chest just snaps.

“You said you’d come back for me!” she cries, and her voice hitches on the lump of tears at the back of her throat and god, she sounds absolutely pathetic. Wilbur’s face softens immediately, which somehow just makes her feel even worse. “In Manberg. When Schlatt put me in prison, and you and Tommy were in Pogtopia, you said you’d break me out when it was safe. I waited for weeks , Wilbur. It was… it was horrible.”

“Niki…” a kaleidoscope of emotions flicker across his face, and he seems unsure which to settle on. “We got you out though, right? After the festival.”

“You looked for the button first,” she says quietly, and he stills.

Her sniffling sounds embarrassingly loud against the quiet background of night.

thank you sm!!! i’m gonna put these under the cut because they got a little long sorry (tw for discussion of suicidal ideation)

to preface: tommy is kind of the accidental but incredibly necessary invisible support beam for niki and wilbur’s making amends in bitter. niki cannot accept wilbur’s actions and apology without first acknowledging her own actions and making steps towards an apology, because otherwise it kind of falls flat? in that ending scene niki finally gets what wilbur is feeling and wilbur finally gets that someone else knows how he feels (it’s not perfect 100% yet, but…. that’ll get explored later)

onto the actual snippet! “tommy talks to wilbur - not kindly, but he does” was very important to me! tommy has stuck by wilbur ever since pogtopia, but the tragedy is that he is not equipped to deal with wilbur’s issues, and it shows. wilbur’s first stream after revival depicts this really clearly, where tommy tails wilbur around the whole time but insults him, is still stuck on calling him the villain, physically fights him at some point, etc. on one hand this isn’t healthy but on the other hand tommy is actually around, which is more than can be said for basically any other ally wilbur has had on the dsmp, maybe excluding his dad, who literally killed him lmfao.

this whole issue is exacerbated by the fact that tommy believes that he is the only person who properly understands wilbur, the only person who gets what happened to him, and feels like wilbur is generally his burden to bear. he failed to stop wilbur from both 1. hurting other people and 2. killing himself after the pogtopia-manberg war - and he doesn’t trust wilbur not to do either of those things again, so he’s stuck hovering around wilbur while wilbur is inadvertently setting off his own trauma and feeling responsible for any way he might fuck up and hating that but not wanting to leave. tommy’s memory isn’t perfect and he isn’t a perfect narrator, what he remembers from pogtopia the most were the scariest parts and that’s understandable but it means he’s holding wilbur to the worst expectations of behaviour (and he does so very vocally). the others showed up later, sure, but in tommy’s eyes he’s the only one who saw wilbur’s descent, and by the time they showed up wilbur had already changed irreversably. tommy tries to rationalise this by splitting the ‘different wilburs’ apart from each other in his head (he does this in canon too - there’s one quote from like late 2020 where he says he and tubbo need to keep on going for who wilbur used to be, not who he became, even though they’re,, the same person), and no one challenges that perspective, so he just keeps doing it even though it’s not healthy for him or wilbur.

and then limbo happened and, oh geez, THAT didn’t help jhfaskjjfsa

tommy is on a bit of a knife edge with niki in this fic. niki’s in this state of “ok, he’s annoying whatever, i’m moving on”, but all tommy knows is that she tried to kill him that one time, disappeared off the face of the map, joined a book club with two people who definitely do not like him, and now is just acting weirdly mellow and polite. she is not someone he wants near wilbur bc what the fuck is she gonna do? what is he gonna do? who knows. he’s frustrated that niki doesn’t seem to acknowledge how he’s feeling (especially bc once upon a time she would have been someone he trusted to acknowledge them - they were friends, they fought together) and he’s taking a big step by telling someone about his concerns here, especially bc tommy doesn’t really like talking about them at all. he wouldn’t be saying absolutely anything to niki if he didn’t truly believe she should stay away from wilbur, even if he’s wrong about him. (sometimes i think i write tommy as a little too emotionally mature here but it all goes out the window when wilbur’s brought up. idk if that balances it out)

ok onto niki: this is the first she has actually heard of limbo! she’s only just come around to the fact that resurrection is possible at all. death is kind of a touchy subject for niki both in general and re: wilbur in the fic - she’s coming off of a period in her life where suicidal ideation was, uh, a big thing (whether you want to read that into canon or not is subjective, that’s just the angle i went with in this fic). the sudden existence of a life after death, miserable as it is - and whether she really believes in such a place, when it only exists in tommy and wilbur’s words - that is a lot of information for her to absorb all at once. death is a weird connection point for tommy and niki here, coming right off of the fact that they’ve just acknowledged each other having those problems - tommy, out of, yknow, altruism, would very much like to keep niki out of that place, and niki is quietly reckoning with the fact that that is where she would have sent him. the concept of limbo from the perspective of a character with no experience of it, even secondhand, is so interesting to me like what kind of eldritch location would you feel like you’re living in asghjkl

(also - i gotta be honest the jealousy angle here but mostly when she’s talking later about dream not deserving wilbur’s companionship kinda came out after this post came across my dash while writing. whoops /j)

-

fun fact, this is the very first snippet of bitter that i ever wrote! all the way back in may!! this is like the moment of the fic - it's where the miscommunication that niki and wilbur have been having is shattered entirely - and so sticking the landing was uhhh kinda important to me lol.

wilbur's entire being in this fic is basically consumed by L'Manberg - he equates his self worth to it entirely. in his eyes, everyone (rightfully) hates him because of what he did to L'Manberg, because L'Manberg was corrupted and he himself with it, etc. niki tries to tell herself this, and while it definitely does form part of her issues with him, it was the betrayal that causes her this much pain - that he seemingly brushed her and their friendship off entirely when he supposedly left her for dead in manberg. because here is what we as the audience know: wilbur couldn’t leave niki in trouble when he heard her life was in danger, even when he was trying to find the button (pretty much the only thing he sees himself as having left at this point) and so he returned. here is what it looks like from niki’s perspective: wilbur told her to wait in manberg until it was safe to come to pogtopia, laid the place with TNT, went to blow up the place, and only returned when he couldn’t find the detonator (and then the first thing she saw him do in pogtopia was encourage the pit behaviour but that’s not what we’re talking about asdfgh). that is massive miscommunication and it’s been brewing between them for months - to make a quirky little reference to the title, niki has been carrying that anger with her so long it's gone bitter. it was never just about l’manberg with niki - not that anger, not her and wilbur’s friendship (hence the little flashback earlier in the fic, bc niki’s relationship to anarchism and statehood or statelessness juxtaposed with her friendships with wilbur and eret - she loves l’manberg bc she loves wilbur, but she loves eret too and those national ties don’t undermine that - is Real Interesting to me) - so when wilbur asks what else there could possibly be (because in his mind, what else could she have bothered staying around for?), she just fucking breaks.

“Niki freezes. Stock still, unable to move, unable to breathe, ice threading its way through her gut...with slow-dawning horror, she can feel hot tears welling up behind her eyes” - prose discussion time! heat and cold are two big throughlines in this fic - particularly for niki, cold is what she is. admittedly when i started with it i mostly wanted to subvert hot = angry and cold = dead but i kinda ended up enjoying this take on it for what it is instead of just as a subversion (also i like the idea of revived people running hot, their bodies r working hard to keep em going). she’s holding onto her feelings and refusing to deal with them, she’s frozen over. descriptions of cold are key to niki’s mental state throughout the fic - cold weight on her chest, feelings of frostbite when she and wilbur hug the first time, ice cold water during the dinner scene, waking up in the cold flat, etc. this was an attempt at describing a more visceral feeling of like, when you’re really mad and you can just feel the adrenaline running through your veins. always felt more cold than hot to me. when she starts to cry, the facade she’s been putting on is finally thawing out and cracking the ice she’s buried her feelings under. (also gives an excuse to write warm comforting hugs towards the end /hj). it’s a loss, it’s catharsis, it’s a whole mess.

and ofc this is all news to wilbur and he feels terrible, because as unintentional as it was, he really really hurt her - because the destruction of l’manberg fucking sucked but above all else wilbur hurt the people he loved because they loved him so much and not in spite of it, because they cared about him so deeply and his death was a massive blow to them. this hasn’t even dawned on him, because how could it? he respects deeply niki (lowkey respects her opinion more than his own at this point) so he has to listen, because it’s niki (“and he looks at Niki the same way he does whenever her voice is being drowned out in a crowd - the way he does when he wants to hear her, when he wants to know what she has to say” - because he does), and what she says fucking floors him. in his eyes, he failed her by putting her in danger and then by destroying her home - the idea that she valued him and their friendship so much flies entirely over his head until this moment, and he is forced to re-evaluate the mindset that has motivated him since… basically since pogtopia! the way i write wilbur is like… yes, he’s one of niki’s closest friends and he’s more aware of her insecurities and issues than most (which is why he does always take the time to listen to her, etc) but he does over-idealise her a bit. tbf, i think he does to some extent with everyone (calling tubbo strong on the anniversary stream, for example). also the fact that he really wasn’t around for niki’s lowest moments as a character! he still thinks of her the way she was in l’manberg - confident, steadfast, respected - and this moment shatters that for him as he realises exactly what effect he and his death had on her and everyone else, not just by his actions, but because they loved him and cared for him so deeply.

sorry that this got horrifically long!! and thank you so much for sending snippets in <3333

[yenforfairytales]

Consider - Sam Smith’s song “Diamonds” for Silverusso

Consider me OBSESSED. I hadn't heard this song before, but it's perfect!! Thank you! Silverusso Anthem until further notice lol. Here's a YouTube link!

(x)

I got carried away again...

Have it all

Rip our memories off the wall

All the special things I bought

They mean nothing to me any more

Is that not Terry Silver? He was clearly bored with his rich, executive life in KK3. But he came alive when he started scheming and met Daniel.

(x)

I mean, he started off with his target being Mr. Miyagi but quickly became hyper fixated on Daniel. There was a shift of focus.

I have a feeling that when we see Terry again(hopefully in s4), he'll once again only feel truly alive in his interactions/manipulation with Daniel, after decades of just bland existing. In a parallel to Kreese, who credits Johnny with bringing him back to life.

And with this part:

But to you

They were everything we were

They meant more than every word

Now I know just what you love me for

We could apply this to the fake persona Terry bought to befriend Daniel, how he found Daniel's weakness that way. But the shipper in me, likes to pretend that Terry and Daniel had more interactions after the '85 All Valley. That maybe Terry tried to be involved in Daniel's life somehow, either by trying to make amends or by messing with Daniel further, and Daniel shut that shit down and Terry realized he couldn't get any form of relationship back. Cue Terry ruining Miyagi's Little Trees and Daniel getting a restraining order! Any headcanon or theory fits lol.

I am crossing my fingers that Season 4 provides more insight or flashbacks 👀

It's hard to believe Terry just walked away like nothing after Daniel beat Mike. Like he literally walks offscreen with a shocked expression on his face at the end of the movie. But what about after??

We deserve to know lmao

Anyway

The first verse is Totally Terry.

And the second verse is 100% Daniel:

Shake it off

Shake the fear of feeling lost

Always me that pays the cost

I should never trust so easily

You lied to me

Then left with my heart 'round your chest

Like??? Are you kidding me! Basically, despite Terry completely using Daniel and betraying his trust, a bond was formed. And Terry took a piece of Daniel with him. It haunts Daniel that he cared about someone that never really existed. He has trusts issues to this day, and like he tells his daughter, he lives with the fear every day.

Daniel feels like it was all his fault though. That he brought it on himself. I think when he meets Terry again, they're going to fall into their old habits. Whether Daniel realizes it or not. Terry's going to exploit that deep down Daniel does care about him. Because Daniel will still be a tangle inside of guilt, admiration, and anger.

Although, it would be fun to see Daniel doing a little exploiting of his own. Because I think deep down Terry cares about Daniel as well. I could be reaching, but they're both schemers now and it would be fun to see them play a little cat and mouse. 😘

(x)

The bridge is both of their POV:

Take all the money you want from me

Hope you become what you want to be

Show me how little you care

How little you care, how little you care

You dream of glitter and gold

My heart's already been sold

Show you how little I care

How little I care, how little I care

Possibly both of them pretending not to care. This fits better with their s4 versions. While they try to hurt and outdo the other. These two characters are actually so similar, but that's another discussion.

I still think it'd be fun to see a flashback of Terry offering to pay Daniel's way through college, or the dealership, and an argument breaking out and it ending badly. Johnny has had several flashbacks of his younger self, whether with Sid or Kreese, and if this show continues to follow its theme of balance then we are due some flashbacks with a younger Daniel. 👀

It seems like Seasons 1-3 are Johnny's trauma and possibly Seasons 4-6 will be Daniel's...

And if anyone's wondering why I think Daniel got a restraining order against Silver, it's because Daniel has never seemed afraid that Terry would pop up somewhere. Even after he saw that Kreese was back in Season 2. Like when he went to the Cobra Kai dojo at night and had that little standoff with Kreese, it didn't look like Daniel thought it was a possibility that Terry was in the building or about to pop out and scare him.

Again, I'm probably reaching lol, the answer is probably much more simple in regards to the show and its writers. And anyway, even if there was a restraining order, I'm sure Terry had that removed with his connections almost immediately. And even if he left Daniel alone that doesn't mean he hasn't been keeping tabs on him🤣🤣

(x)

I digress!!! The chorus is bittersweet:

My diamonds leave with you

You're never gonna hear my heart break

Never gonna move in dark ways

Baby, you're so cruel

My diamonds leave with you

Material love won't fool me

When you're not here I can breathe

Think I always knew

My diamonds leave with you

To me it's like, "diamonds" being the superficial go ahead and leave I don't need you, but also "diamonds" being the take my heart with you and all that implies when it's toxic.

I can definitely see this song being used for gifsets and music videos. Especially after we get some prime silverusso scenes once s4 comes out 👀🙏

It really represents both eras. And I can't wait to see how much these characters and their dynamic have changed or stayed the same when they're in the same room again.

Thank you so much! I'm deep in those feelings now