#this was very long I expect approximately no one to read this and maybe that’s for the best lmao

[ikemenomegas]

There's that scene in Phantom Parade where Gojo tells nanami that if he didn't go with him, he would scream and cry on the spot and in your au, id expect nanami to slowly turn to gojo's alpha and go: 😕😮‍💨

😆i have no idea the context of that interaction, sounds like something inspired by Gojo and Nanami's terrible Hokkaido work adventure, but it did make me giggle bc you're absolutely correct

"Why is he like this?"

"Hmm?" you turned slowly. Satoru had kept you up last night. You stifled a yawn. You'd spent over six hours humoring him through losing spectacularly at final fantasy fifteen. Or at least you thought it was losing, could you lose that kind of game? Either way, you were pleasantly sleepy and the world felt washed in cotton.

So you thought Nanami had spoken, but maybe that was just many years of getting good at reading the gradation of Kento Nanami's Shades of Exasperation.

Nanami was staring at you and so was Satoru, with a kind of familiar hesitation that indicated he was awaiting some kind of reaction from one or both of you. So you decided that whether or not Nanami had spoken was probably irrelevant.

Your kouhai's expression now told you he was seriously wondering whether or not you'd been hit on the head when he wasn't looking. It wasn't like you'd complain about it if you had been.

"I'll go with you, Satoru," you said, equably, gazing up into your mate's covered eyes and falling back on something that occasionally satisfied whatever mood he was in, although efficacy tended to depend upon what exactly he wanted. Where were promising to go? No clue, but hopefully somewhere where you could get something to drink. As you'd grown older, staying awake all or most of the night seemed to make you more inclined to dehydration the next day.

A loud, whiny "Noo-ooo," left Satoru's lips. They were glossy with just a slightly darker shade of pink at the center like he'd freshly applied the lip tint you'd bought him last week. He'd said it was some limited edition thing that tasted, or at least smelled like it should taste, like umeshu.

"Of course you'd come--" Satoru had continued with making a scene, and Nanami looked like he was starting to grind his jaw a little, which was a bad habit both you and Shoko had been trying to break him of, "--unless you're the kind of alpha to leave me alone--".

You reached for Nanami's shoulder to prod him but your hand was snatched from the air and enfolded into Satoru's, a jealous tint to the air that you knew was all performative. Probably.

At least that had worked. Nanami looked like his mouth was about to drop open.

You wanted to point out that Satoru was already well on the way to crocodile tears by this point. "I thought the crying was going to be for Nanami," you teased with a tired, almost fond sigh.

A loud, near approximation of a whining, petulant sob left Satoru's pink lips. You wondered if there was actually any alcohol in the lip tint. Maybe the fumes were going to his head.

"Why are you ganging up on me!?" he exclaimed, ridiculous and provocative, and clearly angling to see where this was going.

Fine. Never let it be said that you didn't know how to go for a killing blow, even against Gojo Satoru,

"Well, you look awful pretty when you cry. I just thought I'd give you a chance to show it off," you said, reaching up to cup his cheek, the very image of an alpha placating an omega.

Nanami's palm hit his face with a near audible little smack. Whoops.

Satoru snickered as he drew you up the street, long legs eating up the distance so smooth it was almost like he was gliding. You followed along, trailing for a bit just to make sure Nanami was in fact, grudgingly, trudging along in Satoru's wake.

It occurred to you that you still didn't know where he thought you were going.

[fili-urzudel]

Wildflower Ch. 1 - The Beginning

Warnings: None

Word Count: 1.1 k

Dear Reader:

The following events have been amalgamated from multiple sources and translated to a language you can understand to the best of our ability. We can only approximate the exact gestures, actions, and emotions of the characters involved, but hope we have done them justice. Songs have been the most heavily changed to make them more lyrical in your preferred language. However, the sentiment remains the same.

Thank you, and enjoy.

The sun rose earlier than expected, and Kíli thought it made the Shire look rather nice. The rolling green hills and wide dirt paths were no match for Ered Luin’s sharp peaks and impressive bridges, of course, but they were nice all the same. 

“Ye cannae stare at the dew all day,” Dwalin said gruffly, almost running into him as he exited the Hobbit hole, hauling yet another bag of garbage from the Baggins home.

“I know, I was just coming out to help you,” he smiled easily, and Dwalin huffed in reply. 

“Gettin’ the ponies ready is a bit more pertinent.”

“Ah, I see we’ve brought out the advanced vocabulary this morning.”

Dwalin shot him a look that could kill, and if his hands were free, he might have tried.

“Kíli,” a deep voice warned from around the bend.

“I was getting to it!” Kíli exclaimed quickly. “Where’s Fíli, anyway? He’s supposed to be helping me with this.”

“Your brother is writing a letter to his dear wife to let her know he’s safe,” Balin said, already standing by the ponies, loading maps and parchments into his saddlebags. 

“Oh,” he said simply. Normally, he would stick his tongue out or something of the sort, but he was rather concerned about his sister-in-law as well. 

Thorin nodded gratefully in Balin’s direction—he always seemed to know how to get the two of them under control, much better than he could, anyway.

The company was underway just before daybreak, and Kíli found himself squinting against the sun as they left. 

The morning was too quiet. 

“Anyone care to make a bet or two?”

* * *

“Wait! Wait!” The cry came from behind them. One by one, the dwarves reigned in their ponies, turning to see the aforementioned potential burglar running up to them rather comically, waving the contract as he did. “I signed it!”

Kíli smiled broadly—he had won his bets. He had seen a peculiar look in the Hobbit’s eye. That, and Gandalf betted that Bilbo would come to his senses. The young prince figured it would be pure foolishness to bet against a wizard.

Balin glanced at the Hobbit skeptically as he pulled out his reading glass, carefully inspecting the paper.  “Everything appears to be in order; welcome, Master Baggins, to the company of Thorin Oakenshield.”

The company cheered; they had a burglar! Maybe not a very good one, but at any rate, a burglar. After a small fuss concerning the use of ponies as their primary mode of transportation, they were once again on their way, now a company of fourteen.

“Stop! Stop! We have to turn around!” Bilbo’s calls did indeed cause the company to halt.

Kíli could see the look on his uncle’s face without looking at him; he had seen the man exasperated often enough, and he was beginning to feel the same way.

“What on earth is the matter?” Gandalf asked before either of them had the opportunity to.

“I forgot my handkerchief,” Bilbo complained.

“Here!” Bofur called helpfully, tearing off a portion of his rather soiled outer coat. “Use this!’

“Bilbo?” At the call, the entire procession stopped in their laughter, turning to see another Hobbit coming up to their trail.

Kíli immediately noticed something different about the Hobbit, not in her appearance—though, that may have been a factor—no, but rather in the effect she had on him. She was beautiful in a way he had difficulty explaining: her hair long and fastened back with several clips, save for the curls on her forehead; her long, pale green skirt and loose white blouse; her blue eyes that shone in the sunlight.

“Where are you going? Who are these people?” Kíli was jerked out of his reverie by the question, momentarily panicking as though it was he who was expected to answer.

“Who is this?” Thorin grunted, and the Hobbit simply glanced at him curiously before returning her gaze to Bilbo.

Kíli wished her eyes had not simply flicked over him.

“Oh, um, gentlemen, this is May Bramble, my cousin, who happens to live just west of this path we're using,” Bilbo explained, his hand awkwardly fiddling with the reins of his newly acquired pony.

At Gandalf's lightly confused expression, May chuckled. “It's very distant, but, somehow, we're both Tooks. One more than the other.”

The wizard nodded thoughtfully and went back to his pipe.

The dwarves gave each other looks of barely disguised humor—these Hobbits and their family trees!

“A bit far out of town, is it not?” Thorin asked, eyeing the maiden with a kernel of suspicion.

“My great-great-grandfather was one of the more... eccentric Hobbits of his generation,” she answered seriously. “He thought it better to rely more on the land, as our ancestors had, and it has served us well. Now, Bilbo, are you going to answer my question or not?”

Before Bilbo could answer, Gandalf took it upon himself to explain the journey, and its reasoning, despite Thorin's protests—“We do not need everyone in the Shire knowing our business!”

“Oh,” she furrowed her brow seriously. “That sounds... very noble. And exciting.”

Thorin stared at her, hoping that would be the end of it and they could be on their way.

“Would you mind the addition of another to your company?”

“We don't need any dead weight,” Thorin said bluntly. “This is hardly a jolly quest.”

“We could use an extra pair of hands, always,” Kíli argued, and Thorin raised a brow at him. “And I hardly think she's so eager to join this company for gold when no payment has been offered.”

“No, no, I would never assume that I was entitled to any of your gold,” she shook her head quickly. “I'm only joining for the adventure.” She smiled at Kíli, a bright grin that was easily returned.

“And we do have an extra pony,” Fíli pointed out, seeing the look on his brother's face. It was certainly one he had not quite seen before.

“Have both of you gone mad? We cannot—”

“Let her come!” Gandalf interrupted. “I have a wizard's intuition about this one.” He gave a not-so-subtle wink in her direction.

Thorin spared her another glance.

“Fine. But we will not be waiting; we've wasted enough daylight as it is.”

May jumped excitedly, running back to her front door and grabbing a large leather bag before jogging back to the company that had indeed already begun to move on. 

“Here’s a pony, lass,” a red-haired dwarf offered kindly. 

“I’ve always wanted to ride one,” she cheered, quickly moving to ride sidesaddle. 

“Did you just… have a bag of your things ready for a journey like this?” Bilbo asked as she rode alongside him. 

“Did you not?” Her quick response was followed by the brightest laugh Kíli had ever heard. 

He was in trouble.

[iam93percentstardust]

It's not just the commodification of fandom. It's not just the disinterest in wips in favor of completed stories. It's not just the unwillingness to take chances on new writers.

It's the demand for instant gratification too.

I'm posting a "wip" right now. It's actually a fully completed story, and I stated that in the A/N when I started posting it a few weeks ago. I finished writing it early in December. It's not going to be abandoned and discontinued. Short of a tragic accident, it will 100% be posted in its entirety before the end of January.

It's also almost 60k words long. Each chapter is approximately 14k words. That's a lot to expect people to read quickly, so I made the decision to post weekly instead of dumping it all at once. I don't normally do that for wips. I normally post bimonthly to give myself time to write the next chapter. But in concession to the fact that this one is already finished, I decided to post once a week. Could I have posted it all at once or even once a day? Sure, but again, I have more than a few close friends who are slow readers, and I thought it was better to give people the time to read each chapter and let it digest before dumping another one on them instead of making them feel like they have to read it immediately so they don't miss the next update.

This, apparently, was a mistake.

I've been very open about working on this fic since I started it in September. People told me they were excited to get the chance to read it every time I posted an update about where I was in the writing process. When I announced that I was posting it, they told me that they couldn't wait to read it. It's not like I was expecting massive numbers of kudos and comments; this fandom has shrunk in size and engagement, I'm not the most popular writer in it, and I try not to feel entitled to engagement, but considering all the people telling me they were excited for it, I was expecting something.

Instead it was crickets. All those people who were so excited and told me they couldn't wait to get home to read it? That was the last I heard from them, unless it was to express outright incredulity that I expected them to read a work in progress. "It's not a work in progress!" I protested. "I'm just taking a little longer to post it!" Yeah, but it's not posted all in one go, so why should we bother to read it? We'll just wait until the end of January once it's finished. "Will I hear from you then? Will I get any indication at all that you liked it?" Eh, maybe. If we feel like it. But it'll only be one comment at the very end. If that.

This keeps happening. If it's not an already completed chaptered fic that I'm posting over time instead of immediately, then it's an idea that I had first talked about a while ago but took a couple months to write only to be met with silence once I start posting because everyone moved on and forgot about it. If it's not ready to go right now in all its fully finished glory and all 60k words posted immediately after I first spoke about it, then why am I talking about it at all? Why should I expect people to be waiting in anticipatory eagerness?

I remember when I posted my first Christmas event fic in 2020. It was already finished too when I started posting it. I'd been talking about it all year. People had seemed really excited for it when I first mentioned it, but then interest seemed to die out somewhere around August. By the time I started posting it in late November, I was fully convinced that no one was going to read it. I actually posted the first chapter and then immediately turned my computer off and didn't let myself turn it back on until the next day.

I was shocked by the number of readers I had. The number of comments. The sheer amount of people telling me they'd been waiting on tenterhooks for me to post that first chapter. And it kept coming. People were talking and theorizing and marking their conversations with spoiler bars for anyone who hadn't read the latest chapter. People timed when I posted the first few chapters so they could be waiting by their computer for when I dropped the next one. I was randomly gifted art. It was really an event, and I'll always be grateful for the support and community I was given for that month.

I never believed I'd ever be able to capture that kind of readership again, and I was right, and that's okay. But when I posted last year's Christmas event fic, for the first time since I started doing this in 2020, someone asked me why I bothered to space it out over a month instead of just posting the entire thing in one go on Christmas Day and how could I possibly expect them to be that invested for an entire month instead of just waiting until it was finished. I didn't know how to tell them that only three years prior, that's not only exactly what people did but they were excited for it to be like that.

If I'm not going to post my already completed fic in one lump sum right now, then the audience for it is nonexistent. And the audience won't grow once it's finished. It's like I have one opportunity to capture the readers and if they weren't willing to take the chance on the first chapter, then they'll never come back. It's disheartening, to say the least. Only six months ago, I was telling a friend that I thought this was my forever pairing, that I'd still be writing for this ship when I was old and grey. And now I'm going through my ideas folder, wondering what can be repurposed for other ships, because I increasingly feel not just that I'm shouting into a void but that the void is actively ignoring me.

I can't post wips because what if I abandon them or take too long to update? I can't post a chaptered fic in one go because that's too many words to expect people to read. But I can't space out posting completed chaptered fics either because everyone wants the instant gratification of the full fic right now. So what am I supposed to do?

I miss December 2020, but it's not the random art that I miss or the kudos or the number of comments. It was the community that built up around this fic. It was knowing that it was okay to space out the chapters because everyone was still right there with me, talking and theorizing and using their spoiler bars. It was my audience trusting me enough to come along with me for the ride instead of waiting for me to be done. I was so scared back then that the full year between me first talking about the idea and posting the first chapter had lost me my audience, scared that they'd all forgotten about me and moved on to other authors who were quicker to post, but I wish I'd known that three years later, it would only take four months for people to lose interest in an idea.

I'd have treated December 2020 like it was way more special than I did.

[cookinguptales]

God, so. This is a story I haven't told in a while, so it'll probably be new to a lot of my followers.

This morning I got my kudos email and saw one for a fic I didn't recognize. I puzzled over this for a few minutes, then clicked on it and immediately remembered everything I'm about to tell you.

"Oh right," I said. "This is what happened the last time I fell down a research rabbit hole while writing original fiction."

The long and short of it is this: I used to do a Halloween fic exchange every year, and one year someone requested "dinosaur ghost." I was immediately like "that sounds fun!" and then, approximately three seconds later, remembered an article I'd read recently.

(This is me, unfortunately.)

A long time ago, there was this kind of mad rush for dinosaur skeletons to put in museums. (The Bone Wars, if you're familiar.) The Carnegie Museum ended up finding an Apatosaurus skeleton, but at that time, no one knew what that skeleton was supposed to look like. The researchers argued quite a bit about it and, despite the fact that they'd actually found the correct skull during the dig, attached the cast of a skull of a Camarasaurus to it instead. This skeleton had the wrong skull for decades until the mistake was realized and eventually switched out for the right skull in the 1970s.

This left me with an appealing, sort of whimsically romantic idea: what would it be like, if dinosaur bones are haunted? And what would it be like if two ghosts were being forced to inhabit the same dinosaur skeleton?

So I decided that I wanted to write this story about this mismatched skeleton and the ghosts that haunted it, but in order to do that properly, I had to find out what happened to that Camarasaurus skull after the Apatosaurus was properly reassembled.

Friends, I fell down the fucking rabbit hole. I looked at the museum's website. I was looking in journals. I was on Google looking at families' vacation photos so I could get a better look at the exhibits in the museum.

I was down bad.

In the end, I gave in and emailed the museum. Like... this is a weird question, but is there anyone who could tell me what happened to the Camarasaurus skull that used to be on display with the Apatosaurus?

I wasn't expecting a reply, really. Maybe an intern would email me back with an apology. If I got really lucky, a docent might actually know what I was talking about.

Imagine my surprise when I get back an email from an actual fucking paleontologist. He is not just happy to tell me what happened -- he is thrilled. He was excited that someone was even asking these questions, and I didn't even almost have the heart to tell him why I'd asked.

Now... I'll take a moment here to say that I am actually interested in museum studies. I'm super interested in the way we teach science, the way we teach science history, and the history of how we've taught that history. I took classes on it in college, in fact. I tried to take paleontology, too. I even took all the preqs and everything. I just couldn't get it into my schedule in the end.

So when a literal fucking paleontologist emails me to talk to me about these things, I sit up in my seat. I want to seem like I am On The Level. I reply to this man with my academic email address.

OH MY GOSH, he says. YOU WENT TO PENN? I WENT TO PENN!

Oh no. Oh no. I am in too deep. I am in way too deep. This kind, charmingly enthusiastic paleontologist cannot know that I am writing a quasi-homoerotic dinosaur ghost love story. He can't.

So I talk to him about my own field of study because I desperately want to sound like a real scholar and not like this is research for my AO3 account. (Even though it is.) We have a very nice conversation. He tells me everything I need to know and then some.

Apparently, I was right when I'd suspected that I'd seen a Camarasaurus skull in some of the photos of the exhibit. He was pleased I'd noticed. But it wasn't the same one that was on display with the Apatosaurus skeleton.

The real Apatosaurus skull was too fragile to be put on display, so they made a cast of it instead and mounted that on the skeleton in the exhibit. The real skull is being kept in the Big Bone Room, which is what they call their fossil storage. The cast of the Camarasaurus skull? Even though it was just a cast, it was still kept for posterity. It is also being stored in the BBR along with the skull of the Apatosaurus. And the real Camarasaurus skull that the cast was based on is now displayed near the Apatosaurus skeleton in the exhibit.

So both parts of the skeleton are now with a new version of their old friend, and they'll never be alone again. I don't think I could have designed a more romantic, bittersweet ending if I'd tried.

I write my fic. It's lovely, in my opinion, and exactly what I wanted it to be. It's about love and friendship and the sort of wistful affection you feel for friends who have gone and those you have just met.

I do not speak to the paleontologist again.

To this day, I am deeply relieved that he never found out what I was up to, but also sort of curious to know if he would've liked it if he'd read it. I took some extreme scientific liberties while writing my quasi-f/f dinosaur ghost fic (shocking, I know) so probably not. lmao

You never know, though! Some academics are into some super weird shit! Like me!

So I guess I always feel kind of wistful about the fic, too.

Anyway... Here's the Carnegie Museum's page about the Apatosaurus/Camarasaurus skeleton.

And here's the story I wrote about them:

Something Borrowed 💜🦕

[lewis-winters]

3 and 6 for the positivity meme?

I'll answer this backwards because my answer to no. 3 got long.

6 - what's a headcanon that you'll die on that hill?

Lewis Nixon III was a theater kid and has done drag in his life. This is forreal. The ghost of Dick Winters revealed this to me in a dream.

3 - what are some fics you go back and read again and again?

oh I love this question. in the last ask I did say I left out some creators and now is my time to redeem myself! (also another reminder that I desperately need to finish this massive fic rec post I have been steadily adding fics to since January BUT ANYWAY)

under the cut!

all of @churchkey's Winnix and ToyeMalarkey fics! god do I love them so much. I re-read A Spell of Riot once a year since it was completed.

and of course @anthrobrat's Bob, TP, and Gen Kill fics!

all of BristlingBassoon's Winnix fics - Queen for a Day inspired my "Lewis has done drag" conviction and When we met, you'd never expect this series is just. divine.

@marycontraire's Contact Tracing. of course.

make it up as we go along - Joe drives his cab, Chuck plays Call of Duty, and Babe just wants to pass Biochem; their apartment is like Grand Central at the best of times and that’s without the two possible fugitives they decided to harbor in the guest room; Luz’s life is turning into a terrible romcom about a coffee shop; Harry’s friends are bad at running a bar but they’re trying their best; somebody got punched in the face; and someday there will be a New York Times Bestseller about all of it.

Or, the interlinked soap opera-worthy drama of a group of millennials in Philadelphia, told day by day.

Lie if God is Sleeping - Gene flipped the puzzle over to read the back. “My name is Edward Heffron,” he read aloud. “I killed a man, and now I’m paying the price. 18,000 pieces. It will take approximately seven days to complete me. For experienced players only.”

What the fuck was a curse this nasty doing in a Philadelphia used bookstore?

rivers always reach the sea - my favorite webgott canon era series fic ever

Situation Normal - Winters and Nixon move to the city, reunite with some old friends and find themselves adopting a new, four-legged one.

By Small and Small - Babe wants to keep talking with Gene, but he doesn’t really know what to say. He feels like, in the past, he never would’ve shut up, but now, since Julian, he’s just got nothing. Maybe that’s grieving; Bill says that’s grieving, anyway, but Bill uses the term like a Band-Aid to put over every aspect of Babe that has changed.

Or: The one where Gene is in med school and Babe's messed up over Julian.

Dear Lover - A group of friends who supervise soldiers' mail are secretly very invested in one Major Winters' letters to a woman he seems to be having a secret affair with.

all or SJtrinity's Band of Brothers (webgott) fics and The Pacific (sledgefu and andyeddie) fics

Green and Gold - Merriell has dark magic and a guilty conscious. He never considered how the war would change them.

The American Sublime - "Tactician that he is, he finds the likelihood of still being loved by someone who, thanks to him, has just awakened to a wicked hangover and a face full of cold piss next to nil."

Dick Winters and Lewis Nixon billet together at a farmhouse in Holland for a rare few weeks of peace and privacy, while Dick struggles to process his promotion and his time away from Easy Company. Set during the first minutes of Episode 5, "Crossroads."

Cows. Wildflowers. Feelings. Handjobs.

Black Ink on Some Blue Lines - It’s been sixteen years since the letter was written, but it never found its way to the one it was intended for. The thing about secrets is they eat away at you, not all at once but slowly over the years, and you begin to wonder, to play out the what if scenarios in your mind. Instead, David buried it away and pretended like it never existed. He should have killed it, he thinks to himself, not buried it while it still had breath in its lungs.

In which David remembers his evolving relationship with Joe over the course of the war and decides to deliver a letter.

Baby You Can Drive My Car - Everyone has their thing. Perco takes watches. Nix scrounges for liquor. Welsh continues his never-ending quest for anything that will please Kitty Grogan. Even Eugene robs abandoned apothecaries with only a touch of guilt, making off with as many bandages and sulfa packets as he can carry. And then there’s Speirs, sweeping behind them like a shadow and carrying away anything they leave behind that sparkles or shines.

Babe steals cars. He’s getting pretty good at it.

Come in From the Cold - In which Smokey Gordon's coffee shop 'Bastogne' saves lives by lending cutting instruments and offering a steady supply of caffeine and sugary goodness. The shenanigans are just a by-product.

Call me 'sweetheart', Please? by @mariamegale - A not-relationship in the making. (baberoe)

anthroposcene, interrupted - Three months ago, Ray Person was a Philosophy major at Harvard. Now, he's dodging Runners trying to get from St. Louis to Cambridge without a) starving, b) dying by accident or c) offing himself. However, three's company, and it comes in the form of a dog with no bark and a taciturn Marine Staff Sergeant who's last name is Not-Pitt, which has gotta count for something.

[dioxazinereads]

Congratulations, You're a Dad! Ch1

Before you read this, please keep in mind that English isn't my first language and that the timeline in this is vague. Expect the RE cast to be OOC, and that the whole virus shtick confuses me, so sorry if I got it wrong.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Chapter 1

This was supposed to be a simple mission.

Grab the files and leave.

Kill a few wayward zombies here and there.

Maybe meet Ada again.

But other than that, it was supposed to be trouble free.

Leon should’ve known it wouldn’t be as simple as that.

Especially with a track record like his.

But this was just bizarre.

(e/c) eyes stared at him from behind a tree. And Leon stared back, watching as the little child peek out from behind the tree before retreating back when they saw that he was staring and peaking out again when they thought he wasn’t looking anymore.

Leon could feel a headache coming. 

Approximately 14 hours ago, Leon was at home half way through his 4th bottle of whiskey when Hunnigan called him for another mission, 3 weeks after he finished the last one. 

Honestly, Leon was surprised when they took so long to contact him again. Usually, they’d give him less than a week’s rest before sending him out on another one. Such was the burden of being the top agent of the D.S.O.

Even more surprising was the mission he was getting assigned to.

“A retrieval mission?” Leon asked, pouring himself a drink. He took a sip of it, licking his lips before asking, “Who is it this time?”

“It’s not someone. It’s a file.” Hunnigan replied. “Very important ones, might I add.”

“And how important is this file that you're sending me, of all people, to get it?” He downed the whole glass before pouring himself a new one. He’s almost finished his 4th bottle, should he stop? Nah.

“According to our intel, there used to be an Umbrella lab underneath Coral Island.” Hunnigan replied, and Leon could hear her type something on her computer before continuing. “The citizens were unaware of the lab’s existence until they were searching for refuge from the infected.”

“And you got this where exactly?” Leon asked, finishing his glass and picked up the whiskey. He was about to pour it into the glass before deciding that that’s taking too long, and drank straight from the bottle. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand still holding the whiskey. “I thought communications were cut after the island was contained?”

“It was.” Hunnigan confirmed. Leon couldn’t see her but he imagined Hunnigan nodding when she said that. “Some of the survivors found a working boat and escaped the island. They were caught by US officials and were promptly quarantined and questioned.”

Ah, yes. 

‘Quarantined’.

Sure they were. 

Head tilted back, Leon downed the remaining whiskey, shaking it for good measure once he finished it. He placed the bottle back on the table and sarcastically said, “I’m sure they were welcomed with open arms and a party.”

Hunnigan, like a champ, ignored Leon’s words and continued on, “According to them, despite the lab being abandoned for years, it was notably clean.”

“Well, yeah.” Leon cut in. “It’s a contained area after all. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t want something like dust and open air to fuck up their experiments.”

“Sealed rooms can get dusty still.” Hunnigan explained, not even bothered by Leon cutting in. “Further in the lab, they spotted infected scientists. And instead of, venturing further, the survivors went back to the surface-”

“Smart.” Leon said after sipping his 5th bottle. While Hunnigan recounted the events to him, Leon went to his stash of whiskey and grabbed another bottle which he was now drinking. “Don’t venture into places you know nothing about. Especially underground labs that would require passcodes and ids.”

“..and founded a refugee camp.” Hunnigan continued despite Leon cutting in for the 2nd time. “Your mission is to investigate the labs for any documents about future projects and/or the T-virus that plagued the whole island.”

The urge to be an asshole outweighed the resigned and tired agent.

“What if I don’t go?” Leon asked, leaning back on his chair, legs crossed while he tapped the whiskey bottle. He should not be doing this. Especially not to Hunnigan, who’s had to put up with his shit for years.

“Your plane leaves in 3 hours.” Hunnigan said, ignoring Leon’s words like it was second nature. “Pack your stuff and leave as soon as you’re ready. Additional weapons will be at your disposal at the airbase. Hunnigan out.” 

And the call ended as soon as she said that, leaving Leon to his thoughts.

He did not like that. 

Leon turned off his phone and chugged down the remaining whiskey before standing up from his seat. He placed his phone on the table and picked up the 4 other bottles on the table and disposed of them. 

After that, Leon headed to his room and picked up a duffle bag, his clothes already packed. He barely needed the bag nor the clothes in it, but he has once used it and that’s all the reason he needed to keep up with the habit. 

Besides, it was better to be over prepared than underprepared. 

Once everything was locked, Leon left the house, thinking about the bottles of whiskey he’d be drinking once he’d return.

That is, of course, if he’d survive this time.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

I'll be honest, I have no idea where this is going. I just have an idea that I want to write and zero plans how to execute it.

Another thing to note, I have an AO3, however I'm scared of the AO3 curse. So I'll only post this story here.

If you guys like the story, please don't post it on other websites unless I said so.

Also don't expect any post schedule, I'm writing this as it comes to mind.

[myths0f01d]

Ok so few months ago I can't remember when. I went through a faze of reading every merlin cross harry potter fic I could find. Including merthur. It's a small list. A really really small list. It's amazing though. I grew up obsessing over harry potter and then merlin. So obviously I devoured the fics and then grew sad when there were no more. So I started writing my own. To be fair it was a very complex story line I chose to write so it didn't last long. I think I have the first half of the first chapter down but I have no hope even for that. But now. As the flame is rekindled. I'll be thinking it out more and writing it again. I say this in hope. But I have no idea since school is starting soon for me.

I have the summary written and maybe the title? I'm not sure.

Also fun fact about me. I have never stuck to reading a 100k fanfic until I read 'Emrys Ascending' by tricksterity on ao3. Probs one of the best merthur fics I've ever read. Go check the fic out. You won't regret it. Trust me.

Anyway here's the summary for my own one. Sort of. Or the main outline?

Many years ago, around 300 years to be exact, Merlin placed the crystal of Neahtid in vault 713, in the lowest part, at the time, in Gringotts wizarding bank. He thought it would be safe there.

What he did not expect was that approximately 200 years later would he be informed that it had been taken, then attempted to been taken again. Now chasing after a half giant, a child and a wacky Headmaster and some unforeseen lurking evil Merlin is forced to venture out into the wizarding world once more.

Though now in hindsight it was not a smart idea to attend the school as an 11 year old boy, apparently it raised a lot of questions when you appear out of nowhere.

It also does not help when a few older years resemble suspiciously to close to Arthur and the knights, so its no wonder he’s so distracted.

There's going to be loads of shenanigans by the way. I want it to mostly be funny fluff and light hearted. Obvi there has to be angst on some parts. I still have a lot to refine and go through but the base idea and what I want for it is there

Here's the old summary (first draft)

Long ago merlin put the crystal of neahtid in vault 713 in the depths of gringotts Wizarding bank.

He thought it's be safer there.

It's not his fault a half giant, a child and a slightly less marbles then there should be headmaster stole it.

And it's certainly not his fault when he thought the best plan of action was to go undercover and take it back. As an 11 year old.

Only to find out the past has come back to haunt him. In the form of of a few 3rd years scattered across houses.

Because really, Guise isn't around anymore to tell him it's his fault. So he'll believe it's not.

That is until he hears a familiar laugh in the forbidden forest.

Ok so maybe it is his fault.

Destiny can go shove it honestly, merlins not amused.

Tell me witch one you like better

[heroictoonz]

Febuwhump 2022 Day 10: "How Long Had It Been?"

Ships: Ben & Dexter & Steven

Warnings: N/A

AO3 L!nk in the Comments!

It was night when the doors to the lab opened. Light wafted in from the hall. Dexter’s eyes squinted with a frown at the sudden glare against his computer screen. With a groan of annoyance he whipped around in his seat to face the intruder. As usual he fully expected his pink clad elder sister. Her inquisitive ways always causing him nothing more than annoyance. Doubled with the fact that she could never keep her hands to herself. Though, in their older years there was a better respect for boundaries, she still had a bad habit of falling back on old ways.

Instead, Dexter was not met with the wide and curious eyes of his sibling, but instead, the mixed expressions of both Steven Universe and Ben Tennyson.

Steven Universe and Ben Tennyson were both odd in their own respects. Dexter could not lie in his fascination of their respective ties to extraterrestrial life. Steven, a half breed of human and an alien race called Gems and Ben, wielder of the Omnytrix, a device able to reform his DNA into that of multiple alien species. Yet, even past his scientific curiosity he would be willing to go so far as to call them his friends.

Their presence was not nearly as much of an annoyance as Dede’s; however it was still a hindrance to his work. He gave a sigh and leaned back into his chair. Rubbing at his eyes from under his glasses before giving them both an exasperated look. “What is it?” he questioned.

Steven’s eyes darted towards Ben before turning back to Dexter. He held a sad expression. No. Maybe sad was not the right word. Steven was always a very emotional man; Dexter noted. His face tended to always show off his thoughts like a clear window to his mind. A myriad of emotions constantly littered the hybrid’s features at any given moment. The idea of his heart living on his sleeve was incorrect, Dexter believed. Instead, it was much more likely that the letterman he wore almost religiously was made from the very thread of the man’s own soul. However, the amount of emotions all at once could also be a challenge to read. Instead of just one thought or feeling, everything was on constant display. Picking out what Steven was showing off was like deciphering a code in some cases.

Ben however, was a bit easier to get a read on. As his emotions tended to be relatively simplistic when they presented outwardly. Though, with his history, Dexter doubted his emotions were anything simple. But, when Ben was open with them they were much easier to understand. So, Dexter turned to the other in this case, hoping a better answer would lay in his features.

Ben’s own face showed a type of frustration. One that seemed intertwined with another emotion altogether. However, Dexter was not sure if he recognized it very well. Though, it was a similar one to whatever was entangled in Steven’s own furrowed brows.

“I read many languages,” Dexter began again with a huff. “Silence is not one of them.”

Steven frowned at that before finally speaking up, “When was the last time you slept?”

The question caught Dexter off guard. Slept? That was easy, he… Oh. Well, he knew he had taken some sort of a rest at some point. He vaguely recalled napping some odd number of hours ago. Even so, what did it matter? And of what concern was it to Steven or even Ben? He shook his head and gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “I sleep like a child nightly,” he lied. “Now if that is all you need-”

“How long has it been since you ate?” Ben stepped in next. “Like seriously ate. Like an actual meal.”

Dexter frowned at him in annoyance. What was this? An interrogation? “I do not know what it is the two of you are getting at, but my well being is of no one's concern but my own.”

Suddenly a buzzing sound started up as the gentle blue light fuzzed into existence behind him. Computress’ voice spoke, “It has been approximately seventy-two hours since Dexter’s last meal aside from coffee drank at 6:47am this morning. In the last four days he has slept approximately seven hours total.”

Dexter snapped to look over to the AI with a frown. “Betrayed by my own computer,” he grumbled to himself.

“Seriously, Dex?” Ben sighed and crossed his arms over his chest. Dexter registered what seemed to be disappointment both in his voice and expression.

“And this is why we’re here!” Steven declared with a smile. “You work yourself way too hard and we’re gonna make you take breaks from here on out.”

“Starting now,” Ben added on as Steven grabbed Dexter’s hands and pulled him from his seat.

“Hold it!” Dexter hissed out and he yanked his hands back. “Who do you two think you are? Barging into my lab and telling me what to do. I can take care of my own well being and it is of no concern to either of you.”

It was Ben’s turn to glance at Steven. That expression Dexter couldn’t pin down had returned to both of them. Ben then shook his head and replied, “We’re your friends, Dex. We’re always gonna be concerned about you.”

“Especially when you’re close to working yourself sick,” Steven added.

Dexter’s form straightened with a realization. That emotion in their faces. The one he had ignored due to the inability to name it. He suddenly realized what it was. Worry.

Dexter looked from the other two then back to his work. As if reading his thoughts, Computress’ voice buzzed back to life. “All current work has been saved under the proper files. Any new Fuse research has been sent to Mandark for peer review and his response is estimated to arrive sometime tomorrow morning. This means you are free for the rest of the night.”

“So,” Steven said with a smile. “You can relax for a bit!”

“Honestly, you deserve to. You do a lot,” Ben continued. “Maybe a bit too much on your own.”

Dexter gave a sigh. “Fine. I will rest for the night.”

Ben and Steven smiled at each other in success before each grabbing one of Dexter’s hands, leading him out of the lab.

[eleanorblythe]

Romantic Homicide - Anton Chigurh x Original Female Character - One Shot

This is a supplemental to my first three chapters and explores Anton and Her before the events of Romantic Homicide

Three times they met. Three times she survived him.

Also on Ao3 with author notes and translations - here

Summer of 1977

He had seen her several times during the summer. It was unnerving. It was like he summoned her. Every time her face flitted into his mind, she appeared.

The first time it happened was about a month after that night in the motel. She hadn’t seen him. They both happened to be in the same gas station.

He mused that they both now had different cars.

He watched from his car, as she filled up her tank, made small talk with the cashier in store, all beaming smiles and easy laughs, before settling in her car, where a blank expression washed over her. She opened up a folder on the passenger seat and read and flipped through the documents and pictures.

Contract.

He watched her drive away. He briefly thought about following her.

Why? He shook the thought out of his head and drove away.

___________________

The next time it happened, it was only a few weeks later. This time she saw him first. He was settled in a booth in a diner and felt a shadow pass over him, expecting the waitress with his food. Until that voice…

“Hey handsome.”

He looked up, keeping his face as neutral as possible. She smiled down at him then slid into the seat opposite him.

“If I didn’t know any better I’d think you were following me,” she purred.

Confusion must have flashed across his face because she laughed and placed a warm hand on his fist, resting on the table.

“I was kidding, but you could have said hello at the gas station, I don’t bite…unless you like that,”

She had seen him. And why was she flirting with him? He absently wondered whether she did it because she knew it would make him uncomfortable. But with her hand on his - it was so warm. So reassuring.

So, right.

“If you’re on a job or just, don’t want company by all means tell me and I’ll go,” she was conscious he hadn’t said anything and was staring down at her hand on his.

“I’m not on a job.” He met her gaze. It was as good as an invitation she was likely to get out of him, so she removed her hand and flipped through the diner menu.

“What’s good?” She asked scanning over the lists.

“It’s a diner off the highway. None of it’s good.”

“You say that, but I once had an excellent sundae in a place like this, just after this huge shootout. It was like the perfect reward.”

Another shadow passed over him, and this time it was a waitress with his food.

“Here we go, sir - oh sorry, ma’am, would you like to order?”

She peered over her menu at the plate that had just been put down in front of Anton.

“I’m good, we’ll share, won’t we darling?”

Anton considered killing her right then.

“No, thank you.” He gritted out.

She smiled apologetically up at the waitress.

“Sorry, my husband gets very cranky on long car rides. We’ll be fine thank you,” instantly putting the young girl at ease as she moved to serve other patrons.

“Does look good,” she mumbled as she took a fry off his plate.

“I take it back, I do mind you sitting here,” he said lowly.

She merely rolled her eyes. She. Rolled her eyes. At him? His fists clenched until the knuckles turned white.

“Anton, dear, if you’re going to strangle me you should know, my safeword is peach,”

“Why should I know that?”

“You seem like the type.” She helped herself to another fry.

“Maybe I’ll just shoot you.”

She raised a perfectly arched eyebrow, then seemed to remember something.

“Oh your native tongue is Spanish, sí?”

“Yes.”

“I had a run in with a very angry Mexican recently and he said something to me that for the life of me I couldn’t figure out, my Spanish is a little rusty,”

She said a vague approximation of what she had obviously overheard. She was right. Her Spanish was appalling. The corner of his lips lifted slightly as he translated back to her:

“Blonde cunt bitch.”

“Well, it’s not blonde, but close enough, I suppose.” She took a further fry before Anton muttered.

“I’m inclined to agree with him.”

She paused mid bite then shuffled closer to the table, speaking conspiratorially.

“You seem tense,” Anton ignored her and took a sip of his coffee, then she added, unhelpfully, “Do you want to fuck it out in the restroom behind me?”

Anton hid his surprise well, but he did burn his tongue. He placed his cup down a little too hard and glared at her.

“Why are you doing this?”

“What? I was trying to be helpful,”

“No. You’re not. Why are you doing this?”

She smirked.

“Because it’s so fun to watch you squirm.”

“And you know who I am.”

“And you know who I am.”

“I’m not interested in your games.”

She leaned back in her seat with an, almost smug, grin.

“Yes you are.” She said quietly. “If you weren’t, you would have killed me that night.”

“There’s still time.” He was lethal. His whole body vibrating with silent rage.

She hummed pleasantly and took one final French fry off of his plate (leaving him with approximately, six left) and slid herself out of the booth.

“Yes there is, Anton.” She leaned over him, brushing against him, to take a sip from his coffee. “Come and find me, when it is.”

She then proceeded to lick around the entire rim of the cup before delicately placing it back in its saucer. She gave a final wink, her finger ghosted over his cheek and walked away.

Anton sat for several minutes, allowing his food to get cold. He simply couldn’t understand why he would allow this woman to get under his skin. Or was that, what this was at all?

Over the years he had met many different types of people. She didn’t fit cleanly into any one category. She could be sweet and sour. Friendly and savage. Between them they had racked up more dead bodies than all of their other “colleagues” combined. They were both ruthless. Heartless. Fearless.

He didn’t fear her.

But he was wary of her.

He wanted to write her off as crazed ninfómana, but he knew she wasn’t. She was too good at what she did to simply be crazy. He knew how that felt.

“Come and find me, when it is,”

He had a sinking feeling, that time was fast approaching. What concerned him, was he wasn’t sure what he would do. He dug around in his pocket and flipped the quarter he found in there. Staring down at the side that faced him, he was almost ready to abandon everything he once believed.

He reluctantly put the coin back in his pocket and tucked into his, now, cold burger and leftover fries.

He didn’t touch the coffee again. No matter how much he wanted it.

___________________

The time after that, Anton knew. Fate was absolutely fucking with him.

It was a couple of months after their last encounter. Anton did everything in his power to avoid her. He worked odd hours, he took jobs outside of his normal remit and always out of his usual state of operations.

A client had asked Anton to recover some files from a former associate, he owned a nightclub.

When he arrived. It was a bloodbath.

Apparently this former associate had a good many enemies and a rival gang had arrived, baying for blood. Most of the public managed to get out before the gunfire started, but some had been trampled and some simply got in the way of the flying bullets.

Anton didn’t have time to discriminate who would and would not attack him, so he resolved to kill them all. He systematically made his way room by room, floor by floor. The office was at the back of the third floor. He tried to stay close to the shadows but, like a moth to a flame, people were drawn to him, determined to come out on top. They never did.

The third floor was significantly quieter. There was only the dull thrum of music drifting from the main floor, and the distant sound of gunfire. He stood outside the double doors to the office, and could hear shouts and the sound of furniture being moved around - or more accurately, being crashed into.

Anton kicked open the door and shot at the nearest person. Sending him sprawling across the carpet. This alerted the others who took cover behind sofas and desks. There was another two behind a frosted glass screen, but they were already engaged in a close quarters fight.

He quickly disposed of the others scrambling to escape and was about to turn his attention to the two left behind the glass when a man came crashing through the glass landing on his back, covered in cuts and bruises.

“That bitch…” the dying man rasped.

There. Was. No. Fucking. Way.

Anton watched, almost in disbelief, as she stepped over the shattered glass holding a dangerous looking shard in her hand, Anton could see the glass was cutting into her palm and blood was starting to bead and spill down her hand. She almost didn’t look human. Her eyes were completely black and her lip was curled in such a way it reminded Anton of a snarling wolf. She was so completely focused on her prey she didn’t even notice Anton watching on.

She knelt down, towering over the man on the floor.

“Where is it?” She spoke so softly, but her tone was venom.

“I don’t know!” He choked out.

She took the shard of glass she was holding and stabbed it into his gut. He howled in pain and tried to turn away, but she slapped him back to face her.

“Not good enough.” She said over the screams. “Lie to me again, and I remove your balls,”

“Alright! Alright, the code is etched into the underside of a drawer in his desk, now let me go!”

“No.” And she slit his throat.

She seemed to come out of her haze and finally saw Anton watching from the corner of her eye. Her eyes immediately lost their hard edge and glinted a little with mischief. A small smile gracing her features.

“You have got to be kidding me,” she huffed out a laugh and stood up from her knelt position. “You just can’t keep away, can you?”

He remained silent and unmoving.

She walked over to the large desk dominating the office and began carelessly pulling out the drawers, allowing the contents to spill onto the floor as she checked under every one. When she found the safe code she ripped away the painting that hung in pride of place and started spinning the mechanical combination lock, listening carefully to the clicks.

Once opened, she ignored the stacks of money, duct taped bags of cocaine and pistols and fished out a stack of Manila files. She sifted through them until she found one with her name on it. She quickly found a nearby trash can and dumped her file in it, unscrewing a bottle of liquor and pouring that too into the trash can.

“Got a light?”

Anton wordlessly tossed her his lighter. She lit the file on fire, she turned to pick up the overturned desk chair and took a seat, lifting her legs onto the desk top and started to pick small bits of glass out of her clothes and skin. She finally relaxed and looked up at him.

“So what brings you here, Anton?”

His eyes flicked to the pile of documents.

“Hopefully not the ones I just burnt?”

He ever so slightly shook his head.

“Just as well, you never know, that creep may have your file mixed in there,” she gestured to the scattered pile of Manila folders.

Anton could see from his position the file he was after, but he refused to move. Couldn’t move. He was half convinced he was hallucinating. Why her?

She put her legs down and leaned forward on the desk, resting her cheek on her palm.

“You don’t say much do you? I like a good challenge. There’s a motel around the corner…”

Anton finally moved.

He levelled his shotgun at her head.

“Ah. Has that time finally come?” She didn’t seem very surprised. She slowly rose from her seat and walked around the desk as he slowly approached her. “And you’ve made your decision?”

Anton kept his grip on his gun with one hand and dug a coin out of this pocket with the other. He flipped it and slammed it down on the desk beside them, fingers covering the coin face.

“Call it.”

She looked down thoughtfully at his hand then back to him. An indecipherable look flashed over her face.

“This is what you do?”

“Call it.”

“What if I don’t want to?”

“Call. It.”

“If you want to kill me, just kill me. Use your hands, if you like,”

His eyes burned her. He didn’t understand how she was looking at him. Was it sadness? Pity? Eventually she breathed a deep sigh and gave him what he wanted. Anton slowly lifted his hand off the coin and they both glanced at what stared back at them.

That was three times.

Three times she had cheated what was coming to her. Every choice she made should have killed her long ago. He should have killed her the second he saw her. But he didn’t. He didn’t know why, then.

He didn’t know why, now.

He tossed his shotgun on the desk and grabbed her throat, slamming her into the wall so hard the painting next to them fell to the ground and shattered. She hissed in pain as her skull connected to concrete.

“You.” He snarled “Why do you, get to live?”

She gasped for air, as he tightened his grip, but she never rose her hands to try to pry his away. Which only infuriated him more. Was she so willing to throw her life away?

“I should have killed you when I saw you,”

“Then why didn’t you?” She breathed.

“Not for your games.” He admitted to her.

She gave a small, sad smile.

“Then why?” She whispered. She was losing oxygen, soon she would black out. Or he would finally succeed in killing her. He wondered if he had the strength in him to snap her neck.

He, almost imperceptibly, shook his head at her.

She closed her eyes and allowed a tear to escape the corner of her eye. When she opened them her eyes were misty and the life was draining from them. She took a shuddering breath.

“It’s okay, I won’t tell anyone.”

To this day, he doesn’t know how she did it.

How she knew.

How her words were the very thing he needed to hear in that moment.

How she seemed to know him better than he knew himself.

He knew then, why he was right to fear her. She could see into the deepest parts of him, locked away, long since forgotten and abandoned and bring them into such glaring and startling clarity that it left him feeling something he had never felt.

Vulnerable.

She was somehow, both his strength and undoing. That rarest of creatures.

Too precious to snuff out.

Just as she was about to breathe her last, he released her throat. She tried to gulp in some air but was cut off by his mouth descending on hers.

She tried to raise her arms up in an attempt to push him away, but he pinned them to the wall, holding her there as he now tried to suffocate her in a whole new way.

Eventually he broke away from her mouth and kissed the sore red marks on her neck that he knew would soon become bruises. She took greedy breaths, groaning and panting as the air and life returned to her body.

“I should fucking kill you,” she rasped.

Anton lifted his head from her neck and met her eyes, noses touching. Breath mingling together.

“But you won’t.” He said.

“No, I won’t.” She closed the small distance and kissed him desperately, she bit his lip hard enough to bleed then pulled back. “And neither will you.”

“No, I won’t.” He said echoing her words.

They didn’t make it to the motel, instead he had her there in that office, among the dead bodies they left behind.

She was pleasantly surprised to learn Anton, in fact, could be very vocal.

Afterwards, they left together - easily dispatching anyone who was left in the building - and made it to their cars. He once again watched her drive away into the night before picking up the file he came for, flipping through the contents when a scrap of paper fluttered onto his lap.

He picked it up and allowed himself to smile.

‘Come catch me…’ It read, and below - her address. She lived in his state. His city.

He promised to himself he would visit sometime soon.

She was his rara avis.

He would keep her.

[whitepawn]

Moshang superhero!au

Shang Qinghua wasn't lucky by common standards. Well there was always the need to dig deeper then it comes to Shang Qinghua. At first he seems like someone who would be envied dy less fortunate: had a really really nice place in Cang Qiong, was gifted with power of changing reality, got to hand out with the coolest people possible. That was the first layer. The second is: a guy with ability that is hard to get the use of, tons of work, no personal life, even in close future. Then comes the third layer: a man of a grate wit, who successfully mastered seemingly lame ability and fully deserved his place among the strongest. Fourth: ah wait he's a nerd and forever alone. Fifth: he has a crush on WHO?

And the list can go on and on. Shang Qinghua was a mistery. Was he a traitor for allying with supervillain Mobei-jun? Was he really all this nerdy? Is he like gay or something?

And here we have Mobei-jun. People don't seem to have problems with reading him. Approximately you'll need about three seconds to understand all you need to know about him. He's dangerous, powerful, brutal, hot (in a cold way) and wouldn't even notice if he crushed you dead. That's basically how he is. But there's always room for more. Even to his own surprise. Mobei-jun is currently on his way of developing into a mature adult, rather than overpowered giant angsty teen. He's soon to find out that he can be caring, patient, thoughtful, protective and even weak.

But now all we have is Shang Qinghua, exhaustedly falling on his soft amazing bed. Or is he? The very moment he expected himself to be buried in his blanket he seemingly just feel right through his bed, blanket wrapping around him like a trash bag. His fall wasn't to long though. He only had time to group himself a little, before his back met the bouncy material. Shang Qinghua started wiggling himself free and after he did, he started with a great shock at Mobei-jun, who was staring back at him. His slightly raised brows were giving away how much he was took off guard. Mobei-jun seemed just to casually sit on his couch with an open laptop, home clothing – really fancy ones – on.

"I.." started Shang Qinghua. "I told you many times to not open portals in my apartment." He saw Mobei-jun furrowing and instantly lost all his attitude. "Am I needed, Dawang?"

Mobei-juns furrow deepened. "Yes." Was all he said, as he opened something on his laptop and gave it over to Shang Qinghua. In reality, he was very much surprised by his power's outburst. He didn't had this random portal opening situations since he was in middle school. Was he dripping so deep in his thoughts it came to thinking about Qinghua and actually summoning him?

"Ugh, I know this is no problem for you, Dawang" whined Shang Qinghua, wrapping himself up with his blanket. His fingers though started typing as he leaned over Mobei's laptop and started working. "I was so close to sleeping my hunger over." He muttered to himself as if didn't even noticing Mobei-jun was paying him all his attention.

It wasn't really late, especially for Shang Qinghua who would easily spend half of the night scrolling through his phone or writing something. The fact that he really was going to sleep meant that today he really wore himself off. Mobei-jun almost felt guilty for taking sleep Shang Qinghua was aiming for away by this embarrassing accident. Maybe he should've send him back. But he didn't want him to leave. The all reason why he mindlessly opened a portal to Shang Qinghuas apartment was because he wanted him to be here. Just to silently admire his presence. But it turned... Exactly like he wanted. Shang Qinghua was here, and Mobei-jun got to just feel good in his company. But Shang Qinghua was exhausted, tired and hungry, probably sleep deprived too.

That's definitely not how Mobei-jun want him to feel. He opened the delivery app on his phone and ordered some noodles Shang Qinghua liked. He then stood up from the couch and went into his bedroom to make a call. Mobei-jun called one of his minions for them to organise the fastest delivery possible, and after ten minutes a really terrified delivery worker was at his door.

Shang Qinghua haven't moved since he started working so, then Mobei-jun placed a plastic bowl of noodles on the table, his head tilted up and his eyes went wide and glowy.

"You should eat." Stated Mobei-jun sitting back on the couch near Shang Qinghua.

"Dawang!" Shouted Shang Qinghua while looking like all life was slowly returning back to him. "Thank you. This lowly one will never forget you kindness."

Mobei-jun let out a quiet grumpy growl wich made Shang Qinghua huff a laugh in amusement as took a mouthful of noodles. Mobei-jun had ordered himself some grilled meat with vegetables so Shang Qinghua wouldn't be embarrassed of being only one who eats. It was fine, Mobei-jun would gladly spend some extra time in the gym tomorrow.

They ate in comforting silence. Mobei-jun was dealing with some usual mess his subordinates would cause in this time of night by sending several messages to the most responsible ones. Shang Qinghua did pretty much the same but he somehow had the ability to get Mobei's men moving even faster. That was one of many reasons why Mobei-jun valued him as ally.

An hour and a half passed as they sat unmoving, to preoccupied with work. Shang Qinghua usually disliked doing something for long time without change, especially work. But he treated ruling mob as a really nice hobby. More of it, having fully concentrated Mobei-jun near him helped steadying Shang Qinghua's wild mind so he could work for that long without being distracted.

For Mobei-jun, who totally preferred actually being on the field than commanding over a bunch of idiots, he tolerated it many times better then Shang Qinghua was beside him. His pure interest in making Mobei's men doing things reminded Mobei-jun that controlling all of them is actually cool and not pain in the ass all the time. He found the feeling flattering. So he was pretty productive this evening until he noticed that something went strange. He lifted his eyes from his phone and noticed that Shang Qinghua seemingly had fallen asleep wrapped up in his blanket, open laptop in his hands.

Mobei-jun looked around himself as if searching for something to tell him what to do now. He helplessly clenched and unclenched his fists while looking at peacefully sleeping Shang Qinghua. He then took his phone and sent new message but in entirely different tone. And to new contact. To Luo Binghe.

'My hero fell asleep on my couch, what do I do?' he typed.

'OMG Mobei go send me a pic NOW' Luo Binghe was as easily hyped about anything that had a slightest connection to Shen Yuan.

'Why?'

'BECAUSE!! You want my advice or no?'

Mobei-jun hesitated for a couple moments before taking an awkward shaky photo of sleeping Shang Qinghua and send it to Luo Binghe feeling his face warming up in response of this act. He then deleted the photo from his phone, letting Luo Binghe do whatever he wanted.

'Awww he's cute. Not as cute as Shizun tho... Anyways look at Shizun!' And Luo Binghe send him about 30 photos of Shen Yuan lying here and there asleep. Mobei-jun rolled his eyes and let out an irritated growl.

'Okay. You seem to be experienced in such things, good, now tell me what to do.'

'Yeah right. So it's all simple, your little guy looks pretty little so just scoop him and tuck him in. Double check if he's comfortable enough and leave a glass of water beside the bed.' Okay that was cheesy.

Mobei-jun just throwed his phone away.

It never was so difficult in the past. When things like this happened to his exes he always was okay with just leaving them where they were. But this wasn't the same. This was Shang Qinghua. His back already was a mess, he complained about it hurting from his office chair all the time. Mobei-jun just couldn't let him sleep like this, so his limbs will be numb then he wake up. Shang Qinghua wasn't like him, he wasn't built for being in uncomfortable position for a long time. He almost was fragile. It was knowledge that get Mobei-jun to long to get, so he made sure he learned it well.

He realised he was staying unmoving, towering over Shang Qinghua, practically starting at him for too long to be appropriate.

Finally he pulled himself together and reached out to take sleeping Shang Qinghua in his hands. As he carefully lifted him up, he noticed a few things. Shang Qinghua was heavy. Well of course he was, Shang Qinghua was a bit overweight, and now sleeping he made a real dead weight of himself. It wasn't like Mobei-jun had a struggle with holding him. Pretty much opposite. Mobei-jun had lifted many thing way heavier, so that wasn't the case. It just felt right to hold him. Shang Qinghua was warm and soft to the touch and actually feeling him in his arms was strangely comforting.

Mobei-jun cut himself on the place and opened a portal in Shang Qinghua's apartment. He didn't tucked him in, but he did make sure a glass of water was standing near his bed.

[sineala]

Five fic self rec meme!

Tagged by @nostalgicatsea approximately two weeks ago. I am not entirely sure what the parameters of this meme are but I think it might just be reccing five fics of mine that I like. I currently have 302 stories on AO3, so sifting through the contenders here was challenging. I tried to stick to shorter work of mine. This is all Marvel fic because that's what I've written the most of, because I feel like I've become a better writer over the years, and because I decided that the PWP I wrote in The Eagle fandom in Latin might have, uh, limited appeal.

All-Time Low (Marvel 616, Steve/Tony, 12,000 words, Explicit.)

You know how sometimes you write a story that ends up being exactly the story you wanted to tell? You get it down on the page and somehow it's exactly the way you wanted it to be in your head? The words just come out of you easy and fast and you're in the zone the entire time? (Yes, I know the term is actually "flow state.") And, sure, maybe it still needs some editing, but writing it is just this extremely good experience where you don't ever stop and wonder how any of it should go and all the words are just there. You know the thing I mean? I only have a couple stories that happened like this, but this one is one of them. I don't have much memory of actually writing this one, which is how that goes; I remember that I got the prompt and I knew what I wanted to write and then somehow this entire thing happened.

It was actually written for one of Kiyaar's prompts, which was that Tony should be sleeping with men for money during the second drinking arc and Steve should find out and there should be "shame and humiliation and tears." I looked at it and I thought, oh, I got this. The element of Steve then sleeping with Tony after he finds this out, which is a big part of the story, was actually not part of the original prompt, which I don't think even occurred to me until after Ki read the story and said she liked that development that I'd come up with that part myself. My brain was just like, hey, I know exactly how this story goes. Never even crossed my mind to do anything else. 

I keep putting off writing the fix-it sequels -- I have Plans for how the blizzard goes in this universe -- because I am afraid I won't be able to make them as good as the original story.

The Libertine (Marvel Ultimates, Steve/Tony, 6,000 words, Explicit.)

One day, I was just sitting there minding my own business and I thought, "You know what? Ults began in the early 2000s and therefore early-canon Ults Tony would absolutely have self-identified as a metrosexual," and then I thought, "Goddammit, I guess I have to write this story now."

I know that this one is in most ways a pretty standard first-time getting-together story but I thought it would be delightful to make Steve and Tony's roles in it opposite from what the prototypical Ults Steve/Tony story would do. So Tony here is like "actually, no, I'm not gay, I'm just metrosexual... oh shit, wait, I think I'm actually pretty gay after all" and Steve is the guy who spent World War II sleeping with every guy he could find. In the story, neither of them expect this about the other one, and I think fandom doesn't either.

I am also weirdly proud of thinking up the title of this story because "libertine" is a word you would probably want to apply to Ults Tony and yet Steve, the Sentinel of Liberty, ends up claiming basically every other liberty-related word, for obvious reasons. And maybe here he gets this one too.

(Incidentally, reading through the See Also section of the Wikipedia entry on "libertine" is a trip I think you should all take. Wow.)

The Longing and Yearning (Bullet Points. Steve/Tony, 13,000 words, Explicit.)

This is also a pretty standard first-time story but it's also my attempt to make Bullet Points fandom happen, which I think pretty much worked, so I'm pretty happy about that. It's a very small continuity, but it's a Steve/Tony thing now!

Steve and Tony never actually meet in canon and also Steve dies halfway through the series, but I had a lot of fun imagining what they might be like together. It was interesting to get to write Tony hero-worshipping a much older Steve, who was Iron Man and had basically all the physical trauma Tony usually gets from being Iron Man, and Tony wanting to be Iron Man because of Steve being Iron Man. Which is, you know, not usually how Steve/Tony goes. I also had a lot of fun furnishing Steve's 1950s-1960s house for him (Gwyn helped me out a lot with this while betaing) and writing Steve and Tony into a world of slightly vintage US government employee homophobia in the age of the Red Scare, which I don't usually get to do in Avengers fic although it occurs to me now that I actually really could have been doing this all along in 616 early canon.

Look After Your Heart (Marvel 616, Steve/Tony, 19,000 words, Mature.)

Last week, I remembered I'd written this when someone was asking for recs of stories where Tony's loneliness plays a major role and I ended up describing this one as "loneliness is Tony's villain origin story." I hadn't thought about it in years and I reread it and was like, you know, this wasn't half-bad.

This has not been one of my most popular Steve/Tony works, I think because the tags and summary make it look like a real downer -- which, okay, yeah, it kind of is -- but I would like to point out that it actually has a happy ending. I wish to stress this. Happy Steve/Tony ending. I promise. You just take a trip through hell to get there.

So this is an AU where time bullets don't exist and when Steve gets shot at the end of Civil War, he dies and stays dead. Tony finds this out when he wakes up after World's Most Wanted, doesn't remember the past couple years of his life, and discovers that Steve is now dead. He experiences a lot of grief. So this is a canon-divergent AU running through the events of Avengers v4 and Hickmanvengers up through Superior Iron Man, in which we all get to find out exactly how far off the rails Tony can go when he continues not to have Steve around to keep him sane, functional, heroic, or sober.

This fic is also interesting as a historical document, because it's one of my earlier stories in the fandom. I actually wrote it when Hickmanvengers was still going, before Time Runs Out happened, and even before Superior Iron Man happened. The last thing in here that was based in canon is the Great Society incursion. At this point, we knew that Tony was going to be Superior but we didn't know how it was going to happen, what it was going to be like, or how Hickman's run was going to end. So I took a whole bunch of guesses, and I honestly like a few of them better than what we actually got.

Smell Like I Sound (Marvel Adventures: Avengers, Carol/Jess, 7,000 words, Explicit.)

This is a Carol/Jess fic with background Steve/Tony. Look, I didn't promise they were all going to be Steve/Tony. This is set in MA:A, mostly because I needed a canon fairly close to 616 where Carol and Jess hadn't canonically met, and Jess does exist in MA:IM. I wanted to tackle an issue I hadn't really seen explored much in Carol/Jess fic, which was "how do Carol and Jess actually get together if Jess's pheromones uncontrollably don't have good effects on women?" because that seems like it would be bad. (I mean, it would also be bad if Jess's pheromones did uncontrollably have good effects on women, but that would be a different story.)

(Because comics are gonna comics, I'm pretty sure that MA: IM Jess's pheromones do have negative effects on women. This is not necessarily the case in 616. We actually found out a couple years ago in 616 that Jess can in fact pheromone women in the fun way, which, yes, I do have a fic outlined based on this. You bet I do. I just have not yet written it yet.)

I don't write a whole lot of femslash, which in this fandom is partly due to The Carol/Jess Troll (thanks, dude) and it's partly because I have a femslash problem I've never figured out how to consistently solve, which is that I can't manage to write a whole lot of f/f that has the same kind of stakes and feelings and tropey idficcy goodness as the m/m that I like to write. I can't really even articulate the problem in a useful way; I just try writing f/f and then I read it back and mostly it's not the thing I like because what I end up writing just doesn't seem exciting to me. And I know it's possible for me to write the thing I like because this one is the thing I like! I did it here! It's just not a trick I can pull off consistently. But, anyway, this one was fun. I think I did this one right.

Not sure who has done this meme, but I'm gonna tag @blossomsinthemist and @isozyme.

[squish36-writes-and-draws]

17 November: Unraveling

Word count: 1385

TW: Swearing

General Taglist (lmk if you want to be added/removed!): @stellar-lune @faggot-friday @kamikothe1and0nly @nyxpixels @florida-preposterously

@poppinspop @uni-seahorse-572 @solreefs @corruption-exe @rusted-phone-calls

@when-wax-wings-melt @good-old-fashioned-lover-boy7 @dexter-dizzknees @abubble125 @hi-imgrapes

@callum-hunt-is-bisexual @callas-pancake-tree @hi-my-name-is-awesome @katniss-elizabeth-chase @sillyguy-supreme

@void-kill @thefoxysnake @the-pre-quiz

Unraveling Project Specific Taglist (lmk if you want to be added/removed/upgraded): @cutebisexualmess @crippling-pages @daizythegreat @sophiefostersno1stan @iggydancebreak

@theleopardstalker @you-will-meet-your-downfall @multi-fandom-lunatic

On Ao3 or below the cut!

First (3 November) / Previous / Next

A Script of a Video from Florent's YouTube Channel

    Alrighty, everybody. Being that I am chronically on the internet and I expect that you are as well, I take it we’re all familiar with the concept of flower shop AUs. If you aren’t, well, maybe you should preserve your sanity because one second you’re reading a cute little story about these deeply traumatized characters opening up a flower shop together and the next you know way too much about the Omegaverse. Don’t look that up.  I don’t need you to be scarred for life too. 

    Today’s topic isn’t really going to be connected to fanfic, but I needed a way to hook you into the video because let’s be fucking honest, approximately none of you are going to willingly click on a video about the history of plants. You can make your self-inserts have a crisis over the fact that Stegosaurus never saw a flower. It’s very sad. I’m sad. 

    Where I’d like to start today is with the Great Oxidation Event. It actually killed, like, everything, so it’s kind of significant in the course of Earth’s history. This was over two billion years ago—I better not see Young Earth Creationists in my comment section. Go away. Humans and dinosaurs did not coexist unless you count birds as dinosaurs but then again birds are just government spies so they aren’t real either—but essentially the whole thing with the Great Oxidation Event is that some microbes figured out how to do photosynthesis, realised it was good for making food, and then they pumped so much oxygen into the atmosphere that everything fucking died. 

    So, uh, that’s why we have oxygen in the atmosphere now, which is kind of a nice thing to have in general, I’d say. The really cool thing is that we have fossils, called stromatolites, of these microbes from that long ago. Like, we have a spotty record of multicellular life, but these biofilms of cyanobacteria managed to survive two billion years. So much has to be missing from the fossil record. 

    The next stop on our journey is a lot nearer to us. In the Devonian period, which ranged from about 420 million years ago to 360 million years ago, instead of having forests of plants like we’re used to, there were giant fungi, like Prototaxites. I know what you’re thinking and I refuse to comment. The Devonian is also home to what is currently the oldest known tree, Wattesia. Before that, it was Archaeopteris, which definitely isn’t confusing when put next to Archaeopteryx, a genus midway through the transition from dinosaurs to birds that lived during the Jurassic. 

    The Devonian ended in a mass extinction before giving way to the Carboniferous. Most of the coal that we’re using to cause next mass extinction is from the Carboniferous, mostly because there were a lot of fucking trees. Like, so many trees that by the end of the period the oxygen levels were around 35%, which is quite a lot compared to today’s 21%. Trees were having a good time. 

    Insects were also having a good time. The increased oxygen levels means that they could get a whole lot bigger and at the same time figured out how to do flight, which is good for them and bad for my mental health. Just to take a couple of examples we have the genus Meganeura, a dragonfly with a wingspan of a meter and the genus Arthropleura, which was a myriapod taller than me. 

    I am aware that I am short. However, that is still heinous bullshit and I shall not stand for it. 

    On the arthropod front, there’s a clade of spiders known as the Mesothelae featured in Walking with Monsters and it was the size of a cat. I don’t want to be here anymore. Let us move on to the Permian for about thirty seconds. 

    In the Permian, everything died. A lot. More than the dinosaur asteroid that I’m sure all of you know about. Plants died a little bit less than most things, but it was still generally not a good time. While we’re here though, I want to talk about Glossopteris. Now, all of you are looking at this and going, “that just looks like a leaf,” and, yeah, it is. But its fossils were used as evidence towards proving tectonic plates, which I think is pretty cool. I’d also like to mention Lepidodendron, which lived during both the Carboniferous and Permian and has been mistaken as being an imprint fossil of a large reptile’s skin. No. It’s just a tree with some funny-looking bark to our modern eyeballs. And, to round off this trifecta, we had conifers first appear during the Permian. 

    And now let’s jump forward to the Cretaceous. This is the one with most of the dinosaurs you know. As an audience retention strategy, I want you to come up with a list of your ten favourite dinosaurs. Unless you’re a dinosaur aficionado purposely trying to be difficult to invalidate the accuracy of my point, you’re probably going to name at least a couple that are from the Cretaceous.

    The Cretaceous is also where angiosperms, flowering plants, went absolutely buck fucking wild. Like, today angiosperms make up 90% of the living plant species on Earth. And you know what else first appeared? Well, technically it’s a flowering plant, so I’ve already covered it but, like, the concept of Earth without grass is completely absurd to my little brain. I’m sure the ecological niche was covered by other things, but the fact that most of human society exists because we domesticated grasses in the form of wheat, corn, and rice and that only appeared during the Cretaceous is not something I want to comprehend.

    And that brings us mostly to today. I mean, there was probably an asteroid in there, but I also don’t care very much about the Paleogene. It’s close enough to modern day to not be as interesting as the older periods. It’s just slightly weird. I mean, there was the family Chalicotheriidae, which looks kind of funny, I guess. 

    What does all of this mean though? Why did I bother doing all of this? Was it so that you could copy and paste what I said into your Flower Shop AU I definitely didn’t cause to start existing at the beginning of this video so you spent the last ten minutes writing instead of watching my shit editing skills? No. It’s because I know too much shit about plants and I need to tell other people about them or I’m going to be even more of a menace to society than I already am. 

    I also think that it’s important to think about plants in the context of geologic history because so much of the space is taken up by dinosaurs, and that’s kind of a shame. I’m not advocating for less dinosaurs; I just want to highlight that there are other things in the fossil record. There are people who stare at fossilized pollen all day. I’m not going to lie to you—I would sell my soul to do that. That sounds fun. I’d be so good at it, I promise. Let me see the pollen. You can trust me to not eat the rocks. 

    I definitely haven’t ever tried to eat a rock before. 

    Anyway—I’d like to thank all the people on Patreon who, for some reason, fund this mess, and if you’d like to join them for whatever reason, link in the description. I don’t know why I bother saying that. You know how YouTube works. You also know that YouTube likes it when you like, subscribe, and leave comments telling me about how I’m obviously wrong about everything ever. Genuinely though, I do appreciate the corrections you guys give me. I’m one guy here and sometimes I say stupid or stupidly worded shit. I can’t wait for the Latin scholars to tell me that I absolutely fucking butchered the scientific names. You all know who you are. In my defence, taxonomy is a dumpster fire and it’s not my fault that I’m treating it like it is. And, finally, I’d like to thank Keefe, who took the time out of his day to stare at me ominously while I was writing this script. I’m not concerned at all.

[theriveroflight]

"I have secrets you don't know about" + Darklaw

available to read here; takes place directly after the epilogue of "Ghost Stories (and Other Forms of Magic)"

Eve and Espella come back together, slightly past suppertime.

"Did you let your parents know you came here?" Dad asks.

"They're expecting me home late," Espella answers, "but thank you." She dips her head briefly.

Eve seems fairly relaxed as well. Jean wonders just what they were doing outside — Espella had left, and Eve had remained in town for most of the day. It was nice for them to have more one-on-one time — that was something that rarely happened. Generally, they were either with family or with Espella, who was kind of like family.

"How was…" Jean hesitates, uncertain of how to put her question.

"Oh, the trip went well," Espella answers. "The buses ran on time, and my friends were great. It was very nice to see them again."

"I'm glad," Jean says, finishing the conversation as politely as she can. There's nothing wrong with Espella, per se, but Jean had never really…bonded with her. She suspects it might be because she's an interloper in a friendship that's lasted as long as Espella has been alive. Or maybe it’s something else, something they experienced that no one else did.

Supper goes well, but the moment Espella leaves the amount of conversation decreases. At least until Father starts bringing up his latest research project and Mother starts to ask him questions. It's an approximation of "normal".

That night, when they return to their room, still shared after all this time, Eve asks Jean a question.

"How much do you know about quantum physics?"

"Not much," she admits in response. She's tried reading some of Mother's books, but she's leaning more towards Father's field. Not in the least because she's learned to manufacture her own hormones, even if she isn't using the one's she's made.

"Do you believe in parallel universes, then? Or maybe the butterfly effect."

"Eve, are you alright?"

She hears Eve sigh from the other bed. "I'll start at the beginning, then. We used to hold a fire festival yearly — around October. We're no longer holding it."

"Okay?" Jean's never heard of the festival before, but if it hasn't been held since Jean first came here, then she wouldn't have heard of it.

"The last one was twelve years ago," Eve continues. "It's technically my fault, but it's more complicated than that. I'm sure Dad has told you about the properties of Labyrinthian water. The bell up in that tower is pure silver."

Oh. "Why was the tower never taken down?"

"No one can get up there to ring the bell anymore," Eve answers, "so I suppose if doesn't really matter. We locked the doors and threw out the keys then. And it's a good thing I did, too, because if I hadn't then Espella and I would have rung the bell."

"So…what?" Jean asks. "What’s the point of this thought exercise-slash-history lesson?"

"If we had rung the bell, I would have died that day," Eve says. "And I know that because I lived through it."

"You…lived through it?"

Eve sighs. "This is why I doubted you would believe me. You’re a woman of science. It sounds incredulous even to my ear, and I was the one who experienced it."

"Tell me, and I'll see just what I make of it," Jean says.

"The keys to the bell tower were a pair of pendants, made as gifts for Marie and our mother," Eve begins. "Set in them was a gemstone, and that gemstone had certain…properties. Properties that allowed the dead to remain in a state of…being undead. It gives power in the form of various tricks, and time in a couple different forms. In my case…I didn't even seem dead at first. I'd been crushed by the rubble, but I looked fine. My body was constantly preserving itself from the moment before my death, so…they didn't even realise I was dead until a few months later. Dad took me to the doctor and I had no heartbeat."

"You were…dead, but still…possessing your own corpse?"

"Essentially. Father and Arthur chose to cover up the bell tower and make people believe it no longer existed through the drugs they were studying."

"And then…?"

"Espella wasn't doing well in the aftermath. Mum and Marie had both perished in the fire, and so had most of the town. She blamed herself for it, of course. It meant that they were focusing on her…because I seemed fine. He was worried when we found out I was dead, of course, but…Espella was practically catatonic. We had to do everything we could to help her, especially since we had no clue what was wrong with me. So we got to work. We…constructed a story for Espella where she couldn't be the bad guy — where there were was a witch who cast a spell to destroy everything. And then…we made it real, with me as the witch."

"Eve, I…must say, this all sounds so…strange."

"I have secrets you don't know about," she answers. "I'm trying to tell you them. Please. Listen to me."

Jean has wanted to know Eve's secrets for a long time. She always thought knowing her secrets would help her truly become Eve's sister, as she was meant to.

"Go on," she says.

"Arthur built a village. The three of us worked to recruit people for a new experiment about the water on this islet and the native flowers. It was part of a terrible experiment, and I was essentially…a lab assistant, in some ways. When we started to experiment with my new abilities…we discovered I could possess others, and use their bodies to do things they wouldn't do otherwise. I also had developed the ability to possess objects, akin to what you might call a poltergeist. We…devised spells for the witches from those abilities. Of course, as time went on I recruited more people to help. I couldn't do everything on my own, though of course there were certain spells I had to do myself, or else the illusion wouldn't work."

"Oh," Jean says. Of course. The flowers — they have hallucinatory and hypnotic properties. Just what was the entire experiment trying to study?

"You did come to the village in this timeline, eventually. Dad picked you up, in much the same way he had in this timeline, but…your memories were rewritten, and you had to disguise yourself as a boy, since he didn't want you to be condemned as a witch."

Jean inhales sharply.

"When the bell tower was exposed…he killed himself not long after, though you thought you had killed him because you had grown paranoid as well. It was a disaster, and it caused me to turn on Espella and Arthur, blaming them for my state. So I approached you, and we put together a plot for revenge on the two of them. But there was…interference in that plot, thanks to someone else attempting to kill Espella. Her cat was killed instead, and became a ghost in a similar way to myself. But unlike me, instead of being frozen in time, she could travel back in time. And through that…we used my body to return to the festival twelve years ago, and make it so that the experiment never happened."

"You're right," Jean says. "I'm not sure I truly believe you. It sounds more like the plot of a novel or perhaps a dream than something that truly happened to you. If we had the pendants, we could potentially discover the radiation, but…"

"I threw them in the river," Eve admits. "It was the only thing I could think of."

"And why are you telling me this?"

"Because I spoke to Espella earlier, and she said she trusted you," Eve answers. "It isn't…purely our secret, but we're the only ones that have memories of all twelve years, as spotty as Espella's is from the time she was ill. I've…heavily summarised for the sake of this explanation."

"I gathered," Jean says. Can she really believe Eve's secret? Eve isn't prone to these flights of fancy. She is more inclined to believe it, but…time travel? Ghosts? It all sounds so…fantastical.

"I wish to apologise to you, as I never got to before time reset. I know you lack any memory of that period, but I manipulated you. And…I am glad we have this opportunity to make amends."

She's glad she's not in that version of reality. It doesn't sound like she had the best of fates.

[raayllum]

I have a question, in good faith. I just answered a question about my opinion of Season 4, and a big reason I give it a 7.5 out of 10 is that they broke the main couple up off screening a graphic novel.

Now I didn’t go into detail, but this probably takes off a whole point for me, because I don’t feel like we should have to read extra material to understand what’s happening in the main plot line. Is this the first time we’ve ever had to read extra material not for bonus information but an understanding of the main story?

Hello, yes, I love answering questions in good faith. Can't promise that I'll have a satisfactory answer, but hopefully I can provide a not overly long one, for once!

Through the Moon (the graphic novel of which you speak) is the only supplementary material (thus far) that's been released that isn't a prequel, so in that vein, I'd say yes. The graphic novel does explain that Rayla left (and shows her leaving) before the 'reveal' drop at the end of 4x01. She left approximately a month and a half after S3, so right around / on Callum's birthday (which, we didn't know it was his birthday in the graphic novel itself, so that's almost undoubtedly something that got added to S4 for Callum&Viren foils and general heartbreak reasons).

However, to me, and this also due to having friends who watch the show casually, or have not read the graphic novel Through The Moon (TTM)... I genuinely do not think you need to read it unless you don't want Rayla leaving to have been a 'surprise' (which some people like to know spoilers ahead of time, which is fair). Given that there's a timeskip and an arc wrap up (and that we actually got to see them be a cute couple in S3, not just at the last minute) some sort of shift was probably to be expected. All the plot context TTM is given pretty early on in S4, but there are also fun little connections to make as you go on rewatches, for example:

4x01 reveals that Rayla is not only not at the castle, but MIA, and that the boys don't know if she's alive/okay. The context from TTM is that her risk taking decisions were already a concern for him, which can probably be deduced from the show's canon anyway, given that he jumped off a mountain for her.

4x01 and 4x02 also show that rather than being mostly curious about unknown things like before, they actively make him agitated/anxious (Soren's secret keeping, the blank book, trying to decipher the mirror). TTM adds context to this in that Rayla told him she would let him come with her, and then went back on that promise, but canon already makes this clear in 4x01 with "I don't even know if she's alive"; he has no answers about Rayla. That is also undoubtedly one of the reasons he's agitated. However, while her lie is insult to injury, the show never brings it up as a reason he's mad at her; it was always her extended absence: "So you disappeared for two years for no reason at all?" / "Well, maybe you might know that if you'd been here the last two years." Again: the lie isn't an actual thorn in his side (seemingly) so it's a thing from TTM that is omitted, because it isn't emotionally relevant.

Then she shows up and we learn, specifically, that she went to hunt down Viren. Rayla has always been a paranoid ("Sooner or later, we're going to run into someone from 1x06, "There's danger coming, I know it" from 2x01) person with an independent streak. Rayla leaving to kill Viren because she doubts her own abilities, when she spends most of the first few seasons doubting them (particularly in S1 and S3) and fearing failure ("You let him live but killed us all") is also very in character. One of my favourite little details is that Callum struggles to say Viren's name at all ("It's something Lord -- the previous high mage left behind") until Rayla shows up ("So you must have found Viren, huh? Was he dead after all?") because that trauma - Rayla was so sure that she failed that she couldn't trust they were safe - is so intertwined.

A lot of S2, as well, spent hammering in the fact she didn't want to lose Callum (to Soren and Claudia, to his pursuit of magic, to dark magic, to death). Her leaving him behind to protect him is not something that's a big logic leap to make, I think. After all: "It's okay, Callum. I'm not asking you to come with me. Protecting that dragon doesn't just feel like the right thing to do, it feels like the right thing for me to do" (2x07) and "But... I'm not going with you. You and Ezran should take Zym. But I can't leave" (3x08) and her almost confession last but not least: "Callum please, come back! You've got to stay with me [...] I can't lose you like this, you mean too much to me" (2x09).

TTM adds context - the nightmares about Viren ruining the life she still had, and her and Callum's increasing mutual fear of losing each other. They quite honestly don't even break up. Now, I don't think things would've gone well if Callum had gone with her (relationship wise) given their differing priorities in TTM and also how they show love (for Rayla it's protection, for Callum it's togetherness), but the last conversation they actually have in TTM is

Now, I'm not exactly expecting a casual reviewer to remember and notice all the tiny things, but I am expecting them to remember major plot points, specifically that Rayla really struggles with letting people help her (1x06 and 3x04 both leading to disasters with Zym being in danger because of it) because she doesn't feel like she deserves it, and that she has a tendency to be overly self sacrificial (too many episodes to count).

Her trying to save the dragon in S2 was heroic, yes, but also stood out to me specifically as "This tendency of risking herself is going to be something that she and Callum have to confront and work through, because it is diametrically opposed to them functioning as a long term couple/team". When she wants to stay behind and die for her parents mistakes in S3, the only reason she doesn't stick with that is because she learns that they didn't run, not that she didn't have to die even if they had. So something like this, even if not in so dramatic a way was something that I'd been expecting for a few years now. S4 and Callum's anger at her abandonment is the first time we've seen this tendency be solely in a negative light, in a lot of ways, which is really exciting, and I don't know how much they'll get back together until Rayla has had the epiphanies she needs to.

The biggest thing to me that TTM adds to S4 is that Callum isn't just upset at Rayla for leaving him, but that he's mad at her for leaving without him, specifically. He wanted to go with her, he didn't totally believe in the mission but he wanted to keep her safe, citing "I let you go into the Moon Nexus alone" (earlier in the graphic novel, and not without protest) "and I knew right away I made the biggest mistake of my life. I could have lost you." But again, I expect this sentiment to be something that is far more readily explored in S5, and is also something you can kinda piece together given how often he runs after her in the first three seasons, and him reading what's implied in show and confirmed through TTM to be her goodbye letter because she didn't think she was coming back (4x01 credits):

TDP official also in the lead up to S4 released the goodbye letter, which we'd never read before, and it broke all of our hearts.

TLDR; to me, TTM isn't necessary unless you want a deeper read on the characters. I expect S5 to give them more of a chance to talk and perhaps explain their own actions in S4 more (again, reaffirming that fear of losing each other, which was the root of his anger and of her leaving) but I don't think TTM is necessary unless you want the specifics. All you need to know is that Rayla left to hunt down Viren and Callum has been very sad about it since. You get all of that within the first couple of episodes. The biggest question that TTM raises that S4 doesn't answer is, if she was so dead set on her mission, how and why did she convince herself it was okay to come back at all, but again: I think S5/S6 will have the answers on that.

[birdofdawning]

Sleepovers

“Here are two more,” said Myka, watching a well-dressed couple approach the tall, Second Empire-style house. The street lamps shone on the New England mist, and with the full moon out everything looked like an Atkinson Grimshaw painting. (Briefly she wondered if Helena had ever met John Atkinson Grimshaw but she quickly repressed the impulse to ask; Pete would make fun of her interest, and she didn’t feel like being made fun of tonight. She refocused on the investigation.)

The man (approximately 5’11”, medium build, receding dark hair, well dressed) was looking about nervously while trying not to appear like it, as the woman (5’5”, early forties, blonde, evening wear) preceded him up the steps and knocked at the ornate front door. A moment later they were inside.

“That’s thirteen people so far, all affluent-looking. Just the sort I’d expect to see at a private auction. But far be it for us to actually go in and stop them,” said Helena’s voice from the back seat of the SUV where she had constructed a sort of nest from travel blankets and her woollen coat. She sounded irritable.

“We don’t actually know that this is the site of the auction, or even that there definitely is an artifact auction happening,” said Myka carefully, “We only know that Tourtellotte is a collector, has had a previous connection with an artifact, and that he owns this house. We need more data — you of all people should understand that. They could be doing anything in there.”

“Yeah they could!” said Pete, lighting up, “Maybe it’s a—” Myka gave him a narrow glare. “—a sleepover! Just a fun Thursday-night sleepover, like when we were kids. You remember sleepovers, right Mykes?”

Myka glanced back up the street to track a passing car. “Not really. I never went to a sleepover when I was a kid,” she said absently.

Pete turned to stare at her. “What, like, not ever? Really?”

Myka silently cursed herself. “No. And can we not turn this—”

“So what was the problem? Oo, I know, you could never decide which books to bring! No, you needed to vet the rating of every scary movie! No, the houses were never up to fire code and you—”

“I was never invited, okay? Can we get back to this now? Our job?”

Pete subsided immediately. “Well, that sucks. Hey,” he nudged her with his elbow, “I would have totally invited you to a sleepover. If I had been allowed girls over. (I wasn’t.)”

“And if you weren’t ten years older than me. Creepy.” Myka elbowed him back.

“I take it,” said Helena’s voice from the back, “that a ‘sleepover’ isn’t some form of overnight transport?”

Pete turned around in his seat, excited again. “Oh man, H.G. doesn’t even know what a sleepover is! I’ve got two sleepover virgins here! Looks like we’re gonna have to do something about that when we get home.”

“Pete,” began Myka, rubbing her temples, “I am thirty-one. I don’t feel a tremendous urge to—”

“We’ll get some movies and some snacks, and stay up all night,” Pete carried on, “We can finally have that Aliens marathon! I’ll text Claud.” He pulled out his phone.

“Ah, so it’s similar to your movie nights. But with… sleeping?”

Myka twisted around to face Helena. “A sleepover is for children. Or teens, I guess. You spend the night at your friend’s house and do fun stuff.”

“And you sleep there? Or you don’t sleep?”

Myka thought back to the Baby-sitter’s Club books she had read. “You probably do fall asleep eventually, but there’s lots of talking and maybe watching movies like Pete says.”

Helena considered this. “When I was fifteen,” she said, “I was apprenticed to a dressmaker and shared a bed in an attic room with two other apprentices. We would talk for a time each night, if we weren’t too tired. I suppose this is similar, though I would have hesitated to refer to us as ‘friends’.”

Myka was very still. Helena rarely shared personal information unprompted, and what she did reveal was always cheerfully vague. “You were a dressmaker?” she probed tentatively.

“Not for very long,” said Helena, “thankfully. I was a terrible dressmaker. I was far more interested in the sewing machines themselves. Eventually I was dismissed for taking them all apart despite the fact,” she huffed, suddenly furious, “that I had improved the design and doubled their efficiency! But no, that irksome woman Mrs Moffet wouldn’t hear it. I was ‘a troublesome, wicked child’ and had to return home to my father in disgrace.” She muttered something else to herself and stared out the window.

“What happened then?” asked Myka, hardly daring to breath.

Helena gave her a quick glance. “Nothing very interesting.”

“Oh,” said Myka, disappointed.

Helena snorted, and then smiled at her. “Poor Myka! Alright. I was sent off to my mother. She was housekeeper for a very grand lady (new money though, and she had married into it), and I was a downstairs housemaid for a summer. And I was an even worse downstairs housemaid than I was a dressmaker’s apprentice, if such a thing were possible.”

“At Uppark?”

Helena was startled. “Yes. At Uppark. How on earth did you know that? Oh, Charles, of course. Yes I see.”

Pete put his phone away. “Okay, Claud’s up for Aliens next weekend, if we can wrap this up early enough. And then you two get to braid each other’s hair and tell scary stories all night!”

“Yes, that’s what it was like as an apprentice,” said Helena, losing interest. “Well, I would tell queer stories of time come adrift and de-evolved men and so-on, and they would tell me to shut my head and go to sleep because we had to get at four to light the stove. But there was certainly a lot of hair-braiding. Here come two more worthies trying to look innocuous. The one on the left is armed, I think.”

She and Pete carried on, focusing on the case again. But Myka’s mind was elsewhere, imagining herself and Helena at fifteen years old, sharing a bed. She thought she would have happily lain there for hours listening to that low, velvet voice talk of travellers from other times and blue bacilli and sinister orchids and enormous terrifying birds . Until sleep took Helena, and then, warm beside her, Myka would have listened to her slow breathing and inhaled the scent of her hair and—

Myka mentally shook herself. Obviously they could never have really been friends, not as teenagers in the ‘90s. Helena was so pretty, she surely would have been popular and have had no time for weird, awkward Myka Bering. But perhaps now they could be grown-up friends, who shared books and… and had coffee dates. Good friends.

Myka decided that she wanted to be good friends with Helena very much.

[gonzague-if]

Hmm the latest asks about Nevers made me think...

I like him a lot, but I guess since I've played the Patreon version I've had more time than other readers to just come to terms with what will happen I guess, but now I'm curious about things.

First one is... when will that happen? I mean, I'm assuming it's not that big of a spoiler to tell us when to expect the MC to kill him? At the very least an approximation. I'm curious as to how many scenes we'll be able to have with him and so on. Obviously, the more content we'll get with him alive, the more the players will get attached to him. But on the other hand, since it's one of the events that put the whole story into motion, I'm assuming it can't really happen very late on...

And the other one is about the ask answer you wrote in which you tell you consider him a RO even if it's a very sad story. And well, truth be told, ever since I played, I too considered him a RO - just not one I'll be pursuing (lucky me to have fallen for Peyrolles and not having to deal with the romantic side of the Nevers tragedy haha). With that being said... if a player picks Nevers as RO, just how much will that impact the rest of the playthrough? Like, I'm assuming regardless of romance we'll be able to determine just how much the MC manages to get over his death or no, and how much will they feel guilty. But I'm also assuming romantic feelings will be a whole different can of worms. So will players be able to determine if their Gonzague still loves Nevers and basically never stop, and have choices related to that even if he's dead? And will they be able to "pick another RO" after that? That sort of things! Thank you!

Hi! Thank you for the ask. :)

Nevers's death will happen early on, yes, since it's what starts the plot. I'm expecting it to happen in chapter 3, or even chapter 2, depending on how long things will be in the next chapter. I don't think there'll be another scene with him before that happens, the one in the game is pretty much a goodbye scene, the way I see it. I would love to sneak in another one before then, but I feel like it would be awkward and maybe lessen the impact of the scene that's already there.

And as for his romance, you pretty much summed it up! I'll put more details under a read more, in case people would rather keep it all a surprise.

Essentially, the route will be about MC grieving his loss and what they did to him, trying to come to terms with it and failing or succeeding, choosing to still love him or move on, etc.

Depending on MC's relationship with other characters, they might be able to discuss their feelings about him, get help moving on, and maybe fall in love with someone else along the way.

I also plan to explore their past relationship with Nevers through a couple of flashbacks, so you'll still be able to interact with his character through them after his death.

Of course, all of that is the rough plan, things could change a bit as I write, but for now, that's the goal!