#the struggle to remain a whole person is real

[nnnn99999]

The ending of peaceful property, much like the entirety of the show, was bittersweet. I really tried to hold in my tears, but ended up crying anyway.

The ridiculous part is that it wasn't the sad backstory or Home's goodbye with his grandpa that made me cry. No, it was Home's silly little song and dance wearing that bright orange outfit that broke me. To me, it was the most impactful scene in the whole series. For me, this was the climax of the story. Because to me, this scene represents everything I feel this show was about. It was the perfect culmination of contradictory emotions.

Yes, this show has its flaws. Yes, it is nowhere near perfect. But I loved it anyway. There was so much love and effort poured into this series and it shows. Everyone involved in this project tried their best to present something meaningful and wholesome, and I appreciate that genuine love and passion.

Finding comfort in your own home with the people you truly love amidst the cruelties and unfairness of life-to me, this is what this whole show was about. To be able to laugh amidst the difficulties of life, to feel deep sorrow even in the happiest of times, to survive the harshest struggles without a moment of weakness yet fall apart because of a simple sentence, to love the person you hate and hate the person you love, and so much more that makes us human-this is what this show gave us.

It started as a silly little ghost show, and ended up becoming an exploration of family and home. While watching this show, I laughed, I cried, I became angry, I felt frustrated, I felt helpless, I became excited, I felt disheartened and so much more. To me, a show that managed to make me feel so much is a good show. I had a wonderful time watching it.

Was the ending of this show happy or sad? You could say it was neither, or you could say it was both. And that is why I think it was the best ending for this show. I am glad that my ragtag family of weirdos can stay together and start a new journey together. Suradech is alive and well, and so are the other four, and that's all I wanted from the ending. Because as long as you live, the possibilities are endless.

Peaceful property will always have a place in my heart.

Side note 1: I really appreciate the fact that Suradech remained the mvp till the very end. He really saved the day. Suradech is the ultimate best boy. Making a shades wearing bodyguard without any dialogue so endearing to the point I was willing to get into a fight for him is the real achievement of this show in my opinion.

Side note 2: I have a lot of things to say about family and familial love in this series. This is something that has been brewing in my mind since the first episode so my thoughts re all jumbled. But I will write an essay once I manage to organize my thoughts.

Side note 3: I was not scared by the horror part of this show. I don't know if it was because I am genuinely that unbothered by horror or because I was too busy appreciating the ghost makeup. Whatever the reason may be, the primary emotion I associated with the ghosts was sadness, not fear. The team truly did a great job with the ghosts.

[peterlorrefanpage]

I appreciate this post.

Tangent:

In a more general sense, I've been wondering how people hear about or come across Things That Existed Before They Did.

Putting behind a cut since this is all meta and little to do with Peter Lorre:

I grew up in a household that had tons of things that existed before I did, so I was immersed in what's probably now considered older-than-oldies. Syndicated reruns and old movies were a thing. LPs and 45s and 78s were a thing. Books were a thing.

But perhaps just as importantly, parents who knew who the actors were, who the musicians were, and what the books said - and who spoke fluently about all these things - were also, well, a thing!

This is not to say I knew all the things; I wasn't nearly as exposed (ha) to Peter Lorre as I have been in the past couple years, beyond the more famous movies he just happened to be in. The caricatures I saw seemed ha-ha and grotesque all at once, with little to nothing to do with the amazing depth and nuance that he really was - as I only later found out.

I'm glad to still be finding things out. I don't want to be a calcified lump with nothing left to learn. I've seen what happens to people who espouse that, and it's hideous.

So.

What do people do who haven't been brought up with the things?

Reruns still happen. YouTube is full of free old-time stuff to watch and listen to. Archive.org is bubbling over. So is Project Gutenberg. Etcetera. Things are out there to be delighted in and absorbed. You don't have to hope that your LP has liner notes in its album sleeve so you can learn about the band or understand what the hell they're singing (enunciation is a lost art; so is the balance of voice to instruments), you don't have to stay puzzled at a reference your favorite author just made. You can find shit out.

And yet I still see people absolutely SHOCKED that things existed before they did. That the song they're listening to is a cover. That Person W's shiny new thing is because of Person A's work decades before.

So it makes me wonder: Do people actively search things out, trace things to their roots, realize that their favorite song or show or book or actor didn't just burst into being that second? Or have we become passive passengers in our own lives, too used to sitting back and having our screens serving us with what the algorithm thinks we want?

On the flip side, LP sales were awesome in 2022, there does always seem to be somebody popping up to say Thing X came from Thing B, and spaces like tumblr and MetaFilter show amazing critical thinking and wonderful 'things'.

man, i keep thinking about homage, pastiche, reference humor, etc. but now the thing im wondering the most is whether or not 18 year olds recognize caricatures of peter lorre

[palms-upturned]

Frustrates me to no end seeing people say “what’s your alternative to voting blue? Stage a revolution right now? This second? Get real, you’re posting on your computer instead of firebombing walmarts.” I don’t think that you understand what people are actually doing. I know for myself, I’ve been reading more history and theory than I ever have before. I’ve been marching. I’ve been getting involved with labor activism. I’ve been doing strategic research. I’ve tried to archive and share resources. I’ve watched other people do WAY more than I ever have or probably could. I’ve seen people occupy arms manufacturing sites and hold wildcat strikes and disrupt daily life as much as possible. We’ve all seen this happening at unprecedented levels for months now. And most of all, I’ve seen Palestinians telling us, rightfully full of anger, do not ever go back to how things were before. Do not turn away from what’s happening and your own complicity in it.

This is not something that we can vote our way out of. Our state is built on the same violence being inflicted on the people of Palestine. We helped to build Israel. We are still arming it and funding the “war” right now. Even the most half hearted measures from international bodies like the UN to take the bare minimum of a stance against genocide are quashed by the US. As they always have been, our power and resources are used to reinforce imperial and colonial hegemony. That remains the same no matter who is sitting in the Oval Office. And so does our own struggle for liberation. Meaningful change is never, ever going to come from within. We force the change to happen, as we always have.

If you can understand intersectionality, then surely you can understand this: we are not going to free ourselves by sacrificing colonized people. You may vote blue, and for you it could be a matter of life and death. Believe me, as a poor disabled person in a red state who almost killed myself over medical debt, I know the stakes. But I think you have to own the fact that you are empowering perpetrators of genocide and breaking solidarity with colonized people, not even to liberate yourself, but just to bargain with the oppressor for your life. That Palestinians and everyone else who we have harmed are going to be angry and they are more than within their rights. Instead of deflecting by just assuming that no one else is capable of putting their money where their mouth is and actually trying to lay groundwork for change, just do whatever you feel you have to do and sit with the reality of the situation.

Palestine will be free, we will be free, the whole world will someday be free. But for now, this is where we are, and we won’t free ourselves by operating like crabs in a bucket. Get organized, take care of each other, commit to solidarity. Empower yourself and each other rather than the state.

[sadieshavingsex]

yeah like. He just can’t give me the security I want I think, that someone else would be able to give me. I feel like maybe the solution is just to break up because I can’t be bending over backwards for him when he just won’t for me. It’s a constantly fucked up power dynamic. Like I am totally unstable but I try my best to accept him and not ask anything of him that he’s not willing to give and I feel like now that I am asking him to do the same he’s like. Ok I’ll try.

But it still feels like I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop like him trying is just for now and then he’ll get to decide when the other shoe drops and we’ll break up

[gotskamstuff]

My heart is actually breaking for JJ!!

We already saw throughout this season how he was struggling to adapt to their new life with money and how his first gut instinct was of pure panic just thinking that he was gonna become a Kook and that money would change who he is, but now he also found out not only that Luke is not his father…but he actually is the heir of a Kook family, JJ is the heir of the whole of Goat Island!

It already breaks my heart because it’s obvious now that the lash out he has in part 2 (the clips from the trailer where he goes apeshit destroying everything) comes AFTER this discovery which is most likely gonna cause some major spiraling from him and he’s gonna be in a fucked up mental state when we pick up on the story again.

And to be fair who can blame him? He basically just found out that his whole life was a lie, his identity JJ Maybank doesn’t even exist and he is a whole other person: Jackson Groff, a child who was believed to be missing/dead for 19 years.

This also makes JJ’s story and the life he lived growing up 10 times even more devastating.

He grew up in abuse and neglect when all along he had a better life waiting for him and that he was stripped away from, he grew up with traumas that were never real and he was gaslighted to believe: I mean, he lived his entire life believing that his own mother abandoned him as a choice and never cared for him (and developing a fear of abandonment) to then find out that his mother died when he was barely days old and he almost died with her.

He grew up under the same roof of an alcoholic “father” who physically and mentally abused him with no regard, a “father” who neglected him to the point that JJ had to work multiple jobs as a teen just to survive and being stripped of his childhood, a “father” who left him homeless and put JJ in the position to spend days of life without food struggling to afford a meal…and all along his biological father was right there, on the other side of the marsh living in lavish in his family’s mansion, knowing that his child was living in the Cut with an abusive drug addict.

There’s so much devastating information to digest all at once for him: his identity being a lie, his mom never being the woman who abandoned him, his real mom being dead, the abuser that raised him (or better neglected him) having no blood ties at all with him wasting his life away, his real dad and only biological parent alive living all along next to him in riches, the fact that his entire life could’ve been so different from the one he lived and without abuse, AND ON TOP OF EVERYTHING HE JUST FOUND OUT HE IS THE LAST SURVIVING MEMBER OF A FAMILY WITH A DEATH CURSE!!!

He’s gonna spiral so badly and again, who can blame him?

This also makes his found family with the Pogues and his relationship with Kie so much more special, at this point they are the only thing that remains real in his life and the only thing that can still ground him to the person he is. The only truth.

It seemed almost impossible for JJ’s story to get even more tragic and yet it just did! 💔

[jjbalice]

Martyr's Folly

Summary: Yunho helps and comforts the reader after they've accidentally cut too deep.

Genre: a hurt/comfort Yunho x reader oneshot

Word count: 4.81k (15-20 mins)

Trigger warnings: semi-descriptive self-harm (blood, cuts, use of blades - nothing too crazy, though, don't worry!), panicking, crying, mentions of relapsing, lots of pet names, nicknames, and physical affection lol, Yunho is a blessing

A/N: This fic is pretty personal since I've been struggling with not feeling valid enough because of the way I SH, which isn't the stereotypical kind you see in movies and such. In a way, it's an attempt at scaring myself from buying any actual blades mixed in with the comfort I crave whenever I slip up, I guess.

Baby cuts. Cat scratches. Damage dealt within the epidermis and the higher half of the dermis. Whatever you want to call it.

For a few weeks now, that's exactly what has been slowly but steadily appearing on your feet and lower calves. Or re-appearing, rather. A bad habit from the past coming back to haunt you all over again for no apparent reason.

No but seriously, what reason for doing this is there? You're happy, you have a stable part-time job on the side of your studies that are also going great, and an incredible boyfriend with whom you've just celebrated a 6-month anniversary. No real issues in your life as far as you can see.

Sure, sometimes you get caught up in a fight with your friends or parents, or even with Yunho, or maybe some of your insecurities hit extra strong on some days. But all of that is normal, right? Just some passing obstacles that get resolved in a few days tops.

So why are you here, at 3 am, staring at the husk of a person in the mirror? Why is your head so empty yet incomprehensibly full at the same time? Why are your hands all fidgety, getting ready to strike any moment?

Truth be told, you have no clue.

This was supposed to be a lovely weekend for you. You got off work early on Friday, securing enough time to pack your stuff at your dorm before heading to Yunho's apartment for a sleepover. He's been trying to convince you to move in with him after your anniversary, saying how it would be both cheaper and closer to your university. Both of those arguments are true, and yet you remain stubborn, wanting to keep your independence for just a bit longer.

Alas, Yunho has no choice but to respect your decision and settle for weekend sleepovers in the meantime.

And even those are great! The two of you get to talk for hours and play games, cook dinner together or order in and watch TV... Mainly, though, you get to cuddle and snuggle to your hearts' content (and maybe even do a bit more than that, if the opportunity and want arises).

That's also one of the main reasons for your hesitance over this whole... relapse thing.

Because of Yunho and his affectionate nature towards you, hiding the traces of your renewed habits became much more difficult. You couldn't cut where you used to before, all of those areas feeling way too exposed now.

And so, you settled on the bottom of your legs. Anything a pair of longer socks could easily hide without too much questioning from your boyfriend. Let's just say your feet are cold all the time now, even though summer's just barely starting to end.

Is it satisfying to harm there? No, not at all. The area is too small and angular, and the pain-to-mark ratio is nowhere near optimal. Everything feels too bony and stings more than other places, and all you get from it are the faintest of scratches.

But anything to at least partially quell the urge, right?

Well, not exactly.

If the razor blade hidden within the confines of your duffel bag was any proof, your methods weren't exactly effective.

You've never used an actual razor blade before, never even planned on trying it since you knew about the dangers of using it and how everything could get out of hand within seconds. Sure, the scissors and other sharp objects you've used until now weren't exactly perfect either, but they didn't put you at as much of a risk of going to the ER.

...So why did you buy the blade then?

Well, it was pretty cheap, first of all. You could just buy it, think about using it, and then throw it out without feeling too guilty about it, right? Not to mention how it helped you feel more valid about harming, even if you haven't used it yet. Self-harm is always depicted as razor blades on wrists, so even just owning one somehow helped you feel a bit more valid amidst the disappointing scratches on your leg.

It's been a week since you've bought said blade (or 5 blades rather, as they came in a pack - what a steal!). During that week, not much has happened to it. Right after you paid and got your receipt, you tossed the paper into a nearby trash can and stashed the pack of blades into your wallet. And there they were even later tonight, as you quietly crept to your bag to retrieve them, careful not to wake Yunho up.

But let's rewind back a bit. Back to where today's misfortune started.

Just like with everything else lately, you don't know why the urge to indulge washed over you specifically tonight. You and Yunho have spent such a fun evening together, lounging around and enjoying each other in whatever way felt right.

And yet, the moment the lights were turned off and your boyfriend spooned you from behind, holding you close while his breathing slowly evened out, it was as if something had shifted in the air. An overwhelming sense of emptiness washed over you, making you feel both completely dull and overstimulated. Yunho's arms around you felt both like an anchor and a vice, the opposing feelings adding even more to the already rising chaos in your mind. You were suddenly overly aware of every part of your body, as if your own skin was calling out to you.

You didn't want to.

You knew you had to.

As gently and quietly as you could, you unwrapped yourself from Yunho's embrace and got up. He let out a soft sigh at the loss of contact, and you had to admit, you already mourned it too.

Sneaking into the bathroom, you closed the door before turning on the lights. Avoiding the reflection in the mirror, you began searching through the cabinet under the sink. You didn't want to see yourself right now. If anything, it would just add to the confusing conflict raging within you, and you really didn't need that.

Rummaging through each shelf one more time, you let out a frustrated huff. There was nothing you could use. Well, save for the expensive-looking razor Yunho owned, but you really didn't have the patience or coherency to take apart your boyfriend's belongings.

It's time, then.

The return to the bedroom was a bit stressful, as you couldn't decide between searching through your duffel bag there or bringing it with you to the bathroom. Both options seemed too noisy right now, causing you to awkwardly loom over the bag for a few moments, chewing nervously on your bottom lip.

In the end, you decided to just risk it, crouching down to begin unzipping the top. Strangely enough, you kind of hoped Yunho would hear it and wake up. Maybe the shock of being caught would stop you for the time being and you could just go back to bed.

To both your luck and dismay, Yunho didn't wake up, his biggest reaction being the slightest stir of the sheets.

With your wallet in hand, you walked back to the bathroom, your steps a bit bolder this time. Now that you knew Yunho wouldn't wake up so easily, you didn't pay as much mind to the noise you were making.

In a weird way, you were upset. Upset he didn't wake up. Upset he didn't magically realize what your new obsession with socks could possibly mean. Upset he wasn't there to stop you right now.

But along with the upset came a strange feeling of calm. Joy, even.

He doesn't know. Nobody has any idea you're doing this right now. Nobody cares enough to find out anyway. You're free to reign over your body as you please, especially if it will finally shut down the confusing mess of emotions boiling within you.

It will, right?

It's 3 am. You're staying over at Yunho's apartment and he's currently sleeping in the bedroom next-door. You finally gather enough courage to look at yourself in the mirror, but it's rather disappointing. The shell standing in front of you doesn't bring up any emotions anymore. It doesn't even look like you, you think. Maybe this isn't you, after all. That's what you like to tell yourself whenever the moment is over, that this isn't actually the real you harming yourself. This is someone else taking hold of you and your upcoming actions.

You sit down on the cold bathroom floor, a razor blade in hand. When did you unpack them? The small paper packaging and 4 other blades are lying right next to you. Huh. Guess you did just now.

You don't bother taking off the socks. A precious thing like this shouldn't be used in such a shitty spot anyways.

Then again, you also don't exactly want to die right now, so the wrists are off-limits. Sure, you want to feel more valid and that place is the most stereotypical one to cut, but you're already holding the blade you thought you'd never dare use, so that's enough "progress" for now.

Now that you think about it, the thighs sound pretty scary too. You've always heard of some major arteries being located in the thigh. Perhaps you shouldn't risk it there then. Not yet, at least.

And so, like a coward, you move back to your lower leg.

To your defense, you do go considerably higher than usual! You pick a nice spot that's vaguely in the middle of the side of your leg, where your shins and calves would meet.

Deep breaths. You can do this. Just brace yourself and-

...

...

Oh fuck.

No, no, no nonono-

You knew the risks, you knew you should watch out for the pressure when using a razor blade for the first time since it's so much sharper than any pair of scissors you own, but somehow even the lessened pressure you put was too much.

Within seconds, blood started flowing to the surface. You dropped the blade, making it fly in a random direction as your hands trembled.

Your eyes welled with tears as, despite the blood, you could see a gash way deeper than any cut you'd ever made until now; you could literally see two parts of your skin split-

You're gonna throw up. Or faint. Or both. Oh fuck.

The first drops of blood fell onto the tiles just as your own tears pooled over. Your chest heaved with your labored breathing. You didn't know what to do.

Should you go to the ER? Will it stop on its own? Should you wake Yunho up? Oh god, you should probably wake Yunho up, shouldn't you.

Wiping your tear-stained face as best as you could with your shirt, you crawled over to the bathroom door. You were too scared to walk, afraid you'd faint if you stood up so suddenly.

As you sat by the door, another sob wracked through you. You couldn't calm down, you were too scared of what might happen if you didn't take care of the gash in time. And yet, you couldn't help but fear what might happen if you woke Yunho up. Now that you think about it, maybe it will just stop on its own and you can hide it for the rest of the weekend and then you'll just make up a story of how you got into an accident at work and-

One look at the trail of blood behind you was enough to get your hands on the door handle, pulling the door open on your second try. The door handle flew back up with a loud bang as you dropped back down, but the door was open at last. You pulled it fully open from where you sat, taking a few shallow breaths once you did so.

"...Y/N?"

Now. Now he wakes up. Not at any point before you could have done this. Now.

In the back of your mind, a strange feeling of anger bubbled up. Somehow, you wanted to blame Yunho for not getting to you sooner. But the second you realized what your brain was trying to do, you felt another pang of nausea hit you.

Yunho was not to blame in the slightest. This is all you. You started this, you went through with it, and now you're crawling back to him for help. Don't even try to put any blame on him, no matter how much easier it would make this whole thing to stomach.

"Y/N, are you okay?"

Right, he was awake. The shuffling of the sheets coming from the bedroom confirmed as much.

You tried to call out to him but choked on another sob instead.

All of your fear of being seriously hurt and needing help immediately shifted, transforming into the most heart-wrenching wave of guilt imaginable. Just what have you done? Why are you burdening someone else with this? Are you really going to make him see this?

Your thoughts were quickly interrupted by the first footstep. All the raging panic hit you anew, making you speak before you could think.

"W-wait!" You cried, an unknown feeling of desperation clutching your chest. "Please, please don't come here, please."

To your surprise, the footsteps actually stopped.

"...I'm waiting, but please tell me what's going on," Yunho replied with obvious unease.

Well, uh. You haven't exactly thought this far, have you?

"O-okay, I, well, I," you stumbled over your words, trying to work through the mush of your brain to come up with anything even barely comprehensible. "I did something really bad and I think I need your help but you have to promise not to be mad. I don't know what to do but please don't be upset."

Selfish. That's what you were. Even amongst all this chaos and pain you were about to drag Yunho into, all you could think about was saving your own face and evading consequences.

"Y/N, I'm sorry but I'm coming in," Yunho suddenly announced, and the footsteps resumed. "I need to see if you're okay, I promise I won't be mad."

There was no escaping it now. You could only brace yourself for the worst, whatever that would entail.

Two feet stood before your hunched-over form. You didn't dare look up, you didn't dare see what he was feeling.

As carefully as he could, Yunho stepped around you and further into the bathroom. You heard the scraping of metal across tiles before the cabinet doors opened. A towel, a first aid kit, and a medium-sized, colorful box appeared before you, along with your boyfriend in his cozy pajamas. Still, you didn't dare look up.

Wordlessly, he propped your injured leg up as gently as he could, as if he was handling the finest china in the world. Placing the dark grey towel under it, blood immediately rolled down and seeped into the material.

"Okay, this might seem a bit weird, but just- I'm not an expert or anything, far from it, really, but-"

As Yunho rambled nervously, you watched his hands tear open a pack of pads. Ever since your sleepovers became a more regular thing, he'd made sure to keep some in his apartment at all times in case of an emergency. Never had he thought he'd use them in this type of emergency, though.

You watched in confusion as he pulled out one of the pads, opening it and double-checking which side was sticky and which was dry. Unable to hide his worried grimace as he got closer to the wound, he pressed the cotton pad against it.

"I- I probably have something better in the first aid kit to stop the bleeding, but while I look through it, just hold that down to the cut, okay?"

You nodded weakly, deciding not to ask any questions and just let your boyfriend try to fix you. Not that you could say much anyway, not with the way your throat had dried and closed up from all the anxiety.

You silently kept watch as Yunho fumbled through the red bag, noticing the slight tremors in his hands. When you looked at his face, however, it appeared surprisingly neutral.

Ah, so he was trying to stay calm to not worry you any further, but on the inside, he was freaking out just as much as you, if not more. Great. You didn't think you could feel more guilt than you already had, but guess not.

"I'm sorry it's taking so long," he spoke up again, "Mingi would get injured all the time before he'd moved out - you know how clumsy he can get - and I, uh, haven't exactly taken the time to re-organize everything. Sorry."

Your lips twitched into the smallest of smiles, along with a hushed "It's okay, babe".

Yunho's eyes shot up at your words, mirroring your soft smile with his own. Pausing his search for just a second, he leaned over and planted a quick, reassuring kiss on your forehead. "You're right. I'll take good care of you, don't worry. After the first accident Mingi had here, I bought some steri-strips... They should still be around here somewhere, but we threw the original packaging away, so they're just a bit hard to find."

You hummed in understanding, hoping you could ease at least some of his worries by showing him you were doing alright.

Somehow, the moment Yunho appeared in the doorway, all of your previous panic stopped. It was as if through his presence, the jumbled mess of worries surrounding you had split into two. Yunho had graciously shouldered the worries about your physical state, while you focused on keeping his mental well-being in check. All of the fear about his reaction to this situation as a whole was still there, of course, but for the time being, you'd managed to shove them to the back of your mind. It was something to worry about later, when the two of you could calm down and properly talk to each other.

For now, all you had to do was just worry about Yunho while he worried about you.

"Finally!" Yunho sighed in relief, fishing out two small packs of steri-strips. "Okay. Let's do this, then."

But as he shuffled closer to your leg again, he paused.

"Wait, I'm sorry for assuming," he began while opening the first set, "but you don't want to go to the hospital, right? They'd obviously do a much better job than me, but since you said you needed my help, I just, I guessed that- you know. Should we go to the hospital instead?"

You immediately shook your head no, making Yunho smile faintly, glad to have read you right and that he wasn't wasting time trying to play hero.

You were thankful he didn't insist on taking you to the hospital. You knew it would probably be for the best, but right now, in your state, you couldn't even fathom going. You were terrified just crawling to the door to beg for Yunho's help, let alone driving to the opposite part of town to have complete strangers examine you.

"Right then," Yunho sighed, mentally steeling himself for the next step. "Can you feel your leg fine? Feeling faint or anything?"

You just shook your head, slowly easing the pressure you held on the cut. "I'm okay, I think. Just a little shaken up still."

Yunho nodded thoughtfully, helping you unstick the bloody pad from your hand. Luckily, it seemed that most of the bleeding had stopped, at least for now. "It's okay, I'm a bit out of it too."

"Sorry for making you do this," you whispered sincerely, but Yunho quickly stopped you again.

"Don't be sorry, Y/N. I know you didn't mean to do this. You wouldn't have called for me like that if things went down the way you wanted them to."

You couldn't bring yourself to say anything after that, feeling your throat tighten as a fresh wave of tears rushed to your eyes.

You averted your gaze as Yunho began cleaning the area as gently as he could before placing the strips down, helping hold the wound shut. Four strips helped the cut close up, and then two were laid on top of them to help everything stay put. Despite no professional medical training, you swear your boyfriend could do anything like an expert first-try. Well, considering him saying something about treating Mingi's injuries, he might have actually trained a bit already. Either way, you could feel your nerves easing a considerable bit at the sight of the gash finally closed-up.

"There we go," Yunho said contently, giving your other leg a gentle pat. "Just stay put a little longer, okay? I'm gonna clean up a bit in here."

Oh, that's right.

You were so out of it you completely forgot about the blades scattered around, the blood dripping across the floor, the towel, pads, first aid kit, everything.

Closing your eyes, you tried to focus on your breathing. It has mostly returned to normal, but you could still feel a lot of tightness in your chest.

"Hey now, don't go falling asleep on me, okay?" You heard Yunho calling out to you a few meters away, making you peek one eye open.

He was kneeling by the sink, scrubbing at the dirty tiles. When he noticed you looking at him, he flashed you a quick, comforting smile.

"'m not falling asleep," you protested, "I'm just resting a bit, sorry."

"It's okay, I was just a little worried."

Yeah. That's definitely one way to put how Yunho was likely feeling right now.

But that could be dwelled on and discussed later. For now, all you had to do was sit still, breathe deep, and stay strong.

...

"You still with me, princess?"

You opened your eyes again, this time to find Yunho sitting in front of you. You don't know how much time has passed, too focused on pacing your breaths, saying the alphabet forwards and backwards, thinking about your favorite TV show moments - anything to calm down, really.

When he saw you were still fully awake, he pulled out a gauze bandage with a small smile. "We should be fine with just the steri-strips, but let me wrap this up for you to be one hundred percent safe, okay?"

You let him do as he pleased, trusting his judgment better than your own at the moment. As he bandaged your leg, you looked around the room, noticing everything was back the way it was before you'd entered.

"I put the, uh, the blades away for now," Yunho continued, a nervous edge to his tone. "I didn't want to just throw them away without permission, but leaving them out here in the open didn't seem like a great idea either. Sorry if it seems distrustful, it's just... you know."

"You're scared I might do it again," you finished for him, making him nod hesitantly. "It's okay, I get it."

It was honestly surprising how easy it was to talk to Yunho about this. Maybe it's because he already saw the worst of it, maybe it was the way he took such gentle care of you, or maybe it was just his entire attitude about this so far. Caring, non-judgemental, open to listen.

"Alright then, I think we're done here. Let's get you to bed, shall we?"

Before you could respond, you were picked up by a pair of strong, warm hands. You wanted to object for a split second, but on second thought, maybe it was in your best interest not to move too much right now.

A few moments later, you were laid back down on the bed, a soft kiss pressed to your temple before you were shrouded in your blanket. With a whispered promise of returning again, Yunho rushed back to turn off the lights and close the door, enveloping the two of you in darkness. You waited a second, two, and then the bed dipped behind you with a quiet creak.

"Come here." Yunho's arms wrapped around your waist from behind again, holding you closer than before. "Is this okay? Should I give you space?"

"It's fine, Yuyu."

His chest shook with a small chuckle. "Oh come on, don't call me that right now." He somehow snuggled up even closer to you, pressing his face into your neck. "I'm already emotional enough as is."

A beat or two of silence passed between the two of you before he spoke up again.

"Was this," Yunho paused, hesitating for a second, "was this the first time you did something like this, or are there... more?"

You sighed. "Well, this was the first time I've messed up like this and used an actual razor blade, but in general? There's been a few instances, yeah. Most of them happened years ago, but lately, it started up again."

Yunho stayed quiet this time. As the silence stretched on, you began to grow worried. Is this the moment where he gets mad at you?

A sniffle broke through the air, quickly followed by another. The hold around your waist tightened.

"It's the socks, isn't it?" Yunho barely choked out, voice trembling.

Never have you felt so guilty in your life before.

"I thought it was weird, I wanted to ask you about it, I really did," he sobbed, burying his wet face further into your shirt. "I didn't want to make you feel bad about it if it was genuinely just something you preferred, so I held back, but it worried me anyway. I should have asked so much sooner."

"Yu..." You tried to turn around in his embrace, but he stopped you, not letting you see his tearful eyes. "Honey, it's not your fault in the slightest, please don't beat yourself up about it."

"But I should have-"

"Just listen to the same advice you gave me, hm? You never wanted this to happen, you wouldn't be so torn up about it otherwise. It's really not your fault."

With what you assumed to be a watery hum of agreement, Yunho nodded into your back.

You tried to turn around again, and this time, Yunho finally let you. You watched as his silhouette sat up, reaching around for the tissue box on the nightstand before wiping his tears and blowing his nose.

"I'm sorry," he muttered, crumpling the tissue and putting it away, "you're the one hurting and I'm making it all about myself."

You tutted softly as he laid back down, shuffling closer to him to drape yourself over his broad chest. "That's not true, Yun. I know this is really hard on you as well, you have all the right to be upset. Please don't hide it just because I'm also in pain."

"Okay," he accepted, taking a deep breath to calm himself.

The room stayed quiet for another few minutes, save for the faint rustling of the sheets as you intertwined one of your hands with his.

"If it's okay," Yunho croaked in a careful, ginger tone, "could we maybe talk more about this tomorrow? I feel like I have over a million questions right now, but I don't want to overwhelm you when you should be resting."

You let out a small, sleepy chuckle. "Yeah, that sounds good. I think I'll also feel a bit better if we talk about this some more tomorrow. It's a bit embarrassing even now when I know that you know, but I trust you enough to share this part of me, I think."

Yunho leaned down to kiss the top of your head, making you smile. "Thank you, you have no idea how much that means to me. And please, never feel embarrassed about this. Just because this stuff is not talked about enough doesn't mean your feelings are wrong or not valid. We'll figure this out together, I promise. No matter what it takes."

"Okay. I look forward to tomorrow," you said, pressing a quick peck to his sternum before lying down again. "Goodnight, Yuyu."

"Goodnight, love."

Please, don't hesitate to reblog or comment!! Any kind of feedback is much appreciated!! <333

(Also would once again like to say that this was not meant to romanticize SH in any way, and I hope it did not come across that way. Take care, everyone <3)

[ceilidho]

prompt: post-apocalypse ghost/reader fic where ghost and the rest of his team come across the feral, blood-soaked reader who stabs first and asks questions later. (on ao3 here)

-

The world ends on a Monday.

Abysmal timing; they’re on leave by chance, the whole lot of them. Soap and Gaz are playing cards in the barracks when they get the call. Price is still in his office when a phone in the corner of the room that never rings suddenly does (he stares at it for a time before picking it up). Ghost is someplace, no one knows for sure; what they do know is that when he does finally answer their calls, he’s out of breath and there’s a thread of panic in his voice that makes the blood in Soap’s veins run cold. 

He’s never heard him sound like that. He never will again.

The virus rages across the country, hopping borders like they melt away into the ether. Country after country toppelling to this unnamed virus that demolishes society so completely that there was never a chance for the military to contain it. That chance evaporates before even the faintest spark of hope is lit. 

Soap is used to killing, but what he never gets used to is the sight of those things that take human shape. Calling them zombies is easy at first, but even that name comes with a sense of distance; it evokes things seen in films and tv shows, not the real flesh-and-blood of it all, not sitting in a caravan speeding down the motorway with bodies torn apart and scattered across the road. He learns to bite his teeth and hold his bile down at the sight of one of those creatures hunched over the masticated remains of a person. 

Then suddenly it’s seven months later. The core unit of them make their way across the continent, taking back roads where they’re less likely to encounter the hoards of infected. They’ve had too many close calls for them to take chances anymore—even armed to the gills and strapped in body armor (the remnants of the military efforts that collapsed within days), Gaz’s shoulder pad has crumpled beneath too sharp teeth and Roach has had his legs swept out from under him, his throat nearly exposed, nearly torn open.

Ghost’s hands are still wet with gore from taking that infected apart. If any of them make it, it will likely be him.

A part of Soap worries about Ghost. Even he feels the tender edges of his own humanity bristle at the day-in and day-out struggle that is now a luxury rather than a hardship. Just being able to survive is a miracle. Ghost just goes dark. From the little Soap knows of Ghost (which is still more than most; he’s confident enough to say that of their group, he’s the one that Ghost shows himself to the most), he knows that Ghost has already endured enough suffering for an army. Never mind a single man. 

There’s a flatness behind his eyes these days and it scares Soap, just a bit. He no longer looks like a person behind a mask but rather the sun-baked skull itself. 

His worry only fades when they come across the girl.

She’s a feral little thing, half-starved and out of her mind. They see her slip in and out of abandoned houses when they make their way through a small village in the French countryside (or what Soap thinks is France), hair matted with sweat and blood. 

It’s Ghost that pauses, Ghost that makes them stop and detours long enough to creep up on her, holding a big hand to her mouth when she howls and tries to tear his whole arm off. It takes over an hour to calm her down long enough to reassure her that they mean her no harm. She tries to take off no less than six times.

Soap has never seen Ghost look smitten, but there’s no other word for it. 

When Price tentatively suggests leaving the girl behind—not a terrible suggestion after she tries to stab Ghost—the look Ghost levels him with brooks no further arguments. They’re keeping the girl. 

She’s his problem, as far as Soap and the rest of them are concerned. No name, unless it’s Soap yelling “Girl” or “Hey, you!” when she does something stupid like actively seeking out infected to kill. Ghost chuckles all deep baritone when he sees her hack away at an infected man’s neck. It’s enough to make a man hurl. Love in a time of zombies. 

He hears them murmuring to each other sometimes, late at night when the team is holed up in a house or a barn they’ve commandeered. Doors always reinforced, someone standing guard on the roof. The low rasp of Ghost’s voice, almost susurrous, almost intimate. Her voice like a chittering wolf. 

Hovering between sleep and wakefulness, Soap doesn’t look away from the wall in front of him. He knows if he does, if he turns over from where he’s supposed to be sleeping, he’ll see Ghost hovering over the girl roughly half his size, her face blocked only by the way his arms frame either side of her head. He doesn’t think he’ll be able to stomach the sight of his friend’s hips bucking into the girl.

He hears him mutter something like, “You needed to be found. I needed to find you.” and then it’s enough. He lets his brain shut off. 

If it keeps Ghost sane and with them, so be it. 

[lesbxdyke]

Decided to steal my own tags from This Post because I didn't want to detract from the very good points being made about wheelchair accessibility in the art

So I'm disabled. And I often have to use crutches as a mobility aid. Sometimes one, sometimes two. And even with that, I still sometimes can't get around.

There have been numerable occasions in my life where something has been marked as 'accessible' that is not accessible to me, because it was made with ONLY wheelchair users in mind.

And like I said in my tags, it's a genuinely great thing that things are now being made with wheelchair users in mind! I am genuinely heartened and happy that wheelchairs users are being recognised in public spaces and accommodated for!

But they are not the be all and end all of physically disabled people.

I need the extra space of a disabled bathroom. Especially as another physical disability of mine causes me to often require space to change underwear or clothing.

However, if I'm having a bad pain day, I can't wash my hands. Because the only sink is at the height for a wheelchair user. So my options are to eschew hygiene and pray that a cleaner wipes down the door handle regularly so others aren't interacting with a thing that I have touched without washing my hands, OR risk furthering my own pain by bending to reach the sink, which could end in me stuck in the bathroom as my back seizes and I cannot move.

As I'm sure you can imagine from reading that, neither option is a good option, but one is a safer one for me. And I hate it. I'm 'lucky' in that I have to always carry baby wipes with me anyway so I'm somewhat able to mitigate the hygiene issue, but what if I didn't? What if I didn't have the extra disability and just had the back problems that required the extra space of the disabled bathroom for my mobility aids? What then?

I also have a radar key (for those not in the UK: disabled bathrooms are often locked. A radar key is a skeleton key for disabled bathrooms all around the UK) so I can always gain access to the disabled bathrooms. Except... I often have to find staff to help me open them anyway because the door handles are low and I can't bend to press them.

Now this post isn't me saying that the world should be built only to cater to me in particular (tho gods it would be nice!)

This post is talking about competing support needs and how my experience as a disabled person, struggling with how so much 'accessible' stuff is only designed for wheelchair users is just as valid as a wheelchair user celebrating that they can use an ATM and a public bathroom without needing the aid of a stranger or a carer.

I've seen quite a lot of people, in real life and elsewhere on the internet, want to call it Ableist when people ask for there to be a different option that would be inaccessible for a wheelchair user to use within an accessible area like a bathroom. They think it's able bodied people, or parents (since often in the UK, disabled bathrooms also double as baby changing, which is a whole different kettle of fish) demanding we take away the accessibility that the bathrooms are there for. They don't think about people on crutches, or canes, or with mobility that changes by day, or who can walk unaided but cannot bend, or, or, or.

Two sinks in a disabled bathroom would change my life. One wheelchair accessible, one not. I could wash my hands. Other people who needed the bathroom could wash their hands. Everyone could be hygienic in an accessible way!

Two ATMs, side by side. One lower, one higher. I can access my money. Wheelchair users can access their money. Everyone can withdraw their money safely in an accessible way!

Maybe there's no solution for some (like the door handle) but if others were solved, then the remaining ones would bother me a lot less. It's a lot less frustration and humiliation inducing to say "Hey, can you open the bathroom for me?" When you know you'll be able to wash your damn hands once inside, yknow?

[nekropsii]

thoughts on meulin as a whole :?

I think her Toxic Positivity as commentary on Tumblr Fandom Spaces is spot on, and I feel like no one acknowledges that trait partially because of the same reason that it’s there in the first place. The reason I say “partially” is because it mostly comes down to people not reading the Openbounds, but still professing themselves to be “experts” just because they saw a few pieces of Fan Art. Any remaining percentage goes to Misogyny. The Leijons are not allowed to be seen as complicated people because they are Cute Girls, and therefore are Dumb and Silly and Have No Humanity - I mean, Personality outside of this.

Every Abled person who has looked me in the eyes and told me she’s Bad Hearing Disabled Representation because she “isn’t using real sign”, or because she’s “still speaking verbally to people” owe me $500 per every word of their statement. Textually, she loves her disability, and she loves navigating it and the world around her. She loves the new learning opportunities, she loves learning sign. She’s open about this! Literally the only real reason she’s still speaking verbally to people is because the people around her won’t fucking take the time to learn sign for her. This is a struggle that a lot of real actual hearing disabled people face. It’s not unrealistic. Lip reading exists. Her disability was gained, so she already knew how to talk. I wish every Abled person a very Shut The Fuck Up, Forever. I wish them a very Begone, Concern Troll. I love Meulin. I’ll kill you.

[sapphicvqmpires]

❁ཻུ۪۪♡ who are you?

vampire series | shuri udaku | part 1

Pairing - vampire!shuri x black fem!reader

Word count - 17k (yup)

Contains - smut (18+), fingering, cunnilingus, clit play, overstimulation, choking/breathplay, biting, edging, strap-on sex, blood drinking, descriptions of blood, gaslighting (it’s a vampire story, so it’s a whole bunch of shady shit going on), and probably more I forgot

Divider From - @firefly-graphics

Sneak Peak - “Shuri…baby…” Your breathless whimpers forced Shuri to release you, her face drawing closer to yours, yet she looked so different. Her dark brown eyes transformed into a blood-red hue, her fangs fully extended, and her mouth stained with your blood. The image frightened you at first and Shuri looked away in shame, attempting to conceal the face she despised so deeply.

Tags - @inmyheadimobsessed @amplifiedmoan @vampzxi @abenomeiiii @heejayy @shurislover @shurismainbxtch @shuriszn @naomis-daydream @prettymrswright @pocketsizedpanther @gardenof-venus @tiii-iiiiii @verachii @ihearttish @playhousedistee @somethingcleaverandwhitty @niyahwrites @tishsrealwife @oceean @sookiesookie @myaraines @cafehyunji @6-noir @ventingfanfics @marsology @imjusthere2readbruv @desswright29 @ooglyboooglybitxh @sweetalittleselfish-honey @kisskourt @shaiwritesss @sapphicbarbz @darkangelchronicles (comment if you want to be tagged in future fics, 18+ only)

Writers Note: whew fuck, this was definitely the most challenging thing I’ve ever written for tumblr. I could’ve went on and on, but I realize that’s not ideal. This is part 1 of a three part story, this part is mostly just an introduction to Shuri and her character, delving into her past and her life as vampire while introducing the vampire lore. Reader is nosey af but who wouldn’t be if they got to question a vampire? I hope you guys enjoy this read! I always love reading your comments!

“If I touch a burning candle I can feel no pain, If you cut me with a knife it's still the same

And I know her heart is beating, and I know that I am dead

Yet the pain here that I feel, try and tell me it's not real

It seems that I still have a tear to shed” - tears to shed, the corpse bride

November 23rd, 2411, New York

❁ཻུ۪۪♡ You found yourself sitting in a bar, one that sat high up in the air as most buildings did in the now 25th century. The night sky enveloped you, its vastness serving both as the reason you are able to walk the earth and the reason you want to leave it, yearning, if only for a brief moment, to bask in the sun's warmth seeping through your dark skin once more. Those days were dearly missed. You missed early morning brisk winter breezes. You missed chocolate sundaes on balmy afternoons. It was the little things that made life meaningful, and you missed it all but most importantly, you missed her and this couldn't possibly be her. It would be too much of a coincidence to cross paths in this exact space at precisely the same time, especially when space and time had lost their significance to you ever since your transformation…that was until this very moment. Moving closer cautiously, you walked in silence, struggling to stifle your gasp.

It was her.

She retained the same appearance as the day you first encountered her; ageless, timeless, and effortlessly divine. That finely chiseled jaw remained a masterpiece, her dark skin still the epitome of flawlessness, and her hair wore the same exact short curls that framed her face in a manner that rendered her the most attractive person you have ever encountered. Even after nearly four centuries, you have yet to meet someone like Shuri Udaku. If a heartbeat resided within you, it would undoubtedly be pounding against your rib cage. If breath were still at your disposal, it would stagger beyond your control. However, for the past 400 years, you possessed none of the two. No breath. No heartbeat. You were frozen.

Closer and closer, you moved forward, until finally you took the empty bar stool next to her in the very empty bar.

“Shuri?”

She paused. Her body stayed deathly still right before she turned to see the face she missed so much.

“Y/n…?”

“Yeah…”

And while your heightened senses surpassed any human perceptions, the world seemed to suddenly go quiet, embracing a rare moment of absolute silence. It was a profound silence, the kind you craved after a prolonged period of listening to the world and all its presence for so long and it seemed Shuri felt the same. Both of you embraced this quietude, finding solace in its embrace, until she eventually broke the stillness with the very mouth you had once intimately known.

“It’s been…it’s been almost 200 years, s’thandwa.”

That name. Oh, how you missed that too.

“Yeah…I guess it has been.”

February 16th, 2022, New York

The day was warm, the sun reaching its peak in the sky while your dark attire absorbed its radiance. You reveled in the comforting sensation it provided, a soothing contrast to the ache settled within you, a certain feeling of content that masked the emptiness you felt. Yes, the sky was bright, the day was warm, but your heart was not. Not with the scene that surrounded you.

“We gather here today to commemorate our brother Jonathan. He was a friend to us all, a person that will truly be missed and cannot be replaced….”

You found it impossible not to internally sneer at the kind and flattering words used to depict your former partner, Jonathan, during his funeral. To everyone present, he was a gentle and caring man, someone adored by everyone who had crossed paths with him. However, you were all too aware of the person he was behind closed doors; a coward, a despicable individual who was good for nothing but the depths of pockets. He had used you as a mere pawn in his life, exploiting your exceptional beauty. You were nothing more than an object, a prized possession desired by many men, but he had claimed you. Your parents had practically arranged your marriage to Jonathan, a companion chosen for you due to his wealth. The plan was for you to marry him and become his perfect wife. That was until a week ago when he passed away.

“My son was everything a mom could want…,” Jonathan’s mother began, breaking into sobs as she mourned for her son you hated so deeply.

“He was…the most perfect boy. My baby boy. And y/n…” Her gaze connected with yours, her eyes filled with a pitiful sorrow that you could not reciprocate or even pretend to, and so you did nothing but offer her a weak smile as she proceeded. “My boy loved you, baby. He loved you with his entire being and I hope you know that.”

A pitiful smile graced your face, the only response you could possibly give her amidst your numbness. The pain and hollowness residing in your heart were not born from sorrow or profound grief over Jonathan's death, but rather from the absence of love and affection he gave you. The lack of love in a relationship that had consumed three and a half years of your life weighed heavily on you. All you had received was a shattered heart, and there was no one there to assist you in gathering the fragments except for yourself.

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

The moment you closed your apartment door, a long exhale escaped you; a mix of relief and stress as you stepped into your now quiet space. It was vastly different from the usual banter Jonathan would welcome you home with, his tendency to pinpoint faults in you as an outlet for his anger that had nothing to do with you in the first place. Yet now, you stood alone. The sentiment was uncertain and you were not sure how to feel about it, but there was an odd form of comfort in the deafening silence. Your mind was a whirlwind of thoughts, a tangled maze of broken strands. Amidst the chaos, your mind always retorted back to one single thing: your friend, Shuri.

You had arranged to meet with her in a couple days and finally address your suspicions head-on. You were well aware that you were most likely overthinking, perhaps being overly dramatic or even irrational, and that your theories might be far from the truth. But after a year of friendship, the burden of skepticism had become overwhelming. The feeling of being kept in the dark, the feeling that she harbored secrets and consistently hid things from you, had pushed you to a breaking point. You couldn't bear this constant uncertainty any longer. You were fully prepared to demand answers and possibly present an ultimatum because you were simply exhausted and as much as it would break you to have to remove Shuri from your life, it was what you needed to do if she refused to provide you with the solace and closure you needed, especially in times like these.

You proceeded with your night routine, changing into your pajamas and getting comfy in your now very empty bed. Was the bed always this large? Or did Jonathan just always make you feel small? Finally, after a long day, you allowed yourself to weep, sensing the tears tracing their path down your cheeks and absorbing into the softness of your pillow. You cried yourself into the most serene sleep you had in years.

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

You sat at the diner where you and Shuri would always meet at late hours, waiting for her to appear so you could finally voice the subtle anger that had been building within you over the course of a year-long friendship. It wasn't just a matter of her being a weird individual disinterested in sharing about herself—it was everything about her. The way she spoke, the way she was ridiculously smart, the way she has done absolutely everything and been absolutely everywhere in her short 26 years of being on this earth. It seemed she spoke an almost inhuman number of languages, and you couldn't recall ever seeing her eat, despite her assurances that she did. Her handling of alcohol was reckless, yet you'd only witnessed her drunk once, maybe twice.

There were countless aspects that unnerved you, but the most unsettling was her adamant refusal to meet during daylight. She claimed it to be solar urticaria, a supposed sun allergy, and you believed her initially. However, her increasing avoidance of daytime interactions left you puzzled and frustrated. She wouldn't respond to your texts or answer your calls during daylight hours, making it impossible for you to visit her, even when she didn't have to leave her home. Strangely enough, you had never even seen her house.

The mounting suspicions were overwhelming, and you wondered if you were being silly. It couldn't be true, right? There was no scientific proof or evidence to support such a claim. But what else would your suspicions add up to? What other explanation was there, except that she might be a va--

"Hey, y/n," her velvety voice broke through your thoughts. She settled into her seat across from you, and you couldn't deny how fine she looked. She had always held a certain kind of beauty, and not in a friendship type of way; it was a beauty impossible to overlook, one that left a lasting impression on everyone, yourself included. It was an ethereal allure, almost divine in nature. She gave off an attractiveness that surpassed ordinary bounds, and you were no exception to its impact. It was a challenge to put into words, but she seemed otherworldly, perhaps even godlike in her allure. She was undeniably attractive, captivating beyond what your body could handle, yet you continually suppressed any attraction you felt towards her. After all, you were in a relationship, a terrible one, but a relationship nonetheless. The last thing you needed was to lose the only person you believed truly understood you because of a silly attraction you may have felt for her.

"Hello, Shuri," you responded, your voice carrying a hint of tremor from the nerves that had crept in. Shuri caught on, and her self-assured chuckle let you know she sensed the anxiousness that had taken hold of you, further quickening your heartbeat.

"You look beautiful," she remarked, attempting to ease your nerves, though both of you knew that did nothing but make it worse. Her words carried a magnetic charm, one that surpasses the human experience, causing the hairs on your arms to stand up. You managed a soft smile in response, genuine but subdued, as that was all you could offer right now and Shuri immediately picked up on the fact that something was off about you. There was a subtle shift in your demeanor and posture, a slight dimming of the twinkle in your eyes but it didn't escape her notice.

“What’s wrong, y/n?” You’re caught off guard because you didn’t think yourself to be that obvious. You knew for a fact you were never that transparent. But to Shuri, you almost always were.

“What do you mean?”

“Well there’s obviously something wrong.”

“Obviously? I’m just sitting here, I’ve said all but five words to you, how is it obvious??” Your tone turned a touch harsh, frustration evident as you were tired of Shuri's ability to see through you. Raising an eyebrow, she chuckled, revealing her perfect set of pearly whites.

“I’m sorry for your loss, by the way,” she said once she stopped her laughter. You huffed in annoyance, rolling your eyes as you crossed your arms.

“No need to be sorry…I’m almost relieved he’s good and gone.”

Shuri softly smiled, a smile you knew she tried to contain but it was no use.

“What?”

“Nothing…I just think…I think you’ll be much better without him. You never needed him, y/n.”

For a moment, you almost got caught up in her, lost in her words and the enchantment that peered behind her beautiful dark brown eyes but you remembered what you were here for, and you weren’t about to succumb into her hypnotic gaze as you often do.

“Shuri…I-I need answers…like…like, right now.” Even though your voice trembled, your request was resolute. You yearned for something from her, anything at all. And just when you thought you had the advantage, that same self-assured smirk reappeared on her face, as if she had been waiting for you to bring up the conversation.

“What?,” you questioned her facial expressions.

“What?,” she challenged back.

“No, you’re the one giving me that look so you tell me what's up.”

“The floor is yours, princess.”

You rolled your eyes, inhaling deeply as you debated whether to continue with this conversation. If your suspicions were wrong, you'd feel like a damn fool. Shuri would undoubtedly tease you relentlessly, something she already enjoyed doing. But you pushed aside all doubts and plowed forward despite the hesitations that surfaced in her presence. Clearing your throat, you released a hefty exhale before proceeding.

“Shuri…I know you’re gonna think I sound insane but I’m getting to a breaking point, and I just have to ask…”

“Then ask.”

You paused, glaring at her as you proceeded. “We’ve been friends for about a year now, and there’s no better way to put this but there’s just something incredibly off about you…like, it’s fucking with my head.”

Shuri bit the inside of her cheek, trying to contain her laughter.

“You are insanely talented at like…everything, you’ve been everywhere, you speak multiple languages, I’ve never met your family, or seen your house and I’m starting to question whether you even have a family…or a house…”

“Are you done?”

“Not even close. You never eat…or drink, but you drink an insane amount of alcohol almost everytime we go out yet I’ve seen you get drunk maybe once…?? Shuri, that's not humanly possible.”

“You’re listing things about myself like I don’t already know, pretty girl.”

She always knew her way with words.

“I’m not done.”

She gestured for you to proceed, resting her back against her chair.

“The sun…what is your deal with the day time??”

“I already told you, y/n.”

“No, don’t give me that shit. I don’t buy it…so you’re allergic to the sun or whatever…you can’t pick up your phone?? Answer your texts?? But as soon as the sun goes down…”

Shuri just sits there, interested but also unbothered and you weren’t sure how that made you feel. There was silence for a moment.

“You gonna say something or just sit there and look good all evening??”

Shuri said nothing but another chuckle.

“What’s so funny, Shuri? You’ve been saying nothing but laughing at me the whole time.”

“I was waiting for you to finish what you were saying.”

“I have nothing else to say.”

Shuri leaned in, placing her forearms on the table, her smug grin never wavering. Her eyes shifted between the two of your own, delving into the depths of your eyes. You swallowed, nerves building up in anticipation.

“Come on, y/n. You’re a smart girl. I’m sure you can figure it out.”

“I—“

“I don’t need to repeat everything you just listed. Why must I answer what you already know?”

“What are you saying, Shuri??”

“Don’t be stupid now. You know.”

“What do I know??”

Shuri arched an eyebrow, and you took in a sharp breath. It couldn't be. There was just absolutely no way.

“Uh uh. Don’t fuck with me, Shuri, this isn’t fucking funny!”

“I’m not playing with you, princess. I have no reason to anymore. You know.”

“Anymore?? What does that mean?? Tell me what the fuck is going on.”

“I’m not messing with you.”

A lengthy silence ensued as you both locked eyes, glaring eachother down. Shuri appeared unbothered, almost captivated by your frustration and that only fueled the fire that was coursing through your veins.

“Uh uh, there’s just no way. No fucking way,” you uttered in disbelief as you made your way out of the diner, coming face to face with the dark night that surrounded you every single time you were with her. Shuri rolled her eyes before she got up to follow you. You hurried behind the restaurant, hoping to get a moment of privacy to collect your thoughts, but that hope dissipated as you felt Shuri's firm grip on your wrist, causing you to flinch at her harshness. Shuri let go abruptly, offering no verbal apology, but her eyes held a silent regret at the action.

“Shuri, what the fuck is going on??,” you asked, attempting to keep your voice down but your mind was too boggled to remember you were still out in public.

“I’m gonna need you to keep your voice down, y/n.”

“Keep my….excuse me?? No! Don’t fucking tell what to do, Shuri! Tell me what the fuck is going on!”

“Y/n…,” a voice of warning, one that was accompanied by her firm stature.

“No, don’t fucki—,” but before you could complete your sentence, your body was wedged against the building wall, Shuri's palm firmly covering your mouth as her body trapped you in. She held you like that for a moment, admiring how you so easily yielded to her control even after your mouth refused to shut up for her.

“You’re a feisty little thing, aren’t you?” Your face softened just a bit, almost relaxing into her touch.

“Are you going to listen to me, y/n?”

You nodded, a smirk appearing on her face at the gesture.

“Good girl.” She let your mouth go. “No wonder Jonathan could not handle you.”

You scowled at her, eyebrows furrowing together as Shuri pinched your chin and tilted your head up just a bit. “Let me take you home and I will tell you everything you need to know. I’ll answer any important questions you have, baby, but you have got to listen to me. Do you understand?”

You were trembling, and though your pride nearly kept you from acknowledging it, fear gripped you. Fear of Shuri and whatever her motives might be. Your heart felt like it could burst through your rib cage at any given moment.

“Breathe, baby, breathe. I’m not gonna hurt you. Just let me take you home. Please.” Her plea seemed to carry a hint of desperation and it provided an odd sense of comfort. You knew that you would be okay and so you agreed.

The car ride remained silent, only the rhythmic patter of raindrops against the car window and Shuri's old tunes playing softly. Your heartbeat felt so loud, you swore you could almost hear that too…or maybe she could.

Once you get there, Shuri swiftly makes it to your side, helping you get out as she softly massages the skin on your wrist.

“I don’t need your help getting to my door, Shuri.”

“I just wanted to make sure you were ok.”

“I’m perfectly fine.”

She lets you go, trailing behind you as you make your way to your apartment.

You made yourself a cup of tea in an effort to soothe your nerves but the absence of conversation between you two left an eerie atmosphere in the space, one that surpasses the fact that you now live alone in a space that was once for two. The rain seemed distant, tapping lightly against your balcony window. Suddenly, the sound of her presence broke through your state of mind.

“So…are you gonna tell me what’s going on, y/n?”

You swallow, trying to contain your composure. “Nah, I’m waiting for you to tell me, Shuri.”

“I think you’ve gotten it all figured out now. Am I right?”

“But I want to hear it come from your mouth, Shuri. I wanna know it’s true because you told me.”

Shuri reclined, stretching her arms casually against the sofa, adopting an almost cocky posture as she grinned at you.

“You gonna fucking say something or what?,” you snapped in impatience.

Shuri raises an eyebrow as she releases a breathy chuckle. “You have such a mouth on you.”

Your eyebrows lightly furrowed together, before you rolled your eyes dramatically. “Yeah, whatever.”

“Fine. Let’s have it your way then. Let me reintroduce myself to you…Hello, y/n. My name is Shuri Udaku and I am a vampire,” she said with a nod of her head, as if the fact meant nothing. Your heart stops for a second before it begins beating uncontrollably, consumed with pure shock. Even though you already knew, you were never prepared for how it felt once it was made real.

“I can hear your heartbeat, princess. Tell me what you’re feeling. What’s going on in that beautiful head of yours?”

“I…I need some time to p-process…”

Shuri remained silent, her eyebrows knitting together as she observed you, appreciating the way you stumbled over your own words. She was captivated by you, by the way your body responded to her and to this newfound piece of information that you were trying to keep your composure over.

“I want you to go, Shuri.”

But she did not budge. Perched there, she observed you, and an increasing fear of her began to gnaw at you and Shuri seemed to sense this. She rose from her seat, advancing toward you, firmly placing her hands on the armrests of your chair as she hovered over you. Her lips were mere whispers away from yours, and the desire to both flee from and lean into her lips was a thin line in difference. You were torn between pushing her away and surrendering to the magnetic pull. Even though she had always held a certain dominance in your relationship, it was different now. It was hunter and hunted. Predator and prey. You felt so small, utterly defenseless, and you swallowed in anticipation, awaiting her next move.

“Shuri…please,” you choked out.

“What’s wrong, baby?”

“I—please don’t hurt me. Please.”

A soft chuckle escaped her lips, and though it wasn't inherently menacing, it sent shivers down your spine. Shuri leaned down, her lips almost brushing against the side of your throat, and your entire body quivered the closer she got.

“Please,” you said softly, unsure of what it was you were pleading for at this point. Did you want her to stop? Did you want her to keep going? There was a thin line between the two and the beat in your heart found its way between your legs and you could only hope she couldn’t sense that too. Shuri pressed her lips into your throat, kissing the sensitive skin as you sigh in relief. You tried so hard to contain the moan that was threatening to escape you but you swallowed it, clenching your thighs together instead. The feel of her soft lips against your throat was threatening to undo you and the sound of her voice nearly made you bring her face into yours.

“I would never hurt you,” she hums as her lips continue to softly assault your throat. A soft whimper escapes your lips, an unwilling beg for her to give you more and Shuri took note of it but did not give into it. She removes herself from your body, coming back to face you and your eyes that drown in both fear and want. She takes your cheek into the palm of her hand, pressing firm into your warm skin.

“If I leave now, are you going to be ok here on your own?”

You nod and she smirks at you, admiring how you and that smart mouth of your was at loss for words and how she was the one that got you that way.

“I’ll see you whenever you want to see me. Let me know and I’ll give you all the answers that you need. Just reach out to me, yeah?”

You nod again. She grabs your hand and helps you off the chair, pulling you in by your hips until your pelvis bumps into hers and suddenly all fear is replaced with pure lust and this was nothing new. You always had an attraction for Shuri, even when you were with Jonathan, you could never ignore how beautiful she was and how her beauty lit a spark in you and though there were never any official titles placed between the two of you, you always knew a part of her wanted you too.

“Shuri,” you groaned, completely overtaken by her and her presence.

“What is it?,” she asked, her voice winning you over with the bass it held. You swallow harshly, embarrassed with yourself and how much you were leaking onto your panties.

“I want…I n-need…”

“Tell me.”

You remained silent, hoping that the desperation in your expression would convey what words could not but that was not enough for Shuri. She let you go and your body immediately ached at the emptiness you felt. Then, she gently gripped your chin, tilting it slightly to ensure your gaze was locked onto hers.

“Call me when you’re ready.” Shuri heads towards the balcony door and opens it, and the coolness from outside immediately strikes your skin and you shiver.

“Shuri, what the fuck are you doing?? It’s raining and it’s damn cold, close the door!”

Shuri only smirked at you, scanning her surroundings before she effortlessly jumped off the balcony as if it was nothing. You immediately gasped, rushing to the edge to search for her, but she had vanished. All that remained was the sound of the pouring rain and the rustle of the wind in the air, clogging your senses and sending a sharp shiver up your spine. You had received the answer you sought, the one you needed, but now you were left with nothing but an insatiable craving to know more.

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

A week had passed since that night with Shuri, a week of solitude spent grappling with troubled thoughts that ignited an overwhelming sense of desire. Finally, you summoned the courage to reach out and arrange another meeting with her. Shuri agreed, relieved that you were willing to take it up a notch.

“So what about mirrors?”

“What about mirrors?”

“You know…that dracula shit, how he can’t see his reflection and all…is that real?”

Shuri chuckles. “False. I can see my reflection perfectly fine.”

“Ok…uhhh, what about the whole thing with crosses, crucifixes, holy water and all that…?”

“False. Although I do not like being in the presence of those things, only because I find religion to be messy and I never really believed in it.”

You raise an eyebrow at her. “Okay, ummmm…what about garlic?”

Shuri burst into laughter. “You watch way too many movies, y/n.”

“Well shit, I don’t know. Pop culture got you guys all kinds of fucked up.”

“I know, it’s ok. I just…keep going,” she assures, coming back down from her laughter.

“Okay um…the sun.”

“You know the answer to that.”

“I know but I want to hear it come from your mouth, Shuri.”

“You must have heard enough lore to understand that we cannot go into the sun, princess. It is one of our greatest weaknesses. If I go in the sun, I’ll die. It’s simple really.”

A part of you went numb as the fragments and clues started to unravel and fit together before your eyes. Yet, you knew there was a crucial aspect of her you needed to confront, the elephant in the room that you were eager to discuss as soon as she disclosed her true nature as a vampire.

“W-what about your…your diet?,” you ask, already knowing the answer but afraid to hear it anyway. Shuri goes silent, as if she wants to keep the obvious all to herself.

“Shuri, baby…you said you would talk to me.”

“I know what I said.”

“So then talk to me. You’re the one that came into my life. You knew you would eventually have to have these conversations. So tell me.”

“They never last this long,” she replies, her eyes no longer on yours.

“What? Who never lasts this long?”

“What I am trying to say is, y/n…I’m tired of being alone. I’m tired of having this same conversation over and over and over again just for that person to run. No one has lasted this long.”

And that’s when it hits you. That’s when you remember that vampires are immortal beings. “Wait…how…how old are you?”

“I’m 26.”

“You know what the fuck I mean.”

A subtle tilt graced her lips as she smiled, exuding the same self-assured manner she always seemed to have.

“I was born in 1794, turned in the year 1820. And I’ve been this ever since,” she says so matter of factly. It startled you at first, leaving you trying to do the math in your head and Shuri notices right away.

“228.”

“What?”

“That’s the answer you are looking for.”

“Wait, how’d you…?? Wait…can you read minds??,” you ask startled, worried she may have heard all the dirty thoughts you’ve had about her. Shuri laughs.

“No, not necessarily. I don’t need to read your mind directly in order to know that is what you were thinking. Your body language says it all.”

You glare at her in confusion.

“I have been around long enough to understand what someone is trying to say or what they are thinking through their body language, princess. A skill humans think they have but I promise, you truly do not.”

“Uh huh…so you can’t read minds? Then what can you do? What kinds of powers or whatever do you have??”

“Powers??”

“Yeah or whatever the fuck its called!”

Shuri chuckles. “We don’t have ‘powers’. We have abilities. Take for example…the cheetah. The fastest land species…well not necessarily but you wouldn’t call its ability to run fast a power would you? Or the owls' capability to see at night? Is that a ‘power’ to you? How about the elephant's strength? A power? No. They are abilities that help them run from predators and catch their prey. It’s no different for a vampire. We have…capabilities that make it easy to catch our prey.”

You swallow hard, unsure of how to respond to the snarky yet intelligent way she put it.

“Throw that knife at me,” she commands, pointing to the knife you used to cut your steak.

“What??”

“Do it.”

“Shuri, I’m not gonna throw a knife at you, are you mad??”

“You cannot hurt me, y/n.”

You glanced around, surveying your surroundings and noting the nearly empty restaurant as the night advanced. Gradually, you picked up the knife, taking a deep breath before hurling it towards her. She effortlessly caught it in the palm of her hand, as if she had performed the act a million times before, the blade no more than an inch from her eyes. She then opened her hand, revealing the deep wound the knife had left from her grip and the blood that started to pool. Your eyebrows furrowed in confusion as you observed her flesh healing at an inhumane speed. It was no different than the healing process for a human but sped up by 100 times.

“Whoaaaa,” you say, like a child seeing something extraordinary for the first time.

“I can also communicate to you telepathically,” she says, but her mouth did not move. It was as if she had placed her voice inside your mind and spoke to you that way.

“Wait…how’d you?? Do it again! That was cool!”

“I’ll leave it for another time,” she laughs. “I also have senses beyond the human capacity to even dream of. When I…turned…it was as if I was blind my whole life, like I was a deaf and could finally hear. My senses overwhelmed me, I swore I was going to die with everything that was raging through my body. I’m fast, strong, never get tired…I can talk about my ‘powers’ for a long time. But really…it loses its touch overtime. I often forget those abilities are there.”

At this moment, your jaw dropped in astonishment, completely enthralled with what truly existed and that it had been right in front of you all along.

“So you’re like…a superhero…with super cool powers and shit.”

Shuri's presence briefly darkened as a glint of emotion shimmered in her eye, a momentary pause that was so brief but felt long.

“Superhero,” she repeats. “No…nothing like that. Not anymore.” She mumbled that last part and it caught your attention but you chose to ignore it for the time being, steering back to the original point of conversation.

“Shuri…your diet.”

She looks away in shame, closing her eyes before she proceeds to answer. “I drink blood.”

“Ok…and what else?”

“That’s it. That’s all I eat. Human food tastes like nothing to me, it’s disgusting really. It does not give me any nutritional value either. The longer I go without drinking blood, the more I’ll start to feel it.”

You take a sharp gulp. “So how often do you feed on people?”

“Often…as much as I can.”

“D-do you…kill people?”

A brief pause ensues but Shuri's intense gaze stays fixed on you all the while, her jaw tensing before she continues.

“I have.”

Heat rushes through you. “Do you kill people often?”

“Not anymore.”

“...anymore?”

“Yeah, that’s what I said.”

You looked away, almost disgusted with the person you were sitting in front of.

“We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to, y/n.”

“No I…I want--I need to hear this. When…when was the last time you killed someone?”

Shuri refrained from speaking immediately, choosing to study and began to grow queasy.

“Not that long ago.”

“How long ago?? Did I know you??”

“Yeah.”

Another deafening silence engulfed the space between you two. There was no need to voice your next question; she already anticipated what you were going to ask.

“It was February 10…2022.”

Instantly, a sinking feeling gripped your stomach, and your heart felt like it might leap out of your chest as tears welled up, ready to surface.

“J-Jonathan?,” you whispered as you choked on your tears. She nodded her head, almost unbothered by the tears you were shedding for him.

“What…what the fuck is wrong with you??!”

“Y/n…”

“No! No, don’t fucking touch me!”

Despite the near emptiness of the diner, the few present all had eyes only looking at you before you stormed out with both confusion and hurt coursing through you. You climb into your car with determination before driving home, the desire to distance yourself from her was overpowering but when you got home, you were heavily startled to find her seated on your couch, indulging from your stash of whiskey.

“What are you doing here?? How’d you even get in here?!”

“Through the balcony.”

Your fractured sobs were on the verge of breaking free, and your tear-streaked cheeks were evidence of the intense breakdown you had in the car ride back home.

“You can’t just break into my house whenever you want to,” you managed to spit out.

“Can’t I?,” she challenged.

“Shuri…get the fuck outta my house. Get the fuck outta my house, I swear to god, Shuri…”

“I did you a favor, y/n.” The audacity she displayed left you stunned, as you pressed your temples in an attempt to ease the throb in your head from all the tears you cried.

“I never liked him. He never treated you the way you deserved and you just let him treat you that way. I was so sick of seeing you cry, y/n. Is that the life you really wanted for yourself? I mean, let’s be honest. You’re more than happy he’s gone. Now there’s nothing in the way of going after what you really want, seeking for the life you deserve, princess. I did it for you.”

“I--wow. You are mentally insane. What is that, some kinda romantic vampire notion??”

“It can be,” she responded, and you struggled to discern if she was being sarcastic. Nothing could be certain when she wore that enigmatic grin on her face.

“None of that was for you to decide, Shuri! You can’t just go around killing people and for what?? Cuz you don’t like them? That’s a life…a human life you just took away…”

“I’ve decided a long time ago to not care too much for human life anymore. There is no point and it does nothing for me.”

“I…what? Ok…yeah…Imma need you to get the fuck outta my house…like…now.”

Shuri rises from her seat, advancing towards you, and soon you're caught between the wall and her imposing presence once more. Your breath hastens, and the hairs on your arm stand on end as she takes you in. Shuri takes pleasure in the way your body reacts to her, attempting to decipher just how frightened you truly are. You swallow nervously.

“What are you scared of, princess?,” she asks with low lids, her eyes glazed with desire.

“Y-you.”

She lets out a soft chuckle as she fakes a frown, almost mocking your fear.

“Why?” Gently, she runs her fingers across your cheek as she speaks softly, a sly smile appearing on her face while she observes your pleading eyes locked onto hers. “Tell me why I scare you, baby.”

“You kill people, Shuri.”

Shuri nods, humming in agreement.

“You could kill me.”

“I could…but I won’t. You know why? Cuz I care for you…I care for you and it scares the absolute shit outta me.” She utters these words with a hint of sorrow in her eyes, as if a fracture lies beneath the confident facade she typically displays when you're around. Strangely, this vulnerability lessens your fear. You reach out and touch her face, gently placing your palm against her cheek, and she leans into your touch.

“Do you care about me?,” she asks, her voice coming to soothe you.

“Hmm?”

“Do you care about me, y/n? Tell me, please. I need to know.”

In an instant, any remnants of warmth and comfort vanish, swiftly replaced by a surge of anger within you.

“Shuri, how the fuck are you even asking me this right now? Do I care about you?? You killed Jonathan!”

“Yeah, and he tasted fucking delicious,” she snarked back. At that moment, you no longer cared about holding back the tears you had struggled so hard to keep in check in front of her. It felt futile.

“Are you…? Shuri, I beg, fuck outta my house…like right now!”

“Do you really want me to go though?”

You did, you wanted her out of your face but there was a part of you that wanted her to stay and learn more, though you decided to push it to the farthest corner of your mind for now.

“If I remember correctly, you told me you were relieved that he was gone.”

“That doesn’t make it ok,” you spat. Shuri sits back down, manspreading on the couch and she looks ridiculously delicious. How pathetic of you to find the attractiveness in her even in the midst of the anger she fueled through you. She tells you to come sit beside her but you opt for the couch in front of her instead and she chuckles at you.

“I just…you can’t be mad at me for reacting the way I am.”

“Who said I was mad?”

You took a brief pause, granting yourself a moment of composure as you regulate your breathing and wiped away your tears. Shuri sensed the warmth emanating from your body and tuned into the steadier rhythm of your heartbeat before she proceeds.

“I just have one question for you, is that ok?”

You nod.

“Are you relieved because of who he was? Or are you relieved you no longer have an obstacle that is getting in the way of going after what you really want?”

“W-what?”

“Don’t play stupid.”

“I-I don’t--”

But you were cut off by the swiftness of her body approaching you and it startled you. She was in front of you in less than a second, her figure was nothing but a blur as she ran to you, traveling at the speed of light.

“How did you--” and once again Shuri hushed you with the raise of her finger.

“You ask me about honesty, telling me to come clean to you and all I’m asking is the same from you. I need your honesty as well. And maybe you won’t give it to me today and that’s ok because if there is one thing I have in this life of mine, it’s time. But I need you to relax, just breathe. I know there’s a lot more swimming in that mind of yours and I am willing to clear it for you if you let me.”

You finally allow yourself a moment of calm, inhaling deeply numerous times as your mind relaxed into her even just for a brief moment. She made it so hard to stay mad at her, even for something as viscous as the things she did, she always, always knew her way around you. The two of you sat back down, eagerly waiting to see who would break the silence. You had a multitude of questions to pose, but for now, you chose this one.

“So are you like…dead?”

A soft smile appears on her face. “I prefer the term undead but yes, I died so technically that makes me dead.”

“You died,” you repeat her words to yourself and Shuri nods and there is most definitely a hint of sadness in her eyes.

“How?”

Her manner transforms, her brows knitting together as she adopts a more rigid seating posture. “It just happened, I guess.”

Confusion sets in. Why would she permit you to ask all the questions you need, only to respond on her own terms?

“Shuri, your hostility is really starting to piss me off.”

She pauses, her face tainted with frustration.

“You said I could ask anything and you would tell me.”

“No, I said I’d tell you anything you need to know.”

“And I don’t need to know this??”

“No, you really don’t.”

“So one minute you're telling me I can ask all the questions I want but when I overstep your boundaries, you back away. Uh uh, that’s not how we’re doing this. I ask. You answer. Or I’m not doing this, Shuri.”

“This? And what exactly would this be, y/n?”

“That’s not my point.”

“Then what is your point?? Don’t I deserve answers too?? Don’t try to play stupid with me, y/n. It may have worked for him but that shit does not work for me.”

A brief interlude of silence engulfed the space, one that almost broke you but Shuri continued to speak.

“I’ll just leave you be for now because you clearly have a lot of thinking to do as well.”

Once more, she leaves you, leaves you with just enough to drive you mad.

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

2 weeks pass by and you have not seen or spoken to her since that day but your thoughts have been consumed by her non-stop. You took the time to do your own research, trying to find things out for yourself but you were met with even more questions by the end of it. You continuously pull your phone out, wanting to meet with her again, but everytime you gather up the courage to type the message, fear would make you delete it.

You prepare for bed, doing your usual night time routine and when you turn around to go to your bedroom, she is standing right behind and it scares you out of your mind.

“Shuri, what the actual fuck??? You scared the living shit outta me!!”

Shuri laughs lightly, finding amusement in your pissed off state.

“That shit ain’t funny, you almost gave me a heart attack. Quit doing that.”

“I don’t know, your reaction is kind of funny.”

“Shuri!!”

“Fine, fine. I’m sorry. It’s just…you never called, I was beginning to worry.”

“There’s no need to worry, I’m perfectly fine. Plus these things go two ways. Haven’t heard from you either.” Your torn is harsh and short tempered.

“Are you still angry with me?”

“Yes.”

“What did I do now?”

“Are you here to tell me what I want to know?”

“Yes and no.”

“I don’t know what that means”

“You will.”

You maintain silence, growing weary of her ongoing games. You walk right past her, rolling your eyes in frustration as you head toward your bedroom, and she trails behind, following you inside.

“If you’re not gonna tell me anything, you can go,” you say as you plop into your bed.

“Actually, I was thinking I could stay the night,” she remarks, casually taking a seat on the bed beside you and getting comfortable. The idea triggered a mix of unease and excitement. Having Shuri in the same bed as you opened the door to countless fantasies your mind could explore, but it also carried the potential for things to become…ugly.

“What? I’m not going to eat you,” she quips, reading your unease and responding in a playful manner. You clench your teeth, attempting to conceal the subtle fear creeping in because even though you know she was simply toying with you, it raises another question: did she have an appetite for your blood?

“I’m serious, y/n. You know that right? I won’t hurt you.”

You pondered it in silence a bit longer before responding to her.

“Fine…but stay on your side of the bed and don’t even think of trying anything,” you remark with attitude and Shuri, per usual, only laughs at you.

“Whatever you say,” she replies with her hands in the air. You roll your eyes in aggression before shifting in your bed, making yourself comfortable as you endeavor to drift off to sleep, lulled by the sound of your own breath and the absence of hers. Your heart races for a while until it finally settles into a deep slumber, a sleep in which you experience the most vivid dream in your entire life.

➳ the dream:

You wake up to the sound of unsettling echoes of a distant battleground, the anguished cries of people you loved and cared for pierced your ears. You had never felt so much fear in your life, disoriented and overwhelmed by your grim surroundings. You never felt so willing to help and use your Bast-given powers that had been passed on to you ever since your brother entered the ancestral plane but it was when you attempted to get up that you realized you were deeply wounded and you could barely move, the healing effects of the heart-shaped herb becoming slow. You were overcome by an excruciating physical agony, you struggle and weep, the most horrific pain you've ever known taking over you. Amidst this suffering, a distant cry reaches your ears, nearly snuffing out your last breath.

“YINTOMBI YAM!!” (“SHE’S MY DAUGHTER!!”)

“Akayi kuphumelela, kumkanikazi wam! Ukuba uyahamba, siya kufa sonke! Uya kufa!” (“She won’t make it, my queen! If you go, we will all die! You will die!”)

“Hayi, hayi intombi yam! Hayi Shuri yam!! Bast ndicela ungamthathi uShuri wam! Sele uno T'challa, hayi uShuri wam, nceda !! NDIYACELA!!" (“No, not my daughter! Not my Shuri!! Bast please don’t take my Shuri! You already have T’challa, not my Shuri, please!! PLEASE!!”)

The cries were violent, compelling you to move toward them, yet your feeble body refused. Your heart raced, the blood pulsing through your veins as if in a rush, leaving you breathless, and the world seemed to constrict around you under the scorching rays of the sun. The warmth enveloped you, vibrant and teeming with life, a stark contrast to the disturbing sounds that surrounded you.

“Uya kuba kunye nezinyanya, uKumkanikazi uRamonda. Uzakuba noT’Challa.” (“She will be with the ancestors, Queen Ramonda. She will be with T’Challa.”)

"Hayi hayi!!” (“No…NO!!”)

The echoes of agonizing cries gradually diminished until they were nothing, your vision faltering as breathing became a struggle, your body shutting down faster than the healing effects of the heart-shaped herb could manage. Your life was slipping away, breath fleeing your lungs, and you made the decision to embrace it as you faded into a state of nothingness and you saw the ancestral plane for a small moment, its beautiful sky right within your grasp until you suddenly awoke with a sharp inhale and a vicious cough.

You were greeted by the serene night sky, accompanied only by the chirping of crickets and you were startled once you noticed a woman seated before you, her face unfamiliar and her accent foreign to your ears.

“Who—who are you??,” you asked, but she did not answer. “How did you get into Wakanda?”

You adjusted your body to stand, surprised that you were completely healed with no sign of injury or pain. “Did you do this?? Heal me??”

Again, you were met with silence until finally she spoke with a grin. “Something like that,” she quipped, teasing you as she sat man spread on the log below her. The treescape surrounded you, the darkness overwhelmed you and you should be cold but you weren’t.

“How did you do it?? What kind of science is this??!!”

But the woman merely chuckled, finding amusement in your perplexed state and the endless questions you directed at her. "Science," she reiterated, almost tauntingly.

“Who are you??,” you asked once more, this time with more demand but still, she gave you nothing. “I-I have to go back to the palace. I have to see my mom, she thinks I’m dead! I heard her cries!”

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”

“You won’t even tell me who you are! Why should I listen to you??”

She shifted her posture, and under the moon's gentle glow, you noticed an unusual quality about her. Her face, though seemingly perfect, bore eyes that were anything but human; glassy, with a hue of blood-red. This sight filled you with fear, urging you to flee, racing into the forest in a desperate bid to reach the safety of the palace and escape the woman who instilled such terror in you.

As you ran, you began to realize how you moved much faster than ever before. Your senses heightened, capturing details and sounds that were previously beyond your perception. The overwhelming influx of sensations left you both stunned and astonished. The world appeared silent, yet it roared with sound. Every rustle, every detail in the darkness of the forest was vividly clear to you.

You pinpointed this experience to the heart-shaped herb, pondering the potential existence of Bast. Could this be a miraculous gift from the ancient power? But when you got to the palace, that was when you would learn, learn it had nothing to do with the herb or Bast. You climbed the towering walls, reaching your mother's bedroom window, opening it cautiously to avoid startling her but your unexpected appearance had the opposite effect. Fear flashed in her eyes and she wanted to scream but she didn’t.

“Unyanisile ntombam?? Usisiporho??" (“Are you real, my daughter?? Are you a ghost??”)

“Hayi mama, ndim! Ndiyaphila! Ndilungile! Andifanga…” (“No mother, it’s me! I’m alive! I’m ok! I didn’t die…”)

“Kodwa…sikubonile. Ubumkile...njani-” (“But…we saw you. You were practically gone...how-”)

“Kulungile mama, Bast undigcinile! Wandomeleza, wandomeleza, ukuze ndoyise iintshaba zethu. Ndiphilile, mama." (“It’s ok mother, Bast saved me! And he made me powerful and strong so I can overcome our enemies! I’m ok, mother.”)

Your mom was taken aback, startled by the way you so openly claimed that Bast saved you when you never believed in such spiritual things before but she did not question you. Her overwhelming emotion was simply relief that you were alive. Your mom was sobbing, tears streaming down her face uncontrollably as she embraced you, holding you as if it were her last moment and you welcomed her in, finding solace in her warmth and familiar scent as you nestled your nose against her neck..and that is when you heard it.

A distinctive rhythm that captured your attention, the steady thump of her heartbeat, so pronounced that it drowned out any other ambient sound. The pulsating rush of blood through her veins accompanied it and it brought you a feeling that was so unclear yet simple at the same exact time. You struggled to comprehend what you were feeling, but the more you resisted, the harder it became to contain. A fiery sensation engulfed your body, saliva pooling in your mouth beyond your control, an overpowering urge rising within you, craving her life source more than you craved anything else before.

“U…uyayiphunga?,” (“Do…do you smell that?,”) you asked, your face still buried into your mothers neck.

“Unuka ntoni?” (“Smell what?”)

"Ndiya yidinga." (“I need it.”)

“Ufuna ntoni, ntombi yam?” (“Need what, my daughter?”)

“Momma…”

"Yintoni, Shuri??" (“What is it, Shuri??”)

You held her so tight, you felt like you could break her and your mother screamed in pain as she felt a crack in her ribs. You were breaking her.

"Umama?? Mama ndiyaxolisa...ndiyaxolisa kakhulu," (“Mother?? Mother I’m so…I’m so sorry,”) you choked out in a state of terror, the sound of her ribs cracking haunted your ears as you held her. Tears brimmed to your eyes as you struggled to let her go, your eyes burned with a wicked venom as your thirst gnawed at your whole body and took away any sense of rational thinking. And suddenly she was gone, no longer in your arms as you looked at the mirror in front of you and saw Shuri’s reflection staring back at you, her mouth covered in blood.

Abruptly, the scene changed and it was no longer your mother in your arms but another woman. She was beautiful. She had deep, dark eyes and skin to match. Her hair was as thick as a lush forest, full of vitality and texture. Her lips are as full as ripened fruit, tempting and inviting.

“What are you waiting for, Shuri?,” she said to you, her voice breaking through your psyche in such a calm, inviting way and you wanted her. Wanted her to be yours forever.

“I want to be with you. Forever. Turn me.”

A surge of guilt briefly tugged at your emotions but that was quickly overridden by an intense longing to be with her until the end of time, an overwhelming love that you had never thought was humanly possible and probably because it was not humanly possible to feel as deeply as a vampire feels.

“I want you to do it, Shuri. Turn me. Please. I want this.” Her dark brown eyes shimmered with a blend of desperation and love and you were so scared. So scared to cross your boundaries once again but the thought of not being with her forever scared you even more.

"Please," she pleaded one final time before you pressed your lips to hers, savoring the warmth of her human essence before trailing down to her throat, delicately grazing your mouth across her tender skin and her pulse whispered against your lips. Opening your mouth, you descended, piercing her veins with your teeth and you moaned as her life source flowed into your mouth, embracing the flavor you desperately needed. And you did this until everything dissolved into an abyss, an engulfing darkness that consumed you until finally, you woke up. And you were you.

You woke up with a commotion of feelings; you were confused, hurt, and scared. Glancing to the side, you found an empty bed, leaving you to wonder if Shuri had even visited your place last night or if it was all part of a dream.

The day unfolded, besieged by thoughts you struggled to push away. No matter how hard you fought, your dream clung to your mind, refusing to dissipate. As night descended, Shuri arrived along with it, standing on your balcony and for the first time, she knocked.

“Shuri?”

“Nkosazana.” The sudden language change throws you off as you step aside to let her in. She has food in her hand, no doubt for you of course.

“Shuri…what language is that?,” you ask with the most curiosity you have ever had so far.

“Xhosa,” she replies without so much as looking at you, emptying the bag of food as she assembles it on your dining table.

“Is that your native language?”

“You never noticed the accent?,” she responds, still not looking at you.

“No, of course I noticed the accent but…Shuri…where are you from?”

Shuri pauses, her entire body freezing momentarily before she resumes.

“Are you Wakandan?”

“So you know about Wakanda?”

“Of course I know about Wakanda. I couldn’t escape it not too long ago, it was all over the news and everything. The world’s most powerful and technologically advanced. A secret hidden in Africa. Home to the…Black…Panther,” your voice trailed off towards the end as you suddenly remembered the reflection staring back at you in your dream. The reflection of Shuri with blood on her lips wearing what you now recognize to be a Black Panther suit.

“Shuri, I need you to tell me something.”

She looks at you for a split second but says nothing.

“Were you…were you the Black Panther?”

Once more, she remains silent, almost entirely disregarding you as she finishes preparing the food. You stand there, observing with genuine admiration. On any other day, her tendency to ignore you would drive you up the wall, your lips ready to hurl curses and demand answers, but this time, you allow her the moments she needs to compose herself. You saw her in a whole new light and you sympathize with her.

Shuri pulls out a chair, signaling for you to sit, and you comply without zero fight on your end as she takes a seat across from you. You bite your inner cheek, plagued with even more questions than you had before.

“You can talk now,” she said, breaking the silence. You took a bite of your food, before proceeding with your abundance of questions.

“What happened last night? What was that??”

“I little trick I like to call ‘dream manipulation.’”

“So you were in my head?”

She nods.

“You made me see…your past?”

Another nod.

“But it’s not like I was watching you. It was as if I was you. I could see, hear, and feel everything you felt as if it was my own. I felt everything.”

Shuri sits there and remains in an unbothered state, only waiting to hear what else you had to say.

“So you were the Black Panther then? A long time ago…or whatever.”

“Mhmmm.”

���What happened?”

“You saw what happened.”

“I know but…I want to hear it from your mouth! A lot happened and I need answers, Shuri! Enough with this unbothered facade you got going on here and fuck you! Answer me!”

Shuri’s nostrils flare as you push her temper, but she quickly swallows it down as she comes to realize that you have every right to be upset.

“I’m sorry,” you apologized for your outburst.

“Don’t be. You have a right to know. It’s just…my brother, T’Challa was the Black Panther up until his life was taken from him and the mantle was passed down to me and then I became the Black Panther. We had enemies, enemies that wanted our resources and our vibranium…stories that are still happening today. I was seriously injured one day in combat, so injured that my loved ones left me for dead. And then I met her. I still don’t know who she is but I know what she was. A monster who turned me into this. Thinking she gave me a second chance at life when she should’ve just let me die so I could be reunited with my brother.” Her voice sounded shattered, burdened with hurt and remorse, and your instinct was to comfort her, to alleviate her pain. But as a feeble human, what could you possibly offer to ease her suffering?

“I never saw her again, the woman that turned me. My maker.” She said that last part with nothing but disgust. “And I hated her…for a long fucking time. I still do. I had to learn to fend for myself, had to teach myself to control my thirst and survive in this human world on my own. It’s been such a long and lonely journey. And everybody leaves. Everybody.”

You sat there, your ears and heart open to her as she fought the tears that loomed on the brink of falling. You so badly wanted to jump into her arms and cradle her, promise her everything was going to be ok but those were not your promises to make. There was nothing you could give her and you felt so small and helpless.

“Shuri…I’m so sorry.”

“It’s ok. It’s not your fault. I just…it has been years since I have said that out loud.”

A faint smile touched your lips as you extended your hand towards her. Despite harboring more questions and unresolved moments, you decided to set them aside, at least for the moment. Shuri reciprocated, reaching out and delicately taking hold of your hand, pressing it to her lips in a desperate gesture as she kissed your skin.

“I want to take you somewhere,” she says.

“And where would that be?”

“It’s a surprise.”

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

You are in your car, but Shuri is at the wheel, navigating deeper into the dense forest. It's dark and somewhat intimidating, and you begin to wonder how Shuri is driving without headlights down the quiet road, until you recall her mention of her incredible eyesight. Finally, after what feels like an hour, Shuri steers into an extremely secluded area. The quietness is disrupted as you hear something other than the chorus of crickets; a gentle sound of water and soft waves. It's a vast lake, so expansive that it could easily be mistaken for an ocean from your perspective.

Shuri opens the car door and extends her hand, and this time, you accept her gesture. Leading you to the lake's edge, the moon was so big and bright, casting a luminous glow upon the night sky and the surrounding stars. The scene is breathtakingly beautiful and grand, the most picture perfect setting for a perfect moment with the person you wanted to be around the most.

“It’s beautiful as fuck out here,” you commented.

“This is where I live. You see that house hiding behind us? That’s my place. It’s where I come every morning and hide away. It’s where I come to just be…free. Free from this world and be who I was made to be.”

“So you do actually have a home? No coffin??,” you joked and she lightly laughed with you.

“So what else can you do? Show me. There’s no one around us, I want to see you being you.”

Shuri raised an eyebrow. “What is it you want me to do?”

“When I was…you…in my dream, you gave me a taste of what it felt like to have your body. When you ran through the forest that night to go back to your mom, I felt your strength, your speed, all that stuff. I want to see it. Show me the cool side of vampirism.”

Shuri tilted her head in contemplation, a pensive smile appeared on her face as she pondered the idea. Typically, she engaged in these activities alone, leaping through the trees, melding with the forest, maneuvering in ways the human body couldn't fathom.

"Fine then," she says, rising swiftly before running towards the trees at an astonishing speed. As she reaches the trees, the reality is beyond your imagination. Her body effortlessly launches onto a branch, beginning a mesmerizing journey from tree to tree, flipping and diving in ways that leaves you smiling in complete and absolute awe. It appears as if she's floating, moving with such speed that gravity seems to chase her, almost a blur in motion. You had never seen someone look so…free. And as she comes back down to meet you, moving faster than your eyes can track, there's no sign of fatigue or weariness. It's the most alive you had ever seen her.

“That was…wow,” you say in complete shock and Shuri laughs at you.

“It’s pretty neat, I guess,” she replies with a smug grin and it makes your stomach tingle. Shuri sits in the sand near the lake and you follow her.

“Do you like being one?”

“Hmmm?”

“A vampire…do you like being one?”

“Sometimes.”

“What’s your favorite thing about it??”

Shuri chuckles, dipping her head between the arms she has perched on her hiked up knees. “I like being able to manipulate people’s dreams,” she replies, shocking you with her answer. “I don’t sleep so it’s the only way I can dream, I guess.”

“No sleep??”

She shakes her head.

“What about your least favorite thing?”

Shuri goes quiet before answering, pondering the many ways she could answer this question.

“The blood lust. Being frozen. Watching the world change but staying the same.” She says this while looking out at the lake, taking her bottom lip into her mouth.

“Do you think you’re a bad person, Shuri?”

Shuri looked at you, eyes scanning your genuinely curious face before she proceeds. “I’m not sure. It’s not so black and white. It’s this weird thing, like…vampires emotionally feel so deeply but we were cursed with the primal instinct to hunt, feed, and kill. It’s like…with humans…when you guys get hungry, you simply go make yourself a sandwich or something, right? Fix yourself a quick meal. With vampires, it does not matter what we feel…that feeling always becomes hunger. If I’m angry, I want to eat someone. If I’m sad, I want to go eat someone. Horny? Eat someone,” she chuckles. “And then you’re left with nothing but an overwhelming guilt. It’s exhausting. Humbling, in a way, to say the least.”

You swallow, utterly captivated by her and every word she has to give you. This version of Shuri is vastly different from the person you've known over the past year. Seeing her in all her openness and vulnerability makes you realize that you never really knew her and it's only been in these recent days that you've felt so deeply connected to someone in a way you've never experienced before. You could sit here and ask her question after question after question, but there were a few that burned at your heart and it hurt you to ask, but she placed the questions there with the dream she fed you last night.

“Shuri…may I ask you something else?”

“It’s all you’ve been doing, princess. What’s to stop you now?”

“Well…I was wondering if you could tell me what happened to your mom.”

Shuri hung her head low, trying to get lost in the grains of sand and the mere sight of her made you regret your question but once she let out a hefty sigh, you knew it would be ok.

“I went back to the palace that night…the night my life was taken from me and to this day, it was the biggest mistake I had ever made. I thought my senses were some kind of spiritual doing from the heart-shaped herb, that Bast had given me a second chance, how foolish of me!” She buries her head into her hands and you lean forward, not sure what to do but let her have this moment of mourning.

“She thought I was a ghost at first, that I was reaching her from the ancestral plane, claiming that she had watched me die and she most definitely did but I did not know that…yet. She held me in her arms and I did the same and it was at that moment I knew something was off. Her heartbeat was so loud…like a drum pounding in my ears and it overtook me. My throat burned and I could smell her blood and I had never wanted anything more in my life. I wanted it so bad and it scared me. And I made sure that…that I would have it…” She choked on her tears, sobbing into her forearm and you kneeled forward to bring her head into your chest.

“I was brand new, y/n. It was damn near impossible for me to control it. And with no maker to rely on, no counseling or guidance, I was ruthless. An infant vampire and the taste of her blood was the most…feeling that for the first time, it surpasses any human experience. And it disgusts me to say it but I am being honest.”

She sobs in your arms, accepting your embrace as she feels comfort for the first time in years. The feeling was so foreign to her, to feel loved and accepted for who she was, despite acknowledging that she was the monster she believed she was.

“You didn’t know any better, Shuri. You can’t blame yourself for being thrown into this against your will and not knowing how to cope with it. It’s not your fault, baby,” you cooed, lulling her into your warmth as you comforted her.

“That’s what I thought at first, what I told myself for years. But that was my mother, y/n. My flesh and blood. You would think a daughter's love would surpass anything but that just goes to show how strong the thirst for blood is, especially in the beginning. No human equivalent. And it haunts me to this day.”

“Shuri—“

“I left Wakanda, for good, after that. Left them without a protector, without a ruler…I don’t know how they managed to pick themselves up after that but clearly they did. And I’ve never been back. I would love to…go back, one day. But I can’t. Not with the reminders it would bring.”

She lets out a few more soft sobs before she proceeds. “But hey, I managed to make it on my own. No maker, no guidance. I was ruthless in the beginning. Most vampires are.”

You feigned a smile, one that was just for her. “And what about the girl in my dream? Who was she?”

“That was…she was a dear friend of mine. Someone I loved. Someone I cared for.” A tear falls down her and washes into the fabric of your shirt. “But it does not matter anymore. She’s gone now.”

“What happened to her?”

“What happens to all humans, I suppose. She died. Never got close to a human after that. I tried…many times but they would all run eventually and understandably so. You are my first--the first person who has stayed with me. It scares me, really.”

Shuri gets up, coming face to face with your own tear-stained cheeks as she gently wipes them away with her thumb and you let out a soft smile.

“Soooo…no fangs? No cool eyes? Aren’t vampires supposed to look cool?,” you joke half-heartedly in attempts to lighten up the mood and put Shuri’s aching heart at ease and it seems to work because Shuri lets out a beautiful laugh, that laugh that you have loved for a long time.

“Would you prefer I walked around with red eyes and fangs??”

“I don’t know, you’d look kinda hot,” you half joke and she glares at you in both confusion and admiration.

“Walking around like a twilight vampire,” you tease and she makes a face of disgust. “Heyyy, don’t do Twilight like that. They’re good movies.”

“Fuck that,” she laughs and you laugh along with her.

“You’re really beautiful, Shuri,” you say, leaving Shuri in a subtle shock.

“Where did that come from?”

“I’m not blind. I may have been with someone our entire friendship but I always saw you and you were always beautiful to me.”

“Oh, so now you’re being honest with me? After you had me begging like a fool,” she teased.

“I’ve always loved you Shuri, you know that. You just wanted to hear me say it.”

Shuri chuckles. “Love…what a strong word, thrown around like it weighs nothing.”

“No but I do love you, I’m not playing. I love this version of you. The version of you where I actually know you. Where you let your guard down and just be…you. I love you.”

Shuri sighs, basking it all in. It’s been so long since she’s heard those words and it scares her.

”I wanna try something, if you’ll let me.”

“Anything,” your words rushed out with a tinge of desperation, revealing more than intended, driven by an urgent longing. You craved her, yearned for her presence. Her gaze locked onto yours, her eyes mirroring the same desire, as she tenderly traced your cheek. Finally, she leaned in, her lips meeting yours, and in that moment, you both embraced each other as if it were the last breath you'd take. The kiss ignited swiftly, your breaths turning erratic as you struggled to match her fervent passion. Gradually, she lifted you, and you instinctively wrapped your legs around her, never wanting to break away. She carries you across the small beach, bringing you into her house and not once did you two disconnect your reckless lips. The kiss itself spoke volumes, telling a story of how much you two yearned for one another, conveying unspoken feelings that had resided within long before you ever knew of Shuri’s true vampire nature. The heat between your legs began to rise, becoming warmer and wetter as you felt your clit brush against Shuri’s lower abdomen and that minimal friction alone felt like it was going to be the death of you. Shuri feels what you are trying to do and she grabs your ass in response, helping you feel more as she pushes you into her and it causes you to moan into the kiss.

“Mmm,” you moan, a sound that drove Shuri mad.

“That was fucking sexy,” she remarks and you cannot help but feel a tang of embarrassment for the lust you had for her. Jonathan was never one to tell you how sexy you were to make you feel desired, but instead to feed into his own ego of having you underneath him.

Shuri sits on the couch as you situate yourself on top of her, your crotch above hers, still kissing in pure intensity as the spark between you both transforms into an uncontrollable flame. Your lips were so swollen and sore, but it's inconsequential in the face of everything else. In that moment, nothing exists except Shuri, and your determination to be with her is unwavering. Shuri's kisses leave your lips, shifting towards your jaw and down to your throat as you struggle to hold in the moans that threaten to spill over, your heart beat intensifying. Shuri grasps your ass once more as you begin to grind, your actions portraying sheer desperation as you chase the friction that Shuri’s body gives yours. Shuri's hands reach for hips, guiding your movements and you squirm under the weight of her direct kisses upon your throat. Your heart thumps erratically, syncing with the pounding in your pussy and you are drenched.

“Shuri…please,” you whined, as she bruised and marked your tender throat. “I need you, please.”

Your desperate plea drives Shuri insane, hearing your voice in its deepest sensual urgency was enough to make her take you right there and then.

“You have made me wait way too long to have you like this, s’thandwa. I hope to fuck you at least half as long.”

Shuri lifts the hem of your skirt before her hand finally finds her way to that spot she needed for so long and she groans at how much you are soaking through the material of your thin panties.

“Bast, baby. You’re soaking wet,” she murmurs softly, and you nestle your face into the arc of her neck, concealing both the embarrassment and the warmth that rushes to your cheeks. But she assures her baby girl that there's nothing to be ashamed of, affirming that she had always sensed when your pussy longed for her.

“It’s ok, baby. I love seeing you like this. Let me see you.” Her voice was so smooth and sensual, a velvety depth mixed with a husky rasp that made your head spin as she stroked you though those thin panties, pressing the fabric between your folds as she taunted your throbbing clit. Your whimpers were small and short-breathed as you came back up to face her, your hopeless expression coming to meet a face that was ready to tear you apart.

“I could always tell when you were turned on, nkoszana. I could always smell when this little pussy needed me, so there’s no need to shy away now, do you understand me?”

And you’re nodding your head fervently, almost absentmindedly as you struggle to truly grasp your surroundings with Shuri’s long fingers playing between your dewy folds.

“Want to watch you cum in these little panties of yours.”

“Unh.”

“Yeah, that’s it baby. Look at you. You’re so fucking pretty like this.”

“Shuri…unh…pl-please.”

“Did he make you cum?”

“Mmmm…huh?”

Shuri chuckled in a cocky manner, a self-satisfied sound that rolled off her tongue as she felt a sense of superiority over you and your body.

“Jonathan? Was that his name? Did he ever make you cum?”

You can hardly even think with the way she was touching you, her firm fingers deliberately swiping at your clothed clit.

“S-sometimes,” you managed to say and that much was true. Sometimes he would make you cum, not because he was taking the time to learn and understand your body but usually it happened as a result of him chasing his own high. A lot of the time you would not even finish and he did not even care to make sure you did.

“Only sometimes?,” she teases, a deliberate tactic to understand how to handle you while also reveling in the sight of your mouth faltering and stumbling.

“F-fuck h-him. Unh…fuck.”

“Hmm?”

“Fuck J-Jonathan. I’m glad he’s g-gone. Oh.”

Shuri smiles at you, an arrogant grin as she basked in the mess you were as she toyed with you. Shuri’s fingers pick up the pace, pressing firmer into your clit and the waves of your orgasm begin to crest through, approaching in silence as your firmly gripped Shuri’s shoulders. Your hips are bucking into her as your pussy drools through the fabric, leaking directly onto Shuri’s fingers and the sounds coming out of you are too far gone for your control.

“Shuri, Shuri…yeah! Unh!”

“Cum, y/n. I want to see you fall apart from my fingers.”

“Mhm.”

Your orgasm quietly emerges, a slow, measured sequence that pulsates through your pussy walls as you surrender entirely, collapsing into Shuri’s arms as you ride the waves of your high. And Shuri talks you through it, whispering assurances of love and telling her girl how pretty she looks as her greedy pussy soaks all over her fingers and slutty panties, caressing your clit through the lingering aftershocks as you grapple with the descent from your gradual climax. Overwhelmed, you clutch her wrist, the struggle evident in your lungs as they battle to regulate your breathing, your mind lost in a haze.

“Shuri...I…fuck, baby.”

“You’re so messy,” she remarked with a smirk, hooking those dangerous fingers underneath the fabric of those panties that hugged your waist, tugging until the thin material pressed into your clit and you moaned at the sensitivity. She brings her fingers down and pulls them to the side, your slick sticking to the fabric and Shuri’s eyes flood with lust and desire, burning with a deep hunger that surpasses the blood that lives in your veins. She craves you in every single way. She brings her lips to yours, her eyebrows scrunched together as she ripped the panties off of you and you gasp, finally free of the thin line that was keeping you from Shuri’s skin and she lifts you up once again, taking you into her kitchen as she roughly knocks away anything in her way and places you down on the cold marble countertop. Shuri lets go of the kiss, crossing her arms as she removes her top, coming face to face with her defined abdomen and lean arms.

“Open your legs, y/n. Let me see her.”

You oblige, opening your thick, brown thighs and your pussy glistened before her. There were strings of cum that stuck to your inner thighs as your slick refused to detach from your pussy, creating a web of your arousal and the look on Shuri’s face sent shivers down your spine.

“Fuck, I have to taste her.”

“Then do it. Let me use your mouth.” You were still so delicate and sore from Shuri’s overwhelming touch but you desired more. “Let me fuck your face.”

Shuri got on her knees, bending before the melanated goddess before her as she wrapped her arms around your thighs, resting the back of your knees on her shoulders as she spread you open, coming face to face with the mess she created. You look down at her, admiring the way her arm muscles flex as she wrapped them around your thighs, watching the way your cream stuck to the side curls on her head as she dove into your ocean, wrapping her lips around your swollen clit and you arched your back at the sensation.

“Oh fuck…yes, Shuri, YES! Just like that, baby.”

Her mouth and tongue played with your clit, fucking in and around you in an overwhelming harmony that had you grinding into her face and she allowed it, allowed you to use her face as a means to please yourself. She moaned into your clenching cunt, finding the taste of you being better than she had ever imagined and her fingers pressed into the flesh of your thighs, sure to leave an imprint the following day.

“Unh, unh, unh, oohhh. Yeah.”

She could tell you were getting close, the way your thrusts into her face became more aggressive, the way your pussy continuously got wetter by the moment, and the louder your moans were getting, it was all telling of your impending climax. But she tells you to hold it in, keep it in longer so she can play with you more, feel your pussy clench around her tongue for a few more moments as she watches your clit grow larger with each slurp.

“I c-can’t, baby. Please. I'm gonna cum.”

“Not yet.”

“B-but—”

And your pussy is met with a sharp slap of Shuri’s hand that makes you yelp.

“I said not yet. Understand?”

And you nod your head frantically, your knuckles losing its color as you clutch to the ends of the marble countertop.

“Good girl.”

And Shuri dives back into you, consuming your essence as if she was ignoring your whimpers of overstimulation above her but she heard you, and she enjoyed the sound of you. Your cries were soft and fragile, a mere whisper of distress as you struggled for the woman below you, wanting to make her happy, give her the pleasure she received by pleasuring and having her way with you. You grasped onto Shuri’s curls, feeling her coiled hair through your fingers as you tussled with your orgasm that was on the brink of breaking through.

“Sh-Shuri…please.”

“Hmmm??”

“Please, baby, please. I have to.”

“I know, my impatient girl. You can cum now.”

“Oh…OH. FUCK.”

You fucked yourself against her face, her tongue moving in and out as her nose bumped your clit and you watched your cum trickle along the angular contours of her jaw, glistening against the richness of her beautiful complexion.

“Oooo fuck. Shuri.”

Shuri took one last lick through your folds, attempting to clean you dry but your continual leaking for her made it impossible. She stands on her two feet, resting between your opened legs as she’s greeted with the most vulnerable version of yourself, visibly struggling to recover from the intensity of your orgasms and it was that sight of you that nearly caused her to lose complete control.

“You’re shaking, y/n,” she cooed with a tease. “I’m just getting started with you. I haven’t even fucked you yet.”

“Mmmm.”

“Is that what you want from me? Does getting fucked by a vampire make you wet?,” she asks in a condescending tone. You cannot answer with words, no matter how hard you try and so you nod your head in sheer desperation.

“You will be broken by the time I am down with you. Ruined for anyone who tries to come after me.”

You could hear her voice, yet you were deeply disconnected, unable to fully grasp the profound meaning behind her words and it was so apparent to Shuri that she felt she had to resort to communicating to you telepathically in an attempt to reunite your mind with your body.

“You’re ok, s’thandwa. Follow my voice.” The voice in your head pulled you back to reality, your pussy was still aching but your mind was at ease.

“Now listen to me, y/n. Being with a vampire is nothing like being with a human, especially that little boy you almost called a husband. I’m going to fuck you, and I’m going to fuck you good. If at any point I’m going too hard or I’m hurting you, I need you to let me know.”

“Mhmm,” you manage to say. She cups your face in her hands, brushing the tears that sat on your waterline with the tips of her thumbs, and god, she was in love with you.

“You’re so pretty, y/n.”

“Please, Shuri.”

“Please, what?”

“I want—need you…”

“Mmmm,” she hums knowingly, her eyes dark and seeping in lust as she teasingly drags a finger through your sopping folds, and you wince at her touch, simultaneously wanting more and running away from the stimulation her touch gave you.

“Please? Please, Shuri? I n-need you. Unh.”

“Ssshhh, I know baby, I know. I want to take my time with you.”

Your soft whines of overwhelming pleasure climbed up your throat as she brushed her fingers between your puffy folds, purposefully avoiding your clit and it is enough to make you lose your mind but this is how she wants you; desperate, needy, craving more. But once she presses your clit, you let out a wail as you softly cry at her touch, tears falling down your cheeks.

“My little cry baby.” Her voice is condescending, belittling as she plays between the swollen flesh.

“That’s right, y/n. Cry for me. Show me how much it is.”

“Fuck me?,” you whimper.

“Bast, you’re needy, huh?” she says with a smirk, your desperate plea shooting an ache into Shuri’s pussy because she needed you just as bad, her vampire lust surpassing that of a human experience.

“I know I am…it’s just Jonathan…he n-never—”

“I know, princess. It’s ok. I got you now, I’ll take care of you.”

“Unh.”

“Oh sthandwa, I’m going to fucking ruin you.” She said this like it was a promise, like she was sure no one would come after her and if they did, they wouldn’t make it too far. You moan as Shuri plunges her fingers into your cunt, falling in love with the way you immediately clench around her, your greedy cunt letting more slick pour out for her.

“My pretty slut to ruin.”

“I don’t care, just ruin me.” You buck your hips into her fingers in desperation, craving more and more from her and you were so embarrassed with how loud your pussy was, how much your clenching walls needed her but you didn’t care enough to stop yourself.

“Please, baby, pleeaseee,” you beg. “Fuck me, Shuriiiii.”

Shuri chuckles, licking her lips as she salivates at the sight of you, finding it increasingly more and more challenging to restrain her hunger. She could sense your heartbeat growing louder, sense the blood flowing through your veins and your pussy walls, and she wanted it, wanted you. She wanted to witness your struggle as she claimed from you what sustained her life as she fucked you into another realm of sex.

“Oh fuck,” you whine as Shuri's touch finds the bundle of nerves inside you, intensifying the throb within your walls as your pussy squeezed her fingers. She swiftly took her fingers out, leaving you to whimper at the emptiness you felt yet that sensation quickly dissipates as Shuri starts swishing your clit from side to side. Your eyes roll back, and uncontrollable groans take over.

“Unh…Shuri…fuck, I’m gonna—you’re gonna make me—“ but Shuri immediately detached from you, your slick sticking to her fingers and creating a trail on the floor.

“You’re a messy girl, huh? Fuck…open your mouth for me.” And you do, moaning at the taste of your own flavor and the sight makes Shuri so horny, so wet, she cannot stand to not be inside you any longer. She wanted to feel how deep you were as she buried herself inbetween your dark thighs, get lost in the way your pussy swelled up with each hard thrust she fucked into you. Shuri removes your top and her bottoms, leaving you both in nothing but your bras just before Shuri fiddles with the device on her wrist, her strap snugly fitting to her waist. Your eyes subtly widen at the size of her, she was much bigger than that fucking man you hated so much. Shuri grabbed her shaft, slowly pumping it as she brought it to the swells of your folds, rubbing her tip against your overwhelmed clit and you whimpered at the touch. She puts the tip in, and you immediately clench around the sheer girth of her tip, letting out a soft scream as your body grapples with her size.

“Yeah, you’re gonna be fun to play with,” she comments with a sly smile. She lifts you up and you wrap your legs around her once more, your clit is pressed into her dick making your kisses turn into cluttered moans as you pant into her mouth. She grabs your ass and presses you into her, guiding your hips to grind into her until finally you meet her bedroom and your back hits her mattress, her lean but muscular body hovering over you as she purposefully made sure her shaft caressed your clit. She continued to press fervent kisses into your mouth, in awe of the way your mouth struggles to reciprocate those kisses as you feel her dick moving between your folds, caressing your bulging, beating clit.

“Look at you, how helpless you are,” she taunts as your breathing picks up.

“Shuri pleeasseee,” you whine, so overwhelmed and loving the way she took her time with you. This was all a new feeling to you, your mind and body being loved and explored and it was almost all too much, but your need for her overtook that feeling. Shuri removes herself from on top of you, resting her back against the headboard and she gestured for you to come sit on top of her.

“Take this off,” you complain, gesturing to her bra. She grins before crossing her arms and removing her bra. Her perky breasts were so beautiful and you could not help but take one of her erect nipples into your mouth and it causes her to moan, a sound you could never get tired of.

“Turn around for me.”

“But I won’t be able to see you.”

“That doesn’t matter, you’ll feel me.”

“But—” and she cuts you off by snaking her hand around your throat, causing an immediate gasp to escape your lips. She applies a gentle pressure to your windpipe, deliberately restraining her vampire strength to avoid hurting you. You revel in the way she makes you feel, sensing her containment of crossing the boundaries of her strength and it makes you feel dizzy. Using your throat as a grip, she turns your body towards the mirror.

“I love how you look when you shut up,” she whispers into you, her palm still firmly placed around your neck and you stifle a choked whimper, grasping onto her forearm as you feel her veins protruding through her human-like skin. She takes her tip once again, placing it between your sopping wet folds and your eyebrows clench together in anticipation.

“You ready, princess?”

You nod, and finally, finally you feel full, filled to the brim as her dick moves inside you, stretching you out in ways you have never before and she feels devine. You knew in that instant, she had left an eternal mark on you and you wanted to keep her inside you forever. Shuri whispered praises into you, making sure you knew just how much your needy pussy was squeezing her dick, how deep and wet you were as she thrusted slow, harsh movements that reverberated into your pussy walls and it fucked your mind up. Your moans were staggered, uncontrolled sounds as Shuri’s hand remained around your throat, pressing kisses into your shoulder.

“Shuri,” you cried and she removed her hand from your throat, and when you thought it was over, she unclipped your bra, grazing the material over your nipples as she brought the skimpy fabric to your throat, brushing it over your trachea and you swallowed in anticipation, understanding what she was going to do next and you allowed it. She pulled it, pressing the fabric hard into your windpipe, not enough to choke you completely, but just enough to have you gasping as you left your breathing to her. The act was so sensual and heightened the pleasure that coursed through you as she continued to thrust into you, trailing her other hand down your torso until she reached your clit, circling your bud excessively.

“Oh fuck, Shuri…yes, YES. UNH.”

She admired the view in the mirror in front of you two, got lost in the way your breasts bounced with each hard thrust she pounded into you, the sweat and drool that trickled down the valley between them and you were both a wreck, both so close to your release.

“That’s it…that’s…fuck. That’s a good girl. My good girl.”

“Fuck. I’m gonna cum again, Shuri. Can I? Please?”

“Mhmmm,” is all Shuri can manage to say as she approaches her own orgasm, tugging the fabric into your windpipe and you let out a strangled moan.

“Sh-Shuri…I’m cumming. Shit, don’t stop fucking me. Keep ch-choking me j-just like that. Oh…unh.”

Your orgasm surged within you like a forceful, tumultuous wave, roughly rushing through every aspect of your existence. It started in your pussy, pounding through your throbbing walls before spreading through your veins and dominating your entire body. It was seraphic, a celestial pulse that made you squirm against her, moaning through it as you noticed Shuri approaching her own high but she quickly dug her face into the nape of your neck, an attempt to contain her own moans that threatened to escape her throat.

“Fuck…y/n…,” she sobbed into your skin.

“No, d-don’t do that. Fall part for me, Shuri. I w-want to see it. Let me see what I do to y-you, baby.”

“N-nkoszana…”

“Cum inside me Shuri. Please.”

With her vampire speed, she switches the position so you’re lying on your back and you’re met with the hunger that surged through her eyes right before she pressed her lips into the side of your throat as her moans sink into your skin.

“I-I can’t,” she whimpers. “I need it. I need you.”

And immediately you understand what she’s talking about. She wants you. All of you.

“Unh.”

“Ssshhh, baby, it’s ok. Drink from me, Shuri. I know, just…please.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” she struggles to say in your neck and your heart races. Everything is pounding. Your head. Your heart, Your pussy. And you were so overwhelmed but she was buried so deep into you, her thrusts were so surreal and you were no longer fearful of the woman above you. She was unraveling before you, revealing her true self and desires, baring it all before you.

“I-I—“

“I know Sh-Shuri…it’s ok. I promise, it’s ok.” You’re grasping her curls, moaning into the curve of her neck and she lets out one last beaten whimper before she sinks her teeth into your throat. It hurts at first, a sharp pain that scared you but the more you basked in it, the better it felt. Her plunges into you were getting sloppy and uncoordinated and it did not take long before you could feel her dick twitch inside you, grazing your walls as her cum spilled into your used pussy. It was an exchange of want, giving you her cum as she took your blood and it only took a few more messy pumps until you were cumming as well, one last blissful orgasm as your mind danced with stars. You are both moaning in each other's necks, the pulse in your pussy slowing down, a hard yet slow beat that had you twitching and your heartbeat felt the same. As Shuri continues to drink from you, you begin to feel dizzy, lightheaded, your physical body needing her to stop but your mind and your pussy ached for more.

“Sh-Shuri…I-I think—unh.”

“Mmmm,” Shuri moaned, struggling to detach from you, in a world she craved for for so long as your blood brought her to a state of ecstasy. You were addicting, making it a struggle to stop as her body rushed with pleasure.

“Shuri…baby…”

Your breathless whimpers forced Shuri to release you, her face drawing closer to yours, yet she looked so different. Her dark brown eyes transformed into a blood-red hue, her fangs fully extended, and her mouth stained with your blood. The image frightened you at first and Shuri looked away in shame, attempting to conceal the face she despised so deeply.

“I’m sorry,” she mumbled, ashamed of herself.

“Hey, hey, look at me. Don’t hide from me, Shuri. I-I want to see you. The real you.” Raising your hand to her face, you guide her gaze back to yours and slowly, she complies, exposing herself openly, displaying her true self and she was hauntingly beautiful. You tenderly caress her face, appreciating the intense red in her eyes, the sharpness of her fangs, and your blood trickling beneath them, her mouth colored crimson from the intimate exchange.

“I’m sorry,” she repeats and you gently hush her.

“Ssshhh, it’s ok, baby, it’s ok. I’m not hurt, ok? You didn’t hurt me. You did amazing, my love. You did so well.”

She nods and as you lean in to kiss her, the flavor of your blood meets your taste buds and though it isn’t pleasant, the significance of the act outweighs the taste. Shuri cleansed your lips of your blood by licking them, then did the same for herself before withdrawing her strap that was still buried inside you.

She runs her tongue over the blood that stains your neck before planting a kiss on your forehead. Cradling your head in her hand, she gently leans your forehead against hers and whispers:

“That was better than I ever imagined.”

︵‿︵‿୨♡୧‿︵‿︵

Both of you lay sprawled against her bed sheets, cuddling against her chest as you bask her scent while the sound of waves crashing not too far away filled the air.

“I have one more question, and then I think I’m done.”

Shuri chuckles at you. “And what would that be, s’thandwa?”

“So vampires are like…dead, right?”

“Undead.”

“Yeah yeah, whatever…I just wanna know…how exactly does one become a vampire?”

Shuri raises her eyebrow. “Why do you need to know that?”

You roll your eyes. “No reason, I’m just curious. Like there obviously has to be some kind of process.”

“Well of course there is.”

“So then tell me.”

Shuri gets up, presses her back against the headboard and you straddle her. She eyes the bite mark on your neck, tracing the unhealed scar and you wince.

“So fragile,” she whispers, almost mockingly and your heartbeat escalates and Shuri hears it, causing her to softly chuckle.

“What?”

“What?”

“You’re always laughing at me, so what’s funny?”

“Nothing, it’s just…I love the way your body responds to me.”

You gaze at her in confusion and she only stares at you in admiration, a profound sense of affection and tenderness reflected in sharp gaze. Her expressions held an unspoken language, a silent conversation that speaks volumes of how much she loved you.

“To become a vampire, you need to be dying, at the threshold of death. Then a vampire will give you their blood to drink, once that blood enters your system, it will kill you completely.”

You softly gulp.

“And then the blood will ‘fix you.’ Rid you of any scars and imperfections, rid you of wounds and disease until your body is brand new and strong and gives you back your life, making you the strongest you’ve ever felt. But not without consequence…of course.”

“That sounds…terrible,” you softly laugh.

“Trust me…it is,” she chuckles along with you, drawing you closer for a kiss that you wish could linger forever.

“The sun will be coming up soon. You’ll have to stay here until it goes back down, I won’t be able to drive you home until then.”

“That’s fine,” you reassure. “I’m tired as fuck anyway, I’ll probably just sleep here.”

She nods in agreement.

“Shuri…?”

“Yes, y/n?”

“I lied earlier…I actually have one more question.

Shuri sighs. “Last one?”

“For now.”

Shuri rolls her eyes. “I’m all ears.”

You place a quick peck on her lips before you proceed. “You know I love you, right?”

“For a while now,” she teases and you flick her shoulder. “Is that your question?”

“No.”

“Well I’m waiting…”

A deafening silence enveloped your surroundings, overpowering Shuri's heightened senses, allowing only the distant waves' sound, the rhythm of your heartbeat, and your faint breath to echo through her ears. Your palms began to sweat, and you nervously bit on your bottom lip as you contemplated whether to proceed with your question. Shuri gazed at you, filled with anticipation, almost wishing she had the ability to read minds so she could put her own at ease.

“Y/n, you’re scaring me…what is it?”

Your eyes glistened, and she sensed the hairs on your arms standing on end, yet your voice shattered the silence with your burning question; one she had hoped never to hear again.

“Turn me?” ❁ཻུ۪۪♡

Whew fuck, I need her baadddddd. Also, thank you so much for 800+ followers on here, that’s insane! Love you all and congrats if you made it through that long ass fic

[muzzlemouths]

For prompt

“Whatever this is - it’s over”

Sun & Moon centered / 7,686 Words

You’ve been fired.

There’s no Ifs, Ands, or Buts about it, if your (former) boss’ tone is anything to go by. You got the phone call bright and early a number of days ago, only an hour before you were scheduled to go in, yet you were still expected to continue on with your shift as usual. This was just a personal heads-up; a courtesy, they said. You’ll finish out the week before they kick you to the curb for real.

You don’t tell anyone. Not on the first day, or the second, or any time soon. There are forty-eight hours remaining when you decide it may be best to keep your mouth shut all together. Would it be easier, that way? Would it hurt any less?

It’s hard to imagine your coworkers don’t suspect something. You’ve been suspiciously dispirited these last few days, jumping between pretending not to care, and outright hysteria when you believe yourself to be alone. You’ve been careful. Whatever emotion has spilled from your voice is only a drop in a turbulent ocean, its waves threatening to crash and pull and swallow you whole. You lack the energy to keep your head above water, and have just about stopped swimming all together. The thought of letting yourself drown is easier. It chips away at the guilt.

They don’t intend to let you lose the fight that easily.

“Is everything okay?” Sun asks fifteen minutes into your shift, a rearranging of the same question he’s asked every day for three days. You struggle to keep yourself from snapping at him.

“Everything’s fine,” is what you answer him with instead, “just like I told you yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that.” The blanket in your hands is folded with the ferocity of a cat wrangling prey, as though the very fibers wage a war against you. Evidently, everything is not fine. “Will you please just drop it?”

“Sorry, sorry,” he quickly raises himself from a slouch to avoid crowding you further, hands flying up in defense, “it’s just…you’ve been so quiet this week, sunshine, and you know how I worry–”

“Well don’t,” you snap – thinking better of it the moment you catch his flinch from the corner of your eye. Your hands slow against the fabric, then stop all together. You deflate with an exhausted sigh and do your best to regain some composure. “I’m just tired, Sun, that’s all,” you try to face him with a smile, “I didn’t mean to snap, I’m sorry,” it doesn’t reach your eyes, “can we just forget about it?”

He straightens further, stiffening in the joints (he gets the picture loud and clear), his hands wringing in circles, already. “Of course, star, all forgiven!” You don’t miss the choice of nickname. Moon will doubtlessly bring it upon himself to ask you the same damn question before the end of your shift if he’s already invading this conversation. “Forget about what?” Sun continues with a wink, “I can’t even remember what we were talking about!”

His effort softens your shoulders. You know he can’t help but worry, it’s in his nature, but it will only make these last two days all the more difficult. “Thanks, Sun. I promise to try and be a little less grumpy.” You produce a smile with genuine effort this time, and he appears to reciprocate by unwinding the joints that had been coiled tight.

“Any time, sunshine. Now then,” he gestures awkwardly toward the heap of blanket, “would you like some help with that? It appears to have gotten away from you. Nasty beasts, these things are. Always causing trouble!”

The fleeting relief of humor helps the waves recede, bit by bit. You let laughter wash over you instead of grief for as long as it’ll last and do your best to ignore the way an ocean of dread still laps at your ankles.

-

As expected, Moon is hot on your tail before you’re so much as halfway to the locker room when the lights go out. There’s ten minutes left to your shift and, if you’re lucky, you can spend them gathering your things and avoid him entirely. Unfortunately, your luck this week has apparently run dry.

“Leaving so soon?” He asks from the rafters, “What has you in such a hurry?”

If it wasn’t a hurry, it’d be a lingering. An insistence to stay for as long as your timecard would allow, regardless of task, dragging your feet like a child that wanted to stick around and play for only a few minutes longer. You’d look desperate – suspicious, if nothing else – and you couldn’t lead him on to what was happening.

“Got places to be, things to do,” you lie in perfect sing-song harmony, “I’ll be back tomorrow.” It’s one of the last days you can tell him so. “Don’t you have patrols to be doing?”

Your locker slams shut. Moon is behind it, his nails still dug into the cheap metal. He watches you like a shark circling its next meal. “Done for now,” he tells you. “Follow. I want to show you something.”

Do you really have a choice in the matter?

Moon leads you down a familiar path. Past the Daycare, into the theater, through the blue door. You know the route to their bedroom by the back of your hand. “Is this important?” You try not to sound impatient, but the longer you’re here, the harder it will be for you to leave. Moon doesn’t reply.

He holds the door open and ushers you inside with an expectant glare. Your hesitance to enter has his eyes narrowing further. If you didn’t know any better you would think he was angry with you, but you can’t think of what you might have done to piss him off this time.

You walk into the room if only through sheer force of will, each step a fight in and of itself, waged against the bile in your throat and the weight that’s made knots of your stomach. Just five minutes. If you can last that long, you’ll have a reasonable excuse to leave without him thinking any worse of you.

Moon continues to the wall and carefully frees a paper from its tape, pausing to stare at it between his hands if only for a moment before returning to your side. The fairy-lights you bought them are strewn along the ceiling corners and provide only enough light to see him offer you the paper. You still find yourself bringing it within an inch of your face and squinting to make out what it is he’s so intent on showing you.

“It’s from your first day here,” he supplies.

You look for answers in his voice. Motive, emotion, anything. Anything but the unreadable stare he serves you and the thin paper between your fingers. With no other options you draw your flashlight from its holster and bring it up to the page, careful to angle it away from him. Normally he would take a precautionary step back, but today, he remains where he’s at, eyes glued to you. The flashlight clicks in your hand.

“Oh,” a quick breath runs between your teeth, “this is…”

The three of you together. Sun on one side, Moon on the other, and you smack dab in the middle. Crudely drawn as all children’s art is.

You remember the day it was gifted; a regular at the daycare – black hair wrapped in a rainbow scrunchie, the first to arrive and the last to leave – she had come up to you in the moments before it was time for pick-up and tugged at your sleeve. You had spent the day stressed beyond belief and worried about your future at the company, and hardly even noticed her arrival until the art was shoved into your hand.

She disappeared up a slide before you could get a proper look at it, but her eyes found you through the bars of the playpen’s upper level only a minute after. You remember it melting away the stress in your shoulders upon finally turning it over, thinking to yourself that maybe things would work out after all.

Despair opens a hole beneath your feet as the ocean finally drags you under, starving your lungs of air and plunging you into an endless darkness. You fall, and fall, and fall—

“I know it can be…difficult,” Moon’s voice cuts through the pitch, “working here, I mean,” you force yourself to find his eyes, vibrant crimson in a sea of black, “but we can figure something out. Or– or change, maybe, if that’s the problem.”

“What?” Your body feels weightless suddenly, the plummet taking even the bile, even the knots, leaving you with nothing nothing nothing.

“You haven’t worn your daycare nametag all week,” he points out, voice straining as he nods toward the empty space on your chest, “I just – we just thought you would come to us first before transferring.”

The bottom of this great abyss arrives without warning and shatters you entirely. Here, you are no better than a whalefall, heavy bones on the ocean floor, what’s left of you will be picked apart and then swiftly abandoned.

Your knees hit the floor. Moon is quick to follow, eyes flashing wide in a fit of panic, he bends to reach your height and cups a hand over your shoulder. “Star?” The frequency in his voice-box is all wrong. It fizzles and pops with a merciful worry you’ve never been allowed to hear before. “Tell me what’s going on.”

If your world is an ocean then you are a tidal wave, crashing and breaking along the shore, and you risk taking him with you. The paper wrinkles between shaking fists as you finally collapse into a discordant sob, unable to hold it in any longer. The seafoam carries you far, far away, until his voice is nothing but wind in its current. But he’s owed an explanation, isn’t he?

“I’m not transferring to another position,” your every word is pulled like teeth and hurts twice as much, the effort it takes to continue plunging you ever deeper, buried within cold sand, “I was fired, Moon. I’m not coming back.”

His grip on your shoulder hardens until it’s almost painful, nails digging into flesh. You hardly feel it. Your mind sways on uneven waves, your body is numb, a distant part of you, heavy with grief. He releases you on realizing and hesitates only a moment before wrapping his hands around your own. His voice warbles with unspoken dread.

“Why?” He asks.

Why, indeed? You had asked the company a thousand times, and asked yourself a thousand more when their answer wasn’t enough to sate you. Maybe you weren’t working hard enough, fast enough, your efficiency lackluster in every way that counted. Maybe you spent too many hours shooting the breeze with Moon and not enough time sorting boxes of craft supplies or folding blankets. Maybe your coworkers had seen you bringing Sun flowers one too many times. Maybe the kids asked too many questions and you answered with too much, or not enough. Maybe it was a combination of these things, or none of them. Maybe it was as simple as management had made it out to be.

Budget cuts, is what they told you. Your presence was no longer a necessity. The daycare would manage fine on its own.

“I don’t know,” you end up telling him, “maybe I just wasn’t good enough.”

You don’t notice that one of his hands has untangled from yours until the back of his knuckles are brushing along your cheek. They catch a tear as it falls and let it bleed into a strand of hair, gently tucking it behind your ear. “No, no no no, Starlight, you’ve done nothing wrong,” his murmur keeps you from drifting further into the sea, a fragile tether around your waist, fraying at the seams, “I’m sure there’s a way to fix this. We can find a way.”

“I tried,” your sob rings through the empty space of their bedroom, causing him to freeze. “I did everything I could, offered what I could – I’d have worked less hours, accepted less pay, anything. It doesn’t matter!” The tether unravels fiber by fiber. “It’s too late, Moon.” This won’t last. “It’s over.”

“We can still–”

“No!” The tether snaps. You turn your cheek in the palm of his hand and flinch when it cups your jaw, angry tears pouring over his thumb. “I’m so tired of fighting this when it’s obvious that they’ve made up their minds,” you can’t look him in the eye, “Please don’t make this even harder than it already is.”

Your fingers pinch at the edges of the paper, then pull it taut, taking in the art for a final time as water-stains spill across its surface. Wordlessly, you return it to him.

He doesn’t immediately take it, staring back at you, instead, as if by some miracle you’ll change your mind. But you don’t. You get back to your feet when his hand leaves you to take it, a terrible, crackling whine spilling from his throat, the motion of your stand so abrupt his nail stings a thin line down your skin – but you don’t feel it. You don’t feel anything.

He catches you by the wrist as you turn to leave.

“Please,” he whispers, eyes wide, “let us try.”

The waves are cold and heartless. They brush against your skin with affections no less tender than this and numb you down to the marrow. “I’m sorry,” you shake him free of your wrist, “whatever this is, it’s over.”

The door shuts at your heel with a whisper, and Moon does not try to follow.

-

You don’t sleep that night. The look in his eyes haunts you like a ghost, there each time you close your eyes, you toss and turn restlessly from the time you get home to the time your alarm goes off the next morning. Though you expect the sound to be grating as always, today it is anything but. Sweet, like a lullaby. Familiar. You savor it for all of a minute before forcing your hand over the button. Tomorrow, you’ll hear it for the last time – until you can find yourself a new job somewhere else.

You go about your morning routine with a certain amount of listlessness. The waves aren’t turbulent, anymore. They’ve settled into a mindless current, the idle of driftwood on a calm ocean’s surface. You skip breakfast.

Key in the ignition, seatbelt on, you adjust your rearview mirror and swear that Sun smiles at you from the back seat. Here one minute and gone the next. You had often joked about breaking them out, one day. Showing them the world.

How foolish.

Your drive is interrupted by the lazy push of traffic, and you can’t help but feel like the universe itself is dragging its feet with you. The remnants of a nasty fender bender just ahead distracts you briefly. Your mind is drawn back to the many times Moon complained about you driving home each day in what they both considered a death machine. Bitter laughter chokes against your tongue as you pass it by, free hand rooting around for your phone so you can explain away any tardiness.

“It’s fine,” says your boss. Of course it is. You’re only here for a short while longer, anyway.

You’re half an hour past the beginning of your shift when you finally pull into the parking lot, the area busy with cars already. You do what you can to avoid your coworkers’ gaze upon entering and clock in with your head down, thoughts still distant.

There’s an abundance of noise coming from behind the daycare doors long before you reach them. Pushing forward, you find yourself between dozens of children playing in what can only be considered unmonitored chaos. Craft supplies have spilled from their drawers and made a river onto the play mats. Toys litter the walkway, forcing you to step over dolls and plastic rockets and stuffed animals alike just to get to the front desk. The chorus of unrestrained fun bleeds your eardrums.

And there stands Sun at the center of it all, covered head to toe in paint, glue, and stickers, hands shuffling with guilt behind him while your boss verbally chews him up and spits him out.

“What’s going on here?” You drop your bag behind the desk and sidestep through a sea of running toddlers before coming to a stop at your manager’s side. Sun’s head snaps upward with a vocal clickclick at the sound of your voice, the tiniest flicker of relief settling in his overheating frame.

“Finally,” answers your manager, “I don’t know what you’ve been teaching this thing, but it’s gotten far too lazy. These children need to be reigned in immediately,” he gestures wildly at the ensuing chaos, face so red and tight you think he might just pop. “Now that you’re here you better fix it. I expect everything to be taken care of when I return, or you can say goodbye to your last paycheck!”

“Oh, u-um,” you shoot a quizzical look in Sun’s direction, but his face is blank, save for the usual candid smile, “sure thing. They’ll be perfect little angels when you get back.”

Your answer is nothing more than a grunt, that of an angry and pouting dog. He nearly bodies a third grader on his way out.

Your neck cranes to shoot Sun a narrow-eyed look. “What was all that about?”

“I haven’t the slightest clue what you mean!” He chirps.

What happens next moves like clockwork. Sun turns on his heel and brings two fingers against his smile, and perfectly imitates the shrill of a whistle, seamlessly gathering the children’s attention with little more than that and a clap of his hands. “Anarchy time is over, children,” he sings, “time to clean up, up, up so we can watch our movie!”

He receives a divided wave of reactions, squeals of glee overshadowed by groans and whines of not being done with their games, just yet, but he’s quick to put a stop to that with the simple lift of a finger. “Remember, first one to clean up their area gets to help me pick out the movie,” his smile undeniably widens behind the mask, “and our snack!”

The resulting chaos is of a different variety. Children of all ages bustling around to do their part until every toy is in a pile and all the crafts have found their way back to the table. Not perfect, by any means, but it’s about as close to organization as the daycare gets until Sun has a proper crack at it himself.

He never needed your help. Not before your arrival, and certainly not now. Sure, having an extra pair of hands around makes his job exponentially easier, but he managed to uphold this business for years before you were hired. He knows just what to do.

And here, too, does he know exactly what he’s doing.

“You cheeky bastard–”

“Language!”

“–you did this on purpose.” You accusingly point a finger toward the smug expression he’s wearing, that plastered smile shining back at you like he is none-the-wiser to what you’re saying. He’s practically mocking the very implication of it. “What were you thinking!”

His head tilts thoughtfully to the side, pointer finger coming to sit atop the chin of his faceplate as if he’s actually thinking about it, “I’m not sure what you mean,” hums Sun. “Do you mean to say that I pulled every drawer from the shelves and placed every toy within reach first thing this morning? That I let the children run amuck, all willy-nilly? That I encouraged their ruckus? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“Yes!”

He tuts, shaking his head in disbelief, “I would never do such a thing, sunshine! Why, I’ve just been doing my very best to keep these rowdy tots in line until you could get here. It was utter disarray without you here. Disarray, I tell you!”

You aren’t sure whether to be proud, or allow the feeling of your blood boiling to spill into something more tangible. “I know what you’re doing, Sun,” you decide on a halfhearted scold, instead, “this was risky. Too risky. What if you had been punished with more than a slap on the wrist?”

“I can hardly call that tantrum your manager pulls anything in the way of a slap,” he insists, “and besides, it all ended up just dandy. See?” He nods in the direction of a much cleaner daycare, the children already pouring over a basket of DVDs like vultures on old meat. His hand is heavy as it abruptly rests atop your head and rustles through your hair. “Everything went according to plan, petal. Stop your worrying.”

You slouch under the touch and gently bat his hand away, only half-smiling. “It’s not going to work, you know.”

“It might!”

“But—”

“I told you, didn’t I?” He turns fully now and cups your face between both of his hands, “Quit your worrying, little biter. You’re not allowed to stop trying until the rest of us have.”

You pout something fierce, a frustrated whine already building at the back of your throat. It eventually eases into the lows of a sigh. There’s no point in fighting either of them on this. Sun, especially, is aggravatingly stubborn when he’s set his mind on something. You can only imagine the plans they were making from the very second you left the night before.

Your eye catches on a subtle twitch in his fingers, and deeper still, in the depths of his chest, the whir of an overworked fan. The telltale signs of an anxiety attack that he’s barely restraining. He has every reason to be anxious, too. Sun can’t handle messes on a good day, so to go out of his way to intentionally create this much of it...

He really is trying.

“Thank you, Sun,” you take in a deep breath and hold it, relaxing with the exhale. “I’ll try and be a little less...grumpy, about all of this. Let you have a chance at trying at least.” You feel a pang of guilt at having to say it twice.

His right hand strays from your cheek while the other one stays. “Do you promise this time?” He asks, already knowing the answer.

When he taps his pointer finger against your bottom lip it tastes like sticky paint and glue. Your nose wrinkles, cheeks splitting with a smile even when all you want to do is cry. “I promise.”

-

It doesn’t work.

Why would it?

A single day of ruckus is nothing in the grand scheme of FazCo’s wallet. Sun is given a secondary scolding while being told to do better, and that’s that. There isn’t enough banking on your presence here to bother paying your checks any longer.

You still thank him for the attempt, knowing just how much he put himself through in the effort, and he remains convinced that something will change, even now. That a miracle will bring you back to them. When you say your goodbyes it’s with hope in his eyes, and acceptance in yours. You don’t notice how poorly he’s actually holding himself together.

Or the flicker of purple in his gaze as you leave the daycare behind.

-

That night is no better than the last. If this continues, you’re going to spend your final day with them sleep deprived out of your mind. It’s not like it can be helped, either way, seeing as each attempt at getting some rest violently reminds you of how little time is left. The memories you shared and the memories you had hoped to make, all taken from you in the time it will take for the sun to rise and set once more. It felt like a sick joke. Too cruel to be real.

It’s three in the morning when you receive a call.

You notice your phone vibrating on the bedside table within seconds of it, seeing as you’re still awake and watching old sit-com reruns to quell the anguish in your heart. You don’t hesitate to answer it the moment your eyes settle on the name.

It’s your manager. And he sounds – to put it lightly – like he’s going to piss himself.

“You better get your ass over here,” he half-quivers, half-snarls into the phone, “I mean it. Now.”

You’re already up and looking for your shoes when you hear a heavy thump from the receiver. “What was that?” You ask, eyes scanning the room for your other sneaker, “What’s going on?”

“I forgot something before closing and— does it matter? Just get over here!” Wood splinters around his voice. Behind that, the familiar sound of bells.

“I’ll be there as fast as I can,” you tell him, “try to find some place to hide.”

Forgetting your shoes entirely, you shove your feet into some slippers (it’ll match the rest of your attire, anyway), and throw yourself out the front door.

-

You really ought to have been pulled over sometime in the mad-dash between your house and the pizza-plex. Either the officers normally patrolling these streets are all at home sleeping like normal people, or your luck is finally turning around. Though, considering the circumstances bringing you to this point, you can’t say that’s entirely true.

The building is quiet as a ghost when you slip inside. “Moon?” Your voice spills over the empty halls and bounces back to meet you again, making the wide arching mouth of the pizzaplex feel that much more hollow. His voice does not answer you.

Instead what you hear is a rattling from the distance. The sound of metal on metal. You head for its direction in a full-body sprint while digging out the phone in your pocket, considering giving your manager another call, but ultimately thinking better of it. If he really was hiding (as he should be, if he cared whatsoever about your advice) the ring would only give his position away. You would just have to find them without it.

It doesn’t take long.

You round the corner to the sight of Moon making a meal out of your manager. Or trying to, at least. The metal bat your boss wields to ward off the normal type of intruder (already dented in to look grotesquely misshapen by now) is the one thing standing between him and a bed six feet under, and judging by the quivering in his arms, that method isn’t going to last much longer. His back presses against the floor with the entire weight of the animatronic atop him.

Moon spits and snarls, teeth gnashing behind the mask and nails carving slivers of metal from the bat that keeps his right hand from doing damage to anything else. The left hangs limply at his side with its elbow joint bent out of shape, wires exposed and barely keeping the limb pieces together. His chest is dented in a number of places, proving that the bat struck successfully more than once, though you can’t say your manager is looking any better.

Especially when you near them and get a proper look at the man who pays your checks; thick blood pools from his nose to chin, coating gritted teeth in red. The color stains his shirt and climbs the length of his body, thin gauges rivering down both arms. And his leg, fuck, the angle is all wrong–

His neck cranes to see you, face red with effort rather than anger for once. “Call your dog off!” He barks.

Ignoring the implications of that, you nod like your life depends on it (as it’s surely about to) and raise your hands into the air, daring a step closer. “Moon,” your chest feels tight, as though you aren’t getting in enough air, but you’ve done this song and dance plenty of times before. “Hey, it’s okay. You’re okay. Can you look at me?”

And he does. Against all odds, he does. The ever briefest flicker in your direction, a long enough distraction to give your manager a chance at escape but not enough to prevent Moon from immediately trying to follow.

“Hey,” you find his wrist to stop him in place, mirroring his own gesture from only a night before. An unspoken plead.

His head does a one-eighty to look directly at you, the expression he regards you with being that of a total stranger. Icy dread sinks into the lengths of your stomach and takes your heart with it.

"Moon, it’s me," you try again, "I'm here, I’m here, can you–"

His good hand raises, fingers winding above your elbow, and for an ever fleeting moment you think that maybe he's already found his way back to you. Then your feet leave the floor.

And your body ragdolls across the tile.

It’s a fickle thing, human life. It was stupid to think you could go into this situation guns blazing and still make it out okay. But it’s here, your back against the floor and body aching like a fire ablaze, when your eyes crack open to the sight of your manager limping toward the exits – leaving you behind like table scraps – that you realize just how much trouble you’re in.

Moon’s sharpened nails tickle against the back of your throat as his fingers encircle and squeeze, the choked breath he draws forth beating against your already battered ribs.

“Moon–” His name becomes lodged in your throat, rasping violently as you feel yourself raised in one smooth motion. Your back connects with the wall with merciless force and any hopes you may have had about this, too, all being an act disappear in an instant.

Tears brim at the corner of your eyes, your vision already starting to dwindle, they burn down your cheeks for what feels like the hundredth time that week. Still, you refuse to allow this to be how it ends. You’ll get your final day here, even if it takes everything you have left. Even if you’re forced to wield the same ocean that dragged you under.

“Please,” you whisper. His grip tightens. Your lungs sting with the effort of each breath, mind racing for the right words to say when it all becomes clear to you. “We can find a way to fix this,” your eyes search for any remaining piece of him, desperate and pleading as he’d been the night before, ”just let me try.“

One finger pries away, then another.

You collapse to the floor in an instant.

Moon stares upon you with a look you can’t quite read. He recognizes the words, he has to, or you wouldn’t be swallowing mouthfuls of air right now. Even so, his level of clarity is uncertain.

“Have to–” his good hand twitches, fingers contorting indecisively, “have to keep you here,” he says. “Late. It’s late.” His hand balls into a fist, then relaxes. The black swallowing his eyes begins to recede, giving way to familiar crimson if only in small, slow increments. “Time for bed.”

The song and dance continues, even if he’s forgotten which direction to put his feet and the lyrics are all wrong. You know the meaning behind them; what he wants to say, what he’s trying to say.

So you offer him a nod, slow at first but building with your confidence. You can still save yourself. Save him. “Yeah, I was just getting ready to lie down,” you tell him around a cough, “S-See?” You point with a wary smile towards yourself, thanking your lucky stars that you decided to wear an actual pajama set to bed for once instead of just an old T-shirt and pants. There’s only one slipper remaining on your foot – the other sits abandoned a few feet from where you currently sit, having been lost in the scuffle. Moon follows your gaze to its location.

He gives you a sideways, narrow eyed expression, red slits among a field of black which blends seamlessly into the dark hallway. Then he’s lowering himself into a crouch and half stepping, half scuttling towards your slipper. It would be endearing if you weren’t skating on thin ice right now.

Bending further to pick it up, he eyes the slipper for a moment before looking over his shoulder for confirmation. You nod, once more, and bring yourself to yawn with enough dramatics that it has his eyes dilating in that special way, more red blooming and overtaking the black. The action is only half forced. You really are exhausted.

Like tiptoeing across the thinnest layer of a frozen lake, you wait until he’s finished placing the slipper back on your foot before continuing with the next part of this dance. “Will you help me get to sleep?”

He stares, eyes calculating, as if he knows it’s all a game. You’re tricking his code in the only way that still works – and it doesn’t always work – but it has to, this time, because your whole life relies on him playing along.

And he does, lending you only a nod before bending at the knees and scooping you into his arms, bridal style, at a pace that denies any chance for argument. You don’t fight him, anyway, and you don’t miss the wince that crosses his face as his wounded arm wraps weakly around your shoulders, either, barely able to keep you there.

You also don’t miss the irony of having spent two days waging war against your insomnia only to be taken in for a nap by the very person you wanted so desperately to avoid. They weren’t meant to see you in this state. Likewise, you know how much he hates you to see him like this, too. A fair trade, you suppose. Life is funny like that. And by funny, you mean unfair and horrible.

When you breach the Daycare doors, Moon makes a beeline for the nap area and sets you down on a nest of blankets and pillows. It’s normally their job to fold and sort these into their respective cubbies, so you can only imagine their displacement here was a culmination of built up stress. The image of Moon refolding each blanket again and again without gaining any proper satisfaction from it plagues your mind, reinforcing the guilt that has already begun to creep its slow fingers around your throat again.

He wordlessly settles a pillow beneath your head before thinking better of it and tossing it across the room, though the blanket he had tucked you in with remains where it’s at. Then, changing his mind again, he slumps into a heavy sit just behind you and draws you near, your back against his chest, both arms surrounding you in a hug despite the effort it takes for him to raise his left below the elbow. His faceplate bonks gently against the top of your head.

And he’s silent like this for a long, long while. Leaving you feeling tense and defenseless, never truly knowing if you’re out of the woods just yet. If he’s come back to himself. You don’t allow yourself to look back until a quiet tremor spreads through the arms holding you tight, extending to his hands, trembling fingers curling into your shirt, eventually traveling throughout his entire casing until it feels like his very exoskeleton will vibrate straight out of its frame.

A noise stirs from his voicebox that you don’t immediately recognize. Practically a whisper, at first, it strains against his mechanics like a high pitched whistle through steel pipes before the frequency snaps, becoming the whitenoise heard between television channels, loud, discordant, ugly and raw.

A sob wracks through him.

“You can’t leave,” he chokes between the static in his throat, tucking you ever closer, “please, please, please don’t leave us.”

The agony his voice wields threatens to pull you back under. You fight the sensation, forcing yourself to relax in his hold, instead, even as you suffocate within it. Tears well into your eyes for the umpteenth time and fall soundlessly from your chin to land against his arms.

After a decisive moment, you make up your mind, answering him first with a stern shake of your head. “I won’t,” you promise, “they’ll have to drag me out of here kicking and screaming.”

Your chin lifts with an effort to meet his eyes, and you smile, wry and shaky as it is, hoping that he’ll reciprocate. He doesn’t. Looking down on you with a black, oily sheen smudging his cheeks, instead. You can’t bring yourself to blame him for it. In the end there’s only so much you can do. A promise is nothing in the eyes of the organization behind their very existence.

“I’ll stay the night,” you tell him, as if it’s any comfort. He answers with nothing more than a nod, then rests his chin atop your head, again, not willing to meet your eyes any longer. More noise spills from his voicebox, weak and distant, none of it words.

It isn’t long after that he begins to sway. A subtle rock from side to side, joined a moment later by the familiar tune of his music box, its winds and clicks singing against your cheek when you turn to face his chest.

For the first time since receiving that dreadful phone call, you find yourself drifting with ease. Darkness curls around you like a warm blanket to the gentle, albeit shaky hum in Moon’s throat, soothing you ever further, despite your struggle to stay awake with him for just a little longer. Just one moment more, safe in his arms.

Sleep drags you under.

-

It’s morning when you next wake. The day is only getting started, judging by the position of the sun as it glares through the daycare windows and directly into your eyes. You are greeted by your other Sun, who smiles at the sight of your eyes fluttering open and has you wrapped up in his arms much in the same position as you had fallen asleep, though you take note of an additional blanket wrapped around you.

“Morning, sunshine,” he croaks – an odd and unfamiliar lack of excitement in his quiet tone – though you know it would be cruel to expect happiness from him after last night. “Did you sleep well?”

“Mm...actually, yes,” you admit around a yawn, “but I’m sure it was only a few hours.”

“Three, to be exact,” Sun answers you. His arms unwind, careful of the damage to his left, to finally return your freedom. He is visibly reluctant to do so. “It’s around seven, now. How do you feel?”

You shimmy out of his remaining grip and take the opportunity to stretch and turn yourself around, careful not to go very far. Sun’s fingers twitch in your absence like he’s waiting for an excuse to pull you back into his lap. “Seven already?” You dodge his second question, not wanting to get into how sore you are after being chucked like a stuffed toy across the room only hours before. Moon is doubtlessly feeling guilty about that enough as it is. “Shouldn’t you be getting the daycare ready for open?”

He reaches for you, but thinks better of it, and tucks the hand back into his lap with the other. “I just–” his voice strains, going silent. Every ray has disappeared into his faceplate to leave only the points. It isn’t until your own hand outstretches and rests against his that he rediscovers his voice. “I just wanted to spend more time with you, whatever time we had left.”

Your smile wavers, tears threatening to spill across your cheeks again right then and there. There is a telling layer of black oil coating the underside of Sun’s eyes, too, that you elect to ignore. “I understand,” you tell him, “but you’re only going to get yourself in more trouble if the daycare isn’t open on time. My boss might not let me finish out the day if that happens.”

A whine rings from his throat at the mere possibility of it, that of a guilty dog staring at the floor, tail tucked between its legs. He goes to say something, but you beat him to it.

“Come on, I’ll help you get set up, and we can talk some more in the meantime.” You look down at your clothes, remembering your impatience to get out of the house the night before, and grimace a bit. “We can just say I thought it was pajama day, or something. I’m sure the kids will love that. Let me just get some caffeine in me first and then we can–”

Cool fingers wind around your wrist while your knees are still bent, not even fully to your feet yet. His hold on you isn’t painful, but it is dangerously close to becoming so, and you don’t have to look far to see the panic in his eyes.

“I’ll come right back,” you promise, “Just a quick hop down to the coffee booth, that’s all. I’ll even bring some fizzy faz back for you.”

His whine sharpens, reverberating against his chest. “You aren’t supposed to be here in the first place, remember? What if you’re caught?”

“What are they going to do, fire me?”

It is evident by the harsh squeeze he gives your wrist that he does not, in fact, find your joke funny. Nevertheless, he begrudgingly releases his hold on you and takes to rhythmically tapping all ten fingers against his knees, instead, the metallic tink tink tink echoing even through the fabric of his pants. “Be quick, please?” He begs.

You give him a quick nod and take off in the direction of the booth with as much skip in your step as you can muster. Which, admittedly, isn’t a whole lot. Three hours is still three hours, even if it was spent in the arms of your favorite people, and you’re still feeling downright miserable on the emotional front.

The staff bot greets you by name as you shuffle up to the counter and order your usual, taking care not to burn yourself on the cheap styrofoam cup that gets handed back to you. When you turn back around, lethargic and gripping the cup too tight, you come face to face with your manager.

He looks…well, he’s looked better. There are bandages wrapped around both arms, a collection of them scattered across his face and jaw, none of it professionally administered. You imagine that even the management around here does their best to avoid a lawsuit. Though, judging by the crutches he’s using, you have to assume he went to someone with medical training after patching up what he could himself.

You expect him to be upset. Pissed off, really. Instead, he looks at you as though he’s seen a ghost. That, if nothing else, gets a laugh out of you.

“Hey, boss,” you hum, trying to act nonchalant, “having a nice morning?”

“I–” he gawks for a while longer, wetting his chapped lips. You think he looks almost normal without all the angry red and popping veins. “I wasn’t expecting you to be–”

“Alive?” You supply, cocking an eyebrow. Your smirk is definitively smothered, trying not to get too cocky with the asshole who left you to die the night before, but its presence can be heard in your tone nonetheless.

“Back at work, already,” he corrects with a strong grimace, evidently knowing he’s been seen through already. “Didn’t Moon…”

“I got him under control,” you say with an easy shrug. It isn’t the first time. Were the circumstances different, you’re sure it wouldn’t be the last, either. “Can I still keep the coffee? I know I’m not on the clock yet, but…”

“It’s–” he stills, breaking awkwardly into silence for a moment before deflating with a long and tortured sigh. “It’s fine,” he grumbles. “Doesn’t matter.”

He is silent as you pay the bot, sipping sagely on his own coffee while avoiding your eye and wearing a painfully constipated expression. It isn’t until you’re preparing to head back that he calls your name again, causing you to pause, dread rising in your gut. You force yourself to turn around.

He looks sour in the face, like the staff bot traded out his coffee’s sugar for a handful of lemons. You are preparing yourself for the scolding of a lifetime when his eyes roll, casting to the side. “You’re being demoted to minimum wage,” he tells you.

It takes a few seconds too long for the words to catch up to your brain. When at last the implications sink in, it takes real, actual effort to not smile like a kid on Christmas and jump around right there in front of him.

You settle for a wide – normal – smile, instead, but still laugh a little too loudly, nodding with enough enthusiasm to make him groan. “Sure thing,” you tell him, “I’ll be here bright and early tomorrow. O-Or whenever. Same schedule?”

“Sure,” he grunts, “just keep your dogs under control.”

And then he’s gone. Simple as that. He walks past you and into his office, shutting the door with a soundless click, and you are left in an empty hall too early in the morning, coffee going cold in your hand, a hundred thoughts racing through your mind and all of them sending you into a run back towards the daycare.

The drawing comes to mind again. Sun on one side, Moon on the other, and you in the middle – and it’s here where you can no longer stop the smile that blossoms across your face, the heat that warms your chest and sooths away every cold and aching wave that had threatened to drown you and take your heart with it.

Yeah… maybe it would all work out after all.

[brucebocchi]

Summer 2024 anime roundup: ALL IN ONE

hey! i also post these reviews on my ko-fi. this is a labor of love so if you like the stuff i write, i'd really appreciate it if you'd throw a few bucks my way. thanks!

Well, I'm much busier now than I was in the first half of the year, so that means less time for anime and less time for writing about it. I managed to watch only (ONLY?) nine shows this season, so might as well put it all in one post.

As always, each show's OP is linked in the title.

Let's jump in.

Returning anime

NieR: Automata Ver. 1.1a, part 2

After a COVID-plagued production delayed the last few episodes of its first half last year, A-1 Pictures’ adaptation of Yoko Taro’s landmark action-RPG returns to deliver the real meat of the story. And as with the game, the first half of NieR: Automata Ver. 1.1a was something I’d classify as “pretty good!,” while the remainder is what makes the entire endeavor worthwhile.

I’m happy to report that not only did the studio not lose a step, but they improved on the presentation of Ver. 1.1a immensely. The action sequences are superb and expressive throughout, and the CGI integration is actually, y’know, integrated this time out. The score, both original and borrowed from Keiichi Okabe’s contributions to the NieR duology, remains as evocative as ever. They also ramped up the cheesecake more than a little bit, and let’s be real, that was the draw for a lot of people in the first place.

If there’s any one thing Ver. 1.1a can claim as an advantage over the game’s narrative, it’s that the former does a lot more work in building on A2 as a character. There’s just enough to chew on in the game, but having more of her backstory from the YoRHa stage play and manga adaptation integrated into the narrative makes for more of a meal. Having A2’s history and real personality pinned up as a backdrop as she struggles to suppress both really fleshes out her journey and eventual resolve as shit continues to hit the fan. She’s also just a big ol’ tsundere sometimes. And not for nothing, but they gave her an absolute DUMPY for no reason, but I can’t really pin that as a negative.

9S’ whole thing happens too. I really don’t have much to add to that.

When I reviewed this show’s first half at the end of 2023, I mentioned that the initial concern with the anime’s very existence is that it’s adapting a narrative that is functionally being told through the very fact that it’s a video game. The delivery of the game’s true ending, especially, is so innately A Video Game that it’s functionally impossible to adapt directly into a television show. I’m happy to say that although that function is lost, Ver. 1.1a’s ending is still plenty satisfying (and I’m told especially so for Drakengard fans, without giving too much away). Something is still very much lost in the transition, though. In his review of the penultimate episode, Anime News Network’s James Beckett wrote:

What the anime of NieR:Automata has not been able to capture in these critical final moments is the way that the game makes its players complicit in the tragedy in a way that they could never be if they simply sat down and passively watched these events unfold from behind the safe veil of the fourth wall. It would be like if we were each individually guided on stage to place our hands on Hamlet's shoulder and push him gently onwards to his final destination. It doesn't change anything about what happens in the story, but it changes everything about what it means to us.

These acts of “ludonarrative culpability,” as Beckett called it, are the reason why Yoko Taro is considered an auteur in the gaming sphere. Both NieR games are tragedies writ large, and Yoko’s genius lies in making you, the player, carry out the tragedy, often well before you realize what you’ve wrought. And to Beckett’s point from his review, NieR: Automata is a perfectly fine sci-fi story in its own right, but the game puts the blood squarely on the player’s hands and inserts them into the narrative in a way that simply watching cannot. The connection I felt to the story was only there because I’d already played the game myself; I can only imagine how it would feel if this was your introduction to NieR.

So to return to a question I suggested at the end of last year: Do I recommend this to people who haven’t played the game? Eh, not particularly. It’s a well-made show, to be sure, but there’s enough missing from what makes Automata such an exceptional game that I’m not sure I can recommend it wholeheartedly if you’re not already familiar. Then again, I wouldn’t really know how it reads from the other side. To those who know and love the game, Ver. 1.1a isn’t quite the “Rebuild of NieR” some were hoping it to be, but it’s an interesting companion piece that takes surprising strides to tie it even closer to the preceding franchise. If you’re a newcomer? YMMV. Either way, play the game.

Oshi no Ko, season 2

I spent far more time than was necessary in the Discourse Mines following Oshi no Ko’s thunderous debut last year and a controversial (but fortunately inconsequential) turn of events in the manga shortly after the season finale. Though I remain one of the series’ foremost glazers, I’ve had my moments where I worried that maybe I overrated it a bit in my head, that I carried too much water for writer Aka Akasaka, and that I’m still riding the high of the series’ premiere.

Oshi no Ko’s second season completely erased any lingering worry almost immediately and reminded me and the world that yes, it Really Is That Good. The “It’s So Over” switch flipped to “We Are So Back” as soon as best girl Kana Arima and co-lead Taiki Himekawa dazzled their co-stars and one another with literally colorful displays of their acting prowesses. My expectations continued to rise as an active reader of the source material, and studio Doga Kobo continued to surpass them. This adaptation is just that good.

Aqua’s quest for revenge and Akasaka’s continuing examination of Japan’s entertainment industry both lead us into the world of stage acting, specifically 2.5D adaptations of famous manga and anime. Aqua is cast alongside Kana and his sham girlfriend and former reality show co-star Akane in an adaptation of the fictional smash hit shonen manga Tokyo Blade, along with several members of a theater company to which Ai once belonged. While Aqua is more concerned with getting dirt on Ai’s background than he is with acting, Kana and Akane have much more personal stakes as they try to show one another up and still put on the best play they can. Kana can’t stand Akane’s absolutist, matter-of-fact approach to acting (nor the fact that she’s fake-dating the guy for whom Kana’s down abysmal), while Akane, who idolized Kana as a child and is disappointed to see her take a step back as an actress, is trying her damnedest to rekindle the spark that convinced her to pick up acting in the first place. On the fringes, rookie actor Melt Narushima is trying to make up for a heinous performance in the first season that earned him the scorn of his more experienced castmates as well as a mangaka’s permanent ire.

A good amount of this arc does feel like Akasaka was still sorting through his feelings about the Kaguya-sama live adaptation when he wrote it, but he also gave himself some room for reflection on his own side of the equation as a mangaka. Tokyo Blade’s creator, Abiko Samejima, holds her creation very dear and is not impressed with the script. Her friend and former boss, Yoriko Kichijouji, is entirely too familiar with how badly the process can go; her own manga, Sweet Today, was horribly botched in this show’s first season, and she wants to help Abiko-sensei keep a level head. Kichijouji-sensei is the voice of reason this time out as she points out all of the concessions creators may need to take in order to get their work adapted and the unimpeachable truth that mangaka are basically crazy people (and you can practically hear Akasaka screaming through her lines; four months after Kichijouji said this in the manga, Kaguya-sama published its final chapter, marking Akasaka’s retirement from illustrating serialized manga). At her urging, in addition to an all-nighter helping Abiko-sensei make a deadline, the play goes off without any more hitches.

I didn’t much care for the Tokyo Blade arc in the manga but I knew full well that it would translate well to anime just as well as the acting sequences in the first season had. Akasaka’s decision to have the actors treat the stage as a battleground felt a little silly on the page, but experiencing everything again in sound and motion reminded me that this was the same genre of psychological competition that made Kaguya-sama one of my all-time favorites. Doga Kobo is just stupidly good at adapting manga. God, the animation is incredible. Character animation is as deliberate and mesmerizing as always, and emotional moments are punctuated by interpretive splashes of watercolors. Melt’s breakout on stage was a standout moment in the manga, but the abstract, expressionistic depiction of his redemption was so perfectly conceived on screen that life imitated art: Kichijouji-sensei cried in the anime, and manga artist Mengo Yokoyari cried in real life.

I could go on and on and on, but if you’re already this deep into Oshi no Ko I really don’t need to tell you anything else. This season, for all its gorgeous visuals and onstage glory, does not hesitate to remind you at the worst possible moments that this is still ultimately a revenge story and pulls the rug from you just as gleefully as it dazzles. The first season was already exceptional, but the second cements Oshi no Ko as an all-time great adaptation. As a fan of the manga, this is as good of an anime as I could ask for, and then some.

Mixed Bags

My Deer Friend Nokotan

I’m just exhausted.

I’ll admit, I bit a little too hard on the marketing. The preview trailers promised madcap, nonsensical fun on the level of Nichijou or Asobi Asobase, the cast was exceptional, and the OP’s refrain was a total earworm (Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan! Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan! Shikanoko Nokonoko Koshitantan!). It even has the cast jumping in the air! And we all know the Ryo Yamada rule! This was going to set the bar for gag anime!

Oh, how little I knew. Y’know how sometimes you see a trailer for a middling comedy movie and you can tell they already gave away all of the movie’s best jokes? Turns out My Deer Friend Nokotan did just that. I did temper my expectations; it’s not like I thought this was going to be the second coming of Nichijou or anything, but I guess I was still expecting something, I dunno, funnier?

The premise seemed to lend itself to a good comedy either way: Torako Koshi, a former delinquent, has successfully expunged her prior reputation and worked her way up to becoming her school’s student council president. All of that is nearly thrown away when a bizarre new student, Noko Shikanoko, immediately clocks her and almost spills the beans. Also, Shikanoko (who prefers to be addressed as Nokotan) has antlers and can commune with deer. She may even be a deer herself. She hoodwinks Koshi into starting a Deer Club at school, where they recruit Koshi’s upsetting younger sister Anko and the languid, rice-obsessed Bashame. Allegedly, shenanigans ensue.

Take this with a grain of salt, as humor is very subjective, but this show just plain isn’t very funny. Nokotan’s gags hit at least as often as they miss, and a lot of them just feel unforgivably dull. One bad segment can feel like an entire episode. The only reliable gags are gross-out humor, outsized slow-motion violence, or Nausicaä references. Everything else is just Koshi barging into the lower third of the screen to shout about how wacky the joke was just then.

Look, I know that humor doesn’t always translate across cultures. The things I don’t understand about Japanese humor could fill several libraries. I do, at the very least, get the basics of the boke/tsukkomi dynamic (fool and straight-man, basically) and how the reaction to a silly thing is usually the real punchline. I’ve absorbed enough Japanese media to adapt to that momentum. That nearly goes out the window here, because Koshi’s role as the tsukkomi is a straight-up momentum killer. It’s rarely just a “wait, what?!” or a “yeah, that’s rich coming from you;” it’s usually more like “wait, that is so ridiculous! You couldn’t possibly have pulled that off! And what’s that you’re wearing all of a sudden?” The rhythm is just gone. Comic timing? Don’t know her. Even if I thought the joke was funny at first, you could probably see any semblance of a smirk fading off my face by the time she was done. And hey, maybe some of this stuff doesn’t translate. Maybe it’s not that funny in Japan either.

The other characters outside of our main two really don’t help. Anko’s whole “yandere siscon” act isn’t very funny to start with, and she brings nothing to the table otherwise. Bashame is such a nothing character that even Koshi was sick of her by the end of the season. And while I feel like a good narrator can add a good level of je ne sais quoi to a comedy anime (see: Kaguya-sama), an overly intrusive one can actively take away from the humor (see: the Kaguya-sama dub). Nokotan’s narrator comes at it with a sort of winking, nudging “HEY, WE’RE A GAG ANIME” energy that gets too grating, too quickly. What doesn’t help is that he eventually affects a fake-desperate “please watch this show and tell your friends!” bent that called to mind Ron Howard’s narration in Arrested Development’s third season as it was approaching cancellation. Meta humor, as in the latter, can absolutely elevate the level of comedy; 100 Girlfriends in particular wielded it like a machete. In Nokotan, on the other hand, it betrays a clear lack of confidence in the writing, and there’s nothing less funny than comedy that doesn’t even believe in itself.

It’s not all awful, I swear. There are genuinely some very good gags; Nokotan’s cat-and-mouse game with an anachronistic matagi was a blast from beginning to end, and the skin-suit gag got a bigger laugh out of me than almost anything else I saw this season. Any good anime, especially a comedy, lives and dies by its voice cast, and Megumi Han’s performance as the titular Nokotan is this show’s whirring, beeping life support. She makes the absolute most of her considerable range as the jokes call for it, while somehow never stepping on her own toes by dipping into her Kana Arima voice from Oshi no Ko. Koshi shares a VA with Hatsune goddamn Miku. Bashame is pretty much only tolerable thanks to the languid performance of relative newcomer Fuuka Izumi, whom I’m very glad to hear in something that isn’t Gushing Over Magical Girls.

And aside from the music (the OP, to be fair, is infectious), that’s about all there is to like about the production. Did Studio WIT really make this? It looks like it could’ve been made by anybody, and that’s not a compliment. The uncanny CGI deer were the only real visual standout, and even those lost their shine before long. Something attempting to be this audacious needs to have a look to match, and Nokotan falls flat. Again, maybe that’s on me for trying to hold it to the standard Nichijou set.

I’d honestly be surprised if this gets picked up for another season. I’d be hard-pressed to come back for more.

No Longer Allowed in Another World

(CONTENT WARNING for discussion of suicide)

Osamu Dazai was one of the most complex and fascinating figures in Japan’s modern literary canon, right up there with his ideological opposite and real-life rival, Yukio Mishima. Dazai was, frankly, a disaster. He was a serial womanizer, terrible with money, repeatedly disowned by his family, unemployable, a deadbeat dad, and hopelessly addicted to drugs and booze. His magnum opus, Ningen Shikkaku, or No Longer Human, is a stark semi-autobiography, just barely fictionalizing his repeated failures of dignity and self-preservation, including his several failed attempts at double-suicide with his many illicit lovers. The same year it was published, however, Dazai was successful in his final attempt, drowning himself alongside his mistress in 1948.

But like, what if he got hit by the isekai truck instead?

Isekai Shikkaku, or No Longer Allowed in Another World, fully Goes There. The series begins with the legally distinct, unnamed Sensei and his lover Sacchan blindsided by an anachronistic truck along the riverbed. Sensei comes to, alone, in a monastery inspired by the JRPGs from well after his time. He doesn’t know what’s going on and he doesn’t care. All that matters is that he’s still alive, and that sucks for him. Sensei is greeted by Annette, an elf priestess in a virgin killer sweater, who is shocked to discover that not only has he not gained a single stat boost by coming to this world, but he’d also rather kill himself than take her up on the standard offer of an OP cheat skill (and he’d also just rather kill himself in general). So he bounces to go find Sacchan. His refreshing outlook on the new world, as opposed to the other excitable losers who got isekai’d before him, completely melts Annette’s brain to the point of falling in love with him on the spot, so she dons her sluttiest Persona 3 battle armor to chase after him.

Sensei hates this shit. Contemporary western fantasy hadn’t made its way to Japan yet in his time, so he has zero point of reference in this world, and he sure as shit has no clue what a JRPG is. The level-up jingles give him migraines. He has no self-preservation instincts and the only solace he has in this strange new world is a jar of toxic sleeping pills that he munches like M&Ms. He has no interest in or aptitude for fighting, so when he encounters a big-tiddy catgirl being squeezed half to death by a walking tree’s branches, Sensei sees the perfect opportunity to get himself killed. Unfortunately, his blood has become so toxic from said pills that piercing his skin instantly kills the tree, saving the young lady he incorrectly names Tama. Much to Annette’s consternation, she joins the party, and they set out on Sensei’s quest to find his lover and finally die in peace.

As you can guess, that’s not what happens. For some time, we see Sensei throwing himself in harm’s way, floridly imploring various fantasy monsters to kill him in one shot with their big bats, to the point where they get creeped out. His vaguely-threatening exhortations for death make for a fine formula, but one that can wear thin quickly. Before it gets that chance, though, the seed planted in Annette’s introduction bears fruit: The visitors to this world from our own aren’t here in isolation, and they have succeeded in completing the usual isekai goal of overthrowing the demon king. There’s now a massive power vacuum, and nature abhors that shit, so a cabal of erstwhile isekai protags dub themselves the Fallen Angels and decide to take over.

This turn was, to put it bluntly, the main thing that kept me watching. There’s a fine bit of commentary inherent to this framing that the type of wet-noodle, borderline faceless self-insert isekai protags tend to appeal to antisocial losers who would rather give into their basest impulses than see an opportunity to actually better themselves. This is not at all lost on Sensei; his keen eye for the human condition leads him to interrogate the Fallen Angels his party encounters so that he can write about their own failures as humans, as well as the gaping voids in their previous lives that led to them acting like petty tyrants as soon as they gained a bit of power and treating a brand new world like their own personal playground. Sensei’s writings reveal that he did indeed gain a power when he came over to this world; if he sees fit, a finished book will surround its subject and reanimate them back in their original world and afford them a second chance to right their wrongs or, in one particularly moving case, start over on the right foot.

For as audacious as No Longer Allowed’s premise is and as impeccable its comic timing and voice cast (you will find some absolute heaters completely buried on the call list), I just didn’t find it all that compelling. Isekai as a genre is so oversaturated that it was old hat to call it oversaturated even five years ago, so while I do try to pan for gold, sometimes I just come up with a neat-looking river stone. Hell, I can’t even say this one’s all that neat-looking; there’s nothing that looks all that great about it to begin with. The character designs and backdrops are pretty standard JRPG-style stuff that you’re just as likely to find in the likes of Helck, with lackluster animation to match. Didn’t care too much for most of the characters either. Even for its commentary on the isekai genre and the type of person it caters to, No Longer Allowed just ends up shaking out like another isekai series. 

There’s clearly more at play here, and I might just go ahead and read the manga because I didn’t really find myself looking forward to watching the anime. Maybe it just didn’t translate well. No Longer Allowed in Another World does clearly have something to say under its silly premise, but its method of getting that message across is, ironically, buried underneath the usual trappings of the genre it’s trying to say something about. 

Wistoria: Wand and Sword

I’m gonna preface this by saying that Wistoria is probably the best anime I watched this year that I’ve classified as a “Mixed Bag,” save for Jellyfish Can’t Swim in the Night. I’m generally of the mind that excellent production can make up for a middling story (my enjoyment of the likes of Solo Leveling and Wind Breaker this year was pretty emblematic of that), and that is the case here for the most part. Wistoria, story-wise, is nothing special; it’s your standard power fantasy set in a magical school, but the entire presentation is just almost fascinating enough to overcome that hurdle.

Hell, it’s almost not even worth going over the plot. Unassuming boy named Will goes to a magic academy, he doesn’t have any magical aptitude, so he makes up for it by honing his hand-to-hand combat prowess in the school’s designated dungeon. It’s Mashle meets Solo Leveling. Will gets picked on (like, a LOT), but he doesn’t care, because he made a promise long ago to reach the pinnacle of magical society to reach his childhood friend, who happens to be a genius mage. There are duels, there’s a tournament, there’s monsters, you know how this goes.

Will has allies in the school, namely a female friend who’s madly in love with him as well as a professor who covers for his shortcomings in magic-related subjects, but remember that this is a self-insert fantasy: There are also increasingly menacing bullies for him to put in their place. Will is challenged by a Snape-like instructor, a classmate who just hates him so much for not having magic aptitude, and a top performer at the school who’s just flat-out evil (and racist to boot!). And of course the latter two also have goon squads of snickering hangers-on. Will always succeeds, of course, because despite his shortcomings, he’s the strongest and most specialest boy. It’s almost like an isekai without the isekai. Too bad we find out that Will is hilariously shredded, which kinda blows a hole in the self-insert aspect.

Goofy shonen-isms aside, there’s still plenty to enjoy here. Varying types of magic, artifacts, and fantasy races abound, and lore is sprinkled throughout the show in character biographies in the commercial break eyecatches. The story does get gradually less stupid as the season goes on and characters are better fleshed out. And hey, there’s nothing wrong with watching a really strong dude beat the shit out of monsters and assholes.

The only thing that really kept me coming back to Wistoria was that, plainly, it looks and sounds fucking awesome. It’s not the best-looking anime I watched this season (that would either be Oshi no Ko or one of the next two anime on this list), but Wistoria takes such a surprisingly cinematic approach to such an uninspiring story that I couldn’t help but keep watching. The lighting effects are lush, combat animation is bonkers in its best moments, and the score is pretty darn good too. It definitely takes some big swings at simulating camera movements and perspective shots that don’t always accomplish what they set out to do, but I can appreciate the ambition bleeding through. I can see the vision, and that’s what counts.

The actual content is pretty paint-by-numbers, but Wistoria is well-made enough that it’s worth a shaky recommendation. Maybe just turn your brain off until the action picks up. I've heard the manga gets pretty good from here on out, so I'll probably stick it out for another season.

The Gems

The Elusive Samurai

If you’re not already familiar with this series, do me a favor and watch the OP linked right above. Pretty good character animation, right? Expressive, weighty, plenty of personality. The colors pop like crazy too! A lot of the time, an anime series will heavily stylize its OP to attract eyeballs and YouTube metrics, oftentimes bringing in outside animators and directors for a unique feel. In the case of The Elusive Samurai, I cannot stress enough that all that animation is the standard.

Yes, this show looks exceptional. Even putting aside the fact that it’s historical fiction, this show has a truly timeless look to it that I still struggle to put into words. The Elusive Samurai is clearly a modern production but bears all of the hallmarks of what great animation has always looked like when a studio is willing to invest in it: Colors are so bold and saturated that I want to take a damn bite out of them, backgrounds are painstakingly hand-painted even for brief cuts, and there even seems to be a film grain overlay to really sell the classic feel. It’s not perfect (I’ll get into that later), but holy shit is it a feast for the eyes.

Adapted from the pages of Weekly Shonen Jump, The Elusive Samurai is a heavily fictionalized retelling of the fallout of the Siege of Kamakura in the 14th Century. Tokiyuki Hojo, left without a family in a bloody coup of the shogunate, is prevented from committing suicide by enigmatic priest Yorishige Suwa and then thrown right back into the fire of the battlefield. Yorishige, who has prophetic visions of the future, foresaw Tokiyuki’s ascent to leadership and wants to see how he fares in battle. Tokiyuki didn’t bother with his training as a young master, instead playing elaborate games of hide-and-seek with the Hojo clan’s advisors, so in the face of certain danger, he’s left with no choice but to do what he does best and run the fuck away. And as with evading his training, Tokiyuki realizes that it’s way more fun than actual combat, and the future is suddenly even more clear to Yorishige: Evasion, not bloodthirst, will guide Tokiyuki’s path to revenge.

At Yorishige’s increasingly unnerving behest, Tokiyuki goes into hiding at Suwa Shrine and begins building a squad to take down the usurper, Takauji Ashikaga. Along with Yorishige’s daughter, Shizuku, he teams up with young warriors Kojiro and Ayako, and in their travels pick up the crass, kitsune-masked thief Genba and the food-obsessed swordsboy Fubuki. It’s fine as extended casts go, though we don’t get much from a few of them past their introductory arcs. Tokiyuki is an absolute delight, though. He’s a sweet and joyful kid despite his circumstances; real shonen protag material. And most importantly, he’s completely over Yorishige’s shit.

I’m a sucker for magical realism, and The Elusive Samurai delivers. Yorishige really does appear to be a prophet, to the point where he can even predict Dragon Ball Z (yes, really), and he and Shizuku are capable of pulling off acts that any actual person would consider a literal miracle. Mythical beasts roam the land and those that were slain appear to reside on a different realm accessible to the Suwas. All of Takauji’s top soldiers have senses and abilities far beyond anything human or animal, and Takauji himself seems to have borrowed some of his prowess from the devil himself. With this show’s commitment to top-tier visuals and animation, the sky's the limit for what we can see, and it kept me glued to my TV every episode. It almost made me want to watch Demon Slayer. Almost.

The cast has some solid performances from familiar names and voices: Yuichi Nakamura is his usual blusteringly silly self as Yorishige, Aoi Yuuki is a riot as Genba, and Katsuyuki Konishi (Kamina himself!) infuses Takauji with appropriate menace. There’s some Chainsaw Man and Bocchi sprinkled into Tokiyuki’s clan of rookie warriors as well. Good stuff, but what really caught my attention was a surprisingly familiar voice giving life to the bug-eyed villain Sadamune Ogasawara: None other than Yutaka Aoyama, the narrator of Kaguya-sama: Love is War. Nobody could have more perfectly infused Sadamune with the appropriate level of self-serious goofiness than the guy who narrated Kaguya-sama’s balloon game like it was an NFL Film. Perfect casting.

As incredible as this show looks most of the time, the remainder does have a critical issue: CloverWorks didn’t seem too invested in hand-animating horses or any of the show’s characters riding them, so it opted instead for CGI. Very poorly-implemented CGI. I really try to take stuff like this as it comes, but the modeling looks way too video-gamey for the style the rest of the show is going for, to the point where I’m taken out of it. There’s really no excuse for something this uncanny with the high bar The Elusive Samurai set for itself early on (and yes, Uzumaki is airing as I write this, and I’ll talk about the similar problem that show has at the end of the year).

I know I just said this about Wind Breaker last year, but this may be CloverWorks’ other Big Shonen Hit. It certainly has the juice, between the wacky gags and shockingly brutal violence, and CGI issues aside, the studio has clearly invested in it. A second season is already on the way, and I’d say it’s paid off. If the studio can iron out the kinks, this could end up becoming an all-timer.

Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines!

If I haven’t made it clear enough, my anime journey has turned me into a bit of a romcom guy. Couldn’t tell you why. Maybe it’s because Tenchi Muyo was a formative anime for me, or maybe it’s because I got on Kaguya-sama relatively early in my return-to-weebdom trek and I’ve been chasing that high ever since. I could go on and on about the ones I’ve watched and which particularly stood out, but we’d be here all day. At the same time, though, a burgeoning market for the genre, particularly among the shonen demographic, means that there’s gonna be some real slop out there. Plenty of anime, manga, and especially light novels are targeted at the “lonely boy who wishes cute girls would attach themselves to him just because he’s A Nice Guy” type, and while there are some genuinely excellent series that cater plenty to that kind, there’s a well-defined line between the good and the trash.

Makeine is well aware of that line and elects to skip rope with it. Genre subversion is at its best when the work in question shows a genuine care for the milieu it’s satirizing, and Too Many Losing Heroines is to trashy light novel romcoms what The Eminence in Shadow is to edgy isekai and Bang Brave Bang Bravern is to vaguely homoerotic mech warfare. It’ll slap you in the face with every dumb threadbare cliche you’ve come to expect from the genre, and it’ll do so with a smile.

These stories are usually fronted by a total wet noodle and Kazuhiko Nukumizu is the soggiest soba you’ve ever seen. His main interests are water fountains and hey, wouldn’t you know it, light novel romcoms. As far as he’s concerned, he’s a background character with the personality to match. He’s thrust to the forefront, though, when he’s caught staring at his classmate, Anna Yanami, embarrassingly picking up the pieces from being brutally rejected at a cafe. She forces herself into Nukumizu’s booth and helps herself to several courses’ worth of stress-eating on his dime, which he never agreed to. As recompense, Anna decides to cook him lunch until her debt is more or less repaid, and would you look at that, Nukumizu just made a friend!

As the title would suggest, Anna’s not the only lovelorn maiden finding her way into Nukumizu’s school life. He’s exhorted into joining the school’s literature club, where he meets the track runner, Lemon Yakishio, and the lit club’s stammering stalwart, Chika Komari. He also has to bear witness to each of their own crushes backfiring and deal with the fallout. And amidst this chaos, there’s plenty of botched confessions, getting locked in storage closets, boob faceplants, and all the other nonsense you’d expect from the genre. And it’s terrific! And in the midst of all this, even as Nukumizu seems to be a passenger in this journey, you see him ever-so-slowly realize that he has some agency and grow closer to these girls. Makeine is plenty silly and more than a little stupid, but there’s plenty of heart in here as well.

The offbeat character dynamics and clever dialogue are what really make this. Everyone is just refreshingly weird in their own ways. Anna is a complete menace and totally convinced she’s the protagonist of life, and she may not even be wrong. I almost don’t care whether she and Nukumizu get together or not; they’re such a fun “serious guy/goblin mode girl” pairing that I’m not that interested in their dynamic changing. Komari and the lit club VP Koto are a dynamic fujoshi duo, ensuring that the club’s shenanigans aren’t too shonen-centric (and funny enough, Koto has her own idea for an Osamu Dazai isekai). Everyone in the student council has something demonstrably Wrong With Them, the homeroom teacher is a disaster, and the school nurse probably belongs in prison. I love every single one of them. I could’ve done without Nukumizu’s offputtingly-clingy little sister (and learning about her analogue in this season’s other romcom LN adaptation, Alya Sometimes Hides Her Feelings in Russian, was enough to put me off of watching it), but it looks like one of her own female classmates is in love with her, so that could be gold in later seasons.

A-1 Pictures, to borrow an industry term, put its entire pussy into this production. As with last year’s Heavenly Delusion, there was so much love put into the lighting effects, background art, and character animation that I felt like I was watching a Makoto Shinkai film at times. All of those elements working in tandem massaged my brain in such a way that when every episode ended, I was left confused because hey, where the hell is the rest of the movie? Makeine is also loaded with killer visual gags, and I give A-1 a ton of credit for letting those jokes land without calling too much attention to them, unlike a certain other show I watched this season. The opening and endings were real treats, with three different EDs as the season progressed, each depicting one of the titular heroines’ personal journeys (and performed by each respective girl’s VA, no less). This is some real investment on the studio’s part and it absolutely paid off.

I promise that every time I compare a romcom to Kaguya-sama, it comes at a great inner struggle to prevent myself from doing so, but if that anime is truly over and this is where A-1 is focusing its resources, Makeine may very well be a worthy successor. I really can’t say for sure whether this or The Elusive Samurai was the best new anime of the summer season, and it doesn’t help that they aired on the same day and I’d always watch them back-to-back. Just know that they’re easily two of the better anime I’ve seen this year.

Mayonaka Punch

If “mega-cancelled YouTuber starts up a new channel with a bunch of disaster lesbian vampires” isn’t enough of a hook for you, I really don’t know what else to tell you.

Masaki got kicked off her popular NewTube channel after punching one of her co-hosts, and the internet is letting her hear it. Maybe barging in on the “we’re firing Masaki” live stream and tackling one of them didn’t help either. Rather than film the bog-standard apology video, she figures she can just wing it and start up a solo channel. Masaki decides to start by playing the hits and drunkenly recreate her first channel’s breakout video in a spooky abandoned hospital, and finds more than she bargained for in a vampire named Live (pronounced like it’d be short for Olivia) who really, really wants to drink her blood in particular. Masaki nearly falls to her death in a panic, only for Live to save her and reveal that she has the very filmable ability to fly, so Masaki cuts a deal: If Live can help her get a new channel off the ground, Masaki will let her drink her blood.

This is tremendous content, so Masaki moves in with Live at Banpai Manor along with her vampire roomies to produce a new channel, co-starring the eternal 10-year-old day trader (night trader?) Ichiko, the soft-spoken fujoshi musician Fu, and the heavy-vaping gambling addict Tokage. They name the channel Mayonaka Punch (because mayonaka means “midnight” and because Masaki punched the shit out of her former co-host) and quickly get to work trying to beat Masaki’s former channel to their goal of a million subscribers (and a delicious lunch for Live). Even though they try to pass off their vampire shenanigans as Very Good CGI, they run afoul of a vampiric authority figure for exposing their identities, so they have to get internet famous the old fashioned way: Cute Girls Doing Cute Things.

I can’t quite put into words what a blast this show is. Mayonaka Punch frequently barrels along at a madcap pace, often punctuated by an electro-swing score, as its cast of loud idiots (and Fu) carom off of one another to chaotic effect. The voice cast really sells it, too: Ikumi Hasegawa (Kita in Bocchi the Rock!, Vladilena in 86, Übel in Frieren) owns every ounce of Masaki’s mounting exasperation as she deals with all the vampire nonsense while continuing to avoid the consequences of her own actions. Fairouz Ai continues her MVP-caliber resume for 2024 in style as Live, infusing her with a kind of desperate manic energy as she scratches and claws for Masaki’s approval. This was easily my favorite of her many roles so far this year, and two years removed from Chainsaw Man’s debut, it’s been a treat to hear her once again voicing a feral, bloodsucking loser.

As silly as Mayonaka Punch gets, though, it delivers some serious emotional blows when you least expect them. The fourth episode, centering on Fu’s history, is one of the best of any anime I watched this season. There’s also some very interesting history between Live and the head vampire’s go-between, Yuki, that was told through (though partially buried by) a series of video game facsimiles, and I hope there’s more there someday. And, of course, there’s Masaki’s evolving relationship with Live, with romantic undertones so tantalizing they might as well be overtones. I really thought there wasn’t enough time left in the season to reach a satisfying conclusion, and though it might not have fully reeled in the yuri bait, I was pleasantly surprised at how well everything tied together.

Mayonaka Punch’s ending is open enough that I can only hope it gets a second season, but I’m not about to hold my breath. That’s a tall order for original anime that don’t set the world on fire, but this one has all the right pieces for a future cult classic. Liked and subscribed. 

Suicide Squad Isekai

When this was announced, the only reaction it really got out of me was “Sure dude, why not.” As far as what this show is, it does what it says on the tin. It’s an isekai featuring a motley crew of anti-heroes plucked directly from the David Ayers and James Gunn Suicide Squad films. You already know what you’re in for.

Sure enough, this is a straight up Suicide Squad story from the jump: Harley Quinn and the Joker (the latter sporting yet another heinous makeover) try to pull off a heist, it goes sideways, Harley gets arrested and forced into Amanda Waller’s scheme to mine rare resources in another world alongside Deadshot, Clayface, Peacemaker, and King Shark. It’s your standard JRPG-style isekai fantasy world, except the previous Suicide Squad of Enchantress, the Thinker, Ratcatcher, and Killer Croc seem to have run roughshod over tensions between races and kingdoms, leaving Rick Flag alone to pick up the pieces.

And what ensues is pretty much what you’d expect. Everyone looks appropriately anime; Psycho-Pass character designer Akira Amano did especially good work with Harley, to the point where I’m shocked that a billion-yen idea like “anime Harley Quinn” was slept on for so long. All of this makes it even funnier that Peacemaker is still very much just John Cena. Character designs aside, Suicide Squad Isekai only seems to look good when it wants to; most of the moment-to-moment stuff looks a bit muted but absolutely pops off when business picks up. There’s even a flashback sequence of Deadshot and Ratcatcher that has a sort of loose, crumbly Masaaki Yuasa look to it. Despite the genericism of the setting and inconsistency of the aesthetic, though, Suicide Squad Isekai still carries plenty of style with it. The intro and outro are both blasts; I didn’t realize until the season ended that the “Tank!”-style OP was by Tomoyasu Hotei, the composer of the most iconic piece of music from Kill Bill. The ED (content warning: Mori Calliope) heavily features Amanda Waller getting down in ways I can only hope to one day see Viola Davis recreate. 

The fusion of American and Japanese styles is definitely awkward at times; the occasional references to other Warner Bros properties like Lord of the Rings and Tom and Jerry feel particularly shoehorned in considering this is a Japanese production, but the voice cast makes up for a lot of faults. Anna Nagase captures Harley’s freewheeling energy perfectly, and her penchant for nicknames is extra cute in Japanese when she’s calling the Joker “Purin-chan” or King Shark “Nana-chan.” Jun Fukuyama is a real standout as Clayface, channeling the flashy spirit of Joker (not this one, the Persona 5 one) to animate Basil Karlo’s irritating showmanship. Takehito Koyasu as Peacemaker doesn’t quite have the self-serious goofy energy we’ve come to expect from the live action version, but it’s such funny casting on its face that I don’t really mind. Can this tradeoff go both ways? I want John Cena as DIO yesterday.

For a Studio WIT production and a story by Re:Zero’s writers, Suicide Squad Isekai may occasionally feel like less than the sum of its parts (par for the course for the property’s recent adaptations, unfortunately, save for the Gunn film), but if you don’t come at it expecting too much you’ll have a good time. Far from my favorite this year, but it’s a crowd pleaser, and those, I like.

[phoenixcatch7]

Deep in my ff7 rereads so here are my favourite fandom fics, hands down.

End as you mean to begin <- 130k+ of time travelling cloud parenting the remnants, seeking asylum in a war torn wutai to keep all four of them out of shinras hands while sephiroth is absolutely Going Through It in midgar. Great Genesis characterisation and cloud mothering his way to an international incident. Bonus gender hijinks, hilarious misunderstandings and zack. Unfinished.

The fear of falling stars <- 500k+ and soon to be completed. Cloud and insane!Sephiroth time travel back to their shinra days and I cannot emphasise enough how much cloud is Not Doing Well. Gorgeous wordplay and top tier banter. Utterly unhinged blood enemies to ??? to ?????? to lovers sefikura. It's E rated and probably the tensest I've ever been reading fic lol, it is not lighthearted! But it's incredibly well written and the characters are phenomenal (zack my beloved) so if you've got strong nerves (and like a quarantine pairing) I'd definitely recommend it.

Voice of the gods <- 170k+ of almost idyllic gods and avatars au. Slow, soft and full of world building, it's a lovely relaxing read of cloud getting anointed the envoy of sephiroth, god of war, and slowly growing into his role and joining the ranks of envoy. Lots of side characters take larger roles here, and sephiroth himself is a darling without losing his sharpest edges. Unfinished.

I CAN FIX HIM (series) <- possibly my favourite sephiroth characterisations ever. 130k and growing of pure shaking this man like a doll in a perfect mix of almost delirious crack and gutting angst (often both at once!). Very good writing, every single funny moment hits like a truck and keeps building until you're choking with laughter. Bonus points to ROADTRIP! for being utterly, utterly insane. I cannot emphasise enough just how GOOD every single character and their dynamics are written.

Just anything ff7 written by AimeeLouWrites, if you've been in this fandom for any length of time you'll have heard of her. Great concepts, great executions and aus for DAYS.

Five hearts to make him whole <- 130k+ of time/dimension travelling cloud getting sent to a world of soulmates - and his alternate self bagged all four soldier firsts. Alternate cloud also died violently a few years ago and boy did those soulmates (not) take it well. Our cloud, of course, was not read in on any of this. Shout out to the emotional support chocobo! Unfinished?

Shall I find rest <- another soulmate agszc (?) dimension cross but this one is 100k+ of post AC cloud and Tifa waking up and deciding to make it everyone else's problem. They're so done with all the drama. Bamf nibel duo to the end and Tifa is the mvp. Unfinished.

Advanced release <- 250k+ and it's sephiroth receiving the original game in a strange packet that appeared in his room. It spirals into a messy and painful exposure of conspiracy, lies and inevitable tragedy. Video game logic is a running gag and zack remains the only actually stable person in the whole sorry mess but he's also Having a Terrible Experience. Really well written!!! Unfinished.

On broken wings <- 160k+ of pure post AC sephiroth redemption from his pov. Him struggling to find his place in a new world and experience real human connection evolves into MOOGLE EMBASSY need I say more?? Unfinished.

With Great Power Comes Meddling Fucking Gods <- 470k+! Poly WEAPON cloud gets yoinked back to the past (feat agzs), dies for a few days and misses his family SO bad but he is determined to change the future for the better. Probably the most healthy and mature cloud ever lol. Unfortunately for him, insane!sephiroth is pulling a inner hollow and gaia herself isn't talking. If you like symbolism, whoo boy!! The dream sequences are a DOOZY (and drowning in eroticism). Wonderfully written, the divide between sane!sephiroth and his counterpart is really cool to see. E rated at times but it's absolutely DELIGHTFUL and WEAPON cloud is such a treat. And I cannot emphasise enough the symbolism. Zackkura (kinda) and slow burn! Unfinished.

A brand need not be seen <- 180k+ in a world of soulmates where the four firsts have clouds name on their wrists. Trooper cloud is tentatively, desperately hopeful. Then a smoking hot op af adult cloud appears, with no names on his wrists at all. It's a really cute flirty fic despite covering shinra politics, identity crises, huge self worth issues, lots of trauma, and finding your own place in the world. Unfinished.

Memory's struggle <- 250k+ of cascading time travel. Basically everyone goes back, which goes great XD. Everyone... Except cloud. I read this a while ago but I do remember poor cloud just getting loved and spoiled by literally everyone and freaking out about it lmao. He was so confused! Unfinished.

Additional edit:

A solitude of space <- a wonderfully soothing 90k complete of sephiroth getting resurrected and moving to stardew valley to become the farmer. It's sooooo peaceful and following him as he grows into his own person and experiences real normality and community is lovely, if a touch angsty. Eventual sefikura with cloud moving to the farm when he's not doing deliveries. It's just. Really nice. I think I cried at the end. Finished!

One-Winged Angel's Self-Saving System <- 55k+ sephiroth enters the Chinese fantasy Scum Villain world in place of the scum villain himself! (He's the third person to take on that role, but who's counting?) Reborn into a plant body he's set loose on an unsuspecting world with a completely different magic system (sentient swords! Immortality!), with only the guide of a mysterious hallucinated ai. Freedom to make his own choices! Aroallo seph rep! He messes up the plot so bad, recruiting accidental love interests with kill counts and resurrecting long lost immortals. It can get a bit heavy but it's really fun and sephiroth has no intention of ever going back. Unfinished.

The SOLDIER General's Self Saving Shizun <- 73k+ of the opposite of the last fic: the scum villain (the 2nd) gets isekai'd into sephiroth! Shen qingqiu, aka the modern world native shen yuan, fails to resurrect into his prepared plant body and wakes up in a new fictional world, once again as the villain. With his limited memory of the games and his immense knowledge of cultivation (scum villains magic system) he tries to get a grasp on his new life while evading hojo, the president, his new subordinates and the war front while cultivating to immortality - something shinra is VERY interested in. When I tell you these two fics have a GRIP on me. I've written so many fic ideas around them. It's actually insane. The first thing he does is completely redecorate his rooms and buy a whole new wardrobe, which is totally not suspicious XD. Unfinished.

The fifth act <- 160k, it's a good ol' time travel fic - with a twist. The truest exploration of ripples in a pond, or how kindness, when true, can be returned in most unexpected ways. Or maybe how a single act of good can change the world.... Or maybe it's about how you must never turn your back on an enemy. Cloud has people to save and people to kill, and only time will tell which is which. Complete.

Of Things That May Be Only 'Verse <- another series! At 250k, it's about sephiroth resurrecting, only to, uh, slip and crack his head lol. This sends him spiralling through a vision of a cosy life he'd never dreamed, and when he wakes up? He wants it so bad. But that means behaving. Slow burn sefikura redemption, side Cid/Vincent (vincid?) which ngl did convince me of the ship, domestic fluffiness and found family galore! And the whole series is complete!!

Little seph <- a 160k series about the AC sephiroth revival going wrong. Stuck in the body of a kid, post AC sephiroth is a feral kitten carefully domesticated with the power of pancakes, wing preening, and deeply uncomfortable sleepovers. He's a brat, a pest, a murder machine, but he just wants to be part of a family even if he pretends he doesn't. Eventual sefikura, and overall just a very good read. Fully complete!

We are no heroes <- 70k series, about a secretly time travelled sephiroth desperately trying to save his friends and finally, maybe, rest. When I tell you this had me SOBBING. I was BAWLING. Extremely good, zack is best boy. This man is just so tired. Beautiful descriptions. And, again, complete! Yay!

[2hoothoots]

saw this post in the tag earlier talking about how we never really get a detailed look inside Maligula’s mind, and it got me thinking about the themes of the game again so I’m gonna use it as a jumping-off point. because i agree, it’s very significant that we never get to really see Maligula/Lucrecia as she used to be! but i think that fact actually makes the game much stronger, especially on a thematic level.

Lucrecia’s presence haunts the narrative throughout Psychonauts 2. at first, we can only make her out through her absence. she’s the seventh stump around the campfire, the missing center of a torn photo. we see glimpses of her in the ruined fragments of Ford’s mind. in Helmut’s mind, she’s a looming specter, a shadow of the friend he once knew. in Gristol’s mind, she’s a celebrated war hero. and as the game goes on, we learn that everything in Psychonauts 1 – the Aquatos leaving Grulovia, the family ‘curse’, Raz running away to camp – all of that was set in motion because of her. she’s at the very center of the tragedy that PN2 revolves around.

and she does haunt the narrative, even if Nona is still alive. because the old Lucrecia – the real Lucrecia – we never get to meet her. she’s long gone.

the closest we come to actually interacting with Lucrecia, as she used to be, is in Cassie’s mind. while the rest of the Psychic 7 only have a few lines to share, paper Lucrecia has a full dialogue tree. this is probably one of my favourite moments in the whole game. there’s an awe in Raz’s face, getting to meet her, but also this palpable tension throughout the conversation.

(screenshots taken from here! if you don’t remember this conversation, or just want a refresher, i’d highly recommend going back to watch it.)

this dialogue tree is great. it’s funny, and subtle, and surprisingly moving. Raz is full of questions for Lucrecia, and Lucrecia isn’t giving much away, but we get glimpses of her story here that are so tantalising. it’s a fascinating window into the person she used to be: coy, and playful, and a little aloof.

but – this is also very clearly not Lucy. we hear Cassie’s own thoughts coming out of her mouth (“Cassie told us [hydraulic mining] was very bad for the environment, but nobody listened to her, as usual”), but her dialogue is also steeped in Cassie’s confusion, her struggle to understand what happened (“I don’t really know [why I murdered all those people]. I was the nicest person during my time at Green Needle Gulch”). this is the closest we ever get to seeing Lucrecia, face-to-face, but she’s still heavily filtered through someone else’s perception.

how much of this is the real Lucrecia, and how much of it is just how Cassie sees her? we’ll never know.

i think a crucial part of PN2’s themes is that perception – how you can be someone completely different to different people around you. everyone has their own version of the story to tell. the most obviously propagandistic is Gristol’s retelling, which comes as a shock twist at a climactic moment that throws the whole game on its head. here, we get to see the other side of the story, from someone who only ever knew Lucrecia as a protector, a general, a murderer – and thought she should stay that way.

(screenshots from here)

but as entrenched as he is in his narrative, Gristol doesn’t have all the answers, either. and Ford’s version of events, while probably more factually correct, is still steeped in his own biases. Ford was so dedicated to the memory of the woman he loved that he did terrible things for her; and when he tried to bury that memory, it was so deeply entrenched in his mind that it broke him.

(screenshot from here)

but note the wording, when he talks about using the Astralathe to “neutralise” the “problematic” parts of her mind. My Lucy.

something else that PN2 touches on is how experiences change you. after the battle against Maligula, the remaining members of the Psychic 7 become very different individuals. Cassie withdraws from the world, unable to return to normality after everything that happened; Compton becomes an anxious wreck without his support network. Bob is broken with grief after the loss of his husband, and Ford willingly shattered his mind because it was what he thought he had to do to keep Lucrecia safe. and throughout the game, Raz helps all of them – but he doesn’t fix them. he doesn’t undo everything they went through, because how could he? the things that happened will stay with each of them forever.

and it’s the same with Lucrecia. even after she lets go of the rage and grief and violence that Maligula carried with her, symbolically severing the threads that bind her to her past – she doesn’t just go back to her old self. because she’s someone different now, too. she’s a mother, and a grandmother, and she loves her family so truly and so deeply. she’s patched together a new life for herself. and that’s what she affirms to Raz, in the moments before the final fight.

and he loves her right back. even after everything he’s learned, she’s still his Nona.

i think sometimes a story is more satisfying for not giving you the easy answers. Psychonauts 2 leaves a lot of things unsaid. it gives you pieces of the puzzle, glimpses of Lucrecia’s story through other people’s eyes, and asks you to draw your own conclusions from that. and then it says: this is who she is now. this is what matters. and personally, i think it’s stronger for that.

[invisibleicewands]

Michael Sheen’s extraordinary gesture as he pays off debts of hundreds of people

He plays an angel on screen and he has proven he is an angel in real life by undertaking an extraordinary gesture. In an unprecedented move the actor has used his own money to write off personal debts of hundreds of people in South Wales

It’s been confirmed that Michael, who famously plays angel Aziraphale in Good Omens, has brought light and relief to many families struggling with debt with this wonderful act of benevolence.

The move was not publicly announced by the Port Talbot star, but was uncovered by fans who spotted posts on Facebook in local community groups from a television production company called Full Fat TV.

The posts read: ‘Actor Michael Sheen has been campaigning for a fairer credit system for years and in an extraordinary gesture, he has used his own money to write off personal debts for hundreds of people in South Wales. If you have received a letter from a company called Ten Acquisitions the good news is that Michael has paid off some of your debt and he’d love to hear from you. The details of how to get in touch with him are in the letter.’

Intrigued by the posts which appealed to those who had received letters from a company called Ten Acquisitions confirming that Michael had paid off debts, one fan took to X to ask him directly if the posts were true.

Fans wondered if it was somebody using his name as a scam, but the actor in replies on his X account confirmed the posts were neither clickbait nor a scam.

He wrote: ‘It’s not clickbait. I want to clarify, because we want people to get in touch.’

The campaigning Welshman, a long time advocate for a fairer credit system, has teamed up with the production company to film a documentary about the plight of those struggling due to unfair financing.

On Monday, Michael appeared in Parliament where he joined calls for a fair banking act to tackle the credit crisis affecting people and businesses.

In 2022-2023, more than 9 million were declined for credit, with millions relying on pay-day-lenders and buy-now-pay-later schemes with high interest rates. At its worst, lack of access to affordable credit means hundreds of thousands of people find themselves turning to loan sharks, while viable businesses remain stuck, unable to develop and create jobs. Campaigners are calling for a Fair Banking Act to help ensure that everyone can access essential financial services and support.

Speaking at the event in Parliament on Monday, Michael said: “Anyone can find themselves in a place where they need credit to make ends meet or to get through a difficult time. The lack of affordable credit for people on lower incomes is harming individuals and families, but also businesses and communities. Whole regions are seeing their growth held back. We can’t keep waiting and hoping that things will get better. We need something to change now. The Fair Banking Act could be the thing which really makes the difference”.

"We can’t keep waiting and hoping that things will get better. We need something to change now."@michaelsheen has joined calls for a #FairBankingAct to tackle credit crisis affecting people and businesses.

[pavedinashes-if]

Paved in Ashes

The only constant in your life is the board beneath your feet.

Slice of Real Life Drama Focus: Romance and Life Struggles

⫸ STORY:

You're only 20 when suddenly your life goes bam! Throwing you into a whole new city, a different country even. Wasn't part of the plan, but you know how life loves to mess with plans. People happened, stuff happened, and suddenly you're on the move. The new chapter ahead? Buckle up, 'cause it's not gonna be all sunshine and rainbows. And guess what? Your step-mom? Yeah, she's right there in the same city. She's always had this knack for trying to steer your ship, like every decision's a GPS checkpoint.

But hey, there's this one thing that's never let you down—your skateboard. It's like the buddy that's been with you through thick and thin, the one that never bails. Among all this craziness it's like your anchor. So, the big question is—can you break out of the loop you got in? Find your place in the world and restart or lose yourself in temptation? Time to find out.

⫸ LOCATION:

Hamburg, Germany - Known as the Gateway to the World, featuring Germany's most sinful mile. Welcome to your new home!

⫸ YOU: Customize your own Main Character

Looks: Hair, Body, Scars, Piercings & Tattoos and much more

Gender identity and sexual orientation

Personality: Sarcastic / Genuine, Rude / Polite, Grumpy / Friendly, Aggressive / Peaceful, Stoic / Emotional, Shy / Bold, Deceitful / Honest, Arrogant / Humble, Selfish / Generous, Oblivious / Aware, Disinterested / Curious, Cautious / Reckless

Nickname: What do people call you?

Fashion: Pick your clothes to match your personality

Custom Skateboard: Design the look of your board

Skate Style: What's your riding style?

Vices: Alcohol, Drugs, Smokes, Gambling, Aggression, Self-Harm

Job: pick one of several professions - or don't

Hobbies: pick a hobby that makes you happy

Housing: live with your step-mom, find a place for yourself, share a flat - or don't

ATTENTION - Regarding Qs

inbox open for game-related asks, No scenario asks, what if asks Progress updates will be posted once there is something to announce

DEMO: Prologue, 24. October 2024—Dashingdon Link [23k words]

⫸ FEATURES: Juggle a new home, new friends, new romance, new profession, new temptations, old and new vices, crazy night life, your stepmother and build yourself a reputation out there.

⫸ ALL 12 DATEABLE & OTHER NON-DATEABLE CHARACTERS BELOW All romance in this story is optional and can be skipped all together if preferred. Still, the platonic relationships will be rewarding and deep on a different level. There are poly options available and each character has their own expectations, needs, wishes and desires, which you'll have to discover.

Note: Throughout the story, you'll encounter the ROs at various points. However, not all of them are destined to remain in your life; some seek fleeting enjoyment while others might become sources of annoyance. Just like reality, there's a mix of success and setbacks, reminding you that heartache is an authentic part of the journey. #heartacheisreal E.g.: If you behave like an a*hole, there's a chance they'll break up with you.

⫸ DATE OPTIONS - Overall 12 ROs & flings available

Samual / Samantha "Sam" Peters, 25 - 💙

Your Neighbour [m/f]:

Occupation: Police Officer - Life's flipped you into a whole new city, right? Newsflash! Next door's got a friendly face that's making things a bit less chaotic. Only thing is, you're starting to wonder if there's more to this neighbor than the casual chats. Are they keeping something under wraps? 💬 "In front of my eyes? Are you serious?" ♡ Loyal, Observant, Dedicated, Reliable, Friendly & Approachable 🚩Overprotective, Controlling, Difficulty Switching Off 🛹 Does not skate Looks: tba Social Media: Samantha Playlist: Spotify #pia: samantha #pia: samual

Felix / Felicia Nowak, 21 - 🩷

Your Ex [m/f]:

Occupation: Rich Kid - Old flames flare up as your past strides right back into your life in this brand-new city. Sparks are undeniable, but so are the reasons things didn't work out. Can you give this a second shot, or is it just history playing its track again? 💬 "Your mother always loved me, you know it." ♡ Confident, Generous, Driven, Charismatic 🚩 Impulsive, Superficial, Entitled, Manipulative 🛹 Does skate Looks: here Social Media: Felix (xF!MC), Felix (xM!MC) #pia: felix #pia: felicia

Alex Czarnecki, 25 - 🧡

Your New Foe [m]:

Occupation: Lawyer - None other than a face that seems to have it out for you. Every encounter feels like a clash, sparks flying in every direction. But hold on, could there be more to this hostility than meets the eye? 💬 "I am looking forward to making your life a living hell." ♡ Sharp-Witted, Analytical, Passionate, Perseverant 🚩 Stubborn, Guarded, Confrontational 🛹 Does not skate Looks: tba Social Media: Alex Playlist: Spotify #pia: alex

Noah / Naomi Cho, 20 - ❤️

Your Best Friend [m/f]:

Occupation: Photographer - Your ride-or-die best friend's on the other side of the world. They're just a text away, keeping your spirits high as you dive into this new city's chaos. The catch? Obviously the distance, but: Is there more to this bond that's worth exploring, or should it stay in the "friend zone"? 💬 "Pah, plane tickets are so cheap these days." ♡ Optimistic, Spontaneous, Loyal, Empathetic, Playful 🚩 Conflict Avoidant, Flakey, Jealous 🛹 Does skate Looks: tba Social Media: Naomi(xGF) #pia: naomi #pia: noah

Xavier Hoffmann, 22 - 💚

Your New Friend [m]:

Occupation: Musician - So, you meet this new friend at an event, and suddenly life's got an extra splash of excitement. But hold on—there's something about this new buddy that's keeping you guessing. Can you really put all your cards on the table, or is there some trick up their sleeve? 💬 "See? Super easy and nobody will ever find out." ♡ Inspiring, Free-Spirited, Passionate, Charming 🚩 Attention-Seeking, Impulsive, Unreliable 🛹 Does skate Looks: tba Social Media: Xavier #pia: xavier

Bianca Wolf, 19 - 🩵

Your Childhood Friend [f]:

Occupation: Student - A chance encounter brings back memories of your childhood friend. It's like life's throwing surprises your way, and this friend's becoming more than just a blast from the past. Can you pick up where you left off, or are you diving into uncharted territory? 💬 "I have to admit, seeing you kind of...messes with my head." ♡ Supportive, Empowering, Trustworthy, Honest, Kind-Hearted 🚩 Mood Swings, Stagnation, Drama-Prone 🛹 Does skate Looks: tba Social Media: here #pia: bianca

Laurenz / Laura Svenson, 20 - 💛

Your Rival [m/f]:

Occupation: Pro Skater - Rivalry's a familiar tune - Drama is to be expected 'cause they don't give you an inch of space. Competition's getting a different flavor once you both aim for the same goal. Can you navigate these uncharted feelings? 💬 "Oh, you will so damn fuckin' much regret it!" ♡ Spontaneous, Humorous, Enthusiastic, Entertaining 🚩 Egoistic, Control-Freak, Insecure 🛹 Does skate Looks: tba Social Media: Laurenz Playlist: Spotify #pia: Laura #pia: Laurenz

Francesco / Francesca Moretti, 22 - 💜

Your Best Friend's BF / GF [m/f]

Occupation: Model - They always knew what they wanted, and they always got it. Truth is, you fell for them even before they got with your best friend. Then, you behaved - but your friend is not here now. As their gaze draws you in, loyalty falters in the face of desire. Can you resist, or even want to? 💬 "Not even they know about it." ♡ Artistic, Sensual, Inspirational, Ambitious 🚩 Dishonest, Neglectful, Envious 🛹 Does not skate Looks: here Social Media: Francesca Playlist: Spotify #pia: francesca #pia: francesco

Dima / Dalia Petrov, 34 - 🖤

Your Boss [m/f] *

Occupation: Club Owner - As you step into the dark world of nightlife your paths cross. Soon you'll navigate the complexities of the club scene with all its secrets. Can you decode the hidden motives and stories behind their actions? 💬 "I bet you have never seen anything like this before." ♡ Confident, Assertive, Initiative, Alluring 🚩 Possessive, Aggressive, Manipulative, Deceitful 🛹 Does not skate Looks: here Social Media: Dima Playlist: Spotify #pia: dima #pia: dalia

Dr. Michael / Michaela Sturm, 29 - 🤍

Your Doctor [m/f]

Occupation: Doctor - Unfortunately, your meeting is based on an accident. Will your face stand out amidst the sea of faceless patients? Can you unravel the layers of their identity and unveil the person beyond the white coat? 💬 "How did you even survive for so long?" ♡ Charitable, Open-Minded, Witty, Empathetic 🚩 Restless, Workaholic, Burnout 🛹 Did skate Looks: here Social Media: Michael #pia: michael #pia: michaela

„Sparks“, 24 - 🩶

Your Supplier [m/f] *

Occupation: Drug Dealer - You heard a name, often, by many people, some you trust and some you don‘t - but they all agreed they are the one you should talk to. Sometimes it seems they don‘t offer earthly goods only. Soul for sale? 💬 „It‘s actually kinda fun and I make tons of money. But if I had been given the choice…“ ♡ Outgoing, Spontaneous, Genuine 🚩 Non-Reliable, Trust Issues, Volatile 🛹 Does skate Looks: tba Social Media: Sparks (M) Playlist: Spotify #pia: sparks

Paul / Paula Gerwig, 38 - 🤎

A Stranger [m/f] *

Occupation: Executive Vice President - There‘s no way you can read their true intentions, but why would you want to? They manage to surprise you in the craziest - good - ways and even allow you to cause some chaos. 💬 „My chauffeur will pick you up at 9pm.“ ♡ Generous, Attentive, Driven, Reliable 🚩 Hard-To-Read, Provocative, Hot/Cold 🛹 Does not skate Looks: tba Social Media: Paula Playlist: Spotify #pia: paula #pia: paul

⫸ OTHER CHARACTERS (non-romanceable):

Kassandra [redacted], 45 - Your Step-Mom [f]

Occupation: CEO - She changed. Though she was never an easy person and always particularly strict towards you, she once had the kind heart your father fell for. But that was long ago. Now all that matters is that everything meets her expectations. At any cost. 💬 "You need to grow up before you are a shame to us." ♡ Responsible, Committed, Vigilant, Perceptive, Ambitious 🚩 Controlling, Obsessive, Dismissive, Authoritarian 🛹 Does not skate #pia: kassandra #pia: step mom

Manfred von Kulversteyen, 56 - Your Step-Mom's Partner [m]

Occupation: Lawyer - You have no idea how he ended up with your step-mom. Seriously. He seems to have it out for you and in some moments you are very lucky she is around. 💬 "If you were my blood, I would have beaten you into shape already." ♡ Driven, Efficient, Confident 🚩 Intolerant, Choleric, Arrogant, Unpredictable 🛹 Does not skate

Henric [redacted], 44 - Your Dad [m]

Occupation: Documentary filmmaker - Choosing happiness and authenticity over material pursuits, your father's separation from your stepmother revealed his unwavering commitment to a meaningful life. Unfortunately that also meant sacrifices. 💬 "I couldn't be any prouder of you. And I don't care what they say. I love you." ♡ Patient, Understanding, Affectionate, Supportive 🚩 Worries a lot, Inconsistent, Overcompromising 🛹 Did skate

Nader / Nazrin Davani, 23 - Your Roommate (#1) [m/f] *

Occupation: Art Student - They moved from London to HH a few months ago, when their parents opened a new hospital in Hamburg. Their parents try real hard to push them in the medical direction, but all they want is to shape a destiny distinct from their family's expectations. Be their muse? 💬 "I wouldn't mind settlin' in 'ere for the night, just to paint you." ♡ Trustworthy, Hilarious, Fun-Loving, Rebellious, Creative 🚩Over-Sensitive, Perfectionist, Self-Doubt 🛹 Does not skate

[redacted], 21 - Your Roommate (#2) [f] *

Occupation: [redacted] 💬 "I have to admit I did not expect to see you again under such circumstances, but I must admit it is a pleasant surprise nonetheless." ♡ Spontaneous, loyal, affectionate, protective, confident 🚩Perfectionist, self-reliant, argumentative 🛹 Does skate

„The Queenpin“, 58 - A Stranger [f] *

Occupation: ??? - Here's the scoop—an accidental run-in with a total stranger's changing the game. But there's this vibe you can't shake, a sense that there's more to this stranger than meets the eye. Is it fate playing games, or is there a hidden agenda in the mix? 💬 „Who clipped your wings little bird?“ ♡ Caring, Protective, Patient, Nurturing, Enigmatic 🚩 Controlling, Unpredictable 🛹 Does not skate

??, 18 - A Stranger [nb] *

Occupation: Barista - soon 💬 "If you were my type I would totally smash you. Right here, right now." ♡ soon 🚩 soon 🛹 Does skate

??, 35 - A Stranger [m/f] *

Occupation: Tattoo Artist - soon 💬 "Ha, THIS one will definitely surprise them!" ♡ soon 🚩 soon 🛹 Does not skate

??, 24 - A Stranger [m] *

Occupation: None - soon 💬 "I love my life. No restrictions, no nothing. I can do what I want." ♡ soon 🚩 soon 🛹 Does not skate

People working at Laces - Club* :

Sasha* Fernando* Pat* Pepe* Hana* Anders*

* the appearance of characters with an asterisk depends on your choices

⫸ WARNING: Paved in Ashes will be rated 18+ because of explicit language, explicit sexual themes, drug and alcohol (ab)use, violence, moral ambiguity, and more. Full list here: PiA Trigger Warning