#this is my third attempt at this if it still fails i'll be so over it 🫶

[as-thra]

coyle this halloween !!!!!!! + the gc conversation that lead to this under the cut :]]]

kyle belongs to @cynosure404

they got it eventually

[eelnoise]

pulsewidth (nsfw!)

zoro x fem!reader

masterlist kofi

cw: scent kinks, pussy eating, piv sex on a weight bench idk

an: well, here you go. take my post workout brainrot in fic form. pls ignore any formatting issues i phoneposted this

wc: 1.9k

tagging: @bby-deerling @kaizokuniichan @nina-ya @strawheart-pirate @missmugiwara @sanjisjuul @kibblz-n-bitz @sleepymarimo

You don’t join Zoro for most of his time spent training, but do occasionally bid yourself into the Crow’s Nest to quietly work out alongside him – though far enough away to avoid being the victim of a rogue blade to the gut should you accidentally get too close.

You hum to yourself, generally content in your usual routine that’s become so normal that your mind begins to wander from the monotony of your motions. Even the sounds of Zoro’s blades slashing into a dummy across the room begin to fade into the background and merge with the rhythmic, low rumble of the room’s atmosphere.

Though you're ripped from both your focus and the calm when your ears perk at the sound of your name. You pause your workout, body turning to face Zoro with arms still extended – though your scowl of concentration melts into a relaxed smile as you look at him curiously.

“Do me a favor?” he says, beckoning you over with a wave of his hand once he's sure he has your attention. “D’ya think you could try and dodge some swings?” Zoro asks, motioning to the blades in his hands. "Y'know, kinda like a moving target?"

“Only if you promise not to hurt me!” you tease with a wag of your finger, knowing full well the swordsman would never lay a harmful finger on you.

Zoro rolls his eyes and waves you over again. "I'll try my best to keep 'em to myself," he replies, his gaze glinting with amusement. He shifts his stance, golden earrings clinking together and catching a twinkle in the sunlight – and with two swords at his sides and held at the ready, even the air around him seems to crack with a fierce energy.

"When you're ready," he calls out, waiting for you to position yourself.

You know full well that Zoro's a formidable foe but you’re no slouch in the fighting department either. You circle around him, matching his pace, your own muscles tense and ready.

Zoro makes the first move, his swords slashing out in a blur, the dull edges aimed for your torso. You duck under the first strike just in time, but fail to avoid the second and third. His eyes narrow, his lips curling into a predatory grin as his swords whistle through the air, just brushing past your body.

"Nice dodge," he compliments, spurred on by the challenge you present. He switches tactics, the blades now spinning towards your legs, seeking to knock you off balance. "You move quick."

Sweat runs down your brow, mingling with the salt from your skin as you work to keep up with the swordsman. The air grows thick with the heat of the spar, both bodies dancing in a duet of dodges, near misses, and – when you can't quite keep up with his movements – sharp jabs to your ribs with the dull edge of one of his blades.

The sweat-slicked floor threatens to throw off your footing when you try to dodge a particularly quick swing to the thigh – and it ultimately succeeds in doing so following an unbalanced duck that causes you to slide forward. You spread your arms in a feeble attempt to stay upright, but land face-first into Zoro's bare chest.

Zoro's heart skips a beat as your body collides with his, the wet heat of your skin and the scent of your sweat invading his senses. His swords clatter to the floor, the blades falling from lax fingers as he reaches out to steady you, his hands gripping your waist to keep you from sliding off.

"Not bad," he grunts, the warmth of his body radiating against your own. He loosens his grip, allowing you to stand, but he keeps his hands on your waist, his gaze locked onto yours. "You're improving."

His muscles tense, the urge to wrap you in an embrace almost too strong to resist. Zoro's thumbs brush against the curves of your hips, his grip tight enough to keep you steady, but gentle enough to hint at a desire to explore more.

For a moment, time seems to freeze, and the only thing you can hear is the rapid thump of your heartbeat in your ears. Zoro pulls you closer, his lips meeting yours in a hungry kiss. His tongue flicks against yours, demanding entry as his hands begin to roam, one sliding under your shirt, the other gripping your ass.

Zoro groans, his hand pushing your shirt up to reveal more of your skin. His fingers trail along your sides, lingering over your hip bone and the curve of your waist, the roughness of his skin contrasting with the smoothness of yours.

Your body responds to his, the heat between you intensifying, the air charged with the potency of desire. Zoro's mouth travels down the sensitive skin of your neck, leaving a trail of wet kisses in its wake. He guides you to the weight bench, easing you on it gently – but with the determination of a man who knows what he wants.

His eyes roam over your body, drinking in the sight of your curves, the smoothness of your skin, and the dewy tinge of your breasts. His hands roam to trace their outline, thumb circling your nipples, his touch firm yet gentle.

Zoro’s mouth closes over one of your hardened peaks, sucking gently while his hand cups the other. You arch your back, offering yourself to him, your breath hitching as pleasure begins to spiral throughout your body.

You gasp out his name, fingers finding the length of his toned back as his heavenly ministrations continue. Your body trembles under his touch, each sensation a path to the aching core between your legs.

He releases you with a soft pop before trailing kisses down your body, his gaze never leaving yours. As he reaches the waistband of your shorts, your breathing grows more erratic, the anticipation of what's to come nearly unbearable.

Zoro watches as your eyes flutter shut, the motions of his mouth and hands eliciting soft moans from you. He hooks his thumbs under your shorts and – with the aid of your hips and thighs raising upward – slides them down your thighs.

He spreads your legs wide, his fingers trailing between them and teasing the sensitive skin of your inner thighs. He inhales deeply, his nostrils flaring as he takes in the heady scent of your arousal, His finger slips under your panties and pulls them aside before sliding you down the bench and closer to his mouth. Large hands settle on your hips as he buries his face between your legs, his tongue tasting your folds in long strokes.

Zoro takes hold of one of your legs, hooking it over his shoulder to give him better access to your core. He grins against your skin, his lips brushing against the sensitive flesh, his breath warm and heavy. "So sweet," his lust-drenched voice growls into your ear.

Zoro's tongue flickers against you, the sensation sending shivers down your spine. His fingers graze over your entrance, and in an instant he fills you with two large fingers, making you gasp out in pleasure.

Zoro's tongue circles your clit while his fingers plunge in and out, the rhythm quick and deliberate, each curl that brushes up against the sweet spot inside of you. His gaze fix on your face, watching the expressions flicker across it, drinking in the sight of your pleasure – and with a final, skilled flick of his tongue and a deep thrust of his fingers, you cry out in bliss, your body convulsing as pleasure claims you, overwhelming your senses in a glorious wave of delirium.

Zoro continues to worship you, lapping up your essence until your body calms and your breathing returns to normal. He slips from between your legs, and he rises, his eyes dark with lust. "Fuck," he mutters, adjusting himself to hurriedly tug his pants down, releasing his thick, precum-beaded cock to the hot air of the nest.

"Hold onto me," he says as his grip takes hold of the backs of your thighs. It's a suggestion, but it's the only warning you'll get. He positions himself at your entrance, cock nudging against you. And with a firm but controlled motion, he pushes into you, stretching you wide and filling you full. His lips find yours once more, his tongue invading your mouth with the same ferocity he uses to claim your body.

Zoro groans into your throat, the sound rumbling through your body as he begins to thrust, his hips moving in a steady, driving rhythm. His fingers dig into your thighs, holding you in place tightly while his cock slides in and out with wet, satisfying slaps.

The rocking of his hips becomes more insistent, his movements growing more urgent, his cock hitting all the right spots to keep you on the edge of ecstasy. His breath grows harsher, the beat of his heart pounding against your chest, your bodies moving in harmony.

Zoro's hand slides between the two of you, thumb finding your clit to rub in circles, the motion in perfect sync with his thrusts. The building heat within you flares, the edge of another orgasm sprawling at your senses.

His movements grow more erratic, his thrusts more desperate and fierce, his grip on your waist tightening, his free hand working your clit with a skill that borders on obsessive.

"Zoro!" you gasp out, your body tensing as the pleasure spirals out of control. His name is a plea, a demand, for him to keep going, to not stop, to let you reach that peak.

He exhales sharply as he feels you tighten around him, the slick, wet heat of your sex milking his cock. "Already?" he muses as if he isn’t about to burst as well. His thrusts grow more frenzied, the look in his eyes a mix of lust and possessiveness.

With no time to consider a reply, your orgasm crashes over you – body shuddering and pussy clenching hard around him. Zoro growls, his thrusts becoming more erratic as he nears his own release. With one last, hard plunge, he lets out a guttural cry, his cock pulsating as he fills you with his seed.

He collapses onto you, his chest heaving as he struggles to catch his breath, his lips brushing against your neck, his voice a ragged whisper. "Damn, girl," he mutters, the sharp edge of his tone helping to snap you back into reality.

"What do you mean 'damn, girl'?" You retort with a faux whine and a playful hit to his shoulder. "That was all you, I just went along with it."

"Well, you're a distraction," He chides with a smirk, coiling his arms around you before rolling you atop him. Zoro holds you to him closely, his cheek nestling down into your hair.

You grin, nestling against the warmth of Zoro's chest, the weight of his arm around you a comforting anchor. “Yeah, well, things happen," you reply with an impish grin of your own while your fingers begin trailing up and down the sides of his torso.

Zoro's arm tightens, his fingers linking with yours as you trail them along his skin. "I'm not complainin'," he murmurs, smiling into you.

The two of you lie there, breath in tandem and slowing from exertion. The rise and fall of his chest threatens to lull you into slumber, and you almost let it do so – though you think better of it due to the awkward position that someone else may find the two of you in.

"Take a bath with me, stinky," You say, tilting your chin up to him. "C'mon."

Zoro chuckles at your quip, the sound gentle and amused, before giving a playful nudge to your side. "Alright, stinky.” He says, lifting you up and off of him. “Lead the way."

[osarina]

ᡣ𐭩 DEATH BY A THOUSAND CUTS

FEATURING: dazai osamu

SUMMARY: seven months after his defection, you run into dazai osamu by sheer chance. you know in your heart what you should do—traitors are to be disposed of, regardless of any previous relationship you might've had with them... but can you bring yourself to do what must be done? or will you be more driven by the questions you desperately need answered?

(wordcount: 7.1k; fem!reader, pm!reader, angsty (i promiseeeee i have some happier ones coming up with pm!reader and pmzai), alcoholism, dazai is in a particularly bad mental state)

AUTHOR'S NOTES: this one was suchhhh a doozy. the third installment of my pm!reader & pm!dazai universe, this is why i had to retcon he's my collar because originally pm!reader didn't see him at all during the 4 years but i got the idea for this fic like 2 ?? weeks ago and it was too good to not use - tomorrow i think i'll put up the masterlist for it so you guys can see the chronology and planned installments

Against all odds, you run into Dazai Osamu seven months after his defection.

You should put a bullet in his skull. You watch absently from the mouth of the alley as the ex-Port Mafia executive groans, trying to push himself to his feet only to crash back onto the pavement, blood smeared across his face from a crooked nose and split lip, bile pooled on the ground where he’d landed.

Gross, you think, lip curling up in disgust as his lithe fingers smear through the vomit, blunt nails scraping against the pavement as he attempts to push himself up again but fails. His shoulders are heaving, breath slow and labored as he lets out another wretched sound, crumpling back to the ground. 

You click the safety off of your gun, pulling it out of your pocket as you quietly make your way deeper into the alley, over to where he’s still struggling to get off the ground. He doesn’t even acknowledge your presence until he hits the ground hard again after nearly making it to his feet. This time, he falls onto his shoulder and gasps in pain as he rolls onto his back, blinking up blearily through glazed-over eyes that can hardly focus on you or the gun pointed at his head.

You should just get it over with, pull the trigger, and leave the body for cleanup to handle. It’d be a better fate than he deserves, cleaner and quicker than he’d ever give himself, and not even half as painful as it’ll be when the Port Mafia inevitably get their hands back on him. 

You’d be sparing him, really; it would be a mercy.

And it’s what is expected of you. Letting a traitor as high profile as Dazai Osamu go free when you have a clear chance to execute him would be more than enough to have you stripped of your rank and thrown into the torture chambers, body dumped in the river when the Port Mafia is done punishing you. 

But still, for some reason, your finger hesitates as you move to pull the trigger. 

“You…” His voice is so slurred that you can hardly make out coherent words, but you use his words as an excuse to bide even more time, curious to see what he’s going to say. You can smell the whiskey on him from where you’re standing, his skin is paler than it usually is, and you notice, idly, that the bandages on his right eye are gone and you wonder when he chose to shed them. “You’re not real.”

Your eye twitches in irritation. 

You pull the trigger. 

If he was sober, he would have expected the reaction from you and dodged the bullet, but he’s not sober, so his eyes fly open in shock as the bullet grazes his ear and embeds itself in the pavement next to his head. He doesn’t look any more sobered up by the pain, which you suppose is a testament to how drunk he really is, but he does look significantly more confused. 

“You shot me,” he says, pale lips parted as he stares up at you—too pale, you notice absently, brows furrowing a bit as you try to consider what to do.

“Yeah,” you say, voice rough with irritation. “Real enough for you?”

Dazai blinks, you don’t even think your words are registering and you don’t know what the fuck you’re doing. 

Get it over with, you tell yourself again, this time positioning your gun over his forehead. A clean kill. You won’t move it to the side at the last minute again. You remind yourself that this is what he deserves—he’s a traitor to the Port Mafia, to you. Killing him now would be a mercy compared to what the Port Mafia would do to him, compared to what he’d do to himself. 

He stares up at you, brown eyes wide and glassy. He parts his lips to speak but you can’t give yourself the same excuse; you don’t wait for his words this time. 

You pull the trigger again.

But Dazai is moving. He rolls over onto his side trying to push himself back to his feet and the bullet lodges right into the ground where his head had once been lying. You stare down at it in disbelief, gun falling to your side as your fingers start to feel a bit numb and clunky, breath catching as you realize what you’d almost just done—what you tried to do. 

Dazai makes it to his knees and he tries to reach out for you but you step back out of reach. His brows furrow before he keels over again, dry heaving now—there’s enough bile around him for you to realize he’s probably thrown up everything in his stomach and then some. He leans against the wall, the glassiness of his eyes spilling over his cheeks as he continues to dry heave but your gaze is still trained down on the ground where the bullet is embedded in the ground where his head had just been laying. 

You just tried to-

You think you’re the one who feels sick now. The dinner you’d had out with Chuuya and Kouyou rises to the back of your throat as you take another step away from Dazai. Your vision blurs as your gaze turns to him again, but instead of the tattered and vomit-stained clothes he’s wearing now, he’s back in the dark suit you’re accustomed to, crumpled on the ground still, but not because he’s drunk because he’s been wounded on a mission that he took on so you wouldn’t have to. 

You just tried to kill Dazai.

Dazai, who’s been your closest friend since the two of you were sixteen and at the center of the most violent conflict to rock Yokohama’s foundations. Entirely inseparable, forever entwined since the moment the two of you met; the type of instant click that most people could only ever dream of experiencing in their lives. 

You almost killed Dazai.

Dazai, who promised to put a bullet in Ace’s head if the man ever came near you again after he found out the newly promoted executive had insinuated putting one of his collars on you during a confrontation between the two of you. He knew that even he would face consequences for threatening another executive, that he would face even more if he dared to follow through with his threat, but he didn’t care and he had every intention of following through if it meant keeping you safe.

You would have killed Dazai if not for sheer luck. 

Dazai, who used to kiss you with trembling fingers and quivering lips, because for as much as his reputation as the Demon Prodigy had spread throughout the country, he was still just a teenage boy who’d never had his first kiss until the two of you got drunk on champagne after a successful mission when he made the mistake of admitting to you that he’s never kissed anyone before. The two of you’d spent the entire night giggling between chaste kisses, getting through just about two bottles of champagne before you started throwing up.

He held back your hair and laughed at you as you leaned over the toilet, miserable. But he was gentle with you in a way that Dazai Osamu is never gentle with anyone, fingers carding through your hair, rubbing absent circles on your back to soothe you as you choked over sobs and gags. 

Then there’s you. You, who not only a moment ago, looked down at him with your lip curling up in disgust, unable to hold your grimace at the way he laid in his own vomit. You lifted the barrel of your gun in his direction not once, but twice, and you pulled the trigger not once, but twice.

When you showed vulnerability to him, he showed you a type of tenderness that everyone thought was long lost to the notorious Demon Prodigy. 

When he finally shows vulnerability to you, you only show him cruelty in response.

You try to convince yourself that it’s different, that the circumstances are different now but the words ring hollow in your head, taking no root, because you think the circumstances shouldn't matter. This is Dazai. Dazai. There are no circumstances that justify executing him.

Your head spins and you take another step away, you don’t know where you dropped your gun and you don’t want to know. You don’t want to look at it. You don’t want to touch it. You’ll send someone else after it later. You blink, and for a moment, you can visualize what almost happened: you can see Dazai motionless on the ground, blood pooling around his head and a bullet wound piercing through his forehead. You gag, pressing your hand to your mouth as you force back the bile that nearly comes up. 

“Wait,” Dazai garbles out, pushing off the wall toward you but he propels himself right into the ground again, face first, scraping his cheek on the concrete. “Don’t leave again.”

Again? The word nearly pulls you out of your daze, the bitterness that’s poisoned you for seven months returning with a vengeance as your eyes focus on him. 

Dazai, who left you without a word or a warning. Not even the slightest goodbye. He abandoned you like you meant nothing to him. 

“I need to-” he gags again as he pushes himself to his knees. He tries to reach forward again but his whole body sways, eyes half-rolling back as he tries to steady himself, on the verge of passing out. “I need to tell you this time. I need to-”

He doesn’t finish the sentence, slumping back over onto the ground unconscious—in a puddle of his own blood and vomit, naturally. The logical part of you knows you should just leave him there. You’re already playing with fire by not executing him on the spot, but you also know if you leave him here, it’ll be as good as a death sentence. If he doesn’t die on his own from alcohol poisoning, then he’ll certainly be found by the Port Mafia patrols. You think Dazai is a fool for drinking so much so deep in Port Mafia territory, for not being careful enough to make sure he didn’t wander out in the open. 

He should know better. 

He does know better.

A part of you wonders if it was intentional, if he thought that he’d stumble into Port Mafia territory and he’d run into someone eager to lay claim to the fame of being Dazai Osamu’s executioner.

If that’s the case, he nearly got his wish—that thought alone almost sends you spiraling over the edge again, having to shove away more nausea. You force all thoughts of the Port Mafia and betrayal to the back of your mind as you fall to your knees next to him, gathering him up into your arms and pushing yourself back to your feet. He curls into you instinctively, even while unconscious, smaller than you remember, smearing blood and bile all over your suit. Your grip on him tightens, a shaky breath escaping your lips when you realize that this is the first time you’ve touched him since the night he left. 

You shake your head to clear your mind, desperately trying to focus. You can’t stay out in the open with him for long otherwise you’ll risk someone seeing you with him, and that’ll open a can of worms you’re not prepared to deal with.

You’ll drop him off somewhere safe, and then you’ll get back to base.

That’s all.

That is not all.

The safehouse in Sakae that the two of you would run to whenever you wanted to avoid Mori is just how you left it the last time you spent the night with him there over half a year ago. One of his jackets is still draped over the couch, one of your ties thrown haphazardly on the ground—you remember the night vividly, the way he smiled against your lips as he lead you into the back bedroom, stumbling over each other and fumbling with buttons as you tried to undress the other while walking to the room, high off the success of a mission that everyone had said would fail because the odds were so stacked against the two of you. Even Chuuya had laughed in your face when you said you’d take the mission, but you knew so long as Dazai had your back on it, it would work out in your favor. 

He’s woken up several times, you don’t even know what he’s saying in his incoherent babbles. Every time he wakes back up, he’s calling for you, stumbling out of the bed you laid him in after getting him cleaned up and crashing to the ground before he reaches the hall. It’s irritating, you have to go back to help him back into the bed every time and he starts babbling again, passing out before you can figure out what he’s saying. You finally had to move yourself into the back bedroom with him so he didn’t try to get up again.

You don’t know why you’re still here. 

You lean your forehead against your hand as you sit on the bed next to where he’s lying, one leg tucked beneath you while the other hangs over the side. You tell yourself it’s because you don’t want him to get up drunk trying to look for you and then crack his head open, but it’s a weak excuse because Dazai Osamu is not your issue anymore. It’s not your job to watch over him when he gets shit-faced drunk, it’s not your job to patch him up when he gets hurt, it’s not your job to look out for him. 

He left you, not vice versa, You don’t owe him anything. He lost that privilege when he betrayed you. Fuck the Port Mafia, he betrayed you when he left without a word. You deserved better than that. You deserved a goodbye. You don’t owe him shit. You should leave him here to rot in his own vomit and blood but-

But you won’t.

Your gaze drifts back over to him. He’s still out cold—cleaner now, because it had never just been ‘get him somewhere safe and then go back to the base,’ as soon as you got him into the safehouse you wrangled him into the bathroom to clean him up. He was uncharacteristically pliant as you manhandled him into the shower. You suppose it was because he was unconscious for half of it but even for the moments where he was awake and blearily blinking the water out of his eyes, looking up at you through wet bangs with those stupid big eyes of his, as if he was still unsure if you were actually there.

Instinctively, you reach out to brush the back of your knuckles against his swollen, split lip, wondering if it was just from him being clumsy while drunk or if he’d managed to piss someone off at a bar. Both are equally likely—Dazai is a rather cantankerous drunk when he’s alone and drunk on whiskey, and even after cleaning him up and dousing him in soap to get out the reeking scent of his vomit out from where it’d sunken into his skin, shoving a toothbrush into his mouth to brush his teeth and scrubbing so they don’t rot from the bile, you can still smell the whiskey on his breath.

You wonder how much he drank. His skin is still pale, his breath shuddered, and he’s shivering even though you wrapped him in three thick blankets. Some degree of alcohol poisoning, that’s for sure. You tell yourself that’s why you’re not leaving—you don’t want to leave before you’re sure he’s pulled through the worst of it. You’re not going to admit to yourself that you don’t want to leave because you’re worried it’ll be the last time you see him for real this time. 

You hesitate right before your knuckles brush his skin, swallowing thickly before you withdraw your hand back into your lap, eyes sliding shut as you sigh.

What the hell are you doing?

If anyone from the Port Mafia knew what you were doing right now, you’d be hunted down right alongside him, branded as a traitor and sentenced to death. Chuuya would kill you if he knew what you were doing right now—and not because you betrayed the Port Mafia by helping Dazai, instead because you’re a fucking idiot. You’ve done a lot of stupid things in your life, but this might take the cake for the stupidest, sticking your neck out for someone who didn’t even care enough to tell you goodbye. 

You rub your forehead, tired. You try to summon the anger you felt when you first found out he betrayed the Port Mafia from Mori and Chuuya—from the hot fury you felt in the direct aftermath, screaming and breaking everything you could get your hands on as you cursed his name and burned everything he left in your apartment to the cold rage you felt when you finally calmed down, bitter and lonely and betrayed by the one person you never thought would betray you—but you can’t. And you think it’s pathetic because what use is all of that anger if you can’t utilize it when the reason for it is lying right before you?

If Chuuya were here right now, he’d drag you out by the hair and leave Dazai to suffer on his own. You left your phone in the kitchen after turning off your location, because he was already buzzing incessantly wondering where you are. You’d told him that you wanted to stop by one of the fishing ports in Kanazawa to check on a small weapons shipment that should’ve arrived earlier in the night before heading back to your shared apartment—you’d moved in with him after Dazai’s betrayal. He made the executive decision himself, not giving you a choice in the matter because he realized that you living on your own in the apartment that Dazai had practically moved into with you was not conducive to you healing from his betrayal.

Plus, you think he was lonely too without Dazai around anymore, but he’d never admit that.

You should’ve been back an hour ago. You’re sure that he’s getting suspicious and it’s only a matter of time before he tries to track you down. You don’t think he knows about this safe house in particular, Dazai had threatened you with piling up mission reports onto you if you told him about this one, but you wouldn’t be surprised if Chuuya learned about it through other means—somehow, he always seems to know everything. 

You sigh again, heavier this time as you try to figure out what to do. You know what you should do, but you also know you’re not going to do that. Your gaze drags back over to him and your breath catches when you realize he’s awake again, bleary brown eyes trained on you, brows furrowed. 

His lips part to speak again and you tense, waiting for whatever he has to say, unsure if you’ll even understand it.

“You… came with me. You never come with me. Are you… really here?” 

Even though his eyes are still glazed over and muddled, his voice is less garbled than it was before. You think that’s a good sign, but even so, you let out an even heavier sigh, this one more irritated, and a bit confused because you don’t even know what that means: you never come with me. 

“Yes, Dazai,” you say sharply, but then you let out a puff of air. The same memories that hit you before coming right back to you, remembering all of the nights Dazai would stay up having to take care of you, patient in a way that he never was with anybody. You soften your voice a bit as you say, “Yes. I’m here.”

Dazai looks at you like he doesn’t believe you. He blinks once slowly, then his brows furrow deeper and his lips turn downward.

“You don’t call me Dazai.” He speaks the accusation slowly, as if to make himself sound more coherent, but you can still hear the clear slur in his voice. “You never-”

You turn away because if you don’t, you think you might lose your temper. He’s drunk, you remind yourself, but he’s still ripping open wounds that never properly healed, because how dare he expect you to still call him by his given name after everything. It had taken months for you to get used to calling him Dazai again and-

You feel your chest start to cave in again and your throat spasms. Your eyes flutter shut and god, you want to hate him. You thought you did hate him, you convinced yourself of it in all of the bitter rage and acidic betrayal you’ve felt the past seven months but now that you’re confronted with him again, you know that it was never hate. You could never hate Dazai Osamu. You'd just missed him so terribly that the pain was easy to mistake as hate; love and hate has always been a treacherously thin line, and Dazai more than anyone else wavers on either side of it.

Your heart feels like it’s about to leap from your chest and crawl right back to him, you have to physically place your hand over your chest as if to hold it in place, to make sure the traitorous thing can’t go back to the very man that tore it shreds. You force yourself to breathe, in and out, steady, trying to settle down. 

This was a mistake, you realize, this was a mistake. 

Just as you’re about to push yourself up, you feel lithe fingers curl around your arm. You freeze, not even daring to glance back at Dazai. You can hear him pushing the covers off of him as he crawls closer to you, the mattress dipping beneath his weight. His movements are unsteady, and you can’t bring yourself to push him off of you when you feel him slump against your back.

His weight is familiar, comforting in a way that it shouldn’t be. If you close your eyes, you can imagine that you’re back at the Port Mafia base seven months ago and Dazai is draping himself across your back, complaining about being overworked by Mori and trying to convince you to take over his paperwork. You’d have to drag him halfway across the base trying to get to your office with his dead weight hanging onto you, you remember all of the wary stares from your subordinates as they try not to let their gaze linger on the two of you but let their curiosity get the best of them regardless.

You hate that you don’t push him off right away, that you’re letting yourself indulge in his touch again. You’ve moved on from this—from him. It’s been seven months. You’re over all of this.

“You… understand, don’t you?” 

You barely hear the words muffled against your back, but you do and you can’t help but stiffen at them. He shifts against you, fingers biting into your skin as he pulls himself up a bit more to bury his face in the crook of your neck, arms looped around your waist as he leans all of his weight onto your back. You can feel his breath warm and shuddered against your neck, making your hair stand on end, and his hands are limp in your lap now, fingers brushing against the material of the clean slacks you’d pulled on after getting Dazai showered.

It’s all so familiar that it could make you sick.

“How could I?” you ask bitterly, even though you know you shouldn’t take out your resentment on him while he’s so drunk; he probably won’t remember any of this in the morning anyway. There’s no point, you’ll just be wasting your energy.

His arms tighten around you, breath hitching against your skin. “I had to, Odasaku-”

The noise you let out is such a sharp scoff that you can feel Dazai flinch behind you. You almost shove him off of you but you refrain, taking in a deep breath to calm yourself down. You never really had any feelings about Odasaku—he was always just there, you heard about him from Dazai occasionally and he seemed pleasant enough the few times you encountered him—but after all of this, you can’t help but hold a grudge against him, irrationally blaming him for Dazai leaving you.

“Odasaku wasn’t your only friend,” you say tightly. “You had me. Chuuya. You-”

“It’s not the same,” Dazai protests, clinging to you as if he hadn’t just driven a knife right through your back into your heart. 

This time you do shove him off, barely sparing him a glance as he lets out a surprised yelp, sprawling back onto the bed. You push away the mistiness that threatens your eyes, breathing in and out slowly to try to keep yourself calm. It’s not the same, you repeat his words, bitterness poisoning your blood and clouding your head. What the fuck does that even mean? You know logically you should take his words with a grain of salt, that he’s so drunk he probably doesn’t even know what he’s saying, but you just feel so angry that it’s hard for you to keep that in mind. 

You hear him scrambling behind you: a thump as he hits the floor hard and then a rush of movement as he pushes himself to his knees. His fingers curl around your ankle before you can get further away and you have a half a mind to kick him off of you and leave.

You don’t.

“Don’t leave,” he pleads. He drags himself to his knees, pulling at your pants and it takes all of your self-control to not look back down at him. “I didn’t-it came out wrong. I didn't mean it like that.”

“How did you mean it then?” you ask him, even though you by all means should not even bother to hear his shitty explanation.

“I just-I didn’t mean it like that.” You’ve never heard Dazai’s voice crack before, but it does now. “Don’t leave. I miss you.”

“You miss me?” you spit out, and you finally turn to look down at him—a mistake, of course, because he’s on his knees in front of you, looking up at you with those stupid, big brown eyes and you almost let your anger fizzle away at the sight of it. He’s drunk, you remind yourself again, but it doesn’t stop you from snapping at him. “You left me, Dazai. You have no right to miss me.”

“But I do.” His fingers fumble for your hand, grabbing one of yours with both of his. “I miss you so much, I think about you all the time.”

His lashes flutter, fingers brushing along your forearm as he presses his lips to your knuckles and then to your pulse point before leaning forward to rest his forehead on your thigh. You can’t even look at him, keeping your eyes trained on the wall, because your lashes feel wet and heavy and you know that you’ll give into him if you look at him now and he doesn’t deserve that.

“I couldn’t go to you before I left,” Dazai whispers and he sounds oddly coherent now even though you know he’s not. “I would’ve asked you to come with me.”

For some reason, that hurts worse than if he’d just admitted he didn’t care enough to say goodbye. Because what does that even mean, I would’ve asked you to come with me, would that have been so bad? He didn’t want you with him? Why wouldn’t he have wanted you with him? If you had left, he would’ve been the first person you ran to, begging him to come with you.

“How terrible that would’ve been,” you say, and you’re proud that your voice remains cold and steady, not betraying the hurt ripping through your chest.

“I wouldn’t have been able to handle it,” he says, voice breaking over a hiccup. “Odasaku had just died and-”

He cuts himself, and you dare to look down at him when you feel him lift his face from your thigh. You regret it immediately. Glassy, glazed-over eyes beg for you to understand, and you scare yourself because you want to understand when he shouldn’t even matter to you anymore. You’ve moved on. You have. It’s been seven months. He left you without a word. So why do you care so much for what he has to say right now?

“You wouldn’t have come with me,” he says, shaking his head. “You would’ve said no. You never would have chosen me over the Mafia.”

Your lips part to deny the allegations, to say that of course, you would have come with him, but the words fizzle out before they even form on your tongue because-

“You can’t even bring yourself to deny it, can you?” Dazai asks, and although he sounds more cogent now, you can’t help but notice that he’s starting to look sick again, the back of his throat making that faint clicking sound it always makes when he’s about to throw up. “You never would have chosen me.”

You would choose Dazai Osamu over a lot of things. You would choose to save his life before yours if put in the position, and you would choose to trust him over anyone else in the whole world. You’d follow him to the depths of hell and deep into the shadows, until your blood is black and corrupted and you’re entirely irredeemable, but you can’t follow him into the light. 

You can’t choose him if it means betraying the Port Mafia. With his defection, the two have become mutually exclusive: Dazai or the Port Mafia, there’s no way of having both anymore. The boy you’ve come to love or the only home you’ve ever known. The only family you’ve ever had. A shitty family maybe, but a family nonetheless. If you don’t belong with the Port Mafia, you don’t belong anywhere on this earth, and as someone who’s always had a desperate fear of alienation, the thought makes you sick.

You stare at him, throat tight, and then you say, colder than you intend for it to come across, “... If that’s really why you didn’t say goodbye, then I’m glad you didn’t put me in that position.”

The expression that crosses Dazai’s face is something caught between ruin and shock—and you can’t help but wonder if he held out hope, thinking maybe he was wrong in his assumptions. That there had been a chance that you might’ve chosen him if he’d given you the option. That he’s been living his life in the what-ifs for the past seven months and now that he’s finally gotten the chance to bare his heart to you, you’ve crushed it.

Your chest tightens, your throat spasms and it takes all your self-control to not immediately take back the words, regret flooding you so intensely that it nearly makes you physically stumble. Because it’s true, you never would have picked Dazai over the Mafia, but he didn’t have to know that—especially not now, when he’s drunk and vulnerable in a way that he’s never allowed himself to be before.

You hope, for his sake and your conscience, that he doesn’t remember any of this in the morning.

His lips part to respond again but his hand is flying to his mouth instantly, doubling over, and you’re cursing, reaching for the trash bin you’d brought into the bedroom and falling to your knees next to him, helping him kneel upright and holding the trash bin in front of him as he starts gagging again.

“I would’ve-” He’s still trying to talk through the bouts of nausea, gasping over air, body trembling as he leans into you for balance.

You don’t want to hear what he has to say.

“Dazai-”

“I would’ve chosen you,” he finally forced out, voice breaking over the words and you’re not sure if it’s a sob or another heave that escapes his lips as he continues. “If the positions were reversed, I would’ve chosen you.”

Oh.

The words echo in your head so loudly that it makes you want to cover your ears even though you know it won’t do anything. You want to accuse him of lying, tell him that he’s full of shit and just trying to make you feel guilty, but you don’t think he’s capable of lying right now and you don’t think this is anything Dazai would have ever admitted to you if he was sober. He guards his heart more carefully than anyone you’ve ever met—in the two and a half years you’d known him, he never admitted he cared about you. You knew it just from how he treated you, but you think he might’ve ripped his own tongue out before actually admitting it.

You wrap an arm around him as his whole body shudders through another gag and he tries to push you off—angry, upset, you don’t know what he might be feeling because you’ve never seen him like this before—but your arm only tightens around him and Dazai crumbles.

He heaves again, clutching the small garbage can to his face as he throws up all of the water you’d managed to get in him before he passed out earlier. Tears spill over his cheeks, his face is pale and his lashes are fluttering again, on the verge of passing back out. You swallow thickly as he leans into you, letting him collapse into your chest after he’s finished vomiting.

“Will-” he tries to say, but his voice is slurred and weak. He’s desperately trying to stay conscious, you can tell, but he’s fighting a losing battle. “Will you be here in the morning?”

No.

You don’t want to say it, you think you’ve done enough damage for the night, but there’s no need. As soon as the words leave his mouth, Dazai is slumping over unconscious, head laying limp on your arm, lashes brushing his cheek. You sigh as your grip around him tightens before you adjust him in his arms to carry him back into the bed, laying him comfortably beneath the covers.

You don’t linger for long after that. After another hour or two passes and Dazai doesn’t wake up again, you make your way back into the bedroom, raising your hand to his face to brush away the dark locks in his eyes before cupping his cheek. Even in his sleep, he leans into your touch, and it makes your chest feel so agonizingly tight that you think you might be having a heart attack.

You lean down to press your lips to his forehead, to his nose, and then to his lips, indulging yourself one last time. Your forehead rests against his as you consider your words—there are a million things you’d like to say to him before you leave, but you don’t have nearly enough time to get them all off of your chest.

Instead, you tell him softly, “I hope you don’t remember any of this in the morning.” You don’t move your hand from where it’s caressing his cheek as you stand straight again, thumb drawing absent circles on his skin. Your voice is thick with emotion, eyes welling with tears that don’t spill over. “We’ll meet again one day.”

Dazai wakes up the next morning with a hangover so bad that he thinks he might die.

He sits up in bed and is instantly groaning, hand flying to his forehead as his brain throbs inside of his skull. He needs to figure out where he is—the last thing he remembers is…

The bar?

His eyes slide shut as he tries to think, but it only makes his head hurt more. He flops back onto the bed, arms splayed out. He still feels nauseous, he can feel it rising to his throat and he desperately does not want to throw up again—it’s one thing vomiting when he’s too drunk to remember, it’s an entirely different thing to vomit while he’s sober and conscious. 

Dazai thinks he might rather die. 

He lets out a heavy sigh as he begs the nausea to go away, breathing in and out deeply. He lifts his hand to brush a lock of hair away from where it’s tickling his ear and-

Ouch.

Dazai’s eyes fly open again, confused now, as he rips his hand away from where he’d touched his ear to stare up at the ceiling. He’s used to waking up with odd injuries after a night of blacking out at whatever bar will still have him, but his ear is a particularly strange place to be wounded, isn’t it?

Driven by curiosity now, he forces himself into a sitting position, and it’s only when he pushes himself out of bed, does he finally start to recognize the room he’s in. His lips part in a distinct mixture of shock and confusion as he looks around the room slowly, making his way over to the mirror.

The safehouse in Sakae?

His chest feels heavier instantly, and a tight feeling rises to his throat as he catches sight of an old jacket of yours draped on the desk chair, the one that had ripped during the last mission you went on together—just the way you left it the last time the two of you were here. A pair of his old dress shoes are lying haphazardly outside the closet door, he’s sure that if he peeks into the closet, all of your suits will be hanging there because you refused to share the closet with him so all of his spares are stuffed in the dresser. Dazai suddenly feels sick again and he doubts it’s from the hangover this time.

How did he get here?

He needs another drink desperately.

But first… Dazai leans over the dresser to look into the mirror—a bit dusty after so many months with no one stopping in—he lifts his hand to brush his hair behind and then-

What?

His jaw drops and his brows furrow, his fingers graze over where the top of his ear used to be, only to find the whole upper quarter of it missing. 

What the fuck? He mouths as he stares at the missing cartilage, and then he looks back around the room, and just as his eyes catch a trash bin that should be in the bathroom, his vision blurs, and his head is aching. He’s suddenly stumbling down an alley, he’s lying in a puddle of his own vomit, unable to stand up straight. He can hear someone approaching and he knows he should get up, find some dumpster or crevice to wait out the night until he’s sober enough to get the fuck out of the heart of the Mafia’s territory in Yokohama, but he can hardly move.

He can lift his head from the pavement just enough to-

Just enough to see you.

Dazai can hardly cope with the emotions that rattle his chest. Longing, because he’s missed you so terribly the past seven months. Disbelief, because you shot his fucking ear off. And… and Dazai isn’t quite sure what the other emotions are. They’re heavy and light at the same time, his chest feels bubbly but his ankles feel chained—it’s a weird mixture of hope and dread, he thinks, because the safehouse is eerily quiet, seemingly void of any life other than Dazai himself, but the chance that you might still be here…

“Will you be here in the morning?”

The faint memory of the last words he spoke before he passed out the last time rings through his head, and his feet drag against the ground as he forces himself to move from the bedroom into the main room of the safe house. His fingers hesitate against the wood of the door—scared that he’s going to open it and you won't be there, scared that he’s going to open it and you will be there. He doesn’t remember the things he said to you last night, but he knows that he’d been staring at old pictures the two of you took before he blacked out. He can hardly imagine the things he might’ve said to you when given the chance.

It takes all of his strength and all of his willpower to push open the door. 

It takes even more to actually step out of the bedroom.

The safe house is empty.

You’re nowhere to be found.

Dazai’s feet are moving before he’s fully even registered what’s happening.

He makes his way into the kitchen to rummage around for another bottle for him to drown away his sorrows, but he doesn’t pull out the untouched bottle of his favorite whiskey he knows is sitting in the cabinet—he goes straight for the wine fridge. He nearly shatters three bottles of whites before he finally gets his hands on your favorite red, the one you’d asked him to stock up in there for you three days before he left, knowing that the two of you had a mission coming up and you’d be celebrating here, as always. Not knowing that he’d have betrayed you by then. 

He struggles to uncork it, the frustration causing his headache to return with a vengeance. It takes an embarrassingly long amount of time for him to finally get the bottle open, but when he does, he brings it to his lips immediately, eyes sliding shut as he downs a few generous gulps.

The taste is familiar. Pleasant. It makes his heart ache with such an intense longing for you that it nearly makes him throw up.

He can almost imagine that he’s tasting it off of your lips instead.

He leans over the counter, elbows digging into the marble as he tries to push away the ugly feelings ripping apart his chest. He can’t. He never can. He hasn’t been able to since the day he left you behind seven months ago. He can only numb it.

With a hand closed around the neck of the bottle, Dazai slides down the cabinet to sit on the ground. His cheeks feel wet, but he doesn’t dare lift his hand to acknowledge the tears sliding down them.

Instead, he lifts the bottle to his lips again and drowns himself in the memories of you for another night. 

[starchaserwrites]

@jegulus-microfic / february 21: attack / word count: 641 cw: slight nsfw

The moment Sirius hears a stressed Regulus on the other end of the phone, he knows something is wrong. His usually cool and calm younger brother has almost given him a heart attack by asking him, in a tense and overwhelmed voice he has rarely heard before, to get to the hospital as soon as possible, along with the insistent sound of an ambulance siren. When he tries to get more details, he just tells him that he'll explain everything when he gets there and that everything's fine. Oh, and to bring Remus with him.

As he explains the situation to Moony, who has been looking at him expectantly throughout the phone conversation, worry creeps into his face. 

"Let's go now, I'll drive," is all Remus says as he gets up and grabs his keys.

As soon as they pull into the hospital's car park, Remus's phone rings with a message notification, which he pauses to read for a moment. The cackle of laughter he emits leaves Sirius completely baffled.

"What's going on?" Sirius tries to ask, but the taller one has trouble controlling his breathing in the middle of a fit of giggles. "Remus Lupin, my baby brother could be dying in there and you're laughing your ass off in here?"

"Trust me, he's not the one who's going to die!" he replies, when he manages to regain some composure.

"What do you mean?"

"My love, I need you to stay calm, okay?" the taller one asks, grabbing him by the shoulders. "I can assure you Regulus is fine, I promise, but I'm going to let him explain to you the reason we're here."

"He told you and not me?" Remus simply nods.

"Are our parents hospitalised?"

"I wish, but no."

After another failed attempt to get more information, they both meet Regulus in the waiting room.

"James Potter's family?" a nurse asks before Sirius can even ask what's going on. "He's stable now, you can come in and see him." 

James?

Still disoriented and once inside the hospital ward, Sirius can name four things he doesn't quite understand. The first is why James and Regulus (who seem to hate each other) are here together, the second is why everyone except Remus, who looks rather amused, is avoiding eye contact, the third is why his best friend is wearing a neck brace, and the fourth is why his younger brother, who knows nothing about soccer, seems to be wearing a rather familiar Arsenal jersey that barely covers the bruises on his neck. Wait, bruises?

"If someone doesn't explain to me what's going on in the next five seconds, I'm going to commit arson."

"I broke James' neck," says Regulus, while at the same time James exclaims, "I fell down the stairs. Remus laughs and Sirius finally understands what's going on.

"Enough! I see what's happening. Guys, I told you not to fight over me, you both have my affection eq—"

"I sat on his face, broke his neck and he passed out." Regulus interrupts.

The room falls silent.

"Why didn't you stop him, James?"

"Sirius..."

"It was an accident, right?" asks Sirius looking at them all, "Right, Prongs?"

"We've been together for four months."

"'You brotherfuck—"

And Sirius lunges at James attempting to throttle him.

And the thing is, he's happy for them, he really is, but he's angry that the two bastards made him believe all this time that they hated each other, so he had to keep making separate plans to prevent them from killing each other.

For all the weeks James has to wear the neck brace, Sirius avoids eye contact with him so he won't remember why he has to wear it. This proves to be difficult as his best friend in the world tells everyone about the reason as if it were some heroic feat.

[jazeswhbhaven]

💜Only 4 Me, Levi: Mass Birthday Post💜

💜Mini Playlist💜

Obsession- Innerpartysystem Change- Deftones People Error- the GazettE Filth in the Beauty- the GazettE I'm That Girl- Beyonce All Mine- Kali Uchis

💜Cake Flavor Headcanon💜

White Chocolate Raspberry bundt cake, drizzled with sweet cream and Raspberry compote

💜How the Nobles Celebrate Their King's Birthday💜

Foras: He mostly tries to convince Glas and Barbatos to leave Leviathan alone so he can serve him by himself all day. After being turned down for the third time with the span of five minutes, he's opted to hang himself for him instead.

Barbatos: He wanted to present a perfect rosebush he worked on growing in the shape of Leviathan. But it was too distracting so Levi destroyed it and Barb was to hang for thinking he could replicate Levi's beauty with plants.

Glasyalabolas: He intentionally seeks out MC, in attempts to spend alot of time with them in order to agitate his Majesty. He's even taken off the top half of his uniform to show off his form and let MC put their hand through his chest...which didn't last long because Leviathan immediately dragged him back to the palace by his rope to hang.

Orias: Oh the usual, he tried to get his soul...steal his life force, pulled all the pranks he could because he assumed he'd be distracted by his birthday and MC. He even put poison in a cupcake and tricked MC into delivering it. Ofc Levi suspected it and every plan failed. Up he goes!

Overall: None of these nobles work together, too jealous of one another and wanting to one up on who's praising Levi the most. Sadly, it's even certain that Levi would hate it more if his nobles planned something together for him anyway. How dare they all work together to waste time? Well it is for him. But still, can't have idle hands when there's things in Hades to take care of.

💜How Levi Celebrates with MC💜

MC does what their told and stays exactly where they were standing with their phone in hand. Suddenly, there's a presence behind their back...

MC: Oh! Levi, you showed up...

Leviathan: Why wouldn't I? I told you I was coming...

MC: Right. Um, So?

Leviathan: First, look at my face. What do you see?

MC: Nothing in particular...just your face?

Leviathan: No. Tell me what you see.

MC: Just a pretty face looking at me? Is that what you wanted to hear?

Leviathan: *scoffs* Next, focus on my horns.

MC: Levi...

Leviathan: Is there a problem? Or are you just too stupid to pay attention?

MC: No! Hey. I get it you're better than the others...you don't have to show....

Leviathan grabs their arm and starts dragging them back to his room

Leviathan: It seems you need to focus in a more private setting. Being in the middle of this hallway has you thinking about other men again.

MC: ????? But I-

Leviathan: I swear if I could tie you up and throw you in my coffin for the rest of your life I would. At least there you would have nothing to think about.

MC: *thinks to themselves* Guess this is best I'll get for celebrating his birthday.

Leviathan: See? You're doing it right now aren't you? Unbelievable. Right in front of me...*grumbles and drags them faster*

💜Levi and Beel: The Worst Besties Ever💜

Beelzebub once tried to throw Leviathan a surprise birthday party in Aybssos by luring him there with false pretenses that it was important. The amount of devils yelling "surprise" pissed of Leviathan so much he chased around Beel for three days trying to kill him for doing this. After the three days, he went back home to find a pile of gifts waiting for him that magically appeared from Beel. He told Foras to burn every single one, but changed his mind and took them anyway. He still has the gifts in his room in a glass case that he covers with a blanket so others can't see it. He uncovers it once in a while to dust it and look over everything.

nsfw incoming....

💜He doesn't normally celebration his birthday so he skips the formalities

💜A present? Why did you waste so much time picking something when he hasn't told you what he liked? Oh wait...he does like it...

💜The gift is easily forgotten because he suspected you asked someone else about what he likes, which means you're speaking to other devils again

💜As your clothes strip, he asks who was it that told you what he liked? Was it that annoying fly? That beast from Tartaros? The walking disaster that defends Gehenna?

💜It doesn't matter who you were asking, you're here now sprawled on his bed with your legs folded close to your chest so he can thrust so deep you won't remember anything but his cock in your hole

💜He leans in for you so you have a good reach for his neck, make sure you choke him with vigor or he'll stop thrusting in that good spot that's making your eyes roll

💜Repeat his name over and over during, say it perfectly, same tempo, don't waver...he wants to know all you're thinking about is him.

💜How many hours have passed? Does it matter to you that much? Of course not. His mission has succeeded and you're thinking about nothing except of how your brain is mush, every orifice on your body has been filled with cum, and marks have been left in obvious places for others to see.

💜Your his. his. h i s. You belong to Leviathan. No matter if it's his birthday or any other day.

💜Happy Birthday to the Most Envious and Petty King, Leviathan 11/01💜

[sleeepybeary]

☆ 𝐌𝐀𝐆𝐈𝐂 𝐏𝐎𝐖𝐄𝐑𝐒 ☆

𝐀𝐁𝐎𝐔𝐓: Agatha just wants to show you her latest act as a magician, yet even that somehow goes slightly wrong.

𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐒: none?

𝐖𝐎𝐑𝐃 𝐂𝐎𝐔𝐍𝐓: 644

Stumbling into the room, came your girlfriend. With a smile held high upon her face, hands clasped behind her back, she looked undoubtedly suspicious.

“Love, can I show you a magic trick?” she had uttered, a glimpse of mischief already settling within her eyes.

Blinking up at the young woman, you wave your hand with an unamused look. This was the third time she had attempted some kind of weird magic trick with you today.

Though, you suppose no day is ever a normal day when living with Agatha.

“Yeah, okay. Last time though” your words came out in a more exhaustively delivered sigh than anything else, your eyes hooded in their usual cascade of boredom.

You weren't doing much before Agatha entered the room - but watching her fail again was something that could keep you semi-entertained at the very least.

Agatha quickly shifts her position, moving to stand in front of you as she holds her hands out in a clasped position, almost like a clam.

“May I present to you, my magic!” Her voice deepend in a way she'd deem to be mysterious as she pulls back the hand on top, revealing the small of some fly as it rests within her palm; limp and vulnerable.

“Uhm… Agatha… this has to be the weirdest start to one of your performances yet”

“Your point?” She chuckles, her other hand still hovering over the small creature. “Now, watch closely as I turn this fly… into a bird!”

Your eyebrows hang slightly lower as you focus on the way her hand moves around the fly, watching as she then proceeds to clasp her hand over it once more in an almost dramatic clap.

“Abracadabra!” She laughs out to herself, her contagious smile taking effect as her teeth gently sink into her bottom lip.

“Very original” you chime in, watching expectantly as she creates a small cup out of her hands - therefore revealing the contents of her creativity.

Though, instead of seeing what you were expecting - that being the fly in a questioning transformation - you came across an empty space.

Agatha had let out a sound somewhere between the crossroads of a groan and a scoff. She was almost bewitched in response.

“Where did that pesky thing go this time?”

“This time…?”

“Yes” she paused to pinch the bridge of her nose - her elbow bent perfectly as she held it up high in the air for some sort of dramatical effect. “Last time it ended up in the drawer to our-”

Agatha was cut off at the sudden flapping of something small - a dash of green and blue zipping past her face. “Well, I suppose we've found it?”

Agatha tutted, pushing her tongue against the inner of her cheek as her eyes moved to a fixed focus upon the small bird.

“I mean, at least we know it worked…?” You smile slightly, feeling half conscious under the inferno gaze that your girlfriend held for the flapping creature. If she tried hard enough, you're almost sure she could turn it into something eatable.

“But now I need to turn it back before it litters our house in its-”

“Okay, Agatha. I get it”

She shakes her head, watching its frantically drawn out patterns before swiping her finger, causing it to crash into the sofa.

Quickly leaping forward, your girlfriend had reached out, her hands extended and palms flattened as she took an iron fisted hold of it. However, this had also caused her commotion as her body had crashed into your own, her head pressed into your arm and a leg thrown over your thighs.

“You know, if you wanted me to get so close to you, you could've just asked?" You smile slightly, earning yourself a sly eyeroll as she moves to stand, using her thumb to push some hair out of her face before she mumbled some words that seemed to fall flat upon your sense of hearing.

It was a spell of some sort, evident in the way she exposed that of a fly once more - the bird completely gone now.

“I'll need more practice with this spell…” she sighs, narrowing her eyes upon the small and feeble body of her subject, almost as if she were already thinking up some unimaginable storm to perfect her ways of witchcraft.

“Yeah, you do that… and uh, next time, make sure you have control over its whereabouts before you try and change one thing into another?”

“Yeah… maybe”

[hoshiseon-digiarc]

desire ; preview

♰ pairings :: ot8 vampire!ateez x fem!witch!reader

♰ genre :: dark fantasy, smut, strangers to ?? to lovers, fluff, maybe slight angst?, soulmates/fated lovers

♰ content :: polyamory, references to religious themes, all of them are kinda down bad... some more than others, reader is enamored with them (i'll add more by chapter, they're not written yet)

♰ word count :: 580

♰ note :: all of the descriptions are general as this is the preview, please read the warnings for each chapter!! this is my first time not writing in third person :,) each chapter will probably focus of different sets of members. the chapters aren't planned, i'm writing this as i go so pls be patient. i'm not sure how many chapters there'll be. feedback is greatly appreciated and i should have the first chapter up very soon!! ♡

♰ gen. warnings :: blood, violence, predator/prey dynamics (non sexual & possibly sexual in later chapters), fear, anxiety, sight obsession, stalking, general dark themes, manipulation (non sexual)

☽ smut warnings by chapter, MDNI!!

as i look around confusedly, i forget that there was a small chance i was being followed by something. instead astonishment replaces the fear as i look around. but not for long. i start to hear the distinct sound of crunching leaves coming from my right. this time my entire body freezes for a fraction of a second and i do not turn to see whatever it is coming for me. instead i turn left and start to run. as i sprint through the tree line, i make it long enough that the clearing behind me starts to morph back into endless trees.

but turning back to look proves to be a mistake as i trip once again and fall, unable to catch myself as i collide with the ground. sharp pain shoots through my knee again and i know this time i would not just have a bruise. i wince and cry as i push into the dirt to roll onto my back. through my fear, i could only hear my boots making contact with the earth beneath me but now that i am still i can definitely hear the pursuit of something coming towards me. it doesn't sound like running but then again i may not be able to hear over the sound of my own pounding heart and heaving breaths. i attempt to scramble to my feet and push through the pain in my leg but i can only manage a weak limping jog. i feel tears pool in my eyes as i stop to lean my side against a tree. there's just no way i'll make it to my cabin like this. and there's no way i'd beat whatever it is that's following me. as the pain in my knee starts to throb, i sink lower until i'm sitting with my back against the tree.

through my wallowing i failed to realize that the sound from before had stopped. as i turn my head to look around, i spot a silhouette to my left. back from where i originally started running. it looks like.... a person? who in their right mind would be out this far? it seems like the seconds drag on as i stare wordlessly at the unmoving figure. i have no options to weigh so i wait. for impending doom most certainly. but there's nothing i can really do. trying to get up again really isn't practical and would just alert them to my location, if they don't see me already. i blink and suddenly the figure looks a lot closer than they were a second ago. no... my mind is playing tricks on me no one moves that fast. my heart rate kicks into high gear as the figure starts to become larger. they're definitely getting closer. my reflexes kick in and i scramble with no success to get onto my feet. i hear my breath stutter and a cry threatens to leave my lips as the figure finally really comes into view and then stops. though it's still very dark, they're close enough now that i can see the person is a man. he's human looking... enough. but that doesn't really quell my fear. he's still not close enough that he could hear me if i spoke in a normal tone but i shouldn't get my hopes up. i watch as his head tilts to the side for a second before he starts to walk, much slower now, towards me.

[divijohm]

Can you Do When Ben Drowned Comforts Suicidal Fem!S/O (Also If Anyone is Suicidal then I Felt Sorry for Them and I Wish I Could see People Have to Care for Them or Someone have to Call Suicidal Hotline So It will Helps Them, Seriously Don't do this IRL Otherwise Suicide is Tragic)

Ben comforting Suicidal s/o

A/n: As a person who tried to kill myself 3 times by pure rage and raw strength (unplanned) I'll base this in my experience. If you're passing through this thoughts please seek help the world isn't as shitty as media makes it look like, I recommend following @/jacobsimonsays on TikTok he tells daily good news about the world, also #hopecore is great it'll give you a lil more hope in humans ALSO step outside, even if it's just in your backyard take a little bit of sunlight, eat and drink, go for a walk, get a pet if you can, seriously it may sound dumb but as someone who's been there this helps lots. The pet specially is a great suicide prevention, you'll think of them when you're trying and (at least for me) it makes you stop, just remember to take care of the lil fella

TW: SUICIDE, (3) FAILED SUICIDE ATTEMPTS, SUICIDE IDEALISATION, PASSIVE SUICIDE

⚰️ He found you, rope attached to your neck, you weren't really up anything you're just going to pull the rope until you died. You were crying, but you weren't stopping anytime soon. You wanted it all to end, he had to call help because he couldn't get your grip out of the rope. You blacked out but other than that, and the rope bruise on your neck, you're fine

⚰️ then he found you, again, this time violently banging your head on the wall trying to crack your skull over he managed to make you stop voluntary, he did a quick bandage on your bleeding head but not much after that, he was worried of course but he didn't really knew how to best act in this situation so he just. Stayed there while you cried until you slept.

⚰️ The third time was what really got him, you're in the bathtub, you've used something that made your body limp, your head wasn't above water and your wrists where cut making the water a pretty light pink, he panicked so hard he couldn't help you nor get help. You're not moving, he thought you died he screamed so hard that he bleed out of his throat, someone else heard it and helped.

⚰️ "Why would you do that? Aren't you happy here? Don't you like my company? Have I done something? Is someone or something bothering you?" He asked after you finally woke up. You couldn't answer, you didn't know what was wrong, your life wasn't bad, you lived well, you had good friends, a good family, etc. Maybe you weren't cut out for this world. You couldn't answer so you cried, cried and cried some more he held you close the whole time.

⚰️ He never really asked why after that only time

⚰️ After that chat you stopped your attempts, for his sake and for the sake of your family, you would want your favorite family member and him to have to bury you, but that didn't mean you've stopped desiring death.

⚰️ You started acting more recklessly than your usual, they would notice if looked close enough, you started eating less and when you did it wasn't healthy, you've stopped looking to both sides when crossing the street, engaged more with potentially violent people, started drinking (more if you drunk already), etc

⚰️ no one seemed to notice, but Ben did, he was worried but didn't know how to approach the situation.

⚰️ After some research from his part he started taking care of you in subtle ways, taking you to those fancy healthy restaurants where there's all the junk food you like but they're made of healthy things, calling you to go to park dates so you can get sunlight and walk a bit, healthy things disguised as silly stuff

⚰️ You got a little bit better with all that, after all a healthy body is a healthy mind but still not good enough for Ben you were still acting too recklessly for his taste.

⚰️ He heard that pets help people's mental health so he got you a dog, a big one, think golden retriever or German Shepherd big. You love it.

⚰️ You're not in good health yet, you still have your super down days, but now you're better and the future looks a little bit brighter

[inkblackorchid]

What the hell happened with Crow: an autopsy (Part 4)

*Deep breath* Okay, everybody. Let's do this one more time.

First off, hello, or welcome back. Let's get the introductions and disclaimers out of the way, shall we?

This is the fourth and final instalment in my very, very long-winded attempt to analyse the character writing of Crow over the course of the entirety of yugioh 5Ds. For everyone who hasn't read the previous parts of the analysis, you can find part one here, part two here, and part three here.

This post, and my analysis as a whole, is neither meant as a Crow hate post, nor as a manifesto to convince people who don't like him that they're wrong. It's as genuine an attempt to simply look at and dissect what the show gives us about him as I can make, though I admit to personal bias because I do like Crow. That said, I'm trying to stay as neutral as possible, because the aim of this entire post tetralogy is to look at the writing decisions made for this character and how they impact him—and how they possibly influenced the audience's perception of him.

My previous three posts all reference this as well, but since I still see these things parroted all across the internet to this day: Please don't read this post under the assumption that any of the 5Ds production rumours are true, especially not the ones surrounding Crow. Because, to make this as short as possible, every popular theory as to why certain characters were mishandled during the later parts of the show fails to line up with the production timeline of said show. Chiefly among those theories, the idea that Crow was meant to be a dark signer and that his popularity correlated to his cards, and the idea that Aki, specifically, had to give up her screentime for him because her VA got pregnant, which both lack any basis in reality, as you can read in the posts I linked. (One final shoutout to @mbg159 here, who compiled these incredibly comprehensive posts and can also be found here on tumblr. Huge thanks.) So if you can do me one favour, please just let the 5Ds rumours die already and read this analysis without the hope of seeing any of them confirmed. I'm so sick of these crackpot theories at this point that I can hardly find the words for it. And while we're on the topic, I also don't want to see this post used as a means to pit Aki and Crow against each other in any way—both have good reasons to be well-liked and both deserve their spot in the narrative, all right? All right.

And now, at last, let's get down to business. The last time I got on a virtual soapbox and yelled about Crow, I covered the entire WRGP, murder-duel-robot induced break included. That means that for this, final stretch, we'll be looking at everything from episode 137 onwards—the Ark Cradle arc. (A side not for dub aficionados here: Episode 136 was the last episode that got an English dub. In other words, everything I talk about here never even made it into the English version. Because 4Kids, I guess.) As we've done before, we'll take a look at what exactly Crow gets up to during the final stretch of the show (and, notably, the epilogue), then see whether any of it needed improving, and if so, how it could have been improved.

You'll find all further yelling below the readmore, and I'll leave you with the other, usual warning here, as well: This will be long. Even if the Ark Cradle arc, relative to the rest of the show, isn't, this post most certainly will be. So get some snacks and perhaps don't start reading this late at night unless you're good at knowing when to stop and reading stuff in bursts. (I'm not.)

As I concluded at the end of my last post, the WRGP ended up being a bit of a mixed bag for Crow. He's there, he duels, but at the same time, despite being positioned as an equal third of a protagonist trio, he's notably less important and arguably also weaker than Yusei and Jack. Moreover, where the plot is concerned, he sure didn't get too much to do—not to speak of the fact that the writers didn't grace him with any meaningful interactions with a certain character who'll become very relevant here.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. First, the preamble.

With the end of the Team New World duel, the final arc of the show drops the by this point unexpected arrival of the Ark Cradle right on our heads. So, what does Crow do here, at the start, other than be shocked? Well, not much. A lot of the first episode that introduces the Ark Cradle focusses more on the imminent threat said structure poses to New Domino City, and we flash back to our protagonists mostly to ascertain that things are, in fact, going to shit. Even once that focus on the city evacuating shifts again, the episode concerns itself more with Yusei than with Crow. However, meagre as it is, we do get the first interaction between Crow and Sherry during the Ark Cradle arc in this episode.

(Uh.... at least they're technically talking to each other?)

And frankly... It's not much. Unfortunately, up until the duel where he faces her, the Ark Cradle arc continues a trend regarding interactions between Crow and Sherry that we already saw in the WRGP: They barely get to interact, and even when they do, they never have anything so much as resembling a meaningful conversation, mostly because Sherry basically never addresses Crow directly, nor seems very interested in him, while Crow is usually there only to react to what she's saying, rather than actually talk to her. While digging through my mountain of screenshots, I found that latter part to be especially interesting, because as it turns out, this is a trend not just in Crow's interactions with Sherry, specifically. Many moments that probably contribute to the nefarious "screentime" (I've explained my gripes with this term in part two) some people like to accuse Crow of hogging have him only be part of a scene so he can react to what happens in it, to the point of him sometimes feeling like a stand-in for the audience reaction the writers might be hoping for. The above is a perfect example, because as far as character writing is concerned, Crow's "interaction" with Sherry here is utterly devoid of meaning. He's just there to communicate his disbelief over the ominous prediction that Yusei is guaranteed to die if he goes to the Ark Cradle, which feels like exactly the kind of reaction the writers probably wanted from the audience. After all, it's a bold, shocking statement to make. The protagonist, dying? In a card game anime geared towards twelve year-olds? It's downright preposterous. And Crow seems to agree with that, if his dialogue is anything to go by.

This one and other scenes (mostly the kind that contain plot elements that Crow doesn't actually interact with) got me thinking, though, and after having gone through so much of the show with a fine-tooth comb now, I think I've come to a conclusion, so permit me a tangent here: I believe the choice to let Crow, specifically, be a character who often only reacts to events or interactions after the DS arc, rather than contributing much himself, is deliberate. Don't get me wrong, I don't think he's the only character who is frequently put in this position—Aki, the twins, and even Bruno, especially when they're on the sidelines in the WRGP, also often only seem to be there to react or comment on things, perhaps partially to remind us viewers that they still exist, despite not being in a position where they contribute anything to the plot. With how much the twins and Aki got pushed to the side after the pre-WRGP and the Unicorn duel, respectively, and with how toned-down Bruno's entire character is until the very end, as not to spoil his tragic antagonist status too much, Crow in particular ending up as an often reactive, rather than active character stands out a bit more, though. And I think this has everything to do with his personality, because it contrasts that of Jack and Yusei. Think of it. Sure, Crow is shown several times to be just as cool and competent as the other two, but what he has that the other two crucially lack is the ability to freak out like a normal person. I'm being hyperbolic here, of course, but I do genuinely believe this, because when I think back to the show, Jack and Yusei, due to their character writing, only ever seem to be allowed to lose their cool during pretty specific circumstances, and only in very specific ways. Jack, for example, only ever gets to freak out either when a scene paints him as the butt of the joke (like during his infamous, dramatic outburst over cup ramen), or when the freakout is caused by—and expressed as—righteous (or not so righteous) fury (like when he storms off angrily after catching everyone watching his old duel with Dragan). Meanwhile, Yusei is played so straight that we barely ever see him lose his composure at all, outside of intensely dramatic, high-stakes situations (think his dark signer duels with Kiryu, his confrontation with Roman, his initial failure to accel synchro). Hell, the closest we get to ever seeing him be mildly upset about something like a normal person, as far as I can recall, is when he gets embarrased by Martha calling him out on his perceived crush on Aki. That's it.

Crow, though. Crow's allowed to do something the other two aren't: He's allowed to react to the world around him like your average guy. Jack blows through their household money for expensive coffee. Crow gets upset. Understandable. Crow gets injured right before his big debut in a turbo duelling tournament and is upset to the point of snapping at his friends over it. Understandable. Seeing Yaeger's kid cheering his dad on and knowing that this kid will cry if his dad loses makes Crow relent and throw the match. Understandable. Sherry predicts Yusei's imminent death due to hocus pocus and Crow calls bullshit. Understandable.

Do you see what I'm driving at? With how the show treats the other two Satellite boys, I'd argue none of the moments above would have worked anywhere near as well if the writers had tried to make Jack or Yusei take Crow's place in any of them. Because while Yusei and Jack, I feel, were certainly written to be the coolest characters (at least to the target audience), Crow seems like he was written to be the most relatable. He's the guy who takes on a delivery job when they need money. He's the guy who complains about his cranky landlady. And he's the guy who reacts to insane nonsense happening around him a little more realistically than his defeated-an-ancient-devil-to-absorb-its-power brother, his shouldering-the-guilt-of-a-cataclysmic-event-decades-ago other brother, their mutual previously-violent-psychic-who-was-part-of-a-cult friend, and the one-of-us-can-see-spirits-and-we-share-a-weird-kind-of-magical-bond twins. As such, it doesn't feel too out there to me to claim that in many situations, they made Crow the stand-in for the audience, because he has a less iron composure than Jack and Yusei, is readily available in many scenes by virtue of living with the other two, and happens to be the guy who has the arguably most normal backstory out of the signers. (Save, perhaps, for Rua, but I've already addressed before why the writers barely ever pulled Rua centre stage for anything. And they certainly wouldn't have pulled him centre stage for this, either.)

Now, as far as character writing is concerned, assuming I'm at least halfway correct with my hunch above, I feel that whether or not this decision is good or a shot in the foot on the writers' part depends largely on every audience member's individual perception of Crow after the DS arc. If you liked seeing this scrappy guy introduced during the DS arc, of course you would have been happy to see more of him! Even if he's only present in scenes to comment on what's going on and doesn't actually get to do anything meaningful. If you didn't like Crow that much, though, I can see how him popping up so often only to yap a bit and contribute essentially nothing could have grated on you. And as I said, I think this is where the "screentime" discussion comes in again, because yeah, Crow is very much on screen in all these little-bit-of-nothing scenes. He doesn't get to do much and his character isn't fleshed out or reinforced in any way, but he sure is there. For better or for worse.

And this—this is where I can finally get back to him and Sherry. Because in his interactions specifically with her, it is for worse, due to the fact that all the scenes that contain both of them before the Ark Cradle duel are pretty much exclusively these kinds of little-bit-of-nothing, reactive scenes. Crow doesn't get to interact with Sherry meaningfully, and he never—and I need to empathise this—, not once gets to interact with her one on one, not until the end-of-series duel both of them take part in happens. What makes Crow's lack of meaningful interactions with Sherry even worse is that his later duelling partner against her is Aki, of all people, who by contrast gets to interact with Sherry a whole bunch, most notably during her duel against Yusei. Not only that, but Sherry is also shown to actually be interested in Aki, which cannot be said for Crow. Yet, still in the same episode I was describing above, while the Ark Cradle begins its descent, it's not Aki, but Crow who is entrusted with this card by Mizoguchi/Elsworth:

(I'd like to point out that the dialogue following this moment doesn't make it clear whether Crow even knows what Sherry's connection to this card is. For all we know, this could be the first time Crow sees it, without being aware of any of the context surrounding it.)

You know, the card that's essentially a symbol of Sherry's attachment to her parents and her commitment to revenge. The card that basically her entire character revolves around. For a single piece of cardboard, this thing comes with a lot of narrative baggage attached, yet canon doesn't even take the time to assure us that Crow knows what Z-ONE means, other than it being a memento of Sherry's parents, as Mizoguchi explains. And frankly, this all feels like a rather ham-fisted attempt to get some last-minute setup for the later confrontation between Crow and Sherry in. It's like the writers desperately wanted to feel the emotional moment in the duel later to feel earned; they wanted to have their cake and eat it, too. There's only one problem: They didn't even bake the damned thing, the ingredients are just sitting around, untouched, as if staring at them long enough will magically make a cake manifest.

But, well, since I'm already talking about this, I may as well get into the actual meat of the matter, because frankly, it's not like Crow gets much else to do at the start of the arc. Yusei takes off because he at first wants to go to the Ark Cradle alone (like an idiot), leading to the signers coming after him (and telling him he's an idiot). Joining this effort and assuring Yusei that they won't let him die alongside the others is as much as Crow gets to do before the inevitable three-way duel starts.

(That said, while it doesn't accomplish anything, I've always appreciated this little moment while Yusei still tries to pull his stupid kamikaze plan—Crow would know more shortcuts in the BAD area than he does. After all, he lived there for a good while!)

After that, everyone gets up to the Ark Cradle and, as we all know, the signer group is forcibly split up by Z-ONE before deciding to go to a Yusei gear each in order to shut down Ark Cradle's negative Moment. (Top ten sentences that wouldn't make a lick of sense to anyone who isn't up to their neck in 5Ds lore.) And the very first duel on the menu in this final stretch of episodes is also Crow's final duel in the entire show.

(Drumroll please.)

Here's the thing. I love this duel, actually. I get extremely hyped every time I rewatch it. BUT. But. I do not love it so blindly that I couldn't see that it has not one, but several issues. Not only that, but those issues don't just rest on Crow's shoulders, they sadly rest on the shoulders of all three participants in this duel, because frankly? Alongside the four-way Jack/Rua/Ruka/Aporia duel, this duel is one of the Ark Cradle arc's desperate attempts to tie up loose ends. Because as much as I enjoy this arc, that's exactly what it is: A race to the finish line, an attempt to tie as many loose ends as possible up in as little time as the show could get away with. To make clear why I think this, let me just list off all the things this arc resolves or at the very least tries to tie up with a neat bow:

It reintroduces Aki's psychic powers, which we were previously led to believe she'd lost. Notably, we didn't get a reason for why they disappeared and don't get a reason for why they reappear, either. It also turns them into healing powers in an attempt to establish a reason for why she later studies medicine.

It explains what happened to Sherry and what actually drives her revenge. Furthermore, it releases her from her narrative fridge-prison in order to actually let her duel Aki (yes, Aki, specifically), which is a confrontation that was subtextually implied several times previously.

It resolves the question of Bruno's identity by revealing him as an antagonist.

It finally reveals Life Stream Dragon, who was at this point teased over seventy episodes ago.

It also finally rewards Rua, who was teased to possibly become a signer during the DS arc, with an actual signer mark. (As short-lived as it may be.)

It actually explains Iliaster's real plan, which is Z-ONE's hope that the 5Ds gang can actually save the future.

Speaking of which, it actually explains who Z-ONE is and why he's a big deal. (Remember, this guy was first teased a good while ago at this point in time.)

Alongside Sherry, it dusts off several protagonists who didn't get an opportunity to duel on-screen and lets them duel one, final time. (Notably, Aki, Rua, and Ruka, who at this point haven't been seen duelling since the early WRGP or even pre-WRGP.)

You may notice that none of these bullet points contain Crow. They do, however, contain Aki and Sherry, both of whom went into this finale with several unanswered questions as to their characters. Crow, not so much. But let's just put a pin in that for now while we actually jump into the duel.

*Cracks knuckles* Aki & Crow VS Sherry. Here we go at last. Fair warning, the character writing of all three participants of this duel overlaps a fair bit here, so expect to hear a bit of a mishmash about our revenge trio.

So, how does this duel start? Firstly, with Sherry waxing poetic about why she's even opposing Team 5Ds now.

(A dramatic switch of sides that sadly doesn't hold a candle to Bruno turning out to be Antinomy. Which, funnily enough, might be why this duel is front-loaded and Bruno's comes later.)

I won't dig into this too much, but I just want to point out the one thing this moment gives us: It establishes character motivation. Sherry claims she can no longer get revenge and has thus lost her purpose. (The reason why she can no longer get revenge, if you're interested, is because Moment Express, her final lead, vanished in its entirety, as far as canon is concerned.) Thus, she took the bait when Z-ONE offered her a new purpose, and, more importantly, a reward. Now, Aki and Crow at this point in the episode don't get to hear what that reward is, but for our analysis, it's important to keep in mind: Z-ONE promised Sherry he'd alter the timeline so she would get her parents back if she helps him. And I think this is immensely important because this is not only Sherry's goal in the present, I think it's actually the core of her character from the very first moment we meet her. In classic, tragic-avenging-type character fashion, she claims to want revenge when what she's really doing is trying to numb the pain of the awareness that she'll never get her parents back. (Though I'll admit this may also be my generous read of her as a person who likes revenge-obsessed characters.) And then, Z-ONE dangles the actual thing she wanted all along before her. Of course she took the bait.

This brings us to the start of the duel itself. As we know, Sherry employs some tactics that feel quite different from what she previously did in this duel. First and foremost, she messes with the mechanics of the duel itself by using the field spell Ecole de Zone, creating an illusion that confuses Aki and Crow into duelling not her, but each other at first. Sherry, meanwhile, takes a very passive role, clearly intent on letting the two destroy each other while she sporadically activates card effects to accelerate this. What makes all this stand out as even more unusual for her is that she sets this up by lying. At the beginning of the duel, she tells Aki and Crow that there's two of her, and that each duellist will fight one copy of her on a seperate field each, but this is a misdirection to make the two signers duel each other instead of her. And, look. I don't need to tell you this is out of character for Sherry. Canon literally does that for me.

(Case in point.)

It's only after Crow and Aki catch onto the fact that something's wrong and after Aki destroys the field spell that Sherry uses her "real strategy", switching to Soul Binding Gate, which inflicts real damage every time a monster with less attack points than her life points is summoned, in order to whittle away at both other duellists' life points. This is also the point where she reveals to her opponents that she's doing all this to get her parents back. While she does that, we get a bit more back and forth in terms of cardplay, until Aki sets the field up just right so Crow can land a very high-damage hit with Black-Winged Dragon to end the duel. And that is pretty much the gist of it on the duelling side of things.

So what's going on on the narrative side of things, then? Well. Let me front-load something I've noticed on the narrative end: This duel heavily interacts with Crow's and Sherry's characterisation, but barely at all with Aki's. I'll make clear what I mean by that below. For now, let's just get an overview by going through the character moments as they occur in the duel. Why go through all of them? Because most either interact with Crow in some way, or set up a later interaction in the same duel that he's a part of, that's why. I'll get into the nitty-gritty of what this duel did well and what it didn't after that. (Mostly. You may have noticed I like tangents and rambling excessively.)

So.

The first moment belongs to Aki and Crow in equal measure, and happens just as Ecole de Zone is destroyed—which Aki accomplishes by using Crow's monster to synchro summon Black Rose Dragon, as well as prevent that synchro summon from being negated through the same monster's effect, so she can use her dragon's field wipe to get rid of Sherry's field spell. When Sherry is surprised by this, Aki and Crow explain that they memorised each other's cards as part of a strategic effort as a WRGP team.

(Friendship is, in fact, magic.)

Not only does this explanation make perfect sense, it's also an excellent little tidbit to tie Aki and Crow together as a tag-team here, as it strengthens the connection between them. The only gripe I could possibly see with this is that it feels like this didn't necessarily need to be a surprise, end-of-the-show reveal. Frankly, it could have been pretty cool to see this much earlier, to have members of Team 5Ds realise what their teammates were getting up to during the WRGP duels, for example. (Instead of so often having the other signers react just as shocked as the announcer to their teammates' plays—I'm side-eyeing the infamous "a trap from the graveyard"-moment in particular. Like, Aki, sweetie, if you memorised Crow's deck, why are you surprised that he has a trap he can activate from the graveyard? I digress.) Moreover, this could have built anticipation for this particular duel, as viewers would have been excited to see what Aki and Crow would come up with to defeat Sherry as a team. So this moment is not bad, really. Just a bit underutilised, at least to me. (The word "underutilised" might become a trend in this post.)

Every other character-driven moment from here on out is shoved into the second duel episode, 140. Speaking of which, this episode starts with Aki and Crow getting the reveal of why Sherry is helping Z-ONE, where she admits that she joined the bad guys because she wants her parents back. She even goes as far as stating that because Z-ONE showed her the future, she has no hope that it can be saved and thus at least wants her lovely past back so she can have some solace before everything goes to hell for humanity. But we already went over that above.

Next up, albeit this moment should probably be considered more of a running theme than just one self-contained thing, we have Crow's struggle with Soul Binding Gate. Remember, the effect of this field spell causes all players to take damage every time a monster with less ATK than Sherry's LP is summoned. And at this point in the duel, Aki is barely above 1000 life points, so Crow worries about triggering the field spell's effect and hurting her, which leads to him playing suboptimally because he's more concerned about his friend than about winning the duel. Notably, Aki calls him out on this.

(She has a point.)

Outside of providing an internal conflict for Crow to grapple with, this isn't much to write home about. (Side note: I do find it interesting that they introduce the fear of physically hurting someone in a duel specifically in connection to Aki here, though, given that through her psychic powers, she had to grapple with this exact issue many times in the past. I have no idea if this was intentional, though.)

Between this and the next moment, there's a nice bit of interplay between Crow and Aki again, where he activates a card to refill her life points just in time so she doesn't drop to zero through Soul Binding Gate, while Aki uses a defensive trap to protect Crow in return.

(This is just here because it's a money shot to me. The juxtaposition of their faces and their life points, showing that while Aki may have the lowest life points, she still has the coolest head in this duel, and while Sherry technically has the upper hand, she's beginning to falter because she didn't anticipate the other two to work so well together. It's chef's kiss. Mwah.)

What follows after this, is, of course, the Big Moment. Where Sherry tries to convince Crow to forfeit so she can win and have Z-ONE change the past. And this is the one I really need to dig into.

With Sherry's earlier admission that she's on Iliaster's side because she wants her parents back acting as setup, she begins her attempt to sway Crow by telling him that if he had the opportunity to change the past, he would do it, too. And while Crow initially protests, Sherry challenges this, then proceeds to show him what Z-ONE's power could accomplish, and we get a lengthy sequence where Sherry, through weird cyborg-techno-magic-shenanigans that are never explained, takes Aki and Crow to a dreamlike space where Crow sees the orphans he used to take care of being happily reunited with their parents. Sherry also ominously tells him that this is "what he desires deep in his psyche" before promising him that if he surrenders the duel, Z-ONE can give him a world where Zero Reverse never occurred and all the kids can have happy lives with their real families. (I wanted to post most of this sequence in screenshots, but while I have them, I've realised I'm only a few images short of tumblr's limit already, so forgive me because I will need those remaining image spots.) This moment proceeds to introduce some serious doubt on Crow's end. Aki, meanwhile, remains steadfast, telling him not to fall for Sherry's manipulation, which leads to her giving an almost Yusei-style speech. In a moment where Crow wavers, both because he's genuinely considering whether taking Sherry's offer might be the wiser choice, and because he doesn't want to hurt Aki by triggering Sherry's field spell effect, Aki calls out to him and tells him to snap out of it by reminding him of how Yusei reached out to her during their second duel. This speech is a bit, um. Clunky, I feel. (At least if the translation is correct. If it isn't, then that may be the issue.) See, she tells him that Yusei "saved her from the darkness of her psychic powers", that "he wasn't concerned about his own safety and risked his life to persuade her", that, because her psychic powers are now gone, she's "renewed" and that this somehow brought her to the epiphany that as long as she believes in her own potential, she can change the future. This is lifted almost verbatim from the scene, by the way. Leaving aside the fact that half of this feels like a mild to severe misrepresentation of Aki's character arc during the DS arc (don't talk about it, don't talk about it, I need to make this another post of its own, damn it), I, personally, can't exactly follow how she ended up with that final epiphany from the circumstances she listed. But lucky for us, Crow apparently gets what she's driving at, because he quickly echoes her statement and they both conclude that Crow's kids also believe in the future and fight to live, that they're not sad about their lives the way they are right now, even though they don't have parents. Thus, Crow catches himself, echoing Aki's sentiment and telling Sherry that he, too, believes in the future. And through the power of Friendship and Believing in the Future, he manages to use Aki's cards to land the final hit, nicely mirroring how she used his to destroy Ecole de Zone.

...Phew. Okay, look. First off, that above, large section is basically several character beats stacked on top of one another. On Sherry's end, we have the intriguing fact that she's specifically trying to manipulate Crow, not Aki. In fact, she doesn't so much as try to sway Aki, as though she knows it's no use. Then, on Aki's end, we've got her pulling a real Yusei, staying level-headed almost the entire duel and reaching out to make sure Crow stays on track. This moment also ties back to her own conflict with her powers again. (Which, unfortunately, I will talk about, and yes, I'll be chewing drywall the entire time I do it.) Finally, on Crow's end, we've got a nice, proper moment where he doubts himself and, by his own admission, nearly makes a terrible mistake because he wants nothing more than for the kids he used to take care of to have good lives.

Now, before I go over what worked about this moment and what didn't, let me just chew through the rest of the actual duel itself, too, then circle back too highlight some things. In other words, time for me to chew some drywall.

*Sigh*

At the very end of the duel, there are two more character moments that are noteworthy.

First, right before the final hit, we get Sherry desperately defending herself against Aki and Crow's newly strengthened belief that the future can, in fact, still be saved, which she does by (rather heartbreakingly) asking what's so wrong about wanting her parents back, about wanting their love and warmth back. It's at this point that Crow's allowed to get back at Sherry by challenging her beliefs, telling her that people "work hard to live because they only get one chance at life", and that there's no point in trying to go back to do things differently, that the only way to keep going is to believe in the future, regardless of whatever painful and sad events one has had to live through. I'd say this sentiment certainly fits Crow, character-wise, especially given his rough Satellite background. It does partially fall flat because it feels a bit weird for him, specifically, to now be acting like he knows Sherry inside and out, much like she did with him earlier, but again, this is simply a matter of setup and I'll try not to belabour that point again. The horse is already dead, no sense in beating it. It's after this speech and the final attack that Sherry finally realises her error.

Buuut this leads us right into the next character moment. Because as the duel ends, Sould Binding Gate physically falls apart, pelting all three of our duel participants in debris and threatening to crush them under it. While everyone does briefly fall over (and Sherry gets a moment to realise that her father wanted her to live strong, not accept seemingly inevitable doom and die weak), they soon realise they were not, in fact, buried under rubble, though. Because guess what! Black Rose Dragon to the rescue. Black Rose Dragon, who can suddenly physically affect her surroundings again. You know, that thing we were led to believe Aki could no longer make her monsters do because she lost her powers completely out of nowhere. And there's more! Because not only does Black Rose Dragon take care of the debris for the trio, as she disappears, she also heals all three of them, and in response, Crow gets a line that I unfortunately cannot for the life of me discuss without bias because it kills me every time.

(Crow. Crow, please. You're killing me. I beg you.)

This line out of Crow's mouth feels extremely weird to me, and in the process of typing up this post, I've been trying to find the reason why. Here's the conclusion I've come to: Firstly, it feels a bit out of place from him, somehow. A line hypothesising about what psychic powers can or can't do—this is something I would have expected out of Aki's mouth, but not out of Crow's. I believe what makes it feel so out of place, though, isn't necessarily that it seems a bit odd for him, specifically, to theorise about this, but that when I hear it, I don't feel like the character is saying it. Instead, in this moment, moreso than in some others that suffer from the same issue, I hear not Crow, but the writers speaking. I hear them telling me "look, we know we made it seem like Aki's powers are super gone and like they were super, irredeemably bad, and like she and you should be happy that they're gone, but here, see, this is what they're really like. Don't you think we came up with something clever here, to set her becoming a doctor later up nicely? No, this isn't because we needed to backpedal on our decision to make her lose them and be happy about it at the last second, why do you ask?". And yes, I concede this might just be me. (So feel free to disregard this in terms of analysis, I just have some weird kind of vendetta against this line.) But still, even without my personal issues hampering me, this line of dialogue out of Crow's mouth is just plain odd. After all, how would he know what "real" psychic powers are? Since when is he the expert, especially considering we've never so much as seen him comment on Aki's powers before? (And for the record, this line would have seemed just as weird had any other character other than Aki said it imo. It just has that unmistakable "writers trying to justify something at the last second"-tang to me.)

And do not. Do Not get me started on the fact that the writers, despite going to such great pains to paint Aki's psychic powers as an exclusively negative thing especially during the WRGP arc, decide to reintroduce them here, suddenly as a good thing that can also heal people, which directly contradicts every choice they've made when it came to Aki's relationship to her powers ever since the Team Catastrophe duel. While crucially also lacking the one thing this entire duel is practically begging for: Fucking. Setup. But at this point, the handling of Aki's powers, specifically, really needs its own post, so I'll hold off on any further comments here and come back to that another time. I feel like I'm beginning to talk in circles, anyhow. Setup. Setup, setup, setup. This duel wishes it had it, because then the ideas presented here—which, in a vacuum, are compelling—might have worked smoothly.

But, with that. We have finally made it through the duel itself. Sherry, at the very end, gets her change of heart and at last cements herself as a good guy, and that concludes the first duel in the finale, and also both Aki and Crow's last duel in the entire show.

And good lord, was this duel all over the place. Though I think my meandering scene-by-scene breakdown of it showed as much. Now, onto the proper evaluation of what worked and what didn't here. First, let's get the good these two episodes do out of the way, shall we. (Because there is a lot of Bad I need to yell about, unfortunately.)

By virtue of being one of the final duels, this is Aki and Crow's last chance to shine, and shine, they do. Both in the duelling department and in the character department. Aki makes two major plays that upend Sherry's strategy and Crow's perfectly in sync with her, showing that the two truly are teammates, and paying off all the character moments they had specifically in the Team Unicorn to Team Catastrophe section of the WRGP. Their friendship and cooperation is believable and entertaining to watch. Then on the character side, Aki's growth is (somewhat) paid off—where she used to be a character that doubted herself and was afraid of hurting people, she is now the one who can keep a level head and help others fight their self-doubt. Meanwhile, Crow gets to show off his unfailing dedication to community and family again, both by watching out for Aki and by selflessly desiring not for himself to have a better life, but for the kids he used to take care of. And Sherry, who was previously removed from the narrative in such an unsatisfactory way, finally gets to duel again, gets to explain why she actually does what she does, and gets to join the heroes at the end, permanently joining the ranks of the good guys instead of the villains. Happy endings all around.

Ehem. And this is where I'm gonna be less nice about this duel. Because the problem is, due to the specific constellation of characters involved in this duel and how they previously interacted in the show, there's a lot of stuff here that doesn't work nearly as well on a second watch as a first watch would like to make you believe.

First, a broader issue on the card game end of things: The way this duel feels, it's very much more Aki's duel than Crow's, which is also kind of confirmed in the card plays being made. Though it's Crow who's first shown to catch onto the fact that a third party is activating additional card effects out of nowhere, it's Aki who fully solves the mystery, uses Crow's monster to synchro summon Black Rose Dragon, then activates her dragon's effect to get rid of the illusion for good. And while Crow gets to land the final hit, it's Aki's setup and her trap, Synchro Stream, that make it possible for him to win for both of them. And yet. On the dialogue- and character-interaction side of things, this duel is made out to be much more Crow's than Aki's. Because, perhaps surprisingly to some, Aki doesn't waver one bit in this duel. She's got her head in the game the entire time. She's here to do business—that business being defeating Sherry—and by god, does she do it. Moreover, unlike Crow, she has much, much better setup to be duelling Sherry than he does. And this comes right back around to the main thing this duel suffers from, which I've already harped on about: Crow and Sherry, up until this point, have not interacted in a way that would make the connection between them seem in any way significant. Unfortunately for this duel, though, Aki and Sherry have.

From the first episode where we're introduced to Sherry, she's shown to be interested in who Aki is and what she can do. During the duel between her and Yusei, she comments on Aki's powers. Later, when Aki is getting her turbo duelling license, Sherry watches on with interest. At some point while Aki's training, Sherry drops by to speak with her and Yusei again. My point here being, of course, that Aki, unlike Crow, got several scenes where she interacted with Sherry or had Sherry meaningfully take note of her existence before this point. Yet, whatever dynamic the writers may or may not have been aiming for between these two is, at best, underutilised in the final duel, if not completely ignored, at worst. Instead, the writers shift their focus to Crow and try to make us believe that Sherry, a character who has barely acknowledged his existence thus far, would know him well enough to consider him the better target for her attempt at manipulation. (And don't get me started on how the hell Z-ONE's weird robot magic is supposed to expose what Crow "desires deep in his psyche". That is simply a chasm the show expects us to suspend our disbelief over.) And look. The thing is, I don't think the Big Moment where Sherry tries to convince Crow to forfeit is terrible in isolation. Like, they could have made this work, had they given these two setup, had they given us, the audience, reason to believe Crow could be swayed like this (which they, notably, also didn't), and had they given us the impression that Sherry knows Crow well enough to pull something like this. What hurts the scene immensely, however, is that it's preceded by everything before, starting from the WRGP, where there is no setup between these two, no reason to believe Crow could be convinced to forfeit a duel against a major antagonist, and no meaningful interactions to support the belief that Sherry knows who Crow really is at all.

What also stands out to me is that Crow really doesn't feel like the best character to parallel Sherry, here, either. Parallel in the sense that she tries to get to him by expressing a desire she believes they both feel—getting a certain, nicer version of the past they never had back. Because the thing is, Sherry and Crow hardly feel like they have very much in common, and there's certainly no previous hints to make anyone believe they would have this in common. (So for all we know, Sherry could have just been taking a shot in the dark by trying to convince Crow.) You know who could have made for an excellent character to mirror Sherry, though? Yeah. The third person in the room during this scene. Aki.

See, here's the thing about these three as characters, in relation to what this scene tries to accomplish (getting a protagonist to waver by having the antagonist appeal to certain emotional similarities between them): While Crow may perhaps be more relatable to the audience, he isn't all that relatable to Sherry. He comes from dirt poor origins, she from rich ones. He doesn't even remember his parents, she defines herself by the memory of hers. She's a lone wolf, he's incredibly community-focussed. The only parallel you could have drawn between these two, up until this duel, is knowing what it feels like to want revenge. (Sherry with her parents, Crow with his kids back in the DS arc.) But guess what, unfortunately, Aki knows that too, what with her past as the Black Rose Witch and wanting to make people pay for ostracising her. And to make matters worse, she has a lot of other things going for her that parallel Sherry much, much better, too. They both come from well-off families, both have had major, traumatising events in their lives revolve around their parents, both left their initial family structure by way of drastic changes in their life, both are intimately familiar with the desire for vengeance, and, most damningly, Aki knows what it's like to stand on the side of the bad guys—like Sherry is doing in that very scene—because you feel like it's the only place that gives you hope/meaning. Not to speak of the fact that Aki, given her turbulent past with her psychic powers, would probably know exactly what it feels like to want a past you never had back. There would have been so much to work with there, and it makes whatever they were gunning for with Crow look... lacklustre, to put it mildly, by comparison.

The worst part is, I think, that the blame lies neither with the characters nor with the scene concept here. Solely with the execution. Because I truly think they could have made this work. They could have made the entire duel work, big character moments and all. But the keyword is and always has been setup. Setup, which the writers, at least in part, strangely gave to Aki, but not to Crow, which is what hurts particularly his portion of this duel, and, arguably, his character writing in general. Because—and this may be a small thing in the grand scheme of things, but permit me this—while Crow wanting a better future for the kids he used to take care of over a better future for himself feels perfectly on brand, the idea of him forfeiting a duel against a major antagonist, while the threat of the entire city being destroyed is hanging above his head... doesn't. Like, yes, I've talked about the fact that Crow is the only character in 5Ds who ever actually loses duels on purpose. What you may remember, though, is that both occasions we've seen him do this—against Lyndon and Yaeger, respectively—were much lower-stakes duels than this. Not to speak of the fact that it also feels a little odd that Crow, of all people, would buy into the idea that Z-ONE's genuinely powerful enough to just give those kids their parents back, given how liberally he called bullshit on pretty much any and all supernatural mumbo-jumbo claiming that fate is inevitable, or that the gods have this-and-that power, or what have you the entire show. (Also, doesn't he strike you as the guy who'd wonder why Z-ONE's not using his fancy powers for better things, if the extent of them is so great? Or is that just me?) It's a moment of character doubt that tries to sell itself as believable, even though we've never been given any hints that this kind of temptation, specifically, could work on Crow.

Ultimately, Crow & Aki VS Sherry feels like a very hot-and-cold duel. On the cardplay side, the teamwork between Aki and Crow is well done, yet the duel does feel like it skews more towards Aki than towards Crow. Sherry, meanwhile, plays tricky and mean like a proper antagonist, but does so at the expense of sacrificing all her previous tactics and monsters (and, arguably, some of her character, though this is probably on purpose, given her transformation into an antagonist). Then, on the character side, we've got Aki in an interestingly Yusei-ish role, which, while it feels like a good way to show how she's matured and learned, wastes her character dynamic with Sherry. On the other side, Crow and Sherry interact in several personal ways throughout the duel that leave you wondering when exactly these two got to know each other so well, because the show certainly didn't give us a visible progression of their dynamic. The only dynamic that leaves nothing to be desired is that between Aki and Crow (stilted speeches aside), because it excellently showcases their friendship and teamwork. Very weird decisions made in the writing here all around.

We'll get into the nitty-gritty of what changes I would have suggested to improve this duel below, but first: What happens after this duel? Well, two more Yusei gear duels, Aporia briefly standing up to Z-ONE, and then, the final, big clash between Yusei and Z-ONE.

Given that Crow isn't even present for two of these duels and then barely gets more to do than stand on the side and react during the final two, I will dare to skip all that, though. Because really, Crow's occasional comments and the play-by-play he sometimes joins the others in giving when spectating a duel don't exactly contribute anything to his character. They're just there so he gets something to do and doesn't fade into the background entirely when a duel that doesn't involve him is going on. This includes the moment where he, much like the other signers, gets to give Yusei Black-Winged Dragon for the final duel, as well as the later moment when Yusei uses it, chanting in tandem with Crow as BWD arrives. And other than that and the tear-jerking moment when he later reacts to Yusei returning despite all odds, he really doesn't get any noteworthy scenes.

In other words, we are skipping straight to the end. So, where do we find Crow there?

(Oh, y i k e s.)

There's a popular post circulating around this site that goes something like "the worst thing you can do to a character is make them a cop during a timeskip". And, look. I don't think I need to tell anyone that becoming a sector security officer is an extremely jarring character choice for Crow. Crow, of all people! The guy with the face full of markers, who used to be part of a duel gang, who was introduced in the show gleefully stealing from security Robin Hood-style, and who has every reason to despise law enforcement! (Leaving aside the obvious logistical issue that Crow in no country in the world could have completed his police training in the few months between the Ark Cradle debacle and this scene. But given that 5Ds generously brushes realistic concerns like this one aside on multiple occasions, this is, funnily enough, the thing I'm also more willing to overlook here. The character dissonance, however, less so.)

I'll try to be generous and guess that the writers were aiming to convey a message somewhere along the lines of "even someone who's done bad things in the past can become an example for others" or something like it. The problem is just that Crow didn't need any such message because he was already the good guy while he was still actively stealing from security. He was the lovable rogue to a T, damn it! But this, in particular, is a surface scratch hinting at a bigger issue, I think—namely, the issue of the show's complete pivot when it came to the depiction of law enforcement after the DS arc. Because when we think back to that part of 5Ds, good security officers were the exception, rather than the rule. And this is exactly what makes Crow of all characters becoming one even weirder. He would know, would remember how security used to treat him, his kids, his friends, his brothers. And if the idea here was that, well, he's trying to improve sector security by joining it and changing it from the inside, so to speak, then guess what was missing again: Our good, old friend setup. I'm starting to feel like a broken record. So yeah, I don't think a ton of people, whether they like or hate Crow, would disagree that this is a supremely weird position to put his character in.

As we find out through 5Ds' epilogue, however, his sector security job isn't quite what Crow actually wants, though. (And thank god, because that would have been such a bizarre position to leave him in.) Instead, we're shown fairly quickly that several duelling leagues are apparently trying to scout Crow out, and that he's tempted to accept one of the offers and go into pro duelling. This is at first shown in a short scene where something like a league scout follows Crow, then later, when the whole group—sans Jack, at first—is getting together and everyone starts discussing their futures. Aside from complaining a bit about his job and upsetting Aki without meaning to, Crow doesn't get much to do here, either. For what it's worth, at least him feeling tempted to ditch the security job feels more in line with the original Crow we got than with whatever strange twist the writers were going for after this shorter timeskip.

What follows is the very last duel of the show, the long-awaited Yusei VS Jack rematch, of course. And while he doesn't get to participate in this one, Crow, much like Aki and the twins, spectates the duel and ends up having an epiphany about what he wants to do. This epiphany ends up being that he does want to turn to pro duelling, and as a reasoning, canon provides us with this:

(As is known, intense card games are the only way to make children smile.)

Personally, I wouldn't say this is a terrible or out of character reason for Crow to decide to go pro. But there's more to that I'd like to discuss. First, though, let's take a quick look at where we find Crow after the second, bigger timeskip, which is inserted right in the middle of Yusei and Jack's final duel.

(Okay, yeah, I'm a sucker for the bullet earrings.)

The quick scene Crow gets here makes it unmistakably clear that he did go into pro duelling, just like he decided during the duel in the past, and not only that, he went into tag-team duelling and apparently managed to reach world champion status with his teammates. The above scene, however, is the exact same moment he decides to leave said team, so he can instead go solo and (presumably) try to beat Jack.

Now, we can discuss this in a bit more detail. Personally, I'm extremely in two minds about Crow being one of three characters, total, who ends up becoming a pro duellist after canon. Jack seems obvious, especially given the pivot back to his more Fortune Cup-esque persona the writers did around the Red Nova episodes. Rua also makes sense, given that Jack was his idol from the start. Crow, though, feels a little more complicated. The thing is, like so many things surrounding Crow in the Ark Cradle arc, the writers gave us no indication pro duelling is something he's really passionate about before this point. Worse, they didn't even really tell us what reason he saw to participate in the WRGP with his brothers beyond "could be fun". So there isn't really a connection here. The same thing goes for the fact that he specifically talks about teaching his teammates above, which is also something he wasn't associated with all that much previously. Though this one is admittedly less egregious, because at least Crow was seen briefly coaching Aki as she prepared to take his spot during the Unicorn duel. Still, while I wouldn't go as far as saying it's an out of character choice for Crow to go pro, it still feels a little odd that he went down the same route as Jack. Personally speaking, it feels like the writers didn't quite know what to do with him. Because as I said, Jack is obvious and Rua also makes sense, and I'd say the same goes for Yusei. Then there's Ruka, who is treated about as in-depth in the epilogue as she was throughout canon, and Aki, whose "setup" for her timeskip self was done extremely hasty and last-minute, but at least it was there. Between all of them, Crow occupies a weird spot where it doesn't so much feel like he ended up on the wrong trajectory for his life, as it simply feels like there were choices the writers could have made that would have fit him much better. What with his theme of legacy and community, trying to make Pearson's dream of a place where disenfranchised children can learn good life skills a reality would have been a good fit, for example. Especially considering his close ties to the Satellite orphans he used to take care of, which, funnily enough, are reinforced one more time as canon flips back to present day and Crow is seen bidding his kids goodbye.

("Come back"? When, precisely? And what part about "literally saved the world twice" doesn't qualify you as a hero to a bunch of kids ten times over already?)

Considering canon seems hellbent on making sure we know the signers went their separate ways and that they aren't anywhere near each other by the very end of the show, though, my guess is that Crow had to end up doing something like pro duelling, in order to get him out of New Domino City and away from the friend group whose shenanigans we were so accustomed to following by that point. Of course, there's also the argument to be made that Crow staying in NDC and getting a more community-focussed ending would have also been significantly less cool than making him a kickass pro duellist with bullet earrings, which circles back to how the writing interacts with its target audience.

The only thing that follows after this, then, is the big goodbye, and with that, ladies, gentlemen, and other lovely 5ds nerds, we have successfully followed bird boy's path throughout the entire show. And what a ride it was. (I did not think this analysis would end up stretching over a whole four posts.) Time for some closing thoughts before I do my thing and suggest some rewrites that could have made all this feel more coherent one more time.

Crow's character arc, if it can even be called that, feels about as hot and cold as his and Aki's final duel with Sherry over the course of the show. His introduction is fast-paced, he's made to be likable quickly, and his integration into the main protagonist group is as quick as everything else about his narrative. Between the way he shows up out of nowhere, briefly disappears without fanfare, and is then reintroduced with even more importance before slipping into the signer group like he's always been there, it truly feels like his entire inclusion in the narrative was a last-minute decision by the writers to include that one, additional character concept Kazuki Takahashi had originally created after all. If there was one way to describe his whole arc, it would be that it's a rush. At the start, the writers are in a hurry to make him likable, then they're in a hurry to make him a signer, then they're in a hurry to give us a whole backstory for him, then they're in a hurry to give him a believable character dynamic with Aki, and at the end, they're in a hurry to pay off a character dynamic with Sherry they didn't properly set up with him. You may notice that leaves significant gaps, and the lack of balance between those gaps and the rushes surrounding them, I believe, are part of why he's such a polarising character.

Crow is integrated so thoroughly into the signer group at the end of the DS arc that, much like Aki and the twins, he gets stuck in the position of being a character that cannot simply be removed from the narrative for a longer amount of time. And this, I think, ends up biting him in the ass, because in the gaps where the writers don't rush to do something big with him, it often feels like they don't quite know what to do with him at all. So, he instead gets relegated to small side tasks, like inane duels that don't affect the plot, or becomes the person who reacts to unfolding situations in whatever manner wouldn't fit Yusei or Jack. He feels like he's the third portion of the protagonist trifecta only in theory—the status of an equal third player seems to be what the writers had in mind, yet, looking at the show, it feels like an honorary title, at best, because the writing choices made for him don't convey anywhere near the same amount of thought and effort as those of Yusei and Jack. Crow's backstory doesn't intersect significantly with that of his brothers, his dragon is introduced way too late and never given an upgrade, he never gets to clash with Iliaster until the Team New World duel, and throughout the entire WRGP and Ark Cradle arc, there isn't a single duelling victory that's solely his. People who prefer other characters over Crow like to harp on about how much screentime he gets; I argue that this is exactly what showcases how poorly the writers took care of him in many instances. For as much as Crow is plastered onto the screen and given the aesthetics of an equal player in a protagonist trio, his many appearances are as much of a curse as they are a gift, because too many of them aren't spent setting up anything meaningful or developing his character in any way. Speaking of character development: There is none. Crow exits the show pretty much exactly the same as he entered it, brief security stint aside. And, look, this need not necesarily be a bad thing. Static characters exist and they have their place in stories. It's just that in Crow's case, his utter lack of development feels like another damning indicator of the writers' cluelessness when it came to utilising him, given his weird, sort-of-elevated-protagonist. Aki, who is so often weighed against him, gets significantly more development than he does. And though Jack also ends up in almost the same place at the end of the show as he was at the start, at least he had a dip in the middle where his character was somewhat malleable and not set in stone. Crow didn't.

What we end up with, then, is a character whose concept is perfectly fine on paper, but whose execution proceeded to turn him into the one and only favourite for some, and the embodiment of piss poor writing for others. Having now looked at pretty much his entire run in the show with a bloody microscope, I end up somewhere in the middle, myself. He's a good character and much of his writing is confusing at best, utter dogshit at worst. As for what decisions in the writing room led to him turning out like this, I'd still pay good money to know them. For what it's worth, I've tried my very best to make an educated guess as to all of them.

And now, for the final time, allow me to do my very best to suggest how the issues of the Ark Cradle arc could have been addressed in order to make Crow's part in it less messy.

In previous posts, I've split up my rewrite suggestions depending on one circumstance: Whether or not Crow stays a signer. However, this time, I will deliberately forgo this, for one, very simple reason—Crow's status as a signer doesn't matter one bit for the Ark Cradle arc. Regardless of whether he has a mark or not, his duel with Sherry remains unaffected, and so does his later timeskip-self. Thus, pick your favourite, both versions work for the Ark Cradle.

Now. Onto the elephant vengeful Frenchwoman in the room. Let me repeat my favourite word in this post one more time. What the dynamic between Crow and Sherry needed, more than anything else, in order to satisfyingly be paid off during their Ark Cradle duel, was setup. There was so much time Crow spent on screen doing fuck all, and some of that time could have so easily been allocated to him interacting with Sherry in a meaningful manner. (I'm side-eyeing especially his pre-WRGP duels. Those did nothing to add to his character and could have easily been replaced with episodes where he actually gets to talk to Sherry one on one.) And if not that, then the writers could at least have done themselves the favour of letting Aki talk to Crow about Sherry, which would have arguably set up their three-way clash even better. Moreover, show us how the hell these two characters parallel each other and how they differ, damn it! The main issue with the big moment Sherry and Crow had in the duel was that Crow's faltering and his sudden, deep understanding of Sherry came completely out of nowhere. So what if they had shown some of that earlier, then? What if they had shown where the lmits of Crow's resolve lie, what could get him to doubt himself? What if they had drawn the parallel of Sherry and Crow both supposedly being characters that sometimes wistfully think about a past they never had earlier? It would have done so much to make that duel hit exactly the way it was probably meant to. As a bonus, if we had gotten Aki and Crow talking about Sherry, too, the scene of talking Sherry out of helping Z-ONE could have been a team effort, just like their card playing was. Both of them would have reasons to know different aspects of Sherry each, and both could have brought up good arguments. And this is really all this duel woild have needed to be better on the story end, I think: A solid, narrative foundation to make it obvious to us why it has to be these three characters duelling, why it could have only been this setup, why it made the most sense to let these three bounce off each other. Crow only needs that extra step to slot in better with the girls here.

As for the epilogue, I don't think anyone will be surprised to read that I would have never made Crow a cop, not even temporarily. The depiction of law enforcement 5Ds gives us during the DS arc is too damning for that. However, given the way the ending is structured, he does need some sort of occupation that feels like it's not quite the right thing so he can later change his mind about it, of course. Here, though, is where I, purely in service of Crow's character, would suggest a change that probably doesn't work with the ending's final aim of separating the 5Ds gang by hundreds of kilometres each. I would let Crow go into pro duelling first, then let him figure out that's not what he actually wanted. Crow, to me, is a character who is so intrinsically tied to community and family that turning him into a solitary pro duellist—even if he claims to do it to make the kids back home smile—feels off to me. Thus, from a character standpoint, I would let him pivot back to wanting to take care of those kids. Either through what I suggested above, letting him carry on Pearson's dream, or, which also feels fitting to me, by letting him help out Martha again and setting him up as the guy who'll take over when she can no longer run the orphanage. It's not the cool, glamorous end the show gave him, but it's what feels more like the family-focussed guy we first met in the show. It doesn't gel with the idea of permanently separating him from the other signers, though, unfortunately. To do something like that while keeping his community theme, one would probably have to send him away to shack up with Brave or something, to help orphans in other countries. But this, I think, nicely showcases the dissonance between what Crow's character writing would suggest he might do at the end, and what the show demanded he needed to do so he'd no longer be close to the others. Because my focus, as always, is only on character here. And Crow, with his personality and his writing, feels like the character who chafes the most against the idea of striking out solo, abandoning his ties to the community he was so invested in previously. To that extent, the above suggestion is the best I can provide with what we were canonically given. If we wanted to keep the canon ending he gets and actually make it make sense why he suddenly wants to be a lone wolf pro, the only thing I could suggest would be more setup for that. (Ah, there it is again. One final time.) Show Crow having some actual competitive drive, show him enjoying the whole tournament thing more than he thought he would during the WRGP. Just give us something that shows why he would want to go down this path, and why some other things that were previously important to him might not be a priority anymore. It all comes back to setup.

*Deep breath*

So, here we are, then, and this is it. This is all I could make of Crow's character writing in the entire show. To everyone who read this post in its entirety, a heartfelt thank you. To everyone who read the whole series of posts in its entirety, I'm so glad you're as insane about this show as I am, it makes me feel incredibly appreciated. Hope you enjoyed the ride, more meta posts will come eventually, just about different topics. In the meantime, see ya.

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

medialog june 2k24

watched

wordplay - rewatched this documentary about crosswords and particularly about the annual crossword tournament put on by will shortz while waiting for the anesthesia from my wisdom tooth extraction to wear off and found it about as charming as i remembered... i love a doc about a subculture made up of endearing nerds. i first saw it when it came out and on revisit it also has some intensely 2004 vibes - in particular jon stewart shows up as one of their crossword-fans talking heads and it really brought home for me how influential he was on the development of internet tone (like to this day the reason so many people on reddit sound Like That is because they're trying to be jon stewart and failing...)

the bourne ultimatum - movie go zoom zoom! still not convinced matt damon can act

artists and models - i had never seen a dean martin/jerry lewis film before and i don't really want to again but i'm glad i saw this one (this is how i feel about the two (2) wes anderson movies i've seen, and also pulp fiction & tarantino). some great colors & costumes, a plot that goes surprisingly bonkers in a final third turn that reminds you it was the cold war (between that and all the stuff about comics & violence this one also functions as a real time capsule), and (my main reason for watching) shirley maclaine the love of my life is so adorable and funny as a daffy sweetheart in a role that really lets her (a former dancer) show off her gift for physical comedy.

the secret garden - the cast in this movie is so good, including the children in the starring roles, and while it doesn't even attempt to do anything with the book's deranged relationship with things like the british empire and the concept of disability, watching it really did bring me back to why the book has been so beloved - the fantasy at its heart is ultimately about hard humble work paying off and about friends teaching each other to be nicer, which are i think deeply appealing narratives for children in a way that people sometimes forget. it's so funny that part of what cures mary and colin of their bad personalities is meeting another unhappy rich child for the very first time!

humanist vampire seeking consenting suicidal person - this was slight but sweet, a darkly funny romcom with some style and heart. also i had never seen a french-canadian movie before i don't think and it was a fun surprise to hear them talking like "frenchfrenchfrenchfrenchRRRRfrenchfrenchRRRR." not an accent with which i have much familiarity!

jurassic park - my somewhat inexplicable, even to me, aversion to raiders of the lost ark had me avoiding action spielberg for basically my whole life but i gave this a shot thinking maybe i would appreciate it if not enjoy it and was absolutely GLUED to the screen from about five minutes in. i understand why other directors are like that about spielberg now, and also what jj abrams is trying to do all the time and failing because he doesn't understand how it actually works. this is like the most famous movie in the world basically and i've seen so many clips from it over the years and yet even waiting for them and expecting them to come i was ON THE EDGE OF MY SEAT! like WOW! truly a movie that feels like a theme park ride more than any other i've seen except maybe fury road. anyway as you statistically speaking probably already know this movie absolutely rocks, and not just for (1) laura dern and (2) jeff goldblum with his tits out.

citizen kane - spent the last weekend in june at two different marches & closed it out sunday night with a screening of the movie that made me bisexual <3 one day i'll figure out a way to articulate how this movie did what it did to me but for now i will just say that it is great and its reputation is deserved and orson welles is one of the most entertaining screen presences of all time and it looks so cool and beautiful all the way through and it is so so so so gay

interview with a vampire season 2 - my opinion on this is at this point well established lol finally some good fucking food!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

read

megan abbott, the turnout - this & the zadie smith book are further steps in me catching up with authors i lost track of during some bad reading years! when i heard that megan abbott was coming out with a book about sisters who run a ballet school i was like LOL because that's like the peak ultimate megan abbott premise (girls and the nastiness of both feelings and bodies and ambition and hunger and an atmosphere of nightmares and filth and the insane dynamics of a tightly knit but deeply dysfunctional world, all to the nth power), and guess what as a megan abbott fan i loved it :) all the bad reviews on goodreads for this are like "why is this book so gross? why is she sexualizing the nutracker? there were scenes in this book that made me feel dirty reading them. way too much focus on the wet leotard crotches of little girls" and i was sickos dot jpg the whole time. but actually i think the reason that this wound up being my favorite abbott since dare me is that at its core it's a book about a woman with an unbelievably fucked up childhood due to her incredibly fucked up dead parents and the suspense that gives the book its tension and its form is less about what's going to happen with the plot and more about whether she is at any point going to put it together that the things that happened to her when she was young were actually bad; the further the book goes, the more deeply you understand the walls of denial and distortion around her entire life. it rules.

david j. skaal, something in the blood: the untold story of bram stoker, the man who wrote dracula - as previously mentioned, i have some real qualms with some of his dracula readings, but overall i found this an addictively pleasurable tome - 600 pages and he kept them turning the whole time. i love a biography that starts off with some background on medieval ireland, you know? skaal is a good writer with an engaging but learned style, and the book is clearly both exhaustively researched and intended for popular audiences (albeit popular audiences who have definitely read dracula, but, i mean, who else is reading 600 pages about this guy?); reading it often feels something like having a drink with a professor who knows his stuff and is NOT afraid to gossip. dracula qualms aside i may investigate some of his other books, particularly his book on dracula screen adaptations, since i'm curious about those but don't necessarily want to, like, watch most of them, lol

bonnie jo campbell, the waters - book club book that was objectively certainly not terrible and which had some things i did like or appreciate, like an 11 year old girl obsessed with math (representation matters...) but which i found just about the most boring thing i have read in my life. like i would definitely say campbell is a better writer than, say, taylor jenkins reid (to name another book club book) or whatsherface who wrote the book of fried green tomatoes which we also read las year... but i found those books much more aggravating but also easier to get through than this book, which really requires you to have some level investment in, like, the natural world of rural michigan, but mostly made me feel so glad i don't live in a small town where all the men have guns.

zadie smith, swing time - it's funny because when i started this i was spending a lot of time thinking about how maybe plot and structure have become underrated, but then this was like a very long book written in the style of someone just kind of talking at you about their life, with plot events technically happening but never feeling like the driving force of the book, and i was totally riveted, which was a good reminder that you can get away with anything if you're a genius! smith is just such a keen observer of people and how they operate, and so allergic to relying on any kind of obvious assumptions about the relationships between demographics & personality or beliefs, even as demographic realities are such a key part of the fabric of the book... i was a little worried i would be disappointed by the fact that she abandoned the modernist-leaning experimentation of NW for a more straightforward, even chatty, style, but "you can get away with it if you're a genius" applies to that too. this book is also an absolute masterclass in the universal through the specific - i cannot emphasize how much literally not one thing the protagonist experiences has ever happened to me, how much our lives and backgrounds and personalities overlap not at all, and yet constantly i found myself aching with resonance over things like "it's so true that's what it's like when you have a mom" or "that really is what it feels like when you are young and sort of smart but also sort of stupid" (which if i were to define it briefly is i think more or less what the book is about).

listened

charli xcx, brat - i remain after all these years a true romance truther and continue unfairly to measure all her subsequent work, much of which is frankly too sophisticated and experimental for my listening taste even if i recognize she's Doing Something, but this album sounds great and has some bops. as a straight-through listen it was too rich for my blood, but i find myself enjoying the songs on shuffle mixed in with whatever else i've been into more than i would have expected from that first exposure, and also 360 has been stuck in my head more waking hours than not for like a month and a half now and i'm still not sick of it (although i think my favorite song on the album is 365, and not just because i think it's really funny that she ended the album with "the opening track coming out of the bathroom after doing cocaine"). plus as someone who HAS been listening to charli since whenever the video for "you're the one" dropped it is nice to see The Culture finally rally around her even if i remain a little puzzled over why now, the all-star remixes getting rolled out have been pretty delightful (LORDE!!!!!!!!), and it's nice to have the zeitgeist coalesce for a moment over something i too think is fun (especially since the other thing gay people love this summer is chappell roan on whom i have yet to be converted sorry to everyone i'm sincerely glad you're having a good time)

[coimbrabertone]

Motorsports Christmas: An After-Action Report.

May 26th, 2024 was one of the biggest days in motorsports, and it was freaking exhausting in the best ways possible.

So, everybody knows that the Monaco Grand Prix and the Indianapolis 500 are on the same day, well, the Charlotte 600 is on that day too, making for the triple. This year, the Catalan Motorcycle Grand Prix also fell on that weekend, so there was a quadruple of racing, and I was ready to watch it all.

I woke up around 5:30am - the joys of the Mountain Time zone - in time to watch MotoGP at 6am. Aleix Espargaro took pole on the factory Aprilia and Raul Fernandez on the Trackhouse Aprilia satellite bike lined up third, but it was Pecco Bagnaia in second that turned into the protagonist of the race. Bagnaia held off the likes of Jorge Martin, Marc Marquez, and Aleix Espargaro behind to take a calculated victory.

I was happy for Bagnaia, however, with Jorge Martin in second having a dominant championship lead, it did sort of feel like a pyrrhic victory. Bagnaia gives this controlled, smart victory ride but it doesn't really matter since he only scored five more points over his main championship rival. Add in the fact that Marc Marquez, who is toe-to-toe with Bagnaia in the fight for second, finished third. This means that Bagnaia leaves the Catalan Grand Prix 39 points behind Martin and just 2 ahead of Marquez.

That's not even the worst part.

Enea Bastianini - the rider I support - kinda had a meltdown this race. First, he starts eleventh, loses places off the start, and then got pushed off at turn one by Alex Marquez. Enea cuts the track to rejoin, receives a long lap penalty, refuses to serve it. He then gets gets pushed off again in a second attempt. Enea receives a double long-lap penalty for failing to serve the penalty, serves one but not the other, and then gets a thirty second penalty post race.

In his interviews, he called it a protest against unfair stewarding decisions.

On track, it led to him finishing eighteenth and out of the points.

This is particularly devastating as Jorge Martin and Marc Marquez - the guys in second and third - are fighting to take his seat for 2025. I already did a blogpost about this a few weeks ago and I have a lot to get to today, so I'll keep this brief, but yesterday was not a good day for Enea Bastianini.

The Monaco Grand Prix also happened. Swiftly moving on...

Joking. I'm joking. Monaco was actually pretty good this year. The Ferraris and McLarens qualified 1-3 and 2-4, respectively, so we got a fight between them rather than Red Bull dominance. Unfortunately, they decided to fight by going as slow as possible to prevent anyone else from pitting once they all got a free change of tyres under red following a scary first lap incident between Sergio Perez and the two Haas cars.

Still, it was a fight between Ferrari and McLaren and the top seven all put a lap on eighth place. That was as vintage F1 as you could get. It was also at vintage speeds with them running around four seconds off the pace, but hey, strategy shenanigans are fun.

Charles Leclerc won and proceeded to drop the Monegasque flag in front of the Prince of Monaco, twice. That is objectively funny and probably my favorite F1 moment of the weekend.

So, the Indianapolis 500.

Normally it would start shortly after Monaco, however, a rain front in Indianapolis delayed the 500 into the afternoon. This would wreck Kyle Larson's attempt to do the full 1100 mile double at Indy and Charlotte - more on that later - but it did actually lead to some great moments for me personally. Spending the hours in discords with other motorsports fans talking about when the rain might stop, when the track might dry out, when the race should start, whether Larson would stay or go...it all gave a very wholesome, community feel that I really enjoyed.

Then the race itself. It was amazing.

The clouds cleared, we got a partly cloudy afternoon with filled grandstands and a full 500-mile race around the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. We got a little bit of everything. Crashes (where thankfully nobody was hurt), engine failures, competing fuel strategies, sixteen different leaders - that's half the field! - and a last lap, penultimate corner pass for the win.

Now, I'm an Arrow McLaren fan. Alexander Rossi was a driver who I followed in F1 because I was excited at the prospect of seeing the first American driver in a decade. Rossi's F1 hopes with Marussia didn't work out, but he went on to Indycar and won the Indy 500 in his first attempt. Between the peak Andretti years where he had the knife between his teeth bringing the fight to the likes of Josef Newgarden and Scott Dixon, to now, where he's in that beautiful #7 white and orange McLaren, bringing the fight to the likes of...Josef Newgarden and Scott Dixon.

Then there's Pato O'Ward, the exciting, young, charismatic Mexican charger in the #5, driving an awesome orange and black car. It's perfect, he and Rossi have night and day cars, and they were slingshot passing each other in the Indianapolis 500 to save fuel. That was the happiest I was during the race, watching my two favorite Indycar drivers in my favorite team leading 1-2.

Then Alexander Rossi made his final pitstop for fuel.

They were racing to keep track position, so they fueled him just a bit short, and I fear that ultimately decided the course of the race.

Josef Newgarden cycled out in front at the end of the fuel cycle, Alexander Rossi attacked first, got in front, but immediately got overtaken again as he had to save a bit of fuel. Rossi would try again, but Newgarden would nose ahead, as would Pato O'Ward.

Pato O'Ward was a student of the Indy 500, so he knew he had to make the pass as late as possible to ensure that Josef Newgarden wouldn't be able to respond. Pato would lift in turn one on a number of final laps to stay second and keep the draft, before finally making the attack in turn one on the final lap...only for Josef Newgarden to come back at him in turn three.

There was nothing Pato could've done at that point.

Josef made the pass in turn three, got a good exit off turn four, and Pato didn't get enough of a draft to the finish line in order to stop him. Pato was rightfully devastated, Rossi ended up in fourth, behind the lead two in addition to third placed Scott Dixon, as a result of his fuel strategy.

It was utterly devastating.

But that's motorsport. The days that you lose are what make the days that you win more meaningful. The Indianapolis 500 happened in its entirety despite all the rain and the worries. Not only that, but NBC is saying that the preliminary ratings look to be over 5 million viewers for the race. A last lap pass, a back-to-back winner, and a ratings bump over last year. As much as I wish Pato or Rossi could've won that race, I've spent the last day making my peace with it. For now, I'll just be happy that Indycar as a sport snatched a victory from the jaws of defeat.

Then there was the Coke 600 at Charlotte.

I tuned in late thanks to the late Indianapolis 500, and I was pretty emotionally drained at this point, but a charge from Brad Keselowski at the end of the second stage got me motivated again. Brad Keselowski, the owner-driver of the #6 for the team I support in NASCAR - Roush Fenway Keselowski Racing, also known as RFK Racing - pushed his way up the field. He moved into second, and he was hunting down the leader, Christopher Bell.

I began to believe that, after a 1,113-day winless streak, Brad Keselowski would win two races in three weeks.

Unfortunately, as soon as he caught up to the back of Bell, it started raining.

To add insult to injury, Kyle Larson, who had run the Indianapolis 500 earlier that day and completed all 500 miles, finishing 18th after a pitlane speeding penalty, had just arrived at Charlotte. He was about to take over the #5 from replacement driver Justin Allgaier, only he never got the chance.

At this point, I was emotionally drained after three and a half races, so at around 8:45pm, I fully embraced my grandmother era and went to bed.

That wound up being the right decision, because despite waiting out the rain and attempting to dry the track, NASCAR would end up calling the race anyway when they hit the end of Fox's TV window. Christopher Bell would win the race, Brad Keselowski would have to settle for second.

I quite literally missed nothing by going to bed when I did.

So, I sorta got the result I wanted at Catalunya, a full-on positive result at Monaco, and narrowly had my picks finish second at both Indianapolis and Charlotte.

In the grand scheme of things, that's not a bad Motorsports Christmas.

And on June 14th and 15th, we have Motorsports New Years with the 24 Hours of Le Mans, so the Racing Holidays aren't quite over.

[eponymous-rose]

Had another RIDICULOUS fight in BG3 (major spoilers for Act 3!):

So there's my Tav, Shadowheart, Astarion and Karlach heading to the House of Grief. We get into a confrontation with Viconia DeVir, as you do, and suddenly there we are, somewhat underprepared (no elixirs, no dipped weapons), facing down an even 20 enemies on Tactician difficulty.

Okay. Okay. Shadowheart is isolated from the rest in the initiative order, so even though my fighter Tav and Karlach each whittle down one of the weaker enemies, the rest have ample time to bring Shadowheart down, again and again. I'm in a situation where I know that trying to keep her up is going to make things impossibly difficult, but I hate giving up the damage and healing (not to mention I really really want her to be conscious in case the game chucks me straight into a cutscene). I also don't want to Globe of Invulnerability this fight out of sheer cussedness.

Okay. Karlach and Astarion (tied at the top of the initiative order) are nearby, maybe they can get something set up? But oh, Shadowheart's gone down in a region of Darkness, so nothing can be thrown at her, including healing potions. I'm doing some complicated mental math with bonus actions and actions and trying to figure out how to get Shadowheart up, get some health into her, and get her out of the line of fire. My hail-Mary attempt to use Astarion to break concentration on the caster of Darkness fails, so I have to give up Shadowheart for dead (at least for now) and have Karlach leap over most of the enemies and flee up the stairs to at least force some of the enemies to waste their turn dashing up to follow her.

Shadowheart is immediately killed, and Astarion (exposed in his attempt to help Shadowheart) is unfortunately right behind her. Finger hovering over the "reload" button, I hesitate. Eighteen enemies remaining, just two very fighty girlfriends (Tav and Karlach) remaining alive. Wouldn't that be a cool story if it worked out?

Here we go. I have my Tav cast Haste on herself (she has it from some item or other - this version of Haste is 10 turns instead of the lesser amount you get with Potion of Speed, there's literally *no* downside!) and she starts wrecking shop. One turn: 3 dead. Another turn: another 3 dead. Meanwhile Karlach is whittling away at a few of the enemies up on the stairs, mostly just soaking up hits masterfully with the halved damage.

Uh-oh. Tav loses concentration on Haste (there's literally *one* downside!). From there, it's pretty quick - she's downed and killed within a turn, leaving Karlach alone at the top of the stairs. 10 enemies remain, most of them magic users with the ability to nullify healing, several of which are untouched with over 100 HP.

Uhhhhhh, okay. Let's try this. Karlach is wielding Nyrulna, which does more damage (as well as some extra damage in an AOE) if you throw it instead of using it in melee (it teleports back to her hand). She manages to throw it at a few of the enemies up close and pick off one, then jumps over one enemy, grabs another enemy, and throws that enemy at a third enemy. Just barbarian things, you know?

But things are starting to look rough. I have Karlach take a Potion of Speed at some point, mainly to do some running away from the enemies to force them to Dash on their turns, and I realize quickly that said Potion of Speed about to wear off, which means I will have one missed turn where I'm out of commission entirely and Karlach (who currently cannot heal herself due to a spell and will also lose her damage-halving Rage) will be dead.

Okay. Uh. What do I have in my inventory? Oh! Spell scrolls! Those might do some good, although I'll still be a sitting duck even after dealing some substantial damage. Or... wait, is that a Potion of Invisibility?

Karlach uses both of her actions to run to a side chamber, out of sight of the remaining ten enemies. She chugs that Potion of Invisibility.

The enemies all stare at each other. The enemies yell threats. The enemies do not come after her. Her next turn comes around, and she is immobilized by the lethargy at the end of the effects of the Potion of Speed, and her Rage drops. But she's still invisible! Another round of confused enemies yelling. And we're back!

The effect preventing her from healing is also gone, so I have her take a couple health potions over a couple more turns of invisibility. Now we're back to full HP, baby! Emboldened, but before going back to raging, she walks up to the Big Bad and uses a spell scroll to cast Disintegrate. 12% chance of killing her, 88% chance of 0 damage!

And... yeah, of course that didn't work. Not sure why I thought it would. Goodbye invisibility. Hello rage.

What ensues is a Yakety-Sax-worthy chase around the level, with Karlach sprinting a bit ahead, doubling back to throw the trident at a few enemies, then sprinting away. They're going to flank her, though, as she runs back towards the original staircase. Hey, there's a door here! She has juuuuust enough movement to pop inside. Hey, line-of-sight is a thing with most spells!

She closes the door behind her.

The enemies waste another turn just getting close enough to fling the door open, at which point Karlach has done some more healing and is ready for further violence. By this point more and more of the enemies have been dropping (including the Big Bad), and we're down to just five.

More kiting, more sprinting around, lots of jumps, strategic pushes, a few close calls, and Karlach is staring down the last 23 HP of her final enemy. Incredible. Amazing. A worthy feat.

.......wouldn't it be funny if I managed to rez all the other characters before finishing the fight?

Instead of dealing the finishing blow this poor Justiciar was doubtlessly expecting, Karlach cuts and runs back over to Shadowheart, pulling out a scroll of Revivify and bringing Shadowheart back as far from the remaining enemy as possible.

Shadowheart spawns in, baffled and at 1 HP. Shadowheart also is not currently in the initiative order. Shadowheart promptly heals herself to full and revivifies Tav, lying nearby, before both are pulled into the initiative order.

Karlach takes a hit from the remaining enemy, and then again when she pulls away to try to find Astarion. Yes, find Astarion. Our rogue has stealthed his dead body off the map. She fumbles around for a bit and finally just gets into melee with the last enemy and ends her turn. Amisra and Shadowheart are up, Amisra heals, and it takes a prod from @loquaciousquark for me to remember you can click on the character portraits along the side to target them directly. Shadowheart brings back Astarion and heals him!

Karlach, fire in her eyes, chases down the remaining Sharran and takes down the last little flicker of HP.

Final result: all 20 enemies killed, all 4 of my party members alive, conscious, and sitting at over half HP.

Exactly as planned.

[pray4saint]

invisible string

masterlist & descrip. pg. 13+. established relationship. bf!ted. soulmates but on accident, kinda. song inspired fic. fake locations used in story. swearing. playful use of 'whore' and/or 'bitch' referring to reader's friend. use of 'y/n' and 'f/n' for friend's name.

a/n. i'm a swiftie so inspired by invisible string by taylor swift, tags: @slxtmeri

”i'll be back in ten, alright?” you nod and your boyfriend kisses the top of your head before leaving your apartment and shooting you a smile on his way out the door. you'd completely forgotten about the fact that you were on the phone and they had to clear their throat to get your attention again. ”sorry– were you saying something?” you say with a sniffle at the end of your sentence. ”yeah but now i'm on something else.”

ted had gone out to get you more tissues and cough drops and more frozen pizzas because in the last week you'd come down with a cold and despite how much you told him he didn't have to go to the store, he did. he was just that boyfriend.

”right okay, what is it?” you ask, snuggling back down into the sofa, blanket pulled right up to your chin. ”okay your boyfriend ted, he looks like that one guy from uh,” they snapped their fingers a few times as if trying to order the memory back to mind. ”two-ish years ago, remember? at the lynx lounge-bar?” the air you exhaled came out almost as a laugh. ”first of all, how do you remember that?.. and second, you'd have to show me a picture 'cause i don't remember it.” they scoffed, before sliding out of the call to find it. ”give me like five minutes.” you used your hands to push yourself off the couch, ”while you're doing that, i'm gonna go make tea.”

”okay."

”aha! i fooouuund it! y/n!” you your phone up from the counter, shaking your head at your friend. ”yes? did you find it?” that question comes out a little more sarcastic than you intended but this was one of your close friends, it didn't really matter. ”yeah, i found more than one. they're sending right now.” your lips form into a little 'o', and you tap out of the facetime call to open your text messages.

to say you were surprised was an understatement. it was ted in the photos with you. one with your head buried into his shoulder while he struggles to hold you up. another at a booth with you sitting on his lap, surrounded by your at-the-time large group of friends and one or two of his. your jaw seemed to drop farther after each picture. the third was horribly shot, with you and ted laughing while trying to dance. then the fourth was actually a video, music blasted but still you could hear your own giggles into ted's arm and shoulder and neck as he jumped around to the song with you on his back. you guys were wasted wasted. ”oh my god.” you let out a breath you didn't even know you were holding in. ”that is him. at least, it looks like him. uh,” glancing up at the time, ted should be home any minute, you smile. ”how did you remember that, damn.” your question isn't rhetoric but it's still a statement and you tap back into the call to see your friend, muted, laughing their ass off. ”unmute yourself you whore.” again, they burst into a fit of laughter but this time you can hear all of it. ”i'm hanging up.” you say and they put a hand up in defense, ”wait–” wheezing. ”WAIT BITCH,” a cough and attempt to catch a breath. ”does he know?” you smile, sniffling, trying to bite back the laughs that want so badly to escape. ”he will when he gets home, and when he does i'm hanging up on you–” your eyes flick up to the turning of the door handle and you wave at your phone. ”bye bitch.” the last thing you hear is a cut-off gasp before you end the call.

”hey teddy,” you coo, tossing your phone onto the other end of the couch, pulling the blankets snug around your middle. ”hi sweetheart. you alright?” it never failed to amaze you how often ted would ask if you were alright. ”yeah, just got off the phone with f/n.” you smile as he marches over to you, leaning down for a quick kiss before continuing on to set the bag of goods on the table. ”oh, anything interesting?” he wasn't even looking at you, he was moving items from the table to the cabinets but he was still invested in what was happening despite having only been gone for ten minutes. ”yeah actually,” you start to trail off, thinking about the right words to say. unfortunately, nothing comes of your short contemplation so you just blurt it out. ”do you remember being at the lynx lounge-bar approximately two years ago?..” your voice dies out at how specific the question sounds as you say it. ted's head turns to you and his face is scrunched up in confusion. he sets the last item down on the counter and steps closer to the back of the couch, leaning over you. ”maybe. why?”

maybe you did sound a little crazy to him, because what reason would you have for bringing up something he barely remembered? ”just something f/n mentioned is all.” you didn't smile, although your voice gave away how excited you were. ”okay y/n what's going on? am i about to get sniped or ambushed?” despite his serious-ish tone, you knew he was joking. still, you rolled your eyes at him, and reached across the couch for your phone. ”i was there that night.” you voiced, opening the photos that f/n had sent you. ”and you're never gonna believe this teddy, we,” you looked back up from your phone at him and gestured between the two of you with your index finger, ”were there together.” you turn your phone to face him with a smile on your face.

”what? there's no way.” he got up close to the back of the couch to look at your phone screen. his eyes seemed to have been lost in the pixels. ”that is you, right?” you ask, pointing to the man in the picture who is most obviously your boyfriend. ”yeah, i just, wow. talk about fate.” he smiles, eyes still on the photo. ”almost like an invisible string, huh?” he asks, standing up and moving to stand behind you, hands on your shoulders. ”yeah, like an invisible string.” you mutter as he leans over, placing a small kiss atop your head. ”and y'know y/n, if the universe wanted us to be together so badly, we should make sure it's forever right?” he asks, and watches as you straighten your back and turn around where you're sat. ”oh?” you already knew what this was about, all your friends knew, your family knew, his audience knew how badly he wanted to marry you. ”just a heads up sweetheart.” he headed back for the kitchen to get you more medicine to take.

pray4saint© do not copy, translate or repost my work without my express permission.

[luveternals]

paring: Konig x rebel reader. rating: mature, MDNI cw: dystopia AU, enemies to lovers, angst, (not a story, just a sneak peak of the 1st version, sorry. link to thd completed story!) a/n: I haven't forgotten to post nor did I just decided to drop writing or whatever. This story just turned out to be more complicated than originally planned. Lie, I haven't planned bananas. I literally had no idea what to write until 3h ago and I was already 5h past the time I wanted to post the third story lol hate to do this but I'll have to push it back to my next scheduled day. ~ sneak peek of the 1st version ~ full story in 2 days ~

It’s difficult to stay true when the goal you’re trying to reach is not your own. Well, you do support the idea, somewhat, you wouldn’t be here otherwise. Wouldn't be taking cover behind a broken wall, breath forcefully kept slow and stead, and hoping the shadows would be enough to cover your tracks. Wouldn’t be risking your life for a mission that is destined to fail.

It’s an trap and, somehow, you feel your leaders knew it and still sent you out.

One of your brothers lays dead at your feet, his blood stains your feet and will lead the enemy to you the moment they find the footprints.

There’s a soft sniffle and you spin around to slap your hand against one of your sisters’ mouth. She stares at you and you stare back, your hand leaves a red imprint on her face and you see her twitch with the desperate need to wipe it off.

It was a set up. You’re all going to die. But your mission isn’t over yet.

She’s crying.

Go. You tell he with a motion of your free hand. She shakes her head eyes wide with panic, but you're already pushing her back. Go and live.

You don’t check if she does, body turning and slipping around the corner before you could even register any further protests.

The sound of fighting seems to be coming from all directions. Your family is fighting with all it has while you give your last attempt to make this total failure some kind of meaning.

You’re almost at the end of the alley when you stumble to a stop. A man stands there, body covered in gear and rifle steady in his hands as he points it in your direction.

He doesn’t say a thing but doesn’t move either. Don’t move or i’ll shoot, his posture says.

Your own gun is raised, solid and loaded and aimed at his head. “Get out of my way,” you says, throat dry and voice a breathless demand.

But he’s a solid obstacle. One taller than most and built to fight until his heart is forced to stop beating. He simply blinks and your grip tightens around the weapon.

“I will shoot you,” you say, but there is no real threat behind the words.

And he knows.

He lowers his gun at the words and, with movements smooth and so damn steady, pulls his head gear off.

His face is still hidden away whatever cloth he’s using doesn’t give much away about what one would find underneath it.

But the design has come so familiar to you during this fucked up war that your grip falters.

“I’m not letting you do it,” he says, and his voice and accent at the last hit your heart can take.

You arms go slack, and your head drops forward. Rain had started trickling at some point, the grim and filt of your boots and clothes polling at your feet. “Do you know how much i’ve lost for this?”

He doesn’t say anything but the silent words he must be thinking make your fists bench into fists.

“Your killing my brothers!”

“And you're killing mine,” his words take you by surprised, you didn’t expect him to say anything at all. Not about this.

What you did expect was him to hide away behind his social anxiety. Behind the excuse he doesn’t know how to act around others, that he doesn't know how to express his feelings properly.

Instead, he braves on — the only time finally does — and associates to the enemy.

~ ~ ~ a/n: I'm a bit of a perfectionist and this is actually killing me. But it's the middle of the night and I'm kinda sick. Whatever mistake I made is my own and will be gone soon. have a good night. enjoy your day. please forgive the delay ;^; it's only the third day damn

[bau-drabbles]

condescending Hotch thoughts (?)

i'd really like to write you a "normal" ask but my mind is plagued with Hotch and you just enjoying a night out in the early phase of your relationship and then things get heated when you arrive at his apartment. You would love nothing more than him having his way with you but he'd be all like "sweetheart, i'm trying to be a gentleman here, you really want me this much you can't behave after a date?" thoughts 😶

i'd really like to write you a "normal ask" but there are also Hotch surprising you (trying to) pleasure yourself but failing because your touch can't compare to his :( "sweetheart i'm home, did you- oh, and what do we have here? Having fun without me i see.." (all accompanied with a little smirk of course) you don't answer but you make a weak attempt at finishing your actions but you just can't 😕 "oh no honey, what's up? you can't finish without me cause I ruined you for anything else that isn't me?"."aaron...wanna feel good..." your tone is weak, you feel defeated but you know he's right. "yeah? you wanna? good thing morgan took some of my paperwork so i could come home early, huh?" you aren't understanding what he's saying anymore and you can only focus on the fact that he'll make you feel VERY good soon "honey? honey you there? oh i know my princess is somewhere in her thoughts but the sooner i'll make her cum the sooner she'll remember that it's my privilege to do so" thoughts 😫

or even Hotch finding out you want another child with him while not being so subtle about it one night you would just be there in your bed and he would start nuzzling your neck: "can't believe how greedy you are, i've already given you two children and you want to repeat it all over again? okay honey it's fine, i know your cycles and you'll be ovulating in a couple days, it's the perfect time"  you can't stay still at the thought of another mini hotchner growing inside you again and experiencing the path and the pleasures of a third pregnancy with him thoughts 💜

AGH I'D GIVE HIM AS MANY KIDS AS HE WANTS

🍐 anon (i usually go by this in different blogs, but if you already have a pear anon i'll change emoji 😊)

(sorry I am in a Hotch brainrot these days and my cycle isn't really helping but it makes me h word and emotional for him and my other 2636 crushes- oh how I wish fictional men were real)

OH MY GOD 😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫 please i'm in LOVE with condescending hotch don't ever write normal hotch asks these ones are perfect!!!! 😵‍💫❤️‍🔥❤️‍🔥

ESPECIALLY when you've been acting a bit like a brat and you're really needy but your fingers just won't cut it but he doesn't even help. he just watches you with a smirk, instructing you to continue with a cocky tone. "what happened, baby? what happened to that temper of yours??"

but then he does eventually take over, his legs separating yours and all of it was worth the wait when he practically devours you 😵‍💫

he's so in love with making you cum different ways, always teasing more out of you when you're overstimulated and panting for breath "come on honey, one more? for me, sweetheart?"

he always has you blurring the line between pleasure and pain, every cell and every nerve ending coming to life that erupts in a sensation that steals every single breath from your lungs. with every orgasm, his name rising to the heavens as they leave your lips sung only for him but meant for all to hear

you can't tell me this man doesn't have the biggest breeding kink ever 😩 you just look so damn pretty all filled with him, he can't help it everytime. his lil princess all filled with his seed, he can't help but devour you everytime.

i don't want babies but i'd have his in a heartbeat pls!!!

[the-cinnamon-snail]

Okay I'm not normal about Lego Monkie Kid this is a known fact but I was listening to Mitski last night and now I have. Words. Over how Mitski songs connect to LMK characters because I am not normal.

These are kind of long so I'll only do one section of how songs tie in with LMK characters per post because I have a lot of words.

This is part one, and it's under the cut due to the length!

Okay so obviously I'm going to start with the obvious one to me, that being Mitski's song 'Remember My Name' and Wukong.

With the first chunk of lyrics, I was already thinking of Wukong. The first three lines to me obviously connect to how, when Wukong and the brotherhood failed to remove the Jade Emperor from power, he was trapped alone under the Five Phases Mountain for 500 years. Wukong obviously missed the Brotherhood during that time, even if he argued with Macaque when he came to visit him (that being the 'and make some extra love' line to me because it's a question. Not guaranteed). Then, Wukong was freed by Tripitaka, and had to go on the Journey To The West, eventually thinking of the pilgrims as his new family, that being 'tomorrow's show' in my mind.

Speaking of the 'tomorrow's show' line, I think it leads into sort of how Wukong puts up a mask around people. He acts all confident, like a hero, and ignores all the wrong he's done to not worry people and to come off as a pillar of justice. That and I also like connecting it to Wukong's stage fright despite that fact.

The second chunk of lyrics is where it really gets good in my brain. Wukong needs people to remember him even after all he can do for others (be that the attempt to take down the Jade Emperor or even the Journey To The West) is done. It's his constant reckless acts without thinking of the consequences of his actions in an attempt for immortality, to live forever, to know what people think of him forever. He wanted to be immortalized, his name to be remembered. And it's a bit ironic because one of the ways Wukong did that was quite literally scratching his name out of the book of the dead.

The third chunk of text, Wukong needing something bigger than the sky, wanting all the immortality (cause c'mon, seven times is kind of overkill), he wants to know for sure that it's his. Also, during his time with The Brotherhood and even beforehand, breaking into the celestial realm and causing The Havoc In Heaven, trying to take down the Jade Emperor. All of these reckless actions Wukong did because he surrounded himself with strong people (in his eyes, stars) who encouraged him. Also ignoring Macaque who tried to warn him of the consequences, ignoring that it was dangerous and could be damaging. By ignoring the person who likely cared about Wukong the most, he lost everything, lost the chance to call his world 'heaven'.

The repeating of those chunks of lyrics to me signifies Wukong time and time again trying to reach out for something, someone to hang on to, but losing it. Losing the brotherhood due to self destructive tendencies and being trapped for 500 years, and losing the pilgrims due to the immortality that Wukong had worked so hard for before knowing them. He lost his grip on what he loved, no longer being able to 'hold it in his arms', even if it was his, his found family.

Also something about the lyric changing from 'to finally call it heaven' to 'something like heaven' to me sounds like Wukong finally realizing what he wants but still being unable to obtain it due to careless actions.

-

If you read all the way here I'd appreciate a reblog <3

Part two can be find here! ↓