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abarbaricyalp · 8 months ago

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Hi! If you're still doing the Sambucky romance ask: 🚨

You know I love a good 'mission goes awry' prompt. Sometimes Sam loses his clothes in those ones 😊 From this prompt list

This one got away from me. I don't even know what this is. CW: Mild violence, some monster things

🚨 When a mission goes awry

Bucky blinked and the giant lizard he'd been trying to choke out was no longer in his arms.

Oh no, this was not happening again.

He slowly got to his feet, squinting through the fog that was moving like it was alive. It was almost like the atmosphere of rolling around in arid dirt with the lizards, but wet where that had been dry.

"Sam?" he called out cautiously.

He was answered by an animalistic screech that had him covering his ears and turning tail.

He'd been here before. He hadn't liked it.

The multiverse had broken four days ago. Bucky and Sam had had nothing to do with it, thank you very much. They hadn't even known the multiverse was real until a handful of months ago. Bucky was still fucked up over the reality stone. He could not handle a broken multiverse.

Except that now, he had to.

If he'd thought blipping out of existence had been bad, blipping into another Bucky Barnes's existence was much worse. There did not seem to be a version of him that sat on a beautiful front porch at sunset beside Sam and watched the bees tend their garden while eating homemade blueberry pie. It was always some kind of fuckery.

This fuckery was vampires. The fog had kind of suggested it, but he was never going to forget that noise or the claws and teeth that came with it. How come vampire him was always fighting some kind of harpy?

Like he said, he didn't know anything about the multiverse. He didn't know how multiversal travel should work. Over the past four days, it had worked by swapping him and Sam with another Bucky and Sam every time they were in a fight. And Sams and Buckys got into lots of fights! The world-- every world apparently-- constantly needed to be saved. Actually, Bucky should talk to his therapist about that.

"Sam!" he called again as he ran, looking for any space in this dilapidated graveyard to hide. Last time, it had been a dilapidated castle. Much easier to hide in. Especially because he refused to jump into any of the wrenched open caskets in their upturned Graves. "Could really use some help, birdbrain!"

As if on cue, the harpy and another figure plummeted to the ground just a few feet in front of Bucky. It was a clash of talons and feathers--the worst bird fight Bucky had ever seen between New York pigeons escalated by about 100.

The harpy was a grotesque thing, half human, half bird, all demon. The man on top of it was disarmingly. Sam was always beautiful. It was just that vampire-Sam also had some bird mutation, which gave him huge wings, which grew from and encompassed the upper half of his arms and he had these bird eyes in this molten gold color that were uncannily round with the color spreading from edge to edge. When he was on the attack like this, he had a sharp break and talons instead of fingers.

Bucky was still very much into it.

The harpy wrenched itself away with another ear splitting screech and a trailing line of blood from a new wound on its gross scaly bird neck. It screeched one more time for emphasis and took to the sky, off kilter but still powerful.

When Sam turned to him, he was mostly human--or vampire?-- again. His gold eyes narrowed when he found Bucky. "You again," he groaned.

Vampire-Sam didn't like human-Bucky, Bucky had discovered last time he was dumped in this penny dreadful novel come to life.

"Have there been many others?" Bucky asked. "Have you been pulled away much?"

"Yes and yes," Sam answered. "I just got back from a cow farm in the 1900s."

Bucky grimaced. He could not fathom a cowboy version of himself. Cowboy-Sam had to be super hot though. "I think they're called ranches."

The vampire scoffed and waved a razor-nail tipped hand dismissively. "Leave," he ordered. "And bring James back."

Bucky didn't actually know how to leave, but the vampire had some ability to manipulate these crossovers.

Bucky landed in a new environment, which still didn't have giant lizards. "Oh goddammit," he growled and shoved himself to his feet again. "Sam!"

. . .

Sam landed face first in the sand. He pushed himself up and spit out wet sand before turning over onto his back. This was driveline the Gulf, he decided. No white sand beaches here and the ocean beyond was a tumultuous grey-green beneath the brilliant sunset painting the surface of it.

"Buck!" he called into the sky.

A few seconds later, the sounds of someone shuffling through the shallows interrupted the lapping of the waves. Sam looked over and felt his mouth literally drop open. He blinked against the shine of the sunset and watched Bucky come out of the waves, water cascading off of him like a commercial. He shook his shaggy hair out of his face and hiked a surfboard closer to his side as he hit the shore and had to drag it through the wet sand. He was all lithe silhouette and obvious muscle. He was missing his arm, no prosthesis in sight, and he looked like a walking advertisement. Sam's mouth was kind of dry.

He grinned a little at Sam, dropping the board into the sand to wave, and then jogged over. His pleased expression quickly fell though and he dropped to his knees next to Sam with a worried frenzy to his movements.

"Oh my God, are you okay?" he asked.

"Yeah, man, I just tripped," Sam said.

"I would say so, yeah!" Bucky agreed. "Why do you have legs?"

Sam's brain shorted out for a moment. Normally, he had a response for everything, but he'd never been asked why he had legs. "Because I was born with them?" he hazarded.

But his response was lost in a flurry of movement and curses as Bucky got his arm around Sam's chest--wow, that was a nice feeling--and hauled him into the water. Sam futilely tried to get his feet under him, but Bucky was really strong and fast and the sand was at the soupy-sinking moment of a tide change over loose sand.

"The water will help," Bucky said in a way that suggested he was still trying to convince himself of the same thing. "Oh, God, what if it doesn't?"

Sam was more confused than he ever had been, and he'd seen people get really big and really small, talking raccoons, an assortment of aliens, rocks that altered reality, time, and space, and literal gods.

"What are you talking about?" Sam asked. "Who am I here?"

Bucky squawked a little. "You're forgetting who you are? The Little Mermaid didn't cover that!"

Sam's eyebrows went up. "I'm a merman?" he asked in surprise. His mama had always said he was a water baby.

"Sam!" Bucky whined desperately.

Sam finally took total mercy on him and put a hand on Bucky's shoulder to keep him still. "Hey, calm down. I'm not your Sam," he said. "I guess you haven't had to deal with any of this yet."

Bucky stared at him, blue eyes almost orange in the sun, wide and a little naïve. God, he seemed so young. "Deal with what?" he asked

"The multiverse," Sam said. "I'm not your Sam. We swapped places."

Bucky's tanned skin drained to a more familiar color. "You have to switch back! He can't be outside of the water for long."

And, oh yeah. Shit. Sam didn't know how to control any of this. He wasn't sure how to intentionally swap out with a specific other Sam.

"Okay, okay, calm down, kiddo," Sam said softly. "These things are triggered by fights. Were you part of a battle or something?"

Bucky's face screwed to one side. "No. Why would I be? I was on the waves. But Sam wasn't with me. He could've been dealing with anything down there."

Sam looked to the expanse of ocean that Bucky gestured to. There was no way Sam could figure out where the other Sam had been, much less take up his fight again.

"Listen, I'll try my hardest," Sam said. "But I don't know how to bring him straight back. I'm not in charge of this."

"I don't care about any of that. I don't care about your multiverse. Make it bring him back," Bucky said. There was a familiar steel edge to his voice, the tone that came out when his own Bucky skipped worry and went straight to fury. The kind of emotion that usually led to Bucky making bad decisions.

"I'll try," he promised. "I need you to take a swing at me," he said, standing up and shaking water off of his arms. There was no way to wring out the suit, so that was just going to have to stay. Maybe multiversal travel came with free air-drying.

"What?" Bucky asked, looking askance. "I'm not hitting you."

"My adrenaline doesn't get right if I start it. You have to start it."

Bucky's eyes pinched in. "I ain't been in a fight in years."

Wow, Sam thought. A well adjusted Barnes. Who knew. "Come on, kid. Otherwise, I'm gonna go find a jellyfish to antagonize."

Bucky sighed, squirmed for a second, and then swung at Sam.

. . .

Bucky wandered around the great forest with deep skepticism. He wasn't sure what multiverse this was, but it seemed to be one that wasn't inhabited by anybody. What kind of fight had been happening here?

Up ahead, the dense, dark copse eased some and sunlight dappled the ground. He jogged over to it, hoping to shed some light on the situation. God, he wished there was a Sam around to say that to. The trees opened to a rolling hill and a sprawl of space that stretched on for forever.

Bucky rubbed the heels of his hands into his eyes and blinked at the image before him. Despite the fact that he'd just walked out of a forest, New York City was ahead of him. The buildings were half destroyed. The other half of them had been taken over by the flora of the area. Vines seemed to be tearing apart concrete and rebar. Trees grew through the middle of roads. Flowers covered every ugly grey space available.

It was kind of beautiful, if not for the fact that this was Bucky's home and every childhood memory he had was now buried. Coney Island was underwater.

Suddenly, something wrapped around Bucky's ankle and yanked him down to the ground hard. He kicked his other foot at the binding, expecting a lasso of some kind or a rope trap. Instead, he found another vine, dragging him back into the forest and a massive bush that was growing by the second.

Bucky began to kick harder and reached for the knife strapped to his thigh.

"Wait!" someone called and suddenly a man was springing into action, dropping himself across Bucky's thighs, facing his legs. He began, not to hack at the vine, but to untie it from Bucky's leg. He made remarkably quick work of it. Bucky couldn't get his charger untangled that fast. He sat back as the vine finished coiling into the bush and let out a satisfied sigh. Then he glanced over his shoulder at Bucky and grinned.

How come they were always so handsome?

The other Sam stood and offered his hand down to Bucky to haul him to his feet. "Don't think too negatively about the plants here," he said. "They always know."

Bucky nodded his acknowledgement. He took in the look of the other Sam. This one had intricate gold designs on his face and down his arms. They were radial in nature, making him look even more like sunshine than usual. "You from around here?" he asked. "What is this place?"

Sam shook his head. "Nah. I was dropped here a while ago. I'm just a fast learner."

"Yeah," Bucky agreed, feeling just a little breathless after that close call. "I kind of figured with the whole--" He gestured to his face. "This seems like some future of the Earth I'm from. I know all those buildings."

Sam nodded. He walked a few steps out again, closer to the crest of the hill, and then sat down like the grass hadn't just tried to kill Bucky. "We're not even from Earth. I don't know how we keep getting caught up in Earth nonsense."

Bucky snorted. "Trust me, Earthlings get caught up in plenty of intergalactic nonsense too." His eyes went to the markings on Sam's arm again, thin, lovely lines sprawling from his elbow.

"Blue," Sam said, lifting Bucky's chin with a gold streaked finger. "Yours are blue." He traced a crescent shape around the corner of Bucky's eye. "You don't have as many. Have you ever seen yourself in one of these things?"

Bucky's face warmed and he gently removed it from Sam's touch, looking back to the death of one New York and the birth of another. "No. I think that's one of the rules. Only one of us at a time."

Sam nodded. "I've noticed that as well. But it usually begins to resolve itself when two people are in the wrong universe."

"Yeah," Bucky agreed again. "I've noticed that too."

Sam grinned at him. He was so handsome, it hurt. "I will be very happy to leave this planet again."

"Yeah, we kind of suck."

Sam reached up to trace another crescent along the joint of Bucky's right shoulder. "Maybe not all of it," he hummed.

Bucky blushed again and pulled out a knife as he turned away. "Let me go instigate something to get us out of here," he muttered. Even walking away, he could feel Sam's radiance

. . .

Sam did end up underwater, but it wasn't any kind of water a merman would want to live in. Maybe a bogman. He spit out marshy water and tried to ignore how many mosquito larvae were definitely in his mouth. There was a conveniently placed liana-type vine right on the bank and he hauled himself out of the water.

Sam was not a bayou man. There were enough horror stories in high school about idiots going missing at night and he'd been in the med-clinic waiting room once when someone had come in with an alligator bite that had taken half the meat of his arm with it. Sam did not like the bayous in practice. Which was to say, he had no idea where he was or how to get out of it.

A howl pierced through the quiet then, which only worked to send Sam's heart tripping in his chest in triple speed. He could totally use this vine to climb into a tree.

Actually, he had wings. He snapped them open and water gushed out of the pack.

Two water universes back to back, he thought with more irritation than he'd felt in a long time. Just his damn luck.

There was another howl then, much closer. Sam did begin to climb into the tree. He was stopped by a curious, "Sam?" and he looked down to find a familiar, uncanny face.

"Hey, Jamie," he greeted, relief flooding through him so quickly he almost went lightheaded.

The genetically-spliced, lab-grown werewolf looked at Sam with wide eyed curiosity. Actually, he was always wide eyed. He very much so had a dog's eyes. It had been a while since James and Bucky had swapped places in the middle of a battle (a precursor to this problem?) and Sam had ended up fighting next to the giant wolf instead of his partner. Bucky and a rougarou-Sam had shown up a while later and the fight was over pretty quickly after that.

"Is Sam around by any chance?" he tried.

"You know he isn't," James answered. It was difficult to read his expressions. He had a broad, flat nose that was as reactive as any puppy's, but usually only with disgust and anger. His pointed ears, too tall to be hidden behind his long hair, were under much better control. Sam had a cat. He looked at the ears for behavioral indicators. "I only just got back myself. I was on a planet called Venus, but not our Venus. It was...interesting." Now his nose scrunched and a cute little blush crept along his furry face.

Sam tried not to let his scowl show too much. This Sam had magic in him, which would move this all along much faster. Still, without sulking too much, Sam asked, "How are you feeling?"

"Like I could rip something open with my teeth. I've barely sat still for five minutes over the past week. I'm going from one fight to the next. Have you ever seen a fight on a planet of pleasure?"

Sam grimaced. "Yeah, I can't really blame you for getting mad. And I probably wouldn't stop you from going full wolf."

"As long as it's not towards you?" James finished, taking the words right from Sam's mouth.

"Wow, all Sams really are the same, huh?"

James grinned, showing off all of his long, sharp teeth. "I can send you on," he said. "Sam showed me how. I just don't know where you're going to land."

"Wow, look at you," Sam complimented. "Please do. I don't wanna start a fight with you."

"You haven't found another way for the quiet places?" James asked, raising his bushy brow. "And they say I have the anger issues."

Sam tsked at him and gestured for him to hurry up.

. . .

A galaxy stretched out below Bucky. It was like something from a painting, all swirling colors and bright spots of planets. Jewel toned galactic highways with actual jewels embedded into it. He sat in red dirt and traced nonsense letters beside himself because it kept him calm.

There was no one else up here. He'd never been sent somewhere where there was no one else. True, this was an entire planet, but it was also an empty planet and Bucky had walked for ages across barren plains and deserts before he'd finally come around one swooping crest and found this view. He'd given up at that point and decided just to wait for something to happen.

It was one of the most beautiful things he'd ever seen. An entire cosmos swirled below him, full of twinkling lights and shining colors. He wondered what lived down there. What music did they listen to and what foods did they like and how did they sleep at night? Surely, something was falling in love at that moment. Something was laughing, something else was crying. He wondered if they were being affected by this multiverse bullshit too. Were there missing citizens? Was some version of Joaquin running around one of those lights trying to get back to wherever he belonged? Was something that lived here now fighting the lizards Bucky had been taken from?

Sam could be down there: a thought which almost made leaping off of this planet a feasible idea. He hadn't considered what would happen if he died in one of these places. Usually, all of the dangerous ones kept him too busy to wonder. The glitch would send him on before it got too hairy. The quiet ones, it was obviously not a problem. But if he did manage to leap off of a planet, would he just float aimlessly for eternity? Would he have to swim through zero gravity space to find some alien to duke it out with? Or if he did blip out with someone else, what would happen to them? Did they land on a planet again? Surely not every Bucky in the multiverses would do something as stupid as jumping into space.

"Well, aren't you a sight for sore eyes," someone said from behind him.

Bucky whirled around, on his feet instantly. But all that adrenaline drained just as quickly. "Sam," he breathed. Then he was crossing over the red dust on silent steps and clutching at Sam--his Sam--as tightly as he could. It didn't matter how many times this happened; it always felt like this one could be the last.

Sam hugged him back tightly. "I knew this one was you," he said as he pressed his face to Bucky's hair. "You're always mopey-er than the others."

Bucky rolled his eyes, but he still laughed a little. "If you'd been here as long as I have, you'd be moping too," he promised. "Are you okay?" He pulled away to hold Sam's face gently. "Everywhere you went wasn't too bad?" He looked to be in one piece and the exhaustion on his face was par for the course at this point.

Sam smiled and turned his face to kiss the inside of Bucky's right wrist, feeling the flutter of his pulse for a few seconds. "It was pretty quiet. Didn't get dropped into the middle of any fights this time. What about you?"

Bucky shook his head. "I'm fine. I mean, it wasn't quiet, but I'm fine." He smoothed his thumb over Sam's cheek before stepping into his space again. "God, I missed you."

"You say that every time," Sam laughed. "From my experiences, all Sams are the same."

Bucky shook his head. "None of them are you."

Sam held him for a while longer, pressing half kisses to his head, before he finally said, "Come on, sweetheart. Let's head home."

Out of all of the nonsense about this multiverse glitch, the only fast rule was that universal pairs could send themselves home. It was like the glitch evened itself out when they found each other again. All was right in the world for those few moments.

Bucky had to agree. "Yeah, doll. Let's go home."

. . .

Back in the real Colorado, Bucky was instantly taken off his feet by a charging lizard the size of a minivan. Wheezing on the ground--the ideal position to watch Sam go soaring by above--Bucky had to at least admit, it was nice to be back where he knew the monsters and the people and the rules. At least he was home again.

#sambucky #bucky barnes #sam wilson #i answer things #writing #I don't even know what this is. it just got away from me

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hungry-tum-stuff · 1 year ago

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Introducing: Bix and Tahir!

These are the fellas from my most recent writing piece on this blog, and I just wanted to write up a little post with some background information on them as well as some fun facts!

Bixita “Bix” Meliaki

Credit to BrightGoat for the picrew!

Bix is a harpy! He’s a humanoid, but there are some key differences. Most notably his wings that are just about as tall as he is, his feathered ears, and his talons that he has instead of feet.

In addition to how different he looks, he’s a bit different internally as well. Harpies are smaller creatures (standing about 5’2 on average) seeing as they have to remain small enough to fly. So naturally have small stomachs, but they also have fast metabolisms so they can digest food quickly both to give them energy and ensure they’re never too full to fly. (Unless they seriously overeat) So in order to stay healthy, harpies need to eat more often than a person would.

Bix is an amputee. He lost his right leg when he was a child, and he has a prosthetic made from a vulture’s leg that he has enchanted with necromancy to act like his own. However, the enchantment breaks when Bix is under too much stress, and it costs a lot of energy to recast. So if he’s too tired or hungry, he simply won’t be able to recast the enchantment and get his leg working again.

Bix is also a trans man. He doesn’t like how ‘feminine’ his full name sounds so he prefers to go by his nickname, and there was no need for top surgery either because. Birds don’t have tits ✌️

He is a huge grump, and he’s got quite the temper and dirty mouth despite his ‘angelic’ features. Tahir likes to think this is because the harpy is ‘perpetually hangry,’ which is mostly true because he seems to calm down quite a bit after a good meal.

Tahir: Crown Prince of the Undercommons

Tahir is a Drow: or a dark elf. He was born and raised in the Undercommons: The land beneath the surface. And due to his title, he’s slated to rule it one day. He’s still quite young, (Only 23) and he’s spent most of his life just learning about the world and how to rule a kingdom. He has very little practical knowledge.

The one real special racial feature that he has is his night vision: His eyes are adjusted for dark environments so he can see very well at night or without the help of a torch or fire!

However, he is very book-smart and he’s naturally curious. He likes learning, and he approaches life with a very open mind. He’s not naive though, the harsh environment of the Undercommons taught him that much growing up. He was also trained to use a sword and a bow to protect himself if the need ever arose, so he’s pretty dexterous and quite good in a fight.

He has a very gentle nature. Despite being trained to fight, he doesn’t like fighting and he’d rather avoid conflict as much as possible. At the end of the day, he believes actions speak louder than words. Sometimes this can create an issue when he fails to speak up for himself. Bix evens him out in that regard, because the harpy is absolutely not afraid to speak up.

He has a surprisingly good sense of humor. While Bix relies on vulgarity, Tahir makes quick-witted jokes that usually take Bix a second to process.

That’s all for now I think!! If you’d like to know any more about them, please feel free to send me an ask!! Otherwise, I’ll try to put out some more writing for these two before classes start back up. <3

#original characters #harpy character #drow character #high fantasy #writing

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sigh-artist · 9 months ago

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Half Bird KO just has wings too small to fly... but he can float quite nicely. Yessss... Avian Seekers and Glider KO is such a nice concept.

Even better if he's not afraid of heights... but doesn't want to hang out with the pure seekers who always flock to them. Cause I imagine they make fun of him. Why wouldn't they? Plus? That would add a reason for his "I'm better than you" behavior. He's told he's the worst, so he acts like he's the best. Combine that with Peabird's and their pride and... welp. Good luck with him lol.

What BD btw?

Okay first I wanna say thank you so much for the ask! I don’t mean to be weird or awkward but I get really excited and really genuinely happy when people show interest in my ideas, so thank you!

And Yesssss! I was thinking the same, this is why he has the “I’m better than you attitude” and the pride thing is probably definitely why I chose a peacocks design for him.

As for bd, i think he’s just a “normal” grounder here, but he supports his husband regardless of him not being a pure seeker, he thinks his drop dead gorgeous anyway and loves him. Bd/breakdown is a strong supporter. But that being said, you know how breakdown is known for his huge chest? Well…. Similar to some mammals and how they have multiple…teats? As some people call them? Tits/nipples, well that’s how my breakdown is like, a lot of nips, i think eight, three smaller ones underneath his normal chest/booba. Now it’s weird but since they are aliens , why not have fun and give them weird biology?

But in my lost wings au ,all my humanoid formers have little “mutations” or quirks if you will, so they aren’t quite human, example is starscream and seekers being bird man/woman or heavily similar to harpies.

My Airachnid, similar to how a spider have multiple limbs, has four-six arms, i think six might be overkill but the extra arms are to make her resemble a spider, she has a normal amount of legs, in my original art she had two prosthetic arms underneath her normal ones I think? But designs might change.

TW: for fictional racism-ish stuff/concept/i don’t support or condone real life stuff of course (it’s gross and makes no sense)

but i do imagine seeker’s might have a bit of racism? Prejudice against grounders, of halfbreed seekers or disabled seekers at that, not all seekers are ,i like to think , but seekers have beauty standards and all and if you can’t fly then they don’t think you are as good as them, some think disabled seekers are a disgrace. It’s really sad, honestly, and i think this version of ko might be a victim of this. They see grounders as being “dirty” or “too rough” or “brutal”.

And…whilst I love starscream, he do have old man/boomer vibes and i think…he might be a “tad” (putting it very lightly) prejudiced against grounders too, old bird man racism.

Oops 👉👈 i accidentally rambled again.

Oh before I forget! I’m not the first person to have the idea of seeker ko! I believe I saw another post with a similar concept (of normal robot ko) so credit to them! I was inspired.

Also, notice how seekers can have different body types/be different models of jet? Starscream being more sleek and tiny and dreadwing being more bulky and big? I headcanon there’s different types/species or subspecies of seekers too, rare/hybrid halfbreed or extinct. Or some are just rumors/near extinction rare like vampiric types.

#transformers prime lost wings au #tfp lost wings #transformers au #humanoidformers #tfp headcanons #tfp humanformers #anon ask

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northescere · 4 months ago

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@vvalllerie @icara-mack you guys wanted to see this!!

harpies here are basically just people with bird wings

most harpies also have elemental-related abilities, though a very small minority lacks them and are hence looked down upon (I know what you’re thinking. “EWWW what is this ELEMENTAL ABILITIES CRAP that is SOOOO OVERUSED and CLICHE” well. I am putting a finger on your lips and Shushing you. I have been suffering from writer’s block and this is the best thing I have come up with in six months so let me have my moment)

idk I guess it’s just your basic (non-chemistry related) elements. Air, water, earth and fire. Idk I mean light could be an element too but I’m still thinking about it

Air wielders are probably generally seen as higher and more important in society, like a dominant race or something (yk since birds fly and stuff or whatever)

out of all these elements, fire wielders are basically extinct because they were slowly rooted out of society due to the belief that they were destructive, volatile and dangerous

oh yeah the harpies here are based off of real birds.

still wondering whether I should make it like a modern harpy au or give it like a whole fantasy world medieval kind of theme

Tendou is either going to be like a bearded vulture (vultures being a general bad omen / representative of death, kind of somewhat aligned with the concept of tendou being regarded as a monster and having people fear him in canon idk it feels right to me) or like idk some kind of red bird species. Open to suggestions. Also he’s a fire wielder from a long line of air wielders and probably has been suppressing his powers

Wakatoshi is probably going to be a white bellied sea eagle for the sake of canon parallels (also those birds are HUGE have you SEEN them) or a shoebill (big and scary looking but they’re actually gentle). Water elemental or earth elemental, something related to plants because I’m a farmer wakatoshi truther

a whole thing where wakatoshi tries to get tendou to accept himself as he is. some philosophy about how all elements are both beneficial and dangerous, and even if fire comes with a higher risk than the others that doesn’t mean its only purpose is destruction. destruction is necessary for life to continue on and thrive. from ashes grow strong plants and good harvests.

idk if I’m going to write this or draw this but it will definitely be living in my head somewhere among the general chaos for a very very very long time

other things I randomly thought of:

hinata would probably be like a rufous hummingbird and a light wielder (if i decide to include light as an element). Or maybe he could be powerless. (canon parallel to how he lacks height in VB and hence is at like some kind of natural disadvantage or whatever it’s called)

kageyama the peregrine falcon and water wielder

seagull air / weather wielder hoshiumi. Reference to thunderbirds? Idk hoshiumi probably wouldn’t even be plot-central if I ever write this he’s just neat

does anyone wanna hear me yap about my idea for an ushiten harpies au. like not exactly harpies as in the same as greek mythology but like. bird people

#haikyuu #haikyuu au #haikyuu harpy au #ushiten #ushijima x tendou #north stuff

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smimon · 4 years ago

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Concept: a palm-sized (fantasy) harpy.

#i gott dr a w #shitpost #idea #i mean fantasy harpies are usually human sized right? i'm not really sure #the real life harpy bird is huge #now imagine a pigeon… but it has a cute woman's face #will it eat bread?#xdd

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bogleech · 3 years ago

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here are vaguely scientifically feasible animals I would retroactively add to the world:

Nasty awful slimy fish that take huge ghastly bites out of people, like a cookie cutter shark, but they like the shore so they’d end up keeping beaches more pristine and untouched by tourists. Let’s also put them in some freshwater places.

Huge salamanders that will eat you if you set foot in the swamp, like they’re way way more actively aggressive than crocodilians, but they make way more eggs than they even need and the eggs are so delicious we just throw up our hands and leave most of the wetlands alone for them.

Did you know sloths not only have those moths but just way more ticks and parasites than most other mammals? There should be a big giant smelly wretched ground sloth that defends itself by having just so many fleas and lice you can’t go anywhere near it without getting eaten alive. I want this one specifically in North American forests and it loves eating trash so urban sprawl only makes more of them.

A tiny barely visible gnat with an exceedingly painful bite that’s resistant to basically all poison and what it likes to lay eggs in is cut grass.

A big snail like the african land snails but it’s on every continent and its shell is much thicker with very long very sharp spikes. Mainly the idea here is it would fuck up cars all the time, if we even bothered to invent cars the same way with all these snails everywhere.

I showed you guys those giant sea worms the other day that look like intestines and swallow whole huge fish, the giant nemertean worms, well some smaller nemertean worms have a sting that can fuck you up, and some even smaller ones have no sting but live on land. Let’s put one of the giant kinds on land and give it the sting, a real Mongolian Death Worm. No reason, just making life spicier.

A whale that really does like to wreck boats and eat everybody on board like the old stories, but maybe it makes enormous amounts of ambergris, just barfs all day and it’s so useful to us as fuel or something that we begrudgingly have to let it be and global colonialism just has to be slower and more tedious because of all the vicious pukewhales.

House roaches but they light up in the dark. I’ve said this one before in a similar post but I just think it’d be great if someone’s house could be totally infested with glowing things. We would probably like them or make use of them but could you imagine trying to sleep with them running up and down the walls all night? Ha ha

A bird as abundant as the passenger pigeons used to be except that if it dies before old age it releases LARGE amounts of something similar to Thioacetone. That’s a chemical so rancid that one little vial can make several blocks of people sick! No predators would mess with this bird and there’d just be nothing we could do about it, except forever make sure the environment is as healthy for it as possible cause if like ten of them died from pesticide we’d have to evacuate a small state.

Freshwater giant starfish that float around on the water’s surface and don’t do much but they’re covered in deadly stingers, like a flower urchin. I choose starfish because we wouldn’t be able to easily kill them without making more. They would just make it a lot harder for people to mess around carelessly in nice rivers and lakes, I think. Make these also resistant to poison. In fact make them filter feeders that would easily clean up pollutants.

Even bigger even meaner hornets than the Japanese ones but they’re herbivores that live in careful balance with the trees they nest in, which are most of the trees. Most of the trees in the whole world just have a nest of gigantic hornets that will not hurt anything else, but if you were to, say, cut down or burn a tree, they would be pretty mad.

Bigger and even smarter ravens, like harpy eagle size, really remember your face if you're mean to them and they always tell all the other ones. Can mess you up themselves but maybe they go get one of those starfish and drop it on you.

EDITED TO ADD: you all thought the twelve legged sea spider was scary, well I’m gonna put one on land that gets 24 legs and it is as fast as lightning and also it sucks people’s blood if it catches them asleep. Because it’s so thin it could probably be pretty massive like some of those big giant stick insects. It’s not deadly or anything it’d just look cool and keep people on their toes. I would keep one so you could all say things like “ewwww just get a dog!!” No.

#biology #speculative evolution #speculative zoology #specevo #animals

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luzswonderland · 3 years ago

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Thoughts on Season 2 Thus Far..

I gonna keep most of my thoughts on all the episodes brief, but also long enough where you guys can get the idea of where these episodes stand in levels of importance to me. I already have a lot personal favorites in this first half of the season and hope that the second half will deliver the same energy.

EPISODE 1: Separate Tides

Good episode to start off the second season

Episode does a good job of addressing the different circumstances that Eda, Lilith, and Luz have with adjusting to life after the events of “Young Blood, Old Souls.”

We see the Golden Guard for the first time. With a voice too. I have more to say about him later when I get to the future episodes. But he is a treat!

The reintroduction of the portal and Emperor Belos’ plans for the human world in this episode, does a good job of reminding the audience of what is as stake this season.

Adore Luz and Eda’s pirate outfits ❤

Overall, a strong start to a very ambitious season.

Episode 2: Escaping Expulsion (Personal Favorite)

We finally see Amity’s parents!!!

Wasn’t expecting Odalia’s eyes to be blue, but both parents fit the personalities I originally envisioned them to have

Luz teaching Eda and Lilith to use magic through the glyphs was so cute and shows how different both Eda and Lilith are when it comes to approaching magic

Love how Amity’s separation from Luz was the trigger that caused her to stand up to her parents

Even though I kinda knew the expulsion from Hexside wasn’t going to permanent, it still shows how much pull Amity’s parents have at Hexside and the Boiling Isles.

Looks like the abominations that Alador has made for profit will be used to fulfill whatever plans Emperor Belos has for the human world.

Loved Amity and Luz’s interactions!!!

Episode 3: Echoes of the Past (Personal Favorite)

Fantastic King centered episode

I know that invisibility spell will come in handy in one of the later episodes. Good job, Luz

Hooty and Lilith are a riot this episode. Was not expecting them to get along at all this season.

I thought the show was going to make them polar opposites, but good to see that Hooty has a fan in the house.

King trying to remember his past and recounting his childhood memories was so sad because you realize that he has been trying to find out who he really is this entire time😭

The temple where King was born holds so much history and I hope we go back there soon

Will we find out what happened to King’s dad? What potential does King hold? Find out next time on DBZ!!!

Episode 4: Keeping Up A-fear-ances

Finally get to see Eda and Lilith’s mom and her palisman’s a hawk.

Love the pattern of all members of the Clawthorne family having bird themed palismen. I wonder what palisman Eda’s dad has.

Love how the episode addresses the blatant issue that Gwendolyn has with trying to find a cure for Eda. She cares for her daughter, but she is being blinded by ambition

The scams in the book she was reading were kinda funny tho

Lilith being upset that her mom favors Edal more than her is relatable, but also makes sense considering how the curse impacted Eda’s childhood

Lilith wanting to travel with her mom makes sense and I’m happy she made the decision to do that

Lilith’s beast from is cool

We finally get more information about there being another human that came to the Boiling Isles long ago!!!

We finally catch up with what’s going on at home and see that Luz’s imposter is blending in just fine and Camila is none the wiser. At least that buys Luz some time in the Boiling Isles

Episode 5: Through the Looking Glass Ruins

We get a Gus-centered episode and I’m here for it. I love it when the show deviates from the main narrative and focuses on the supporting cast

Even though I’m not the biggest fans of their personalities, the introduction of the students from Glandus High was great

I really love the character designs of these students, especially Bria, she looks so cute

Gus getting more character development and bonding with Mattholomule was good to see, I hope we see more of their interactions in future episodes

SO MANY LUMITY MOMENTS!!!

Luz getting more attracted to Amity

Amity putting her job on the line, so they could find Philip’s diary

Luz saying that she hopes to show Amity the human world one day

Luz successfully getting Amity’s job back

The kiss on cheek at the end of the episode by Amity

The blushing!!!💜💚-I can go on and on

Amity’s new look fits her well and shows that she is starting to live for herself and not her parents-Good!

Through the help of the Echo Mouse, we also get more information about why Philip came to the Boiling Isle in the first place.

But the Echo Mouse is being picky and stops before it gets good😫

Episode 6: Hunting Palisman (Personal Favorite)

This is my favorite episode of the season so far and probably my top ten favorite episodes of the series.

We are finally introduced to Hunter as the Golden Guard and he is a treat

Everything from his character design, to his goals, to his interactions with Luz make him very intriguing.

The kids begin to pick out their palisman and a lot of them fit their personalities, especially Willow’s.

I’m glad the show is addressing the fact that Luz doesn’t know what she wants to do when she becomes a witch because tbh I’m not sure either. I know she wants to help and protect the people of the Boiling Isles but she can’t really do that if she wants to go back home.

What a good time to bring up this internal conflict

Kikimora wanting to get rid of Hunter makes sense seeing as how the Emperor’s Coven is based of performance

LIST OF FAVORITE HUNTER AND LUZ MOMENTS:

Hunter and Luz’s interaction on Hunter’s ship

Luz slapping Hunter to wake him up😂

Luz stealing Hunter’s staff

Hunter revealing his family history and why he defers to Emperor Belos

These two give off a good sibling vibe and I want to see more of this later

I originally thought the red cardinal was going to be for Luz, but it ends up being Hunter’s palisman at the end of the episode-Interesting

Whatever Luz’s palisman is going to be, I hope it’s an animal that fits her personality because I thought the red cardinal would have been perfect

Maybe she will get a violet-backed starling as a palisman🤔

Hunter comes off as very complex immediately and I love that the show let’s us know that he trying to figure out his place in the Boiling Isles as a powerless being.

Episode 7: Eda’s Requiem

An Eda centered episode is such a plus for this season

So far I feel like the show has had Eda be a main plot point, but she hasn’t really been given her own episode-This episode takes a good step in the right direction

Eda feeling like she’s losing both Luz and King because they have both trying to find out more about their personal journeys is equivalent to a mother accepting that fact that her kids are moving across the country 😥

Eda reuniting with Raine is nice to see. You can automatically tell right off the bat that they have history

Raine being a rebel against Emperor Belos while working under Emperor Belos as a coven leader is BOLD AF

I see why Eda fell for them

We are introduced to the Abomination and Beast Keeping Coven leaders and I love their character designs, especially for Darius

The scene where Raine and Eda play together was so beautiful and does a fantastic job of representing how pure their relationship was and currently is

I love how Raine realizing that Eda has more to live for than she thinks and puts a stop to the song they play in order to sacrifice himself

I know we are going to see Raine again, but I really hope Belos doesn’t do anything bad to them. Raine is a sweetheart

Even though Luz and King lose the Gland Plix race, it was still nice to see that Eda came towards the end of the face.

The reveal of King wanting to take Eda’s last name at the end of the episode is one of the main reasons why I love King and Eda’s relationship. They really do come off as mother and son❤

Episode 8: Knock, Knock, Knockin’ on Hooty’s Door (Personal Favorite)

This is a Hooty’s centered episode which is a first for this show, but this ended up being one of my favorite episodes of the show because of what it addresses

Hooty helping King accidently discover his powers was a shock to me because I just through their interaction was going to end up being pointless

King can now be more useful in battle 😁

We finally see Eda’s dad and see why Eda has a hard time accepting her cursed side.

We also learn how the curse has negatively impacted her relationship with so many people, such as Raine 😥

Eda accepting her cursed side is the first step to begin this traumatic healing process. At this point, I don’t think the show will cure Eda of her curse and I don’t think they should honestly. It teaches the audience that you sometimes have to live with what you have whether it be a disease, a physical disability or mental illness.

GOOD LESSON👌👌

Eda’s harpy form looks amazing. I can’t wait to see what the show will do with this form in the future.

Hooty helping Luz with her crush on Amity was one of the best parts of the episode.

The Tunnel of Love scene and the mixed signals from Luz and Amity had be dying🤣

Luz building up the courage to ask Amity out was so sweet and so real at the same time.

It came off as real conversation between awkward teens trying to figure a romantic relationship out🥰

LUMITY IS CANON!!!😍💜💚

This happened sooner than I thought, but I’m glad it did. This is huge, especially for a Disney show.

Just when I started to like Hooty a lot more, he had to mess it up when he ate a letter from someone who could be King’s dad (?)

DANG IT, HOOTY

Hooty freaking out when he thinks he messed with helping King, Eda and Luz never got old 😂

The comedy was on point with this episode and I love how everything just falls in to place.

Episode 9: Eclipse Lake(Personal Favorite)

This episode had so much going on and I have a lot to say.

We get back to the Emperor Belos plotline of him trying to get to the human world and find out the Belos has actually been to the human world previously🤔

I wonder what Belos wants to do with Hunter and how he relates to these “plans”

Hunter is totally going to get betrayed by his uncle 😥

Amity’s palisman is adorable, I guess she got it off-screen

“DragonClaw Z”😂😂😂

Love how everyone is coming together to protect the house, it shows they really know what’s at stake

Amity using every opportunity she gets to call Luz her girlfriend is so cute❤

Hard to believe she hated his girl’s guts at the beginning of last season lol

Sick Luz is funny Luz

More lore about the secrets of the Boiling Isles and Titan’s Blood

I really wish Luz could have came to Eclipse Lake with the rest of the cast, but I guess the rest of the cast needed to experience Hunter for themselves lol

Hunter being roasted by Eda, King and Amity was hilarious 😂

“A bad, but sad boy.”-Yep that’s our Hunter 🤣

Hunter trying to get into Amity’s head concerning her relationship with Luz and her role in the Boiling Isles was surprising

I’m going to assume that Amity hasn’t been in a romantic relationship before so everything with Luz is new to her. Amity is usually very level-headed.

Even though Harpy-Eda is cool, I like that Eda doesn’t know how to control his form yet, it shows that she has a lot to learn before this form this 100% mastered

Hunter’s desperation to get his uncle’s approval is just sad; I really want to know his backstory because this isn’t it at all

Praise King for helping Amity figure out the text messages🙌

I love how Amity tries to relate to Hunter, it sweet and shows how much she has grown. If only see did a better job of hiding the key 😣

The fight between Amity and Hunter is amazing. I love when the show just flexes its animation like this.

It may not be better than Eda and Lilith’s fight, but I still felt the tension between these two characters. When these two grow up, they are going to be some of the most powerful witches in the Boiling Isles for sure.

Hunter getting to Amity’s head about harming Luz is a low blow imo, but I’m glad Amity knew what was at stake in the situation

Crushing the key was smart tho. Even in stressful situations like these, Amity still keeps her cool. We love to see it😉

Luz can now use some of the Titan’s Blood from Amity’s glove to try to return back home!!!

This episode had no business being this good. When the plot kicks in the show, it never fails to deliver.

Episode 10: Yesterday’s Lie (Personal Favorite)

We finally catch up with what’s going on back on Earth and find out more about Luz’s impersonator.

The gang making a makeshift portal out all of Eda’s junk is very creative. I wondered what they were going to do with that stuff now that Eda can’t sell human collectables anymore.

The dimension that Luz enters through the portal is very trippy and creative. It makes sense since the portal they made is not authentic.

Luz mirror hoping and seeing someone impersonate her had to be scary. I couldn’t imagine.

We find out that Luz’s impersonator is actually a creature from the Boiling Isles known as a “Basilisk”

Vee’s backstrory is awful, I completely understand why she came to Earth and got comfortable after what she went through

We find out that Eda interacted with humans with an alias known as “Marylin”😂

Even though Luz doesn’t find a way home, this is the next best thing to let her mom know that she is okay.

Jacob gave off weird vibes immediately, so when he captures Vee to use her for fame, I wasn’t surprised.

What did surprise me was the fact that Jacob has been watching Vee for a while and he had the house where she transformed in monitored

I wonder if he’s seen anything else🤔

Camila is the GOAT. She came through and helped Vee out. A lot of people would have just ignored the situation, but she knew that Vee was important to Luz and I respect that👏👏

I’m glad she also agrees to keep Vee despite the situation

The scene between Luz and Camila was very heart-wrenching. Luz came clean about everything and Camila’s reaction to that was expected but it was still sad to see

The music and Camila trying to reach out to Luz was just 😭

This episode is a great mid-season finale. This episode addressed so much and foreshadows a lot of plot points to come in the later episodes.

The first half of season 2 had some bangers. More than half of these episodes are already in my top favorites of the series and we still have 11 episodes left. Good Job Owl House. I can’t wait see what the other half has left in store 🙌🙌

#the owl house #toh #owl house season 2 #owl house analysis

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365days365movies · 4 years ago

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March 2, 2021: The Last Unicorn (1982) (Part 1)

I, uh...I wanna talk about zoology.

It’s my profession of choice, although if I’m going to be specific, it’s ecology and ornithology, based on my Masters. But while my expertise is in birds, that doesn’t mean I have any particular preference. So, let’s talk mammals. Specifically, I’d like to talk about horses.

Horses are odd-toed ungulates (Order Perissodactyla) belonging to the family Equidae, with only one living genus (Equus), which includes donkeys, zebras, and a FUCK-ton of fossil progenitors. Not gonna go into horse evolution here, since it’s a vast topic on its own, but the group dates to about 54 million years ago, during the Eocene period.

There are specific features that define modern horses as horses, including a single hoofed toe for walking on, a body built for running with high stamina, and a large cecum in the intestines for breaking down fibrous and herbaceous material. It’s a group native to North America, Africa, and Asia, with the modern descended horse descended from a somewhat unknown ancestor in Central Asia.

They’re grazers rather than browsers, which many similar sized herbivores are. And, of course, they have a close relationship to humans throughout prehistory. Their main systems of defense against predators are the afore-mentioned running capabilities, a VICIOUS kick (especially horses like zebras), and a high-range of monocular vision due to the position of their HUGE eyes.

In terms of sexual selection, it’s essentially based on physical competition between the males in a population, which are usually formed into reproductive harems. That’s one male with multiple females that live within an established range. The females have their own dominance schemes, while groups of males exist in bachelor herds before establishing a harem of their own.

And those two paragraphs help explain why horses don’t grow horns.

Animals like this bighorn sheep, as well as antelopes with impala and gerenuk, perform intrasexual selection using their horns, the size of which determine the fitness of an individual male, with the fights settling any potential ties for watching females. And that’s the main reason why herbivorous mammals grow horns, and horses have come up with different social structures to compensate. But OK, couldn’t they just horns anyway?

Remember the stomach I mentioned earlier? Here’s the thing; hindgut digestion, which is what horses do...not the most nutritionally efficient form of digestion. In order to maintain their running lifestyles, they invest all obtained energy and nutrients into building muscle and other important functions. Fact of the matter is, they just can’t devote enough energy and nutrients to the physiologically expensive act of owning a horn. They do have a close relative that does that, though. However, they’ve sacrificed their speed, intelligence, and even their eyesight for their horns, as well as beefing up their physical defense with thicker skin.

YUP! So why talk about this? I mean...you know why.

OK, so that had basically nothing to do with this movie, but a post like this has been building since I mentioned the gerenuk a little bit ago. Sorry, had to get it out. Anyway, yeah, unicorns are impossible, but they’re still a hallowed mythical creature. National animal of Scotland, one of the most prominent symbols of medieval mythology, a magic-using ethnic class in a mythical kingdom composed of a horse-based majority that also includes normal horses and pegasi...

You know, unicorns. So, I’m definitely interested in what would happen to make a unicorn, well...the last one. My bets are on something man-made, like deforestation or another for of habitat depletion. Could be poaching for the horn. After all, that’s what’s been driving rhinoceros species to near-extinction (or actual extinction in the case of the western black and northern white rhinos. RIP Sudan, you goddamn king).

But let’s find out rather than speculate! SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Recap (1/2)

During medieval times, in a mystical wood called the Unicorn’s Forest, a hunter shows unease to his companion. In the forest, there are no seasons, and the beasts are protected from hunters, as long as there is one unicorn left if the forest. That last unicorn is...the Unicorn (Mia Farrow), who learns from the hunters that she must be the last of her kind.

The opening credits, which are a gorgeous animated medieval tapesty, are backed by the song “The Last Unicorn”, by America (damn, nice pull). Gives the whole thing a Renn Faire feel. Never been to a Renn Faire, but I’d love to go to one, honestly.

Anyway, the Unicorn is in doubt that there are no more of her kind in the world, as they live forever, and she would know if there are none left...right? However, they can also be killed and trapped, so...I mean, they might be dead, Unicorn. As she’s thinking on this, the most Rankin-Bass butterfly ever shows up singing a ballad of love. This is...the Butterfly (Robert Klein), a bard-erfly (see whay I did there) who won’t stop singing, despite the Unicorn’s pleas to tell her of other unicorns.

Butterflies, apparently, repeat to anything they hear around them Which involves like, a lot of non-medieval songs. There’s one about the A-train, apparently, which makes...just NO fucking sense. As the Unicorn also shows frustration at this anachronistic little bugger, he breaks his songs to tell her than the Unicorns have all been chased off by “the Red Bull.”

...I’m going to hold it off as long as I can, but the joke WILL come. It WILL come.

She wonders if she can truly leave the forest, then actually does so in order to find the other unicorns. She happens upon a farmer, who attempts to tame her, as he only sees her as a horse. Apparently, men can no longer see unicorns as they are, and usually only see them as white horses. So, there may be unicorns in the world after all!

Not sure why she doesn’t go back to her forest after realizing this, but...OK. She continues on, backed once again by a song performed by America, called “Man’s Road”. Real talk, I’m digging the music in here, which is my inner folk rock fan talking.

While she finds nothing on her journey, she’s instead found by Mother Fortuna (Angela Langsbury), a witch who runs a carnival that needs a new exhibition. With her comes Ruhk (Brother Theodore) and magician Schmendrick (Alan Arkin), the latter of whom actually can see the Unicorn as a Unicorn.

At the carnival, Schmendrick introduces hiself to the Unicorn, wanting to get her out of there. Meanwhile, an audience is fooled by Mother Fortuna’s illusory magic to see a manticore, satyr, and the Midgard Serpent, when in reality they are an elderly lion, ape with a twisted foot, and really sad snake. However, the Harpy that she has IS real, and a major threat to Fortuna were she to escape.

That night, Fortuna speaks to the Unicorn of the Red Bull, owned by a King Haggard. The Unicorn asks Fortuna to free both her and the Harpy, two signs of the same magical coin. Also...is this a kids’ movie? Kinda thought it was until I noticed that the Harpy has, well...pendulous breasts. Literally the best way I can describe them. Also, three of them, so...there’s that.

After she leaves, Schmendrick arrives to free the Unicorn with his magic...and he’s shit at it. Like, REALLY shit. But thankfully, he’s a decent pickpocket, and stole the cage keys from Ruhk. He lets the Unicorn free, and she in turn releases the other animal prisoners, Harpy included. Which is NOT great for Fortuna, who’s IMMEDIATELY killed.

The two leave together, and head on the Unicorn’s journey to find her own kind. She cannot grant Schmendrick his wish to become a true magician, but he still gives her information about this world, and King Haggard, who seems like bad news.

On the road, the two encounter a gang of thieves of the road, who work for Captain Cully (Keenan Wynn), a short and portly leader of bandits. His mistress is a woman named Molly Grue (Tammy Grimes), who’s endlessly frustrated by Cully’s regular failures. They befriend Schmendrick, who impresses them with illusions of Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Although, it’s not his illusions, but those of the Unicorn, trying to help.

Doesn’t help that much, though, as the Robin Hood-hating Captain Cully ties him up to a tree after all of his men and Molly leave. A frustrated Schmendrick mutters a spell by mistake, and brings the tree to life.

And then my girlfriend fuckin’ broke. Here she is, below:

Ravishing. Yeah, she’s watching this too, and when the tree came up, her words were, and I quote:

...a smooth-talking horse, a three-tittied harpy, and a BOOBED TREE!

Boobed tree is an expression I will find a way to use in my life. Also, this is ABSOLUTELY not a kid’s movie, and that is one busty-ass tree. This tree, called...The Tree (Nellie Bellflower) is in love with Schmendrick, and is enraged by the appearance of the Unicorn. However, the Unicorn undoes Schmendrick’s magic, and puts the t-horny tree back to sleep.

The two encounter Molly Grue, who’s astonished to see a Unicorn. She cries, as she was been waiting to see one since she was a young maiden, but now she isn’t one anymore. Interesting implications there, but moving on. Molly wishes to join them, and while Schmendrick isn’t super down for that, she wins the Unicorn’s trust when she points out that they’ve been going in the wrong direction. Whoops.

OK, with that, let’s break for Part 2! See you there!

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bisexualbumblebee-writes · 3 years ago

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2015/2021- Joel Fry x OC

Joel Fry x Isabel Abbott

Description: The six year difference between Joel and Isabel beginning their relationship to being happily married.

Word Count: 2k

“Welcome back to Candid everyone! My name is Erin Miller,” the interviewer greeted the camera with a bright smile at the camera for her podcast/video. “Today is a very special episode because I am going to discuss the latest season of Game of Thrones. Not only that but today I’m joined here by the cast of Game of Thrones: Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister, Emelia Clarke as Daenerys Targaryen, Iain Glen as Jorah Mormont, Joel Fry as Hizdahr zo Loraq, and Isabel Abbott as Kiyara Tallhart!” The crewmembers applauded as the cast waved when their names were called.

“Thank you guys so much for being here, all my fans and I are huge fans of the show,” she continued, finally looking at her guests.

“Happy to be here,” Emelia responded, the others agreeing afterwards.

“So much happened in this season,” Erin said before exhaling deeply, which made them laugh. “Lots of stories and even more heartbreaking deaths. Specifically the last two episodes. Oh man, I cried,” she emphasized.

“You should have seen the cast when we were filming,” Peter spoke, leaning closer to the microphone as he did so. Emelia nodded knowingly.

“Well today I wanted to talk to you about one specific episode. Episode nine, ‘Dance of Dragons.’ The attack of the Sons of Harpy on the fighting pit.”

“Oh boy,” Isabel muttered, which caused Erin to chuckle.

“Oh boy indeed. Can I just say, it literally happened so quickly. I mean, I blinked and people started getting murdered. Then Loraq is killed!” She ranted. “He was such a semi-good character and I was so sad to see him go.”

“So was Isabel,” Emilia teased. Isabel jokingly glared at the girl then pushed her shoulder, a blush dusting her face.

“Shut up Em,” she grumbled shyly.

“Oh, care to explain?” Erin asked with the same smile Emilia had.

“Yeah, Isa,” Iaian added. Isabel looked around, realizing that everyone was not staring at her expectantly.

“Oh my god I did not come here to be attacked like this!” She exclaimed with a giggle, attempting to hide her embarrassment.

“You were sad about Loraq’s death?” Joel questioned with a teasing smile, though there was a sincere look in his eyes.

“Okay listen,” she started deadpanned, which made the others burst out laughing. “Here’s the thing. During their time on the show, Hizdahr-”

“They’re on a first name basis now?” Peter questioned. Isabel took a second to flip him off before looking at Erin once more, this time with wide eyes.

“Wait, do children watch this show?”

“Yeah sometimes kids watch my show,” Erin responded amusedly. Isabel gasped and covered her mouth.

“I’m so sorry!” She looked at the camera with the most worried expression anyone had ever seen from her. “I’m sorry parents and children that just saw that.”

“No no no it’s okay!” Erin exclaimed, trying not to laugh. “If parents let their kids watch Game of Thrones I’m sure they’re immune to you flipping the bird.” Isabel nodded, though her shoulders slumped in defeat and she mumbled another apology.

“Aww Isa,” Joel cooed, patting her back soothingly. “Continue.” Isabel straightened and pushed her hair behind her shoulders.

“Anyways, Hizdahr and Kiyara got pretty close. Like she brought him food while he was imprisoned and they bonded over their fathers and they talked a lot in their free time. That meant that Joel and I got to talk quite a bit and I’d say we got pretty close,” she trailed off, looking at Joel for confirmation.

“Yeah,” he responded with an affirming nod, hand dropping from her back.

“Yeah,” she repeated, also nodding. “So we got close. No matter what, death always makes me sad, I mourn people I don’t even know. So seeing Hizdahr die up close was very emotionally stressing, and I was crying once the cameras cut. I did the same with Kit after John Snow died because we got close during season four.”

“This season was just a huge blow to Isabel’s emotional state,” Emelia spoke.

“You guys are laughing but that is absolutely true,” Isabel added matter-of-factly.

“While we’re on the subject, am I the only one who noticed all those looks Loraq gave Kiyara?” Erin inquired, looking around.

“Wait what?” Isabel laughed, but her question went unnoticed.

“No! Oh my god I’m so glad you brought that up,” Iaian exclaimed. “Literally, I cannot tell you how many times we had to do retakes because Joel wouldn’t stop looking at Isabel on and off camera.”

“Wait wait wait, are you serious?” Isabel questioned with an almost stupidly wide smile.

“Oh yeah, definitely,” Peter confirmed.

“That’s the entire reason people thought that Loraq and Kiyara were going to get together,” Erin explained. “People were shipping you guys on Twitter. Then Joel, you tweeted that picture of Isabel bringing you lunch. People started shipping you in real life.”

“Aww Joel, do you like me?” Isabel joked, but her smile faltered when she realized that the man genuinely looked flustered. “Are you okay?” She asked worriedly, leaning away from the microphones beforehand. Joel’s already red face reddened even more.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Are you worried about me?” He started off seriously but became goofy during his question, which made her giggle and shake her head.

“Jesus guys,” Peter groaned dramatically. “Just skip the formalities and date already!” Isabel blushed deeply and looked at Joel, who was already looking at her.

“How about this Friday at 8:00?” He inquired with a goofy smile. Isabel’s jaw dropped as the other whooped and hollered at his question. Then Emelia hushed them to let Isabel answer, everyone watching them eagerly.

“Sounds good. I’ll text you my address,” she responded coolly despite the fact that she was screaming on the inside.

“I can’t believe that just happened on my show,” Erin muttered, looking absolutely blown away.

“Neither can I,” Isabel breathed out with a small giggle. “You should have seen it the first time he actually asked me out.” That sent the others into chaos, everyone talking over each other while Isabel and Joel watched.

��When did you guys start dating!?” Emelia yelled, which caused Isabel to flinch then laugh at the girl.

“He asked me out after ‘Mockingbird’ wrapped,” she laughed out in the same excited tone. Emelia mouthed the episode name then looked at her with wide eyes.

“Are you serious? The second episode he was in? And you didn’t tell me?” One would think that all that yelling would calm down laughter, but on the contrary, Isabel was nearly out of breath.

“I’m sorry!” She exclaimed. Erin was still laughing when she decided to step in.

“Wait, so do you mind walking us through what happened?” She asked, and Isabel admired his sincerity. She glanced at Joel, silently asking permission. When he gave her a nod of confirmation, she looked around at the others.

“So, obviously we originally met during season four, when Hizdahr zo Loraq was first introduced. We talked a couple times between scenes, but then he isn’t really heard from so Joel wasn’t really there. Then season five came around and we got to know more about each other and he finally asked me out after the fourth episode. And that’s it,” she explained with a shrug. Iain just stared at them appalled.

“I am just in shock that you guys managed to keep it so exclusive,” he spoke, shaking his head as he did so. Joel shrugged from beside her.

“Well, we wanted to wait until the right time. Just to see if we could work, you know?” Isabel’s already wide smile widened when Joel’s arm slithered around her shoulders, only to pull away a second later. She looked at him confusedly then let out a small scream when he pulled her chair closer by the seat so he could comfortably rest his arm around her shoulders. She blushed shyly then hid her face as the others cooed rather loudly at them. Joel also cooed in her ear then pressed an affectionate kiss to the crown of her head. This was probably the best thing that ever happened to the both of them.

2021

“Hello once again everyone! My name is Erin Miller and I welcome you back to Candid,” Erin greeted happily with a wave that gave both Joel and Isabel a sense of deja vu. “Today I am once again joined by Joel Fry and Isabel Abbott who are here to talk about their new movie Cruella, which premiered in theaters and on Disney+ on May 28,” she paused to face the couple. “Hello you two, long time no see.” Joel and Isabel waved at the camera in unison then faced Erin with bright smiles.

“Yeah, at least since 2015,” Isabel answered.

“Yeah, you guys look good,” Erin complimented honestly. “And I hear that you guys are married now,” she cooed.

“Yeah,” Joel trailed off coyly. Erin giggled and clapped her hands.

“Can I see the rings?” She asked eagerly. Joel and Isabel nodded at each other then took off their rings to show both Erin and the cameras.

“Now, what is this engraved on the inside of it?” Erin questioned, leaning forward to get a better look.

“Mine says ‘you are my moon and stars that paint the sky,’” Isabel answered.

“And mine says ‘you are the sun to my moon, light of my life,’” Joel continued.

“They’re references to quotes we said during the show,” Isabel explained further. “So, during season four not long after we’re introduced to Hizdahr and they were talking about their fathers, she said the line, ‘Everytime a good man dies, they are added to the night sky to paint stars as pretty as the moon. That’s where I believe your father is.’ It was probably my favorite line of the show.”

“Oh yeah,” Erin reminisced. “I remember that. That was a good episode. Joel, what about yours?”

“This was actually during season five when Kiyara visited Hizdahr while he was imprisoned. She had brought him food and he asked her to stay for conversation. I don’t… remember what they were talking about…”

“What love meant to them,” Isabel interrupted before looking around. “Right?”

“Yeah,” Joel answered as the scene came back to him. “Yeah, so it was right after Daenerys said that she would marry him to hold a strong bond. They were preparing a room for him and Hizdahr was not very happy about the forced engagement. Kiyara came down to visit him and they talked about what love meant to them. Hizdahr said that when his father talked about his mother, he’d say that she was the sun to his moon and that she was the light of his life. Those words had stuck with him and he always thought that when he married, he’d feel the same about his wife.”

“Oh so these are based on quotes you actually said to each other?” Erin asked. Isabel blushed and nodded.

“Now, can I ask, why did you decide on Game of Thrones inspired rings and quotes?”

“Because that’s how we met,” Joel answered kindly as he and his wife put their rings back on. “If I hadn’t been cast as Hizdahr zo Loraq, then I don’t think we ever would have met because we had both been shooting different things before and after we were killed off on the show. Like, I was cast in You, Me, and the Apocalypse then Ordinary Lives. She was cast in Doctor Who for a while then Me Before You. Before that I was in Plebs and she was in Once Upon a Time. We didn’t have a lot of time between our schedules, but we made it possible, and look at us now. I owe the Game of Thrones cast and crew everything, because of them I met and later married the love of my life.” Both Erin and Isabel awed at him and the latter hugged him tightly.

“Aw babe! That was so sweet,” she exclaimed.

“You’re going to make me sad that I’m single,” Erin joked.

“Maybe you should get cast in an HBO show,” Joel joked back, making the girls giggle.

“Anyways, moving onto Cruella,” Erin said after a minute. “Yet again we are met with romantic tension with your characters Jasper and Angela.” Isabel shrugged, a bashful smile gracing her face. This would be a long day.

#joel fry #joel fry x oc #i'm joel fry trash

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filmista · 4 years ago

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Gilda (1946): An uncoventional femme fatale

-Isn't it wonderful? Nobody has to apologize, because we were both stinkers, weren't we? Isn't it wonderful? -Wonderful.

Gilda could be the ultimate example of a film in which a single scene transcends the entire film, making the viewer forget about everything. Some may not have even seen it yet, but they do know of that iconic striptease.

What is film noir without the relationship between the protagonists? What is left in a film noir when we strip it of this element, of those murky and sickly as well as fascinating relationships?

Make no mistake: the sophistication that characterizes film noir would be meaningless without the protagonists. And in this sense, Gilda has its own characteristics, something of a film noir, but with a development in its characters very different from the genre.

Here, the femme fatale doesn’t need a man to lead "to perdition." Her reason for being isn’t that, far from it. Therefore, Gilda breaks with that film noir rule; here the protagonists drag each other in that whirlpool that only brings misfortunes, which is resolved in a totally different way in this film.

One of the characteristics of film noir is that of the love triangle although, in this case, we could speak of two love triangles, one of them very particular. At the beginning of the film, we see Ballin rescue Farrell from the street, from the underworld of Buenos Aires.

He has saved his life; one feels indebted and the other responsible for the act. Next we see the third component of this triangle, the cane. A cane that hides a a deadly weapon.

Ballin: It is a most faithful and obedient friend: it is silent when I want it to be silent, but talks when I want it to talk.

Farrell: Is that your idea of a friend?

Ballin: That is my idea of a friend.

It’s not trivial to consider that cane as another member of the relationship between the two men; in fact, when Ballin introduces Gilda, Farrell says: "I thought we were three already”, referring to the cane.

That strange triangle is agreed upon and closed with the following words by Ballin: “This I must be sure of, that there is no woman anywhere. Gambling and women do not mix.” Farrell becomes Ballin's right-hand, his best friend and confidant.

And there it is, the second triangle, and this time, the real one. Ballin appears with his new wife, Gilda, Farrell's old love. As they walk up the stairs, guided by Gilda's siren song, Farrell mumbles an "I hope everything is as before", which sounds more like a wish that he knows won’t be fullfiled; his relationship with Ballin isn’t going to be the same as before. He stands at the bedroom door while we see on his face that he recognises the voice, that voice that he has heard sing so many times in the past.

Ballin tells him that "he seems stunned" listening from the doorway. When Farrell reminds him of the "no women" pact, Ballin replies "my wife is not a woman.” And it is then when Ballin asks Gilda the question:

-Ballin: Are you decent? -Gilda: Sure I’m decent.

The tension between Gilda and Farrell is evident. We don't know what happened between them (that could be another movie), but the wound there is palpable; Ballin is no stranger to that, he realises it perfectly. The Casino workers notice too, in fact they joke about it. When Ballin asks Gilda not to call him "Mr. Farrell", but Johnny, she says "Johnny is a very difficult name to remember and very easy to forget."

And here that obsessive triangle unfolds, so obsessive that, despite Ballin's suspicions that Johnny and his wife knew each other from before, he asks him to stay near her, to take care of her. It seems to be a game that Ballin enjoy. That macabre game reaches its height during a dinner in which the three share a table, in which they toast the misfortune of the woman who made Johnny suffer:

Ballin Mundson : Now then, before we were interrupted, I believe we were about to drink a toast. So: disaster to the wench who did wrong by our Johnny. No, Gilda? You won't drink to that?

Gilda : Why not? Disaster to the wench!

When Farrell admits to Ballin that they knew each other from before, he says, "I taught her what she knows." Up to that point we can imagine what Johnny has meant in Gilda's life. Thinking that Ballin is dead, Gilda and Johnny get married in a wedding that could predict what comes next: we only see her through a window, through the rain that falls outside.

Johnny begins to punish her by leaving her alone, humiliating her, to such an extent that she has to go see him at the office: “Hello. Do you remember me? I am Gilda, your wife ”. Farrell enjoys humiliating her; He lights her cigarette by placing the lighter at waist height, so she has to "bow" to light the cigarette.

She married Ballin out of revenge on Johnny, and he marries her to humiliate her. So much so, that their new home is dominated by a huge portrait of Ballin. She is a prey to her past. She tries to run away from Johnny, but wherever she tries to go, he torments her.

When everything is over, Gilda surrenders and decides to leave the country; He returns to ask her to leave together, while apologizing for his behavior: “We were both scoundrels. Isn’t it wounderful". That obsessive triangle becomes a couple of neurotics, in which with their strange relationship of emotional dependence., they feed each other until they reach the point of recognising that it’s wonderful that they don’t have to ask for forgiveness or that anyone is guilty of anything, the two have been just as awful.

But Ballin returns from the shadows to claim what is his: his wife.

But prophetically it’s a member of the previous triangle, the knife hidden in the cane, that is going to solve this triangle, and this time forever. Ballin dies at the hand of his best friend,

The tagline for the film announced that "there is no woman like Gilda". There may not be a more iconic female character in film history. She has such strength on screen that perhaps because of that the viewer may not have been able to judge her in depth. She has nothing to do with the rebellious woman we all thought her to, nor is she a man-eater; Gilda is simply different. She is a woman with an apparent happiness, that hides an immense sadness and melancholia.

A woman who complains about "so many people and so much loneliness.” Her need for attention and love is palpable. From the moment she meets Johnny Farrell, The expression on her face changes: the past has returned. When Johnny first goes to the ballroom run by Ballin, he meets a beautiful woman and, when he asks about her they tell him: she is a harpy.

Harpies, fantastic beings with the face of a woman and the body of a bird of prey. In Greek mythology, they were the beings in charge to enforce the punishment of Zeus to Fineo, stealing his food. Later on, various traditions gave them malevolent connotations, carriers of catastrophes.

When Ballin appears to be dead, Farrell finds himself between two harpies reading Ballin's will and instructions.

Gilda can’t be considered the classic film noir femme fatale. She seeks to torment Johnny, but in order to make him jealous, her end goal is not money, as is often the case with the film noir woman; She is in love with him, she marries Ballin for money, yes, but it’s a question that Ballin was not oblivious to when he married her; for him she is a beautiful and hungry little girl.

He feels like a man, he realises himself as such by feeding her. But Gilda's wound is very deep; referring to Farrell, she says: "I was once loyal to a man, and look what happened." Ballin justifies her marriage to him: “She said she was born the day she met me. The three of us have no past, only future. Interesting, right?". Those same words are the ones Johnny used when he met Ballin, who had been born the day he met him.

There are two very important themes in Gilda: hatred, hatred that’s been shaped by Gilda’s pain. She reiterates many times how much she hates Johnny, but it’s a simple excuse; She loves him so much that she has had to turn the feeling into hate as a barrier against pain: “Hate can be a very intense emotion (…). Hate is the only thing that warms me. ”

And Farrell in turn thinks about her: “I hated her so much that I couldn't forget her. I was in the air I breathed.” The reunion with Johnny makes her want to plunge into a self-destructive spiral that, that would destroy everything she knows. Her words to Johnny are very significant: "I hate you so much that I would destroy myself to drag you down with me."

But the love game she plays with Johnny reveals something else: She doesn’t hesitate to be seen with other men to arouse his jealousy, a game into which she falls very easily. At the Carnival, with another identity, with a mask, they dance as it seems they did before. She’s mischievous: “I can help you regain practice. I mean dancing. "

He asks her to throw her hat back. He shoves her away violently while she laughs amused. The love-hate game between them is very powerful. We can’t forget the famous slap that he gives her ... although he doesn’t escape a few himself. The game of erotic power play and violence often present in film noir is very noticeable here.

When he takes Gilda home, she does’t hesitate to stress again and again that they are alone. He can’t avoid the temptation and goes up to the bedroom. She has removed her disguise, she is Gilda again, a Gilda in the shadows. They hesitate whether to approach each other or not: "I hate you so much that I think I'm going to die from it ... darling." Their neurotic behaviour could be summed up in this phrase, in that kiss during which the two explode when they say that they hate each other to death.

Gilda’s death drive leads her to an obsessive superstition, another important theme in this film, in which she leaves her life and actions in the hands of that belief, she sees signs everywhere and subjects her life to that destiny. The night the three of them toast to the misfortune that Johnny suffered (herself), she is afraid to drink the glass, as if consuming the champagne closes a pact with the devil.

But after a moment of doubt, she drinks without hesitation, as if that liquid were a poison and she wanted to die right there. She doesn’t care that she’s toasting to her own misfortunes. She’s so superstitious that when she tells the maid, she asks her not to repeat it. Whilst being in luck at roulette someone says "lucky in the game, unlucky in love", and she stops playing to avoid tempting luck. On her wedding day with Johnny, a lonely, sad and glamorousness wedding, a wedding that we as spectators only see through a window, she says: “The rain has stopped. Maybe it means something. ”

Of course Gilda is not the typical film noir woman. She is a tremendously sad woman, sadness caused by love, and who seeks to flee from herself, from everything inside herself.

A woman afraid of her husband and destiny, fearful of life, in a word. In the end, feeling cornered by everyone, the only thing left for her to do is a farewell worthy of her, an iconic dance: She knows she’s being observed by everyone, especially by Johnny. A song in which she asks to blame someone else, "Put the blame on me."

Don't blame Gilda; she’s already fleeing Buenos Aires. But Johnny asks her to go with her. What was Gilda looking for? To be loved. Nothing more, nothing less. Gilda represents the “whore” who wants to emancipate herself to become a mother. Almost no woman in film noir is a mother, a femme fatale is not a mother, she’s a temporary distraction and obstacle to the hero.

But Gilda wants to escape such a condition, and we could really see her as a loving mother and living together with Johnny. In Gilda the woman could be seen as a symptom of the man, Gilda comes to substitute those other symptoms that these men have (sadistic in the case of Ballin, vengeful in the case of Farrell), and take them out on her.

Film noir always plays with appearances: nothing is what it seems to be. But in Gilda, this premise turns to "but in the end everything was what it seemed to be." That game of appearances, like at the Carnival, ends when the participants remove their mask, this time, in a violent way. Neither is Ballin the good Samaritan who saves lives altruistically, nor is his Casino his main activity, not even his death is true. We are shown his shadow on different occasions, in profile; we never see him fully.

Gilda and Johnny’s life is also a lie, to bear their pain. The Casino is itself a lie, a place that Ballin uses to hide his work, and that he has arranged to be able to see without being seen. His office is upstairs, from where, thanks to a set of lights, blinds and windows, he can see everything, like an omniscient God.

It’s the only way out of the suffocating atmosphere of the game room. Gilda is no stranger to what that game of points of view can provide to her, on two occasions she knows she’s being observed by Johnny, she seeks to be observed by him, but she doesn’t see him watching her, as if he doesn't want to see her face and guess what she’s thinking at the moment. The final moment, Gilda’s iconic dance, seems meticulously prepared for him to observe her, but also for him to see how others look at her. What does Farrell do? He stops her. He can’t stand what’s happening.

Doesn't that moment remind us of this one from Paris, Texas?

Or this one?

Two absolutely different women, but in a sense mirrors of each Gilda is the whore who wants to emancipate herself to become a mother; Jane is the mother who emancipates herself and becomes a whore, once Travis appears, she takes the path back to that role of mother. Could that moment that game of points of view, be the beginning of that emancipation, of that path?

That claustrophobic environment and that game of viewpoints is exemplified in Gilda and Johnny's wedding: We only see her through a window, through a rain curtain, we don't even hear what is being said inside the room. We are spectators. But aren’t we during the entire film?

Gilda’s iconic phrase: If I'd been a ranch, they would have named me "The Bar Nothing.", is now more ironic than ever. No, she is not the free woman we were made to believe; she has an owner, Johnny. The mare is back with the stallion.

@purecinema @idasessions @missdubois @mad-prophet-of-the-airwaves

#fave #took me ages to write #gilda #gilda 1946 #charles vidor #rita hayworth #glenn ford #film noir #40’s cinema #cinema #movies #films #film review #movie review #movie analysis #film analysis #filmista

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365daysofsasuhina · 4 years ago

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[ @sasuhinabigflash2020 || Day Twenty-Three: They’re Better Than That ] [ Uchiha Sasuke, Hyūga Hinata, Uzumaki Naruto ] [ SasuHina, vulgarity ] [ Verse: Of Monsters and Men ] [ AO3 Link ]

[ Previous ] [ Next ] [ This piece is a sequel to Days Fourteen and Eighteen ]

Well...Sasuke can say this is certainly a first. And hopefully a last, as far as his career is concerned. Because as a hunter of monsters...working with one is the last thing he should be doing.

Though if he thinks about it...this isn’t the first partnership between himself and this soft-spoken harpy. When he’d targeted her as a potential trophy to prove himself as a Hunter, he’d instead ended up saving her life, teaming up with her against a far more dangerous threat: a vampire.

That, of course, wasn’t exactly planned on either of their parts. Sasuke never intended to spare a monster, and Hinata the harpy never expected to be allowed to live by a Hunter. But the most irritating thing - from Sasuke’s stance, at least - was Hinata’s insistence in her debt to him.

As it turns out...her kind take debt very, very seriously. ‘To the grave’ sort of serious. And now, she owed him her life.

Or so she claimed.

And Sasuke was not happy about that. It was bad enough he let her go, worse still that he lied to his family and clan of Hunters about it. He’d planned on simply avoiding her from then on, but Fate had another idea: to put her in the range of his first official case, looking into an illegal gambling ring run by a kitsune...or werefox, as they’re more technically called.

As it so happens, Hinata seems to know the man in question: one named Naruto, according to her. He’s already had a run-in with monster law, or Nightwalkers as they all call themselves. You’d think that would be enough to send him running him with his tail tucked between his legs. But just in case...Sasuke decides to pay him a visit. See if he can end this without violence.

Oh, if his father could see him now...he’s likely exile him.

But Hinata has pleaded on this Naruto’s behalf. Sure, he’s been swindling humans and risking an exposure of the worlds to one another, but apparently he’s really not a bad guy.

Sasuke will believe that when he sees it. But he promised Hinata he’d do what he could to avoid bloodshed.

Why? He’s not even sure anymore. Maybe he’s too soft to be a Hunter as his father feared. But...too late now.

“How much further?”

“His scent is getting pretty strong,” Hinata assures him softly. “Likely within a block.”

“You can really smell him?”

She glances to him curiously. “Yes…?”

“...sorry. Guess it’s just...weird to realize. I mean I know you can. Just...weird to see it in practice.”

Staring at him for a moment, Hinata dares to ask, “Because you kill us before you can do so?”

In spite of himself, he flinches with a grimace. “...yeah.”

“...I understand. I’ve never seen one of you up close before. It’s...still a little unsettling, if...if I can be honest.”

“It’s a lot less insulting than us talking about me killing you,” Sasuke rebukes, expression still torn.

She doesn’t have a reply for that, and in fact motions for him to pause as she takes a lungful of air at a crossroads of alleyways. “...I think -”

“Whoa!”

Hinata shrinks back with an eep and a flurry of feathers, Sasuke squawking gracelessly as she hides behind him.

In front of them, leaning back and looking ready to bolt, is a man fitting Sasuke’s given description of the werefox: blond, blue-eyed, tanned...this has to be their guy.

“N...Naruto-kun!” Hinata then offers, her bird-like traits vanishing as she realizes who very nearly bumped into her.

“...oh! Uh...Hinata, right? Man, you almost gave me a heart attack!”

“S-sorry! I...I didn’t realize you were that close.”

The blond blinks. “You lookin’ for me?”

“Yes! Well...sort of…?” She gives Sasuke a wary, indicative glance. “I...I have someone here who needs to - to talk to you.”

“Uh...okay. Lookin’ to make some cash there, my dude? I’ve got a couple of really good -!”

“I’m not looking to gamble, let alone illegally,” Sasuke cuts in, already a bit annoyed by the man’s ‘too-cool’ attitude and slick way of speaking. The word ‘illegal’ makes Naruto shift his gears to a defensive posture. “I’ve been sent out by a local clan of Hunters to investigate your dealings and make sure they stop. Permanently.”

Panic laces Naruto’s face as he realizes just who and what Sasuke is. “W-whoa, wait - what? You’re a -? Aw shit, I already got lectured by that old wolf the other day, I don’t need this now, too!”

“Naruto-kun,” Hinata cuts in gently. “We...that is to say, I’m just w-worried about you. If both the Enforcers and the Hunters know about what you’ve been doing...you’re putting yourself in real danger by -!”

“No one’s seen me!” Naruto then cuts in, looking jittery. Sasuke subtly adjusts his posture, ready to give chase if he bolts. “I swear! Yeah I swindled a few Daywalkers but they’re dumb as a box of rocks! No one knows what I am, guarantee it!”

“Anyone come back angry after you swindled them?” Sasuke growls.

“No! Uh, well...okay, a few. But I can talk my way outta anything! Honest! They have no idea!”

“Your luck can’t last forever,” the Uchiha counters. “One of these days, you’re going to slip up and get caught. And if a human realizes what you are and their illusion is shattered, that’s going to make a really big mess. For me, and for your Enforcer friends. Surely you don’t want to piss us both off, right?”

Unbidden as his stress rises, a pair of golden, ink-tipped ears spring out of the man’s hair, pinned in worry. “Look, I-I don’t want any trouble, ‘ttebayo! I was just tryin’ to make a living! You know how hard it is to get a job around here?”

“I have some idea.”

“I got thrown out of the last three I had. They accused me of stealing! It wasn’t stealing, I just…” He gestures vaguely. “...it’s in my nature!”

“Wily foxes. Believe me, I know,” Sasuke mutters, arms crossing. “No-good thieves, swindlers, and con artists.”

“Hey!” Stepping between the two, Hinata puffs up, and despite them not being visible, Sasuke can still picture her feathers ruffling. “Naruto-kun isn’t a bad person - he’s better than that! Stereotypes like that hurt us a l-lot more than you know.”

“Yeah. Like birds being easily spooked and flighty?” Sasuke counters, seeing her wince. “He’s literally running an illegal gambling ring and ripping people off. He’s doing exactly what I said he’d do. And if he keeps doing it, he’s gonna lose a lot more than a job.”

“Please...there has to be s-something we can do…?”

“You, uh…” Naruto takes half a step back, hands lifted. “You’re not gonna kill me, are ya?”

“That depends entirely on what you do, fox,” Sasuke rebukes. “Because right now, I have orders to do just that to ensure you don’t stir up more trouble than you can handle and cause a major incident between humans and monsters.”

The blond pales, eyes widening.

After a pause, Sasuke sighs. “...but I’d rather not kill you. And the only way I can let that happen is if you swear that your swindling days are over. That you’re not gonna keep pulling these stunts and risk you, and a lot of other people, getting hurt because of the panic at a monster being seen. Quit the game altogether, go clean...and I can let you go.” He then steps forward, grabbing the front of the blond’s jacket and ignoring his yip of surprise. “But if I hear about any more werefoxes around here getting their paws dirty...I won’t be so merciful next time. Got it?”

Blanching, Naruto just gives several rapid nods, stumbling back as Sasuke releases his hold. “You...y-you got it, man. I-I’ll go clean! Never touch any cards or dice again, I s-swear it!”

“I’ll be holding you to that. Now get out of here and find something else to do than lurking around alleyways, huh?”

Not needing to be told twice, Naruto spins on a heel and - in a blink - shifts into a huge, two-tailed fox that bolts down the road and out of sight.

Sighing, Sasuke pinches the bridge of his nose. “...I’m gonna be in so much shit if anyone finds out about this…”

“You did the right thing,” Hinata murmurs, hands folded at her front. “I think you s-scared him straight. I’ll check in on him later and...make sure.”

He gives her an unreadable glance. “...thanks.”

Considering him, Hinata then hesitantly admits, “You’re...nothing like I thought you would be.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re...not just a killer. You think, and...you reason. I’ve always heard that Hunters are ruthless...heartless.”

Thinking of his family and their records, Sasuke barely withholds a grimace. “...I might just be an exception to the rule.”

“Well...I’m glad you are. We’re really not bad people, you know. We’re just...t-trying to survive, like everyone else. Sure, some of us stir up trouble...a-and hurt people. But then again...so do Daywalkers. Humans, I mean,” she adds after a pause. “I think maybe...you see that.”

“All I see is me failing to do my job twice now,” he sighs.

“Well...that failure meant two people are still alive,” Hinata replies softly. “...doesn’t that mean something?”

Contradictions running through his mind and giving him a headache, Sasuke waves her off. “...I dunno. But you better get home, and...I better get out of here. And you,” he adds, pointing at her, “are no longer indebted to me. You repaid me with your help tonight, so let it go.”

“But you helped my friend! If anything, I -!”

“Look, I told you: being in debt to me is dangerous for you! If anyone I know were to see me talking to you and not cutting off your head, we’d both be good as dead. You need to stay the hell away from me from now on.”

Not expecting his sharp tone, she retreats a step, eyes wide and tinged with fright. “...b-but...it was you who came looking for me -?”

“This time. And the last time. I thought this would get that debt idea out of your head, but it seems I was wrong.” Stepping up, he rests his finger against her collarbone, trying to look intimidating. “...for your own sake...never see me again.”

Unreadable flickers of emotions dart across her face. “...a-as you wish.”

Hoping he’s made his point, Sasuke stares at her a moment longer before backing away and heading back toward the main road. Why he bothered trying to warn her, he doesn’t understand. She’s a monster. His mortal enemy. What should he care if her actions get herself killed? It would just be one less of them to worry about!

...and yet...it’s getting awfully hard to draw a line between himself, and any other human he knows...and her. Sure, she can burst into feathers, but...her mannerisms, her behavior, her emotions...they’re all exactly like anyone else.

...they’re human.

Buried in his thoughts as he walks, Sasuke stands beside his bike for a long moment, not wanting to drive with his head in the clouds. Everything he’s been taught about monsters - about Nightwalkers - seems to be less and less meaningful the more he interacts with them. Decades, centuries of tradition...are they...wrong…?

Scowling to himself, Sasuke forces the dilemma aside - he needs to report back. He doesn’t have Naruto’s head to present them...and admitting he let the guy go isn’t an option. He can claim the fox escaped...but that won’t stop the hunt for him. Naruto will have to lay low for a good long while for his kin to give up the chase.

But hopefully he realizes that much.

Hoping astride his bike and kicking up the stand, Sasuke veers from the curb and turns around back toward home. He’s too tired and too frustrated to be thinking about all of this. It’s far too large a topic...and he doesn’t have all the answers. Nor can he ask anyone - questioning their oath to rid the world of monsters will surely just get him in trouble. He doesn’t even dare ask Itachi.

...so for now, he’ll just...try not to think about it.

Woo, another piece done today! No idea if there’ll be a third, but we’ll see lol Anywho, more of the new-plot monster verse! This one is growing on me, I’ll admit it. I wasn’t sure it would since I had another multi-part story in this verse with an alternate plot - I thought it’d bore me. But I’m pleasantly surprised lol - and hopefully you guys are enjoying it! I always feel like I can’t write Naruto well. So hopefully I did a passable job with him, eh heh~ Otherwise, I...guess there’s not much to say? I’ve gotta run and get some irl things done, but we’ll see about another part today. We’re still five days behind, but...better than nothing xD Hope y’all enjoyed and I’ll see you in the next one!

#sasuhinabigflash2020 #shbf2020 #sasuhina #uchiha sasuke #hyūga hinata #uzumaki naruto #vulgarity //#of monsters and men [ au ]

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zalk909192 · 5 years ago

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Wings

AfuHiru Month - 18.08.19

Day Two_ Wings Rating_ All What’s in here?_ post dystopic world, a bit of greek myth, starting bad and nice ending, soulmate, a sorf of avian au? Ao3 here, folks (Prompt List) by Nene~

I was born in a place you can call strange, by your perspective. A place where the ground is too far to be reached and all you can see is the sky under and above you. The tallest tree you’ll ever see in your life is there, with its fronds that keep nests full of winged being. Call them harpies, if you want, they call themselves Aellis. They are like the myth you already know: half-human, half-birds. Huge wings instead of arms and hands, claws instead of feet, feathers to keep them warm at night, and a head very human-like. This race has forgotten the Ground after the Earth collapsed with the Huge Flood. A lot of the elders still brag about the Ancients, but every Aellis knows deep inside that it’s just a fairy tale; ugly and weak wingless disgusting beings, with their nose stuck where the world ends, at the bottom of the Tree trunk. Always assuming, of course, that the Tree has actually an end. Nobody with some brain under his own scalp could believe in the existence of something so gross and absurd, right? The Aellis are proud and fierce animals. They have a superior intellect but without any reasons to actually use it. Their life is divided into eating leaves and telling stories. All-day long, for all their life, in eternity.

I was born on the lowest branch of the Tree, in a nest full of eggs. The rules wanted that only the Hatchlings who could spread their wings and fly on top were worth living. When the egg hatches you are pretty much like a human child already. Even without experiences, you have your instinct to follow and normally the 100% of the Hatchlings fly in a matter of two or three days. Well, I’ve been there for a whole year. And when I reach the top, it was by climbing.

When I reach the platform up in the clouds the sight made me uncomfortable. In all my life I’ve never seen the same level of horror and doom spreading in a group of people. Climbing? Nonsense, of course. And in fact, it took me one year to fight my instinct and use some logic. Then it took me seven months to reach my mother. She wasn’t very happy to see me, because she was pretty sure I was dead and if your chicken dies in the hatching, since it’s so rare, you have some vantages in the society. And I was there, climbing, to take them away from her and to bring shame on her name, which, by the way, I’ve ever known. Of course, what else could it be?

I couldn’t even speak, nor understand what the elder was saying. I remember just some fragment I don’t want to repeat. Suddenly, one of the flock grabbed me and after some vertical flying, he simply dropped me. Still, I don’t know why he did it. Maybe to see if I can fly, maybe it was simply a murder attempt. The falling was atrocious. I passed out and when I was awake again, I was alone again, in an empty nest with a useless and now hurtful and broken wing. I climbed. Again. Like a fool who wanted only some company after two years of living in solitude. They were annoyed, but in silence, they let me stick around the flock. I learned to speak and to tell a story hearing them. The only thing I’m glad they did to me was to let me listen. After some time I was so alone that I knew inside me I had only two options: staying and suffer in a nest made of loneliness, contempt and suicidal thoughts, or stop aiming to the top and descend. By all means, the second option was a better option. I was going to be dead soon anyway. I knew that there wasn’t a Ground. I knew the Ancients were a silly fantasy to scare the chicken at night. But I was a chicken and I didn’t fear a myth. I feared my reality so much more. I descended. I descended with a pair of broken wings and no hope. It is the best decision I’ve ever made.

The descending was easier than the raising, but even more dangerous. Since I couldn’t fly at all, I could just jump branch to branch hoping that my only moving wing was strong enough to deaden my falling until the next point. I still have vertigo. A harpy that suffer from vertigo, like “harpy who can’t fly” wasn’t enough. The Tree seemed with no end, I was alone again, but- Long story short, the Ground exists. Ancients exist. And like the Aellis, the Ancients see the Tree like a god. In a desolate land, an endless desert made of sand and colorful stones, the Tree is the only water supply for the Ancients, since his roots are superficial and if you cut them, the purest water will flow out of the wounds. Around the Tree there are three different villages, with three different cultures: the northern, called Estrelas, the eastern, called Sol, and the southern, called Penumbra. Penumbra is the nearest to the three, the richest one, with gardens and fountains in its squares. The people of Penumbra are the most fanatic when it comes to religious stuff; Estrelas is the kindest one, its population likes to avoid conflicts and they are grateful to have only one superficial root to harvest because that is right enough for their needs; at last, Sol. It is the biggest one, most of it is poor and with no roots, and their inhabitants usually come to collect water in the night, under the stars that they loved. Still, they are envious people by nature and they usually sleep during the day. The equilibrium of the three was granted by the presence of a common god; The Tree, of course. But what they saw me the first time, everything was suddenly tense. If the Tree is their god, I must be his spokesman. Fun fact: Aellis and Humans speak different languages. You’ve seen it coming, eh? I know. My life is a joke.

And the most important thing was; who had the right to… keep me?

The first human I saw was a child of the Estrellas village. He was so scared of me he started to scream and he ran away like bats out of hell. I was so tired, so scared and so in discomfort that the only thought I had; “I can’t believe that everything is so fixed and stable.” The Ground is a terrifying place, after a life swinging between flexible branch- I vomited. A lot. Then I was knocked out by the uncomfortable feeling of stability. When I woke up I was in the middle of a shouting crowd, but I was faster to pass out again. When I woke up for the second time, I was in a room -you have no idea what is like to be in an enclosed space for the first time, you have no idea how terrifying is not being able to look at the sky for the first time- full of white, lightweight and quiet curtains. I refused to have another panic attack. I was safe enough, I wasn’t hurt, I had still myself. With my only moving wig- (recap: I’ve never been able to fly, but one wig was broken after the murder attempt, do you remember, right?) -I removed the curtains and I saw a young woman. She has a normal face, normal hair. His legs and wings? Impressive. They were exactly how I imagined an Ancient would have. She was pretty, but monstrous at the same time. She was clearly angry at a man, who was so much taller than her and a lot muscular, and I recognize a word in their talking: “Aellis”.They were talking about me. They seemed to be important people. The man had a crown, so he was really important for sure. She had nothing like that, but she was sitting on a nice chair, the nicest chair in the room, actually, so I guessed it was like the stool of the narrator for the Aellis. I wasn’t so far from the truth. Agon Kong was the king of Estrelas and Mamori Anezaki was the High Priestess of Penumbra. There was another man I haven’t noticed in the corner of the room and he was Gen Takekura, the Spokesman of Sol. They were talking about my purpose and the role I would have in their world. Agon wanted me to bring glory to his village and to have the favor of the god, so he told, but the real intention was to take some power from Penumbra. Penumbra was terrified to lose his Holy Prophet. Mamori was at the verge of tears talking to Agon. Her fear comes to prejudice towards Estrelas people. There was a rumor about how much they love the stars, even more than… you know. The Tree. It was blasphemy and Mamori feared they could not treat me well enough. She was trembling because Agon was right; one of the Estrelas villages saw me first, so technically I should be their right to keep me. Gen Takekura, by the way, was there only because that was an official meeting but he had no interest in me. Still, he was the first to see me. He cleared his throat and pointed out at me. Mamori covered his mouth with her hands. Agon seemed ready to fight and Gen stayed still. I was confused. I glanced at the Agon’s sword, his hand was on the hilt, I’ve never seen anything like that. But I could smell the danger. And the same thing went for the arch and arrows of Gen. So, I looked Mamori in the eyes and I suddenly realized that if I couldn’t understand them, they could not understand me. Anyway. I advanced, just a few steps freeing myself from the curtains. I was like a human 11 years old with a lot of feathers, two meters of black wings, long crooked legs with huge claws at the end, blonde short spiky hair, and vivid blue eyes. Completely otherworldly. They really were mesmerized by my presence, now that I can think about it with clarity of mind. I spoke in my only language, just because it was stupid being seen and not say anything at all. Ah- it was my first time talking to someone and I choose to look at Mamori since she was unharmed. I moved the useless -but not broken- wing in a formal greeting, similar to a bow without a bow. Just with the wing. Get along with it.

« It’s an honor to meet you. »

Well, it was a wise choice said something appropriated because what happened next was totally unexpected. Mamori was instantly pale more than a full moon, she trembled more and a second later she was on her knees. And like it was nothing, she talked to me.

« The honor is ours. Please, Holy Aellis. Tell us what’s your purpose on this land. Are you here for the Great End? Another Flood is expecting us? »

In my mother tongue. And I had no idea what she was talking about. At all. I remember it was embarrassing. I froze for a moment, trying to decide what to do. I could have lied. I could have told them that I was the prophet of the Tree with a steady voice and that they had to treat me well until my death, who coincidentally should have happened the same day of the next Huge Flood. Wait. This is actually a good idea. Why I didn’t think about it? But I was young and naive. A pity, really a pity.

« I’m sorry, I know nothing about it. You ask me my purpose, but- I think my purpose is to don’t die alone. »

Something distracted me. The sky. In a hole in that solid nest. I ignored all of them and went by it to breath better.

« How do you know my tongue? What’s your name? »

Clearly, the other couldn’t understand a word. Agon and Gen had the most beautiful and pissed face I’ve ever seen, it’s one of my favorite memories.

« This is the holy language. The language of God. Only the Tree, their sons, and the High Priests know it. And my name- I don’t know if I should… I’m the High Priestess of Penumbra. »

« Ah. So you don’t have a name? »

« No, I- »

Oh god, I was an obnoxious brat.

« Tell me. »

Well, as a High Priestess, Mamori had lost her name a long time before, but if a Holy Aellis was asking, even in front of the other chiefs…

« Mamori. My lost name is Mamori. Can I ask your name, Aellis? »

I remember I smiled. It was also the first being that actually greets me.

« I don’t have one. Can you choose one for me? Please? »

I smiled again, with real joy in the eyes. And she decided to follow the flow because if she had stopped to think for a second, she would have passed out for sure. She was looking at me so incredulous.

« Yoichi, it means “the bewitching one”. Oh- I- I’m sorry, I choose a name in the modern tongue, I should have- »

« I like it! Yoichi! Yoichi is my name! »

I laughed and my heart was so full, so free. I had a name. A real one. I started crying without knowing and then I was on the floor, like the lonely child I was. Mamori came to me, she dared to touch my face in the most delicate way possible. It was too much. And I passed out again. But I had a name and I still have it. It’s the most precious gift somebody could have given to me.

Mamori is a clever girl. Knowing the other two had no clue about our conversation, she made up a story about me and my needs and in front of what his own eyes could saw, Agon had to give up. I had to stay there, no other questions needed. She taught me everything. Modern language, history, geography, myth, religion, stories. She taught me how to deal with slaves, servants, priests, chiefs. Properly, like the god they think I was. Everything was new. Everybody was nice to me. But I was missing something. My instinct struck back. Time passed, a doctor and a priest even fixed the broken wing and since I could even move both of them. That was a miracle. Still, I was missing something. Years later, I was in my prime, only one thing obsessed me at the point I wasn’t able to eat, nor sleep. The flight. The one I’ve never had. I needed to fly to find the One.

Aellis live like animals, they don’t have modesty or shame, but they must love to be at ease. They have to love one single being with all their heart for all their life to be complete. And I was in my prime and I needed it to live, to breath, to feel. I was suffering from vertigo, of course, by my nature was inevitable… I had to find a mate. I asked to Mamori. I constantly ask her if she knew a way, for me, to be in the sky. She never answered, but she understood my nature and my needs and she was suffering with me, in silence. Agon and Gen, too, understood I was not okay at all. The four of us were really good friends, at some point. I love them, of course, but it wasn’t enough. Time passed and I was in despair. I was lonely. I felt solitude again. It was unbearable. I was 19, at least. I was thinner than I should have been, but my features were like the day of my falling. Anyway, Mamori was done. Seeing her personal god and friend suffer like that was too much for her and she chooses to help in every way possible and so Gen and Agon did. One night, she opened the curtains of my room and she told me with really sad, but excited, eyes to take my cloak and be quiet. I followed her until a carriage. Then, everything was too fast for a while. She hugged me, she was crying, I said she was a crybaby and she kissed my forehead telling me to be a good boy. I didn’t understand, I didn’t have words. I didn’t understand what was happening. Inside, I saw my most precious friend after her. Agon was there with his sword. For years I asked, for fun, to let me have it and he- that night, he gave it to me. I don’t remember what he told me, but I remember I asked what was going on. And I remember his words. “We sold you for your own happiness.”

The trip was the longest I’ve ever done since my falling. It was exciting, even if both Agon and Gen didn’t want to tell me what we were doing or where we were going. I accepted my faith, anyway. I was asleep when everything stopped and I woke up. I was frail, weak, the tremors of the ride were insane and I refused to eat. I was on the 13th of self-starvation. Yes, my body was tired to suffer and I was starting to die, no biggie, went there and did that already when I was a chicken, remember? Agon took me in his arms and I strengthened my grip on his sword. I saw the entrance of a cave, rocks covered in sand. The Witch in the Cave. It was a story for children. Far away from Penumbra, a witch lives in a cave and eat the bad children who don’t listen to their parents.

« …the witch exists? »

I whispered in the night and nobody said a word, then I fell asleep for the fatigue.

Funny how every new plot twist of my life starts with an awakening in a new place. That time wasn’t different from the last one. I woke up and I stared at a ceiling I’ve never seen. No curtains. But a nice smell in the smoky air that surrounded me. I moved a little and a voice…

« Don’t move, you are dying. »

« See if I care at this point. »

I hissed with my eyes closed. That voice was… nice. Even if I were not inclined to see some obvious remarks about my situation, it sounded sweet in my ears.

« I care. I was waiting for you. »

The voice was still so sweet, so caring. I tried to open my eyes but the owner of the voice threw some kind of fabric on my face because I couldn’t open my eyes at all. I was too weak to move.

« Where are Agon and Gen? »

« Safe. Almost home, I suppose. Drink. »

A soft hand was under my head and I smelled a strangely familiar scent. I know, now, that scent was the scent of home. I drank from a bowl placed in front of me and I remembered the leaves of the Tree. Not the leaves drifting down from the sky, but the leaves that were still at their place, on the Tree.

« How- how do you have the leaves? »

« All in due time, Yoichi. »

I drank again. I sensed a drop of water on my chin. Maybe in the cave there was some infiltration of the roots. Then I fell asleep again, against my will.

I can’t remember how many days went by, at that point. Maybe a week, maybe more. All I know is that I was slowly feeling better. I had the fabric over my eyes most of the time, but I had the nice voice to ease my suffering and alleviate my boredom. It was working. It shouldn’t, but it was working for real. The voice told me I was weak for not eating in the right way for years, not only for the absence of his mate. It told me that the absence of the mate is an unbearable pain but it isn’t deadly at all; in fact, when you suffer for the Absence, you stop aging until you find the one. One day I asked why I had to stay with my eyes closed and why I couldn’t know his name. He smiled. I know he smiled, at the time.

« Because your body is not ready. »

I started to ask if I was ready, every day. Obnoxious.

At last, his answer was “yes”. My heart skipped a beat. I was strong, at that point. I knew I could move and I finally did. I removed the fabric, still with my eyes closed I just sit and I stretched my wings a bit with a crooked smile. Then, I opened them and- No words can describe that sensation. No words can explain my tears, my feeling at that moment. In front of me there was the one. My only one. My mate. My ally. My love. He was standing in the middle of the cave and he was so beautiful I couldn’t stand the sight. I clutched my head for a moment, I closed my eyes. I looked at him again. His red eyes, his blonde hair, he was the one I was ready to be devoted to. I didn’t care about other details. The second after, I was there to hug him with my wings. I had closed my eyes again and I was crying, smelling his scent and caressing him with my head.

« My name is Terumi. »

Just a whisper in my ears and I took some space to look into his beautiful eyes.

« I love you. »

« I know. »

« How this thing works? »

« I’m not sure, but I- I love you too. »

My heart still hurts after all this time, if I think about it. The joy was unbearable just like the pain. It’s crazy, I love him in the same way even now. But at that time, I just kissed him and everything was perfect. Until I realize something. After the first kiss of my life, the first thing I said was full of disconcertment;

« But you don’t have wings. »

And his smile. His perfect smile. I don’t care about the wings if I can have that smile.

« I had. »

Terumi stepped back escaping his wings and with his human arms, he took off his vest and turned around, revealing two scars on the shoulder. They were huge, almost gross. I couldn’t care less, actually. I was wondering just if I was allowed to love a human, but nothing was more important than that smile. I kissed him again, and again. I’ve never stopped.

Terumi was an Aellis. He was an Aellis from another Tree, another nest. He has been without a mate for the longest time, in his Tree, for so long he waited. A life. Another life. He lost the count of his years. He was so desperate he just descended the tree and once he was on the Ground, he was captured by a group of nomads. There wasn’t a religion, in that area of the desert, he was just a strange slave. They tortured him, they took away his wings and his claws. Anyway, his physical pain wasn’t worse than the other one. A few seconds later he was saved by another group of nomads. They practiced the arts of witchcraft. And they saved him like he was a mere human. He was wingless and still alive. He stuck with them until the group died of old age and stayed with the last one in the cave. She told him that Destiny has its way. And so he waited. Even after the death of the old witch, and he took her place. He waited. Until Mamori found him, looking for the witch who maybe could do something for her friend, for her god. Against her own faith, against her own rules, he was there to ask the witch to help, because she had an Allies who was suffering and her religion wasn’t enough. He told her to bring the Allies to his cave soon before it was too late. And so she did.

This is my story. From that, it starts ours. I always tell our story, the bright and beautiful one. The one in which we return to Penumbra, the one filled with love and happiness, near my family, my people, near my love, never again in a nest of solitude. But this is my last story, the ugly one, with a bit of his story. I’ll be dead soon. My love is already gone and so I have to. Don’t be sad about me, because I can’t wait to be his wings again.

//I’m too tired to say something, now. I’m done, I’m going to sleep. Somewhere it’s still the 18 of Agust

I DID IT

ENJOY

(A lot of this are missing and I’m not happy, this whole world was worthy of some other details, sigh. Maybe later. Also, the last part is too rushed and it shows. Not happy at 100%, but still. A bit proud. )

#afuhirumonth2019 #hiruma yoichi #afuro terumi #inazuma eleven #eyeshield 21 #fanfiction #crossover #au #harpies #bad at tagging #avian

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serenlyss · 5 years ago

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Reach

(Alternatively titled: Reach (for things you thought were gone forever))

Rating: G Pairings: ritshou, very small background terumob Summary: “Are you an angel?” Shou croaks, suddenly very sure that he must be dying, because this boy is so different from the rumors he’s heard from the people in his village that there’s no way he can be a harpy. He finds himself smiling despite the realization that his death is soon approaching, and murmurs, “You’re beautiful. If this is what dying is, I don’t think I’d mind going with you.” As it would turn out, not all fairy tales are born from imagination. Crossposted to AO3: Reach

Oh my gosh it's finally done. This AU was born from a half-baked desire to write a wings au with ritshou and I've been feverishly writing it for like 5 days now. I'm really excited to share it and super proud of how it turned out, so I hope you all enjoy it too! I had a lot of fun writing in a more poetic, descriptive style. Depending on how the inspiration hits I may write more of this au in the future as well, and make it into a little series. For now though, have this 12k+ word monstrosity.

---

Shou’s starting to regret not telling anyone where he’d planned on going.

His thoughts had started out innocently enough. The rumors of mythical creatures and terrifying monsters that lurked in the thick woods near his little village had always intrigued him, drawing his attention to the shadowy woods he’d been reminded from the time he could walk to never wander into.

Some of the stories are very obviously untrue, like the one that claims that a fearsome dragon sleeps within the shade of the forest’s tallest trees, guarding mountains of gold. They’re the kinds of fables meant to scare people from wandering off too far, but everyone is aware that dragons don’t exist. Even if they did exist, Shou doubts one would choose to live in a place as boring and uninteresting as this.

The other tales are slightly more believable to Shou. They’re stories that had probably sprung from a person’s real memories, stories spun with bravado and just a little extra embellishment each time they’d been told until they’d evolved into fairy tales in their own right. These are the ones that speak of monsters lurking beneath fishing boats, waiting to snap up any poor soul who happens to tumble from the safety of their ship, of human-faced animals that draw you in with sweet words only to lure you to your own inevitable death. Terrifying and malevolent creatures whose only interest in a person is to tear them apart.

Of all his people’s myths and fables, there’s only one that manages to pique Shou’s interest enough to draw him away from the safety of his town. These are the stories about the harpies, a horrifying combination of bird and man, a creature with the talons of an eagle and the face of a woman that could never be satisfied, always ravenous, searching endlessly for its next meal. They’re said to be terrifying, bloodthirsty, beautiful creatures, and Shou can’t help but want to meet one in person.

He knows, rationally, that he’s as good as dead if the rumors are true, but it’s not like he has anything more to go off of, or anything better to do. He’s terribly bored of his uninteresting, lonesome daily life, where the only exciting thing to come to his front door is the salesman trying ceaselessly to sell him things he doesn’t need. So, one day he packs up a bag with his sketchbook and some art supplies and a snack in case he gets hungry and sets off into the woods without a word. He knows that if he tells his neighbors where he’s going, they’ll try to stop him, and that sounds like more of a pain than Shou’s willing to put up with, so he doesn’t tell them. It’s not like he’ll be gone for long, anyway.

---

As it turns out, Shou is very, very wrong about the length of time it’ll take to reach the thicker center of the forest, and even more wrong about being confident in his ability to read his map. By the time he’s a few hours into his walk, he can’t tell what direction he’s moving in anymore, and he’s turned the map over half a dozen times trying to reorient himself. Eventually, he gives up and crumples the map into a ball, shoving it into the pocket of his backpack in frustration. Way to go, idiot, he scolds himself, shoving his hands into the pockets of his pants as he continues to trudge ever forward, you’ve screwed yourself. This stupid forest is impossible to navigate, and now you’ve gone and gotten yourself lost.

The forest is like a maze, trees so close together that it’s impossible for Shou to see more than a few hundred feet in front of him at any time. It’s huge, too; Shou swears he’s been walking in a straight line since he entered the forest hours ago, but he still hasn’t reached the other side. His feet are starting to ache from the uneven terrain beneath his shoes and his neck is slick from sweat that beads from a combination of the hot, humid weather that accompanies the transition from summer to fall and the fact that he hasn’t stopped walking since he first stepped foot in the woods. He hasn’t even brought any water with him, certain that he’d be in and out in a few hours at most.

Shou walks and walks and doesn’t let himself stop to rest, too worried that if he stops he’ll forget what direction to walk in and never find the edge of the forest. It isn’t until the sun has fallen behind the horizon and the trees in front of him are almost too deep in the shadows to make out that he finally stops to sleep, curled up in the thick grass and undergrowth with his jacket wrapped tightly around his shoulders.

After five days of waking, walking, unfolding his crumpled map and futilely attempting to find his way back to his village, the lack of food and water is really starting to get to him. He hasn’t come across anything salvageable, not even a forest stream he could drink from to stave off the dehydration that makes his limbs feel heavy and his tongue thick and dry in his mouth. His skin shimmers in an ever-present layer of sweat as the liquid slowly seeps from his pores, and he’s powerless to do anything about it. Even though the sun doesn’t touch him very often through the trees, the humidity and heat grips him strongly, their fingers digging in and wringing every last drop of water from his body until he starts to feel the telltale dizziness and nausea shutting him down from the inside out. His brain turns to fog and his legs to jelly, but still he walks, knowing that the moment he stops is the moment he gives up on living.

In the end, it’s a gangly tree root that does him in. It catches him around his toes and makes him lose his footing, and he lets out a hoarse yelp as he’s thrown swiftly and certainly to the ground. He hits it shoulder first, arms not quick enough to catch him on his hands, and the shock of it sends cramps up his arm and down his back. He winces, sure that it’ll leave a terrible bruise.

He attempts to push himself to his feet, to continue his endless walking, but his legs won’t listen to him anymore. His arms can hardly support the weight of his torso, and after a few fruitless seconds he lets himself flop uselessly onto his back. The sun is setting, spots of white appearing against dark blue as the last rays of daylight throw long shadows across the forest floor and plunge his surroundings into a thick and unyielding darkness.

He blinks slowly, eyes falling shut for a few seconds before he forces them open again. His limbs are heavy, not an ounce of energy left over to lift them with, and as he stares up at the open sky above him he finds himself unable to make out the stars anymore, vision too fuzzy to separate the white from black. He lets out a shaky breath, feeling the weak breeze stir the hair that arches away from his face. Why did I come here? he wonders to himself, regret creeping under his skin and settling there. This was so stupid… He feels a tears leak out of the corner of his eye, streaking down his face and disappearing into the creases of his ear. He hadn’t thought he’d have any water left in his body to cry with, and yet here he is. He can’t even reach up to wipe the trail of wetness away.

Behind his head, he hears the sound of tall grass rustling under soft, light footfalls. He doesn’t even try to turn to see what animal has stumbled upon him, eyes half-lidded. He knows he’s as good as dead, and whatever scavenger has happened upon him must know it, too. By morning, he'll be long gone, and the animals will pick him to pieces until there are only bones remaining. Maybe one day, he muses to himself in a delirious haze, some scientist will finally make it out here and find my skeleton. They’ll say I was killed by the harpies, and make up stories about a fantastic battle I must have been in… I’ll become the story they tell their kids to scare them away from the forest. The thought brings a bittersweet smile to his face, a brief flash of humor that quickly dies as the feather-light footsteps draw closer.

He listens as the creature approaches him, crushing grass and dry leaves underfoot, until it pauses right behind his head. Its form casts a shadow over him, and through his hazy vision he sees it bend down to look at him. He furrows his brow, fighting to focus his blurry eyes enough to make out the thing that most certainly will be eating him once he finally kicks the bucket, and finds that it’s not an animal at all.

The creature lowers itself to its knees, half-crouched over Shou’s head. Two hands reach out and brush against his cheeks, soft and incredibly careful, but the touch is not quite human. Through his eyelashes, Shou can make out slim shoulders and a slender neck that leads to a head that is distinctly human-shaped, and he can see the shock of black hair that falls into the creature’s face and frames shining eyes with its long strands. Shou’s eyes open wider, a gasp of awe caught in his throat. Two sprawling, shimmering wings curl around the creature and shield Shou’s upper body from the outside, falling over him like a dome and blocking out what little light the half-set sun provides. Hundreds of pitch-black feathers hover over him now, like the ones from the crows he sees outside his modest house, picking at the neighbor’s garden. Something about this creature’s wings is ethereal, however, the kind of vision that can only be conceived in lucid dreams and supernatural visions. His expression swims into focus gradually, revealing an impassive, boyish face framed with those same dark feathers. There’s something melancholic about his expression, a wistful, empathetic look in his eye that makes Shou’s failing heart skip a beat in his chest.

“Are you an angel?” he croaks, suddenly very sure that he must be dying, because this boy is so different from the rumors he’s heard from the people in his village that there’s no way he can be a harpy. He finds himself smiling despite the realization that his death is soon approaching, and murmurs, “You’re beautiful. If this is what dying is, I don’t think I’d mind going with you.”

The boy doesn’t react to Shou’s words. He doesn’t even know if this mystical, ominous, alluring creature can understand his language, though he likes to believe the near-imperceptible lift of his eyebrows is an indication that maybe he can after all. If he does, he makes no effort to respond, simply slides his hands along Shou’s cheeks to gently cup his face between them. He leans over Shou’s unmoving form until his face is mere inches away, his warm breath ghosting over Shou’s skin. Shou wrinkles his nose instinctively against it, feels feathers tickling the bare skin of his arms, and then the boy closes the gap between them.

Shou feels lips press against his, warm and soft, and he draws in a shocked breath through the corners of his mouth. The kiss is careful and awkwardly angled, Shou’s head turned in the wrong direction for it to feel natural, but there’s no discomfort behind it. The dark-haired boy lets out a long sigh against his lips that fills his lungs with fuzz and butterflies, the sensation sending tremors down his spine and raising goose bumps along his arms. A numbness starts in the pit of his stomach and spreads outward, a comfortable heaviness weighing down his limbs and making his eyelids droop as though he’s about to fall asleep. So this is what dying feels like, he thinks, the last thought his brain can manage before his eyes fall closed and he succumbs to the darkness pulling at his mind for good.

---

Shou regains consciousness in phases. The first thing to return to him is his sense of touch, poking at the edges of his foggy mind in the form of a weight that pushes him down into something soft. He feels pleasantly warm and cozy, his head cushioned by a material that reminds him of the soft wool he sheers off of the sheep in his village every summer. His fingers twitch when he realizes he can feel them again, but he doesn’t dare move lest he ruin the comfort of the moment too quickly.

The next thing to return to him is his hearing. He registers, faintly, the sound of movement not far from where he’s laying, the clang of metal on metal or the shifting of fabric nearby. At one point he hears the sound of someone humming in a voice he doesn’t recognize, a melody that comes across only slightly out of tune. The humming is incredibly alluring, and the more he listens, the more he’s desperate to find the source of the voice so he can tell them how mundanely beautiful it is.

It’s this desire that prompts Shou to open his eyes at last. He blinks a few times, letting his eyes adjust to the light that filters into the room from the skylight overhead. He wiggles his feet experimentally, legs shifting beneath a thin blanket that’s been tucked around him securely. He takes a deep breath, then rolls onto his side with little difficulty, propping himself up on one elbow so he can orient himself in his new surroundings.

It doesn’t take him long to realize that he’s not dead after all, the pains in his head and soreness in his shoulder from when he’d fallen an indicator that this isn’t the afterlife. He lifts one hand sluggishly to rub his eyes before glancing around, taking in the humble room he’s found himself in.

He’s laying on a bed atop a mattress stuffed with sheep’s wool and feathers, it’s edges carefully shaped to allow for a flat, comfortable surface to rest on. The afghan now bunched around his waist is also made of wool, dyed and knit by hand from the looks of it, and Shou takes a moment to run his fingers over the surface of it admiringly before he slides his sluggish legs out from under it. If it isn’t for the ache in his head and shoulder he might think he’s dreaming, with the way his fuzzy mind doesn’t quite grasp reality and the soft but constant hummed tune tries to lull him back to bed. He feels like he’s crossed over into another world, bare feet sinking into the coarse fur of the elk pelt that covers a portion of the house’s wooden floor.

The whole house appears to be one single room. The bed Shou is sitting on is set up against the wall furthest from the front door, nestled comfortably in the corner under a window. A shelf housing rows of neatly-folded clothes sits beside an identical empty one, and on the other side of that he can see a second bed, a matching knit afghan neatly tucked around it. It looks like it’s been tucked in very carefully and deliberately.

Gripping the shelf at his side, Shou hauls himself uncertainly to his feet. He sways slightly, reaching his other hand up to his face for a moment as a wave of dizziness washes over him. It passes, though, the dark spots clearing after a few seconds. He releases his hold on the shelf, taking a shaky breath to steady himself before he continues to explore the little cottage.

A neat kitchenette is set up against one wall, a large wood stove and oven taking up most of the space. A stone chimney rises from it to vent the smoke, disappearing through the sturdy roof of the house. Wooden countertops line the rest of the wall, held up by thin, hand-carved beams slotted into holes in the floor, and on top of them lay bowls of fruit and jars of various spices, filling the house with a mixture of aromas that make Shou’s nose tingle. Above the countertops, rows of shelves hold bowls, pans, pots, plates, and even some utensils. Large spoons and spatulas hang in rows from hooks underneath them, each one just a little different from the others.

In the center of the room is a modest kitchen table, made from smooth wood and accompanied by four matching chairs. In the center of it, a woven doily cushions a tall, thin glass vase, inside of which are resting a handful of sunflowers. A few brown, dry petals have fallen from them, but they look otherwise healthy and alive, their clipped ends half-submerged in clear water. Shou smooths his hand over the natural wood, feeling the veins and notches beneath his fingertips. The table is finished with a lacquer that gives off a pleasant floral scent, like lavender. Shou’s never seen a table this nice before, not even in the huge houses of the richest people in his town. He can’t help but marvel at all the personal touches he sees all over the place, each and every item in the house handmade with a skill and precision that he’s only seen from the master carpenters that come to sell their wares in his tiny village.

The house’s third wall is lined from floor to ceiling with shelves. Some of them contain little trinkets - shiny rocks, wooden carvings, stuffed dolls with embroidered eyes and patchwork limbs, beaded necklaces and polished rings - while others are filled entirely with books. They come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, brightly colored spines propped up next to black ones. Some of them look like they’ve been bound in a factory, their pages perfectly even and titles printed on, while others are bound with string and leather and are labeled by hand with dark ink. Shou can tell their owner has organized them very intentionally, but he can’t quite figure out how. Fiction novels sit beside textbooks on physics and mathematics, historical journals lay propped between children’s picture books, and in one corner he even manages to find a few books in a different language, all of them written by hand.

He pulls one out and thumbs through it briefly, and finds it filled with still-life drawings between lines of text he can’t read. There are illustrations of mountain scenery, of lakeshores sprouting cattail reeds and waterfalls careening over jagged cliffs. There are sketches of fruits and flowers, animals and cloudy skies, each of them incredibly detailed and true to life. He has to resist the urge to touch them, a habit he might indulge with the paintings and photographs in his home, but he really doesn’t want to smudge art like this.

He turns the page once more and finds himself in awe all over again. Staring back at him is a beautiful sketch of a boy, sitting in a grassy field with his legs drawn up to his chest. His back is facing Shou, his head tilted up to stare at the sky above, and stretched out from his back are two massive, gorgeous wings. They dwarf the boy with their sheer size, and yet they seem to fit him perfectly, arching up over his head and sloping back down until the ends of them just barely brush the grass behind him. On the boy’s face is a serene smile, eyes soft with fondness and bright with innocent admiration. His hair is carefully shaped, blunt bangs brushing his ears and forming a ring around his head, and Shou has the fleeting thought that his haircut would look incredibly stupid on anyone else but him. Instead, the subject of the drawing manages to make it look charming, in a plain sort of way, and Shou can’t help but wonder how accurate the drawing is to how this person must really look, if he exists at all.

Shou closes the book and replaces it as though he’d never touched it at all, and finally wanders toward the open front door of the house. The closer he gets to it, the louder and more clear the humming becomes, the soft sound quickly swallowed by the noise of the empty fields around them. Shou leans against the door frame and peeks around the corner, breathing stalling when he lays eyes on the source of the noise. He recognizes him instantly.

The boy is young, that much is clear to see. In fact, he looked to be around Shou’s age, or maybe a little older. He’s taller than Shou is, though not by much, but his build is much slimmer, a lightness to his stature that Shou doubts he can replicate. Everything about him is long, from his legs to his arms to the fingers loosely holding the handle of the broom that he sweeps in gentle arcs, chasing fallen leaves from the porch’s wooden floor. His skin is sun-dark, turned a muted copper as a result of long hours outdoors, and his back and shoulders are nearly entirely bared by the backless halterneck top he wears. Shou finds his eyes drawn immediately to the soft edges of his shoulders and the gentle curves of his arms, slim but toned, like a runner’s, and to the divot in the small of his back where his spine curves and disappears into the waistband of his pants. His thin feet are protected by a pair of sturdy-looking leather sandals, held unmoving by the fitted leather straps that secure them.

The most amazing part about him, however, is the pair of pitch-black wings that sprout from his shoulder blades, framed by the seams of his backless shirt. Their feathers shimmer in iridescent hues, sometimes appearing more blue or purple or red depending on what angle the light hits them from. Even half-folded, they take up a great deal of space, even more so than the boy himself does: they’re easily almost as tall as he is, the tops of them level with his head and the ends of his flight feathers hovering at the curve of his calves. They’re beautiful, like something from a fairy tale or a fable, and Shou has to stop himself from rushing over and impulsively threading his fingers into the downy feathers that poke out from between the boy’s shoulders just to see if they’re as soft as they look.

Shou isn’t sure how many seconds he stares before the boy notices his presence, instinctively turning his head to look at him with eyes that are wide with surprise. His humming stops abruptly, as does his sweeping, and he stumbles over his own movements just a bit as he straightens himself up and holds the broomstick to his chest in a distinctly protective manner. “You’re awake,” he says, then winces at his own obvious observation.

Shou can’t help the grin that comes to his face. “Nah, I’m just sleepwalking,” he replies teasingly, shifting his weight off the doorframe to just stand on the threshold of the house. Now that he’s not staring at the floor, Shou can get a good luck at the boy’s face, and he takes advantage of it to give him another once-over. His tan face is all soft curves, and his cheeks still hold just a hint of leftover fat from his childhood years, giving it a rounded look. His hair is short on the sides and longer on top, and it spikes out wildly in every direction. Shou can’t tell if it’s intentional or not, but he can’t help but find it charming anyway. Some of the untamed hair falls into his forehead, framing eyes that aren’t quite humanesque. It takes him a few seconds to realize that the boy’s eyes are pale yellow where a normal man’s would be white, and his irises are all black, not a sliver of color coming to them. They flit over him restlessly, taking in his appearance the same way Shou is taking in his. Now that he’s getting a closer look, he can see the small, dark feathers that sprout in odd places, like the strips of skin between the corners of his eyes and his ears, or along the curve of his shoulders. It’s simultaneously fascinating and just a little bit unnerving, seeing someone who looks so much like him but still so different.

The boy’s brow furrows at Shou’s unwithheld snark, lips pursing in a minute frown that Shou finds surprisingly endearing. “Right…” he murmurs uncertainly, moving to balance his broom against the rail that surrounds the porch. He clears his throat into his closed hand, clearly uncomfortable, then adds, “How do you feel?”

Shou hums, grin softening into something a little more genuine in response to the boy’s concern. “Well, I’m not dead, so that’s good,” he answers. “Thanks for taking care of me, by the way. I was, uh, pretty sure I was gonna die back there, before you showed up out of nowhere.”

The boy nods. “Yes, you mistook me for some sort of angel,” he confirms. Shou sees the corner of his mouth twitch, like he wants to smile but has stopped himself before he can. “There’s no need to mention it. You’re lucky it was me, though, and not another human, otherwise there would have been nothing they could have done.”

Well, if that isn’t ominous, Shou doesn’t know the meaning of the word. “I was that far gone, huh?” he sighs, raising a hand to push a few loose strands of hair back into place, slicked away from his forehead. “How did you manage to bring me back from the brink, anyway? I remember that you kissed me, which was… well, it was weird, I guess, and then I totally passed out.” From the time he’d lost consciousness on the forest floor until now he has no memories, no way to know how much time has passed since then.

“Kissed you?” the boy echoes, looking confused for a moment before he seems to realize what Ritsu’s talking about. “Oh, you mean when I lent you my breath? That was just a spell. I put you into a coma, essentially, to conserve your energy output before you starved to death.”

“You can do magic?” Shou breathes, eyes wide with awe. “That’s amazing! No one in my village can do magic, they don’t have the genes for it. Human characteristic, apparently, but I’ve always thought it would be cool to learn. What other kinds of magic can you do?” The words tumble from his lips without much forethought, even as the boy shifts uncomfortably on his feet in front of him.

The boy lifts a hand to absentmindedly rub at his opposite arm, glancing away. “Why don’t we sit down?” he suggests after a moment of silence, gesturing toward the table sitting, lonesome, in the middle of the one-room house. “I think there’s probably some stuff we should talk about, and you should really get something to eat if you want to get your strength back.” That said, he moves into the open front door, not bothering to wait and see if Shou’s following. The wings on his back rustle quietly as he walks, and Shou has to keep himself from falling into another speechless stupor as he watches the way the light touches them.

The growl of his stomach is what saves him this time, and he stifles a laugh at its fantastic comedic timing. “Yeah, food sounds pretty sweet right now,” he agrees. Before he goes inside, though, he drifts over to the rail and peeks out at the scenery that surrounds them. The house is set up on the bank of a river that rushes down from a tall mountain behind them and disappears into the thick forest on the house’s other side. Shou doesn’t recognize the scenery at all, but he can’t bring himself to worry too much when this new change of location is so pretty.

After a few seconds he moves back into the house, spotting the black-winged boy sorting through the bowl of fruit on his countertop. He pulls a few pieces out and moves them into another, smaller bowl, alongside a small loaf of sweet-smelling bread. He looks nervous, Shou notes, and when the boy glances sideways to meet his eyes he’s quick to avert his gaze again. Shou wonders if he looks as strange to the boy as the boy does to him, if they’re both anomalies of their separate civilizations. Judging by the empty scenery all around the little cottage, though, the boy doesn’t have much of a civilization to fall back on, so maybe he’s just nervous to meet another person at all.

“What’s your name?” Shou asks, sliding into one of the four sturdy chairs. It doesn’t even rock under his weight, each of its four legs the perfect length to sit level on the floor. He can’t help but feel another surge of amazement that nearly everything in this house has been crafted by hand.

The boy turns and slides the fruit and bread onto the table between them, hesitating for just a second before taking a seat across the table from Shou. “It’s Ritsu,” he replies, tone soft and uncertain. “What’s yours?”

Ritsu. The name is surprisingly mundane, the kind of name that, if Shou heard it called in his own village on any given day, would blend right in with the rest of the locals. “Call me Shou,” he says, leaning one elbow on the table in front of him and propping his chin up in his hand. “Where is this place? I’ve never been to this side of the forest before. Seems peaceful,” he continues, conjuring up a map of the area surrounding his village in his head. He wonders how far he’d managed to walk before passing out, and his much farther Ritsu had carried him in order to end up here.

Ritsu nods his head, letting one hand rest on top of the natural wood table while the other reaches for a slice of the bread between them. He tears a piece off of it to eat, and it’s then that Ritsu notices his hands. They’re flecked with tiny feathers that sprout from his wrists and shift when he moves, and they’re tipped with talons that look much sharper than Shou’s blunted nails. They remind him a bit of the unnecessarily long nails that the rich women in his town wear, painted in gaudy colors and long enough that it makes it difficult for them to do something as simple as holding a pencil properly. Ritsu seems undeterred by them, however, pulling apart the bread with coordinated hands that are simultaneously gentle and precise. “Not too far from where I found you. I would tell you what I call it, but it won’t mean anything to anyone other than me,” he replies in a very unhelpful way. After a moment, he reaches out and picks up a second slice of bread, holding it out to Shou.

Shou blinks, meeting Ritsu’s expectant gaze across the table, and accepts the bread from his outstretched hand. He tries to ignore the way their fingers brush against each other as he does, tries not to shiver when he feels the little feathers at his wrist tickle his fingertips. “Thanks,” he sighs, bringing it to his mouth and taking a bite of it without bothering to pick it to pieces like Ritsu is.

“So… what’s it like being a harpy?” Shou asks after another moment of tense silence. “You’re so mysterious out here, living by yourself. The stories say harpies thirst for their next kill and are never satisfied, but you don’t seem so bloodthirsty to me.”

Ritsu looks up at him with an expression that Shou can only place as offended, eyes narrowed and brows knit together. Then he scoffs, face screwing up in unhidden condemnation. “Humans will come up with any excuse to rile each other up, won’t they?” he replies contemptuously. “And I’m not a harpy, don’t compare me to those folk tales. Harpies don’t exist, that’s just the name the humans gave to my people after finding traces of us. We’ve never hunted humans.”

Shou tilts his head, leaning a little further forward in his seat. “Then what should I call you?” he asks.

Ritsu huffs out a breath, tearing another piece of bread from his slice. “You can call me by my name. It’s not like you’ll ever meet another one of me again,” he answers quietly, and the bitterness in his words is palpable.

Shou purses his lips, a bit unnerved at the sudden tenseness in the air, and casts a glance at the untouched bed, nestled in the corner beside the empty shelf. “What about the extra bed? It belongs to someone, doesn’t it?” he asks, watching Ritsu’s face carefully to gauge his response.

Ritsu stands up and turns his back to Shou, moving over to the counter and filling two glasses with water from a pitcher. “It used to be my brother’s,” he answers after a quiet moment, “but he’s not around to use it anymore.”

Curious as he is, Shou’s not so confident he should parse this particular subject. He can practically see the muscles in Ritsu’s back tense up as he speaks, his shoulders hunching up a little closer to his ears and his head purposefully turned away. “I see,” he just says instead. By now, his bread is long gone.

Ritsu returns to the table after another minute or so, sliding a glass of water in his direction. “You need to drink lots of fluids to replenish the ones you lost,” he instructs. “It was the dehydration that got to you first. How long were you in the woods for, anyway?”

Shou cups his hands around the glass and sighs. “Five days. It was stupid of me to think I could make it through the forest,” he grumbles, feeling his regrets from his days of walking catching up to him now.

Ritsu just nods, face carefully impassive. “In the late summer heat, it’s no wonder you got so weak so fast. You probably sweated out most of your body fluids in the first couple of days,” he explains. “Speaking of which, you should really change out of those sweaty clothes, they reek.”

Shou jumps, feeling a rush of mortification as he looks down at his bedraggled appearance. Now that Ritsu brings it up, he can definitely smell his own body odor clinging to his shirt, and he’s certain he must be covered in dirt and grass stains. He screws up his face in disgust, nodding his agreement. “Ugh, you’re right, how did I not notice before?” he sighs. He downs the rest of the glass of water as Ritsu moves over to the shelf where all his clothes are carefully arranged, then stands up to follow him, hovering a foot or so away as Ritsu peruses his wardrobe.

Ritsu turns to face Shou for a moment, looking him up and down, and Shou does his best not to squirm under his sharp, meticulous gaze until the winged boy turns away again and begins thumbing through a pile of shirts on one of the middle shelves. At least, Shou assumes they’re shirts, but they look nothing like the tee-shirts and button-ups Shou usually wears. When Ritsu pulls one out of the pile and holds it in front of him, his suspicions are confirmed.

“Wear these,” Ritsu instructs, pushing the top into his hands alongside a pair of loose-fitting cloth pants. “They’re thin and have good ventilation, so you won’t overheat as easily.”

“Uh, thanks,” Shou responds awkwardly, laying the fresh clothes on the bed. He changes his pants first, which is easy enough, then reaches over his head and grabs his shirt by the collar, pulling it up and over his head in a smooth, well-practiced motion. Then he reaches for Ritsu’s lent top, and pauses when he sees that it’s less of a shirt and more of a flat piece of fabric. Backless, like Ritsu’s current top is. “Um, not to sound ungrateful, but how the hell am I supposed to wear this?” he asks, incredulous. “It’s got no back on it!”

Ritsu casts him a confused glance, tilting his head. “Of course not, it’s kind of hard to wear a shirt with a back on it when you have these,” he points out, gesturing to the sprawling wings that sprout from his shoulders. “It’s not totally backless, anyway, it has hooks at the bottom that clasps in the back.”

“This is super weird,” Shou mumbles, mostly to himself, but Ritsu’s indignant snort says that he’s heard as well. Still, it’s better than nothing, so he slips the halter neck of the shirt over his head and fiddles with it until it lays somewhat comfortably against the back of his neck. It rides high in the front, brushing the bottom of his throat, then swoops down below his arms to hug him around his waist. He moves his hands to clasp the back of it like Ritsu had described, his fingers finding the little copper hooks, but as much as he tries, he can’t get the pieces to fit together. “This thing is so complicated,” he curses.

Ritsu lets out a sigh that’s probably meant to be annoyed, and he takes the hooks from Shou’s fingers. “Let me,” he says, more of a demand than an offer to help, and deftly fits the little metal hooks together so the shirt is snug around his waist. The pants are high-waisted, riding up past his belly button, but even with the extra fabric in place the shirt still leaves slivers of his stomach exposed.

“You really wear this stuff everyday?” Shou asks, tugging at the edge of the top and attempting to stare at his own back to confirm that it really is as bare as Ritsu’s is.

“Only in the summer,” Ritsu replies. “Summer clothes are easy, since I don’t have to worry about covering the skin around my wings. My winter clothes are a bit more complicated.” He gestures to his bottom shelf, but without picking up one of the aforementioned winter shirts and looking at it himself, Shou has no way to gauge what ‘complicated’ could possibly mean. “In the summer it’s easiest to wear these kinds of tops, or just not wear a shirt at all.”

Shou nods, figuring it makes about as much sense as it possibly can considering he’s currently standing in front of an honest-to-god winged person.

Ritsu takes a step back and admires his handiwork now that the outfit is properly in place. “You look much better now,” he comments. “Your dull clothes are ridiculously boring, you know. You’d think humans would have some sense of color.”

“We do, that’s just what I usually wear when I go hiking,” Shou replies, scooping up his faded brow tee-shirt and laying it out carefully. “And if you ask me, it’s you who looks more ridiculous!”

Ritsu makes a sound half between a sniff of disdain and a laugh, and when Shou glances over he sees the dark-haired boy fighting another smile. It makes Shou wonder why he feels the need to keep his reactions to himself, what kinds of reservations he has about Shou that keep him from letting loose and expressing himself. “Say, Ritsu,” he starts, moving to fold up his tee-shirt and pants until he figures out what to do with them later, “why’d you save me, anyway?”

The question makes Ritsu stop in his tracks, halfway to the table to gather and replace the bowls and glasses he’d used for breakfast. “Why do you ask?” he retorts, answering Shou’s question with one of his own, and it comes across defensive.

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but you don’t seem terribly fond of humans,” Shou says, sitting down on the edge of the bed he’d woken up in. He shifts uncomfortably in his borrowed clothes, trying to ignore the way he can feel the drafts on his back now. “I mean, I can see why, humans do some pretty shitty stuff all the time, so what made you want to stop and rescue someone like me?”

Ritsu swallows, picking up the glasses and bowls and dropping them in the sink to be washed later. He lets his hands fall against the rim of the sink, bracing against the surface of it, and is quiet for a few long moments, brows knitted together so tightly that lines form between them. A deep frown tugs at his lips, lips that Shou knows to be soft and warm. “I don’t know,” he says after a moment, quiet and contemplative and maybe just a little lost.

There’s really nothing Shou can say to that, so he doesn’t say anything.

---

Shou finds himself in very little rush to get home, and to his surprise, Ritsu doesn’t rush him to leave. When Shou asks, he brushes it off with empty words, telling him he isn’t back to full strength yet and that he should wait another night, but three days later, when Shou is back to feeling well again, he still hesitates to leave.

He’s not quite sure what keeps him rooted to this barren, empty space. Ritsu is the only humanoid creature for miles, which would normally make Shou ache for the bustle of the marketplace or the empty chatter of the village women gossiping by the church, but instead he finds himself soothed by the noise of the wind in the trees nearby and the lull of Ritsu’s soft humming in the early mornings when he doesn’t realize Shou can hear him.

“Aren’t you weirded out?” Ritsu asks him once, when they’re sitting in the twin porch chairs underneath the hand-thatched awning overhead. The woven straw back of it itches against Shou’s exposed shoulders, but he’s growing more used to it every day. Ritsu continues, “A person with wings like a bird’s, clawed fingers and a feathered face. Doesn’t it make you even a little afraid?”

Shou laughs, loud and unwithheld. “Of course I’m weirded out, you’re like something out of a fairy tale. Afraid, though? You haven’t done anything to make me afraid of you,” he replies, flashing Ritsu a bright grin in return. “You saved my life, after all, it would be kinda rude if I was scared of you after all that.”

Ritsu hums, soft and thoughtful, and runs his fingers absentmindedly through the feathers of one wing. Shou’s caught him doing so a few times now, has watched the way he straightens the crooked feathers and lets the loose ones fall to the ground to be swept up later. He’s preening, Shou realizes, and the thought causes a smile to tug at the corners of his mouth. The little quirks he manages to catch Ritsu indulging in only endear him more to his new friend, if he can consider this friendship, and he finds himself feeling just a bit more fond of Ritsu with each day that passes. “I suppose it’s a good thing, that you’re not afraid,” Ritsu says after a long pause, his black-eyed gaze fixed in a point in the distance that Shou can’t follow.

Shou simply shrugs in reply. “I think it is,” he offers, and sees the way Ritsu softens to it, ever-so-slightly.

There’s a stretch of silence between them, comfortable and calm, and then Ritsu blurts, “Let’s go somewhere.”

“Okay,” Shou agrees immediately, sitting up in his seat, and he tries his best not so show how elated he is at Ritsu’s sudden, impulsive request. In the few days they’ve been together Ritsu has already proven himself to be thoughtful to a fault; he refuses to make even small decisions without thoroughly considering all of his options, so that fact that Ritsu has decided to do something without noticeable forethought sends a thrill of excitement through Shou. “Where should we go?” he asks, curious about what destination Ritsu has in mind.

Ritsu pushes himself to his sandal-clad feet, shaking his wings out and scattering a few dark feathers on the porch. “Someplace I used to go a lot. Get what you need, and we can go now.”

Shou doesn’t wait to be asked twice. He ducks into the house and grabs his tennis shoes, the ones in which he’d walked miles to get here, and slips them on over his sockless feet. Then, as somewhat of an afterthought, he snatches up his backpack from where he’d propped it up against the mostly-empty shelf by the bed he’d claimed and hefts it over one shoulder.

When he turns to head back out the front door, he spots Ritsu standing in front of one of his many bookshelves, holding a hand-bound book in his clawed hands. He runs the fingers of one hand over the cover of it, eyes downcast, and Shou is struck by the wistful, melancholic expression that crosses his face for just a moment before he slides the book into his own bag and settles the strap of it over his shoulder. A question perches on the tip of Shou’s tongue, a quiet curiosity that he has to hold himself back from voicing. There are plenty of things about himself that Ritsu’s hasn’t told him, and that’s okay with him. After all, Shou has plenty of things about himself that he hasn’t told Ritsu, either. It doesn’t keep his mind from wandering, though, wondering what those things could be.

They walk, because even though Ritsu says flying would be faster, he’s adamant that walking will be easier. Shou’s not sure whether or not Ritsu can support his weight and fly at the same time, anyway, and he doesn’t mind walking. The hardest part is scaling the hill behind the house, which is steep and a little slippery from the morning dew that still clings to it, and by the time they reach the crest of it both of them are just a little out of breath.

Shou’s breathlessness is partially due to something else, though, as Ritsu gestures with one feathered hand to the little valley nestled in the hills and Shou’s eyes land on what is quite possibly the most beautiful sight he’s seen since leaving his village all those days ago.

At the bottom of the hill is what appears to be a field of wildflowers, though most of them have wilted under the late summer sun’s glaring rays already. The few that are still standing are bright against the green of the rest of the valley, poking out of the tall grass so that their bright petals can be seen by all who pass by. Most notably, clumps of little sunflowers like the ones in Ritsu’s vase at his house can be seen cropping up all over the field, the bright sunlight only serving to make them look even more vibrant than before.

“Woah, this place is awesome!” Shou exclaims, face blooming into a broad grin. He finds himself reaching for Ritsu’s hand on instinct, fingers curling around his palm and pulling him down the hillside. The surprised yelp he lets out only serves to make Shou’s grin widen, but he’s conscious of the way Ritsu squeezes his hand back so he doesn’t lose his grip.

Shou doesn’t let go until the ground beneath their feet evens out again and he finds himself in one of the little sunflower patches. He drops Ritsu’s hand and flops unceremoniously down into the grass with a laugh, kicking his feet into the air in a burst of energy. The grass and dirt is rough against the exposed skin of his back, but he can’t bring himself to mind as he stares up at the great blue sky and the fluffy white clouds that occasionally cross it. The sun is warm, but not unbearably so, and its rays make everything around him look and feel so much brighter than he’s used to. He takes a deep breath of the sweet-smelling air, limbs flopping out all around him starfish-style, and lets himself be blessedly still for a few minutes.

Ritsu continues past him, black wings folded comfortably against his back as he drifts deeper into the field. Shou cranes his neck back and manages to catch glimpses of him through the tall grass as he walks, stopping periodically to bend over and touch the flowers that poke up through the grass. He looks peaceful, Shou notes, expression holding the closest thing to a smile Shou’s ever seen from him, but there’s a hint of bitterness behind it, too, that makes Shou’s own high spirits dip just a bit. He sits up, turning to give Ritsu a proper look, and watches as he sits down cross-legged in the grass not too far away and plucks a small but bright purple flower from the ground. He twists its stem between his fingers, quietly observing it, and Shou is suddenly and surprisingly reminded of the pencil sketch he’s stumbled upon during his first morning at Ritsu’s house.

Hit with a sudden urge, Shou quickly snatches up his backpack from where he’d discarded it at his side and opens it up, removing his sketchbook and a tin of pencils he’d brought with him from his home in his village. He shifts himself to sit cross-legged on the grass, flipping the book open to the nearest empty page.

He’s not sure if he can consider himself an artist, at least not by trade, but the scratch of his sketching pencil on paper is a familiar and comforting noise. Sketching has become somewhat of a hobby over the last few years, a way of relieving boredom or filling time when he has it. Sometimes he sketches memories, or tries to copy down the faces of people passing outside his window. This time, he finds his eyes drawn to Ritsu: to the not-quite-bittersweet expression on his face, to the little purple flower he twirls between clawed fingers, to the long grass that half-hides his legs and sways gently in the warm summer breeze. It’s like a painting, the kind of image that’s surreal enough that it shouldn’t be able to exist in the real world, and yet Shou sits, and stares at it, and has the undeniable urge to cement this moment for posterity in graphite.

His sketches are fast and rough at first as he focuses on copying down the base image and plotting out his canvas with light lines and geometric shapes. He roughs in the shape of Ritsu’s form sitting in the grass, cross-legged, one hand propping himself up in the grass while the other lightly grips the little bloom he’d claimed for himself. He sketches the curve of his shoulder and the arches of his wings, stretched out to accommodate their length while sitting, and attempts to capture the effortless messiness of his wild, untamed black hair. With softer, more deliberate strokes, he brings to life the line of Ritsu’s jaw and the slope of his nose, all soft edges and muted curves. There isn’t a sharp angle on him, and when he moves he does so with effortless grace and purpose that just serves to add to his ethereal beauty.

Shou would be hard-pressed to deny at this point that he does find Ritsu beautiful, and not just for his shimmering feathers or the way he seems to glow in a way only mythical creatures can. There are little things that bring this thought to mind, like his slender, careful fingers, or the annoyed little frown he gets whenever Shou tries to tease him. He’s never seen Ritsu really smile, but he imagines his smile must be beautiful, too. There’s no way it can’t be, coming from him.

He moves his pencil to capture the set of Ritsu’s mouth, but when he looks up to get another look, he finds that his companion has moved. He blinks, momentarily confused, until a distinct shadow falls over his sketchbook.

“What’re you doing over here? You look really intense,” Ritsu comments, leaning over Shou’s shoulder to get a look at what he’s working on. His expression quickly changes from confused to surprised when he recognizes the rough sketch, though. “Is that me?” he asks.

“You moved! Now it’s ruined,” Shou groans melodramatically. There’s no real anger or annoyance behind his words, though, and his sketch is mostly finished, anyway. “Don’t you know that the first rule of modeling is that you have to stay still? Otherwise the artist has to start over.” He tips his head back and offers Ritsu a smile, if only to reassure him that he’s really only joking.

Ritsu raises a brow at him, unimpressed, and turns his attention back to the rough sketch in Shou’s hands. “I didn’t know you were an artist,” he says, rather than trying to pick apart Shou’s attempted joke. “Why me, though?”

Shou shrugs, setting down his pencil for now and craning his neck back to look at Ritsu upside-down. “I just thought it would make for a good drawing,” he replies honestly. “I can leave it unfinished if you’re uncomfortable.”

Ritsu moves to sit at Shou’s side rather than leaning over him, shaking his head. “No, it’s fine, you can finish it,” he replies, and one of his hands drifts to the bag draped over one arm. He hesitates for just a moment before reaching inside and pulling out the hand-bound book Shou had seen him stow away earlier. He turns it over in his hands once, twice, then holds it out to Shou. “I guess you could say I’m a bit of an artist myself. I sketch in my journal sometimes, when I see something nice that I want to remember. You can look, if you want.”

“You’d let me read your journal? Hope you don’t have any deep, dark secrets in here you don’t want me to know about,” Shou quips, cracking open the book’s leather cover.

Ritsu snorts out what might be considered a laugh, tapping the first page with one long nail. “I wrote it in my mother’s language, you won’t be able to read it anyway,” he points out, quirking a brow in an amused manner. He drags a finger to the top of the page. “This is my handwriting, and this,” he adds, running his finger down the page to where the shape of the unfamiliar words changes just a bit, “is my brother’s handwriting. We used to take turns writing little passages in these books.”

The implied “before he left” hangs in the air between them, unspoken but felt and understood all the same. Shou nods, noting the way Ritsu’s neat, even script contrasts with his brother’s more messy, sloped style. He flips through a few pages of indecipherable writing before he reaches the first aforementioned drawing, a sketch of a new garden filled with tiny green sprouts. Each row of plants is meticulously labeled with a little sign written in that same language, unreadable to Shou, but it’s an impressive sketch all the same.

Most of the sketches in the book of are a similar calibre, still life drawings or landscape sketches of places Shou has yet to see. “You’re really talented,” he tells Ritsu after flipping through a few of them. In between the sketches, Ritsu and his brother’s alternating handwriting take up most of the extra space.

“I’ve been drawing since I was a kid,” Ritsu replies, reaching over Shou’s arm to flip the pages of the journal of his own accord until he reaches one in particular. His hand lingers on the page before he sits back and lets Shou look at it himself, pale yellow eyes trained on his expression from beside him.

Shou blinks in recognition when he lays eyes on the sketch Ritsu’s chosen to share with him. It’s different from the rest, far more detailed, and it takes up an entire page of the little journal. The only writing on it is a few letters written in the corner with Ritsu’s neat handwriting: some sort of caption, Shou guesses. A name, or maybe a date.

The sketch is of another boy, one that Shou recognizes, because he has the same face as the boy from the sketch he’d seen in Ritsu’s other book just a few days ago. He looks like he can’t be more than a few years older than Ritsu is, his face carrying the same soft, childlike curves that Ritsu’s does. On his face is a small, tentative smile, shy, like he’d modeled for this but could never get quite comfortable enough to make the emotion come across natural. Faintly, Shou can make out laugh lines around the corners of his eyes, and dimples at the edges of his mouth where his smile shows his teeth. Like the other sketch, his hair is cut bluntly all the way around his head, leaving straight bangs that fall nearly into his eyes. There’s something undeniably endearing about the sketch, as though it’d been drawn with a great deal of affection. “Is this him?” Shou asks. He doesn’t need to clarify who he’s talking about.

Ritsu nods. “His name was Shigeo - is Shigeo, I mean,” he says, catching himself as he begins to refer to his brother in the past tense. “He’s about a year and a half older than me, though he never could really keep up with me, growing up. Where I was quick to pick up concepts and new skills, he always took just a little longer. My parents worried about him a lot.” As he speaks, his eyes flick down to the sketch in the journal, something undeniably sad in the way he speaks.

Shou swallows, watching Ritsu’s face as he speaks. “Where did they go?” he asks. Surely they couldn’t have abandoned him?

“My parents passed away a few years ago,” Ritsu says, letting his hand fall away from the book. He draws his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around them, hugging them close to his body. “They were hunted by humans who were scared of them and their magic. They would have killed me, too, but Shige protected me.”

“You care a lot about him,” Shou murmurs, “and he cared a lot about you, so what changed?” After all, Shigeo isn’t here anymore. His bed and shelf are empty and there are no traces of him in the little house that used to belong to both of them, but at one point he’d been as active and present as Ritsu is now.

Ritsu’s expression darkens, and he leans forward to rest his chin atop his bent knees. A frown tugs at his mouth, and his gaze is distant. “He fell in love with a human,” he replies, the words barely travelling over the gentle noise of the wind, and Shou catches the way his voice wavers in an attempt to keep his emotions from coming through. “I didn’t like him. I tried to tell Shige that it was bad idea to get involved with humans, that he’d only get hurt in the long run, but he wouldn’t listen. Growing up, we always got along well, to the point where we only had a few silly little fights as brothers, but this was different. Neither of us was willing to change our mind.” His wings shift slightly against his back, drawing in around his shoulders as though to protect himself. “I said terrible things to him, about how I didn’t want to be his brother if he was going to choose a human over me. I told him that if he was going to make such a terrible decision, he might as well just leave. I didn’t think he’d take me seriously, at the time.”

Shou stares down at the sketch of Shigeo laying open in his lap and tries to imagine him standing beside a younger version of Ritsu, one with wide, dark eyes and arms that are a little shorter and chubbier than the ones he knows. He can easily picture a loving and dedicated siblings relationship between them, the kind Shou has never experienced himself but that he’s seen countless times in the children from his village, can easily wrap his mind around a protective Shigeo eager to please his genius little brother. It makes his heart ache to imagine what such a bad fight between the two of them must have felt like. It’s a vulnerable memory, the one that Ritsu has chosen to impart to him. “Why are you telling me all this?” he asks after a moment, folding the journal shut and holding it tightly with both hands. “Why save me, why let me hang around you for so long, why tell me about your family? I thought you hated humans.”

“I do hate them,” Ritsu says immediately, squeezing his knees closer to his chest, and his gaze hardens with regret and anger and loss. “They took my parents, they took my brother.” He pauses to take a breath, shaky and tense, and buries his face in his arms so that Shou can no longer see his face. “I hate them… but I don’t hate you.”

Shou forgets to breathe for a moment, stunned speechless. He’d known, of course, that Ritsu can’t possibly hate him, but it’s still shocking to have it laid out so plainly. Shou had never considered that he might be the exception to the rule, the lone redeemable human that Ritsu has chosen to place his bets on. That if he had been someone else, Ritsu might not have deigned it necessary to try to save his life. “But why me?” he repeats, desperate to know what part of himself was the part that Ritsu had seen and decided was worthy of saving. “Why am I different from everyone else who tried to cross that forest and never made it to the other side?”

Ritsu lets out a long breath into his arms before he raises his head once more. He still can’t look Shou in the eye, though, and he stares stubbornly at the patches of bright flowers instead. “Did you ever realize why the forest seemed so endless and impossible to navigate?” he asks. “It’s because it’s guarded by a magical trap. My brother and I laid it when our parents were killed, to keep humans from ever finding this place again. Anyone who walks into the forest is cursed to wander it until they die from starvation or are killed by wild animals.”

Shou hums, remembering the way his map had become all but useless once he’d walked deep enough into the forest. Without magic of his own, it would have been impossible to sense a trap laying in wait for him. “So that’s why I could never find the end, even after five days of walking,” he murmurs.

Ritsu nods. “Well, we both helped to lay down the spell, but Shigeo was always far stronger than I was when it came to magic. His powers are deeply rooted in people’s emotions, including his own, and it made it difficult for him to control them,” he continues, picking at the purple flower still pinched between his fingers. He tears a petal from it and lets it fall into the grass, nervous. “His powers created a link between the two of us and the emotions of those who would enter the forest. We could feel their anger and their killing intent, but we could also feel the fear they felt in their final moments, their regret and desire to keep living. I tried to ignore it, but Shigeo never could. He never admitted it out loud, but I could tell it tortured him inside, even as the people walking into the forest become fewer and far between. I think that his connection to the trap is part of what led him to start caring for the humans.” He pauses, lowering his gaze, and adds, “Empathy is a powerful thing.”

“So, you knew I was in the forest the whole time?” Shou clarifies, leaning forward and looking up into Ritsu’s face.

By this point, Ritsu’s plucked the flower bare, nothing but its brown middle left attached to the stem until Ritsu pinches that part off, too. “Yes,” he replies. There isn’t an ounce of regret in his voice, but after hearing his story, Shou can’t find it in himself to be annoyed by it. Ritsu continues, “As soon as you entered the forest, I knew you were there, but you seemed… different from the others. You weren’t scared, and you weren’t angry. You weren’t lost, either, like the children would that sometimes wander into the forest without knowing where they were. There was something driving you, I could tell, but it wasn’t a desire for revenge or self-preservation like the hunters that used to come after my brother and me.” He drops the flower’s browning stem, lets it be swallowed up by the tall grass around him. “I saved you because I could tell you didn’t come to hurt me, and because part of me was curious to see if a human really did exist who could look at me without fear or anger. I thought that maybe then, I could start to understand the feelings that would make my brother want to leave me behind.”

Shou swallows, glancing down at his legs, splayed out in front of him and crossed at the ankles. It hasn’t occurred to him until now just how insanely lucky he is to be alive right now, now fortunate it is that Ritsu had decided to let him be the one to change his mind about humanity. “Do you think you understand any better, now?” he asks, voice soft and curious.

Ritsu squeezes his legs impossibly tighter against his chest. “Yeah, I think I do,” he admits, but when Shou chances another glance at him, he doesn’t find peace or closure in Ritsu’s gaze like he might expect. Instead, Ritsu just slumps with regret. His dark eyes are clouded with grief, as though this discovery has condemned something within him. “I do, and that’s the scary part.”

---

Neither of them speaks on the way back to Ritsu’s house. The sun is beginning to set behind the horizon by the time they make it back, and Shou’s stomach is grumbling. He grabs an apple from the fruit bowl to graze on while Ritsu sweeps the feathers and early fall leaves from off the deck, and he tries not to think too hard about the implications of the day’s revelations. He plops down on the edge of the bed that used to be Shigeo’s, a person who Shou now has a name and a face to attach to it. A person who still has a place in this house, should he ever come back to reclaim it. It’s not a place that Shou can keep for himself much longer, and he knows it. Guess I have to go home sometime, huh? he thinks to himself, and the thought leaves a bitter taste in his mouth.

Ritsu comes inside and closes the door behind him, leaning the broom up in the corner by the coat rack. He moves quietly over to his shelf to change into his night clothes while Shou lays on the soft mattress, and when he’s ready to climb into bed himself, he turns to face him. “Shou,” he says, hesitantly, fiddling with the fingers on one of his hands. “I want you to know, I’m… I’m really glad I met you.”

Shou sits up in the bed, eyebrows raised in quiet surprise, but his reply is caught in his throat when he sees the small but undeniable smile on Ritsu’s face. It’s shaky, like he’s fighting the urge to stifle it the way he has so many times already, but it’s still there. It’s slightly crooked and, Shou notices, entirely humanesque, holding the same blunted incisors and sharp canines his own mouth carries. The sight of this little smile, simultaneously remarkable and unremarkable, is enough to send Shou’s heart somersaulting in his chest, the words on his tongue dying before they have the chance to see daylight.

It’s irrevocably beautiful, to Shou.

“I-I’m glad I met you, too,” he finally stammers, once he’s managed to get a grip on his thoughts long enough to form a coherent sentence, though he can’t quite suppress the awe-struck stutter that accompanies his words. “You’re a good friend, Ritsu. I’m really grateful that you decided to save me, that day.”

Ritsu doesn’t say anything in return, just flashes him another little smile and, oh, Shou could definitely get used to seeing that. Then he blows out the candle keeping the room dimly lit and plunges it into darkness, crawling into his own bed for the night.

---

Shou decides the following morning that it’s past time he returns to his village. He has a house and a job waiting for him at home, after all, or at least he hopes he still does, and while he doesn’t have any really close friends, his neighbors are bound to be wondering where he’s gone off to by now. He tells Ritsu as much as he packs up his sketchbook and his pencils and prepares to start the walk back home.

He pretends not to notice the way Ritsu stifles his disappointment under a layer of practiced calm. “Are you sure? If you need an extra day, it really wouldn’t be that big of a deal,” he offers, but Shou just shakes his head and offers Ritsu a bittersweet smile.

“No, I can’t do that. This was never meant to be permanent, anyway, I’ve just been borrowing your extra space from your brother. He’ll need it once he decides to come home,” he replies, gesturing to the empty bed and shelf nestled into the back corner of the house. “Although, it may be a good idea to invest in, like, a bedroll or something, in case he decides to bring his boyfriend with him.”

The suggestion makes Ritsu screw up his face in unhidden disgust, drawing a loud laugh out of Shou’s mouth at the sight of it. Ritsu rolls his eyes, long-suffering. “Yeah, alright,” he sighs, and follows Shou to the door to he can give him a proper send-off.

“You’re sure I won’t get lost again in there?” Shou asks, pointing to the magically trapped forest that lays sprawling in front of him. “I just walk straight, and I’ll make it home?”

Ritsu snorts, raising an incredulous brow at him. “Of course, I know what I’m doing,” he assures. “My brother may have been the one strong enough to lay the trap in the first place, but the illusion on it is all from me. I can manipulate it in any way I want. I won’t take you more than an hour or two to make it back without the trap getting in your way.”

Shou nods, taking comfort in Ritsu’s confidence as the two of them stand side-by-side facing the woods. “Well then, I guess this is goodbye,” he says, and tries not to let show the way the words make his heart fall and his throat feel just a little tighter.

Ritsu shakes his head, laying a hand on Shou’s shoulder. “It’s not ‘goodbye’, it’s ‘see you later’,” he corrects, and lets slip one of those small, kind smiles. “I don’t expect you’ll be able to resist coming back anyway, even if I tried to stop you, so I may as well give you permission to come visit before you end up lost in the forest again.” He plays it off in a casual manner, but the way his neck flushes just slightly pinker than usual gives away his true intentions.

Shou doesn’t bother to fight the grin that comes to his face at this, and before he can think better of it he pulls Ritsu in for a quick, tight hug. He catches the little squeak of surprise Ritsu makes in response to it, but his friend doesn’t pull away, lifting his arms to tentatively return the brief embrace. One of Shou’s hands finds its way into the downy feathers between Ritsu’s shoulders, soft as cotton between his fingers, while Ritsu’s splay against his back and squeeze him once, gently.

“Come back soon,” Ritsu mumbles against Shou’s shoulder before he pulls away, letting his hands linger for just a moment before he lets them drop back to his sides.

“Count on it,” Shou replies with a bright grin, offering Ritsu one last clap on the shoulder before he turns and begins to walk toward the forest. “I’ll see you later,” he adds over his shoulder, raising a hand in an energetic wave as he reaches the edge of the trees. He watches just long enough to see Ritsu return his wave before he turns and disappears into the forest, homeward bound.

---

When he would reach his lonely little house just under two hours later, his neighbors would greet him with worried words and frightened expressions, and when he would tell them where he’d gone and why, they would ask him if he’d found anything worthwhile after so many days away from home.

“No,” he would say, with a helpless little smile. “Nothing at all.”

#mob psycho 100 #mp100 #ritshou #kageyama ritsu #suzuki shou #kageyama shigeo #fanfiction #mp100 fanfic #wings au #reach au #winged ritsu #winged shigeo #alternate universe #dehydration #near death experience #serendipitousfics

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