#triplethreattt | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

freaoscanlin · 3 years

Text

Flurry Rush of Feelings

A Streamer AU. Despite being an art streamer and—she cannot stress this enough—really bad at video games, Hope still hasn’t figured out how to tell the Saltzman twins no when it comes to silly challenges.

Fandom: Legacies

Word Count: 2546

Warnings: None, I think?

Tags: AU, YouTuber AU, Video Games, Breath of the Wild

Read on AO3

“Why did you give me this?” Hope wiggled the joycon over at Josie.

“You’ll see.”

“You know I’m really bad at video games.”

“There’s an understatement,” Lizzie said, not bothering to mutter it. She herself, Hope noted, held the other joycon, which was decorated with some kind of Legend of Zelda decal—Landon had the same one, which was the only reason Hope even had a chance of recognizing it—in her free hand while she triple-checked her camera. On the other side of the desk, Josie looked like she was doing the same. They had a list, Hope knew. Courtesy of Josie, meticulously checked off before pressing the live button.

The twins’ studio was entirely different than her own. Everything in the background was neatly sorted into boxes with prim handwriting—clearly Josie’s—denoting the contents. Not a single loose wire dared show its face in this pristine, well-lit space. She sat in Josie’s usual seat, bracketed by the glow panels behind her, next to Lizzie’s throne. Josie sat in a third seat, still on camera, that they’d jokingly called “the producer’s chair,” like their operation was much bigger than it was.

She could probably take a few pointers for her own studio setup, as she was forever digging around for the correct art supplies or having to mess with her mic or plug something in mid-stream. She knew better than to ask for said pointers, though. If the twins sensed any admiration on her part for their studio space, she’d likely wake up the next morning with both of them in her tiny apartment, ready to redo the whole space from the ground up.

So instead she swiveled in the fancy gaming chair, enjoying the way the pink and blue caught dark highlights in Josie’s hair and trying not to feel apprehensive about what the twins had planned for her.

“That’s the last item. Everybody ready?” Josie asked.

Hope confirmed that she was; Lizzie gave a vague nod.

“Going live in three...two...”

Lizzie perked up, immediately putting on the expression Hope called streamer face. “Hey, Saltz fam! Sorry about the delay, it was Josie’s fault this time—”

“It was not!”

“But we’re here with you finally, and even better, we have a guest! Say hi to our favorite TripleThreattt, the one, the only, Hope Mikaelson.”

“Wow,” Hope said, completely deadpan. “Anybody ever tell you that you have a future in emceeing?”

Lizzie’s streamer face cracked a tiny bit as the glare threatened to come through. “Say hi, Hope,” she said between her teeth.

Hope waved to the camera. “Hi, Hope.”

She was rewarded by a brief appearance of the vein in Lizzie’s forehead and a giggle from Josie. She couldn’t really see the chat feed from her current spot, as Lizzie had angled the monitor away from her and Josie had control of all of that, but from the sounds of things, the chat was going absolutely nuts.

Whenever any of the VampSquad guested on the others’ streams, viewership tended to skyrocket. She’d had Cleo over last week to do some sculpting, and it had been her highest watched video that month. But even this sounded excessive.

She folded her legs underneath her on the chair as the twins greeted various members of chat and did their little opening patter, occasionally chiming in to say hi to names she recognized by ear. It helped her nerves in these much larger streams to hear some familiar names.

Finally, after a couple minutes of introduction, Josie smirked. “Everyone keeps asking what we’re doing today, Lizzie.”

“That’s a good question. Hope, what do you think we’re doing?”

“All I know is you handed me this.” Hope waggled the joycon. “I know it makes the little pixel people on the screen do the pixel things, but beyond that, I can’t tell you. I’m playing a game against you?”

“Even better,” Josie said. “You’re playing with her.”

“Come again?” Hope asked.

“This—” and Josie did a flourish right as the screen in front of Hope lit up with the start screen of a game she didn’t recognize “—is Breath of the Wild, it’s super old and incredibly broken. But it’s great because you can cook in it or just take pictures of ducks.”

“And defeat Ganon, the most evil villain of all time,” Lizzie said, rolling her eyes at her sister’s priorities. “Which is actually what we’re going to do. Together. Today.”

“Which one of us has to be the sidekick?” Hope asked. She thought about it and propped her elbow on the table, playing to the audience. “Arm wrestle you for it?”

“No, no,” Josie said, laughing. “It’s not like that. See, we’re playing on a Switch, which means the joycons can be separated and controlled by two different players. Which is great, except that Breath of the Wild doesn’t have an official co-op mode.”

“It’s cute when you use made-up words,” Hope said. On the reflection behind Josie, she spotted the chat speeding up like they were going insane.

“But you can make an unofficial co-op mode,” Lizzie said. “You have one half of the controller, I have the other half, and we have to control Link together, get off the plateau, defeat the divine beasts, and then fight Ganon. Working together.”

“While hopefully not killing each other in the process,” Josie said.

Hope squinted at both of them. “Which one of you sadists came up with this?”

“People have been asking us to do a co-op run for so long, but we do have that twin telepathy going for us. Which is honestly like cheating,” Josie said, explaining half to Hope and half to the camera propped up in front of her. “So we thought it’d be funnier if you and Lizzie gave it a try, considering how alike you can be.”

“Hey,” both Hope and Lizzie said at the same time.

“It’ll be fun.”

“I see now why you didn’t tell me what we were going to do ahead of time,” Hope said dryly, swinging the joycon about to test its weight.

“To keep you from ghosting us, yes,” Josie agreed without shame.

“I would never ghost you.” Hope thought about it. “Though I’d manage to make myself unavailable for twenty-four to seventy-two hours, so you do have a point. What is this? I get the left arm and you get the right arm? What’s a Link, anyway?”

Lizzie drew up in outrage. “Link is only the most important character in Legend of Zelda.”

“Then how come his name’s not in the title?”

Big mistake, Hope realized, when lore about a fifty-year-old video game franchise she couldn’t care less about came spewing out of Lizzie’s mouth like a plague of locusts. She tried to pay attention for the first three sentences or so, but when words like Hylian and Triforce and destiny started popping up, she found her attention wandering.

Right to Josie, who looked traitorously close to laughter.

You owe me, Hope mouthed at her.

Josie gave her a sunny smile back. From the looks of the reflection behind her, the chat barreled on at an absolutely blistering pace, full of emojis and other various streaming things Hope barely understood when it was her own channel.

“Are you even listening to me?” Lizzie asked.

“Of course not.”

Lizzie tossed an exasperated look at Josie, who immediately straightened up and attempted to look sober. “Look, just do what I tell you when I tell you to do it and maybe we won’t die fifty times before we get off the plateau.”

“What a ringing endorsement that is,” Hope said, hunkering down as Lizzie started the game.

At least the story itself wasn’t hard to figure out. Androgynous elf-like dude waking up from a hundred year sleep, Hope could understand easily enough. Josie mostly remained quiet about what was happening on screen, while Lizzie prattled on happily, filling in details, informing Hope that the person talking in Link’s head was indeed the titular Zelda, that the Sheikah Slate had been invented by a proud race of people called the Sheikah (“Is Link a Sheikah?” “No, he’s a Hylian, pay attention.”), that the game really functioned around this fancy-ass tablet, etc.

The first issue came when Link had to move across the Shrine of Resurrection to collect said tablet. Easily done with one person. A nightmare with two.

“You’re in charge of moving us, just use the joystick there,” Lizzie said, pointing at the joycon in Hope’s hand.

So she did. The wrong way. Was it on purpose? She’d never tell.

Josie’s amused face told her that her secret wasn’t as well-kept as she thought.

“No, no, wrong direction. Go the other way! All you have to do is get us to the pedestal, that’s—ugh, this is going to be a nightmare.”

“You think?” Hope asked.

After much back-and-forthing, a couple cutscenes, and a surprisingly in-depth debate (Josie included) about whether or not Link really needed the pants found in the chest outside the door, they made it out of the Shrine of Resurrection and into the world of Hylia.

“This is probably the longest you’ll go without dying,” Josie observed as the game’s title sequence played, showing Link, in an old shirt and his boxers, standing on a cliff overlooking the entire kingdom. Hope acknowledged that the entire world looked kind of cool, though she’d only admit that if asked by Josie, not Lizzie. “But now the fun really begins. Good luck!”

“I will give you twenty American dollars to take my place,” Hope told her.

“You’re having so much fun, though.”

“Twenty-one American dollars. Final offer.”

“We’ll be fine,” Lizzie said with a confidence that usually could only come from hard liquor or illegal substances.

She was also incorrect. It took them all of three minutes, most of that time spent squabbling, to be clubbed to death by a weird red pig-man that Lizzie called a bokoblin.

“I told you to backflip us so we could get a flurry rush!”

Hope tossed her hands up. “You can’t just make up things and expect me to understand them!”

Josie set the death counter to 1, and didn’t say anything.

Seven deaths later, Hope had mostly gotten the hang of her half of the control. And a begrudging part of her could actively admit that the game itself was kind of neat. Lizzie’s encyclopedic knowledge of what to do and where things like mushrooms and wild boar and exploding barrels were was a little...obsessive. But it wasn’t nearly as bad as the time Landon had made her try playing something called Dark Souls as part of a girlfriend/boyfriend challenge.

God, she was glad that relationship was over.

Finally, they maneuvered Link into putting the Sheikah Slate against another pedestal and activating some kind of tower. Cutscenes of woodland creatures being startled by giant eruptions of similar towers all over the map began to play. Lizzie, Hope noted, focused on the scenes unfolding in rapt attention, while Josie caught up on chat, thanking various people for donations and subscriptions.

“She really likes this game, huh,” Hope said to Josie during a pause.

“I’m sitting right here, and yes, I do,” Lizzie said without looking away from the screen. “Admit it, Mikaelson, you like it, too.”

“I liked the bit where you can apparently nap for a hundred years,” Hope said. “That seemed nice. Can we go back there?”

“No, not until we get the korok seed that always spawns there after you leave the plateau for the first time. We’ll need to get more weapon slots from Hestu.”

“Are you having a stroke?”

Josie adjusted her headphones and sank into her chair, likely to hide a laugh.

An hour later, they’d more or less figured out the controls together, though they hadn’t even completed what Lizzie called the game’s training tutorial. The death counter sat at a very uneven 39, 38 of those deaths being Hope’s fault (Lizzie’s words, not hers). The most hilarious and most clipped death, however, Hope could take no credit for, as Lizzie snatched the joycon out of her hand in exasperation—and Link immediately plummeted into an ice lake, inspiring the blue GAME OVER to come wavering across the screen. Josie alternated between laughing at their pain and serving as referee, all the while taking point on handling the chat.

Not for the first time, Hope admired exactly how smoothly things ran for the twins. It wasn’t her first time guesting, not by long shot, but she inevitably walked away a little envious of how neat everything rolled along on their streams. They’d vetted a good mod team, though they still dealt with a fair number of trolls, and between Lizzie’s in-your-face everything and Josie’s empathetic goodness, they really kept their audience interested. Meanwhile, Hope, every time she went live, felt a little like she was flailing about. Which was why she’d decided at the very start to treat streaming like something she would only do until it truly and honestly felt like work.

Even now, controlling one half of a video game character the monsters probably thought was having some kind of weird twitchy breakdown, it definitely didn’t feel like work. Even though the stream ran for another full hour before Josie and Lizzie did their customary sign-off.

“Admit it,” Lizzie said immediately once the cameras had turned off and all three of them collapsed like puppets whose strings had been cut. “You like this game. You had a good time.”

“I like the art,” Hope said. “Does that count?”

“Yes,” Josie said before Lizzie could give her opinion of that statement. “That counts. Thanks for being such a good sport about the challenge. Even if it means you’re going to ghost us for twenty-four to seventy-two hours, probably.”

Hope heaved a purposefully melodramatic sigh. “I promise that if you text or call me within the next one to three days, I will indeed answer you.”

Josie beamed like it was some kind of ultimate declaration of forever friendship, and Hope decided she was still too new on the dating market to explore the funny skip her heart gave at that. She tucked that away to brood over later.

“We’ll have to do this again,” Lizzie said.

Hope and Josie stared at her. “Wasn’t once torture enough?” Hope asked.

“We have to defeat Ganon. It’s destiny.” Lizzie checked another tab in her browser. “And also our numbers were the highest for this stream that they’ve been all month. Your sub count went up during the stream, too, by the way.”

“Oh, so it’s not destiny, it’s viewership stats.”

“Same thing. Same time next week?”

“I hate this so much,” Hope said without feeling.

But a week later, she showed up dutifully and on time. She told herself it was good to stay in Lizzie’s good graces (and she did actually enjoy having Lizzie as a friend, which was not a development she’d ever have suspected after their disastrous first meeting), but really, she knew better the minute she pulled on her headphones and Josie looked up to give her a welcoming smile.

It might have been about viewership numbers, but some things felt a little like destiny indeed.

#legacies #hope mikaelson #josie saltzman #fanfiction #legacies fanfiction #lizzie saltzman #posting this over here because i put the rest of my fic on my tumblr and this belongs here too #but the beta poster is incredibly broken and thanks i hate it #hosie #right #forgot to tag that bit at first

6 notes · View notes