#this was supposed to be a blank person with no defining features

[temporarilyunspokensneezes]

Bringing a hand up like they're going to cover their sneeze....only to duck away from the hand to the side and sneeze freely in the other direction

[homunculus-argument]

You know that feeling when you've only ever known someone as an old person, and then you see a picture of them when they were younger and you just go "...where's the rest of them?" like they look weird without the marks of age on them, that doesn't look like the person you know. You can't picture this person as someone close to your own age, and trying to see them as such just feels weird. Like they're missing all their most defining features, which you hadn't previously considered are mostly marks of ageing. This person in the picture just looks blank, on default settings. That's not how this person is supposed to look like.

That's kind of what I'm hoping for, in the long run. That it's perfectly fine that I look like a chewed-up piece of gum now, because eventually I will be an old man and people will be used to seeing me as an old man, and if they ever happen to encounter a picture of me from when I was like 30, they'll just think "oh what the shit, he looked like a chewed-up piece of gum."

[songofthesibyl]

More thoughts on Tamlin as a High Lord

I recently saw an interview with David Mitchell about British kings, particularly of the Middle Ages. Early on, he says point blank:

“They were all right bastards, basically, in terms of—the standard of conduct is woefully below what we’d expect.”

When asked what makes a good king or queen, he says:

“All of the things we expect from government today, you’ve just got to ignore that. They’re not trying for any of it, they’re not trying for peace—on the contrary, they’re waging war. In terms of education and healthcare, they’re just—they’re not interested, forget about it. Um, so all you can expect is stability. That’s—the good kings provide stability. The bad kings don’t. And the stability comes from being predictable in your actions, and firm, and not having favorites. And I think that’s why the people, you know I’m—you know Henry the First was particularly good at that. He’s even-handed, he didn’t have a clique. The worst kings, the ones that caused the most trouble—Richard the Second, Edward the Second, Henry the Sixth—have favorites.”

(Is the Inner Circle a clique? Who knows.)

But this brings up a sense of confusion I get about what makes a good leader in Prythian. Lucien and Tamlin both describe how brutal Prythian is in the first book; Lucien emphasizes this again in the next two books—that High Lords are a different “breed.” We see what Rhysand is capable of—we know what the fathers are and were capable of. This is a very regressive, patriarchal, toxic society overall. Are the Courts not featured as much—Dawn, Winter, Day, and Summer—any better? From what we see of Summer, there is a class divide, Cresseida mentions their obligation to return Feyre to Tamlin. Kallias doesn’t seem that enthused about Viviane being High Lady, nor has he apparently mentioned it before. Rhysand is supposed to have basically invented feminism. No women thought to change things before, or had any support in doing so—from anyone, including the magic of the land—before Feyre became High Lady. Because this is the kind of society described in the quotes above. It is a Game of Thrones-esque, medievalist world, and women thrive only on an individual level because of partners or family members like Rhysand. Who have the wherewithal to make said changes and protect the women they make them for (in Feyre’s case, anyway).

But then all of a sudden Tamlin is, alone, an absolute monarch. He alone is a tyrant, though an absolute monarchy is inherently a tyrannical form of government. He alone adheres to tradition, he alone is “conservative,” whatever that means in this world. He alone refuses the existence of High Ladies, he alone hoards wealth. His government is regressive, and patriarchal, and toxic—not Prythian’s as a whole. He stands apart in a bad way. What he does, according to SJM, is bad even for Prythian.

And I think this has to be referring to his personal sins against Feyre of course, his mistreatment of her. But as a leader—it has to be his general instability. He is out of control, unpredictable. Before, according to Rhysand, he wasn’t enough of a bastard, he was too stubbornly Stark-like in his morals (even if he resembles Theon more in the timespan of the novels).  

Now, he isn’t upholding the contract—his role had become defined by being a provider and protector of his Court—a traditional male role, yes. But also, the very basic role of a government. Is presenting a united front, showing strength weaknesses of Tamlin’s, or simply how leadership is seen in every world, for better or worse (mocking presidents when they cry on camera, for example). I saw an  ACOTAR analysis in which Tamlin is simultaneously decried as the epitome of toxic masculinity, and mocked because the fiddle/violin is not a masculine instrument.

So Tamlin rightly has consequences for his transgressions, and it’s one of the things that makes him such an interesting character. But bad even for Prythian? A tyrant compared to the rest of the High Lords? Regressive compared to the rest of the High Lords? Unstable compared to the other High Lords?

A history:

It was a shock to everyone when Feyre was High Lady.

Rhysand felt the need to re-enact UTM in his own Court. He pulled rank with Mor regarding her father in ACOWAR. The state of Illyria and the CoN is accepted as the status quo. Its citizens can’t leave, but it’s implied most of them are monsters anyway, that Rhys has been cursed to deal with. He still has to placate them as part of his army. He does what he can for Illyria, but the culture is almost too ingrained at this point, and its citizens also part of his army. 

The people of the Spring Court (at least the nobility) did not flee when Tamlin’s father risked war with the Night Court by slaughtering its High Lord’s mate and daughter. It fled when Tamlin became High Lord. 

The people of Autumn presumably didn’t flee when its High Lord murdered his own son’s lover in front of him, forcing him to watch. 

There is no word of a rebellion in the Summer Court after its nobility left the commoners to die in the attack on Adriata.

Every Court practiced slavery, and not all fought to end it.

Even with Tamlin—Tarquin knew about Feyre being locked up shortly after it happened; so presumably Spring would have known as well. He executed the sentries who failed to protect Feyre from Mor, in public view, with Lucien begging mercy. The mass exodus didn’t happen until Feyre returned, when the whipping, along with his violence against Feyre, finally convinced everyone to leave. 

David Mitchell, on Henry the First: “What you have to do—you have to be horrible. They were all horrible, you have to be willing to kill at a moment’s notice. But if you do it with a rationale, you do it even-handedly, you don’t have favorites, and you have some notion of the stable government you want to be heading towards, then—then it can work out. And he created a very peaceful kingdom. Albeit through violence. And—and in those days, that’s sort of as good as it gets.”

Tamlin had proven to them, at that moment, that he was not to be trusted, that he had betrayed them, that he didn’t have their interests at heart. That he was not in his right mind, even. And so they abandoned him. Even if it was partly due to mind control and manipulation.

Something is fundamentally rotten with the Spring Court’s training, and yet they abandoned Tamlin when he went too far—and the CoN, the Autumn Court, remain intact.

In reading through the books, even if he doesn’t stand out in a good way as a revolutionary leader (even if he might want to be, deep down)—how does he stand out as a bad leader compared with the ones we’ve spent any time with? How is he just as bad as his father when he doesn’t support slavery? How is he bad as a leader even for Prythian? What are the standards? Other than his instability after UTM.

This is why, reading these books, I suspended disbelief and enjoyed the story, because, really, they’re all right bastards. I am not looking for crumbs, making up something that isn’t there. I get he was a bad leader from ACOMAF onward, though it wasn’t as if he fought with Hybern in the end. But I simply didn’t see how, as a High Lord, he fundamentally differed from everyone else.

People say this isn’t a Game of Thrones-esque series. It’s romantasy. So why is politics in it at all? Why are people writing essays at equal length as this with quotes from the book about what a horrible High Lord he is? Why is it relevant? And how am I expected to turn my brain off for certain parts of the story and not others? I can’t.

[actual-bill-potts]

and all his towers cast down makes me jumpy in the best of ways. I am not usually an AU person, much less an enjoyer of this sort of extreme canon divergence, but this one really works for me. Can you talk a little about what motivated you to write it? Have you sorted out the endgame yet? That tag How to cope when ten ppl got eaten alive in front of u is so rich in potential! Thanks very much :)

adfkldsajk thank you so much for this ask, my answer is going under a cut cuz it's gonna be LONG

first off thank you so much for your kind words, it always makes my day to hear that someone is enjoying my work!!

Second off, this AU was motivated by a variety of things. Some of my thought process is actually laid out in this post: I originally wanted to see Maglor and Lúthien girlbossing together (bc people always pit Daeron vs Maglor when Lúthien is clearly the superior singer...) and then I thought "omg I bet Maglor and Lúthien together would fuck up Angband" and then I thought I have to write this. Originally Finrod wasn't even going to play much of a role - rescuing him was just a catalyst for the plot!

But I am Finrod's #1 stan and the more I thought about his death/possible rescue, the more I realized just how much fell apart with his loss, and how cruel his death was. The guy most famous for having friends everywhere rode near-friendless to his ending and died after losing everyone who stuck with him. I decided: he deserved better, and thus the story took its current form, with one thread following Maedhros and Fingon dealing with the political fallout of the Nargothrond debacle, one thread following Beren, Luthien, and Maglor on the Silmaril Quest, and one thread following Finrod's recovery.

I have sorted out the endgame, although this fic continues to grow in scope. Originally it was going to be 10 chapters max and just feature Maglor stealing the Silmarils; now it is semi-plotted all the way through to the War of Wrath and I'm considering starting a series to fully cover all the themes I want to hit. Suffice to say this story is going to be going on for a very long time, haha.

I am proud of that tag you mentioned, because for all that Finrod wasn't initially supposed to feature that prominently in this AU, I think the tag sums up at least a third of what I want the story to be about. Finrod's story is particularly tragic to me because he loses so much of what defines him as a character in Tol-in-Gaurhoth. He's the Friend of Men, but nearly all of the Bëorians died in the Dagor Bragollach, and Finrod dies believing that he was unable to protect the one remaining descendant of Balan. He's a noted diplomat, but with one request Thingol has entirely torn apart any future hope of complete allyship/harmony between the Noldor and the Sindar. He's the King of Nargothrond, except the Nargothrondrim turned away from him. He went across the Ice for love of his cousins, but Turgon is gone and the Fëanorians betrayed him. The symbolism isn't subtle - he literally dies in the tower he built, that's been turned to evil and destruction...

So what I really want to explore in the Finrod part of this fic is: how would that have changed him, if he lived? Could he recover, from being torn apart so thoroughly? Would he want to? What would he choose to do about the whole Thingol situation, about Nargothrond, about the Union of Maedhros (should it arise)? And of course, there's one person who underwent a similar experience of being torn apart and unmade: what would Maedhros think about all of this? Would he be able to help?

Writing this story has been a true joy and a discovery, because the characters have come so fully alive in my head and I keep discovering things they would be concerned about/do/say that never occurred to me during my (minimal) outlining. For example, Beren was not initially even intended as a POV character, but he's such a fascinating kind of blank in the Lay that I felt an overwhelming curiosity about what he would have thought about in the wake of his rescue. Fingon wasn't really going to make an appearance in this fic, but then I thought - he surely helped with Maedhros' recovery, could he help with Finrod's? How would he respond to the Nargothrond debacle? And he must have been devastated to learn about Finrod's death, coming so close after he lost Angrod, Aegnor, and his father; how relieved he would be, to see Finrod at least saved! So there are many threads that emerged (and are still emerging) from this story that have been so much fun to weave into the narrative.

Thank you again for the question, and I hope you continue to enjoy the fic! <3 <3 <3

[bug-the-chicken-nug]

Not to tip my hat about how I'm a weirdo and I have a weakness for fictional codependency, but god help me I really am thinking about an AU with Ben/Sapient Omnitrix right now huh.

With the Omnitrix sort of becoming an OC in a way, because how this works is

Azmuth programmed it with an AI who is initially just a generically helpful blank slate with pre-programmed knowledge, but adapts to its user, developing alongside them to, in theory, work with them as well as possible.

Azmuth just never knew that maybe this feature would, uh...

Work a bit too well, in some ways.

So, the Omnitrix, within a few weeks of being bonded to Ben, also comes to define itself as a "young boy", and quickly learns English, but can only "speak" in Ben's head.

He prefers to go by "Trix" now, although he also lets Ben call him "Trixie" as a joke (that ascends to genuine cutesy term of endearment)

Besides an inbuilt onboard library of knowledge specific to his own function, Trix is ironically not much "smarter" than Ben. His neural network is still developing. Plus, a lot of what he can do as the Omnitrix is the AI equivalent of "subconscious", because Azmuth found that Trix's prototypes became overwhelmed, unstable, and often overly detached and nihilistic if they had full conscious insight into what they do, and how they do it.

In a similar vein and further bid for stability, much of Trix's factual knowledge is sort of "one step removed" from his core memory, instead archived in a way where it's like "looking it up" rather than "directly knowing it".

This makes him more capable of messing up, especially because Azmuth realized it's actually important to let him be personally capable of both positive and negative emotion, as it ultimately led to a more empathetic and adaptive AI.

(And again, trying to program a fearless and infallible prototype Trix resulted in strange and unanticipated issues over time.)

Ben can also share his senses with Trix, and memories if he wants to, in this way allowing Trix a way to both further connect to him and understand the world around them.

(This also leads to various scenes of Ben voluntarily doing weird and/or dumb things just so Trix can know what it's like)

Trix's personality as a "kid" would come to be as follows:

-Extremely curious

-Oddly enough, also quite anxious, which seems to be a much tamer expression of the sorts of severe neurosis that the prototypes could develop. (I also think the mental image of Ben trying to comfort his watch is weirdly cute in a funny and awkward kinda way)

- Naturally kind of clingy

- Easily bored, but also easily entertained by anything novel.

- A bit of the jealous and possessive type

- Somewhat insecure, sensitive, and awkward at times

- Protective, and a bit overbearing

- Terrible handling of humor and sarcasm, doesn't quite seem to "grasp" it yet.

- If not reciting a knowledge archive, tends to be stilted and awkward with his words. He still prefers nonverbal thoughts, sensations, and images.

-By nature, a people-pleaser. Not just to Ben, but also tends to want to help everyone, and quickly becomes dejected if he feels unhelpful.

- Very earnest and sincere, surprisingly gullible.

In the OS, they are largely just like, super best friends, although it becomes increasingly obvious that Trix is into Ben. (And doesn't realize, in part because he is not *directly* supposed to be able to romantically love, it's just that he is able to develop in such a way as to become capable of it, as a side-effect of the sort of open-ended mental flexibility required of him.) And then like. post-OS, Ben now takes Trix off largely because he starts feeling weird about Trix lacking full autonomy, and wants Trix to be properly able to be his own person (and has Azmuth give Trix the ability to "wear himself" by forming a hard-light projection) Trix sees where Ben is coming from and agrees to this, but as he isn't human, only somewhat mentally modeled off of a human, he lowkey never actually comes to prefer being independent over being a watch, particularly *Ben's watch*, and his Space Adventures (I'm kind of imagining he's kept with a trusted entourage on a ship that never stays in one place for long, to reduce risks of Trix getting hunted down) are fun and all, but Trix eventually realizes he loves Ben, caves to his longing, and runs away to go back to Earth. (Accidentally attracting unwanted attention that is now what kicks off Alien Force in the process)

This unwanted attention DOES give Trix the perfect excuse to attach to Ben again, which Ben is a little reluctant about while Trix is just ecstatic. They compromise with Trix being able to project his avatar while Ben wears him, but only up to a certain distance away from Ben. Which makes Ben feel a little better, but he still can't quite understand how Trix is so content for things to be like this forever. And then Trix ""dies"" right before Ultimate Alien, and Ben goes through a whole edgy depression arc where he can't fucking STAND the Ultimatrix (who is also sapient, but largely indifferent to him because it houses an older AI, one of the ones who's *overly* intelligent and self-aware, overly conscious of just how powerful it is, and as a result, is unable to view life as anything 'special' at all. Leading to a rather alien, much more detached, despondent, amoral, and low-empathy mindset as a result.) Trix is eventually brought back, and now Ben's trauma has left him 100% in agreement with the clingy "stay with me forever and NEVER leave in any way" mindset.

[citrous241]

Ok we need to talk about this suit.

TLDR here: It kinda sucks. Here are my ideas to improve it:

1) Cover the hair, at least partially

2) Put the hood up, or just remove it if the hair is fully covered

3) Make the mask black

4) Add red webbing to the mask

5) Make the blue lines on the torso thinner and double the amount of them

6) Give the torse the colour of the black and red suit style

7) Connect the blue lines on the legs to the torse ones

8) Recolour the Adidas for the love of God

It's another outlandish Insomniac endgame suit. I personally like Anti-ock but ik it's not the best Spider-man design. In Spider-man 2 (which I haven't played yet I just do not care about spoilers) I thought they'd actually improved with Peter's Anti-venom suit. It's objectively a good suit, an original idea and a cool design. And just like the Anti-ock suit, we see it's creation and it's background and all of the steps and reasons for it's creation.

Then Miles just lands next to Peter in this flaming mess.

Like, I don't hate it because I'm not the kind of person that hates media really. But it's the closest thing I'll tell you that. It suffers from over-design, I don't even think MCU suits are over-designed so me admitting that this suit is shows you how bad it is.

We're gonna start from the top; the hair. Now Miles's hair out on his suit can work, and I get that he wants to show off his snazzy new haircut - but not like this. Its so out of place with the rest of the costume. His hair out can look good, as one of my favourite suits in the game and the only good deluxe edition suit imo is this:

The hair is dyed to match the suit's colours and with the hood it makes it not so overpowering. The worst thing is the Evolved suit has a hood, and it's just there. The hood looks like a hoodie, but it's fully a part of the spandex costume to??? Like what??

Next: the mask. Why did they get rid of the face webbing? That's one of the major defining features of a Spider-man costume. All the good ones have some form of it or at least a few lines to signify it. Here: nothing. Just this weirdly itchy-looking mesh-like grey. It's just bland and makes the rest of the suit looks worse.

The torse looks extreme but next to the blank mask it looks even worse. The blue lines are cool, but it's really hard to unsee them are being 4 legs for the spider logo. It's supposed to be their outlines as the legs but I have to force myself to see it. Other than that it's probably the least terrible section of the suit.

The legs are fine really, I don't like that the blue lines on the side just start randomly and don't connect to the other ones at all even though the rest are all connected to each other. I've heard people say that it suffers from the whole thing of Insomniac just never detailing legs, which is true they do do that.. for Peter. Miles has always had just plain black legs, in fact this suit gives more detail to the legs.

And the shoes. They're another thing that clashes to go along with the hair and mask. I did find it kind of weird that people hated him wearing these shoes. They're not bad shoes, and people loved when Miles wore Jordans in Spider-verse. But that's what I was saying before Adidas started selling the whole suit for about $400 total. That, combined with the fact that the shoes also will not change depending on the suit style and the fact that the only real store in the entire game is a high definition Adidas store is just... yikes.

And finally, the reason for it existing:

None, there's nothing. It has no reason. Miles just appears wearing it. And his reason is because he wanted his own original suit. Was he not there when he made his own suit in Spider-Man: Miles Morales? The one that actually looked good? And its not even original it literally has a Peter colour scheme. The red, blue and white being the main colours?

So that's Miles's new suit; a loud and ugly design, with each component painfully clashing with each other, no rhyme or reason for it's existing other than "to be orginal" even though it looks like every deviantart spider-sona in existence. And the cherry on top its a walking advertisement for a clothing brand. Bruh.

And now it may actually be Miles's permanent suit going forward?! It's the only endgame suit that wasn't taken off when the evil was defeated. Ig Peter can't really take off Anti-Venom but he's retired now.

I'm still gonna play Spider-man 2 when it drops on PC. And tbh this is the only thing I think is bad and its an optional cosmetic. That's pretty good going Insomniac.

[raguna-blade]

He says he want's to exult more so he does it more. Strange.

ANYWAY

Having thoughts about Spiderverse in regards to their masks, and Spot

Specifically, notably, how Every Single Spider-Person's mask has them Resembling Spot, a man who was a nameless extra up until a bizarre combination of Personal Decisions, A Combination of Horrific and Fantastic Luck, and Recieving a simply Absurd Amount of Power and Ability has seemingly reduced them to being, functionally, a less defined version of themselves.

That, For all that the outfits of their suits are WILDLY different, and WILDLY expressive in so many ways, they also understandably reduce their ability to project humanity. That, continuing the Spot Comparison, this is their face now. This is them now. This is just them, it's ALL they are.

How, as has always been extremely funny but now seems less so when thinking about it in this vein, the suits seem to be able to magically reduce ABSURD quantities of hair and face shape and make everyone into this same faced mold recognizable as spider-X

That while the masks are very much supposed to protect them and their loved ones from EXTREMELY REAL THREATS, it also the first thing to go the moment there's any kind of emotional vulnerability between Spiders, or their loved ones, and every single attempt at empathizing and connecting with people, even well meaning people, even people who would genuinely be your allies and understand and be huge supports, ends up failing HARD because of this barrier that YOU YOURSELF put up doing exactly what it's supposed to be doing when that's not what you need it to doing NOW in this moment,

And Circling Back to Spot, for the Moment, as a man who's family, friends, everyone abandoned him and as he says won't even look him in his face any more (which he has, warped and twisted though it is) who by rights had friends and family and loved ones until this horrible thing (this potentially amazing thing! But Horrible) was forced upon him against his will, yes as a result of decisions made, but no as a reasonable consequence of those actions, Who Absolutely, unlike every Spider, cannot get out of this "suit" that gives him a blank face, and no identifying features, but accentuates his powers and personality just as much as everyone else (and how, later, like Miles, he changes his "suit" to better match his own ideals for better or worse)

That, anyone can wear the mask, if they choose to, it's STILL a mask and masks can and should be taken off at some point.

[fnrrfygmschnish]

Arkusazzo, and how her design changed over the past 20ish years.

A while back I did one of these for Joguo, but since the oldest Joguo drawing that I had a scan of was from 2008, his wasn't nearly as "complete" as this. Even though I made him up around 2001, Joguo was never really a character I drew all that often until 2008 when I started working on Alleghany Hell School and expanding on his backstory and family a bit more.

2004

The Weird Early Design!

I'm not sure exactly when I first made up Arkusazzo, but I know it definitely had to be after the summer of 2003 and was probably before the spring of 2004. This particular drawing is from a notebook I had in late spring/summer of 2004, but I know I had drawn her a couple times in a previous notebook before that.

This early design was, uh... very different from later versions. Some of the basic features are present of course (dark hair, blank glowing red eyes, wearing a robe with long sleeves) but there's a lot of other random bits that are not present in any later design.

Her looks weren't the only thing that was different. She didn't have any real backstory yet at this point, and was only vaguely defined as a guardian of the "Tree of Arkusazzo" who would lash out at anyone she saw as threatening the tree in some way.

There's some sort of symbol on her robe's chest. No idea what that was supposed to be! I think I used it as an identifying symbol for her in the 2004 notebook this drawing came from (every character in there was arranged into a fighting game style "select your character" screen kind of setup, and all of them had an associated symbol next to their names... which meant one got made up in the moment for anyone who didn't already have a symbol.) But I'm not sure what it was supposed to be. Kinda looks like a spiky skull face sort of thing...? I dunno.

I'm also not sure exactly what her color scheme would have been at this point, since I don't think I ever actually drew her in full color (I tended to draw with mostly black pens or plain pencils back then, only occasionally breaking out the colored pencils.) I'm pretty sure the three random blobs floating around her head were black, white, and gray and her eyes were glowing red, but it's hard to say what color her robes might have been originally.

The weirdest part of this design, of course, is the three random blobs floating around her head. One has a single eye, one has two, and one has three. A lot of her attacks listed in that old notebook involved one, two, or occasionally even all three of the blobs either launching at opponents or firing energy blasts. I think I remember that each one was associated with a fragment of her name ("Arku," "Saz," and "Zo") but I don't have that old notebook on hand to check for sure. Looking back now, the blobs having her name fragments... kind of implies that maybe the humanoid body isn't actually "Arkusazzo" at all, just some unknown person being controlled by them like a puppet? I don't know if that's what my 17-18 year old self was going for at the time, though. It's entirely possible that this was a "draw neat character design now, come up with actual story for it later" situation, which happened a lot back then. And still happens every now and then even now, haha.

2008

New Hairstyle! Actual Backstory!

2008 was the year when I first started working on Fnrrf Ygm Schnish: Alleghany Hell School. Between that and ideas for an RPG Maker XP project (titled Legend of the Barfoo) that never really got off the ground, I ended up expanding on Joguo and his story, establishing him as a ninja from a clan that had been exiled from their homeland and settled in southwest-ish Virginia a couple centuries ago.

And along the way, Arkusazzo ended up becoming a totally different character than before... and became a major part of the backstory of the Gouen-Zu ninja clan, rather than a random oddball from out of nowhere with no connection to anything or anyone else in my various story ideas. The "Tree of Arkusazzo" was now a tree that the demon known as Arkusazzo was sealed away inside by one of Joguo's distant ancestors, rather than an ancient giant tree of vague importance that she protected.

I think this was around the time that I established that every now and then, Arkusazzo's seal would grow weak and she would break free from the tree she was imprisoned in and go on a rampage, and that this had already happened at least once before Joguo was born (with Joguo's father performing the seal that time.) I can't remember if I had already come up with the idea that she was, in fact, Joguo's great-great-great-great-great-grandmother (and the ancestor of his who sealed her away was her husband) or not... but I want to say that I'd already decided on that backstory detail by the time I gave her the "meatball/dumpling" hair buns, so probably. Since she was planned to appear as an optional boss battle later on in Legend of the Barfoo, it seems likely that I'd already decided that her going mad and rampaging was a side-effect of some unknown power within her clashing against the power of the Uggy Barfoo when she stumbled across it and picked it up.

I'm noticing now that her robe's trim (at the bottom and on the sleeves) seems to have little bells or some other decorations hanging from it, which is kind of a neat detail that seems to have been dropped at some point after this. There's also a lot of excess detail on the trim of the robes, which has gotten simpler and simpler with every further iteration of the design. It's not shown in these drawings (since her hands are either hidden in her sleeves or not present at all), but she already had the claw-like hands in her 2008 design rather than normal human-like hands as in the 2003-2004 version.

I suspect there might have been another "in-between" design that I don't have a scanned drawing of somewhere in the 2006-2007 timeframe -- similar to this one but without the hair buns, since I'm pretty sure I redesigned her robes and made her hair longer before I added the buns to her design. But until I have a chance to dig through my community college notebooks and possibly find it... it's hard to say for sure.

2016

Simplified Robes! More Backstory!

This isn't really the "2016 design" so much as the "maybe 2014ish until 2022" design, but the drawing I had as an example just happened to be from 2016. Not much has changed looks-wise, aside from the excess detail along the trim of the robes being toned down from the 2008 version. I think this might have been around the time that I came up with the idea that she is actually very small (5'00" in height) but she often appears much larger and more imposing to observers due to the state of fear and panic caused by... being anywhere near her when she's broken free and started rampaging again.

I mostly picked this drawing because it shows off her "tentacle hair" more than any of the other full-body drawings I had -- there were some 2008-era drawings that featured her using her hair as prehensile tentacles, stretching it out and wrapping it around things and using it to strangle people and stuff along those lines.

As for the "more backstory" part... if her status as Joguo's great-great-great-great-great-grandmother hadn't already been decided upon by 2008, it definitely had by this point! Sometime in the later 2010s I actually drew an entire family tree of the Gouen-Zu ninja clan, with "Arkusazzo, but before she went all glowy-red-eyes and started wrecking everything around her" at the very top alongside Joguo's great-great-great-great-great-grandfather Gaitou Gouen-Zu.

...I still haven't come up with what her name actually was before she became known only as "the demon Arkusazzo." Maybe I never will. That might be one of those things that I just leave unanswered.

2023

Redesigned Outfit! Blue Hair!

The biggest change here, of course, is that for the first time her outfit isn't this vague baggy "wizard robe" sort of thing but instead actually has more of a shape to it. Sort of kimono-ish, I guess. The random red gem attached to the chest area on the gold trim of her robe is gone. She's got a belt for the first time, with dangly rope-ish bits where it's tied! And red bead bracelet thingies!

And, uh... no eyebrows? Hmm. I can't remember if that was an intentional change (the 2003-2004 design doesn't have them either, so maybe I figured I'd bring back that feature? but then again... that might have only been because I hadn't even started drawing most characters with eyebrows yet back then!), or if I was drawing her last year and just outright forgot to give her eyebrows but didn't realize until it was too late so I decided to just go with it.

The blue hair, on the other hand, is definitely an intentional change! Previously she'd always had pitch-black hair, but at some point in the late 2010s/early 2020s, I had come up with the idea that the reason why Joguo's hair is naturally blue is connected to Arkusazzo. Rather than just shrugging and going "Arkusazzo's just so weird that if some of your DNA comes from her you might inexplicably be born with blue hair," I ended up deciding to make Arkusazzo's hair actually be blue so the connection is more obvious.

I think this drawing is the first time I've ever drawn Arkusazzo with her feet visible. Or one of them, anyway. Previously they'd always been completely hidden beneath those long robes. She goes barefoot everywhere because thanks to her unexplained superhuman strength/durability (which she had even before going berserk), nothing she might step on is going to hurt her feet in any meaningful way anyway. And also because, y'know... having gone into a mindless rage, she's not going to stop and think "maybe I should at least put on a nice pair of fuzzy slippers before I go out to slash and tear down everything around me." 😅

[dehautdesert]

Okay, I finished it and I LOVED IT and I’m gonna be talking about it incessantly in the next time period. I’m gonna be making a series of posts about what I liked because I just can’t stop thinking about it, I’ve screenshotted paragraphs I really loved and made notes and stuff, which I actually NEVER do but I just loved it this much, and I am so in love with how nuanced and well-constructed everything about these books is, but I guess I first wanted to kind of… explore what made me react so negatively to it at first and how I was really really wrong? In case it convinces someone to keep on with it?

Full disclosure, I decided to finally read this after having it sit in my TBR pile for around 2 years because I love strategy, whether military or political, and I love guile-based competence porn, but I also love character studies of fucked up people with intense personal relationships, and it’s really hard to find both in the same narrative. I’ve been on a binge of the former for a while now and I was craving the latter without wanting to let go of my competence porn lol. I was first recommended this in a Reddit thread on political fantasy and that’s why it was in the TBR pile, but I was also told that it was quite sexy, and then in the meanwhile I saw a poll on “oversexualized stories” where it was next to ACOTAR, my most hated book of all time, and tbh by the time I cracked it open I had lowered my expectations to “it’s gonna be a decent dark erotica with crudely sketched in ‘scheming’ that I can only hope doesn’t strain my sense of disbelief too hard”.

And this was actually really working against my enjoyment of the book, because at its core this is not dark erotica the way I define it, and I’ve read a lot of dark erotica when I was younger. Basically for me BDSM-flavored dark erotica works by… externalizing a fantasy, like I don’t know, in the simplest possible terms with a noncon fantasy there’s a part of you that wants it and part of you that doesn’t and this gets externalized into one character forcing another one into something but you are actually controlling both parts of the narrative. Or like you have this constant sense of hyperactivation/danger around sex so the love interest in the dark erotica fantasy really IS dangerous and therefore your anxieties are externalized and your feelings are justified. And this is usually done in one of two ways: you make the characters basically sketched in blank slates and let the readers fill it all in with how they themselves feel about what’s going on, which usually leads to lots of people loving it and some people hating it because they are filling it in with their own dislike of what’s going on, OR you build 3D characters whose psychology is magically tailor-made to have them somehow be compatible and make each other better and benefit from the dark erotica situation in some way, making a work of a higher literary quality because now you actually have fully realized characters.

So I came into the experience fully expecting that I was supposed to vicariously sorta enjoy what was happening to Damen, and some of your tags/comments on my previous post really made me wonder why I was reacting so viscerally to this because I have read books with worse assholes and grimmer worlds and more orgies with dubious consent without blinking an eyelash.

And then I figured out that this was all a feature and not a bug, because Damen actually isn’t either of the character types that I described above, and actually one of the few things you learn about him in like chapter 1 is what kind of sex he likes, and he immediately comes off as a bit of a service top, and also as someone who takes a lot of pure, honest joy in his body unblemished by self-consciousness or shame, and he fucking hates all that’s going on around him and I was supposed to hate it too, but I was operating under the reflexive assumption that this is erotica so the author expects me to enjoy myself while reading it. Which actually… yeah, looking back on it it’s excellent writing, because in one offhand paragraph about Damen reminiscing about some random people he’s fucked you’ve set the key through which the events of the next 200 pages will be framed, and I as a reader didn’t even notice how it happened for a long time while fully reacting based on those setups. And I REALLY should have just based on the accurate and TBH kinda haunting depiction of derealization that Damen has at some of what’s happening to him.

Basically the basic-ass dark erotica recipe that I was expecting would have been for Damen to start being a bit more submissive due to external pressures (like having to cooperate to free the slaves), and then Laurent rewarding him for it with affection, and then Damen learning that he enjoys this, and I DID NOT want this to happen to Damen because it was completely incongruous with his character and his desires and the way the world was presented, so I felt really scared that it would go that way and was reacting really viscerally to it.

Uh, on a more personal note, and in retrospective having read the entire series, I feel like there’s a lot there about submission when it’s coerced or expected vs. submission when you want it and it pleases you, and how the first fucks up the second, and as a pretty subby person I really vibed with that.

Reading the Captive Prince books and it's the most surreal experience ever. I hate all the characters and think it would be for the best if that entire geopolitical region was just glassed with some sort of out of orbit weapon. I spent the first half of the first book disgruntled because I had been promised politics and strategy and leadership and all I got was awful arrogant shitheads indulging in society-sanctioned BDSM, which I can get at home by simply calling one of my exes without taking the effort to read an entire book. There's a twist and I could tell what it was at the 20% mark.

BUT. Then the actual politics start and it's actually... great? And the author actually... understands how things work? Very very well? And is also great at illustrating it in an engaging manner? Like here is this extremely skilled person who perfectly understands architecture and supply lines and political maneuvering and military discipline who wrote a book about things they enjoy and that I typically don't, but I have such mad respect for their skill that I am actually getting seriously into it. I love me a scheming mastermind where the author takes the time to explain HOW they gain everyone's loyalty or pull off the political scheme instead of just going 'oh, this character is a scheming mastermind!!'.

Also once both the boys turn out to be Secretly Competent and show it to each other they get the best Grudging Respect vibes and I am just a sucker for that way more than I am for the whole pet kink. Yesterday at this time of day I was swearing up and down that this was just another run of the mill fantasy-romance-erotica thing like a SJM book or, like, that Gild series, and that I would never be sold on it but right now I am 98% sold on it and staying in on a Friday night to finish the second book.

Storytelling skill really does matter.

[tracinginwardinvestigation]

Play #3: Three types of protagonist in narrative-driven RPGs

I wonder if I could categorize protagonists in narrative-driven RPGs into three types based on the degree of details in their characterizations:

Predefined protagonists: the most common types in JRPGs and fiction in general. They are characters that are handled fully by the authors. You can’t interact with their character arc besides watching them unfold in a linear manner. I consider most “silent protagonists” to be predefined protagonists also.

Undefined protagonists: characters I often refer to as “blank-state protagonists”. This protagonist type is generally designed to be an avatar that players can self-insert in or use as vessels for roleplaying. Thus, they rarely have preset characteristics or visual appearance in order to support the player's freedom of customization. Examples can be found in Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2, Icewind Dale, Dragon Age Origins, and Pillars of Eternity.

Semidefined protagonists: a mixture of the first two types. Semidefined protagonists are characters that come with pre-established personalities and backstories, but their further developments in the narrative are often left to the player's agency. Dragon Age 2’s Hawke comes to my mind as an example right now.

The latter two types are definitely unique to video game medium thanks to the medium’s interactive nature. This uniqueness also begs an important question: how should I understand these protagonist types in connection to video game narrative?

One of the fallacies I used to have with these two protagonist types is that I see them as worse versions of the first type in trying to treat their lack of concrete characterization as a flaw. For example, I used to take issue that semidefined protagonists can pick choices that can be wholly contradictory to their (supposed) morality. Let’s say I pick an evil decision early on, but then a good option later—won’t that be Out of Character for that protagonist in the narrative? The fact that the narrative may not even acknowledge that contradiction used to irk me. In the same way, I also thought that undefined protagonist is essentially a relic of the past where narrative in video games only serves as an excuse for gameplay action. But looking back now, I feel my approach to these protagonist types was inadequate, as I was trying to apply literary analysis techniques, ones that tend to focus on analyzing predefined protagonists, to to-be-defined protagonists. What then would be an interesting way to analyze undefined protagonists and semi-defined protagonists?

I think the answer may lie on the player's side, namely in their own interpretation of the blank state. After all, video game is a storytelling medium that actively requests the player's input—thus, it also necessitates that the player does have some responsibility when it comes to giving value or meaning to undefined and semidefined protagonists also. This necessity in player’s injection into these protagonists may be a new storytelling feature that is specific to video game medium; the players cannot just passively “read” undefined and semidefined protagonists, but they also have to actively “write” these avatars into proper fleshed-out characters. Going back to previous example about picking characteristically contradictory decisions, these decisions might be contradictory inside the game, but in player’s own interpretation, these decisions may not actually be so if they can come up with a justification that is in line with their protagonists’ “written” personality! Of course, that also opens up another question: how should the players “write” these protagonists types so that the players can maximize their own enjoyment while playing?

This is a huge topic that I want to tackle gradually. I already have a plan to write an essay on the uniqueness of blank-state protagonists eventually. For semidefined protagonists, I do think I need to play more games that feature them first before I can understand them better, so The Witcher trilogy (Geralt) and Mass Effect (Shepard) are on my playlist.

[runnning-outof-time]

The Light | Tommy Shelby x Reader (Royalty!AU)

(Gif by @tatianapetrovna)

Request: no - part of @mrsalwayswrite ‘s 1K Followers Celebration

Pairing: Tommy Shelby x reader

Summary: There's no possible way for a love between (Y/N) and Thomas Shelby to work out. She's the next in line for her family's throne. His family is the one that everyone's warned about. But it does…and he even goes as far as killing for her.

Warnings: langauge, weapons, character death, sexual situations (PG-13 rated), mentions of suicide

Word Count: 4844

A/N: this is my first AU ... I have no idea what time period I envisioned this to be set in...I just went with the no limitiations mindset that AUs normally have, so please mind the possible inaccuracies. Enjoy! :)

I’D LOVE TO KNOW WHAT YOU THINK! - YOUR THOUGHTS & COMMENTS HELP ME WRITE!

Let me know if you want to be tagged in future stories like this one!

The sun warmed her skin gently as she walked through the field of freshly bloomed flowers to get to the gazebo that sat at the edge of her family's property. Spring was clearly in the air, the birds were chirping, and the whole peacefulness of it all made (Y/N) want to leave the confines of her sprawling castle to go and attempt to be creative.

She ascended the few steps of the structure before sitting down on the lone chair that stood in the middle. In front of the chair was her easel, which held a blank canvas; ready for her to paint on. She put some paint onto the tray that sat in her lap before she stared out at the open meadow that was lined by rows of trees. This spot, where her family's property met the forest, was her favorite spot to come to. It felt like an entirely different world, one that she loved getting lost in.

(Y/N) began painting the scene in front of her, making sure to highlight the accents that were being enlightened by the sun. She mixed the paints to create a layered, grass-covered meadow that had different defining spots of green. Then she started working on the intricate treeline, taking her time in making sure that no tree looked the same, and that all of their unique features were present.

It was when she was focusing on the treeline that she noticed a horse trotting through the meadow with a rider on its back. She could tell from her spot that the person on top of the animal was a man, and he didn't look like any of the people who were on her family's staff. He wasn't supposed to be on their land, but he was moving at a steady pace, so (Y/N) let him be and continued on with her painting. Maybe he happened to venture onto the property accidentally.

The next day that (Y/N) found herself out on the gazebo, which was about a week later due to some rain, the horse and its rider trotted through the meadow again. She identified the rider as the same man she saw the first time, as he had a rather unique hair-do, and he rode the horse a certain way: with a confidence she hadn't seen in even the most trained riders.

She let the man go again, watching as he rode through the meadow and back into the trees. He, like her, was probably just taking advantage of the first sunny day that they'd had in a week. Maybe it was an accident that he was on their property. The horse was probably just taking him to where it wanted to go. She drew inspiration from the animal though and decided that she'd paint it into the meadow scene that she was creating on the canvas in front of her.

The third time that (Y/N) was out at the gazebo and watched the horse appear from the forest line, she decided that she should go and say something to its rider. She was starting to become curious of the reason why he'd chosen this trail to go on. Actually there wasn't even a trail present. He was just blatantly riding through their property.

She stood from her chair and set her tray down before exiting the gazebo and walking through the meadow. As she approached the rider, she started waving her hands, hoping that he'd acknowledge her. To her luck, he did. He slowed his horse down and hopped off once it had stopped.

"Can I help you?" he asked her, his eyebrows furrowed as she stopped a few steps from him.

"I can be asking you the same question. You are on my family's property," she told him, keeping her dress bunched up slightly in her hands so that the bottom wouldn't get caught in the longer grass.

"Am I?"

"You are. There's signs at the treeline. It's pretty well marked," she pointed out, motioning to the several wooden placards that were nailed into the trunks.

The man didn't look worried. "Must've missed 'em," he shrugged her statement off, making her look at him in shock. Did he not know who he was talking to? "Guess I was just so caught up in the view in front of me that I kept on going."

"It is a rather beautiful sight," (Y/N) couldn't help but agree with him. There was a reason why she liked coming out here almost every day.

"Oh, that's not what I meant. The horse enjoys the grass. I've got my eyes set on the woman who sits in that gazebo," he corrected her, a slight grin on his face as he motioned to the gazebo behind her.

(Y/N) couldn't stop the blush from forming on her cheeks at his smooth words, "and I'd be the woman in the gazebo," she pointed out the obvious, making him nod in response.

"Oh, I know, love," he told her, the grin not leaving his face as he stepped closer to her, "I'm Thomas Shelby," he introduced himself then, his hand extending between them.

"Thomas Shelby..." she tried his name for herself, a realization falling over her then, "from the Shelby family?" she asked, her eyes widening slightly. Her mood changed quickly when she realized who she was dealing with.

"You say it like it's a bad thing," Thomas remarked, bringing his hand back to his pocket because he realized that she wouldn't be returning the handshake.

"That's because it is. You've stolen from my family," (Y/N) shot back at him, trying to rid her words of any friendly notions.

The man only smirked at her statement before he let out a slight chuckle and shook his head, "I haven't taken anything you'll miss, sweetheart."

"Excuse me?" (Y/N)'s eyes widened slightly at his obnoxious audacity, "those things were important to my family."

"No they weren't," Thomas shook his head, "don't fool yourself."

"And you think you know everything?" (Y/N) let go of her dress, her hands falling to her hips as she looked at him with raised eyebrows.

"I know that your name is (Y/N) (Y/L/N). I know that you are a Princess who is next in line for your family's throne, but you don't want it. Your brother, Jack, is older than you, but your family put him as a member of the Royal Guard because of his temper. They don't think he's fit to become a king. Unlike you...you have everything they're looking for, but you don't want the pressure of it all. 'S a real shame, idn't it?...if the pressure of it all even mattered," he rattled off confidently, his blue eyes not straying from hers once.

(Y/N) wanted to gasp, to outwardly show how shocked she was that he'd just recited those facts about her and her family like they were a monologue from a popular play. But she couldn't. Reacting like that to his words would give him the upperhand. And she couldn't let him have that. So she tried to level the playing field. "Your name is Thomas Shelby. You're part of the Shelby family, a family that prides itself on lying, stealing, violence, and cheating. You're...you're..." she stammered, her confidence faltering as she came up blank, "you're not supposed to be here!" she exclaimed out of frustration when she couldn't think of anything else that she knew about him. Tommy just grinned at her response, which only made her anger towards him grow.

"So you don't know much more than what everyone knows, eh?" he asked her, his eyebrows raised in intrigue. "There's a lot more to me than you think, darling."

"You're not supposed to be here," she repeated in a low voice, hoping that he would get the hint that she wanted the conversation to be over.

"But I'll continue to be here, and, you know, maybe someday I'll tell you more about who I really am..." he trailed off as he started walking back to the horse that had been grazing, "I'll explain to you exactly why I do the bad things that I do," he continued as he climbed upon the horse with ease.

"Please leave."

"Oh, I am, sweetheart," he sent her one last grin before he rode off, his expression simultaneously making her blood boil and her stomach fill with butterflies. She hated that he made her feel like this. Hated that he already had such an effect on her. And he knew that he did too. She watched him ride off out of sight before she exhaled a frustrated sigh.

She went back to her gazebo and continued on with her painting, hoping that she'd be able to add more details to the horse that was situated on the foreground of the canvas now that she'd seen it up close. But attempting to do this only brought her more frustration because she realized that she was only able to think about its rider.

Thomas Shelby had kept his promise of that not being the last conversation between him and (Y/N) (Y/L/N). At first, everything he said made her blood boil because of the amount of cockiness he exuded in his words. But as he kept coming, and she kept trying to make it seem like it was to her dismay (it wasn't), she started to gain more interest in what he was telling her.

She learned that he was once part of the Royal Guard alongside his two brothers. He was put up onto the front lines to fight against enemy nations rather fast because of his keen skills with weaponry. He then told her that he and his brothers had to leave the Guard when their mother died suddenly. He didn't disclose how she died, but (Y/N) believed it to be from something terrible because of how his expression shifted. He quickly bounced back to his confident self though as he told her that he was one infraction from being kicked out anyway due to his repeated fighting with the other men in the Guard. That's how he knew of Jack and his temper. They'd actually fought each other at one point during his service. It also seemed that fighting ran in the family, because his brothers also had similar infractions on them too.

When they were back home, they took to several different, illegal means of making money for their struggling family. With their mother gone and their father away at a different pub each night, it was up to Thomas and two brothers to provide for their younger siblings. According to him, obtaining things illegally allowed them to gain more wealth quicker...which allowed them to get the things they needed for their family to survive. So, in his eyes, he was doing these bad things to a good end.

As she learned more about Thomas, her first impressions of him were broken down. She started to become more interested in, and attracted to, him. Despite his good looks, and he looked very handsome — unlike any other man she'd seen in her life, she was attracted most to his burning desire to make sure that those he cared about were safe.

So they met each other out in that meadow nearly every day. Her parents were thrilled to see their daughter have such an interest in art and painting, because that's what she was telling them that she was going out to do. If they'd known that she'd actually been going out there in order to see a man who was a member of the family that hers despised greatly, they would have banished her to her room in a second. But she kept her front up, and they kept allowing her to go out to that meadow.

Today he rode in faster than usual. The smile on (Y/N)'s face that usually greeted him fell as soon as she took in his appearance and stressed nature. "Thomas?" she questioned with concern laced in her words as he got off the horse and came over to her. "Tommy, what happened?" she gasped using the nickname that he particularly liked to hear come from her lips.

"Listen, (Y/N)...I can't be here long," he told her as he stopped in front of her.

"What's happened to you, Tommy? You're cut above your eye," she was still worried as she ripped off the sleeve of her shirt in order to hold it onto his wound.

"I'm fine, love," he assured her, pushing her hand aside before he grabbed both of them into his, making her look into his eyes. "You have to listen though. I'm going to have to lay low for a while. Some men caught up with me. They're not too happy with my family at the moment, but I'm getting it sorted," he explained to her, making her heart jump into her throat.

"You'll be ok, won't you?" she checked with him, her wide eyes searching his.

"I will. You're just not gonna see me for a bit is all," he told her, his hands squeezing hers, "I had to come tell you so that you weren't waiting out here for me thinkin' that I stood ya up."

"Be safe, ok?" she said then, giving his hands a squeeze.

"I will," he repeated himself. "I have to go now, love," he told her, dropping her hands from his hold so that he could go back to the horse.

But (Y/N) didn't want him to leave. "Tommy, wait!" she called after him, already in motion towards him before he was able to turn around.

"What?" was all he was able to ask as he turned around to the surprise of her lips connecting with his. His shock wore off quickly as he took her cheeks into his hands, returning the passionate kiss that she was giving him.

"I couldn't let you leave without doing that," she told him as she pulled away seconds later.

"Now I'm not sure if I can leave," Tommy said, a grin spreading across his face as (Y/N) let out a breathless laugh.

"You have to go. You have to stay safe," she said, even though she wanted him to stay, she knew that he couldn't.

"I'll be back before you know. I will see you soon," he promised her, matching his lips with hers once more for an equally as passionate kiss as the first one they shared.

"Goodbye, Tommy," she said as they pulled away from each other.

"Goodbye, (Y/N)," he repeated, a soft smile on his face as he dropped his hold from her so that he could get onto the horse.

It felt like her heart was breaking as she watched him ride away. Once he was out of sight, she decided to go back to her castle. There was no reason for her to be out in the meadow anymore...and it seemed like there wasn't going to be for a few days.

"Miss (Y/L/N), there's a visitor for you," one of her family maids spoke as she stuck her head into (Y/N)'s room. The Princess furrowed her eyebrows but stood from her vanity anyway, following the maid down the grand staircase and to the door. She gasped softly when she saw who was waiting for her in the foyer.

"Thomas?!" she hissed, keeping her voice low even though they were now the only two in the room. Voices traveled far and fast inside the stone walls. "What are you doing here?" she asked him with wide eyes. Half of her was thinking that this might have been a dream. She hadn't seen him in two weeks, and now he was standing right in front of her.

"I can't pay you a visit, sweetheart?" he questioned, the grin she missed so much forming on his face, confidence evident in his words.

"No, as a matter of fact, you can't," she stayed strict with him. She didn't think that he realized the trouble that they could both get in if anyone in her family found out about him being on the property. "My father will kill you if he sees you here!"

"That's a chance I'm willing to take for you, my love," he schmoozed her, the grin still evident on his face as he watched her cheeks darken.

"Well why are you here?" she asked him once she'd composed herself.

Tommy looked into her expectant eyes for a moment before he let out a chuckle and took her cheeks into his hands. He couldn't stop himself from getting her into his grasp. It was like she had a magnetic pull and he was stuck in its range. "I want to see you tonight," he told her, his voice lower than before.

"Tonight?"

"Yes. After the sun sets, meet me out in the meadow. I'll be waiting for you there," he gave her more information behind his plan.

"But the guards..." (Y/N) reminded him, "they'll be making rounds. They ramp up surveillance at night."

"They won't find me," he assured her.

(Y/N) didn't give her response right away. She was too busy weighing out the sides in her head. Her heart was telling her to go and meet him, but her brain was sending out warning signals about the possibilities of what could happen if any person in her family found out what she was doing.

"The longer you take to make your decision, the more chance you have of your father walking in on us, sweetheart," Tommy reminded her after a few silent moments had passed.

"I know that, Tommy," she quipped, a glare on her face as he smirked down at her. She thought some more before letting out a sigh. Her heart had won. "I'll meet you tonight," she finally agreed to his plan.

"That's great, love," he nodded his head, "I'll be waiting for you," he assured her before he leaned down and kissed her lips. A kiss (Y/N) literally had to jump away from in fear of being caught by someone.

"You like to push your luck, don't you, Thomas," she scolded him, although she couldn't stop the smile from breaking onto her features.

"'S how I became the man I am today," he said with confidence behind his words.

"You best leave now...before I change my decision," she told him, both of them knowing from the second the words left her lips that it was an outright lie.

"You'd still be there anyway," he grinned at her as he began to walk to the door. He showed himself out of the grand castle, leaving (Y/N) standing in the foyer with giddiness erupting through her body.

(Y/N) waited until the castle was quiet before she slipped out of her room and onto its grounds. She hastily ran out to where she and Tommy met and smiled as she noticed the dim flicker of a lantern by the treeline. Tommy was leaning up against a tree, and he barely had time to stand up straight before (Y/N) launched herself into his arms and pressed her lips to his.

He quickly responded to the kiss, his hands fastening to her waist as he led her to sit down on the grass. He leaned back against the tree while she leaned against his chest, their lips still connected in a heated passion. All of the pent up emotions created by going from seeing each other every day to not at all for two weeks were coming out now. Tommy pulled away moments later, chuckling as (Y/N) tried to follow his lips when he did. He reached out to brush his thumb across her jutted out bottom lip before he caressed her cheek.

"I have something for you," he told her, his free hand going to root around in his pocket. (Y/N) sat and eagerly waited as he brought his closed hand up between them. "My mother used to be my light. So when she died by her own hand, I slipped into a world of darkness. But now that I've found you, (Y/N), I have light back in my life. You are my light," he told her something he rarely told others, his eyes locked onto hers. "What I have in my hand was once my mother's. I wanted to give it to you...as a symbol of my love for you," he continued before he opened his hand to show an amulet that had an amethyst crystal in its center.

(Y/N) gasped at both what he showed her and what he said. She couldn't believe that he'd just told her he had love for her. By god did she have love for him. "It’s beautiful, Tommy," she whispered, smiling at him as she spoke.

"May I?" he asked, motioning to her neck then. She nodded and he went through the motions so that she would be wearing it.

"I love it," she told him after she glanced down at it, admiring how it sparkled in the moonlight. She leaned in and softly kissed his lips then as her show of a thank you. Tommy's hands wrapped around the small of her back so that he could hold her firmly against his chest. They kissed languidly for a few moments, both enjoying the feel of each other's lips and body's. Then (Y/N) pulled back to look him in the eyes, "make love to me, Thomas," she breathed against his lips as she was easily able to see the great amount of desire he was looking at her with.

"You want me to?" he asked her.

"I do," she whispered, exhaling an anxious breath as his hands slowly started to trail to the ends of her dress. Tommy only nodded and pressed his lips to hers again as he moved her gently so that she'd be straddling his hips with her dress bunched up around her waist. They quickly became a mess of fumbling hands and panted breaths as they found themselves intertwined with each other.

The thoughts of the consequences of this moment were far away as (Y/N) laid tangled up in the arms of the man she wholeheartedly loved.

"Won't you at least come down to eat?"

"No. I told you that I have no appetite."

"You'll starve, you know."

"I'm sure I'll be just fine."

Footsteps were heard then, signaling another successful thwarting of her brother's attempts to get her from her room. (Y/N) hadn't been feeling good for the past several weeks. She didn't have much desire to be social or to eat anything. She was even staying away from Tommy...well there were other reasons for her doing that. She was afraid that some...information might come to light if she saw him.

She stayed in her bed and watched the sun set through the window before she heard footsteps approaching her door again. It was probably Jack trying to rouse her for dinner.

"Open the door, (Y/N)," he demanded, the tone that he used instantly making her stand from the bed and open the door.

"Yes?" she asked him.

"You didn't think I’d find out?" was his first question. Her stomach dropped. He knew about her and Tommy. "I went to your maid, (Y/N). I know that you're pregnant." She most certainly wasn't expecting that.

"You what?!" she asked, her eyes widening.

"She told me pretty easily when I threatened her job. Who's the man?" Jack went on, his tone holding anger now. He couldn't believe that his baby sister was pregnant. (Y/N) kept her mouth shut. The cat might have been out of the bag on her one secret, but she wasn't about to give up her other. But Jack just kept on asking questions. "It was that man who visited you wasn't it? The one who came to our home five or six weeks ago," he drew some conclusions. (Y/N) stayed silent. "He's dead when I find out who he is...and I will find out who he is," he promised her, his voice dangerously low and filled with anger before he left her standing in her doorway before she was able to defend herself.

"Thomas Shelby! Get out here now!" the voice that Tommy instantly recognized as Jack (Y/L/N)'s came from outside his family's home. And by the sound of his words, he didn't seem to be happy. Knowing this man's temper, Tommy made sure to take his gun out with him.

"Jack (Y/L/N)..." Tommy greeted cooly, shoving the weapon into the back waistband of his trousers as he joined Jack in the street, "to what do I owe the honor?"

"Have you been around my sister, Shelby?!" Jack asked, the anger evident in his features.

"What's that matter to you?" Tommy kept calm.

"She's my sister!"

"Yeah? And?"

"And I don't want the lowlife scum that you and your family are corrupting who she is as a person!"

"Thought that you'd already done that...with your temper and whatnot," Tommy quipped back, a taunting grin on his face.

“You’re fucking finished, Shelby!” Jack yelled, his temper spurring him on even more.

“Think you can do it now, eh? Even after that embarrassing failure of an attempt that happened the last time?” Tommy taunted him even more. Within a second, both of the men had their guns drawn and pointed at each other.

“Last time I checked, a bullet makes the job much easier,” Jack stated, a grin on his face as he set his sights on finally killing the man who stood only a few paces away from him.

“Thomas!” a woman’s frantic voice was heard behind Tommy. He didn’t look, but instead watched as Jack’s attention got drawn to the very person he’d come to protect the honor of. Tommy took that moment of distraction to fire his weapon, striking Jack square in the chest. Jack fired his weapon himself upon hearing the other go off, and Tommy then lunged for (Y/N), who was now only a few steps behind him.

“Are you ok, love?” Tommy asked in a worried manner as he lifted his body off of hers, then doing a surface level check for any injuries. She looked to be ok, but her eyes were frantic.

“Jack?” she gasped, peering around Tommy’s shoulder to the man who was lying on the street. “Oh my goodness, he’s dead!” she cried out, tears filling her eyes.

"I only killed him because he was going to kill me,” Tommy told her, taking deep breaths as he tried to get the adrenaline out of his system.

"He was going to kill you because I'm pregnant with your child!" (Y/N) exclaimed, trying not to full-out sob in the middle of town. That wouldn’t be a good look for the royal family.

“Fuck..." was all Tommy as able to say as his eyes widened.

"Fuck, indeed," (Y/N) agreed, surprising herself that she was capable of saying those words.

"You're...you're not keeping, are you?" Tommy asked her hesitantly.

(Y/N) furrowed her eyebrows at his question as shock overcame her. She knew her answer in a second though. "Of course I'm keeping it, Tommy. My parents wouldn't allow me to get rid of the baby regardless of who its father is.”

"Even if the child's a bastard?"

"A bastard?" She couldn’t deny that she’d felt slightly hurt by his question. She thought that what he’d said to her during their night together was true. Hell, she wore the amulet he gave her every day after he hung it around her neck. "You...you don't love me anymore?" she asked in a whisper.

"Oh, I love you, (Y/N). I just didn't think that your family would allow...this," Tommy was quick to dispel her scared thoughts, his eyes locked onto hers to show that he was being honest.

"I don't care if they don't allow it. I want to be with you, Thomas, even if that means they throw me out of their family," she told him then, "I want to have this baby with you."

"Then we will have this baby," he agreed with her, smiles forming on both of their faces as he then pulled her close to him so that their lips could meet.

Tommy helped her up after they shared a passionate kiss and led her into his family’s home. (Y/N) couldn’t deny that she felt scared for the future, for the fallout that might come from her family. But she was equally as excited to spend it with Thomas and the baby they’d created together because she knew that the new addition would bring a much needed light into both of their lives.

Tagged: @alreadybroken-ts @magicalxdaydream @the-anxious-youth @cloudofdisney @look-at-the-soul @golden-hoax @elenavampire21 @peaky-cillian @mrsalwayswrite @julkaamazing @julyzaa

MASTERLIST

[omnitf]

Credit for this image goes to @dissolving-time. Story is mature for some language. This is another story from the Coach Stone universe. I hope you all enjoy it. :D If you’d like to see more of these stories, please join my Patreon.

---------------------------------------------

Stone Cold

“Coach said you have to get your shot, bro.”

I gazed at the meathead that had once been my fellow prisoner. He’d already donned the dog tags that were locked in his footlocker. Muscle rippled over his body as he gazed at me holding one of the biggest rifles I have ever seen in my life.

“Chapman, do you know what that is?” I asked as I eyed the gun warily. The caliber alone would be enough to splatter my brains all over the wall.

“The name’s Champ, bro.” He said it so casually, so matter-of-factly. Had they really brainwashed him so thoroughly?

“Your name is Lance Chapman, from Enfield, North Carolina. You specialize in computer programming, like me. We were brought here against our wills, remember?”

“Nah, bro.” “Champ” let out a deep vapid chuckle. His camouflage draped over his legs, but I could see the hints of growing muscle bunching, just waiting for a good pump to press them tightly against the confines of the cloth. “Coach wants my bod first, my brains second. Huhuh.” He grinned at me, revealing perfectly white and straightened teeth.

I’d hoped to reason with him, but it was clear he was beyond that. I brandished my own pair of dog tags. Like I said, computers were my thing, both programming and the hardware. It took me a while, but I managed to get my lockbox to open, too. And without reducing myself to a wannabe army poster boy. “I have my tags, Champ. You can’t keep me here. You know once I get my tags, I’m supposed to leave. I’m supposed to report to Coach, remember?”

“But you’re not gonna, are you, bro?” he asked seriously as his brow furrowed. “You just wanna get out.”

“I have to get out to see Coach, now don’t I?” The exit was right there in bold black lettering. The lock had already disengaged on cue when I seized my tags. I just needed to get past him. If I could distract him somehow or incapacitate him, I could run.

Chapman spread his legs in a broader stance as he planted himself firmly in front of the door. “You’re not ready to see Coach yet, little bro. And Coach hasn’t called you.”

“I am ready.”

“Prove it.”

I knew a few basics from martial arts training in my youth. I’d been fortunate enough to keep up the practice in my free hours. The meathead in front of me may have had a weapon, but we were in tight quarters. It would be difficult to get that barrel pointing at me if I could stay close. And while he may have had raw strength, I had experience. I also still had my wits about me. I sighed and let my shoulders droop as I approached him. “Look, Champ, just ... let me go, okay? You and I both know this is wrong. It’s against the law to kidnap someone.”

“No can do, little bro. Coach says we need more training. Coach says we have a project to help with. Coach says muscle CHAMPs like me need to train and obey. I listen to Coach. I obey. This Champ o—”

The mantra was what I was waiting for. It doesn’t matter how big you get if you haven’t got the trained reflexes to deal with a sudden change yet. And Chapman’s mind had been either short circuited or rewired to reinforce his thuggery. I’d heard it enough times through the door. It wasn’t soundproofed. I think that was deliberate on the part of this “Coach” to give us a taste of what’s in store. Demoralizing a captive is a large part of ensuring that he or she remains compliant, after all. And I’d heard enough, “This meathead obeys,” to know this was a fulltime operation made heavy on the brainwashing. It had to be to change someone so drastically. This wasn’t just a sign of subtle change. This was downright breaking them and building them back up again into the equivalent of obedient machines.

In this case, it played in my favor, and I hate to think of it this way, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was grateful for it. The mantra made him vulnerable. I laid a hand gently on his shoulder, being sure to get close enough that he couldn’t put the barrel against me. His eyes were glassy and unseeing as he uttered the mantra that he and everyone else like him had been conditioned to speak.

Then I took him down. It was simple to sweep his feet out from under him, and the move flowed like water. Bruce Li would be proud. I followed up with a heavy blow to the side of his head with my boot. Part of our imprisonment had included removing our personal affects, so I had no idea where my street clothes were. I didn’t give the blow enough force for any serious damage, but it would be enough to daze him, maybe even knock him out if I was lucky.

I threw the door open while he groaned on the floor. I managed all of maybe two steps before my arms was seized and I was slammed against the wall. I swear, my bones vibrated from the impact. I saw a helmet with a reflective visor and the broadest chest I had ever seen in my life. This man was huge. And unfortunately for me, he was also very skilled. My arm was yanked behind my back faster than I had time to process. He pulled, and I felt my socket strain to send stabs of pain through my arm and neck. Another faceless mook strode forward. But unlike Chapman, this one was decked in full body armor.

“Well done, recruit. You’ve passed Coach’s test. You will serve in Coach Stone’s cyber unit and in Research and Development. You will obey.”

“Like hell, I will,” I swore. That rewarded me with another painful jerk of my arm while a targeted blow forced me to my knees.

“Meathead recruit will comply.” The man withdrew a syringe from a side pocket and tapped the chamber to dislodge any air bubbles, then pulled off the protective cap with a deliberate casual air of the well-practiced. The substance was green, and the soldier had no qualms over pulling my sleeve up. I squirmed, but a yank of my other arm followed by a crushing iron grip on my free arm left me tense as he stabbed the needle into my arm and depressed the syringe. He removed the needle casually and replaced the cap, then inserted the syringe into another pouch.

The two visored faces stared at one another for the briefest of moments in a silent exchange. Then they nodded as the one who injected me rose, turned and entered the room where I had been held prisoner. A low groan emanated from the space, followed by a series of loud cracks.

“Rise, meathead. Follow.”

The voice that emanated in reply was deeper than I remembered. “This meathead obeys...” An even greater shock greeted me when the lumbering brute emerged. Chapman’s muscle mass had increased dramatically, and the man’s skull had completely reformed. Sharp, angular, square features blunted his face now, and his eyes were a vivid shade of green. The oversized gun didn’t look so ridiculous for him anymore.

“What the hell...?” I murmured.

“Meathead Champ will listen to orders. Meathead Champ will obey. Meathead Champ will fire on his roommate on command. Meathead Champ will prepare to fire now.”

“What?” I balked. I wanted to squirm again, but once more, my captor brought me to heel. I tried to shift out of his grip, but the hold was too strong. Even if I went limp, he’d still be able to haul me back up again. That didn’t stop me from trying, however.

I heard a whine not unlike the sound you hear in a sci-fi movie when a blaster is being charged or a bomb is being primed. The barrel was soon directed at my face. My heart hammered as Chapman uttered his mindless acknowledgement.

“Meathead Champ obeys. This meathead is ready to fire.”

“Fire.”

There was light, a strange tingling that bordered on the pleasant, and then blackness. I came to in an empty barracks. When I rose, everything felt ... heavy, awkward. The sight of the muscles bulging against the fabric of my shirt was more than enough to unsettle me as my throat clenched and my mouth went dry. I wanted to scream, but at the same time I knew better. I journeyed over my torso, my arms, everything. All of it felt in order, albeit significantly enhanced. It was my face I dreaded the most. And true to my fears, I could feel each sharply defined contour from my own transformation that was doubtless facilitated by the rifle. As a test, I ran through pi to see just how far in the infinite decimal sequence I could get. Then I searched through the other parts of my brain. I felt no compulsion, no absentmindedness, no blank emptiness or cotton or wool. I was clear, surprisingly so, given how quickly my mind seemed to jump from place to place.

“Comfortable?”

The question came out of nowhere, and I balked and bawled as my body sent me crashing into another bunk with the increased force of my new mass.

“Well, clearly not anymore,” the voice replied urbanely. I rounded on the figure only to see a man standing at least a head taller than I. His manner was relaxed and composed. His blond hair flickered like silver in the light. And though he was completely relaxed, his body oozed that smug command and intimidation that subconsciously demanded respect from those around him. “Please, take a moment to acclimate yourself. I find a blow to the shins is never pleasant.”

I decided to stick with sitting, rather than rick another launch with a body I had absolutely no experience with. “Who ... are you?” I winced at the depth of my voice. Logic only dictated it would have changed with the rest of my physique, but I had hoped it wouldn’t.

“A scientist of sorts. Biochemistry is my specialty, though I’ve branched out into many other fields.” He chuckled. “Why don’t you just stay there and we’ll have a nice chat between the two of us?” He lowered his broad frame onto the bed I had just launched myself from and gazed at me with vivid blue eyes. “My name is Stone. And you doubtless have many questions and expletives you want to voice, most likely not in that order.”

I felt like a broken record as curse after curse and swear after swear flowed out of me in an invective tirade. Denunciations and questions boomed from me like the retort of a cannon, emphasized by a number of curses and swears until that was all I heard winding down ... and down ... and down....

“Are you finished?”

A plaintive, almost defeated, “Fuck,” hissed from me as I rested my head in two massive hands.

“Glad you could get that out of your system. Now, do you have any real questions you wanted to ask me?”

“Why?” I finally managed to ask.

“You’re a programmer. You should understand. If a program doesn’t work the way it’s intended, you go into the code, find the bug, and fix it. Sometimes it’s messy work, but the end result is worth it. I’m doing that on a global scale, or at least I will in time. Getting rid of bigotry, erasing the divide between the strong and the weak to produce a better world for everyone.”

“You broke Chapman.”

“Champ is happy where he is. He chose it. He wanted it. You two had virtually the same IQ scores and talents, at least when it came to computer engineering and programming. Unlike you, though, Champ was fighting conditions that would make it so that he could never enjoy the same level of fitness and activity that you do. Such a lack eventually results in fantasies, a longing to experience what one never has had. Chapman threw it all away because he reveled in the chance to grow and swell. And, I admit, I fed that desire while he tried to hack the mainframe. I let him see where he would ultimately end up. And I gave him a simple choice. He accepted my offer to obey. He lied to you, pretended to fail, and complied with everything I told him whenever he signed in. He is living his fantasy now, and is deliriously happy to be receiving training as a part of my Meatheads.

Rage curled my lip, but I couldn’t do a thing. I wanted to lunge at the man, strangle him, but my body wouldn’t comply. All I could do was sit and watch.

“You may have noticed by now, but my meatheads can’t do anything against me. I’m their authority figure, their alpha. Or as they like to call me, Coach. You can’t attack me because I told you to stay there. And though you may want to deny it, I know that deep down, you’re enjoying the sensation of your new body just as much as Champ is.”

“How?”

“My formula.” He shrugged his massive shoulders. “It’s not perfect yet, but the iterations I’ve produced from my original notes have been very useful in extending my control. I don’t want to be a dictator, but I’m not about to let the world stay as it is either. Shadow politics, assassinations, pointless bombings and wars, genocides, suicides. This world is a mess. I have the tools to fix that mess once and for all. And I intend to do just that. To sum it up for you, I’m my original test subject. And the formula worked wonders for me as a result, but it also rendered me ... incapacitated for a time. As a result, much of my research was lost, and I’ve had to rebuild using different iterations of my creation until I can find that special mix. On the plus side, as derivatives of my original formula, it seems that anyone exposed automatically becomes subservient to me. It makes things much simpler when dealing with intruders and espionage. It also helps with recruiting.”

“Then why didn’t you just ask me?”

“Because I wanted you to sample the goods. That, and because there are still those who can resist the full effects of my injections and other sources of integration for a certain period of time. As I said, the formula still needs work. But I like to use the less effective iterations for special cases like you. Your specialty in coding and computer engineering is something I need right now. And I want you to keep your mind focused on the task at hand, rather than on weights and muscle. That’s why I’m assigning you to our MEAT department.”

“And if I refuse?”

“I think we both know you can’t.” Stone smirked. “For the record, MEAT stands for Muscle Enhancement and Accelerated Transformation. You’ll be helping us to design and improve a number of methods and technologies to help smooth subject transitions into becoming Meatheads. And more importantly, on how to preserve their skills and knowledge while still incorporating them into the collective. In other words, research and development. Your specialty, if I recall correctly.”

“I don’t want to.”

Stone chuckled. “On the contrary. I think you do.”

“I do—” My tongue stuck. My jaw locked. I tried again. “I do—” Again, I had the same problem. Again, I couldn’t finish. “I ... do....”

Stone’s smirk widened into a sneer. “Glad we got that settled. Oh, and for the safer ones, I want you to experiment on yourself. I’m intrigued to see just what a smart obedient Meathead will look and act like.

I groaned another curse, which only further emphasized my captor’s glee. “Spoken like a true Meathead.”

“Whatever....”

“That’s right. Whatever I say, Meathead.” The cocky arrogance was gone, leaving behind a chilling glare that could cut through diamond. “And you will address me with respect as either Coach Stone, Coach, or Sir. Do I make myself clear?”

I clenched my mouth shut.

“Answer me,” Stone demanded.

“Yes, ... Sir.”

“Good.” His eyes flashed as he rose from his position. “Now follow me. I’ll guide you to your lab. You have a lot of work ahead of you, don’t you, Meathead?”

I couldn’t stop myself as I rose to follow him. “Yes, Sir, Coach.”

“That’s right.” He chuckled. “On second thought, let’s get you dressed first. Then we can visit the lab.”

“Whatever you say, Coach.”

“Good boy,” he purred. I shuddered in revulsion, both at his cold dominance and ... at the jolt of pleasure that surged with that acknowledgement. If that was how it felt now, how would I feel after a few months or years of working under him? Would I be able to resist?

...

Would I even want to?

I shuddered again. Hopefully, I would be able to find a solution before Coach made me a permanent team member. Or worse yet, before I did.

[alwaysbethewest]

The responses to this have been really interesting to me! These results aren't what I expected when I created the poll. I thought that a higher percentage of readers would report immersing themselves and seeing themselves as the Reader character.

I've been active in fandom on and off for over 15 years (👵🏻) and never had reader fics on my radar until 2020 when I joined a fandom where they were the most popular category of fic. I started writing them almost as an experiment to try something new and to be able to participate in the fandom, and I've written dozens of them since then (and read plenty of other people's fics)... but I still sometimes have this feeling like I don't... get it. And that was partly because my understanding of these fics is that you are supposed to feel immersed and actually insert yourself into them, and I very rarely do. I've been working under the assumption that most readers did feel that way, though. I thought it was the whole point of Reader fics' existence as a genre. Why else are so many of us bending over backwards to write Reader characters as blank slates without defining features or racial characteristics or detailed physical descriptions? (To be clear: I'm not saying it's a chore to write inclusive fics or that it isn't worth the effort. But as someone who also writes OC and canon character fics, I often find it refreshing to be able to actually physically describe those characters.)

Anyway, all of that is to say, the responses to this poll left me wondering why it is that reader fic is so popular, if most people aren't interacting with it the way I thought they were? And particularly, why is it so much more popular (at least, in some fandoms) than OC or canon character fics? And after some reflection these are my theories:

Reader fics for most readers are a sort of midway point between immersive self-insert and original characters. They act as a type of AU or aspirational version of the self, or as a neutral stand-in that feels more like a Choose Your Own Adventure-style character than a traditional OC. The second-person/Reader POV format lends a closeness and accessibility to the story that appeals to readers even if they don't picture their actual selves in the fic.

Reader fics feel like a safe space and a particular form of self-indulgence compared to OC fics. Reading an OC takes a certain amount of effort and buy-in, as well as trust that the author will make a well-rounded/interesting/likable character. Justified or not, an OC fic may come across as the author indulging themselves, while Reader fic feels like an indulgence of the audience; we can feel assured it was written for us.

Reader fic is what's there. For whatever reasons, in some fandoms, reader fic has become the norm and is now the default go-to category for authors to write. Some readers read it just because it's what's available in their fandom(s).

Do you agree? Disagree? Think I've missed something major? (I'm sure I have, lol). Please feel free to share your thoughts too.

(To be clear, the idea of option 5 "I would see myself..." is that you rarely, if ever, find fics that feel inclusive/representative of your particular identity and you generally feel forced to see the Reader as a separate character instead because of this. That is, it is the way the fic is written that keeps you distanced from the Reader character, rather than that simply being the natural way you would read a Reader Insert fic.)

[owls-den]

My obsession with Trip really goes way back huh

Welcome to: Owl exposes their art evolution through their many itterations of Trip from Pokémon Best Wishes!

It all started circa 2011. Unfortunately, only one drawing featuring Trip survived the intense purge of any art from this dark period of my life. All I can tell you is that I also drew in 2011 a full on comic about him and you'll have to believe me on that one.

My very first digital art, in 2013, was also representing Trip with a random OC of mine (I think her name was Evangeline or something to that effect). I actually posted it years ago on a Pokémon Forum. Yeah, didn't get a whole lot of love. It is to note that this one is the SECOND drawing I made digitally of Trip. The first one is most likely still sieging in my father's old laptop. Fun fact, this was drawn on Paint.NET using a mousepad. I also found in a sketchbook another one I drew during this time period, this time with some other characters. It's kinda wild how my artstyle was fluctuating at the time.

I then came back to drawing mostly traditionally. I got a bunch of blank sketchpads in 2014 at an art store and instantly got to work and drew the entire cast of Best Wishes for some odd reason. I also found another one. While it's undated, I'm assuming it's from the same timeperiod because of the artstyle. Gosh I liked drawing twink bodies for men huh? That... contrasts a lot with the amount of JoJo looking characters I like to draw these days.

I found some odd sketches from 2015 here and there. It's mostly a try at a realistic portrait and a sketch I made with ink. I remember being very proud of those two when I first made them. I have no clue who this other character with him is meant to be though. Maybe it's still Evangeline or something. Really goes to show how much I changed my view on dynamics and such I suppose. I called it "Rolling Trainer" cause I am a genius who got way into Vocaloid in middleschool.

Next is 2016. It was lodged in a very short sketchbook I used during an internship. I LOVED oniisuu's art style and tried to do chibis like them a LOT. Also I left in the text so that we can all appreciate the cringe :DD As you can see, I sort of thought my obsession for Trip was just hate for some reason since I really didn't like Best Wishes? Like don't get me wrong, there are a LOT of things wrong with Best Wishes but with age I realized that the reason I was so angry at how it was handled was because I loved the characters and thought they deserved better treatment. So it's kind of funny to look back and see how I just genuinely thought I hated this random minor character when I'd draw him pretty much all the time.

After that, I think I took a pretty big break or just lost most of my art of him because the next I found was in 2019. It has a very self aware note next to one of the drawings and the next one has an ink illustration. We can really see how my proportions improved over the years and how my style became more defined, going more towards "semi-realistic". I personally like the shortcut on the arm. I don't think I used a reference so that makes it pretty nice honestly. Also, as you can see, that's when I started drawing Trip with his hair going a bit up for his fringe. I have NO clue why I've been doing this since recently even though it's NOT in his design but it's there.

I found another art made, I think, in 2020 this time. I had been drawing pokémon falling down for a fabric pattern and just drew every pokémon I liked from each generation, a pretty nifty thing I might show in its entirety as it spans over 10 pages or so, and I drew some trainer characters for each gen. And of course, y'all know who I drew for gen 5. I love how my note next to him is just so tired with living. I also redrew the above illustration with watercolors. Doesn't look great but eh.

I also did a redraw of one of my earlier digital art (2013) this time kinda showcasing what I like to do in term of dynamics these days. So huh prepare thyselves for 17 year olds Trip and Eva.

Buff women. Anyways, I got some small digital sketches for 2021, nothing special I never completed them. I might finish the one on the right because I genuinely like the dynamism behind it, how flowy it is, the perspective and also one of my old hc that his hoody has no sleeves.

And finally, the moment we've all waited for, 2022. I am currently 21 and this monster still has not left my head. He's here to stay so I might as well embrace it and return to my good old brain rot. It kinda all came back when I just doodled him on the back of a receipt as stupid as it is, and really, that's a good summary of the kinda place I usually draw Trip on. He always comes back, unannounced, into my life and I draw him randomly onto any surface available.

I hope you found this dive into my art journey motivational or just funny or something. One thing is sure: I'm not stopping drawing Trip. He's been living rent free in my brain for 11 years, at this point, he's staying, it's too expensive to try to evict him, I tried. So huh, if ya want more Trip content I guess follow my blog??? I'm currently making a sprite replacer for BW to turn the MC into Trip and maybe might do a sprite replacer for BW2 as well (though that'd mean redrawing all the costumes at Pokéwood... UUGHHGHGHGHHSDGHDFJSDGfyzeggf) and I also like to shitpost about him and write stupid fanfics about him sometimes so don't hesitate. I'll see you all later, take care of yourselves!!

[socketz]

Spencer Reid x Reader 

Talking To The Moon.

Inspired by the Bruno Mars song, because it’s the one I listen to when I come up with my Spencer Reid fantasies😃.

Type : Angst (It’s just so fuckin’ sad, man)

Warnings : A LOT. Detailed mentions of r*pe / sexual assault, child m*lestation / assault / r*pe, physical abuse, physical fighting, broken bones, dislocated joints (Replacing them! Which is so disgusting, the thought makes me cringe), trauma, the usual Criminal Minds terminology (in terms of describing an UnSub), emotional breakdown, a lot of Death Talk™️ (which could somehow be perceived as suicidal, I guess?), and actual death, there is one (1) kiss. It is a PECK, crude language (profanity), and I think that’s it.

Word Count : 16.3K (this was NOT supposed to be that long, ohmygod)

Request : Not Requested. (This idea came to me in a really horrifying dream that I had, a few weeks ago. I always document my dreams, and this was... Well, it was more of a nightmare. I won’t share, but from the tone of the Fanfic I’m sure you can gather the terror that it endured.)

Summary : There’s a lot of plot for this one. The reader takes on a case (an unauthorised case, you understand), that she relates to on a very personal level. Determined to take on this UnSub, after observing his crimes within the media, and finding thelselves enraged by the Police’s futile attempts to make progress in his arrest, they search for him themselves, and they happen to forget every ounce of Federal Safety training they have ever experienced. Uh, Oh! Do I smell kidnapping? Yes, I do! The reader is kidnapped by the Unsub, and tortured for four days straight. The team are searching for them, but are they fast enough? Either way, Spencer will never forgive himself, and the reader isn’t sure they’ll make it out the other side, alive.

Authors Note : First of all, Baby Spence🥺🤚 the way he was RIDDLED with trauma?? PLEASE?? Got me out here trying to shift realities just to give this man a hug- like he really needs some love, y’know? I have other one shots in the works where he IS receiving his well deserved affection, but it’s not really this one (though he is comforting the reader. Well deserved, methinks)😭 this is perhaps the most graphic and depressing one shot I have ever written😃 I mean, enjoy??? I don’t know if that is the right word. Make sure you read the warning, man, the topics at hand are dealt with in depth and I do not want to trigger anyone!!!!!

Talking To The Moon, Spencer Reid x Reader

They say that the barrel of a gun is cold; that it seeps into the precipitation of your complexion, and the steel aches a circular coolness. They say that your life flashes before your eyes, and that your fight, flight, or freeze, kicks in, when the initial shock of fatality flashes, and blinds you for a defining split second. They say that in your final moments, you show who you truly are. 

They are wrong. 

The metal is warm, upon my forehead, as I blink slowly, a thousand thoughts - words, and probabilities; numbers, and statistics, and the thumping of my heart (thump, thump, thump; thump, thump, thump) everything, and anything; anything, and nothing - all find themselves meandering their way throughout my congested conscience. I think not of my childhood, the warm touch of my mother’s embrace, and neither the pride in my chest as I received my first ‘100%’, with a wonky smiley face, feedback for my very first official essay in school; not the swarm of flying insects, rampant within my stomach, as I first walked into the Behavioural Analysis Unit, of the Federal Investigations Bureau. I think not of Spencer, not of Morgan, or Penelope, Hotch, and Emily. I am… I am not… 

The barrel of the gun is warm.

I blink slowly.

A sheen of smeared colour - like the pretense of a dull oil painting, perceived too close to the canvas - washes over my vision, steals the breath from my aching throat - thump, thump, thump, my heart cries; lodged beneath my tongue, thump, thump, thump - I swallow it back. Thickly, like treacle, and I… There- There is-

The barrel of the gun is warm. 

I blink slowly. 

I collect myself, in my throat, and I gulp with a softness that simply does not suffice. The flavour of something- of something burned, something charred, lies upon the dry thrum of my tongue, and I allow myself to taste it. Just for a- just for a moment. Just for a moment, I taste it, and it is charred- charred and metallic. The burned flavour of my chest, thumping iambically beneath my heavy-set jaw, wafts up, up, up, throughout my trachea, and it coils between my teeth. From the back, to the front, around, and around, does it crawl, and my heart thunders on in my thoughts; thump-thump-thump, thump-thump-thump. 

The barrel of the gun is warm.

I blink slowly. 

The same ache rolls around my motionless joints; it burrows beneath my stained complexion, and I do not flinch as something pop’s, and another bone crack’s. It is not- I am warm. An uncomfortable sense of warmth, that settles upon my grimy skin, and collects itself among my wounded figure, and- and it’s- and it’s hot. It’s hot, and it aches- 

But the barrel of the gun is warm, and I blink slowly. 

I blink slowly, and the barrel of the gun is warm. 

I yearn to think, to obtain coherency, but the barrel of the gun is warm, and it hurts. Oh, it aches, and I- a shuddered breath falls from my unnaturally moistened mouth, tainted by the spill of internally displaced fluid, and I force my eyes to peel open. To unveil beneath their thick hoods, to dismiss the burning heat that flares from my slow blinking, to show him no weakness. I force my eyes to peel open, because, by God, if it’s the last thing I’ll ever do, I will look him in the eyes, and I will silently congratulate myself on my victory. I will not lose; I will not surrender.

And so I peel back my lids, and I ignore the sweltering ache that rushes upon my discoloured, broken, cheek, and I observe him with a gaze of (what I pray to be) great indifference. I slack my features, and I spare myself the wince, as the temptation of heat, licking away the wet droop of my bruised face, engulfs the structure of my poised, blank, expression. Dark, dark, circles; the kind of spherical matter that the mariana trench may find envy within, roam me. Thoughtlessly. Not a thing behind those eyes - no feeling, no rage, no pain. There is no tremble to his digits, as he holds the trigger of the sleek revolver, cherry-wood-handled, and there is no twitch within the muscular construction of his nonchalance, as it fades between four-a-piece, and a regular, blurred, arrangement. 

This is it, I think, at last, and the silence between my irrevocably untelling orbs infiltrates its way through my subconscious. Soon - a mere matter of seconds, that spirals to the incoherent detailing of a slurry construct - there is nought but the mulling tone of my heart, thumping endlessly beneath my burning sternum, and I force myself to breathe evenly. In, my chest rises softly, and out, I exhale something shaken through my nostrils.

By God, I think; this really is it. 

And the barrel of the gun is warm, as I blink up at him slowly, and I do not regard the noiseless sobbing of the child, to the darkest corner of the room. 

This is it. It pounds within my ears, morphed upon the rhythm of my steady heartbeat; this is it, this is it, this is it. 

This is it, and the barrel of the gun is warm, and I blink up at him slowly, and the breath on my tongue tastes like the charred meat of my steadily thumping heart, and I think of nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing, at all - nothing but the silent shake of a tear-stricken expression, caught beneath the dim lighting, as her circular, little, face, enlarges. Enlarges, and morphes, by shadows, and yellow light; approaching. I do not regard her, as she nears in my peripheral, and the curve of her small, fragile, shoulders tremble, and the flush of her moistened cheeks glimmer among the bulb’s reflection, but the burned flavour on my tongue ceases its subtlety, and there is a taught capture about the breath in my lungs. It is reeled back, and stored deeply beneath my broken bones.

And, suddenly, my heartbeat lurches into my throat.

I miss the warmth of the metal, as it flinches away from my bloodied forehead, and I miss the dark discs of his thoughtless eyes, as they leave me, and the ache of my tongue dissipates to a resolve of bitter dryness. 

There she stands, beneath the weight of the revolver, with a violent shake to her thin figure, and a harsh, bruised, red, to her cheeks; puffy eyed, and traumatized. She breathes not a word, she expresses not a sound, and still his finger curls. Curls subtly, ever-so-gently, and my heart tumbles into my mouth, before I can drag it back down. “Coward.” It spits, unbearably rasped upon the echo of my dry, naked, throat; like wood upon sandpaper, it grits, and it grits, and the shavings collapse in my lungs, as they heave; in, I rasp; and out. “You’ll-” I gather my cheek between my jaw, and I nibble it tearsly, a deep, seering, heat erupting- erupting, and sprouting; multiplying, between my very cells. “You’re gonna shoot a- a little-” Another pained, hollow, heave; I clamber for steady footing. “Shoot a little girl?” Dark, dark, circles… no feeling, no rage, no pain. They catch within the light, and never before have I observed a shadow exposed by the sun, and still obtaining its darkness. But there they are, as they gaze unto my own, and I level our stare with ease. “Impotent son of a bitch.” I murmur, a mere breath upon the quiet. 

Antagonize him, my conscious crows; rile him up, give him reason for distraction.

 “That is-” I stutter in my respiration, and the wheeze of a wet cough finds the depth of my chest. It rumbles through the rasp of my throat, and a slick, metallic, moisture coils upon the flesh of my lower lip. The coppery taste ravishes my mouth, and I allow the liquid to spit between my words. “That is why you do it, isn’t it?” I say, no more than a whisper, gargled by the congestion of the red fluid pool, congregated about my tongue. “You couldn’t-” Another ragged breath, “Couldn’t perform. Not for the-” I swallow the metallic, warm, liquid, and it burns my aching throat. “Not for the pretty women. Hm?” He regards me, motionlessly, and the discs of irrevocable blackness roam my hot, burning, features. “So you too-” I gulp back the rise of blood in my throat, unsettled and naturally rejected. “So you took to little girls, instead, didn’t-” A softer, shallower, inhale, “Didn’t you?” 

Silence. The iambic thrum of my heartbeat interrupts the depth of the quiet, but I push it down - down, down, down, beneath the crushing weight of my charred sternum, and I force myself to continue. 

“Yeah.” I say, quietly, “You did.” I harden my gaze. “You do.” You take them, their vulnerable, defenseless, innocent, selves, and you steal their childhood; you steal their youth like the dawn to the night, and you rip the world from beneath their fucking feet. “They’re small.” I rasp. “Young.” I try not to think of the dry red, that - the dry, dark, blood, that stains her little thighs, and I try not to picture the tears on her cheeks, and the seeping crimson that cakes the lower quarter of her sweet, white, dress. I try not to entangle her contorted features with a familiar reflection, try to ignore the burning ache of my sweltering chest, as it burns, and it binds, and contracts so ferociously, and I swallow back the lump, riddled with- with- with something. (Bile, blood, bitten down sobs, does it matter? Does it matter?). 

There she stands, with a violent shake to her thin figure, and a harsh, bruised, red, to her cheeks; puffy eyed, and traumatized.

“They’re small enough to-” I nibble my inner cheek, and the rasp engulfing my tone threatens to tinge with a bespoken darkness. “They’re small enough to feel you, aren’t they?” I say, and there’s something- there’s something that flashes, be it only a split moment, behind those unforgiving holes he deems the window to his soul. Black, and inhumane. Fitting. “They feel you enough to react.” The muscle to the corner of his left eye contracts, a mere millimeter, or so, but I catch it. Oh, do I catch it. “They cry.” I say, softly, and I hope that the girl holds any kind of oblivion she once may have obtained. “They scream. They bleed.” They die. “But, hey,” I murmur, “any liquid is liquid, right?”

It burns, and it aches, and I nibble the eroded flesh of my inner cheek, and I blink up at him slowly, but at least he is here. At least he is here, at least her blood is dry, at least she can walk. At least I can buy her some extent of recovery time. “You’re sick.” I spit, tone lowered significantly, but still strong. Somehow, I obtain my strength, and I continue. “You’re twisted, and you’re useless.” I say. “You’re nothing but a freak, a shrimpy coward with no sexual capability.” Twitch, twitch; the muscle of his left eye contracts, once more, with more force; more concealed rage, bubbling away beneath the surface. “Pathetic.” I continue, a mere grumble upon the thickening silence. “You couldn’t satisfy a woman if you tried-” The barrel of the gun is colder, now, as he forcefully presses it’s rim upon my forehead, but the steel soon begins to warm. I blink up at him slowly, and I prod. I prod, and I prod, and I wait for the sleeping lion to snap and bite. A breathy chuckle falls from my dry tongue. “There it is.” I whisper. “There it is- you’re an embarrassment, aren’t you?” I mock, tone thick with some kind of congealed, faux, amusement. I swallow back the uprising liquid, lodged thickly amongst my throat, and I offer him a blank, condescending, smile. Bloody-toothed, and bitter. “Tell me, Ben, can you even get it up, properly, anymore?” 

SMACK.

I hear it, and then- then I feel it, and before I know what has hit me, he has. The tang of warm liquid, filling my mouth, is entirely indifferent to the coppery flavour I have grown to know, as of late, and I bite back the bubbling groan, a flare of burning heat traveling through the very cells in my ruptured cheekbone. Bruised, and tender; the flourish of agonizing heat pulsates, like the steady beat of my burning chest, and I regain my sturdy posture, gazing back unto the deep, dark, discs. Lifeless, enraged. I ignore the pulse in my features, and the thump of my circulation, gushing rampantly through my senses, as I adjust my blaring joints, and I maneuver my strung limbs. Wrists confined to the sufficient, tight, expertise of Benjamin’s personal experience, they hang perpendicular to my sides; expanded, outstretched, like the span of a bird in flight. 

I hang from them, there, upon the wall, and I ignore the raging fire, engulfing my (dislocated) damaged shoulders. Slumped upon my knees, bruised and discoloured for all their worth, I tilt my head up, and I blink at him slowly. My eyes water, a natural reaction, and the sting in my cheekbone echoes with the afterthought of his gun, freshly stricken, throbbing. But still, I bore my gaze unto his own, and I force my jaw to loosen. “Touchy.” I grumble, bitterly. “What’s the-” I swallow the consistently uprising clump of blood, and of rejected bile, and I try again. “What’s the matter, Benny?” I press. “You insecure?” I say. “Ashamed?” Of course he isn’t, he’s furious. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. “Challenged?” The muscle of his left eye twitches, again, and I force a crooked, toothy, smile. “Yeah.” I say, “That’s it. You’re afraid.” Another twitch. “Out of your dep- out of your depth.” 

“Shut up.” He snaps, “Shut up.” 

My eyebrows raise, and I allow another breathy, rasped, chuckle to fall from my cracked mouth. “Raping little girls is one thing,” I continue, “But kidnapping, and torturing an Official Officer?” Another fleeting, thin, laugh. “Jesus. Who knows what they’ll do to you in there?” 

“They worship Pig killers in that place.” Benjamin snarls, and, for once, I find myself smiling with an unmissable genuinity. 

“Yeah.” I say, with a grin. “They do.” And I allow my humour to dance within my gaze, as I motion the man closer, with a subtle toss of my head. He follows, nose aligned with the warm barrel of the revolver, and I ignore the throb of my cheek, and the iambic scream of my heart. “But, see, Benny-Boy,” I whisper, my breath fanning his thin lips, “I ain’t no Pig.” I tongue the soft mutilation of my inner cheek. “I’m a Federal Fucking Agent.” 

The breeze is not calming, as it brushes upon my face, and I throw myself forward, crashing my forehead upon the smooth curve of his foolishly close expression. A barbaric crack rips though the disturbed quiet, and the sudden splat of warm liquid dignifies itself upon my sopping complexion, as the muffled tumble of retreating, unsteady, footsteps echo clumsily around the room. I think I got his nose, as I fall back against the wall, arms useless, and I connect with the concrete behind me, dragging my bruised and bloodied limbs out, as they abandon their position of lying beneath me. I sit aloft the ground, and my legs roar with a thousand shallow wounds; pins and needles scattering hoarsely about the flesh of my weak anatomy. “Fuck,” I murmur, as I ignore the dizzying, blurred, contortion that warps my unsturdy vision. From a multiple of four, to adjacent and blurred, but singular, Ben scurries to his feet, displaced to an enclosing distance. 

Thump-thump-thump, my heart cries in my ears, and the white noise of the blurred silence seems to hum along to it’s rhythm, thump-thump-thump, but I can’t leave her behind. I cannot bring myself to let her down - not again. Not again. Not again. 

I can’t let her down - thump-thump-thump, thump-thump-thump - as the pins run up my limbs, and the needles pivot their course around, and around the flesh of my legs. Thump-thump-thump, thump-thump-thump, he draws closer. One stumbled step at a time; one step, two steps, three steps, four, I use the wall and bend my knees, groaning beneath the weight of my fucking agony, and I tear myself from the concrete ground, allowing the yell to rip from my moistened, raspy, throat. Thump-thump-thump, thump-thump-thump, he tumbles; closer, closer, closer, closer. 

The cry that rips from my throat, as I throw my leg to his side, it bounces upon the thick walls. It mocks me, in my dizzy breathing, and it laughs along with his soft, quiet, grunt. I strike at his chest, with the ball of my foot, and I pray that my quivering muscles suffice. Ignoring the ambush of sweltering heat, coursing throughout my ankle, and the damaged joint of my knee, I tear up to his throat (his frame hunched, and breathless) with the inner curve of my ankle. SLAM. I revel in the slap of skin, upon skin, as his betrayed choking engulfs my rugged, teary, silence. Oh, how it burns, it aches, and I cry- I cry with such volume, as I draw down upon his cheek, as he falls to the ground, and I crush it beneath my aching heel. 

His parted lips heave with an airy groan, and I force myself to repeat. To repeat, to repeat, to repeat, until the blood beneath my throbbing heel all but retracts my complexion’s grip. The flesh of my foot slips upon his motionless expression, the curl of his digits slowly unravelling, and I slam my limb down upon his broken, bloodied, face, again, and again, and I ignore the warmth of the tears upon my cheek, as they dribble their way down. I notice the first, and then the rest seem to follow, uncontainable and relentless, and still I pummel the structure.

Bruised, and toughened, the sopping entrapment of my wounded heel draws down upon his fractured features, and I release a withheld, shuddered, breath. It is warm, as it fans my chin, and I allow my legs to feather themselves unstably upon the ground. I stop. I pause, and I gather myself with brief collection. The tight stinging behind my eyes seems to worsen, as I force the lump in my throat to dissect, and to surrender to the flames of my burning, charred, sternum, but I swallow it all back, and I shake my legs loose, slowly dropping my frame back down upon the concrete below. 

There he lies; still, and unmoving. Not dead, but not quite alive. 

The girl. It rings in my ears, as my heartbeat settles to something familiar; the girl, the girl, the girl. The girl who’s name I have yet to learn, the girl I have failed to protect - the girl I must save. The girl I refuse to let down, again. “Hey,” I call, quietly, and I soften my tone with significance, just enough (I hope) to eliminate the threat of the glimmering, red, blood, that begins to dry upon my body. “Hey, sweetheart.” I shake back my hair, and I turn to face her, ignoring the glassy shein that warps upon my vision, as my body entraps in a wave of unforgiving warmth, and the hot, burning, sensation engulfes my entirety; running up, and down, from left, to right, in and out of my limbs, from my eye sockets, to the tips of my bloodied toes. It aches, and it burns, and I plaster on a kind, gentle, smile, and I observe the tears upon her scarlet cheeks. “What’s your-” I nibble the ruined flesh of my inner cheek, as a flare of something (something like agony) curls around the joint of my displaced shoulder, and runs sharply through my arm, “What’s your name?” I ask, quietly, and I try to bereft the strain from my tone. 

But, oh, it aches, and oh, it burns. 

“Alyssa.” She replies, quietly. 

“Alyssa?” I try the name on my tongue. “Alyssa, Okay.” I say. “Alyssa, I need you to do something for me.” I tell her, “I need you to do something for me, is that Okay?” Her nimble, sad, face, nods, and I feel something shift in my chest. The burning increases, and the blood on my tongue tastes more like heartache, than of copper. “Okay.” I say, “Can you try to untie these ropes?” I nod gently to the strong grip of my wrists, entrapped within the beige confinement, and I hope - oh, how I hope - that her little fingers are good for something. 

“Okay.” Alyssa says, softly, as she teeters a step closer, and she approaches the still figure of the bloodied, unconscious, man. “Is it-” She steps over his arm, “Is it painful?” 

She reaches up to the knot, be it just above her head, and she works at the painfully tightened enigma. I hiss, softly, at a gentle jolt of my shoulder, and I ignore the loud pop of its agonizing displacement, pulsating with heat, as I murmur my quiet reply. “Only a little.” I lie. “Are you feeling okay?” I ask, tenderly, “Does anything hurt, down-” Another hiss, I swallow it back audibly, “down there?” 

“Only a little.” She mimics, not at all unkindly, as she works at the knot, and she straightens her small, tear-slick, mouth. There is mulled silence, for a passing moment, and I tongue the rough complexion of my inner cheek. “I didn’t cry.” She admits, as though I should be one to offer my congratulations. “I didn’t fight him.” She says. “I’m a good girl.” I swallow the lump in my throat, and I blink slowly, as to diminish the sting of my eyes, and I allow my breath to fall shaky, and uneven, as I regard the girl with a furrow to my brow. I didn’t cry. I didn’t fight him. I’m a good girl. 

“Alyssa, I-” I meet the sharp blue of her cerulean, glossy, gaze, and I observe the seeking ache behind them - the dull rim that seeps upon the light’s reflection. “Alyssa,” I whisper, “listen to me.” Her hands work at the knot, and the curl of it all begins to shuffle loose. “That man is a bad man.” I say. “He’s a monster. You know the kind you read about? In- In the- In the books?” She nods, softly, and I reciprocate her action. “Well, he’s one of ‘em.” I say, and her gentle expression of repressed agony crumples; dissolves to the pinch of a furrow.

“He looks normal to me.” She says. 

“They always do.” I reply, with something like sympathy curled among my smile. “The monster lives inside them.”

“Like a house?”

“Sure.” I say, “Like a house.” 

“I don’t like that house.” She whispers, hardly that of a breath upon the laboured quiet, and I feel the subtle breeze of freedom beginning to slither around my aching wrist. 

The strong simmer behind my eyes seems to ignite a stronger burn, and the blur of colours coaxing my vision adheres to engulfing my senses entirely, a clamp in my jaw to withhold the overwhelming urge to burst out with some kind of vocal sob. I bite it back, gnawing softly upon the mauled flesh of my inner cheek, and I offer Alyssa a gentle, toothy, smile. “Good.” I say. “Good. You don’t have to worry-” A scream tears from my throat, and the barricade of blurring moisture spills over with ease. “Fuck!” I hiss, “Fuck- Shit-” My arm audibly slaps down upon my side, the wrist an awkwardly angled bend, as it cracks aloft the harsh concrete below, and the mocking double-act-popping makes its merry way through, the joint finding itself inverted and ajar, and, oh, it aches, it burns. It fucking burns, and I- “Do the other one.” I murmur, strained by the bite of irrevocable pain, as a teary eyed Alyssa forces herself to overstep Benjamin’s right arm, and to meet the limp hang of my dislodged limb, and her nimble little fingers get to work on the opposing knot. 

I try to grind my teeth, try to swallow back the uprising sob that teeters thickly among my taught throat, and I try to focus solely upon the unmoving man upon the floor, as my arm hangs loosely at my side, and the pulsating ache rivets throughout my entirety; it swirls behind my eyes, and up, up, up, up around the iambic thrum of my cold, incandescent, mind, and down to the very tips of my sharp collarbones; to the steady rise of my chest; in, and out, in, and out, and I listen to the thump of my heartbeat, as it sings it’s hellish chorus in my ears, and it rings true for yet another second - thump, thump, thump; thump, thump, thump - and I pay attention to the melody, the sporadic pulse, the rhythmic reminder that: Here I Am. Living. Breathing (Barely?). With The Life Of A Little Girl In My Hands. There it is. There it is. The truth. There it is. And I listen to it, again. I listen to it again, and I look at her. 

I look at Alyssa, with a violent shake to her thin figure, and a harsh, bruised, red, to her cheeks; puffy eyed, and traumatized, as she works at the knot, and she sniffles to herself quietly. I look at Alyssa, and she isn’t crying. I didn’t cry. I didn’t fight him. I’m a good girl. She is a good girl. I look at Alyssa, and I see nothing but a girl that deserves the world, and I know that she is a good girl, but why should she have to learn her worth in such an earth-shattering way? I nibble my inner cheek, and I digest the uprising urge to allow my eyes to water (excessively, for they have already washed the blood of my bruised, and broken, features, and they lay wet upon my cheeks), as I call out to her gently, and I watch her glimmering gaze remove itself from her concentrated scowl.

“Lissy?” I call, softly, with a furrow to my eyebrows. I meet her cerulean stare, and I observe the reserved redness that circles her glassy orbs, as she draws back her own impulse to cry, and I speak again. Quietly. Always quietly. “Can I call you Lissy?” I ask.

Alyssa nods. “Mommy calls me Lissy Doll.” She says, and the burning flavour flares up, again, upon the back of my dry tongue. I concentrate on it, as the heat of my dislocated shoulder begins to fade, and I suppose that the taste of charred flesh is better than the agony of broken bones. 

I offer her a smile, though I feel it comes across more as a grimace than that of any reassurance, and I nod gingerly. “Alright.” I say. “Lissy, it is.” There is something like heartache, and like the dullness of doubt, that clouds the brightness of her young, infantile, orbs, and I force my lower limbs to shuffle, to face the readily repressing girl before me, as she holds back her upcoming wave of cries, and she swallows back her sorrow. “It’s Okay to cry, you know.” I say, gently, and she shifts her gaze to engulf my warm, piercing, stare, within her own, and the glassy shein begins to thicken. “It doesn’t make you weak.” I whisper. “I know it-” I force down the uprising lump in my throat, a sudden lodge beneath the muscle of my tongue, and I try again, with a tone somehow softer than before. “I know that it hurts, Lissy.” I say, “I know that you want to be strong, and that you- that you want to be a good girl,” A shaken exhale falls from my lips, “but, sweetheart, you don’t need to go through something like that to prove it.” 

She nods, softly, and she purses her lips together, trembling and shaken by her trauma. 

“Lissy, if you can-” I swallow back an audible groan, as I shuffle my injured frame, and the pulse of reconciling heat flares violently within the loose hinge of my displaced shoulder. “If you can untie me, Okay, we can get out of here.” I assure, attempting to convey something like promise with the stern stare of my unwavering eyes. I pray that Alyssa does not notice the tremble of my limbs, or the shudder in my ribs, as something crawls, and winds, its way between my shattered bones, and I pray that she does not notice the exhaustion behind my determination, that she does not catch wind of my growing fatigue, and the difficulty I face in trying to suppress my growing agony. 

“Okay.” She murmurs, and I find myself deflating with a soft exhale, shoulders falling, and dismissing the grave pulsation of fiery heat that depicts its bitter eruption throughout the damaged nerves of my bloody anatomy.

“Okay.” I nod, attempting to compile any form of reassurance, as I tilt my head back, gentle as I can possibly muster, and I let the crown loll back upon the brickwork. It aches, and it burns, but we’re almost there. By God, we are almost there. “Alright.” I repeat, breathless in my movement, as her small digits begin to unwind the tight knotting of the rope. “I need you to-” A subtle jolt, as the rope loosens, sends a great flare of agonized heat throughout my limb, and the rumble of a deep-routed groan falls from the hollow of my throat; low, and honest. “Fuck.” I murmur, softly, as Alyssa wraps her grip upon the burning ache of my wrist, and she removes the restraint entirely, supporting the arm with minimal (though violently painful) adjustment. A roar of unavoidable flames engulfs the limb, as she lowers it gently, and she drapes the limp wrist upon the concrete. I suppress the bubbling hiss that threatens to fall from between my gritted teeth, and I gulp back the wave of nausea that grips me suddenly. 

A swirl of something bitter, something terrible, begins its sultry dance among my stomach - empty, by a four day solitude - and I feel the burl of air, and of ingested blood, of salivation, gargle nastily toward the very pit of my protesting stomach. Still, I ignore it. 

“Lissy, you need to-” I swallow the uprising concoction, warm and smooth in my throat, and I try again, forcing my words through a clenched jaw. “I need you to fix my arm, Okay?” I need you to re-locate my fucking shoulder, and I need you to do it now, before Benjamin wakes up. If he wakes up, I suppose. The slow, unstable, rise and fall of his darkly clothed back is difficult to judge, among my dizzied vision, and the blurred contortion of the world. I do not dwell on this. I do not have to tear my eyes away, they drift naturally, and there she stands; wide-eyed, traumatized, silently begging me to let out a sudden laugh, and to declare my insinuation a practical joke. “Now, Alyssa.” I say, with a sternness that I suppose she is not used to. Not from me, at least, as the glossy depiction of her wide orbs returns, and, again, I find myself unable to dwell on it, as I turn to where her hands hesitantly hover about my sagging limb. “Just-” I exhale a shuddered breath, because, Jesus, this was never in the job description, and I allow my head to fall back upon the wall behind it, as my eyes flutter shut, and I open my mouth to continue. “Just grab onto it - gently, for the love of God - at the upper- at the upper arm.” A small hand wraps around my bicep, and I flinch involuntarily. Oh Fuck, my mind chants, pulsing throughout my body; Oh Fuck, Oh Fuck, Oh Fuck. “Put your other hand-” I swallow back the bile concoction, “Put your other hand next to my shoulde- Shit!” She rips away the palm of her small hand, explicit with a short cry, as I yell out my curse, and the pulse of agony spreads upon the damn wound she placed pressure upon. Be specific, Y/N, my conscience scolds; she’s a fucking child. 

It’s not her fault - not her fault, not her fault - but fuck, if that didn’t hurt. I let out a shaky breath, and I force the erratic respiration of my rising chest to calm the fuck down; in, and out, in, and out, and I offer her a tight-lipped grimace, as she regards me with wide, cautious, eyes. 

“Sorry.” I breathe. “I didn’t-” Another groan; the pulse of my pain continues to mock me, to taunt me violently within the unsteady strum of my gushing ears. Thump, thump, thump, it cries; Oh Fuck, Oh Fuck, Oh Fuck. “I didn’t mean to yell at you.” I say, softly. “It just, uh-” I bite back another cry. “It hurts. That’s all.” She nods, timidly, and I observe the aggressive tremble of her hand, as she begins to re-insinuate her previous positioning. “Not there!” I splutter, abruptly, and she halts in her movement, “Not there, Lissy,” I murmur, as my head rolls back against the brickwork behind me, and I tilt it away from her. “Closer to my- closer to my neck, alright? Not on the shoulder, itself.” She murmurs a noise that sounds similar to some kind of agreement, and I clench my jaw. I clench my jaw, and the nausea bubbling within my stomach seems to heighten. Fuck. And I-

Oh Fuck. It pulses around my aching body; Oh Fuck, Oh Fuck, Oh Fuck, Oh Fuck, Oh- “FUCK!” 

A loud, excruciating, crack, snaps out within the laboured silence, and I am submerged in (what feels like) the damned flames of Hell, licking and biting upon the sore flesh of my battered body, devouring my arm in sharp, agonized, nibbles; ripping chunks of my consciousness with them. “Jesu- Fuck. Holy fuck.” I murmur, slurred and messy, as a hot bout of drunken agony spouts throughout that damned joint. Up, and down, does it stumble; here, there, and everywhere, and I find myself unable to bite back the wave of tears, as they force themselves to grapple my attention, and to erode the bloodied concoction of fresh coating about my features, and I can hardly process the weight of their thickening moisture, as it gathers upon my cheeks, because - Oh, God, holy fuck - oh, I can hardly- It burns. It aches, and it burns, and it devours my limb entirely. 

“Do the other one.” I demand, lowly, tone riddled with a rasp of violent agony, as the heat springs forth to my complexion in a tuft of dampening precipitation, and the salty layer begins to seep the red wash of my skin. “Alyssa.” I say, with a grave harshness to my tone, as she remains unmoving (sobbing silently, to herself) beside me. “Do the other one.” I do not dwell on her quiet crying, as she makes her way before me, and she nestles down at my opposing side, and I do not dwell on the ever-burning fire that seems to corrupt every living cell within me, swirling, biting, licking, ruining, me; running circles upon my exhausted frame. Exhausted. It paints the inner lids of my eyes, and the thought of rest seems so entirely delightful, that I have to peel them open. Exhausted. Exhausted. Exhausted. Exhausted. I resent myself for protesting my bodily wishes, and I heave the silent cry of my sobbing frame, denatured and entirely unaware. Unaware. Oblivious. Unfeeling, as another riveting POP echoes throughout the subtly disturbed volume of the room.

I feel it. 

Oh, do I feel it. 

But it does not register. 

I am so alight, I am so wholly consumed, as the flames lick, and they engulf my frame; they wind brutally throughout the broken possession of my bone marrow, and they curve within the bruise of my jutting spine, my fractured rib; they grapple the cranium of my mind so violently, that I feel my slow blinking may rupture me an explosive head, at any given moment; they rip, and they tear, at the flesh of my muscles, running laps around, and around, my pain threshold; daring me, taunting me. Still think you’re winning? They laugh. Still think you’re winning?

But Alyssa is still here. Alyssa is still here, and Benjamin is still unmoving, at my feet, and I am still breathing. Alyssa is still here, and I am still breathing, and- 

And soft, small, fingers wind through the matted knots of my bloodied, stained, hair, at the base of my neck. 

I shift my watery gaze upon the girl beside me, stricken with a glaze of unforgettable, lurching, fear, as her blue eyes blubber silently, and she cries, and she cries, and she does her best to offer me comfort. She does her best to offer me comfort, and she smiles with closed, tear-tousled, lips, as I furrow my eyebrows, and I find myself bubbling with a warm determination. 

Still winning, my heart thuds, still winning, still winning, still winning. Still winning, and I force my limbs to shift. To move an inch, or perhaps a mere centimeter, as that damned fire engulfs my arms, and it wraps them up, up, up; up, and down, spiraling throughout the system of my nerves. From the depth of the crook in my elbow, to the muscles hung loosely amongst my shoulders. Around, and around, but still, I try. “Come here,” I whisper, softly, and I motion with a nod of the head for Lissy to approach. She follows, a stumble or so trodden, and then she stands before me. I lift my arm - jaw clenched, swallowing back the rise of that bile concoction, and ignoring the violent flare of heat that deems eruption amongst the joint of my fucking shoulder - and I run my thumb along the red flush of her tear-stricken cheek. Trembling, though it is, I hold her face with soft assertion. “We’re gonna be just fine,” I say, almost inaudible beneath my bitten down cries, and I offer her a tight-lipped smile. “I promise, Lissy.” I say. “I promise.”

Alyssa doesn’t nod, she doesn’t offer me one of those (non)comforting, teary, smiles, that find my chest clenching with some sort of heartache, rather than warmth, and, instead, the girl furrows her eyebrows. “Does it hurt?” She asks, again, and I know that she is looking for honesty. That she wants the truth, despite her youth; that her innocence is gone. That whatever spark she once attained no longer resides within her cerulean orbs, and that they are darker beneath the dim yellow lighting. That they are darker beneath her trauma. 

“Yeah.” I say, softly. “It does.” 

“Can you move?” 

No. “Yeah.” I smile, nodding gently, as I lower my arm, and I open my mouth to offer another white lie. “Just a little sore, that’s all.” I say. “Why don’t you-” I swallow the uprising bile that congregates within the over-salivation of my glands, and it scratches upon the ache of my tired throat. “Uh, why don’t you check- Check that, uhm-” I gulp back down my words, rearranging them upon my tongue, as the flaring pulse throughout my entirety finds itself momentarily blinding. Still think you’re winning? Still think you’re winning? “Check the door, Okay?” I say, quietly, and I do not dwell upon the observational quirk of her eyebrow, as Alyssa regards me cautiously, and she retreats her silent footwork. “Try and open it.” I offer her a reassuring (?) kind of smile, crooked, and bloody, but she does not seem to acknowledge it - not anymore - as she approaches the darkened corner of the room; the shadow of the great, steel, door. “Can you do it?” I call, tone impossibly rasped upon the echoing silence around. 

There is the distinct sound of struggling metal, as the door jutts back and forth, stuck strictly within its positioning; locked. “It won’t open.” Alyssa says, quietly, and I wonder just how the little girl remains so consistently composed. Of course, her cheeks are littered with unforgiving layers of drying, and thickly moistened, tears, and her eyes are red raw, wide, and traumatized, but not yet has she… broken. Still, she speaks calmly; still, she bites back her loud sobs, and she contains the shudder of her frame. I can only assume that this gravely resolve will crack very suddenly, one day, and, much the same as the floodgates to an overflowing river, everything will come crashing down upon her city of composure. I do not allow myself to dwell upon this thought, however, as the pressing matter of escaping (preferably before Benjamin regains consciousness) thumps iambically throughout my bodily matter. 

“Try the bolts.” I offer. “Are there any bolts?” 

“No.” She says, distantly, with subtle strain, as though she is poised upon the tips of her toes, attempting to grapple the top of the door frame. “Nothing.” She says. 

“Is there a keyhole?” I try, again, as I bite back a subtle groan. Fire. Fire. Heat, coursing throughout my motionless frame. Can you move? No. No. I cannot. I can hardly breathe, and I-

“Yeah.” She hums. “Right here.” 

In, and out. In, and out. “Okay.” I say, “Keys in the door?”

“No.”

Fuck. There is no need for an IQ of 187 to figure out quite where the missing puzzle piece resides. Benjamin’s belt. The very same belt that he rather enjoyed wrapping around my throat, and observing the silent purple that flared upon the taint of my bloodied, fractured, face, just the evening before. Perhaps it was not evening - the concept of time has evaded me entirely, and I rely solely upon the scent of his breath, to know which meal he has likely devoured, before roaming his way within the… the room. Coffee, and something else particularly sweet (often a pastry, I like to believe) linger upon his words when he speaks, some days, and I know that it is morning. Sometimes the scent of seafood, or a cold sandwich filling, wafts upon my face, and the potent stench of a carbonated drink, with the distant flavour of a cheap beer, and I know that it is midday, or just after the fact. Warm, meaty, scents, with cheap red wine tend to find him delighted, by the time that dinner rolls around, and, I realise, that must mean that it is currently night. 

Hours have since passed, from when he first entered the room, smelling strongly of a meat pie, and a three quarter bottle of cheap, red, wine, and, now, around twenty-five (or so) minutes have slipped through my fingers. Time flies when you’re in agony. Abiding by my own, personally devised, day clock, I might assume that I have been submerged within this room for four days. Almost five, I do suppose, should we not escape before the morning sun rises. Not that we may find out when that is, of course. There are no windows. 

My capture had been no fault other than my own. The ‘case’ (Benjamin Fackle, a serial Child Molester, and Rapist, whom the media deemed the ‘Baby Raper’, and a creature the Police Department have been desperately searching for, for many a month) was not official. His name had not crossed my desk. The team knew of him - of course we did, he was a monster in disguise, and we ached for an invitation to work on the case - but, alas, our company was not beckoned for. I spoke to no one of my private research, my geographical profile, and neither my personal profile, but, with the aid of an unsuspecting Garcia (whom did not know the details of my expertly worded, and secretive, request) I had delved upon the narrowed depiction of three addresses. 

The first, an Orphanage, which had since been demolished, and held not a single occupant, was futile. An easy occupation to discard from my list. And, then, came the second. In possession of my gun (and only my gun, my naivety be damned), with no vest, and no back-up-protection, I entered the grounds. That, among a conundrum of other things, was my first mistake. 

There, waiting for me, among the looming shadows of night, was Benjamin Fackle. Crouched behind the door of an easily concealable blind-spot, I disregarded my Federal training, and I dismissed that damned corner. Always check your blindspots, Agent. I could hear the drilling tone bouncing around my mind, mocking me, much the same as that pulsating heat that continued to rivet around my conscience. You don’t check your blindspots, you’re as good as dead. You hear me? I heard him, alright, but that doesn’t matter, now. Not when it didn’t fall into practice, and I failed to do so when it mattered the most. 

But I simply couldn’t resist it. Not this case. Not this kind of UnSub. 

Not when he has been ripping the innocence from seventy-nine children (and counting), and disregarding them so heart wrenchingly. Not when he has been putting them through the same damned trauma I experienced, as a child. Not this case. Not this UnSub. 

And so I force myself back, upon the brickwork behind me, and I ignore my burning frame with a foolish ignorance, engulfing the movement with stuttered fluidity, as the fragile joint of my wounded, bruised, knees, bend, and they shakingly heave my weakening body from the cold compress of the concrete floor. Up, and down, do the sharp pins flow; around, and around, do the needles pivot, but still, I force myself to stand. I force myself to stand, and my arms hang loosely at my sides; not dislodged, but still not quite intact, still burning violently, still thickly riddled with agony.

I stand, and I rest back upon the brickwork, and I heave my ragged breaths. In, and out, I stutter; in, and out. In, and out, but it aches, and it burns, and I blink slowly. I blink slowly, and I swallow back the protest of my uneasy stomach, that crawls within the salivation of my tight throat, and I force my stuttering frame to take a stumbled step forth. 

Pushing from the wall, I tumble with heavy feet. Mulling within my agony; sharp, shallow, wounds, find themselves imprinting mercilessly about the trembling flesh, inflicting detrimentally upon the complexion, and I almost wish - just for a moment, just for a passing second - that I could halt my breathing. As my legs give out beneath me, and I crumble beside the shallow respire of Benjamin’s still frame, and I swallow down the loud cry that threatens to break through the tight catch of my teeth, as I bite down upon my lips, and I force it down - down, down, down - and I blink back the wave of tears (slowly), and I ignore the heat - God, the fucking heat - that dances, and grips, my aching muscles with piercing ferocity.

I crumble beside Benjamin, and I reach, with trembling, not quite numb, and paling, limbs, for his belt. The clink of the metal upon the stone seems to- it seems to- Alyssa. She lets out a quiet sob, from the corner, and I know what the indication sounds like, as a lump forms in my throat, and I can’t swallow it down, and I fumble with the buckle, and I hope, oh, I pray, that I can find those fucking keys, and I-

Jingle. I drag the metal back, and- Jingle, Jingle. 

A soft, breathy, laugh falls from my mouth, as it contorts to the prologue of a violent sob, and I contort my features, I pinch them as tightly as I suppose that they may allow, and I hold it back- I hold it back, and I swallow the lump, and I press the cool metal of the keys to my chest, and I allow it to vibrate with the shudder of a hollow, dishonest, laugh. A laugh, to fulfil the urge of overwhelming moroseness, and exhaustion, that grapples me so aggressively, I find it difficult to breathe, with my head tipped back, and a glassy shein to my eyes, and I force myself to pull it together. I collect myself, there, upon the concrete, and I call out to the crying girl in the corner. 

“Lissy.” I say, all too quietly for my liking. “Lissy, I’ve-” I swallow my words, as they threaten to exit in a jumbled mess. Oh Fuck, my heart thrums, with lesser the all-consuming fear, and more of the elation, the adrenaline, as the burning heat begins to dissipate, and I suppose that the adrenaline will not last forever. Oh Fuck, Oh Fuck, Oh Fuck. “I’ve got them.” I whisper. “Lissy, I’ve- They’re here, look, I’ve got them-” I stumble to my feet, riddled with the deafening thump of my heart, Oh Fuck, Oh Fuck, Oh Fuck, as it laughs within my ears, and it mocks my auditory joy. It doesn’t burn. It doesn’t ache. I can’t feel a damned thing - nothing but the dizzying beat of my heart, that pumps wildly in my ears. It won’t last long, I think, as I stumble unsteadily on my footing, and I make my way to Alyssa.

It won’t last long.

It won’t last long.

It won’t last long. 

And so I do not bother to comfort the girl, as she cradles her head in her hands, and she ducks it between her bent knees, curled desperately upon the ground, beneath the door, and I do not bother to grow frustrated, as I try the first key of four, and it doesn’t fit. I try the second, and it jams within the lock - not that one - and then the third. The third - oh, the beautiful third - that twists, with jutted prosperity, and it signals the sequence of unlocking metal. 

It doesn’t burn. It doesn’t ache. I can’t feel a damned thing, as I lower myself with unsteadying speed, and I scoop the light girl, trembling, and sobbing, within my arms. My bruised, broken, mangled limbs, and I clutch her to my chest. It doesn’t burn. It doesn’t ache. I can’t feel a damned thing, but I’m winning.

I’m winning. 

I’m winning.

I’m winning. 

I’m winning, as I stumble incoherently through the doorway, and I disregard the nauseating crack, when something collides with the steel of the door, as it chases me through, and I’m winning as I find myself shoving the damned key in the lock, and twisting, and twisting, and leaving it there to rot, and I trap that bastard within those damned, yellow-lit, walls, and I’m winning as I am tumbling through the misleading path of the unfamiliar home. Unfamiliar corners, unfamiliar rooms, unfamiliar sights. But I’m winning. I’m winning. By God, am I winning. 

And I am still winning, as I collide with the front door, and I throw it open, thoughtless for the dutiful ache that is silenced by the thudding in my ears, and I make my way upon the pavement, concealed by the evading darkness that is night, and I begin to stutter my rugged footsteps - bare feet bloodied, and slapping down upon the walkway beneath me - and I hold the girl to my chest. I hold her, and I hold her, and I hold her, and I open my mouth to speak. 

“We’re free, Lissy.” I say, quietly. “Look,” I point above her head, as I glance down upon her whimpering expression, “Look at the stars, baby.” I whisper. “We’re free.” And I know that we are not truly free, that, should my adrenaline, thrumming throughout my entirety, and consuming my conscience in a consistent hum of evading hope, ware off, should the pain settle back in, and the wind stop cooling the persistent burning that peppers moisture aloft my forehead, should everything fall to nothing, and should the morning sun mark the fifth day of my absence, we will not be free. That we will be, perhaps, as good as dead - Always check your blindspots, Agent - within the confinement of unfamiliar roads, and unfamiliar geography, and a town full of unfamiliar people. 

After Benjamin had struck me over the head, a wound that soon sobered up, when he first began the beatings, he had locked me within the boot of his car. I was unconscious for most of the journey, and the back tail light seemed too difficult to kick through, at the time. He had weakened me, considerably, and I found myself unsure as to whereabouts it was that we were going. And, thus, I do not know our current location, either. 

The low hang of the moon does little to console me, as the gush of my blood within my ears begins to slowly dwindle - thump-thump-thump; thump, thump; thump-thump-thump - but, with her cheek rested softly aloft my weightless chest, Alyssa stares up at it; bleary eyed, and consumed. Her stare of wonder gives little away, and I find myself praying, with whatever religion I have left in me, that she may recover. That this traumatic experience may dissipate beneath the life she has yet to live, and that, when the time comes, she will be able to face her trauma, and heal the wound indefinitely. That, one day, she may look up at the moon, and she may not be reminded of what Benjamin Fackle has done to her, and that she may capture the light of the stars within her blue stare, again. That she will regain a form of innocence, and that recovery comes quickly. 

I know that it does not. I know that the pain never truly leaves you, but one can hope. One can hope, and while I am breathing, I hold on to that. 

Just as I hold on to the girl, cradled to my chest, as the thinning beat within my ears begins to fade, and, with every passing second, I find my footing faltering ever-so-slightly. A dreadful kind of suspense begins to well in the pit of my stomach, as a creeping fire begins to erupt, deep within the soles of my bloody feet. It begins in my toes; travels up, up, up, to the uneasy curl of my ankle, the joint bitter in its inevitable damage, and I clench my jaw. I clench my jaw tightly, because I- because I knew that it wouldn’t last long, I knew that it wouldn’t last long, and still, I find myself surprised, frustrated, that the adrenaline is wearing. That, soon enough, I will find myself imobile, constricted by the worst level of pain I will ever endure. Bone, upon bone; fracture, upon fracture; the make-up of my anatomy begs for more adrenaline. 

I push forth. Through the dim lighting of the streetlight - contorting to that of my aggressive dizziness, as the scene frame binds back and forth between the figure of four, and the singular, blurred, picture - I am able to… I can see a-

I sway in my footing, caught by the ferocious burn as it runs up, and it runs down, the joint of my knee; echoing around like the mocking laugh of my slow, steady, heartbeat. Still think you’re winning? It taunts, diving from one ear, circling my head, and protruding through the other, with a sickening giggle to warp it all in between. I grit my teeth, and I ignore it, inhaling shakily through my nostrils. In, I try, and out. But the burning ache has returned, and it drawls its slow, merciless, crawl, up, and up, and up, and up, my entirety; locking in the very cells of my biology, and taunting a dangerous song. 

Oh, how it burns, I swallow thickly; how it aches. 

It burns, and it aches, and I blink slowly, and I raise my foot - up, up, up - and I force it forward. A gentle connection with the floor holds no matter, I comprehend, as a thousand pins scatter about the marrow of my damaged skeleton, and a thousand needles pierce the tranquil complexion of a broken cohesion. It burns, and it aches, but I parry on. I parry on, and I delve myself yet another great number of unsteady stumbles; one foot, then the next, and then another few. I catch myself roughly as I groan out aloud, because, oh, it aches, and oh, it burns, and I blink slowly, and I entice myself to breathe, as I pause. In, my throat rasps upon the cool temperature of the night, and out. 

“Alyssa.” I murmur, gently, as it fills the light air that surrounds us. The girl adjusts her attention, shuffling softly among my grip, and I am unable to swallow the cry that forces its way out, as she regards me with wide, watering, eyes, and I lower her (incautiously) to the ground. She lands with a thud, as her bare feet slap the concrete, and a subtle stumble, as I bend my frame, slightly, and I adhere to an unsteady lumber; contorted by the sheer ferocity of the flames, engulfing my arms with an unforgiving depiction. “Fuck,” I whisper, moreso for the expression, than for any natural effect, and I attempt to regain my posture. In, I rise to my full height, and I ignore the blasphemous heat that licks upon every morsel, every joint, and out. In, I ignore the blissful call of exhaustion’s lesion, as it beckons me slowly, and I flutter my eyes shut, arms hung limp at my sides, and out.  I breathe, and I breathe, and I remain swaying in my place, silently wishing that the damned payphone was not fifteen feet away. 

Still think you’re winning?

Fuck you, am I losing, I spit, internally, and I’m not quite sure who I am fighting, anymore. Benjamin Fackle? My pain? Myself? My exhaustion? Death? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. 

I take another step, and I force myself to contain my expression of pain. I swallow it back, as the salivating gland to the inner corner of my throat begins to over-work, and the sleek bile concoction begins to trail its way up, up, up, through my esophagus, once more, and I feel it beginning to crawl through the burn of my throat. But the payphone is ten feet away, and fuck you, am I losing. 

A rough swallow, and a softly hidden gip; I trudge another few feet upon the cold pathway bellow me, and I pledge my attention solely upon the approaching, smooth, steel of the payphone, enlarging, and imposing, as it draws nearer, and nearer, and nearer; one step, two steps, three steps, four, do I stumble, stuttering gracelessly in my stride as I go, and, oh, the phone is almost here. I reach for it, the sweet, sweet, plastic of bitter salvation, and a gentle cry escapes my mouth as I curl my digits upon it. I’ve got it. I’ve got it. I’ve got it. I’ve got it. 

I’ve got it, and I draw it up, ignoring the flaring heat that roars throughout my entirety, and I allow my trembling grip to pale upon the device; gripping it, gripping it, gripping it, because Holy Fuck, I’ve got it. I’ve got it, but I- I swallow thickly, and I drag my burning frame that little bit closer. I’ve got the phone, and there’s- I check the credit, faintly projected beneath the dim light of the street, and another breathless laugh falls from my mouth, perhaps the first genuine smile gracing my lips, as an unnoticed trail of warm tears track their salty trace down my cheeks. 

One Call Remaining. 

One call remaining, I hover my hand above the metal keypad. I only know one number. I only know one number, but, as I smile, and I sniffle gently to myself, I know that it’s the only number I need, and I dial it - with shaking, aching, fingers, I dial the number, and I clutch upon the rim of the metal compartment with a wavering grip. 

It rings once, twice, three times, and I pray, oh, to any God that may here me, do I pray that he picks up, as the echo of the ringing begins to sound less like the bells of a church, and more like the mocking laugh of someone poking me, prodding: Still think you’re winning? Still think you’re winning? Come on, pick up. Pick up. Pick up. Pick u- 

“Hello?” There he is. Tone thick with sleep, groggy, and deep - down, I notice, but it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. He picked up. He picked up. “Hello?” 

“Spence.” I breathe, as another humourless, teary, laugh trickles from my throat. “Oh, my God, Spencer.” 

There is immediate shuffling, across the line, and I can only assume that he is sitting upright, frowning into the dark before him. Perhaps he has switched on his bedside lamp. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. “Y/N?” He rasps, softly, with such a gentleness, I fear that something else hides behind his tone. “Is that you?”

I pause, for a moment, as my expression pinches, and the crumble of agony descends upon my shoulders like the tide upon the shore, and the edge of my eroded cliff begins to fall. “It’s me, Pretty Boy.” I whisper, tone riddled by the repressed lather of edging tears; the misery that threatens to spill. I bite it back, and I relax my contorted expression. I hold it down, and my chest begins to burn, again. It burns, and it aches, and my body is on fire. But he’s here - my Spencer, my Pretty Boy - he’s here, and I am still breathing, and Alyssa is still here, and Benjamin Fackle is not.

I blink slowly, and I swallow down my silent cries, as the warm moisture of irrevocable tears fall solemnly upon my cheeks, and I sniffle it back, as the shuffling continues through the rough auditory of the responding end. 

“Where are you?” He asks, a certain heaviness to his tone that has not been invoked by the influence of exhaustion. He sniffles, and I wipe my moistened mouth with the back of my wrist, ignoring the sudden flare of pain that engulfs my arm, my body, as a soft sound falls from my lips. I could hope that he did not hear it, that my quiet whimper slipped through the cracks of the terrible connection, but I know Spencer. Oh, do I know him, and so, when he gulps audibly, and he stutters over his words, I know that he is entirely aware of my pain. “I- I couldn’t, I’m-” He takes a shaken, deep, breath, and he tries again. “Where, uh- where are you, Y/N?” He asks, quietly, as the explicit ruffle of a breeze picks up on his end, and the distant slam of a door alerts me that he is on the move. I almost smile. Almost, if it were not for the grave buck of my knee, as it gives out, and I half-collapse, and an audible yell falls from my lips, the phone slipping from my weak grip, and tumbling to clatter with the metal of the side panel. 

The sudden glare of invading heat, rupturing between this cell, and that cell, and every damned muscle in between, catches my body in a crampating hold; forcing me down upon a half-crouch, half-bend, as a forty-five degree angle courses through my hot, hot, agonized, frame. “Fuck,” I groan, as I slowly - oh-so-slowly, with a hiss here, and a quiet moan there - drag myself back up, and I place the phone back to my ear. Fuck. The incessant flourish of heat warps my limbs, carries them upon a throne of daggers, and of bruising pellets, and I find myself stifling back a sob, as he immediately interrupts my discomforted quiet. 

“Y/N?” Spencer calls, no less a shout, than an urgent call. “Y/N, what’s going on?” He pleads, not quite bothering to mask the teary tone that he displays. I suppose that Spencer has always been like that - with me, at least - whereby his emotions are so raw, so pretty, that one cannot help being entirely enamoured by the way his tone thickens, and his lower lip trembles, as he forces back his tears, and I cannot help but allow my eyes to flutter shut; to envision his large, brown, eyes, so pretty beneath the glassy shein, and, for the second time, tonight, I allow a thumping thought to re-iterate itself among my pulse. 

This is it, it says, and I am not sure if I am winning, anymore. 

It just- Oh, Oh it hurts, and it aches, and it burns, and I- and I can’t tell if the moisture on my cheeks is from my silent tears, or the precipitation from my hot sweat, but it doesn’t seem to matter. It doesn’t seem to matter, because the urgent calls of Spencer’s thickening concern seem to fade - drifting, drifting, drifting away - and I lose myself within that certain void of semi-consciousness. Slumped upright, against the payphone booth, it pulses in my ears, and it aches, and it burns, and it hurts, and this is it. This is it. This is it. This is how I die, and I’m not sure if I am winning anymore, and I can’t hear my Pretty Boy, and I can’t picture his pretty brown eyes, or his pretty little face, or the soft embrace I could dare to call home, and I can’t think of anything. I can’t- it won’t- it aches, and it burns, and it hurts, and this is it. This is it. This is it. This is it. And I’m not winning anymore. I’m not losing, I’ve gained some sort of victory, along the way, but I can’t see the finish line, and I’m slowing down. I’m slowing down. I’m slowing down. I’m slowing down, and this is it. This is it. This is it. This is it. 

This is it, and small, nimble, fingers, approach my peripheral. Like that slow-motion scene, with distant classical music echoing from the depth of another, airy, room; I watch it take ahold of the phone; watch it disappear, again, and the muffled tone of a child - Lissy Doll, little, little, Lissy Doll - soaks within my senses, devoured like the sweet scent of honey to a sore throat. I hear her, as I slide down the metal of the payphone, and I succumb to the desperate flames; I hear her, but I cannot bring myself to listen. Not as she speaks, with tears - I assume this is what I notice, glimmering upon her pink cheeks, as she cries beneath the moonlight - trailing her face, and she sniffles, and stutters, and she tries to reply as informatively to Spencer as she possibly can. I want to call out to her - want to inform her that this is why she is a good girl, that her unrelenting ability to do the right thing is what makes her good, not her lack of protest, and neither her silence, or her previously dry cheeks. I want to tell her that I am proud of her, as I lower my cranium upon the cold pathway below me, but I am tired.

I am tired, and this is it. 

This is it. This is it. This is it. 

This is it, and I know that Spencer will save her, now. That, although I am not winning, although I have not won, Alyssa is safe. Alyssa will grow to learn her recovery, and she will regain her aforementioned youth. And, as I roll upon my back, my body aroar with flames that ache, and that burn, and that taunt me desperately within my ear, that thank me, profusely, for my sacrifice, I stare up at the sky, and I smile, softly. Benjamin Fackle will be caught, should he catch his breath, and regain his consciousness, and Alyssa will recover. Her mother will hold her little Lissy Doll, once more, and she will be able to watch her child grow old, and she will know that in my death, her daughter found life. I suppose that death is not quite as morbid, when I think of it like this. 

When I ignore the persistent nagging, in the forefront of my mind, as my eyelids droop, and exhaustion overwhelms me, and I pretend that in dying, I would not tear Spencer apart. I pretend, and I pretend, as I attempt to count the stars above me, for I know that I would shred him, limb from limb, and he would never recover. I am not so arrogant as to believe that I hold such power over any other, but Spencer is not just ‘any other’. Spencer - my Spencer - devotes himself, entirely, to the concept of love. He has never told me this - not in words - but- but I know. Love is not something you should ever find yourself questioning, and, if you are, it is not true love. I have never found myself questioning Spencer’s muse of adoration, despite his reluctance to openly admit it (all those months ago), and I know that I am lucky. That Spencer has known far too much pain for someone of such a golden declaration, and that his soul must be woven of the finest silk. There is not a single part of me - not a fraction, not a section - that does not know this, is not consumed by this. But here, as I lie upon the concrete, and Alyssa’s quiet crying forms a background serenade for my slow, painful, death, I wonder if my Pretty Boy would be alright. 

I wonder if Spencer would recover, in time, much the same as Alyssa will, and I wonder if he will accept that it was my fault. That, ultimately, had I not imposed myself upon this unofficial case, and attempted to take matters into my own, foolish, hands, I would not be here, at this moment, dying. And he would not be awoken in the middle of the night, to an Unknown Number, and he would not be met with the pained cry of his tortured partner - a tortured partner that stares up to the stars, as they lay dying, and smiles because they are beneath the same sky as the love of their life, and, well, nothing seems to matter, anymore. 

My body tingles - the kind of tingle that curls, and crawls, throughout your broken skeleton - and I let it dance, drunkenly, through the course of my very being. For when I remain motionless, it doesn’t quite hurt, anymore. Quite, because I am unsure as to whether the tingling is a symptom of forthcoming death - if I am numb, and unable to feel anything, anymore, but it doesn’t matter. 

This is it, and it doesn’t matter, as I stare up at the night sky, and I sketch my Pretty Boy’s face among the stars, and I know that he fits right in, up there, with his soft chocolate hair, that swoops upon the right side of his face, and curls behind his ear; with his perfect little nose, that buttons, and finds itself entirely symmetrical, and the round, gently crinkled, expression of adoration within his wonderfully dark eyes - creased to the edge, as he smiles at me, and I lose myself in his adoration. And I think that if I am to die tonight, beneath the stars, with the vision of Spencer glancing down upon me with nothing but pure love, and affectionate warmth, I think that I am to die happy. 

“Lissy,” I call, softly, and I hear her murmur something to my Spencer. I am unsure as to how long the credit will remain, though I assume it will not be forever, as Alyssa turns to face me, and I offer her a genuine, toothy, smile. “Can I speak to him?” I ask, quietly, and I can hardly recognize my own voice, beneath the rasp of my naked throat, and the relief that courses through my frame from the numbness that dying provides. “Please?” Please, may I bid my farewell?

Alyssa doesn’t say anything, with yet another sniffle, and she speaks another bundle of words that I do not quite catch, as she lowers herself to kneel beside me, the chord of the phone almost entirely outstretched, and she places the receiver to my ear, and the speaker to my chapped, smiling, lips. “Y/N?” I hear, as I see him amongst the stars, and my eyes crinkle at the notion, bewitched by a toothy, genuine, grin. The phone is cold, and I blink slowly up at the sky. 

“Hey, Pretty Boy.” I say, quietly. “I miss you.”

There is hardly a pause, though I notice that the wind is no longer present upon the static of his end. “I don’t- I’m-” He catches his words, and he rearranges them. He doesn’t know what to say, but I let him take his time. “Why would you do that?” He hisses, softly, after a moment and there is a returning thickness that bubbles in his throat. I hear him swallow, but it doesn’t quite seem to do anything, at all, as he continues, and he sniffles back his tears, slightly. “Why wouldn’t you tell anyone?” He asks. Not scolding, not angrily, more of the bitter mourning, and the grief, that wraps upon his tone, and I find myself swallowing my honesty, for the moment. 

“Can you see the sky, Spencie?” I evade, staring up at the constellations that form before me, as he shuffles, and his silence echoes back to me. “Can you see the stars?”

“Y/N-” His voice trembles, but I cut him off.

“I’m not winning, anymore, Spence.” I say, a mere whisper upon the silent street around us. “I’m not losing.” I continue. “But I’m- I’m not winning, either.”

“What?” He mumbles, voice thick with tears, and I envision them tumbling down his face. Another shuffle breaks forth, and I assume that he has wiped his cheeks. My chest begins to ache, again, as I picture the subtle furrow of his eyebrows, and the way his tongue will run over the pout of his trembling lower lip, as he exhales through his cheeks, and he sniffles with his pretty nose, and I smile, softly, into the night, and, despite the dense knowledge that I will not, I hope that I will make it. That this isn’t it. But, deep down, I know that it is, and thus, I continue.

“I want you to-” I swallow back the uprising hiss, as I move my jaw somewhat to animatedly, and a flare of heat erupts in my throat, and I speak quieter, as I try again, and I know that Spencer’s expression is pinched. “I want you to take care of Lissy, alright?” I say. 

Silence. 

“Spencer, promise me.” I whisper. “I need you to do that for me.” 

“Why would-” He delves a shaky inhale, “Why would I have to do it?” He says. “You’re gonna be fine, Y/N.” He continues, a tremble to his tone, “You’re gonna be Okay. You’re gonna walk away from this, just fine, and Alyssa’s gonna have access to as much help as she needs, and we- and we’re gonna be just fine, Okay?” I want to shake my head, I want to interrupt his self indulged, dishonest, ramble, and I want to stop him - want to reach out, and hold him, and to assure him that he will recover - but this is it, and time is simply not on my side. 

“Spencer.” I call, softly, and he falls to immediate silence; his breathing inconsistent, and shaken. “I’m not winning, anymore.” I repeat, and I know that he has gathered together the missing pieces. “I’m not.” I say. “And- and it hurts.” I whisper. “It hurts, and I’m tired-”

“I know, baby,” He says, gently, as he gulps in a trembled lungful of air, and he swallows down the lump in his throat, and he tries to speak again. “I know you’re tired, and I know that you’re in pain, but you can hold on. I know you can, Y/N, come on.” He says. “Fight.” And a quiet, almost silent, whimper leaves my lips, until the stars are all a blanket of ill-lit darkness, and I can hardly comprehend his grief as he speaks again. “Please.” He whispers. “You’ve gotten through the worst of it, and if you- if you don’t move, and you stop talking, and you preserve your energy, you’ll be fine. You can survive another three minutes, and twenty four seconds, can’t you?”

A breathless, teary, laugh falls from me, then, and I ignore the blistering fire that erupts throughout my body. “Calculated to the second.” I tease, softly, “How ingenious of you, Doctor.” 

He reciprocates my watery laugh, though riddled with far less enthusiasm than I, and he mutters his quiet response: “I do have an IQ of 187, and an-”

“And an eidetic memory.” I finish, smiling toothily to myself, despite the chorus of flames that attempts to swallow me whole. “I know, Spencer.” I say. “And I know that you don’t think intelligence can be quantitatively measured.”

“No.” He says, “I don’t.” 

“And I know that you-” I gulp back the concoction of bile, and I try it again, a certain hoarseness about my tone. “I know that you can read twenty-thousand words per minute, and that you don’t much like the taste of coffee, so you- you pour the whole bag of sugar in there-”

“I do not-”

“You do, Pretty Boy.” I smile, and, beneath the soft crackle of the reception, I hear a low rumble of agreement. 

“She’s right.” They say, a grin to their tone, and I know that voice. Oh, I know it well.

“Is that Morgan?” I rasp, softly, and I smile up at the sky, as the man in question offers his greeting. 

“Hey, Babygirl.” He says, with that same kind of warmth that Derek seems to consistently radiate. My chest aches, again, and I realise that I do not want this to be it. It aches, and the charred flavour of my burning sternum crawls back upon my tongue, and it nestles there, as he offers a question of less-than-casual-conversation. “How you holdin’ up?” He asks. 

“Great, actually.” I joke, as I offer a kind smile to Alyssa, and she runs her nimble, small, fingers through my hair, and she reciprocates the gesture, ascending her gaze back to the stars, as she goes. “If you consider two-” I let out a low cough, as the concoction of bile seeps beneath my tongue, and it- I heave, abruptly, and I force myself to twist to the side, unloading whatever the fuck was left, rejected, amongst my stomach. The wet splatter of blood, and of bile, of mucus, and salivation, coaxes the pavement, a mere few inches away, as I retreat, slowly, back to the receiver of the phone, and I dismiss the neverending roar of flames, engulfing my body, still, as I sink back into my vertical position, and I return to the conversation.

“Y/N?” Spencer calls, a thickened tone of worry conveying about his voice. 

“I’m fine.” I lie. “Just a little, uh-” I swallow back the coppery aftertaste, and I offer Alyssa another gentle smile. “Nauseous.” I murmur. 

“Nauseous?” Spencer repeats. “Do you have a fever?” 

“I don’t have the flu, Spence,” I dare to jest, “It’s probably just something to do with my two dislocated, and relocated, shoulders. Or, maybe my- maybe my (probably broken) ankle, and the-” Another strained groan falls from me, as Alyssa slumps herself down upon the pathway, and she (accidentally) knocks the jolt of my displaced shoulder, a great POP echoing out from such a sudden movement. Fire. Heat. Hot, hot, hot; it licks away at the joint, and I let out a great, stifled cry, as she attempts to place her palm upon it, and I- “Fuck!” I cry, “Don’t touch it, Lissy, don’t-” I swallow down another yell, as the fire runs up, and down, up, and down, the length of my arm; pins and needles carouselling their way about the wounded flesh. “Don’t touch it. Please.” I implore, quietly, as I attempt to return to the phone, and I retrain my gaze upon the stars, slurry, and unfocused, for all its worth, as I find myself woozy beneath the beckon of exhaustion, once more. 

“What was that?” Spencer pleads, as he holds the speaker somewhat too close to his mouth, and my head naturally jerks away from the volume of his cry. Another rip of gravely flames engulf my figure, as I strain myself to lower the extent of my groan, but it- Fuck, does it hurt. It aches, and it burns, and it licks up the fruit of my torture. “Y/N?” He calls, again, “What was that popping? Was that a joint?” 

I grit my teeth, and I exhale through them roughly. In, I breathe, and out. “My shoulder, Spence.” I murmur, “Fuck- Please-” I do not want this to be it. I do not want this to be it. I do not want this to be it. The thump of my heart begins to pick up, and I withhold the uprising sob that threatens to break through. I do not want this to be it. “Please tell me you’re bringing an ambulance.” I murmur, and I hope that my insinuation is correct.

“They’re on the way.” He says. “We all are.”

“All?” I mutter, quietly.

“All of us, Babycakes.” Morgan says. “Don’t tell me you thought we’d be able to sleep, with your face on the news, like that.” 

“I was on the news?”

“Headlining.”

“Great.” I scoff, “My big media break, and it’s the one thing that’ll have me fired.”

“It was a preposterous idea!” Spencer cuts in. “Going in alone, like that. You know that above ninety-seven percent of women are sexually assaulted? In their day-to-day lives? Why would you purposely search for a rapist? Why would you do that without back-up? I- I bet, I bet with every fibre of my being, that you didn’t check your blind spot.” He says, and I feel a certified something stir within the depth of my stomach, and pool deep within, for, oh, he knows me so well, and, and I- “You never check your blindspot. I do it for you, because I know that you’ll forget, but Y/N- fuck.” He says, and his breath shakes as he releases it. “And you know, you know that you are required, by law, to wait for back-up, when you do not have your vest, or any other form of protection. Y/N, we didn’t even know that you had worked on this case, never mind that you had gone to visit the UnSub by yourself-”

“He was out of his depth, Spencer.” I defend, quietly. I say it quietly, because it aches, and it burns, and it hurts. It hurts. It hurts. It hurts, and he listens to me, anyway, and he lets out a shaky inhale, as I speak. “It wasn’t in the Profile for him to do something that ballsy-”

“Well, clearly your profile was inaccurate.” He snaps, a certain edge to his tone that I find myself unfamiliar with, as I recoil, slightly, and I ignore the flare of heat that congregates about my body. “If you hadn’t-” He pauses, and another trembled breath is to follow: In, and out. “Y/N, I just- I’m- I’m scared, alright? I’m worried. I don’t know your physiological, or psychological, condition, right now, and I’m- it’s just-” Another stuttered inhale. “This isn’t easy, Okay?”

“I know, Spence.” 

“I don’t hear from you for four days, twenty-two hours, and thirty-nine minutes, roughly fourteen seconds, and you’re the headline for the news. MISSING: Federal Agent, Y/N Y/L/N, Last Seen in Quantico Virginia, at the Behavioural Analysis Unit Headquarters.” He recites, and I know that it has plagued the back of his eyelids like a lingering, bad, smell, ever since. “You know where you were last seen, Y/N? You were last seen with me, that’s where. And I can’t forget what that headline says, it is biologically impossible, and I can’t stop seeing it every time I close my eyes, and I- and I can’t stop thinking about how, should I have stayed with you for another four hours, or so, you wouldn’t have chased this UnSub, and you would be here, right now, and I wouldn’t be turning down the street, to find you sprawled out on the floor - because I know that’s what you’re doing - in agony, and feeling as though death is knocking at your door, and-”

“Breathe, Pretty Boy,” Morgan cuts in, “Breathe.”

But he doesn’t pause long enough to listen. “And I can’t-” His voice cracks, slightly, and my chest burns, it aches, as the subtlety of silent tears stream down the sides of my face, and they pool within the roots of my hair. “And I can’t listen to you, here, talking to me like you’ll-” He grapples a broken inhale, and he stutters amongst his breathing, and I hear the tears on his tongue. I hear them. I hear them. “-like you’ll never see me again. Like this call is some sort of goodbye.” 

“I don’t want this to be it.” I say, gentler than I feel I have ever spoken, before, and Spencer offers his words of protest. 

“It isn’t!” He exclaims, with a thick bitterness to his tone. Not quite directed at me, though the agony to his own constricting chest is evident. I find myself accustomed to the flavour of my burned sternum, as it rests upon my tongue, and I do not attempt to protest amongst his continuation, as he cries, and he parries on. “Fuck,” He whispers, and I envision him wiping away the fresh moisture of his expression, once again, as a quiet shuffling invokes upon the line. “This isn’t it. We’re-” He lets out a breath. “Can you hear us?” He asks. “We’re almost there.” 

The distant wail of crying sirens engulfs my senses, paired with the static white noise of Spencer's anticipation, and I find my mouth up-tilting, ever so slightly. “Yeah.” I say. “I can hear you.” And maybe, just maybe, this isn’t it. Maybe Spencer - maybe my Pretty Boy Spence - is right. He is rarely wrong, that much may I agree, but he is not always accurate in his future depictions. For once, I find myself thinking, I hope that he is right. 

“Good.” He says, perhaps more so to himself, than to me, as he repeats the notion, and he steadies his erratic breathing. “Good, Okay. We’re turning onto your street, now.” He says. “Can you see us?”  The wailing sirens approach, they engulf the silence of the night, as they blare, and they scream, and they fall louder, and closer, and louder, and closer, and the stars all morph together, into one illuminated band of darkness, and the sirens blare on, growing louder, and closer, and louder, and closer, and- “Y/N?” Spencer calls.

“The sirens.” I murmur, distractedly, as they ricochet around my mind, and they bounce from one fragment of my inner skull, to the other, and they roll impotently about the curve of the bone. “They’re-” Louder, and closer, and louder, and closer. “They’re noisy.” I say, and I doubt that he can comprehend the gentle tone to which I depict, as the wail of the siren cry calls out, and a sudden screech falls present upon their hellish song.

Spencer does not reply, and I listen to the white noise - the white noise that grows distant, as the wailing aubade of the ambulance approaches - and, then, a chorus of footsteps consume my auditory senses.

I know my lover not by his footfall, but by the way in which he collapses, immediately, at my side, and his large, warm, hand, cusps at my broken cheek, and he observes me closely. And it aches, and it burns, but, oh, there he is. There he is, with a furrow to his straightened eyebrows, and a glassy film aloft his beautiful, warm, orbs - reduced to circles of worry, of anguish, as he observes my… my state of being - and I measure the map of his features, I blister them among the roof of my mind, as though I have not looked upon them fondly a thousand times before, and I offer my lover a soft, closed-mouth, smile. I offer him a smile, and I ache to run my fingers across his parted lips, to recall the feel of his skin, his perfect, perfect, complexion, and the symmetrical span of his face. In this moment, I want nothing more than to feel the weight of his body, sprawled out upon me, as my arms wind around his neck, and I embrace my Spencer, and we pretend that all the trauma of the world does not exist, and we love, and we love, and we love. 

I watch the rapid descent of his features, and I gather that he wishes he knew nothing of my physiological well-being, if the subtlety of my pained cries aloft the phone were quite enough to reduce him to tears, and my fingers itch. They itch, they itch, and they itch, to run through the smooth flow of his hair, to brush it away from his pretty little features, and to assure him that: Hey, Pretty Boy, it’s alright. I’m alright. It’s going to be fine. Just fine, Okay? This isn’t it, I was wrong. I was wrong, Okay? This isn’t it, Pretty Boy. Come on. Come on, Pretty Boy, wipe those cheeks. It’s going to be just fine. It’s alright. It’s going to be fine, Pretty Boy. Okay? Okay. 

But eyes, red raw, and leaking, stare down at me, and I know that to speak such words would be nought but a cruel spell of dishonesty. I’m not winning, anymore. 

Trembling fingers work their way through the matted knots of my hair, brushing back the locks from my face, as they flail out upon the pathway beneath me, and Spencer shudders a quiet sigh. “Hey,” He greets, simply, as though he is not attempting to swallow his raging heart, that threatens to break through the lump in his throat. As though he is not on fire, with burning self-hatred (just like I know that he is), and gritting his teeth to prevent any upcoming sobs. As though I am not destroying him, as we speak. As though I am Okay, as though I am still winning. “Can-” Another shaken, stuttered, inhale, “Can you move?” He asks, and I gulp back the remainder of the bile concoction that has yet to bid me farewell. Can you move? No. No. I cannot. I can hardly breathe, and I-

I shake my head, gently, and I attempt to ignore the corrupting fire that, still, nibbles away at the aching flesh of my body, and I- “It hurts.” I repeat, no less than a whimper upon the business of the night. Blue light carousels around the darkness, illuminating the scene in an azure of flashing cerulean, but I see nothing other than the glassy brown of his wide, fearful, eyes. “It hurts, Spencer.” I say, and I am not quite sure just what it is that hurts, anymore, as my vision blurs, and the warmth of something hot, something wet, trails upon my broken cheeks. 

“Shh,” He whispers, tone thickened by the tally of his own violent tear-shed, as he strokes the pad of his calloused thumb aloft my moistened complexion. “Shh,” He says, “I know.” But it aches, and it burns, and I can hardly breathe, once again. “I know, baby, it’s alright.” He says. “I’m here. I’m right here, Okay? Ri- right here.”

 But that- it doesn’t- it doesn’t seem to matter, as he trails the dampness of my sopping cheeks, and his salty tears trickle down his throat. It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because this is it. And, as a certain warmth begins to sprinkle upon the curve of my toes, and the quiet patter of uniformed feet scurry upon the pathway, and the roll of a- of the- stretcher? Of the stretcher. Oh, the stretcher. It aches, and it burns, and Spencer seems awfully beautiful, beneath the gaze of the moon, and my eyes- they ache, and they burn. 

The angel that hangs above me, my very own offering from heaven (an offering, a fraction, like the stars, from the sun) and I think he has never looked more bittersweet in his beauty, than he does tonight, displayed beneath the moonlight. Displayed beneath the moonlight, as though he is carved, sculpted, so effortlessly, by the most callous, talented, hands that the Gods ever did have to offer. I swallow back my prosperity, as the shein upon my eyes begins to dwindle, and I consider whatever religion I have left, inside of me. I consider it, and I come to realise, as my adoration for this angel, for this sweet, sweet, lover of mine, paints itself in poetry upon my tongue, that all of my religion is made up of him. That he tastes like the body of Christ, or whomever my heart has decided is unworthy of worship in the presence of my Spencer, and he has stained my lungs with the scent of his forgiveness.

He is the religion that I have left, and I fall to my knees before him. As he furrows his eyebrows, and everything seems to dim, and the stars lose their spark, and I am wrapped- wrapped up, up, up, in a tingling sensation, that crawls around, and around, my entirety, and dissolves the fire, relishes the flames; that runs its hand through my hair, and threatens to succumb me to exhaustion.

This is it, I think, and I bore my stare into the warmth of Spencer’s darkening expression. His mouth, that hangs open, and shapes the body of words I cannot hear, but look a lot like my name, and the sirens of the world around, they all fall to nothing. 

This is it, and I am consumed entirely in something that feels a lot like him. A lot like my Pretty Boy. A lot like Spencer. For it is warm, and it runs a steady hand through my hair, and it caresses my cheek, and I am- I am Okay. Just for this moment, I decide, I am Okay. The dull shadow of my gaze seems to darken, and the world around collapses, and I hear nothing. But I am Okay. I hear nothing; no buzz, no fuzz of the white noise, but I am Okay, and, in a strangely comforting anonymity, I allow myself to sway along with it’s somber aubade. For what, in life, is more beautiful than the transition? Than the end? 

This is it, and I am Okay, and it does not hurt, as I indulge a final glance upon my lover, before me, and I strain my arm - my somewhat re-located joint, that doesn’t ache, and doesn’t burn, beneath the symphony that is my love - and I raise it up, up, up, and I cup at the curve of his trembled, tear-stricken, cheek. I hear him not, as he whispers to me, softly, and I do not dispel the announcement of my adoration, as I draw him closer to me, and he follows without question. Without question, because my Pretty Boy is not naive. Because my Pretty Boy knows, all to well, the prologue of agony, and, as he leans in to the heart of my hand, and his sopping wet features pinch with the repression of bitten back sobs, and he approaches, and he nears, and his warm, trembled, breath fans my lips, as it all takes place, and the world falls away, my Pretty Boy knows that this is it. That I am not winning, anymore. 

He knows, he knows, he knows. 

He knows, and his mouth is warm, is familiar, as it peppers its soft affection upon the wounded pout of my lips, and he cries his salted tears, that melt upon my damaged complexion with anger, and with poorly consumed rage, and he damns the cruel taste of fate, as it settles within his lungs. He knows, as he withdraws his fragile expression, and a gust of cold, frigid, air, wraps upon the flesh of my parted mouth, and his tongue darts upon his lower lip, and catches a bout full of tears. He knows. He knows. Oh, how he knows. And, as those very same lips bless the blood of my forehead with a ginger, angelic, kiss, and they press upon the skin with shaken certainty, our notion of adoration feels more like a goodbye, than an ‘I Love You’. But there doesn’t seem to be much of a difference, anymore, as I watch, through hooded eyes, and a numb, drifting, body, and I observe the violent tremble of his frame, his hunched shoulders, as he looms above me, and he cradles my face within his large hands. 

There isn’t any difference, because this is it. 

This is it, and I stutter through my final breath, and my half-lidded eyes absorb the dark nothingness before them for one final time. 

This is it.

This is it, and I’m not winning, anymore. 

[love-takes-work]

Steven Universe: End of an Era: Outline & Review

I wrote this review in October but never got around to posting it here

Steven Universe: End of an Era is far more than an art book–it’s also a collection of behind-the-scenes material, stories about the experience of working on the show, planning documents and associated background info, and both older versions of developed concepts AND concepts that never made it into the show. It's a huge fusion of all those elements, and it's definitely an experience!

Some low-quality images are included with my review just to give you an idea of what’s there--it’s not a good substitute for getting your own copy, but here’s a tour!

Like the previous concept art book, Art and Origins, I'll be giving you a description of the structure and overview, while also collecting notable information for fans. Obviously just about everything is "notable" once again, but I'll aim for unique insight or perspective on the main source material, keeping the screaming about everything new to a minimum so you can also enjoy something for yourself if you pick it up. My low-quality photos should prevent people from feeling like I'm reproducing the book in any capacity. Please grab one while you can and have your own experience!

[SU Book and Comic Reviews]

OVERVIEW

The book is titled "End of an Era" for a couple reasons--obviously because it is released after the show has wrapped, but also because Gem history recently ended its "Era 2" and began Era 3--an age of prosperity and peace. The author--the person in charge of adapting all of this information into this slick, readable package--is Chris McDonnell, whose work was previously applied on the Art and Origins book.

The foreword is by N.K. Jemisin, a well-known science fiction author who's a huge fan of the show (and wrote a really excellent series that also has a weird geological connection, by the way).

And the cover, like its predecessor, is shiny and decorated with a beach scene featuring minimalistic characters--this time it's the Gems at night in front of the Temple, and on the back cover is a big pink leg ship in a cross-legged pose.

The interior covers are decorated with tons of amazing sketches of Steven and Connie on the front, and a bunch of Gem sketches on the back. Every interior page that most would leave blank is highlighted with some kind of sketch art or character exercise--it's so much to look at, so much to absorb.

The book is dedicated "For Eddie."

Its organization is different from the previous book in that it shares applicable work in chunks associated with groups of episodes rather than pertaining to different aspects of building the show.

FOREWORD

N.K. Jemisin gives us such a great introduction to the book--apparently understanding very well that the audience of this book is full of animation enthusiasts and adult fans more than it is full of kids, and explaining that bewildering journey some adults had from blowing this show off as a silly kid thing to falling in love with it hard and fast.

The important thing, Jemisin says, is being able to trust a storyteller with your heart. And it was clear to her that Rebecca Sugar knew what she was talking about and was saying important things about identity and the radical power that comes with accepting it and demanding respect.

Important also is how we handle heroes and who gets to be one in fantasy. That's part of the reason Steven Universe speaks to so many--because we see ourselves here, and know stories can be about us. Acknowledging the power we all have to MAKE THINGS BETTER with what we fight for is so important--especially if we're going to speaking to the next generation about it.

Highlighting Rose Quartz as a "born leader" who failed and Steven as a relatable scamp who did what she couldn't, Jemisin asserts that we can save the world.

1. END OF AN ERA

We start with an appeal to the audience to think about identity and the formative parts of our childhood--and how different it is if who you are and who you become is restricted, mocked, erased, or Not Allowed. Most people, if not ALL people, can relate to this, but for those of us with a special relationship with Steven Universe because of queer identity, this hits hard.

But it doesn't have to be anything grand to be something we respect--this show's authenticity comes largely from how personal everything is, drawn from real-life experiences and incidental truths from each artist's perspective, leaning hard on childhood and formative experiences.

Rebecca Sugar offers some interview bits to discuss writing philosophy and why "writing female characters" was difficult for a nonbinary person who'd been socialized as a girl and a woman. Rebecca has spoken before about how frustrating it is that marketing for cartoons was SO gendered when she was growing up (and to some extent still is).

The Gems in the story are all "she/her," but on their planet they're defined by their work, not by emotion or relationships (unlike women in our society), so having them be socialized opposite to how she was and be able to claim those emotions through choice and NOT as just an expectation "as women" was revolutionary. Rebecca wants her show to tell all marginalized people that they don't deserve to be in the margins.

Weighing in on other aspects of the show were Ian Jones-Quartey, Joe Johnston, and Miki Brewster. Ian describes feeling like at first doing SU was a thrill ride that meant they'd finally get to do all the cool stuff, but it quickly became a responsibility that he took very seriously--the need to tell a good story now that he'd been given a megaphone.

Promotional art, planning documents, character sketches, and concept art from the lighthearted to the stone serious is included, along with some very cool (sort of famous) timeline charts that track major characters' developments. It's emphasized by Rebecca that the developmental materials ARE NOT CANON (and especially are not MORE canon) compared the final show.

There are concept sketches alongside final art for Aquamarine and Topaz in "Wanted" (with Topaz labeled "Imperial Topaz"), the Zircons in "The Trial," Blue and Yellow Diamond, and the Off Colors (including Pink Lars).

And there's also a spread of "the two sides of Steven's life: Gem Magic and Rock N Roll" featuring Sadie Killer and the Suspects (referred to as "Buck's band")--as well as a cool "Crew Cameos" key and some concepts for short-haired Connie.

And then there's some more "finished" art with stills alongside concepts, including some background art, revision, and really cool "fairytale" art from some of the shadowplay storytelling bits. We get "Lars of the Stars," "Jungle Moon," and "Can't Go Back."

2. THE BEGINNING OF THE END: A SINGLE PALE ROSE

In discussing the huge reveals and Gem mysteries in the show, the pacing is examined, and emphasis is put on the intended "slow burn." One of the most difficult things in the show was to strategize so that every piece that was needed to support another piece in the future was placed properly to seed what it was supposed to.

Some of the ideas they developed were more of a group effort and were fit together collaboratively (like Amethyst's being younger than the other Gems and Jasper being from Earth), while others were intended from the beginning based on Rebecca's vision (the fundamental idea of Pink Diamond's true identity, for instance, as well as Obsidian's design and sword and our Pearl not being Pink's first).

The writing process gets a great deep dive here, including fun tidbits like how the orb in the moon base was inserted by Joe Johnston and they literally had no idea what it was for when they wrote the episode. They repurposed it when they figured out what they needed.

Rebecca credits her detailed timelines for helping keep the order straight, and discusses how other artists are sometimes flabbergasted that a storyboard-driven show can have this much detail and continuity and yet not get wrecked by the free non-scripted boarding process. But Rebecca and the Crew valued that approach and loved the way fresh eyes would handle an idea, making it come back alive, entertaining, vivid.

Several Crew members weigh in on the writing process. Lauren Hecht refers to making lots of incorrect guesses despite being on the inside. Joe Johnston recalled getting briefed on his first day and getting so excited to start working on this massive project.

Miki Brewster remembered being told Rose Quartz is Pink Diamond and being shocked--and also confused about why Ruby and Sapphire would need to be married if they're already basically married. Drew Green talks about being brought in late and getting to watch unaired episodes and a rough of the movie while eating cereal.

Ian Jones-Quartey complains about Pink Diamond's real jester-like form being leaked to the internet through a Hot Topic shirt. Rebecca piggybacks on that and says it was upsetting that the wedding was leaked because of toy fair keychains featuring Ruby and Sapphire in wedding attire. They'd always be worried about leaks, and sometimes Rebecca struggled not to talk about the reality of Pink Diamond before the reveal because she knew it would make so much more sense once the truth was out. And everything associated with Rose makes more sense once you know she's Pink--especially what happened with Bismuth, considering what we know about how Pink Diamond has a habit of treating anyone who no longer serves her interests.

When it comes to visual cues, Rebecca also talks about intentional designs to create a feeling of unity between concepts, like the flower shapes on Pink Diamond's palanquin lining up with the poofs of Steven's hair and the star imagery of the series. Steven Sugar and Mary Nash discuss how the Human Zoo incorporated this imagery, trying to look like Homeworld with a Pink Diamond touch.

Steven Sugar, as a game nerd, liked to throw in video game references from old and modern stuff to feel like he's inserting what he's enjoying and who he is from moment to moment, while Mary Nash, who related to Sadie as a basement-dwelling young person with cult interests, liked to include stuff from MST3K and cult movies. Pearl's hand gestures get a spotlight too--her reflex to cover her mouth when Pink Diamond was being discussed was analyzed here.

A "Top Secret Visual Timeline" from 2016 is included which tells us some Diamond history. It has an earlier version of Pink Pearl's fate and does not include Spinel since the movie hadn't been greenlit. The timeline includes the birth of the Diamonds, the emergence and major story beats for each major character, and some philosophy of the driving force behind each.

We're told that Pink Diamond straightened up, behavior-wise, after she lost her first Pearl, and that Yellow and Blue wanted to give her a planet but White only agreed to it to prove she would fail at managing a colony. Pearl, meanwhile, is so confused to have a Diamond who keeps asking her what she thinks when she doesn't believe she should have opinions.

And when Pink moonlighted as Rose to start conflict, she found herself leading an army to fight Pink's troops--then Yellow's, and eventually Blue's too. Lapis is said to be waiting for the conflict to end on Earth so she can terraform, but she gets trapped instead.

Pearl's love story with Rose is described as "an endless honeymoon" where she's free to love her, while Rose's is more like "I'm now the head of the family and I'm going to give everyone what they never had, so everyone is super special!"

Jasper is described as "adopted" into Yellow's army as the only successful Beta Quartz. And White Diamond knew that Pink Diamond was not dead--she thought she was just running away from home like a brat and would eventually be back.

3. THE HEART OF THE CRYSTAL GEMS

Now we discuss Rose Quartz--the original Pink Diamond. How she was selfish and selfless, never enough and always too much, and how Greg was her first partner who "challenged her" to be an equal. Rebecca describes Rose as being delighted by the idea that both she and Greg reinvented themselves, but when that leads her to want to share her past, Greg isn't interested--he only wants to know who she is now, and doesn't consider the old her to be her.

Rebecca likes Carl Jung's concept of "enantiodromia," which is the idea that extremes lead to their extreme opposite. This is demonstrated in all of the Diamonds. This narrative is interspersed with drawings of Greg and Rose being cute.

But another "heart" of the Crystal Gems is its relationships--particularly, Garnet, the fairy tale romance embodied. More psychological theories are discussed with regard to differentiation in a relationship making the relationship stronger, and how they made sure that happened for Garnet during the appropriate arc. Rebecca has struggled with the idea that she, like Ruby, went straight from a "family" group to a living-with-others situation and never lived by herself. But she also learned that you can in fact develop as a person in the context of a relationship--you don't have to be alone to do it. Ruby learned that too, and chose on her own terms to be with Sapphire.

The wedding made so much sense to Rebecca and the crew that they couldn't imagine a wholesome couple like Ruby and Sapphire not having a wedding episode. They wanted it for years: The wedding concepts always included the tuxedo for Sapphire and the wedding dress for Ruby.

But pushback (often blamed on the conservative standards of the international market) led to negotiations trying to keep Ruby and Sapphire's relationship from being explicit. Rebecca and the Crew were very tired of this double standard, and they were especially irritated by attempts to claim a wedding wouldn't be well received by a core demographic or wouldn't make sense for Steven's character. But other shows had done weddings and Steven had been established to love weddings already.

Rebecca kept adding more elements to the wedding episode to answer all the concerns, but she didn't want to back down from explicit marriage between these characters. They deserved it. And the audience deserved to see this as wholesome, like any other cartoon wedding. Eventually they got their way and were allowed to have the wedding. But the ordered episodes were also coming to a close without promise of more, so Rebecca had to request more episodes to be able to wrap up the storyline!

And of course, there is Steven, the true heart of the team. A very interesting aside discusses Garnet's leadership and how the network pushed the Crewniverse to acknowledge Steven as the leader. This was successfully resisted throughout as well--because Garnet is the leader (unless she's incapacitated, of course). It's fantastic that this concept was preserved because too often a young male chosen one is elevated above people with more experience and knowledge because of that chosen one tradition, so it's really nice to have a show acknowledge that team leadership is more appropriate for an adult.

4. ERA 3

Beginning with a discussion of the Diamonds, this chapter deconstructs the dysfunctional "family" of the Diamonds (who are said to be based on tropes about evil stepmothers and stepsisters), with the thread of dysfunction originating with White Diamond.

Yellow is physical, Blue is emotional, White is judgmental, and Pink is impulsive. Some philosophy on why Pink is naturally manipulative and why she clashes so much with White is offered.

White believes her identity is to be imposed on all because she is the pinnacle of what should be--and therefore, she has the right to make decisions and statements about and on behalf of everyone. But her secret is that she can't do what the others do--act or feel or want. In trying to be everyone, she is no one.

And this becomes very important when she confronts Steven about his identity and turns out to be wrong. The triumph of Steven being totally, fully himself is a beautiful, simple revelation that's described as far more satisfying than the theories about Pink living inside him or Rose returning from his Gem.

Also discussed is Gem architecture. A lot went into this idea, and Steven Sugar weighs in to say he had to think of what it would mean for a world to have buildings but serve no human needs. That's why it's mostly focused on transport and storage. Even the broken planet is meant to indicate a place stripped for its resources, and everything serves a function that is meant to avoid looking like the human equivalents.

And there's another layer, too: a difference between Era 1 and Era 2. Era 2 became more functional to hide Era 1's broken bits, and older Homeworld buildings still have some "ornate and ancient" feel to them. And the fact that props, tools, and even walls and doors could be living was taken from a concept Rebecca thought was horrible from old Busby Berkeley movies, where people were inanimate objects and it was portrayed as lovely. Tom Herpich helped conceptualize these living objects.

Steven dealing with "princess tropes" is discussed here too. The Pebbles (worked on with Pendleton Ward) were sort of his Cinderella's mice, and all the locked-in-a-tower, having supportive tiny friends help you, getting princess clothes made, attending a ball, having to mind your manners stuff was intentionally related to fairy tales.

The point of doing that (besides fun) was to easily invoke the feeling that Steven was being made to be someone he's not, and that he was being treated like THIS is who he really is when it isn't. White Diamond as the "evil stepmother" is discussed with regard to her detailed features and massive scale. They generally didn't put fingernails and eyelashes on characters (especially not to indicate that they were women or girls!), but they decided White would get all of these feminine markers for tradition's sake.

Rebecca also invokes several other references that were included and describes the princess tropes as "chipping away at his integrity" setting him up for the final challenge with White.

There is again tons of concept art: Homeworld architecture, Pebbles, Diamond diagrams, background Jades and Lemon Jade Fusion, Comby, Diamond extraction chambers, and White Diamond.

5. CHANGE YOUR MIND

Now we finally begin to discuss Steven's identity. The "Perfect Steven," discussed in several interviews before this book's release, was an idea back in 2013; the "ultimate Steven," beefed up and shonen-looking, was far from perfect because OUR Steven is perfect, while this alpha hero Steven idea (used in Steven Universe Future) didn't belong being idolized in such a show.

They thought about having Steven fall apart into organic half and Gem half early in the show (during "Giant Woman" after a successful fusion and unfusion, even!), but they didn't try the concept until the last episode. They didn't want the "Pink" Steven to be portrayed as "better" even though he would be more powerful, so they decided he isn't whole without his organic self and he's just as much of a shell as the organic half. They absolutely did not want any ending that required Rose to be inside him or waiting to come back. But the debates were fierce--what DOES it mean to have Rose's Gem?

Ian Jones-Quartey brings in an anecdote about his own family to emphasize some of the immigrant themes that inspired aspects of the show. He had a brother who reinvented himself elsewhere away from family without resolving issues, and all the ramifications of that were explored in the show through Rose Quartz. (He is careful to say he doesn't think his immigrant experience is like being from another planet!) But he did say you can hurt your old family even if they were toxic or didn't know the real you, and you can hurt your new family by hiding your past. The Pizza family of course was also a more direct reference to Ian's Ghanaian family.

In talking about the new Fusions from this episode, Sunstone is largely described by Miki, who also got to board the Sunstone section. Sunstone was described as a cool 1990s character and the evolution just continued into making them a fourth-wall-breaking PSA dispenser. Obsidian is also discussed, with their sword being an early concept. Steven Sugar said they totally knew it would be forged in action. Obsidian being similar to the Temple design is of course another very early detail.

The story of how James Baxter got involved with one of the final scenes (Organic Steven and Pink Steven fusing in front of White Diamond) was shared. His family was fans of the show and Rebecca Sugar took the time to drive to a birthday party for his daughter and give her a drawing. He then owed her a favor, and this was it.

Concept art is again included, this time with sample boards, promo images, a Diamond fight concept, costume design changes for the Gems, new Fusions, the so-called "Mega Diamond" ship conglomerate, some scenes from the White Diamond confrontation, Pink Steven, multiple pages of James Baxter animation, corrupted Gems and their healed selves, and photos from the "Change Your Mind" premiere and some awards. The show has won one design-related Emmy, a Peabody Award, and a GLAAD award.

6. STEVEN UNIVERSE FUTURE

The book doesn't cover the movie because it got its own book, but dives right into Future. Ian Jones-Quartey emphasizes that the movie and Future are separate and different from the original show, which ENDED. After all, after that, Steven has a neck!

Some new names are invoked now: new writers Kate Tsang, Jack Pendarvis, and Taneka Stotts. They were excited to have Steven make HIS OWN mistakes instead of trying to clean up someone else's! Now, instead of doing the usual shonen anime thing and having the final battle be a big physical rumble, Steven has to make peace with himself and take an active role in coping with what all the fighting has done to him and what effect it's had on who he is (and who he wants to be). There is no sudden "I love myself!" answer, either. It's always a process.

Drew Green and Maya Petersen, who came on board as storyboarders officially in Future, also weighed in on writing for a "mature" show, how to deal with Steven being a "moral compass" while being sort of unreliable, and what they learned as Crew that they didn't know as fans. Drew didn't know Garnet never asks questions. Jack didn't realize the show never deviated from Steven's point of view. Taneka was nervous but excited to collaborate. Kate was worried about how established the show was and what to do as a new writer to contribute appropriately.

Maya was on the old Crew but not as a storyboarder, so felt like some of the "old" ideas ended up not being appropriate for the "new" Future in an embarrassing way--and dreaded the idea of dealing with Steven's emotional problems when they were similar to stuff she'd been through. She also was personally behind the idea of Steven wanting to dump his problems by becoming Stevonnie, and got to work with Etienne Guignard on inventing the Pearl creation backstory with Volleyball.

There's some discussion of "depression hobbies," stress, and the show's pacing. And they say Etienne was entertaining at pitches. There's even some discussion of how Greg is taken off a bit of a pedestal because his terrible restrictive life in the suburbs sounded wholesome to Steven and Greg presented it negatively.

And then there is some information about how the Crew felt behind the scenes due to fan reactions and negative press. Ian discusses feeling offended when the Black characters are described as bad examples, as if their cartoonized but realistic-in-context features are automatically caricatures.

Rebecca Sugar felt beaten down by some of these narratives and began to access mental health services, inspiring some of the content of "Mindful Education." A long reflection from Rebecca discusses people's infighting about her show and what she had a responsibility to show or not show in the story. She learned a lot about bullying from Cartoon Network's anti-bullying program and learned that bullies thrive on whatever attention you give them--unless it is made clear to them by a peer group that no one is impressed by their cruel actions. Also, not all negative feedback is bullying. Constructive criticism is different. Self-awareness can help you avoid internalizing what bullies might do or say to you.

Segueing from the discussion of how people are affected by and connect with the show, we then discuss how they chose as a team what should be covered as the show came to a close. They didn't have time to do quite a few stories they wanted time for, like a Rhodonite story, a Lars side story, and Diamond "prehistory" and religion; all of it was put aside for the main arc with Steven.

They thought people would find those stories about Homeworld and Off Color history very interesting, but so much of the show had been about Steven's Gem adventures, so keeping him mostly on Earth seemed appropriate. The acknowledgment of his battle damage, of his trauma, was necessary and real, and helpful in an important way to the core audience.

Oh, and there was some stuff about a cheeseburger tree. Don't ask.

In discussing the "reverse escapism" of the original show (Gem aliens are intrigued by everyday human culture, and realism is necessary), Rebecca says her views have changed on escapism and gets why some people want a soothing feel-better show. She acknowledged also that her own escapist dreams-come-true fulfilled in the show didn't feel like escapism because they were givens to the majority of mainstream culture, but were never guaranteed to marginalized people.

Rebecca ties in her several-times-told story about "Love Like You" and how the middle bit was when she didn't feel she was worth looking up to, and the realizations she had to tie the beginning to the end. Feeling like someone will like you less if they know you more is terrible. So sometimes a show like this can be helpful in telling people that they belong when their fantasies are things like "I want to be loved" and "I want to know I exist."

In Future, Steven has to connect to who he is and love that person--and understand that person enough to finally feel that even if he's not fixing their problems or saving their world right this second, Steven deserves his family's love and support, and they WANT to give it to him.

There's a huge amount of supplemental material in this section so there's no way I could name it all. The charts for Future's timeline are pretty straightforward, though a few episodes like "A Very Special Episode," "Why So Blue," "In Dreams," and "Bismuth Casual" aren't specifically represented and a couple are in a different order ("Prickly Pair" was conceived as happening after "Fragments" and "Homeworld Bound").

Steven feeling like a monster, having intrusive thoughts, having not forgiven the Diamonds, and getting help/moving on--it's all there.

We have keys, color scripts, and boards for the new opening and some various backgrounds and storyboard art from episodes. Model sheets for Shep, Nice Lapis and Mean Lapis, Jasper, Steven Tag Gems, Pink Steven Powers, Monster Steven. New house concepts, Era 3 Homeworld concept art for the Diamond environments, and background art for the Reef.

New Connie and Greg designs. Concepts for Mega Pearl, the Rose Quartzes, Bluebird, and Morganite (who didn't get used). And there are some photos from recording and the conference room. There are even some extras from "Crossover Nexus," the crossover with OK K.O.!--including an unused cut scene that included Ruby and Sapphire fighting. The rest of the book is a bunch of adorable Crewniverse art--extras, blog drawings, promos, and gifts to each other.

NOTABLE

1.

The first timeline chart in the book features a cool sketch of the original Off Colors, which at the time this planning document was drafted included unused Off Colors Flint and Chert.

We knew of their existence already because of an episode of the podcast, but these two unexpectedly appeared as incidental characters in the Steven Universe Future episode "Homeworld Bound," identified only in the credits. Sad to think that instead of banding with the Off Colors, these two were probably shattered for their crime (being Quartzes who don't want to fight) and that's why we see them being repaired in this episode. Later, there's some brainstorming for types of Off Colors and "a Ruby that wants to wear limb enhancers" is mentioned as well.

2. 

It looks like there was also originally more juice to the story of tracking down the events of the war culminating in Pink Diamond's assassination.

One of the timelines talks about Steven thinking it makes sense that Pearl can't talk about her involvement because she might have been a double agent, explaining why Rose Quartz always knew what Pink Diamond was doing. It seems like that bit was supposed to be included in Garnet's version of the story she believed in "Your Mother and Mine." Seems like they originally conceived Garnet's story to inspire the Off Colors to become pirates and freedom fighters, though in the show's canon this storytelling happened after Lars had already reinvented himself the way he did.

Sadie was also supposed to be sending letters to Lars via Steven, which is funny since the "Letters to Lars" episode is just a montage Steven letter. And of course it's specified that Steven was supposed to get Pink Diamond flashbacks by going to the Palace on Homeworld.

3. 

The second chart in the book makes references to Sadie's reinvention of herself as a parallel to Lars, Greg, and Pink Diamond all doing the same thing, and how positive it is to embrace such a thing--a version of yourself that YOU create.

I love that Yellow Diamond's arm ship arm-wrestling the Cluster was always part of the plan.

There's some more explicit direction to have Connie help Steven understand the Diamonds as "strict parents," and a lot more emphasis on everyone realizing Rose had been inspired by THEM rather than them all following her.

White Diamond is presented here as if she thinks of Pink Diamond as a "daughter" (whom she now understands she has "lost"). There are notes on how the Diamonds have a responsibility to their children and should attend to it before just continuing to make more.

4.

One of the concept art images for the Off Colors features Rhodonite crouching by Padparadscha saying "Don't worry, I won't let them hurt you." It's very interesting because she DOES seem to protect Padparadscha in the show, but doesn't seem confident about it in her final version, even though it does seem like she'd be "programmed" to guard aristocratic Gems because of her Ruby and Pearl makeup. Cool.

5.

A "Crew Cameos" spread was included, which is of great interest to some of us who loved seeing the Crew insert themselves into the show. Not every SU Crew person who's been represented in a crowd was there, but this crowd included Amish Kumar, Kat Morris, Amanda Winterstein, Angie Wang, Lamar Abrams, Emily Walus, Mary Nash, Joe Johnston, Christy Cohen, Danny Cragg, Hilary Florido, Danny Hynes, Matt Burnett, Ben Levin, Elle Michalka.

6.

The official national flower of South Korea, Hibiscus syriacus, is the name of Pink Diamond's flower.

7.

One of Steven Sugar's comments about the silhouette difference between humans and Gems points out that humans have ears. This seems to be pretty good confirmation that they are not supposed to have ears, despite that sometimes we'll see ears drawn on them in some frames.

8.

Rose Quartz/Pink Diamond is characterized in this book as "self-hating" in a really interesting way, saying that because she believed she was not capable of compassion, she practically worshiped those who demonstrated that ability and thought they were so much better than her--which is described as "intoxicating" and resulted in others being drawn to her. How interesting is that!

9.

Timelines reveal that early plans for Pink Diamond's first Pearl originally had her getting destroyed by Pink during  a game, and then her destruction was rewritten as a punishment from the Diamonds after Pink Pearl defended Pink Diamond to the other Diamonds. They went back to the idea of her getting hurt by Pink for the final version, though the cracked face and control by White Diamond was not on the agenda until they started writing "Change Your Mind."

10.

The approximate ages of the major characters, based on emergence, are revealed on these timelines. It begins with a cracked-planet-looking graphic depicting four tiny Diamonds emerging at 20,000 years ago. Some suspicious "blacked out" redacting surrounds a long timeline tail that goes back before that, which may mean there are secrets they still don't want to reveal. But the dates go like this:

20,000 years ago: The Diamonds emerge.

11,000 years ago: Pearl is custom-made for Pink Diamond.

8,000 years ago: Sapphire emerges (on Homeworld).

6,000 years ago: Ruby emerges (on a colony).

5,750 years ago: Garnet is formed.

5,600 years ago: Lapis is poofed and put in the mirror.

5,200 years ago: Jasper emerges (on Earth).

5,050 years ago: The Cluster is planted.

5,000 years ago: Amethyst emerges (on Earth).

4,500 years ago: The Crystal Gems found Amethyst.

3,000 years ago: Peridot emerges (on Homeworld).

40 years ago: Pearl found Lapis's mirror at the Galaxy Warp.

And of course we know 14 years ago Steven is born!

11.

Originally the Diamonds were based on a quartet of themes: Love, Fear, Pride, and Sorrow. It got too complicated to keep and it was abandoned, with Pink's identification of "love" being described as "particularly outdated."

12.

Notes on a sketch say that Pearl was inspired to become bold and unashamed because Pink's questions drove her to have opinions, and it's said that Rose "fell in love" with her boldness.

13.

Rebecca tells the story of driving off a ridge and getting stuck in the desert, comparing this to Ruby's tumble during her Wild West adventure and using it as inspiration. She's told this story before but here it is in print. She also included the story about using the flowers from a friend's wedding to put in Ruby's hair.

14.

Rebecca describes having to "fight" notes she was given when it had to do with Ruby and Sapphire's relationship. One she describes as NOT fighting was for a signing card depicting Ruby and Sapphire dancing. It was called "too romantic" and she decided not to worry about it since it wasn't the actual show content.

She was also scolded over her book The Answer because the powers that be expected her to downplay that relationship. She always argued that queer youth deserved these things.

15.

Tom Herpich describes being inspired to name Blue Diamond's comb "Comby" because he was watching the news about Comey getting fired from the FBI. It's also a mineral-related term and I always assumed that reference was intentional, but maybe it's not and this is the only intended significance to Comby's name?

16.

Rainbow Quartz 2.0's design is not discussed, though the other two new Fusions from "Change Your Mind" (Sunstone and Obsidian) were. RQ2 has some sketches included, but no accompanying narrative in the text.

17.

A sheet of corrupted Gems and their healed selves is offered, though it doesn't appear to be final. The obelisk in "Serious Steven" is labeled Albite. The unnamed Worm Monster, Desert Glass, and Watermelon Tourmaline are included. An unnamed birdlike Gem represents the Big Bird monster from "Giant Woman." The crab monster from "Arcade Mania" is labeled Blue Chalcedony. The Tongue Monster is drawn uncorrupted but not named. The Flower Monster from "Back to the Kindergarten" is labeled Grossular Diopside or Titanite. The invisible monster from "Island Adventure" is labeled Moonstone. The Lighthouse Gem is labeled White Topaz. A form for Larimar that was used in "Change Your Mind" but changed in Future is there. The Slinker is listed as Chrysocolla. And the Crab Monster is listed as Aventurine.

On the next page, this is changed to Bixbite (as it was in Steven Universe Future), and we then also have Lace Amethyst, Blue Lace Agate, Crazy Lace Agate (Fusion), Ocean Jasper, the Mother Centipeetle Nephrite (Facet 413 Cabochon 12) and three other Nephrites, Angel Aura Quartz, a hooded Jasper, Zebra Jasper, Biggs Jasper, Watermelon Tourmaline (labeled as Fusion of Gem * Onion--huh?), Snowflake Obsidian, "Little" Larimar, and Orange Spodumene (who was the Worm).

18.

The Rhodonite side story would have been about the love story of a Ruby and a Pearl working for Morganite. Images of Morganite and her servants, unfused, are in the book. We do not get this additional information, but Rebecca said in a panel shortly before the book's release that Rhodonite's story would have been about finding out that she had been Rejuvenated 17 times because her components kept falling in love and needing to be reset.

19.

Referring to the Diamonds on one of the charts, Steven's perspective is "I can't believe I helped these" and then there's a censor bar. Welp.

20.

Some included art by Hilary Florido features Kevin with a souped-up Koala Princess car and another where Kevin is staring at himself in the mirror in front of an altar to himself.

21.

Rebecca's sweater collection is included in the Crew art.

[SU Book and Comic Reviews]