#this whole chapter is such a minefield of interpretation

[polutrope]

I cannot believe that no matter how many times I re-read passages in the Silm, I still notice things I had not before. This isn't an entirely serious meta because I'm overthinking. And I'm sure someone somewhere has noticed this before, but:

It never actually says that the Silmaril burned Maglor's hand(s). It's logical to assume that the pain he couldn't endure was the same as Maedhros', but in reading this through about eight times in a row I realised that's not actually what is says. I've been transferring Maedhros' whole experience onto Maglor. Perhaps sensibly but, hmm.

It also doesn't say that Maglor perceived that the oath was vain. Which provides interesting interpretive loopholes.

But the jewel burned the hand of Maedhros in pain unbearable; and he perceived that it was as Eonwe had said, and that his right thereto had become void, and that the oath was vain. [...]

And it is told of Maglor that he could not endure the pain with which the Silmaril tormented him ... Of the Voyage of Eärendil and the War of Wrath

(There's also interesting stuff to be mused upon regarding the fact that Maglor's fate is signalled as a rumour - "it is told" - but Maedhros' is not, but that's beside the point.)

[vermillioncrown]

i just reread the dbd loveshack tag, and with the ot3 posts and more recent zl/zyx ones, i can’t wait for the four of them to meet all at once, it’ll be wild flailing on all sides for different reasons the rest can’t interpret or vocalize. like, lwj horny gripping for wwx and his unrequited friendship with zyx, and possible jealousy with zl and zyx’s “friendship”. wwx being his disaster self for his two totally-not-crushes crushes and this random interloper. zl annoyed with how touchy wwx is with zyx, plus lwj’s emotional repression. then there’s zyx who has to deal with ALL THREE of them, but completely misses the romantic/jealous/whatever the hell, undertones of the whole thing is just super entertaining for me. bonus points for shuangfeng commentary

my favorite type of mess: one thing happening with ten million different povs/interpretations

it's a bit tricky bc it depends on when they meet again. i think i hinted that there will be zl in the north or somehow the north visits the south, but both situations are post-ssc. you can imagine how charged those interactions will be in a vacuum - adding on the spice of political tensions and blah blah will uh. yeah.

lwj: on wwx: yes on horny gripping, that hasn't changed. contention due to possible demonic cultivation pending. on zyx: his friendship w zyx will get deeper, and more entangled due to zyx's developing intimacy w wwx (<- not in an exclusively romantic sense). aka more Emotions and ascribed deep meanings to every little thing. on zl: and you know how lwj fucking drinks that jc haterade, esp with how he treats wwx? he will be sipping a different flavor of haterade when he sees zl again, esp given that the two didn't make the best first impressions on each other.

wwx: on lwj: lwj is someone he admires, and it's complicated depending on the events within the ssc. this crush is one he still doesn't realize. on zyx: crush is realized. oh fucking no, but he can't help himself. + the events that i have planned during the ssc and between these two, it's also a minefield for wwx. on zl: wow, this upstanding, talented, serious guy that he met before is here! of course he's zyx's martial sibling ('wow my exceptional crush would have exceptional peers'). esp with the issue of the wen afterwards, knowing that zl essentially helped wq and wn's family without self-benefit is admirable. oh. huh. he's... he's a prickly guy, but wwx deals with prickly people all the time :)

zl: on lwj: how did he get worse on wwx: lol it's that funny, rude little guy - *sees wwx full clowning to get zyx's attention* >:| and then noticing whatever wwx's deal is with lwj post-war, how did he also get worse??? on zyx: kinda redacted because there's a thing that will happen in the next few chapters. but at this point he takes more of zyx's actions in good faith, even if the squirrely nature of them tire him out. and the fact that zyx's still interacting with these northern idiots makes him 'they are hopeless. it shouldn't be our problem. let's go home now'

zyx: 'i don't fucking want to be here, and you guys are making it worse. just behave you motherfuckers'

'oh what, they've all met? lol that's between them and the tudi-shen where they have a fistfight' <- still thinks they aren't part of all of this (bc who goes around thinking people have a crush on them?)

(people with better self-esteem and romantic awareness ig)

'no. how... my neural network was... it was wrong...' despair upon realizing that the shuangfeng betting pool was right, and it fucks them up that they don't even know where to begin calibrating their zl behavioral model

=

bonus:

depending on other relationships that could potentially win out late-ssc

all i'm gonna say is imagine zyx thinking they could park zl next to lxc during a discussion conference. 'lxc, for as much as he mortifies me, is a stand-up guy. we've worked things out during the war. zl should like him'

and the tension that ends up between lxc and zl is thicc af

and then zyx erroneously assumes 'oh wow is this a crush? do they like each other??? that's a lotta manly tension imma leave'

[unhinged-summer-fun]

triptych

The Thief x Marcus Pike x F!Reader (22+)

chapter 5: the magician (reversed)

series masterlist | previous chapter | next chapter

Summary: A thief, an artist, and the head of the Art Crimes program in the FBI all share a soul-bond. What could go wrong?

Series tags/warnings: Sexual content, art crime, light angst, art history and criticism, soulmate-identifying marks, slow burn, f!reader, a reader who doesn’t always do the right thing.

Referenced works linked in the text.

~~

Arriving in D.C. again felt surreal. No, not just surreal. Surrealist. You thought clocks would melt off the walls, cars would float up into the sky, like dreams could become reality and not in a good way, and for a moment, you hoped they would, because that meant your situation wasn’t the strangest thing happening at the moment.

You had spent nine of your ten nights in Chile warming another’s bed, solidifying the bond shared by the three of you yet somehow, somehow not completing it. Your dreams had intense feelings of indecision within them, directionless and untethered. By the time you’d fallen asleep on the plane, things had reached the fastigium, your mind thoroughly confusing you and leaving you anxious as things came down. That fever seemed to break as you landed back in the states, and trudging through Customs, your mind regurgitated all that you’d learned in the last few hours.

It hadn’t occurred to you to even start researching what was going on between you all until you were making your descent into Dulles. Your phone had nearly died looking up any articles about polyamorous soul-bonds, ten pages deep into Google searching and clicking every link along the way. You researched betrayals and secrets and their relationship to the bond, and exactly what loopholes you would have to jump through in able to keep Marcus and Solas in the dark about what you knew. Your unease felt like a coat, buttoned up to your neck and stifling in the new climate.

Marcus was waiting for you in the arrivals terminal when you arrived, adding his smile onto the absurd assemblage of your worries and secrets. While it had been almost winter in Chile, the weather nearly dreadful the whole time, a late-spring heat wave had hit the capitol, and you were unprepared for the dizzying temperatures. He wore a light blue shirt and some rolled-leg jeans. He looked like he’d walked straight out of some fifties daydream. He wasted no time sweeping you off your feet and into his arms, and if you had to blame your split-second hesitation kissing him back on anything, you could have said surprise and sounded believable. Telling Marcus the truth upfront was not an option. Telling him the feeling of his lips was different than the thief’s was not an option. It would topple the tower, and you’d lose them both in a single breath.

Luckily he didn’t seem to notice any of your mental minefield running, happy enough just to see you again. “I didn’t know if it was alright, I just… I missed you.” He looked bashful, scratching at the back of his head and looking up at you through his lashes. He took your breath away, such a big man should never have to fold himself down like that, least of all for you.

“I missed you too. Felt like ages.” You hugged him again to hide your expression, schooling your eyebrows out of their consternated furrow, and your mouth out of its concerned frown.

As you waited for your luggage to come around the carousel, he caught you up on what you’d missed, omitting a few details until you were out of earshot of the public. He told you the investigation has gotten some kind of handhold, an alias. Lucas Castillo. Your mind did the math. Lucas from luz and Castillo from castle from palace. Marcus interpreted your dismayed expression as exhaustion, and carted you to the car as soon as he could.

Your chest ached sharply over your mark, and you fought the urge to rub at it. You feared what you might see: dark and cloudy grain covering the swirls of color, a draining of life from a cosmic gift.

“Let’s get you home, hm?” He drove you to your apartment, where you both quickly got inside to the air conditioning. Your apartment was a bit stuffy from the uncirculated air and the sparse window shades all around, but having the comfort and familiarity of home definitely settled your soul.

“Have you ever seen a soul-bond break?” you asked, blurting out your thoughts and reintroducing Marcus to your impulsive train of thought all at once.

You couldn’t look at him as he reacted to your query, and you continued looking through your things as he responded.

“Not… personally. People put it in the movies, and it kind of seems too invasive for my tastes. It’s personal, it’s… no. I haven’t.” He rubbed nervously at his mark, fighting the urge to run to the bathroom and check on his own.

“It’s not pretty. And… it’s difficult to hide. You’d… you’d know if yours was broken.” You swallowed, memories of your past bubbling up, your father’s voice, broken and begging on a collect call, your mother’s silent tears, the scent of burning, charring—

“Honey,” he said softly, coming behind you and grasping your shoulders. You shuddered a little. “Are you alright?”

You turned, and it was then that he saw the tears in your eyes. “I don’t know.”

##

Your marks, thankfully, were fully intact, and in perfect technicolor. During your absence, the form of his colors had muddied a little, but not a single dot of skin between the frames was lacking that starborn ink. You were relieved at the revelation, but troubled by your erratic state. This vacation was meant to settle you, not stir your insides. Laying beside him in bed, after a thorough welcome home, you traced the edges of his mark, the tingle at your fingertips bursting fireworks across your nerves. 

You wondered at the final shape of things, if the colors would ever settle into form, meaning, or if they were doomed to wander forever like some cursed soul. You watched him as he dreamed, watched the flash of burgundy and gold, a light and darkness across the final panel. You remembered the colors, almost shadow, from Solas’s chest, and missed him terribly. Was he dreaming of Solas?

You spent the rest of the night at the computer, researching shared soul marks, scouring for any clue to your fates. When that failed, you moved to work on your pieces.

##

“These are incredible already,” Marcus said, coming up behind you at your easel. You hadn’t noticed the morning’s arrival, the dark overcast sky breaking the heatwave, at last. The light over your easel had been enough to trap you in its glow, warm and safe from the dark.

You hadn’t given much thought to the pieces until now. The stolen works Marcus had shown you in the portfolio weren’t attributed in any official capacity, but now that you’d seen each one on a wall, taken studies of them in sketchbooks you left in Chile, you understood Solas’s intentions more clearly than you ever would have before. The reluctant inspiration had struck, and you’d gone from driving to being dragged behind the car.

The first piece, a somber king in chiaroscuro, was influenced mainly by Rembrandt. You had spotted a lesser recreation of The Night Watch on the second-floor west gallery at El Palacio, and noticed Solas’s eyes catch on the stark contrast more than once in your walks around the mansion. You felt this was the most likely of the five pieces to be stolen, as you knew personally that this one fed into your thief’s personal interests most of all. The king, hunched over on a throne twice as tall as himself, held his crown upside-down in his hands, looking through it as if just realizing it had been empty all this time. The light from behind him haloed him, and showed none of his expressions, though you had painstakingly etched them in with black oil paints anyway. Depending on the light, you would be able to see the grief in his eyes.

The next was a small 8-inch square of an eye, the eyelashes formed into a surreal image of Jesus Christ’s thorned crown, while a Van Eyck-esque fire reflected in the dark green irises. You’d been studying other works through bulbous lenses, warping their proportions and giving yourself a migraine on no less than three of the mornings you’d spent trying to get the effect right. Solas had kissed over your eyes as you lay in the dark, soothing you how he had been eager to do since the moment you arrived.

The fire from the eye was the third frame, a bit of a personal work, since you’d noticed quite a few emotionally-personal pieces in the portfolio. A Lady and Gentleman in Black, another Rembrandt, with the x-ray evidence of the child snuffed from the canvas. Hayez’s Vendetta triptych, scorned lovers with fading soul-marks. Miguel Carbonell Selva’s Death of Sappho, showing the poet taking her own life at sunset. Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird, a representation of a woman enduring endless pain with stoicism. Bosch’s many, many images of fire. Aivazovsky’s Exploding Ship, and Van Gogh’s The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen, showing the darkness and tragedy of the everyday. So you poured your soul into this frame, letting the fire from a burning silver storm destroy an apple orchard, as your mother’s soul-mark had been that of an apple tree.

The fourth, you coasted that subconscious wave of surrealism and symbolism, a locked window overlooking a busy street, a half-melted candle upon the sill, and a perfectly-climbable lush green lattice beneath it, a wrought-iron ladder leaning to the side. Solas kept so many gilded cages around the treasure rooms, and even his jewelry box resembled one. He’d started decorating them with the Maurizio Cattelan pigeons from the Venetian Biennale. Solas had implied he’d broken into Christie’s and plucked them right from the auctionblock. You sketched in the shadow of a few pigeons on the line opposite the window, a personal symbol that you knew Solas would love.

The fifth, of course, was the massive portrait of Marcus on your sheets, half-painted already and ready for another painstaking coat of paint. You hoped to give the same intimate shadows of Degas, and the luxury of relaxation you remembered seeing in Solas’s A Wealth of Treasure by Giovanni Della Rocca. You hoped an Italian among the many Dutch masters would appeal to him, though by the very real likeness of Marcus you were working towards, you expected that Solas’s interest would lay not in the technique, but in its subject.

You wanted to tell Marcus all this inspiration, all the reasoning behind each piece so he wouldn’t have to guess at it and figure you out. You wanted to tell him about the catch of morning light against the bronze statues dotting the gardens, you wanted to prattle on about the myriad things you’d seen and felt and experienced while in Chile, but to do so meant betrayal, no matter what way you spun it.

So you simply thanked him and said nothing further.

You worked on your newest commission instead of dwelling any longer.

##

The gallery was a bit more prestigious and stuffy than the ones you usually had showings at. Marcus had picked you up at your usual Monday meeting and taken you on a drive out of your neighborhood up toward the Mall, where a squat little brick building hid just to the side of ARTECHOUSE D.C. as almost an architectural afterthought.

“Any reason for this place and not somewhere closer?” you asked, remembering the 40 minutes of traffic you’d shared instead of breakfast and conversation. Marcus gave an apologetic smile.

“I’ll treat you to brunch after this. Promise. To answer your question, though, I mean this in the nicest way possible, but the local galleries near you aren’t really the thief’s MO.”

“You wound me,” you teased, but secretly agreed. Solas preferred the shiny things, and this place was certainly… shiny. The floors were waxed to a high shine, the poured silver epoxy glittering under the gallery lights and the skylight both. They were between showings, the walls bare as agents in suits and black coveralls moved about. An annoyed-looking docent paced the length of the main floor, and gave Marcus an absolutely done glare when they caught sight of you both.

“Agent Pike, you told me that they would be working diligently but I did not think you meant this diligently! They almost tore down the—”

“I’ll talk with the supervisory agent, Mx. Crawford, I apologize for any trouble. May I introduce you to our artist?” He held a hand out to you, and you shook the docent’s hand, quiet and outwardly grateful, like your agent had told you to be around galleries. You… may have gotten into a few spirited discussions with the odd critic.

Mx. Crawford looked delighted to see you, however. They expressed a fondness for your style, which flustered you a little. By Marcus’s pleased expression, you knew he’d chosen this gallery based on your fan following in its management. You discussed a few of your past showings, before moving on to talk about this one.

“Now, I know the goal is to get one or all of your lovely pieces stolen, but I can’t help mourning their loss before they even arrived here. Now, we were thinking that the five—”

“Six,” you said, the number pulled from your mouth almost against your will. Marcus and Mx. Crawford looked at you, confusion evident. “There’s six I’d like to show. One is a commission I’m working on for a client I met while abroad. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind.” You hadn’t even stretched the canvas for the piece you promised Solas. Why were you making more work for yourself now? “I can embed the tracker in it just in case, but it’s not really in the style of who we’ve been tracking. It’d… bury the lede, I think.”

Marcus looked a little unsure, but Mx. Crawford was delighted to host another of your works within their gallery. After the agent agreed on the new plan, you let out a sigh of relief and promised to kick yourself about it all later. For now, you—

“Marcus?” a voice called, a bit stunned and a bit unsure. You turned, and saw a short brunette woman beside a taller blond man, both in the same kind of monkey-suits you’ve seen Marcus wear. Marcus stiffened at your side, and you could feel a kind of boiling tension build beneath your soul-mark. Marcus was some kind of fucked up about this woman, and you were willing to bet this was the infamous Teresa Lisbon.

“Agent Lisbon. Jane.” He didn’t bother introducing you, or Mx. Crawford, who looked conflicted about their liaison’s sudden change in demeanor.

“We… heard you were setting up for a sting. We were in DC for—”

“Yes, we’re setting up for it. Did you drive a Federal vehicle here? We’ve been keeping a low profile in and around the gallery as much as possible before the event.” This was a new side of Marcus you hadn’t seen yet, this was Special-Agent-In-Charge, Motherfucker Marcus Pike. You bit back a grin.

“Oh, don’t be like that, Pike,” the blond man said, looking him over with something like amusement. Your hackles rose, and Marcus flicked his eyes over to you in a don’t do anything brash. You were surprised by this new channel of communication, you’d heard of some soulmates who could practically telepathically communicate, but hadn’t believed it until now. “We wanted to come see you, don’t be—”

“For once, Jane, please consider that a decision made around me isn’t about you,” Marcus snapped. Jane and Teresa looked flabbergasted at this man’s spine of steel. He’d confided to you about his more lax attitude in Austin, how he was prone to letting others walk all over him just because. Since heading the International Art Theft Department, that old Marcus had been solely reserved for you, it seemed. You struggled not to let your attraction to the man show too much on your face. “If you need to meet with me for a case, my assistant has access to my schedule back at headquarters. If not, you can submit it through the portal and we’ll get to it as quickly as federally possible. I would appreciate it if you weren’t underfoot for my operation, now.”

With that, he put his hand on the small of your back, and led you to a far-off hallway with enough determination to stop the armies of Troy in their tracks. You went along cheerfully, pleased and proud emotions bleeding through your connection to Marcus beside you. You felt his fingers curl into your jacket, and the moment you were out of sight of any and all agents, he pressed you against the nearest wall and kissed you desperately.

You kissed him back with the same temperature of passion, a soft moan leaving you as he bit at your lower lip, sucking away the pain as his hands roamed your body greedily. Never before had something been taken in a gallery like this. You were drunk on it, instantly, his kiss some fast-acting drug too pure to be illegal.

He calmed with a shudder and a sigh, his forehead resting against yours. You pressed another kiss to his nose before looking up at him. “You okay?” you asked softly.

Another sigh. “I don’t know. I feel good for doing that, but… that’s not me. I don’t… I don’t make these kinds of rash decisions, or behave like that. I don’t take power greedily, I don’t…” he ran out of words then, and you ached.

“You seemed pretty good at it just now,” you chuckled, squeezing his arm. His muscles were still tight, tense. “Hey,” you said, bringing him back out of his head. “Do you need me here for anything else? Can Mx. Crawford take care of it?” He shrugged, and nodded. “Take me to brunch. Then let’s walk the Smithsonian.”

He melted into your arms with grace and gratitude.

##

All that was left was his face, and you knew it would be a fucking mess and a half before you even started. All throughout the work, there were warped versions of what you wanted. Here, a hand around a wine glass, but the study was taken from one of Marcus’s hands. There, a shaft of moonlight over an arm, an arm you’d slept on several nights in Chile. You were going back and forth with the indomitable task of choosing where you only wanted to have both.

So the face was a fucking problem.

Each attempt you’d made on paper came out to some combination of the two of them, and you hid it from Marcus with a guarded nature he hadn’t seen from you before. At first, he assumed that it was due to you keeping the privacy of your other client, but when he saw elements of himself in the painting, he made his own assumptions.

For some reason, he thought he saw the thief he’d tried to forget all those years ago in Florence. He knew it was insane of him to think, how could you possibly have known his nose curved like that, his smirk curled just that way, but he reasoned with himself (fooled himself, really) with the thought that it was a man borne of the mind of a woman hell-bent on imagining him. That he looked so similar to Marcus must have been his own influence, being the only connection you had to him, and he didn’t ask, and you didn’t say.

It was finished in purples, golds, and dark burgundies, in a golden frame about the size of his torso. The detail you’d put into it was astounding, really. He could pick out all the paintings and sculptures in it, but obviously you’d taken some creative liberties with a few of the large pieces of jewelry hanging lackadaisically over the marble busts.

Obviously.

Regardless of its subject, the five commissions were completed and payment remitted just in time for the show, but you didn’t dare to cash the check before the night of.

For some reason, it felt like bad luck to do so.

[murasaki-murasame]

Time for another round of ‘sad teenagers navigate the complicated minefield of gender, sexuality, and societal expectations’ with Ao no Flag chapter 26!

Right off the bat, I feel like this is the sorta chapter I’ll need to go over a few times when I have more free time so that I can properly go over all of the overlapping themes and narrative threads going on in it. So this post might be kinda messy.

I immediately associated the opening monologue with Touma in regards to his crush on Taichi, but I guess it more or less fits each character. They’re all a bunch of nervous wrecks who are scared of rejection [I mean that in a nice way, lol]. The fact that it’s not explicitly connected to any single character helps it feel like a more universal sort of statement that fits the entire situation going on at this point in the story, which is neat.

Woo boy, back to the ambiguous topic of ‘Futaba wants to be like Touma’, and everything that entails! At this point they’re stressing it enough, and so specifically, that I can only assume it’s something more than just basic admiration/envy. Especially now that we know that, from the start of the story, Futaba was off doing exercise and weight training in the background because she wanted to be like Touma. Which makes me veer even more toward interpreting it as Futaba seeing Touma as literally being a representation of the sort of person she wants to look like. But of course even that could still fit under the umbrella of basic admiration, so I’m not really gonna act like anything’s definitive for now.

Though the fact that Masumi had such a severe reaction to hearing Touma say that Futaba wanted to be like him also makes it seem like it’s meant to be something more complicated and specific than just admiration.

[It’s kinda hard to figure out what order to talk about stuff in because there’s so many overlapping conversations in this chapter, so I guess I’ll focus on Futaba and Taichi first.]

Futaba bringing up the whole idea of ‘what makes her different from other people’ also makes it feel even more like a question of identity, but again, we’ll see how it goes.

At the very least, this chapter makes it even more clear that Futaba never really had romantic feelings for Touma. Or at least, she never really wanted to date him or anything. It definitely seems like she had different sorts of feelings toward him, but since she didn’t understand them or know how to vocalize them, she assumed that it must mean she wants to date him.

It’s really interesting how this whole scene is recontextualizing the earlier scenes between Futaba and Taichi. At the time, it was framed as if Futaba was just trying to be the right sort of girlfriend for Touma, but now it’s becoming more and more clear that she was trying to learn more about Touma so that she could change herself to be more like him. I suppose it’s also worth noting that one of the first things we saw her do was cut her hair into more of a short, boyish style, which she seemed very pleased about at the time. Which certainly feels a bit different now that we know her intentions were more along the lines of ‘wanting to look like Touma’ than ‘wanting to be someone he’d be attracted to’.

It’s still a pretty complicated situation, but it’s becoming more clear that Futaba’s feelings for Taichi are probably more along the lines of conventional romantic attraction, but she’s been struggling to differentiate and label these two sorts of love because she’d basically been conditioned to assume that any sort of interest she expressed in Touma must be romantic.

I’m pretty sure that Taichi’s putting two and two together on this, so he’s probably catching onto the idea that Futaba has a crush on him. I hope that in the next chapter we’ll get a proper continuation of this scene. It’d be lame if it just got immediately derailed and forgotten about.

Anyway, onto Touma and Masumi.

I feel like my desire to get more scenes between these two was a bit of a monkey’s paw situation, because I wasn’t prepared for this level of angst and drama, lmao.

Now Masumi at least knows about how Futaba sort-of-not-really confessed to Touma. That’s good. As I said above, Masumi had way too strong of a reaction to what he said for her to think that Futaba just admired him, but I can’t say for sure.

This is where I regret not having read any of this series for the last month, because I can’t remember if Touma’s said anything about the job he wants to pursue instead of baseball. At the very least it’s something that Futaba apparently knew about, so I guess it was probably something we’d been told already and I’d just forgotten about. It’s interesting to hear that Seiya is against it, but I guess we kinda already knew that.

It’s interesting to see Masumi bring up the idea of Touma and Taichi attending the same university. It’s probably something that Touma’s thought about, but he might still want to move away from where he lives entirely.

It’s always sad, seeing Touma be so self-loathing like this. He just wants to be anything other than who he is now, because right now he just feels strange and abnormal. Which, I mean, is relateable, but still depressing.

I like the little transition between Touma talking about wanting to be normal, and Futaba talking about how it’s ‘normal’ to want to date someone you love. It really hammers in the whole concept of what society deems as being ‘normal’ identities and feelings.

I’m glad that Touma has someone like Masumi who he can talk about this sorta stuff to.

And on the flip side, we also get to see Masumi opening up about her own self-loathing to Touma, which I wasn’t expecting.

I really like her line of ‘why do I have to be afraid of people seeing me for who I am?’. It really gets right to the heart of the matter. Why should these characters need to feel afraid of being open about who they are, and how they feel? Why do we judge and hate people who fall outside of the boundaries of ‘normality’? I’m really glad that a shounen romance manga is asking these sorts of questions.

It was still depressing, but it was nice to see Masumi talk about how she wants to be with Futaba, and comfort her, but she’s still too afraid of rejection to actually do those things.

I’m incredibly curious to see where the heck the next chapter goes, especially since I think the next chapter should be the end of volume four, so it’ll probably be pretty cliffhanger-y.

On the note of volume four, I’d really love it if it’s cover design was themed after this whole festival arc. That could look really pretty.

And like with every time we get near the end of a volume, I also can’t help but wonder how much longer the series will go for before it ends. Obviously we have at least one more volume to go, so a good 8+ chapters, but I wonder if it’ll actually go past volume five at all. It feels like things are getting pretty climactic, honestly. I guess we’ll see how it goes.