#uses the visions as a point of reference. like he doesn’t need to physically see because he has seen it all already | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sailorrhansol · 4 months ago

Note

ok ok requesting a treat for all of us, honestly

sleep demon seungcheol. extra sprinkling of nasty if possible. i want you to out-zaddy you know who.

>:) ok smooch smooch have fun!!!! I LOVE HALIWEEEEEN

Pairing: Incubus!Choi Seungcheol x afab reader

Summary: You can’t seem to sleep, but the strange man in the bar that you can’t visiting promises he can help.

Word Count: 6,239

Genre: Supernatural

Type: Smut, PWP

Rating: 18+ Minors are strictly prohibited from engaging in and reading this content. It contains explicit content and any minors discovered reading or engaging with this work will be blocked immediately.

Warnings: Mentions of insomnia including side effects like exhaustion, dysfunction, derealization, feeling out of it/in weird headspaces, time is not supposed to feel linear in this and it’s supposed to feel kind of liminal-space in places, reader is often confused/thoughts are a little scattered and feels out of it because of proximity to an entity, there are creepy vibes in this, Seungcheol doesn’t always appear the same/mentions of feeling like in danger or on edge around him instinctually, explicit language, sexually explicit content including unprotected vaginal sex, fingering, a lot of spit and cum, nipple play, reference to subspace or an adjacent, choking, oral (f. and m. receiving) multiple orgasms, biting and scratching, I wouldn’t categorize this as explicit dom/sub dynamics but there are power dynamics in some places, mean Seungcheol in spots, like very light humiliation if you squint in one section, overall just…. Weird ass vibes and reccouring scenes/reader not remembering things.

A/N: Hi Jolene Wolene Folene - thank you for requesting this thing that we totally didn’t talk about before I started Haliween and definitely maybe sort of giving me the outlet to write this weird little liminal space demon that I love doing so dearly. Pls enjoy spooky ooky kooky Cheol and his weird little obsession with reader :)

A/N 2: This fic is a part of my Haliween writing event that I’m hosting September - October.

Disclaimer: Disclaimer: All members of Seventeen are faces and name claims for stories. Any scenarios or representations of the people and places mentioned in works are not representative of real-life scenarios. Moreover, none of my works accurately reflect, represent or take a stance on the nuances of Korean culture, cities, people etc. Seventeen members are not Seventeen culturally, intellectually, physically, or representationally in my stories, and should be considered name and face stand-ins for made up characters.

Main Masterlist ❀ Tag List Request Form ❀ Ask ❀ Haliween

Nothing feels real. Your eyes burn as you stare at the computer screen, the letters and the buttons on your email becoming blurry as they swim out of focus. The dull sounds of your office feel as though they’re several rooms over, faint hums heard through walls of plaster.

Pushing away from the desk, you head to the break room, in desperate need of coffee. You know drinking caffeine this late in the afternoon will only further exacerbate your insomnia, and yet you need it if you’re going to get through the next three hours at work.

You’ve hit the point in your endless nights of no sleep where everything feels off, like you’re experiencing things in the third person. You’re there but you don’t feel like it, navigating your day knowing that it’s you doing and saying things at work without really registering that you’re doing or saying those things.

Coffee hisses from the machine into your cup. You stare at it, vision going unfocused again as the smell wafts up to you. Time passes. You stand and stare.

Someone walks into the room, bringing you back to reality as you look over your shoulder and see your coworker come in to fill up their water bottle. They raise their brows at you as though to ask if you’re okay, and you grin, gesturing to the coffee like that’s some sort of answer.

Really, you’re not okay. You have ventured past the threshold of tired into something else entirely. Something that is lesser than, something base and nearly inhuman.

Derealization. It’s a word your doctor had used when you described what it was like for you after so many nights without sleep, the disconnected feeling to the world around you. Even as you walk to your desk, it doesn’t feel real. You logically know that it is, that you exist in a specific time and space.

And yet… you remain buoyed in that space, totally untethered from everything around you. Floating. Lost.

Back at your desk, the words on the computer screen blur again. Come into focus. You type and email. The keyboard makes sounds, but you don’t really register them.

At some point, the day ends.

A bright neon sign burns against the darkness of the alleyway. You blink rapidly, holding your hand in front of your eyes to block out some of the light. Looking around, you don’t see anyone else. The sound of the city is muted and far away, but you smell the burning of fuel and the smell of stagnant water under a dripping window air conditioning unit.

You don’t remember walking here. You lower your hand as your eyes adjust to the burning pink above the door. Looking down at your clothes, you’re at least relieved to discover you put on jeans and a t-shirt before going out on an adventure out on the town.

Police sirens wail in the distance. You pull your phone out of your back pocket, thankful you brought it.

“Fuck,” you swear, flashing the time. It’s 3:33 in the morning and you know immediately you’ve sleepwalked your way to this strange, unfamiliar alleyway.

It’s a vicious circle: go days without sleep feeling like you’re a step away from death, or take just enough sleep medication to knock you out but make you sleepwalk.

Shoving your phone in your pocket, you look back up at the neon sign, reading it for the first time. Hush. A shiver goes down your spine at the name, eyes flicking to the blue crescent moon attached to the pink cursive.

There’s a magnetism about the sign. Your eyes dropdown to the door under it, a nondescript metal entrance to what you think is a bar. There’s nothing to indicate that it is a bar, just a gut feeling. Your gut feeling is also whispering at you to go inside, to open the door and step into the cool space of Hush.

Licking your lips, you take one hesitant step forward. The tingling in your spine increases and you feel static in the air. Heart racing, you take another step. Then another. Before you realize it, you’re at the door with your hand on the knob, cool to the touch.

With a deep breath, you pull the door open and step inside.

It’s even darker inside than the alleyway. Gentle piano music plays somewhere in the room and you swivel left and right, trying to gain your bearings as your eyes adjust. When they do, you see a very small room with a single piano in the corner, two booths, a bar at the back, and three stools pulled up to its counter.

A single person sits at the bar. You hesitate in the entrance, drinking in the stranger. It appears to be a man in a dark purple suit, his broad shoulders hunched over where he leans against the wooden bar top. You can’t make out much else beyond the wide shape of his shoulders and narrow taper of his waist, but you can see the crimson hair that glows like flame underneath the dull, flickering light above his head.

“You gonna stand there all night?” His voice is soft, a gentle pur. He turns his head to the side, his profile shadowed. “I don’t bite.” You hear the smirk in his voice when he tacks on, “Not often, anyway.”

Carefully, you approach the bar. There doesn’t appear to be a bartender of any sort or anyone else in the bar, for that matter. You realize that there’s piano music but no pianist, but decide not to focus on it as you enter the man’s line of focus.

When he looks at you, the world stops. It’s like stepping into a bubble, everything else ceasing to exist. The hair on the back of your neck stands on end and you feel your pulse hammer in your throat as you stare at him, unable to take your eyes off him.

He’s beautiful but it’s not that. His eyes are dark, but there is something more there. Something swimming in the depth of the darkness that you cannot place, something ancient and curious and awake. You feel pinned under his gaze, eyes darting to drink in the rest of his features: soft, pouty lips the color of berries, sharp jawline, thick, angular brows.

Stunning. Dangerous. Alluring.

“Hi,” he says, mouth stretching into a grin. His teeth aren’t sharp, but you have the distinct feeling that they should be. “You’re a pretty thing.”

“Um, hi.”

“Can’t sleep?”

“How can you tell?”

His grin spreads, wicked and cutting. “I have a feeling about those things.” His dark eyes drop to the seat next to him. “Have a seat. Maybe I can help.”

Tentatively, you sit down next to him. “You can help me sleep?”

“What if I said I can?”

Sitting next to him is oppressive. His presence weighs down on you, a physical entity that you can’t see. Static buzzes in your mind and your thoughts feel a little sticky, like just being close to him disrupts your frequency.

He smells like jasmine, immediately soothing. You feel your eyes grow heavy as you blink a few times, settling on the stool as you angle yourself toward him.

You’d misjudged his size when you walked in. He’d seemed broad when you first walked in, but you don’t think you fully understood the width of him. The weight of him. Or maybe it just feels that way when you look at him, your perception of him flickering like a bad TV signal.

“Tell me about your sleep problems.”

You shrug. “They’re like any other sleep problems.”

“Not all sleep problems are the same, Pretty.”

“I suppose that’s true. I don’t really know what causes them. I just… can’t fall asleep and then I start getting worried I won’t sleep, so it makes it worse. I want to sleep so bad but it’s like… wanting to sleep only makes it avoid me more.”

“Mmm. Sleep is a fickle thing, isn’t it?”

“My doctors give me meds but the normal dose doesn’t work and the stronger dose… makes me walk around.”

He pouts. “You poor, sweet thing.”

Something about his sympathy makes you flush. You sulk, looking down at the countertop as you pick absently at the peeling varnish on the wood. “I know,” you murmur. “I just want to be normal.”

“I can help. If you want it.”

You glance at him. His eyes are dancing dangerously. Half of you screams yes while the other screams run. You’re only vaguely aware that you’re in a bar alone with a strange man who knows you’re sleep deprived. No one would help you if you screamed. You don’t know where you would run.

His dark eyes seem to read your thoughts and he laughs, shaking his head as he turns to pick up his drink from the bar. “I’m not that sort of creature.”

“How would you help me sleep?”

“Are you accepting my help?”

His question hangs in the air between the two of you. The piano music has stopped, but you don’t remember when it did. Overhead, the light still flickers. On. Off. On. Off. Onoffonoffonoff-

“You’re under no obligation to accept.” His voice is kind. Warm. Soft like your blankets, cozy like your bed. “You’re always free to make your own decision.”

“I want help,” you agree slowly. “I really do.”

His red mouth curves into a smile and again, you’re struck by the thought that his teeth should be sharp. “Good. I’ll help you, Pretty.”

“What’s your name?”

“You can call me Seungcheol.” You give him your name and he tilts his head, drinking you in. “I know.”

“How are you going to help me sleep?”

Seungcheol finishes his drink. You watch him swallow thickly, suddenly fascinated with the way his throat bobs as he does. The smell of jasmine is overwhelming as he leans in, stopping an inch away from you.

The static increases. You feel your blood buzz pleasantly.

“Close your eyes for me,” Seungcheol murmurs, looking at you through silky lashes. “I promise everything will be okay.”

For a moment, you stare at him, the air charged. He doesn’t hurry you along, content to study your face with that same uncanny darkness swimming in his eyes.

Taking a deep breath, you do what Seungcheol says, and you close your eyes.

Sunlight wakes you up. You roll over in your bed, squinting up at the window. Your blackout curtains are open, letting the morning beam in on where you’re tangled in your comforter and sheets.

Sighing heavily, you close your eyes again, content to lay in the warm sun. Just as you start to drift to sleep again, you recall a pair of dark eyes and fiery hair. You jolt upright, heart hammering as you remember the exchange.

Snatching your phone from your nightstand, you open your walking app to look at where the hell you went last night, but there’s nothing there. Frowning, you pull the sheets off your body. You’re in pajamas and fuzzy socks that you don’t remember putting on.

Hauling yourself out of bed, you lean halfway into the laundry basket to claw through your clothing. None of the things you wore last night are there, so you go to your closet to wrench the doors open and search.

The shirt from last night and the exact pair of jeans are hanging, completely unworn. Your frown deepens as your confusion rises. Turning away from the closet, you open your phone again and try to get any sort of sense of where you went last night, but there’s no text threads. No signs you used public transportation. Nothing in any of your tracking apps that indicate you left at all.

“Was it a fucking dream?” you mutter to yourself, perplexed.

Sitting down on your bed, you try to look up Hush on the internet. You can find nothing in your city that indicates a bar or establishment like the one you discovered Seungcheol in. You even try social media to look him up - Reddit, neighborhood pages, anything to try and find the stranger from last night.

It seems Hush and Seungcheol don’t exist.

And yet… you don’t remember going to sleep last night after he agreed to help you. And you feel rested today.

Puzzled and a little freaked out, you give up your search. A dream is a dream, and you’re content that you finally feel a little less exhausted and a little more awake. You’ll take the win, getting up to start your day with a little bit of pep in your step.

By midday, you’ve mostly forgotten about the bar and the man in it, only remembering those dark eyes and that red hair.

Heat creeps up your spine. You nuzzle against the warmth behind you, the smell of jasmine coaxing you deeper into the embrace. You feel the vibration of laughter against your back, your nerves tingling as you feel feather-light fingers brush up your thighs.

“Tired?”

Immediately you know it’s Seungcheol’s deep voice, that same velvet purr whispered right in your ear. You shake your head no, suddenly not wanting to sleep at all. You press into him further, feeling the way his arms tighten around you as he chuckles, mouth pressing chastely against the spot under your ear.

“Liar,” he teases.

You pout. It might be true, but he could have the decency to pretend it’s not. You open your eyes and look up at him. His hair is like spilled blood in the dark of your room. The curtains are closed, blocking out all light from the moon and street, but your salt lamp still burns in the corner.

Seungcheol looks like the devil in the low, orange light. He’s in a black t-shirt, which is somehow more deadly than the fine cut suit. Your stomach flutters and you squeeze your thighs shut when you realize his hands are brushing up and down your thighs, touch slow.

“Thought you were a dream,” you mumble, words a little thick. “Thought you weren’t real.”

“Dreams can’t be real?” That makes you frown and he laughs, jostling you against his chest. His hands squeeze your thighs and you let out a breathy sound as he nudges you with his nose. “You don’t know anything about dreams, Pretty. Can I show you?”

More than anything you want him to show you. Suddenly your desire for him outweighs any sort of sleepiness, your nerves sparking and coming to life as you nod helplessly against his chest, trying to lean as close as possible.

“Needy,” he chides. He presses a wet kiss to your jawline and you preen, your head falling back against his shoulder. “I’ll go easy so you remember this time, alright?”

“Cheol.”

The nickname sounds familiar. Intimate. Like you’ve said it before - something tells you that you have said it before. You don’t remember where or when, but it’s with familiarity that you moan the nickname again as he nips at your neck, one hand drifting between your legs to pry them open.

He murmurs praise against your ear when your legs drift apart, spreading to accommodate his seeking touch. You’re wearing shorts but it feels entirely too hot under the blankets pooled around your waist. You kick at them and whine, managing to get them down to your knees before he huffs and presses forward, temporarily bending you in half to toss them.

When he settles back against your headboard, you follow him, turning your head to press your mouth to the corner of his. His lips twitch in a smirk, shifting to catch your mouth fully with his.

Seungcheol kisses you like he knows how you like to be kissed - devouring, consuming, hungry. His tongue brushes against yours as he drinks you in as his hand presses between your leagues, applying pressure to your clothed cunt.

You whine into the kiss and he grins against your mouth. A line of spit connects your lips when you pull away panting, looking up at him through half-lidded eyes. His fingers circle your clit gently and your hips buck in his hold against the stimulation.

“Not enough,” you whisper. You grip his wrist with one hand, the other gripping the sheets to bunch them in your fist. “Cheol, please.”

“Hush,” he scolds, biting your jaw. His free hand comes up to your neck, gripping you under your jaw to angle your mouth back to his. “Kiss me.”

You melt in Seungcheol’s grip. His tongue tastes sweet, his grip on you making you dizzy. Your thighs squeeze around his wrist as he works you up, his touch teasing and not enough through layers of fabric.

He knows it’s not enough, content to string you along until you’re writhing against him, back shifting against his chest as you squirm. His kisses drift from your mouth to your jaw, open-mouthed and spit-slicked as his tongue darts out to taste your skin while he goes.

Seungheol’s grip on your chin slides down toward the base of your neck, his fingers pressed tight against your pulse. You can feel your heartbeat slamming in his grasp as he bends your head away from him, lips attaching to the softness of your throat.

His name escapes your lips in a whisper. He hums a pleased sound, tongue dragging up your neck to your ear where he nibbles. “So good for me,” he whispers. “I’ll reward you.”

You follow with an urgent nod, pleased when his hand slides down the waistband of your shorts and underwear. When his fingers brush against the flushed, sticky folds of your cunt, you keen loudly, unable to keep it together.

“So needy.” You can’t tell if it’s an insult or not the way he growls the word against your ear, grip on your throat tightening. “Need my help that bad, huh?”

“Yes, god.”

“I am not god,” he grinds out, voice dark. For a second, the illusion shatters and you glance up at him. His eyes are endless, an ancient thing looking back at you. You freeze in his hold, a prey caught in a trap. Then he softens, pressing a kiss to your brow. “Tell me what you need, Pretty.”

“Hands. Need your hands.”

A bolt of pleasure goes through you when Seungcheol’s middle finger circles your clit. Your nails dig into his wrist, leaving little crescent moons behind. His ministrations are leisurely, giving you what you want but not as fast as you want it.

That’s Seungcheol’s game. He’ll give you what you want, only when he feels like it. You feel a sense of deja vu, realizing that you’ve been here before. Snatches of memories flash through your mind. They pass through your grip like sand, none of them firm enough to grab onto.

“Missed you,” you mumble. “Can’t sleep without you.”

“Ah, there it is.”

Seungcheol is pleased with your recollection. You can tell when he relents his teasing touches, fingers drifting down to press a single digit into your heat. Your stomach flips when he does, relief sweeping through you as he shallowly fucks you with a single finger.

It’s not enough but it’s better. You shiver in his hold, going a little slack in his arms, hips twitching. He’s content to have you like this, working your cunt slowly, watching your reactions as your breathing catches and restarts.

“Feel good?”

“So good.” You can barely get the reply out, words faint. “Thank you.”

“Anything for you, Pretty.”

His kiss is soft against your cheekbone, at odds with the grip he still has on your throat. You feel his hand like a comforting weight, loving the feel of it resting against your pulse. He doesn’t squeeze or choke you, content just to hold you against him.

Seungcheol pulls his fingers out, the wet squelch obscene. “Take this shit off for me,” he tells you, pulling at your shorts.

His heavy hand rests on your collarbone as your hands shoot to your shorts. Hooking your thumbs in them, you shimmy down, lifting your hips with his help to kick them down your thighs and legs to the floor.

Cool air hits your heat as you settle against his chest again. He nestles against your neck, fingers resuming the task of peeling you apart as he sinks his pointer and ring finger into you. You clench around him, loving the stretch and the feeling of his fingers pressing against your g-spot as he slowly strokes you, breath hot against your ear.

Being unable to remember your previous encounter with him feels cruel. Seungcheol knows exactly how to work you toward your high. The slick sound of his fingers between your legs accompanied with his lips pressed against your neck drives you insane.

Unable to keep still, your hips come up off the bed to meet his hand. The hand not fucking you to insanity slides under your shirt. Heat trails his touch. He traces the curve of your breast and your breath stutters, catching in your throat. His nails scrape against sensitive skin, moving higher until he drags his touch over your nipple.

The heel of Seungcheol’s hand presses firmly into your clit. You mewl, thrashing against him, closer and closer to your peak. His strokes turn harsh, finger-fucking you at a brutal pace while his other hand tweaks your nipple, the pleasure-sting making you quake.

“Come on,” he urges, voice deep. Sharp teeth scrape against your throat. “Come for me, Pretty.”

Everything turns to static as you clench around his fingers. You squeeze so tight he can barely continue stroking you through your peak. There’s a high-pitched ring in your ears as you pant through it, vaguely aware that Seungcheol is muttering something against your ear that you don’t understand.

As your orgasm fades, so do you. The world becomes soft at the edges. You feel Seungcheol’s heartbeat against your back and smell jasmine, but you slowly drift away from him, barely able to catch his growl of remember me next time before you’re gone.

Cold granite countertop digs into your knees. You barely register the pain, one hand pressed flat to the counter, the other reaching behind you to tangle in Seungcheol’s hair. Your hot breath skates across the surface, the cool stone not enough to combat the heat of your skin.

Seungcheol’s face is pressed as far as he can go into your cunt, the flat of his tongue dragging from top to bottom. You’re nearly catatonic, eyes rolling behind your eyelids as he fucks you with his tongue.

He grunts when your fingers tighten in his hair, holding him close as he sucks harshly at you. He’s loud as he eats you out, his hunger something more demonic and fiendish than you’re used to. You don’t care, pressing back into him as he mouths at you.

His hands firmly pry you open, fingers digging into the flesh of your ass. You can feel the bruising way he holds you, uncaring as he works you toward another high, so desperate for it that you’re begging.

Begging for what, you don’t know. None of the words that fall from your mouth really make sense. You’re a rambling disaster under the mastery of his mouth, and as you tiptoe the line of your high, it feels like you’ll never unscramble your thoughts again.

You come again, feeling the way you flood his mouth. He doesn’t care, growling low in his throat as his mouth becomes more insistent, fingers pressing into you even harder. Something takes over him in that moment, his grip on you so fierce that you think you might break.

But you don’t. You never do.

“Pretty,” Seungcheol murmurs, cocking his head to the side. Your mouth aches where it’s stretched harshly around his cock, spit leaking from the side of your lips. His thumb brushes across the spilled fluid, grinning as he leisurely pops it into his mouth and sucks. “Such a pretty thing, mouth full of cock.”

You hum around him eagerly, shifting back and forth on your knees. He’s got you on the floor of your bedroom in front of your bed, hands linked obediently behind your back while he stands in front of you. His stomach ripples as he flexes his hips forward, driving himself deeper into your mouth.

Your throat seizes around him again and you feel yourself gag. He pouts and pulls back, letting you gasp for breath. Your mouth is a mess of saliva and cum, wet and sore and battered. You don’t care, looking up at him with watery eyes and sticky lips.

“So important to me,” he whispers, nodding as though to assure you. Your stomach flips and you shuffle toward him eagerly, mouth open. “So perfect for me.”

Instead of using words, you stick your tongue out, eager. Seungcheol grins and the room darkens. There is a buzz in the back of your mind that you can’t place, ignoring the feeling in favor of watching him slowly slide back in, letting your tongue scrape the bottom of his shaft.

Seungcheol sighs, tilting his head back as he sets a slow pace, using your mouth as he pleases. He’s beautiful like this, all tan skin, heaving chest, sweat sliding down his neck, red hair damp. His eyes are closed but his mouth is open, cherry lips parted sweetly to show his sharp little fangs as he pants.

So pretty, you think. Even with teeth sharper than they should be.

You’re standing in front of a bar named Hush. The pink neon burns bright against the gritty night, hurting your eyes. Turning around in a circle, you notice there’s no one else in the alleyway. There’s a certain charge to the air, a hum that you can’t place, but grows stronger when you turn to face the bar again.

A single door sits under the sign, closed and waiting to be opened. Chewing your bottom lip, you stride toward the door, unsure what’s waiting for you on the other side.

With a hard yank, you pull the door open and step into the darkness of the room beyond. It takes a second for your eyes to adjust to the single, flickering light over the bar, but once they do, you see it’s a tiny room. A single piano sits in the corner near two booths, and there’s only one bar top in the back, a few stools in front of it.

A single man sits at the bar but he’s facing you, leaning back on his elbows as he drinks you in. He’s in a purple suit that would look ridiculous on anyone else, and his red hair is bright enough to light the night like a flame.

He cocks his head to the side, a wicked smirk on his lips. “Hi,” he greets. “Can’t sleep?”

“How can you tell?”

“I’m familiar with these things.”

He looks like a devil. You can’t place your finger on what exactly about his face makes you think so. His eyes are dark as the depths of the ocean and when he smiles, you swear his teeth are sharp. “Need some help?”

You do need help sleeping. The doctors can’t help you. Therapy doesn’t help you. Something tells you maybe this stranger can help you.

“Please.”

“It would be my pleasure, Pretty.”

“Seungcheol,” you gasp, hand flying to his wrist to grip him. “Fuck, holy shit.”

Fuck is absolutely right. His hand tightens around your throat, placed just right to make it harder for you to breathe. Your thoughts swim as he fucks into you, his sweaty chest sliding against your back as his strokes grow harsher.

Your knees slide on the bed under the strength of his thrusts. He growls at you to keep up and you whimper, flexing your thighs to remain upright as he drives his cock into you at a pace that sends you hurtling toward your peak.

“So fucking difficult,” he grunts in your ear. His teeth nip your ear lobe and you whine, intoxicated by the smell of jasmine and the tightening knot in your stomach. “You’re always so difficult.”

You don’t know what he means by that, but you don’t think it’s the first time you’ve heard something like that from him. Your thoughts turn to liquid you come around him though, feeling the way you grip his cock like a vice, seizing in his hold.

Everything turns to nothing. You can’t hear, see or feel anything but static. Can’t breathe. Can’t do anything but squeeze and squeeze and squeeze.

And then you're gasping for air, lungs burning as you gulp it down. Falling forward, you crash into the sheets and into complete darkness.

“Why do you come and go so often?”

Seungcheol lifts his head from the bed to turn and look at you. He’s still naked and covered in a sheen of sweat, crimson hair clinging to his forehead. He’s on his stomach laying opposite of you, his head by your feet.

Something sparks in his eyes at your question, his heavy brows pulling together, cherry lips downturning. “I only come as often as you let me.”

“What do you mean?”

His face twitches in what you think might be annoyance. “You have a complicated relationship with me.”

“We have a relationship?”

He snorts and turns away from you, resting his chin on his arms as he settles back down, closing his eyes. He reminds you of a cat - a particularly dangerous cat, you think. “I suppose. Most people couldn’t say they have a relationship with me, and yet I keep letting you invite me back.”

“Invite you?”

“Hush. Stop asking questions.”

“But I don’t… understand.”

“Good,” he quips. “Because every time you do, you send me away only to invite me back in.”

“Come on,” Seungcheol teases. “You wanted it, so do the work.”

Your thighs ache. A pitiful sound leaves you as you nod, putting your hands on Seungcheol’s shoulders as you lift your hips, legs shaking. You’re exhausted and burned out, but the ache you need filled as you slowly slide up his cock drives you to keep going.

Dropping back down in his lap, you feel sparks. Your movements are slow. Seungcheol’s hands are tucked behind his head where he leans back on your pillows, fathomless eyes watching you as you ride him, a little uncoordinated and weak from the exertion he’s put you through all evening.

“Cheol, my thighs,” you protest, instead trying to grind into him. He raises a brow and you pout. “Please.”

“No. Come on, Pretty, you can do it. You can fuck yourself on my cock and make yourself come. Come on.”

“Cheol.”

“No. Do it yourself.”

Gritting your teeth, you let your annoyance fuel you. Anger burns right alongside pleasure as you find the strength to do exactly as he tells you. Leveraging your hold on his shoulders, you continue to spear yourself on him at a steady pace and slowly, your anger is replaced with bliss.

Seungcheol feels incredible. He’s hard to take, stretching you to the max and at this position, he’s so deep that you swear you can feel him in your stomach. You keep going, nails biting into his skin and drawing blood but you don’t care.

Fire burns in his eyes as he watches you. You stare right back, seething at the way he’s making you do it yourself, a little bit of humiliation stinging the edges of your pride. You can tell he thrives on this, satisfied that what you want outweighs any sort of desire to be stubborn.

Somehow, he always wins like this. Always manages to get you to do what he wants. He’s sneaky like that, knowing just what button to press to get you where he wants you.

Sometimes you feel like you’re a puppet whose strings are connected to his fingertips.

Either way, you manage to drive yourself to an orgasm, shuddering around him as you seat yourself fully in his lap, throbbing around him. He lets out a long groan, eyes fluttering shut as he struggles to keep his composure.

Leaning back against his knees, you catch your breath. He’s still painfully hard inside of you, and when his eyes open, you see his hunger isn’t sated. Your heart lips when he surges forward, fast as an adder. His mouth crashes into yours hungrily and you let him have you, eager at the flutter in your stomach as he shifts, altering the angle.

“I’m not done,” he mutters, kisses turning into sharp bites. “So hush while I take what’s mine.”

Something wakes you up from sleep. It’s too dark in your room to see, but your heart is hammering and your hands are quivering. Leaning toward your nightstand, you search for your phone. All you feel is cool wood, no device anywhere.

The dark is oppressive. You don’t remember your room being this dark, the blackout curtains serving as a good device to keep out the city and streetlights, but never so much that you feel swallowed whole. Lost. Devoured.

A tingle buzzes at the back of your neck. You freeze in bed, looking into the never ending darkness. Silence roars in your ears, the outside world completely removed. You can’t even hear your own pulse or breath, the quiet so heavy that panic starts to rise in your throat.

You can’t see but you know you’re not alone - can feel the solid press of something else in the room.

Too afraid to make noise, you resume the search for your phone, fingers moving slowly across the top of your night stand. You can’t find it.

Something presses into the mattress at the end of your bed. You feel the dip under its weight but can’t hear the creek of springs. You give up the search for your phone, snatching your hand to your chest and squeezing your eyes shut.

It’s a dream, you tell yourself. It’s a dream it’s a dream it’s a dream it’s-

The thing in your room moves closer. A scream works its way up your throat where it gets stuck, lodged and unmoving. You squeeze your eyes shut harder, fireworks of color exploding behind your eyelids as you do.

“I know you’re awake, Pretty.” The voice is so low you can barely make out the words. They scrape against you like claws. “You can’t keep doing this,” it says, almost a sigh in its voice. “You know what this is. What I am.”

“Go away,” you whisper, voice weak. “Leave me alone.”

“Don’t do this again.”

“Go away, Seungcheol.”

There’s a low growl that you can feel as it vibrates the air. “As you wish.”

The neon sign above the door says Hush. It burns bright and pink against the night sky. You look around, unsure how you got here. Sighing, you pull out your phone to check the time. It’s 3:33 in the morning, which means you’re probably a victim of your sleep walking again.

Sliding your phone back into your pocket, you look up at the sign again. There’s a little blue moon to accompany the pink cursive neon, and though you don’t think you’ve ever seen this bar before, there's a magnetism about it that draws you in.

Curious, you walk up to the door and go in. The lights are dim and you have trouble seeing at first, but you can make out that there’s a piano in the corner, two booths and a small bar with some stools. A man sits at the bar, his back turned to you.

“We’re closed,” he grumbles without turning to look at you. You frown, cocking your head as you drink him in.

The purple suit he wears is an odd choice. His hair is the color of blood, slicked back and a surprisingly nice contrast to the bright color of his suit. A single light flickers above him, painting him in a gold hue.

“What is this place?” you ask, ignoring the fact that it’s closed.

He doesn’t answer for a second. You think he’s going to ignore you, but finally he says, “Do you have trouble sleeping?”

You’re surprised by the question. “Yes, actually.”

“I can help.”

“Really?” You step further into the bar, watching as he turns to look at you over his shoulder. He is painfully pretty, the kind of beauty that reminds you of old paintings of Lucifer. “How?”

“Are you accepting my help?”

Without hesitation you answer, “Yes.”

His cherry red lips twitch and he shakes his head. Picking up his drink, he polishes it off before standing to turn you fully. The weight of his presence presses down on you like an invisible blanket, weighing you down.

“Of course you do.” He strides toward you and though your instincts tell you to run, something else tells you to stay. He looks down at you with a pair of eyes that threaten to swallow you whole if you let them. His lashes are silky and long, a delicate balance to his heavy gaze. “You always need me, right, Pretty?”

You nod, a word - a name - buzzing on your tongue as he looms over you. “Please,” you whisper, thoughts a little cottony, a little dizzy. “Seungcheol.”

He grins, revealing sharp teeth. “Hush,” he murmurs. “You’re mine.”

TAG LIST

@ddaddunugu @ourkivee @tie-nn @cherrylovescheol

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#seungcheol smut #scoups smut #seungcheol fic #scoups fanfic #svt smut #choi seungcheol smut #seungcheol x reader #seungcheol x you #svt fanfic #svt fic #svt x you #haliween #demon seungcheol

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fizziepopangel · 8 months ago

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“Um, which whore are we talking about this time?”

When he and Valentino first began their relationship, it was solely about sex and using Val to help further his own power, but Vox eventually grew more attached to the moth pimp than he thought he would…. The dick was that good.

Vox acts as Val’s eyes when they’re out together. He’s working on convincing the man to just get some damn glasses, but for now, he just quietly describes things he knows Val might want to see, points him in the direction of whatever he should be looking at, and sometimes even takes pictures to let him look at later.

Being the youngest of the Vee’s, Vox and Val are rather protective of Velvette as if she was their child… So, whenever Velvette is sick and miserable, Vox does what every good father figure does for their chosen adult child: He plays her favorite childhood tv shows and cartoons on his face to cheer her up.

He would never say it but Vox sees Velvette as the daughter he never got to have in his life, he even endured what he refers to as he 'emo phase' (her pilot design)

Vox often turns his being into electric energy to travel through wires connected to modern technology that may be plugged in…. Sometimes, when he wants to get out of doing something, he hides within the wires and just doesn’t take physical form for hours, often doing it when he’s overwhelmed and needs to decompress.

Similarly, when Velvette or Valentino are pissed at him, they unplug cords he’s in when he’s traveling, effectively trapping him in the wires.

In hell, each sinner’s demon form usually ties into how they died, since this is rather common knowledge Vox has put out the story that he was an actor that died after being electrocuted by a livewire on the set of a movie he had been starring in…. In reality, he was an actor who died on set when he had a tv fall on his head while he was throwing a tantrum over something minor in his dressing room during which the ended up tripping over a wire, falling and tangling himself in the cord, and causing the tv that he had just unplugged to topple over onto him as he struggled with the cord.He feels like getting his head crushed by a tv in what sounds like a truly cartoonishly violent way makes him sound a lot less intimidating than his electrocution story.

Having his screen cracked or damaged is physically painful for him, with different damages resulting in different levels of pain/injury. All of the Vees have a repairman on speed dial just in case Vox needs a quick fix after an injury.

Vox only became ‘Vox’ when he ended up in hell, his given name from his time amongst the living was Virgil.

Vox absolutely recorded Alastor getting his ass handed to him in his fight with Adam, and yes he does watch it religiously because he 100% believes that it is better than sex (and yes, Valentino does take that personally).

At the time of his death, tv was still being shown in black and white, meaning that Vox could only see in black and white….In 1965, when tvs began to switch to color, Vox began to have issues with his vision for a time. This time frame came with Vox experiencing migraines, blurry vision, and issues with his screen glitching in and out of color and black and white. During this time, he absolutely thought he was dying a second death.

He’s actually a good cook. He co-wrote one of Alastor’s cookbooks when the two were friends… But the radio demon scrubbed his name and recipes from the book after their falling out. Vox was very upset to find that not only had his contributions to the book he had helped write completely gone, but Alastor used his falling out with Vox to promote his next cookbook: “Eat Your Heart Out: Valentines Recipes & Breakup Pick Me Ups”, claiming that a breakup with a friend was just as bad as a break up with a lover. Vox short-circuited when he saw this, he was livid.

In retaliation, Vox convinced Velvette and Valentino to go in with him on a series of cookbooks of their own… He learned quickly that he was the only one of the three of them that could actually cook.

Vox’s hat controls the wifi wherever he is, which is why his hat has a symbol reminiscent of the wifi symbol. When Velvette is being unusually disrespectful to himself or Val, Vox uses his hat to turn off the wifi in the Vee’s tower, usually resulting in a meltdown from the younger overlord.

Despite having been a tv star in his life, and controlling a good chunk of Hell’s social media in his death, Vox actually doesn’t watch tv often and usually prefers to read.

The sharks in the aquarium in the Vee’s tower were all purchased by Vox. He calls them his babies, and he knows each and every single one by name and personality; picking up on even the tiniest changes in their personalities or swimming patterns. His favorite sharks are two that were fathered by his first pet shark, Vark, that he named Aux and Phono.

Vox absolutely loves dancing. All kinds of dancing, but especially swing dancing since it was the style he had seen his mom and dad dance to the most in his childhood.

Vox 2 Nite has been a late night show hosted by Vox, but it didn't get the views he would have liked, so he began shutting off all other programs at the start of his show and shutting the wifi down all over the city to force his ratings to go up.

#fizziepop thoughts #vivziepop #hazbin hotel #hazbin headcanons #hazbin hotel vox #vox headcanons #hazbin hotel velvette #hazbin hotel valentino #vox vs alastor #voxvalvel #the vees

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weyrwolfen · 2 months ago

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Eidola: Chapter 23 - CT-62-1865 Ori

Rating: T

Characters: Gen, Clone Trooper OCs, Captain Rex, Ahsoka Tano, and other canon members of the 501st/332nd and the Bad Batch

Warnings: canon-typical violence; references to self-harm, injuries, and substance abuse; PTSD; it’s post-Order 66 and nobody is having a good time (but they’re all working on it)

Summary: The mission was never to bring down the Empire. Not really. The mission was to save every single one of their chipped brothers. But if doing do helped break the Empire’s stranglehold on the galaxy? Well, that was just a bonus.

The report in Ori’s hands was thorough. Kix was looking through everything: every medical scan, every prescribed medication, every suggested therapy. Everything. And it was all written down in excruciating detail, just pages and pages of furiously meticulous notes, all coming to the same conclusion.

No immediate evidence of intentionally sabotaged medical care. So, that was something.

Of course, Kix had only just completed his investigation of the formal medical records. He was now moving on to the physical examinations.

Ori set the datapad down on the table in front of him, switched his bucket back over to thermal view, and looked at the cuffed sentient sitting across the interrogation table from him.

Mel’andaro Ye’Daro, Mel, was looking down at their cuffed hands, which were secured to a durasteel ring in the center of the table by two pairs of loose links. They had twisted all four of their hands together in a tight tangle of long fingers. Probably a show of nerves on their part, but their body language did not align much with human-centric models, so that interpretation was tentative at best. In Ori’s filtered vision, they appeared in different hues of green, shading to yellow against the cooler blue of the table and the walls.

According to the other records Kix had shared with Ori, Yendarri, as a species, ran colder than most sentients. However, they were still technically warm-blooded, and shifts in temperature, breath, and heartrate could still be telling. Ori just needed to see if he could get a reaction out of Mel, to get a feel for what to look for during this interrogation.

They were a medic. A surgeon rather, as civilians reckoned such things. They had completed the coursework side of their schooling and then turned down a number of more prestigious offers to take an internship working with the Refugee Relief Coalition. And that choice had actually been what had gotten them caught up in a pirate raid on a refugee camp on Merinae IV.

So either Mel had political aspirations – unlikely, given their lack of participation in any associated programs during their schooling or mentorships from other sentients with such leanings – of they took a medic’s oaths and duty to other sentients very seriously.

Ori could work with that.

“Kix is in medical, giving every brother you’ve treated a complete workover,” Ori said in a casual, almost friendly tone. “If he’s about to find anything untoward, it’d go better for you if you tell us about it now.”

Mel’s eyes, yellow-green in Ori’s thermals, blinked slowly. Blue momentarily washed their face, but then a warmer yellow crept up their neck in oddly parallel stripes.

“I would never intentionally harm a patient under my care,” Mel said cooly, tipping their chin up. If Ori had to guess, he would interpret that reaction as professional offense.

Interesting.

Ori picked up his datapad, opened a blank file, and made a point of casually entering a few notes on his observations.

“Forgive me, if we can’t simply take your word for that,” Ori finally responded in the same politely neutral tone of voice. “You did, after all, compromise our position to an unknown party just a few hours ago. That doesn’t seem like the actions of a sentient who is overly concerned with our health and wellbeing.”

Mel’s eyes fell. Their face, without the extensive facial muscles that made other species so expressive to the human eye, remained difficult to read, but the thermal output shifted again, the yellow banding on their throat spreading further while traces of cooler blue crept over the dome of their head. Was that shame? Fear? Worry? Hard to tell.

Ori made another note.

“Who was it?” Ori asked, again keeping his voice even and unthreatening.

Mel didn’t answer, but her narrow mouth tightened and the skin around their eyes washed faintly blue-green.

Ori noted that response too.

“Was it the Empire?” he asked flatly.

“No,” Mel said, so quietly it was almost a whisper.

“Slavers?”

That earned a much sharper, “No!”

The banded flush along either side of their neck was even more extreme than the one he’d noted after questioning her medical ethics, extending up to their jawline. Both sets of hands clenched hard enough to restrict blood flow and turn their hands a blue that almost faded into the background of the metal table. Almost certainly offense then, probably mixed with at least a little anger.

Ori pressed a little harder, trying to be absolutely sure. “You wouldn’t be the first sentient to trade collusion with their captors for gentler treatment, maybe even a cut of the profits.”

Mel’s narrow lips peeled back, baring rows of needle-sharp teeth.

Perhaps the Yendarri did not have the most expressive facial anatomy or familiar body language, but that expression certainly got the point across. Anger. Offense. Threat.

Ori let the silence stretch out uncomfortably, knowing that most sentients found the blank visor of a trooper’s helmet intimidating, even in the absence of any actual threat.

Mel seemed to remember themselves and made an effort to compose their features again and loosen the death grip on their clenched hands. “I am hungry,” they finally said, very stiffly.

Ori nodded, typing out one final note into his datapad. “I’ll see what I can do.”

The command deck was crowded and tense, even if everyone there was performing to the high levels of professionalism and efficiency that their training back on Kamino had always demanded. There were also at least twice as many troopers in the space as usual, hovering over terminals and datapads. It felt like they were all preparing for a siege.

Ori fervently hoped it didn’t come to that. They weren’t strong enough to weather the Empire’s undivided attention. If it came down to it, the best they could hope for would be to provide enough of a distraction to allow their brothers and the civilians on their island satellite base to escape.

And if Draboon VIII was also compromised, the way they already knew Abainya was? Well, maybe Lady Kryze would be willing to drop them off on some trackless, barren moon in Mandalorian space, assuming she didn’t just write them all off as too much of a security risk to keep alive.

Ori found Jesse and Clip both standing around the holotable speaking with a projection of Captain Rex and Weaver. The sight of the other Guardsmen made something in Ori’s chest clench, but there wasn’t time for that. Duty first.

“…Unclear if using the temple as a retreat of last resort is a good idea,” the Captain was saying when Ori discretely joined the group. “Commander Tano seems to think that it wouldn’t be actively hostile. To us at least.”

That wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, or a sentiment Clip shared if his dubious expression was any indication. “Her backup plan is feeding any invading Imps to our haunted temple?” the ARC asked incredulously.

Captain Rex’s projection shrugged, as if this was a completely normal, sane strategy. There had always been rumors about the 501st, but Ori hadn’t quite believed them until after… Well, after.

“Only if we don’t manage an evacuation in time,” the Captain replied. “What’s the status report on organizing that?”

“What have you got for me?” Ori asked quietly, stepping up next to Jesse at the table. He tuned out Clip’s report. That facet of the current situation was exceedingly important, but not, at least for the moment, Ori’s primary responsibility.

Jesse extended a hand for Ori’s datapad and, when he received it, he plugged it into the holotable and started downloading files.

“The woman Malk saw Mel talking to had her hair arranged in a traditional Alderaanian style,” Jesse said over a private comm line. “Weaver asked the Martezes about the prisoner the pirates had been holding for ransom, the one who negotiated for all of them to be delivered to Alderaan. Apparently the name she gave them was Morena Apoporis. Weaver had some of our slicers pull everything they could find off of the holonet and also the Imperial files we can access.” He unplugged the datapad and handed it back to Ori. “Malk tentatively agrees that they could be the same person, but he didn’t get a very good look before the line was cut. She’s some kind of minor noble on Alderaan, heavily involved with the planetary government’s various humanitarian programs. The whole file’s on there, and so is Trip’s report about that run-in his team had with Alderaanian planetary security on Esla Prime.”

That was potentially useful. “You think they’re connected?” Ori asked.

Jesse shrugged. “Maybe? Seems like too much of a coincidence to not look into.”

Ori couldn’t agree more. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in coincidences, but he’d certainly learned not to trust them.

“Where are we stashing the Commander’s special rations on base?” he asked, moving on to the next item on his list.

“Mess walk-in storage, to the left of the regular rations,” Jesse answered, but the sideways glance was judgmental even through the bucket. “Upping your protein intake?” he asked dryly.

“Yendarri are primarily carnivorous, even if they usually go for more aquatic prey than Togrutans.”

“Right.”

The cameras in the corners of the interrogation room were still blinking when Ori returned. Jesse had set two of their comms troopers to babysitting the feed, in case Ori wanted to go back and review anything later. It was standard practice to record everything on his bucket during an interrogation, but sometimes the additional views revealed something he’d missed in the moment.

Mel looked up at his entrance, dark eyes as unreadable as any Kaminoan’s.

Ori made his way over to his side of the table and set down the things he’d scrounged up in the base’s kitchens.

“Hydration packs,” he said, narrating as he pushed each item across the table where Mel could reach them even with the binders still in place. “And three flavors of carnivore-balanced rations. The mess is actually serving some kind of egg and avian casserole today, but I assumed you might appreciate something that is still vac-sealed.”

Mel, who had been reaching for the first pack, suddenly hesitated, the unspoken part of the offer obviously dawning on them. Those interesting bands of cooler blue flickered across their scalp tellingly.

Of course, Ori had no intention of poisoning Mel, just like he had no intention of actually laying a violent hand on them. The trick with the kind of torture methods the Kaminoans had trained all clone troopers to resist was they usually didn’t work. At least not like civilians seemed to think, from their holodramas on the subject. Sure, a physically broken-down prisoner would start talking, but most of the time, it ended up being a confusing mix of actual intel and whatever fabricated nonsense the victim thought their tormentor wanted to hear. Anything to make the pain stop.

So torture was actually highly ineffective, as information gathering methods went. Plus it was distasteful, not to mention highly illegal in the Republic.

Though not in the Empire.

And Ori had no intention of sinking to their level. Not when he could usually get what he wanted through more strategic verbal sparring instead.

And right now, he was trying to build something like a rapport with Mel. It was manipulative, but it worked, and he was good at it: threading the needle between coming off as friendly, but letting the lingering threat of the situation simmer uncomfortably.

Yes, you are a prisoner, but I am choosing to treat you as well as possible.

You should trust me. This could be going so much worse for you.

I just want to talk.

Ori just switched his thermal vision back on and double checked to make sure the camera icon in his HUD was still green, indicating a recording was in progress. It was. Then he folded his hands on the table to intentionally mirror Mel’s previous posture and waited.

Eventually Mel did reach for the allegedly fish-flavored bar and turned it over in their hands, long fingers tracing delicately over the listed ingredients.

“I can’t vouch for the actual flavor, but it should meet your dietary requirements,” Ori said when Mel finally opened the package and sniffed the contents. “If it does not, please let me know, and I’ll see about providing something more appropriate.”

“Thank you,” Mel said quietly, eyes cast down as they took an experimental bite of the bar. It crumbled, dry and chalky in the way most long-term shelf-stable rations tended to be, but they didn’t have an overtly negative reaction to the food, so that seemed promising.

Ori picked up his datapad. He couldn’t approach the topic of Alderaan directly. Not at first, at least. But maybe…

“Is it typical, to travel as much as you did during your surgical internship?” he asked, aiming for a casual tone. Pleasant, if not actually friendly.

I did my research, I know things about you, so I could be trying to catch you in a lie.

But this is a safe enough topic. We’re just making small talk while you eat, and maybe you can use this as an opportunity to feel me out too.

“No,” Mel finally said, after they opened one of the sealed hydration packs and rinsing down the dry, minimally flavored bite of rations. “Most positions are tied to a single facility or planet.”

“I can’t imagine that refugee camps throughout the Outer Rim were the most scenic places to visit,” Ori commented lightly.

Mel’s eyes narrowed slightly, rimmed in cooler blues in Ori’s thermal vision. That might indicate suspicion or distrust? He refrained from noting that down just yet.

After all, they were just talking now. Or at least, that was the impression he was trying to give.

“Some of the planets were beautiful, despite the war,” Mel finally said, taking another bite of their rations.

“I was stationed on Coruscant for almost the entirety of the war,” Ori said, dangling out a small detail about himself like bait. As such things went, this one was harmless enough. It was possible that Mel already knew the significance of his paint color, but that wasn’t, after all, the point.

You’re smart. Probably smarter than me. If you keep me talking, maybe I’ll tell you something you can use as leverage.

But to get that, you’re going to have to keep talking too.

Mel chewed the rations slowly, far more so than was necessary given their mouthful of sharp-edged teeth. Their eyes blinked slowly.

“Would you have preferred to see more of the galaxy, if you were able?” they finally asked.

Ori allowed himself the smallest of sharp smiles, hidden under his bucket.

“I wish I’d gotten to see snow,” he said, letting the smallest thread of honest wistfulness enter his tone. “It only ever rained on Kamino, and the climate on Coruscant was too tightly geoengineered.”

“I was assigned to Saan early in my rotation,” Mel said. “I’m fairly certain it snowed every day I was there. It was lovely, but keeping the temporary hospital warm enough for the equipment to function was a challenge.” Their words started out slowly, as if carefully chosen, but Mel seemed to be relaxing into this small talk. “Exposure was a significant issue in the encampment there, as were attacks by some of the larger local fauna.” Mel placed the rations on the table and reached for a hydration pack. “I had expected to spend more time helping administer vaccinations and distribute supplementary food, but I ended up having to handle a great many trauma cases there.”

Excellent. Now we’re talking. Time to really start this spar.

“You want the good news first, or the possibly bad news?” Reaver asked, easing down onto one of the low couches of the officers’ lounge area Ori had taken over. The rest of the room was empty. Everyone else was either sleeping through the night shift, or furiously organizing an evacuation in case Ori’s investigation came to the worst possible conclusion.

Ori glanced up from the ‘pads he’d laid out on the table. Sometimes it helped, to just spread his data out like this when he was trying to find connections between the datapoints he and his brothers had been gathering. So far, he wasn’t having much luck though. There were too many gaps in his knowledge, even with the pages of notes he’d taken and the files and files of reports his brothers had been scrounging from every source they could find.

“The bad first,” he answered.

“Pessimist,” Reaver said, teasing lightly. It was a relief, that he had finally loosened up around the rest of them. Ori did not relish having to manage himself quite so stringently around brothers, the way he had to around most civilians. “Someone has been attempting to call the surgeon’s comm.”

“I assume you don’t mean the licensing committee from the hospital,” Ori said, leaning back slightly, letting himself sink into the over-stuffed cushions.

“Actually, them too,” Reaver admitted. “But they’ve been using the safehouse’s central line. Lena is handling that.”

Right. Ori rubbed his face with both hands. The rough battleweave caught on a faint shadow of scruff growing on his jawline. He needed to shave. “Do I even want to know?” he finally asked, because kriff. Civilians always seemed to overcomplicate this kind of thing, and while he trusted Lena, he did, he really didn’t want to untangle some political mess with the capital’s hospital.

Assuming the Empire didn’t just drop in with one of their newest model star destroyers and reduce them all to their molecular components within the next planetary rotation or two.

Ori really, really wanted to ask how Lena was doing, because he hadn’t been able to reach out to her since the incident, and he had a terrible suspicion that she wouldn’t be taking all of this very well.

But… duty first.

“Probably not,” Reaver said wryly. “But I actually meant the other comm.”

Meaning the one Mel had used to speak with their contact. Ori just gestured with one hand, inviting Reaver to continue.

“No, it doesn’t seem to have a tracking device or other nasty surprises hiding inside it. That was actually going to be the good bit of news,” Reaver said, leaning forward to prop his forearms on his knees. “But also, it does have a scrambler that’s bouncing its signal through kriff even knows how many intermediaries. So that means Factor is having a hard time trying to slice the signal and trace it back to its origin. But he also says that the way it’s set up, whoever’s on the other end almost certainly can’t trace our location either.”

That was… mixed news at best.

“There’s a very good chance Mel just told whoever’s on the other end our location,” Ori said resignedly. His eyes settled on the stack of datapads on the low table, but he didn’t really see them, eyes unfocused, lost in thought.

This might provide an interesting opportunity though.

Reaver huffed out a sharp sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. Ori looked up at him, one eyebrow rising in query.

“You’re thinking about answering it?” the Wadj Captain said. It sounded more like an encouragement than an accusation though.

“It’s risky,” Ori admitted.

“Seizing an entire Imperial base, moving in, and then just keeping it running like business as usual was risky,” Reaver said, sounding deeply unimpressed. “And Factor has already asked permission to load it up with extra scramblers and a voice modulator.”

Force, of course.

“And what did you tell him?”

“I didn’t tell him anything, Clip told him to run the idea past you, since you’d be the one answering it,” Reaver said, as if that was obvious. Maybe it was. “So expect to get ambushed the next time you’re on the command deck.”

“Right,” Ori said, trailing off.

It was getting awfully late, and the last time Kix had caught him trying to palm some stims from the infirmary had been… memorable. None of the Guard medics had cared that much, back on Coruscant. But then again, the Guard had always played by its own rules.

So, maybe he should just get some more caf instead?

Ori looked up again to find Reaver watching him carefully. “Was there something else?” he finally asked.

“Yeah, Clip wants to know when you’ll be racking out,” Reaver said, sounding a bit more guarded, a bit more diplomatic than he had before.

Which both stung and was probably fair, given that Ori’s initial instinct was to snap back at the insinuation.

“When I’m done here,” Ori finally said. His tone was very flat.

“Clip said you’d say that.”

“Clip can kark right off. I don’t need a minder.”

“Clip said you’d say that too.”

“So what, next you’re going to threaten me with Kix?” That was usually the next page from this very annoying playbook.

“Nah, Jesse dragged him out of the infirmary ages ago. He’s already sleeping,” Reaver answered, sounding more than a little judgmental. Which, kriff it, was probably also fair. Kix had been building a reputation on base for taking absolutely osik care of himself sometimes, even while he demanded better from all of his brothers.

“So, Aughts?” Ori said resignedly.

“Yeah, Aughts.”

Ori muttered a heartfelt curse under his breath, a rather scathing Pantoran insult calling into question the degree of genetic inbreeding present within the target’s familial lineage.

“Fine,” Ori finally said, leaning forward and starting to stack up his datapads. After all, he could always just keep working in his private bunk. Thank kriff for the privileges of command.

“Look, this situation is kriffed. It’s not going to be less kriffed in the morning, no matter how long you stare at those ‘pads,” Reaver said, and then his expression shifted to something a little sharper. “And Lena will be dropping off Mel’s belongings tomorrow, before she ships out, so maybe don’t show up to say goodbye to her looking like you’ve just staggered out of a 72 hour, live-fire sim.”

That was a low blow.

At least Reaver was gracious in his victory. If he laughed at Ori’s stiff-backed retreat, he at least waited until the Guardsman was out of earshot.

“That’s interesting,” Kix said, cocking his head slightly to one side and squinting down at the images on Ori’s datapad.

“What?” Ori said, almost directly into his second cup of caf.

Kix set down the datapad and pointed to one of the thermal images Ori had saved of Mel. “See those stripes? Adult Yendarri are fully terrestrial, but they go through an aquatic juvenile stage. Their gills are lost during puberty, but it looks like they might retain heightened blood flow where those respiratory structures used to be.”

That was… actually pretty interesting, even if the first cup of caf hadn’t quite finished working its way through Ori’s system. “So, flushing there is like, what? Like instinctively gasping for air?” Some species did that as a fight or flight response, to get more oxygen to their muscles or something.

Force, the cobbled together investigation and interrogation courses the Coruscant Guard had made for itself had never felt like enough, but this was next level.

“Probably,” Kix said, taking a sip from his own cup of caf, flipping through a few more of the images, and then pointing again. “And this one? The banding along the top and sides of their head? Yendarri have sort of fin-like crests down their heads and backs during their aquatic stage. When they’re relaxed, they naturally stand up, but when they’re frightened or agitated, they can flatten the crests down against their bodies.”

So yeah, that all kind of tracked with what Ori thought he’d been observing. Those were pretty kriffing useful tells.

“And how were Mel’s previous patients?” Ori asked, when Kix just kept flipping back and forth between the images, scowling distractedly at the thermal patterns. Ori was sure it was all terribly interesting from a purely anatomical standpoint, but he was on a bit of a tight schedule here.

He did feel slightly guilty, at how that question immediately tossed a wet blanket over Kix’s comparatively good mood. “Everyone I’ve checked has been fine, so far,” the medic admitted, not that his expression grew any less thunderous at what should have been good news. “I’m seeing eleven more brothers today. That should be everyone except Echo. His team is on a comms blackout right now, but I think they’d only gotten to the assessment phase before he left.”

Well, that was something. None of that did a karking thing for the brothers who had been on a waitlist for more involved surgeries, but at least nobody was walking around with a tracking chip or an explosive hidden in a medical device.

Small mercies.

“Let me know if any of that changes as you work through today’s appointments,” Ori said, gathering up his caf and the datapad Kix had dropped back down on his desk. “Do you want copies of those thermal photos?”

“Yeah, sure,” Kix said, but he mostly sounded angry again, instead of intrigued.

Ori figured he’d be in the same position, in Kix’s boots.

Their CMO had been one of the first brothers to trust Mel, had actually vouched for them to the rest of the command structure. And all evidence at the time had pointed to him being correct to do so. Several of the troopers sent on the Abainya mission were only alive because a second trained medic had been on hand to put them back together.

Having a civilian surgeon available to provide access to more advanced medical equipment and public hospital facilities would have been a major coup for them.

Maybe they’d all been blinded by the possibilities.

And now Ori’s own stomach was curdling too, just thinking about it.

“Kix, none of this is your fault,” Ori said, for about the fifteenth time. And he meant it, just like he had the last fourteen.

“Right,” Kix said, looking away from Ori and reaching for one of his own datapads on the cluttered office he’d commandeered near the base’s infirmary. “I’ll let you know if anything changes, but I’ve got work to do.”

That was a pretty clear dismissal.

The base was eerily quiet. Reaver and Clip had been organizing shuttle flights all night, shuttling non-essential personnel out to the islands and non-combatants off planet completely. Ori dropped off his empty caf cup in the nearly deserted mess and then went in search of Jesse.

He found the 501st ARC in the base’s courtyard, waiting in the half-dark of pre-dawn.

“You’re going to have to keep an eye on Kix,” Ori said as he walked up to join Jesse.

Jesse just grimaced. “Yeah, I got that,” he said, sounding more than a little resigned. “He’s blaming himself again.”

“Weaver and I were the ones who did Mel’s background search,” Ori said flatly, looking out over the base’s half-empty courtyard. Only a few brothers were in sight, prepping one of the shuttles for use.

“I know,” Jesse said with a resigned sigh. “And we both know there wasn’t anything to find, so don’t you start too. They looked clean.”

Ori’s head knew that was correct. His gut wasn’t fully convinced.

Jesse took one look at Ori’s face and made an uncomplimentary noise under his breath, but he didn’t immediately say anything either.

They were both painfully aware of the price of this mistake.

They could have done so much with this base. With this planet. Despite their precautions, Ori wasn’t ready to give it up quite yet.

“I read your notes last night. Anything to add to them?” Jesse finally asked.

“Lena is dropping off all of Mel’s belongings,” Ori said. “I doubt I’ll find much useful among the items, but I may be able to leverage them on an emotional level.”

That earned Ori another brief, if heavy, side-eyed glance from Jesse.

Ori knew that he was often… cold while he was working a case. He needed to be, to cut through the heightened emotions and get at the underlying truth. But he’d learned that talking about it much, even with his brothers from the GAR, often made some of them uncomfortable, so he tended to not show this side of him to anyone except another Guardsman.

Except, he was the only Guardsman on Wadj. And brooding over that fact wasn’t going to do anything to help solve the immediate problem.

He took a breath and made an effort to appear more relaxed and approachable. He wasn’t sure how well it actually worked, because Jesse just heaved another sigh and said, “I hope it works.”

Ori did too.

They hadn’t been waiting five minutes before the base’s main gate rattled to life and slid open to let a familiar civilian vehicle into the courtyard.

Two brothers were in the driver’s compartment, the cowls of their loose-fitting robe still pulled up to conceal their faces. While one stayed in the cab for a moment, releasing the seals on the cargo compartment in the back and then powering the speeder down, the other, went ahead and hopped out of the vehicle to open the door for the passengers.

Ris was the first out, herding Aiva ahead of her, then Ieyas and Zora carrying two fabric bags, then Lena.

It took a moment for Ori to realize that no one else was getting out of the speeder, and that was only partially because of the distracting way Lena was smiling at him.

Neither Vesk nor Vait were here.

Once the two troopers pulled back their cowls, revealing Spark and Malk, Buckler was conspicuously absent as well.

Well, that answered that question.

“The twins are staying?” Ori asked, stepping forward to help unload the crates from the back of the speeder. That his path put him right next to Lena was their business, and Jesse could kriff off with that knowing look.

“I’m surprised you can’t hear them fighting with Buckler from here,” Lena said, dropping the rear lift gate so Ori and Ieyas could reach for one of the larger crates.

Ori could just imagine.

Buckler was ferociously protective of those boys, but apparently cadets were cadets, whether naturally born or artificially decanted, and anyone with eyes could see that the twins were spoiling for an excuse to test their training against a real enemy.

Ori had been no different, fresh off of Kamino. He knew better now.

He and Ieyas set the crate down on the speeder’s fold-out hovercart and turned back to the rest of the cargo. There wasn’t much. “With any luck, this should be temporary,” he said to Lena, but perfectly aware that the others were listening in as well.

“Do you really think that?” Lena asked quietly, grabbing a heavy duffle and swinging it on top of the previous crate.

Zora and Spark were already wrestling the last of the largest crates out of the back of the transport, so Ori had no qualms about guiding Lena to one side, hands hovering awkwardly without actually touching her, because he still was not entirely sure of the expectations and boundaries between them.

“We are not certain, but we strongly suspect that Mel was contacting one of the other prisoners from Abainya,” Ori admitted, trying to be as honest with her as he could. “The real issue is that we have no way of knowing much about that sentient’s motivations or who else they might have told about us.”

Given what they did know, he was fairly certain that neither Mel nor Apoporis would voluntarily involve themselves with slavers or pirates, but the chances of Imperial connections remained very high. Humanitarian groups, like the ones Morena Apoporis championed, often received funding from a variety of governmental agencies. Some were run on a planetary or sector scale, holdovers from the Republic system, organizations so entrenched that while portions of their funding stream still flowed from Coruscant, they were largely independent and insulated from the shift to Imperial rule. But others were now headed up by Palpatine appointees who had been granted prestigious, well-paying positions in exchange for complete loyalty. Any of that type could and would report the existence of a rogue group of clone troopers to likeminded politicians and members of the Imperial military.

Therein lay the potential danger. None of them really knew on which side of that barrier Apoporis was camped.

And frankly, Mel most likely didn’t know either. Even though they’d been working for a Republic holdover, Imperial organization in the Refugee Relief Coalition themself, an intern wouldn’t have been rubbing elbows, or other appendages, with the political elites.

Probably.

Thus the ‘temporary’ evacuation orders.

“Yeah, that’s…” Lena stopped and then exhaled, slowly and controlled, clearly shifting mental gears. “How is Mel? You’re not…” she trailed off awkwardly, but the implication was pretty kriffing clear.

Ori pulled back, knowing his expression had shuttered and not really able or willing to rein in that instinctive response to the accusation. “They are currently sitting in a reasonably well-appointed holding cell, eating a breakfast our CMO confirms meets their species’ nutritional requirements. We had a pleasant conversation yesterday about their posting on Saan.”

“Saan?” Lena said.

“An icy moon in the Outer Rim,” Ori responded coldly. An oppressive silence hung between them, tense and awkward. Finally, Ori turned more fully to face Lena and said, “I haven’t laid a hand on them.”

“Force, Ori,” Lena said, eyes widening. “That’s not what I meant.”

Had she not?

Kriff, maybe she hadn’t. Whatever this was between them, this relationship, was so new he still hadn’t quite figured out how it was supposed to work. And frankly, he’d never had much experience dealing with civilians he wasn’t supposed to be protecting, interrogating, or shooting.

Especially uncommonly pretty ones who always had time for a kind smile or supportive advice for all of Ori’s brothers.

It made him misread cues, because he was so used to looking for lies and threats.

“I apologize,” he said stiffly. Kriff it all, she was getting ready to fly back to Draboon for who even knew how long, and here he was sticking his boot in osik with her because he just couldn’t react to anything like a normal sentient.

“No, Force, that’s not…” she stopped mid-thought again and blew out another breath. “We’re going to have to work on this, huh? I don’t even know what I meant. I guess just that I thought Mel and I were getting to be friends, so I can’t help worrying about them, but then they did this, and I can’t even figure out why. It’s stupid.”

Some of the stiff tension went out of Ori’s shoulders, because that, at least, was something he could completely understand. “Our CMO is inside beating himself up for exactly the same reason, so no, it’s not particularly stupid.”

“Oh, Kix,” Lena said, pulling a sad, frustrated face. “I’d ask you to give him a hug from me, but…”

“But I’d probably get skewered for the attempt,” Ori said dryly.

“Yeah, that.” And then Lena caught Ori completely by surprise by going up on her tiptoes and brushing a quick kiss against his cheek. “Just, stay safe, ok? All of you.”

Ori blinked at her stupidly until she grinned at his reaction. It made the corners of her dark eyes crinkle.

Kriff it.

The press of her forehead against his was warm and grounding. “I’ll do my best.”

“I think your brothers are taking holos of us,” Lena whispered, but he was inordinately thankful when she didn’t pull away.

“I’ll kill them later.”

“No, you won’t.”

“No, I won’t.”

He sighed after a long moment and finally broke contact.

“You should head to the shuttle,” he said, hating to have to say that, but the sooner she left, the sooner she and the others would be safe. Or at least as safe as they currently could be.

“Yeah,” Lena agreed, looking over her shoulder.

Sure enough, Malk and most of the civilians were grinning at them.

Jesse was too, even though he was wearing his bucket. Ori could just tell.

“You stay safe too,” Ori said awkwardly.

“All I have to worry about is Mandalorian politics, I’ll be fine,” Lena said with a small smile, but it was pretty obvious that she was just trying to put on a brave front for him.

Ori didn’t call her on it.

But Sith-damned hells, he hated watching her walk away.

“So…” Jesse started to say, once Malk had fired the speeder’s engines back up to return to the safehouse and Lena had disappeared out of view up the shuttle’s ramp, along with Spark and the rest of the civilians.

“Think about what you’re about to say very carefully,” Ori said flatly.

Jesse held up his hands in mock surrender and tapped the duffle bag at his feet with one boot. “This is Mel’s stuff,” he said instead.

Smart choice.

Ori didn’t stick around to watch the shuttle take off. He just couldn’t, it made something dangerous coil down his spine. Wadj wasn’t supposed to be just another pit stop before the galaxy uprooted them all again. It was supposed to be safe, that was the entire kriffing point of risking so much to come here.

He wasn’t sure what he looked like, storming through the base with Mel’s half-empty ruck sack in hand, but every brother he encountered quickly got the kriff out of his way.

There was a small conference room near the base’s small brig which Ori had taken over for the duration of this investigation. Ori shut and secured the door, placed the duffle bag on the table, and got to work.

Lena had cared enough to neatly fold everything and pack it carefully.

That did very little to lighten Ori’s mood.

Three surprisingly colorful sets of clothing; a clearly secondhand, thickly-padded quilt and matching pillow; two pairs of sandals that clearly hadn’t been designed for a human-shaped foot; a standard first aid kit with several specialized additions which had clearly been scavenged from Wadj’s markets, or maybe the pirate’s storerooms back on Abainya; a rainbow-hued wall tapestry; a set of nesting bowls and utensils; a pouch of personal hygiene items; a rather battered-looking holopad with a few novels loaded on it.

It seemed like there should have been more.

But then again, Mel had only recently been freed from slavery. They hadn’t exactly had much time to amass more personal effects.

Maybe that should have sparked a little extra sympathy in Ori. It didn’t, and maybe that didn’t say anything good about him, but it was difficult to not keep spiraling back to the fact to that betrayal was a pretty osik’la way to repay the sentients who had rescued Mel from that.

Ori pressed his hands against the surface of the table and forced himself to just breathe, to focus. He could use these things, he just needed to be smart about it.

The base’s holding cells were kept under the same environmental conditions as the rest of the base, with temperature and air circulation meant for human to near-human comfort levels. The biological profile Kix had provided on Yendarri said that they typically lived in more tropical climates, and Mel certainly hadn’t seemed particularly fond of the cold from their reminiscence about their posting on Saan.

Mel was not giving any signs of being at risk for self-harm, so the cell was already outfitted with thin, synthetic sheets and a minimally padded mattress. They were most likely cold, given their species tolerances. Extra bedding was an acceptable risk, and if it was presented with the correct emotional context, it might prompt a useful response.

And Lena had been correct. Mel had been forming friendships with several of the clones and civilians on Wadj. Ori had observed enough of their previous interactions to determine that those, at least, had not been completely faked.

Ori carefully folded up the quilt, stacked the pillow on top of it, and headed for the cells.

Plex was on guard duty this morning, sitting in the small surveillance room and watching Mel on the video feed. He looked up when Ori opened the door.

“Anything to report?” Ori asked from the doorway.

“They finished eating about fifteen minutes ago,” Plex replied. “Same as the previous interactions, they were compliant with orders and quiet.”

“Right,” Ori said. None of that changed his current strategy, so, “I need you to spot me while I bring these to the prisoner. And I’ll need to talk to them afterwards.”

Plex looked at the colorful bedding in Ori’s hands, raised a single eyebrow, but instead of asking any questions, he just shrugged and said, “Sure,” reaching for his helmet and blaster rifle.

There was a protocol to this, the same as there had been for meals. Plex went into the brig first and ran through the script:

“Please stand and move to the colored square on the floor.”

“Please place both sets of your hands behind your head and turn to face the wall.”

“Please do not move from this position until instructed to do so.”

Only after all of that did Plex buzz Ori into the brig.

The hallway of cells was certainly cleaner than the ones back in the Coruscant central detention facility. Sterile, in a way that suggested that they’d only rarely been used. Mel was standing in the opposite corner of the cell from the small fresher and its semi-translucent privacy screen, back turned so that they could not see Ori’s approach.

Plex kept the watch as Ori walked into the cell, placed the bedding on the narrow cot, and then picked up the tray of empty dishes, leftover from their morning meal.

Upon leaving the cell again, he simply placed the tray on the floor, next to the exit and removed his helmet. Much as he would have preferred having the visual clues his thermal settings could provide, he was attempting to elicit a specific emotional response here: guilt and perhaps sympathy rather than intimidation or fear. And most civilians seemed better able to empathize with an organic face than with an anonymous helmet.

Ori tucked his bucket under his arm and stood in front of the cell. Plex was already reactivating the ray shield, which snapped back into place with a faint hum. Plex sent him a questioning look, to which Ori responded by signing, ‘Dismissed. Observe and record.’

Plex shouldered his blaster rifle with a sharp nod and announced, “You are free to return to your previous activities,” finishing the prescribed script. And then he left the room, heading back to his security post.

Mel lowered their arms and turned, the trajectory of their movement bringing the colorful bedding into view before they spotted Ori himself. They froze, staring for a moment. Ori noticed that their fingers twitched and her dark eyes blinked very slowly.

“Lena dropped off your belongings this morning,” Ori said, and Mel’s head abruptly swiveled in his direction, finally noticing him. They blinked again, a bit more quickly.

“She asked me how you were doing,” Ori said flatly, trying to prompt an opening.

Mel nodded. Ori noted that their narrow mouth thinned slightly, but they did eventually ask, “How is she?”

There.

“She’s gone,” Ori said, letting the faintest trace of his real feelings bleed into his response.

Mel blinked, opened their mouth for a moment, shut it in obvious thought, and then asked, “What do you mean?”

“It isn’t safe here for the civilians anymore,” he answered, and if he sounded a little angry, a little accusatory, a little anguished, well, that was just part of the act. Right? “We are evacuating them all off-planet until such a time as we can determine the threat your contact poses.”

That elicited an obvious flinch. Good.

Good.

Ori nodded, willing to let them stew in that knowledge for the next few hours. Maybe that would soften them up. He could return after midmeal and pick up where they had left off.

He had bent to pick up the tray when Mel spoke.

“She said she wanted to help,” they whispered.

Ori left the tray on the floor and straightened slowly.

Mel had stepped as close to the ray shield as they safely could. Their eyes were huge, all four hands twisted together.

He didn’t speak, he just looked at her, waiting for that first crack to spread.

“She works with a sentient resettlement organization out of Alderaan,” Mel continued, hands pressed against their chest like a plea. “Their public mission statement only mentions refugees, but they also take in slaves and… other victims of sentient rights violations.”

They hesitated, so Ori stepped a little closer to the ray shield himself. “Sounds harmless enough,” he prompted, as gently as he could manage. He wasn’t entirely successful.

Mel’s eyes dropped, but they kept talking.

“The pirates let me treat any prisoners they were holding for ransom, so we spoke a little. In private. After your people arrived and we were both freed, she told me there had been rumors about a group of clones who were freeing slaves all across the Outer Rim, but there wasn’t anything on the official government records. And there were other attacks too. Ones that… didn’t involve slaves.”

“No, there were slaves,” Ori said quietly, because this… this could twist the knife a little further, and hopefully more actionable intel would bleed out. “We briefed you on the chips. Every single one of my brothers still in Imperial service is a slave.”

“She didn’t know, I didn’t know!” Mel’s said, their breaths turning shallow and quick.

Ori would bet credits that if he’d been watching this through thermals, the bands down the sides of their throat would be lit up like signposts.

“So you agreed to spy on us, to see if we were who she suspected we might be?” Ori asked, voice far more composed this time.

“Yes. She said her backers would want to help you, if you could be trusted.”

“And are we?” Ori asked. “Are we what she expected?”

Mel kept talking, the cracks in the dam growing wider, more and more details spilling out between them. Reports back to their contact extoling the work the clones were doing. Mel’s efforts to establish friendly contacts for backchannel communication to the senior command. Asset development. Their entire organization was being scouted.

When the flow of information trickled to a stop, Ori calmly thanked Mel for their cooperation. And as soon as the brig door closed behind him, he took off at a dead sprint, opening a comm line to the command center as he ran.

It was Jesse who answered.

“Get Commander Tano and Captain Rex on the line,” he said harshly, tearing around a corner of the hallway. Two brothers scattered, flattening themselves against opposing walls to try to make a path. “I need to report to them as of five minutes ago.”

AN: Previous chapters are available here.

Dividers by @freesia-writes using helmets by @lornaka. More designs available here.

#eidola tcw fanfic #star wars #tcw #clone wars #the clone wars #star wars the clone wars #clone troopers #original clone trooper #clone trooper oc #star wars fanfic #tcw fanfic #clone wars fanfic #the clone wars fanfic

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jokerislandgirl32 · 6 months ago

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Do you have any personal design headcanons for Zach that differs from canon in anyway? Or is it pretty much just the canon design. Id love to hear whatever you come up with :)

Hiiii!!!! Thank you so much for this ask! Zach headcanons my beloved!

In general my design headcanons for Zach are very close to the canon designs, but I do have some headcanons that add to these designs or alter them. And admittedly, I am pulling some of these from a general Zach headcanon post I made a while back, it can be found here!

Most of the physical headcanons have not changed, but I am going to add to them and revamp them a bit 😊!��Putting below the cut because it’s long! Some of the headcanons, as you’ll see, are exclusive to my Wild Violet AU!

Please note there is a mildly suggestive reference about his body hair, mentions of a near death experience, explosions, drinking, near drowning, CPR, scars, tattoos, and needles! There is also a shirtless image!

Freckles: When Zach exposes himself to prolonged sunlight his freckles from childhood come out again, and not just on his face. I feel like he is the type of person who has freckles on his face, arms, back, and chest. But he does not like that, so he stays out of the sun for this reason.

Body/Facial Hair: Zach is more than capable of growing a full beard, and he has body hair elsewhere, but he either shaves or gets laser removal for the additional hair on his body. Zach is very neat and orderly, so he does not like to have an excessive amount of hair aggravating him. Managing the hair on his head on a daily basis is nearly too much for him.

He likes his triangular goatee though, so he keeps that on his face. When Zach doesn’t shave or laser remove the excess hair, his body hair is straight and jet black, and he feels like this looks odd with his skin tone, giving him more motivation to remove it. Oh, and the Zachbots or Violet do this for him more often than not. Maybe this is a bit tmi, but this guy likes to keep things neat and tidy below the belt… his goatee is not the only triangular patch of body hair he’s got 😆. I am so so so sorry….Oh, he also has a happy trail, okay, okay, I’m done now 😂.

In my Wild Violet AU, once Zach becomes a father (at some point after the twins or Victoria is born) he does allow his facial hair to grow into a beard. He is very particular about how his beard looks, and it is ALWAYS neatly trimmed and well groomed.

Hair: Zach’s hair is naturally jet black and wavy. He uses hair gel to keep it tamed and slick. If he does not tame it after it gets wet it starts to become wavy. So Zach has to immediately comb his hair after getting out of the shower or getting it wet and put the gel in it, lest he end up with unruly locks.

As for that stray piece of hair on his forehead, that piece of hair is the one piece that refuses to be tamed. Zach starts his days with that piece pulled over to the side along with the rest of his hair, but within an hour it’s fallen astray. Zach used to get annoyed by it, but he’s come to accept it as fate.

Oh and even though we have not seen it since the pilot, Zach has a widow’s peak, I’m feral over widow’s peaks so yes, Zach has one.

Eyes: Zach’s eye color changes depending on his emotions and the environment he is in. His eyes range from emerald to an electric green. If Zach is emotionally charged (angry, agitated, anxious, jealous) his eye color darkens. When he is calm, happy, or excited his eye color lightens. Similarly, when Zach is in brighter environments or lighting his eyes become lighter in color, or if he is in darker environments, or greener environments, his eyes become darker in color.

Zach also has vision issues that result in him needing glasses, specifically for distance. Zach is very vain and hates to wear glasses, but he is too afraid to get vision corrective surgery or wear contacts, so as he ages and when he’s certain no one sees him, he wears glasses. I feel like he opts for rectangular lenses, but in my Wild Violet AU, Zach actually wore my OC Violet’s father’s glasses for a long time before he got frames and lenses of his own. Alden Tyler’s vision/needed prescription was identical to Zach’s. So…Zach wore glasses like this for a while:

I like to imagine he walked around college for a year with these glasses before he went and got his own pair. And he only got his own glasses after 13-year-old Violet convinced him to do so 😂.

And I believe Zach has the bags and shadows under his eyes that we see in canon, even as Zach changes for the better in my AU, years of neglecting his health left a toll on his body, and his eyes will always bear this burden.

Tattoos/Scars: This is exclusive to my Wild Violet AU, but Zach has 2 tattoos and some scars. Even though Zach’s deathly afraid of needles, he bucks up his courage and gets 2 matching tattoos with Violet. One is an interlocking black Z and purple V on his inner right bicep, and the other is Alexandria’s initials and hand and footprint on his left shoulder. Violet has the same tattoos on the opposite arm and shoulder, so when they are standing together the tattoos are right beside each other.

Zach has a few scars on his body. He has one scar on his lower back from a fall at summer camp that nearly resulted in him drowning. Violet saved him, gave him CPR, and tended to the wound, but the scar never leaves him. Zach has a scar on the left side of his neck and on the left side of his chest from an explosion in the chemistry lab at his high school prior to his graduation. This may or may not have been the result of a drunken and emotionally unstable teenage Zachary 😢.

Body/Build: In my AU Zach’s built a bit differently. He’s still very skeleton like, but he has some muscle tone. He has small, yet obvious biceps. He has pecs and abs that, while not fantastic, are well formed. He does have a bit of a pudge to his belly, but in combination with his abs/pecs it blends well. I also think Zach’s legs are thin and toned. And his hands, Zach definitely has veins that are noticeable on his hands, why? Because I have a thing about visible veins in hands 😂. I imagine his body type is very similar to this, just with some more belly:

Feet: Zach definitely has that extra toe Aviva mentioned, I don’t care if we’ve seen animation to prove otherwise. The man has six toes on his left foot. The additional toe is called his “extra pinky toe.” Not related, but his twins Victor and Vallen inherit this extra toe. Zach nearly causes Violet to have a heart attack after their birth because she was still hyped up on the meds and forgot he had an extra toe as well.

These are not exactly physical headcanons, but they relate to his appearance, so I’m throwing them in here as well. And you….you Eli, have caused some of these, it’s all your fault….but thank you 😂

Clothing: Although we don’t see it in the show Zach always wears a belt with his pants, in the show he covers his belt, but I love to think he actually tucks his sweater in and has the belt showing. It’s a black belt as you’ve drawn him in, and it’s oh so stylish.

Jewelry: I feel like he’s the type of man that wears a watch. He either has a silver watch or a black watch of some type. I don’t think it’s all that fancy, I feel like it’s solely for functionality and not style, and he perhaps has designed his own watch to serve his needs. So, it’s got his signature Z or V logo somewhere and his preferred color scheme. Since I headcanon Zach as ambidextrous, I feel like he will switch his watch to whichever hand he is not predominantly using in a given moment or day.

In my AU, Zach does wear a wedding ring on his ring finger once he and Violet get married, the wedding band is also one he has fashioned himself and it’s silver colored.

Zach Vibes 😍, image link

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quillyfied · 1 year ago

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Okay first batch of episode thoughts that I don’t know that I can expand into real coherent thoughts so heck it we’re doing it live and cramming them together, no chronology just memory vibes, PART ONE:

- the visceral physicality of that hug on the beach. Hot.

- The way dream Ed keeps repeating phrases but trying new pet names. Additionally: the tears in Stede’s eyes when he first hears Ed calling his name

- Swede being the new husband: fair. Makes sense. Farewell, fond thoughts of unexpected dreamboat Buttons.

- I WANT TO KNOW ABOUT ED’S UNLICENSED MIDWIFERY

- Zheng Yi Sao’s reveal from soup lady to Pirate Queen. Never been another like it.

- Zheng and Auntie have a dynamic that reminds me of a much healthier and better adjusted Ed and Izzy—Auntie calls Zheng out for getting distracted by Olu but doesn’t stop her or interfere, Auntie is the harsh voice of Zheng’s orders and her enforcer with the crew but isn’t cruel, and Auntie clearly respects the hell out of Zheng and supports what she built with her piracy career, and actively helps her and is respected in turn by Zheng. Take what a captain and a first mate are supposed to be like, and bring a flavor of Stede’s people-positive management style without the naive condescension. Competent and thriving. We love to see it.

- Okay but can we get a recipe of the noodle soup bc that looked genuinely so good

- Frenchie is a cat. He’s being a cat. He’s a cAT—

- Fic writers who called bitchy teenage anger Lucius aimed at Stede, take a bow, you’re the MVPs. (And sweet sweet farewells to the many headcanons of Lucius living in the walls of the Revenge as a ghost, but girlie you did not need to be there and that’s for the best)

- Frenchie is so intelligent though. And sneaky.

- Been wondering too if Ed’s impossible bird is a reference to something existing, or something made up for the show, but keep forgetting to Google it. Keep seeing references to albatrosses, which tracks and I’m okay with letting that be the extent of it for now.

- I’m telling you, either Buttons IS the rabbit, or the whole crew is gonna THINK Buttons is the rabbit. Auntie gives him a document about transforming into animals, and in later episodes Ed is wearing Buttons’ shirt and there’s a rabbit??? Buttons has something to do with this.

- The garlic and finger crosses are deffo gonna be aimed at Ed in upcoming episodes. Can feel it. Also wondering where exactly Jim brought down the cannonball for Ed to survive it—AND ALSO HEY YALL THINK CALICO JACK SURVIVED HIS OR—

- Listen I can’t think for too long about the mermaid sequence or imma cry but SWEET LOVING GOLDFISH ;A;

- Also if they don’t make a Rick Roll joke or reference with Prince Ricky then what is the POINT of him

- Also points to us for being pretty sure he ran into Spanish Jackie; you never want to assume but when a guy shows up in this universe without a nose…

- Wondering about the symbolism of the pig in Ed’s Limbo

- Also finding grim humor in how Ed’s vision of Hornigold had to force the nutrition down his throat. Not at all metaphorical and layered.

- Black Pete being honest and not taking the shot. Go you, Black Pete. Not letting your ego talk yourself into irreparable trouble.

- I love Archie. I want more with Archie. Can’t wait for Jim to get good use out of having two hands for more than hyper competent murder. Hyper competent cuddling of their exceptional partners.

- Olu pronouncing eucalyptus. I want to bottle it for a rainy day. Also he’s so sweet the entire time they’re on Zheng’s ship. Love him. Oh captain my captain.

- And…the original rat man in the room. Izzy caring about the crew all of a sudden feels fast but tbh there’s been a time skip and Izzy is fighting an uphill battle with the consequences of his actions; I’m inclined to give the season a bit of leeway and see where it goes. Can’t get into too much detail or I’ll derail this whole thing trying to decode him and I don’t want to.

- I KNEW THE PROMO PIC OF PETE LOOKING EXCITED WAS HIM SEEING LUCIUS. I CALLED IT. IN MY MIND.

- also called that old guy in ropes was Hornigold. Nice.

- I got distracted and made another post about Ed really taking the long way around this whole suicide thing but my heart just drops every time I look at how he CHOPPED OFF THE WHEEL. THAT THING LOOKED SO SOLID. ED YOU TAKE THE AXE OUT AT THE WRONG ANGLE TOO HARD AND YOU COULD HURT YOURSELF PLENTY.

- Okay also aside for how I was NOT expecting either Ed’s prettiest babygirl look to be at his most unhinged, and I was NOT prepared for Ed shooting Izzy in the leg to be the thing that made Izzy lose the leg.

- Like seriously, I figured losing the leg was going to be a metaphor for Izzy cutting out the worst and most toxic bits of himself, the pieces literally rotting away and killing him with them, the toxic masculinity and the homophobia and the racism and such—but not quite like THAT XD and it’s way more a metaphor for him being forced to let go of his relationship with Blackbeard before it kills him, which is better and less comprehensive anyway.

- The way I flinched a mile when Ed shot him though. Just wasn’t expecting it.

- And the way Jim is sticking up for Izzy. The whole thing with them and Fang and Frenchie—I’ll put this up from one of my many failed Izzy essays, their treatment of him has nothing to do with Izzy and everything to do with them as people. Their choice to fight for a better ship atmosphere. Because love and forgiveness have fuckall to do with how much either party DESERVES those things and everything to do with whether they’re WILLING TO ACCEPT THEM. Love is redeeming and transformative but it takes work, babes.

- Izzy just happens to be the recipient of their reaching. And he might just be tenderized enough to let it start getting to him. But we will see.

- Ed’s suicidal tendencies and his will to live and hope versus his belief in his own unlovable nature has been covered so much and so much more eloquently. But it bears repeating that I knew I was going to fall in love with this show when Stede was shown to be passively suicidal, and then later Ed was too. Maybe I’ll make a fuller post about it later, but. That just means so much to me personally. And while the visceral hurt and drama of Ed’s journey is a step beyond me…I get it. I love how it was handled. Looking forward to seeing how it progresses.

- STEDE BELLYFLOPS OFF A SHIP TO GET TO ED. MY BELOVED GOLDEN RETRIEVER.

- Stede’s continual cold dismissal and refusal to engage with Izzy. Character growth. Delicious drama.

- I sincerely hope Zheng Yi Sao accomplishes her piratical takeover. And I hope some sort of truce with the Revenge can be reached, bc yeesh. What a way to get out of an admittedly not great situation with an objectively great character.

- It’s so weird bc like. It’s baseline a historical show. We know that the golden age of piracy ended and not well for the pirates. But they’re already throwing actual hard facts and reality out the window. So it makes things like a Chinese pirate taking over the Caribbean feel way more plausible. I’m excited to see what happens with the larger scope of the show as well as the smaller emotional focus.

#our flag means death #ofmd s2 #ofmd s2 spoilers #here we go. a reaction post.#I finally did it

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bonesandthebees · 2 years ago

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So guess who missed [Wilbur cried.] on the first read? My brain just didn’t register it as out of the ordinary. I’m blaming the fatigue, or being to invested in the story to pick up on it. It’s also because the shift is very smooth, as in there’s a good build up towards him referring to himself as Wilbur, so good that I didn’t notice it and he might not have either.

Also, upon rereading, I realised that there’s a ridiculously long time Wilbur refers to himself with just pronouns. He stops being the Pythia the second he enters the bathing cave. Because that’s what he wanted. He feels like he failed Clara and thinks she’ll be angry so he does not want to be seen by Her (or anyone for that matter). He wants to stop existing for a bit. So the second he enters the dark, he stops being seen and in his mind, stops being the Pythia. And if he isn’t the Pythia, he’s nothing. So now he only refers to himself by his pronouns. And he continues to do so even as Tommy shows up.

Meanwhile, Tommy refers to him by name/nickname because he knows they are alone and he’s aware that the thing freaking him out is probably a religious trauma problem so he’s reafirming the fact that Wikbur is a person by using his name. He also says [No one’s pissed at you, ] so he might think that’s what Wilbur is scared of, Techno brought that up too. Wilbur never actually mentioned why he can’t tell them, he just says that he can’t, so of course they assume it’s because he thinks that they’ll get mad at him when the truth is even more fucked up. But Wilbur isn’t scared of how they would react, in fact he was quite satisfied before the panic hit, he’s scared of Clara’s reaction.

But she can’t see him, and Wilbur trusts Tommy and he’s still very much a person regardless of whether or not he’s being the Pythia. So while not being the Pythia, with Tommy there constantly using his name, Wilbur lets himself be Wilbur for the first time. He lets himself break because he can’t hold it together any longer. And then, when his tears have all run out, he puts his broken shell together to be the Pythia again.

And it’s beautifully written, but it’s so sad. I’m glad Tommy was holding him because someone had to. It’s a step in the right direction. What Tommy is doing is making progress, and now that the other Deathlings got another glimpse, I’m hoping they’ll start trying to fix him too. Preferably with a little less pressure next time *glares at Techno even though I get what he was trying to do and it was necessary because of Wilbur would have never given them that info otherwise*.

Also, I am losing my mind about the fact that Wilbur wasn’t wearing his blindfold when referring to himself by name. He wasn’t wearing the blindfold. He wasn’t wearing the physical representation of being the Pythia because in that moment he wasn’t and so there was room to be Wilbur. And that last thing, I feel like the blindfold is a methophore for being the Pythia. As in, wear the blindfold blurs his vision a little and gives him headaches. It’s harmful to him, yet he wears it anyway, just like he keeps being the Pythia, because he’s terrified of what could happen when he doesn’t.

-🌲

honestly it seems a lot of people missed that moment at first which makes me happy because I wanted it to be subtle. a very 'blink and you'll miss it' kind of thing. like, I considered italicizing wilbur's name for emphasis there to point it out, but then I decided against it and I think it works in the narratives favor.

yes!! so glad you noticed the pronouns thing!! I really like playing with the narrative aspect of the text and I decided as soon as his panic attack really got into gear he wasn't going to refer to himself as the pythia at all. he wanted to be hidden from everything, including clara. he needed a moment where he wasn't anything at all, so he gets that.

this is exactly the kind of moment tommy knew he was going to want to know wilbur's name for. if something like this happened, he wanted to be able to affirm to him that he's a person and remind him of that even when he's so lost in his panic. but he's not a mind reader and so he just says what pops into his head to try and calm wilbur down, but that's not what wilbur's afraid of. it's not the others. it's clara.

but yes, like you said, he trusts tommy. clara can't see him in there, and he's completely falling apart, so for just a moment he lets himself be wilbur again. but then he pushes that back down the moment he can, and puts on the mask of the pythia once more.

techno doesn't have the most tact with that kind of stuff lmao. but hey, he has tommy and he got a hug out of it so things are going very well for crimeboys.

YES IM GLAD YOU UNDERSTAND WHY HE DIDNT HAVE THE BLINDFOLD ON. to refer to himself for the first time by name in so many years, he couldn't have it on. even though it was dark and tommy didn't see his face or anything, it wasn't on. it doesn't necessarily mean anything in a literal sense because again, it's not like tommy could see his eyes or face and he put it back on pretty quickly after that, but it was a symbolic thing and I'm really happy with how that moment turned out.

thank you so much for the kind words spruce!! so glad you enjoyed!!

#ask #spruce anon #through a glass divine

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denimbex1986 · 1 year ago

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'In 2018, an interview with Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan went viral — possibly because it was the first time he’d ever appeared relatable. In that conversation, he said his children sometimes jokingly call him Reynolds Woodcock, after the aloof, reserved protagonist of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread. Though Nolan’s scripts often feature signature, repeated (and often mocked) tropes, including time manipulation, dead spouses, and protagonists who face complex moral decisions, he injects very little of his own personality into his movies. Characters like Leonardo DiCaprio’s troubled team leader in Inception and Robert Pattinson’s equally troubled handler in Tenet are clearly styled after Nolan himself. But viewers rarely come away from Nolan movies with a greater understanding of his worldview, at least compared to the way directors like Martin Scorsese or Quentin Tarantino put their personalities on screen in every movie they make.

One underappreciated idea does recur over and over in Nolan’s work, though, and it surfaces again in Oppenheimer. The protagonists of many Nolan films become obsessed with a specific fear and go to great lengths to better understand or control their terror. In Nolan’s first blockbuster, Batman Begins, gangster Carmine Falcone (Tom Wilkinson) tells Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale), “You always fear what you don’t understand.” The quote acts as something of a guiding light not just for Bruce, but for Nolan’s back shelf of protagonists who seek a deeper knowledge of their phobias for the sake of control. In Oppenheimer, Nolan imprints this narrative device on a historical figure for the first time, and it feels like he’s being more open than ever about revealing what keeps him up at night.

There is no evidence that J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, struggled with frightening visions of high-energy subatomic particles. This doesn’t come through in any documents about Oppenheimer the man, and Nolan seems to have added the idea to dramatize the film, as Oppenheimer periodically pauses to register and recoil from flashes of light, particles, and fire, all representing wordless fears he can’t explain. Though the movie’s dialogue never explicitly references these mysterious events, Nolan’s evocative imagery asks the audience to fill in the gaps themselves — are we seeing what’s in his mind, his future, or something else entirely?

Nolan’s Oppenheimer presents as an awkward, unsociable student with something off about him. It isn’t hard to imagine that he’s troubled by something. And what does this frightful student do? He dives deep into particle physics, devoting his life to understanding and attempting to control his fear — until it reaches critical mass.

The origin story in Batman Begins is the clearest example of this phenomenon: Batman’s vigilante persona was inspired by a traumatic childhood experience with bats. That plot point hews closely to Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli’s classic 1987 comic arc Batman: Year One, but the film dives far deeper into Bruce’s fervent need to understand and control his terror. In a number of sequences featuring fear gas used by the movie’s villain, Scarecrow (played by Cillian Murphy, who also plays Nolan’s Oppenheimer), the filmmaker dips his toes into horror-inflected imagery. The Gothic architecture of Gotham combines with nightmarish sequences where villains see the superhero as a demonic monster, literalizing the metaphor of Bruce becoming his fear.

Following Batman Begins, Nolan’s Batman movies continue to dwell on this theme. Nolan assaults his protagonist with a series of villains who take on the shape of new nightmares. It’s as if he’s trying to teach Batman how to overcome the things he most dreads.

In addition to Bruce Wayne, the two protagonists Oppenheimer most resembles in this way are Leonardo DiCaprio’s Dom Cobb in Inception and Guy Pearce’s Leonard Shelby in Memento. The latter, Nolan’s mainstream breakthrough, focuses on a man with short-term memory loss who is so afraid of forgetting his purpose that he has it tattooed on his body. A significant portion of Inception takes place within Cobb’s dreams, which, through a very thinly veiled metaphor, are haunted by his wife Mal, played by Marion Cotillard. Guilt-ridden by the circumstances of her death, he subconsciously creates a murderous avatar in the shape of the shame he’s too afraid to face. He wrestles for control within his memory, attempting to hide her in a symbolic (and literal) basement in his mind. It doesn’t exactly work out.

Throughout Oppenheimer’s three-hour run time, Cillian Murphy’s protagonist struggles with existential horrors that are much larger than his personal regrets. In addition to the frightening visual bursts of atomic space, the film focuses most of its second-act tensions on the threat that the first atomic bomb test might ignite the hydrogen in Earth’s atmosphere. In real life, that threat was discussed and dismissed by the physicists at Los Alamos. But Nolan lingers on it, sending Oppenheimer to get the opinion of Albert Einstein, who acts as a sort of patron saint of science in the film. But Einstein provides no comforting answers, which ratchets up the tension and fear felt by characters and audience alike.

The threat of humans bringing about their own extinction is no new ground for Nolan’s films. And that may answer why, exactly, he’s so obsessed with fear and the war for control. In Interstellar, climate change devastates crops with a futuristic, dystopian blight. In his 2020 movie Tenet, an unseen society in the future attempts to reverse the flow of time to stop climate change before it gets out of hand. Between those two movies lies the World War II film Dunkirk, about the struggle for survival against a faceless threat. Though the Nazi presence implicitly hangs over the movie, Dunkirk doesn’t linger on a potential apocalypse in quite the same way as other Nolan movies. But the pervasive dread remains.

The fearsome final minutes of Oppenheimer drive this point home, as Nolan gives his protagonist a vision of a future devastated by nuclear apocalypse. His visions of dancing particles and flames give way to a clear, unambiguous doomsday — an uncountable number of rockets fire from an unknown country, streaking across the globe and detonating. Fire consumes everything.

Nolan’s devotion to the theme of people wrestling with their fears ties him to his protagonists, and his more recent focus specifically on humanity causing its own doom ramps that fear up to a universal level. It’s a heavy, existential worry, but it’s an illuminating glimpse into the mind of an artist who rarely lets the audience in. In his films, when a character obsesses about a topic, it typically means that’s the fear that keeps them up at night and drives them toward obsession as a means of control. Both Nolan and his iteration of J. Robert Oppenheimer are exposing their fears that humanity has the power to devastate life on Earth. And as climate change and political tensions simultaneously rise across the planet, it’s hard to blame him.'

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makeste · 2 years ago

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hey guys, so I’ve finished reading BnHA 342 which was a delight to read, but my reaction post is very, very long and will take some time to edit, so in the meantime I’ve decided to make a separate post just to talk about this one character interaction which I am absolutely obsessed with!

let’s see how long of an analysis I can make about this ONE, SINGLE JOKING REMARK THAT KACCHAN MADE COMPLETELY OFFHANDEDLY.

1. so first off, let’s just cut straight to the heart of the matter: this. is. friendship. no more denial. no more HAH, NO WAY, OF COURSE WE AREN’T FRIENDS NOW WALK BEHIND ME!!! the Kacchan who was too embarrassed and too chuuni to admit that he was friends with Shouto died at Jakku. and the Kacchan who’s been running the show ever since then is someone who openly worries about Shouto (asking about him immediately after waking up in the hospital), unabashedly provides him with emotional support (hand on the shoulder when class 1-A confronted Endeavor), and hangs out with him in his room because he doesn’t want Shouto to be going through all this shit alone.

2. speaking as someone whose own #1 love language is using humor to try and relax people and make them feel comfortable and safe and welcomed and at ease, the fact that Katsuki used a joke as his chosen method of support here brought me SO MUCH JOY I can barely even begin to express it. and it’s not even the first time he’s done this! never forget that one time after Kamino where class 1-A was all bummed after Aizawa told them off for coming to save him, and so he grabbed Kaminari and dragged him into the bushes and made him activate his derp mode in order to ease the tension! and also to distract them so he could quietly pay Kirishima back for the night vision goggles, because that is his OTHER love language (cold hard cash!! nah lol I’m referring to the act of physically, tangibly paying him back; showing his gratitude not just with words but with actions), but yeah.

my point is, for someone who always seems to be so angry and serious, Kacchan has a sharp sense of humor that he apparently just keeps tucked away under wraps, and dusts off only for rare special occasions like these, and I absolutely LOVE it and I need it to happen WAY MORE OFTEN. there is a very real possibility of me making a compilation post of every single time Kacchan has made a joke and/or actually laughed about something, just because I’m that desperate to know more about this expertly dry wit of his now.

3. getting back to his friendship with Shouto, this next talking point is the one that’s already been done to death (because you know I went and looked up all those 342 tumblr reactions and metas after I read this chapter because I needed to soak up that analysis asap), but nonetheless this post would not be complete without it! so this is very obviously a commentary on the fact that Shouto’s favorite food is cold soba! a fact which is known to every single citizen of the world! in fact this joke even takes that last part into account, since it relies on that fact being common knowledge in order to stick the landing! in a way it’s partially a friendly little dig at Shouto for making his favorite food such an important part of his personality! like, “hmm, so what would be the worst case scenario for Touya. well obviously it would be him liking something other than soba, since we all know that’s a deal-breaker.” basically this joke derives a good 60% of its humor from the fact that Shouto just loves soba THAT damn much. and Kacchan is obviously WELL aware of this fact because, as we all know, he and Shouto are actually best friends.

4. quick side note, this is also a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it callback to chapter 164, which featured this hilarious interchange between Shouto and his OTHER best friend.

thus adding the additional meta layer that Shouto actually does canonically consider people who like udon to be FUNDAMENTALLY INCOMPATIBLE WITH HIM AS PEOPLE lmao. and Katsuki knows this because he was listening in on that whole conversation and bitching about the two of them being total weirdos! but ALSO he was apparently filing notes away in the back of his big hero brain because he loves Todo actually, so yeah. love it when a scene in a newer chapter retroactively makes a scene from an old chapter even better.

5. lest you worry that Kacchan is back to his OLD VILLAINOUS BULLYING WAYS by poking fun at poor sweet innocent Shouto here, let’s now talk about the ways in which this joke is also a sick burn on Touya! because that of course is the other 40% of the joke! if Shouto’s favorite food is soba, then OBVIOUSLY Touya’s favorite food is going to be the complete opposite of that, because Touya is the worst! just the absolute worst. man fuck that guy!

so there are a couple of additional layers to this part. the first is that Katsuki is very much aware of the delicate balance that needs to be struck here. because he genuinely, unironically DOES know Shouto pretty damn well by now, and so he understands how conflicted Shouto is about his brother. and because he’s a good friend, he’s supportive of Shouto’s desire to somehow redeem Touya if at all possible. and so instead of going all in on how Touya is a founding member of the final villains club WHO BRAGGED ABOUT KILLING THIRTY PEOPLE and who also KIDNAPPED HIM THAT ONE TIME, the worst thing that Kacchan accuses him of here is... having a different favorite food than Shouto. this is basically the gentlest, mildest “fuck that guy” that anyone could have possibly given here.

and then the second bonus layer is that Katsuki is very clearly taking Shouto’s side here. that’s the only possible way for this joke to land. the humor works because Katsuki takes the mundane accusation of liking hot udon, and twists it into a sick fucking burn, because ONLY AN UNHINGED LUNATIC WOULD DARE TO LIKE SUCH A COMPLETELY OPPOSITE FOOD FROM COLD SOBA, THE BELOVED FAVORITE FOOD OF TODOROKI SHOUTO. in other words, if you don’t like Todoroki Shouto’s favorite food, then FUCK YOU! Team Soba all the way! so yeah, it has that connotation too, which is actually very sweet.

6. last but not least, I just want to take a moment to gush about how this was all just perfectly executed and timed. Shouto sets him up for it, and Kacchan pounces on the opportunity without hesitation and delivers the perfect response, which immediately relieves some of the quiet tension in the room, and honest to god actually makes Shouto laugh.

sort of! that was a chuckle at least! it counts!! anyways the point is, Katsuki read the room perfectly and understood that Shouto was trying to lighten the mood and didn’t want to have a heavy conversation about all of his feelings right now (which is something that Katsuki understands very well), so he followed Shouto’s lead and met him at that level, while still managing to communicate (1) “I know how conflicted you are about all of this”, (2) “I’ve got your back”, and most importantly, (3) “we are friends, and I care about you and support you in all things, you big soba loving freak.” it’s affectionate, it’s heartwarming, and it’s genuinely funny as hell.

anyway so yeah, that’s my RIDICULOUSLY, UNJUSTIFIABLY LONG post about what has instantly become one of my all time favorite little throwaway BnHA moments, right up there with the legendary “hey Kacchan!” scene. Kacchan being friends with people. Shouto getting some much-deserved love. Iida and Kirishima being there too, and presumably smiling and taking notes and maybe one day they can tell their children about this. that’s what it’s all about folks.

#bnha 342 #todoroki shouto #bakugou katsuki #bakugou meta #shouto meta #todobaku #todobaku meta #bnha meta #bnha #boku no hero academia #bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #bnha manga spoilers #makeste reads bnha #long post #PLEASE ENJOY THIS LONG META POST ABOUT A CHAPTER EVERYONE ELSE READ TEN WHOLE MONTHS AGO #1k+ words all about BAKUGOU'S DUMB UDON JOKE #heck yeah

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kirascottage · 3 years ago

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dating jj maybank

jj maybank x gender neutral. reader

word count: 1.8k

cw: headcanons, overall domestic fluff, angst if you squint till ur visions blurry, mentions of poor emotional expression, mentions of sex / sexual innuendos, mentions of fighting / injury, strong pda, kissing, consensual groping, swearing, soft!jj

okay so this is the first time i’ve ever written dating headcanons so i’m gonna try my best

• jj and expressing emotions are a very complicated duo and almost everyone knows it, including you. he knows how he feels for you, and feels it strongly, but the way it comes out of his mouth is like gibberish and completely not understandable.

“so you know — like — i don’t know, man. i feel heavy for you, like do you feel heavy for me, too?”

“jj, i don’t even know what heavy means in this context and what you’re referring to.”

• but he comes from a good place, and you come to know, learn and love that, because well he loves you, and with jj you just have to infer by his mess of words.

• this boy tries to be as romantic as possible but he’s literally never had a s/o before. the only thing he knows are one nighters so there is a lot that pope and john b advise him on because miscommunication is quite literally the worst. (stated by john b himself)

• for this instance and the sake of the headcanons: you are a member of the pogues, through and through.

• so most of the time you’re together, the pogues are there too. even dates. they love to occupy and jj could shout at the top of his lungs how they are the biggest cock-blockers to ever exist and they would not care.

• so at that point he doesn’t even try to keep his hands to himself, he will touch you or quite literally make out with you in front of anyone and everyone he can.

• i mean he can get a little protective. (also considering he would never let you around his dad because he wants to protect you and would never let you near anyone that could hurt you)

• i mean this guy would fight for you till the very end; punches thrown countless of times and harsh words absolutely shouted more times than you could count on your fingers, but no matter how many times you chastise jj, he would never stop to defend your honour because at the end of the night you’re the one playing with his hair and kissing his cuts and bruises.

• especially after everything as well with rafe, topper and the kooks he just wants everyone (including the tourons you see once a millennium) to know that you and him are romantically involved and you are very much taken.

• he even lets the most irrelevant people know the both of you are dating because he loves you that much:

“okay, babe, here me out—”

“jj a whole group of kids just asked me about our relationship! i love you, but the whole population does not need to know that we’re together.”

“obviously we can't tell the whole population! or I would, duh.”

• even though he could blabber on about everything about you, including what shampoo you use and which perfume of yours is his favourite, affection is more his style:

• this includes walking around with his hand in your back pocket because wearing anything but jean shorts is really not an option in that heat, (and this does include ass grabbing at every opportunity he can)—

• — his hand gently placed on your thigh while driving / while he’s next to you, interlocking pinkies 98% of the time as you walk together —

• — and peppering kisses is always happening. whether they’re ticking at your checks, suffocating your neck or affectionately placed on your forehead he’s always kissing you.

• other key, and essential, things that come to mind are that his arm is always around you; after everything that’s happened to him he just needs to physically know you’re there and that’s enough to subdue him.

• it’s almost routine for him arm to go around your waist or your shoulder, whether you’re tall or short, tbh he doesn’t really care, his arms and lips are always on you.

• dating jj is dating a teenage boy with absolutely no impulse control and zero control over what he says—

“I mean, dude, if you think about it, why isn’t a banana called a yellow if an orange is called an orange? and why are phones called ‘telephones’ like who the fuck came up with that crap?”

“i mean, hey, we could bang out here and it’s not like anyone would know. like jb could be out in the living room and be like clueless.”

“jj, there’s two windows pointing directly at us. i think he would know.”

• —if you don’t understand then he definitely does not either.

• you also flip each other off a lot and people are like ??? but you both are like — fuck you —(affectionate & full of love with my middle fingers)

• one thing he does know is how to flatter you, whether he’s obnoxiously winking at you or bringing you flowers with his tips from work, or he picked them himself, it’s all in the effort.

• any effort from you is like kids getting their favourite toy they’ve been wanting on christmas, for instance: anytime you bring him food, or offer to stay with him at john b’s is like swelling up his heart to the maximum.

• so when he’s not with you, or the pogues, which is rare he is outside. and jj is like diego the explorer he always finds little places just for himself, or for this instance with you.

• so a lot of dates include going to these secluded spots: sometimes it’s a picnic, or a walk, and stargazing is his absolute favourite as he listens to you drone on about the constellations and even just watching the sky with your presence next to him is so comforting and makes him feel safe.

• of course when the pogues find out they’re brutal with their teasing.

“awww, look at the cute and happy couple!”

“my wittle babies, growing up so fast.”

“god, kie, you make it sound like we’re five?!”

• speaking of alone time, jj loves to cuddle when you guys are alone and that’s one thing he’s not fond of being teased about.

• his head is firm on your chest, his arms wrapped around your waist and his leg flung over your hips. to him it’s just a perfect way to start and end the day.

• he also loves to watch movies while cuddling and he has a set of movies and their genres completely memorized for the occasion.

• he has such a good memory to the weirdest things. like he can state in the exact order your makeup routine, or talk about all the caves and sinkholes in yukatan but ask him how many states there are in america and he’s completely bummed.

• back to what i was saying, cuddling and movie times together.

• he’s the little spoon i will not argue with anyone about this, especially if something happened that day.

• like if rafe pissed him off, some kooks stepped on his toes, his dad had been particularly agitated that day or he was just frustrated. your embrace is what keeps his together. he just loves the feeling of your arms around him, essentially protecting him.

• and the pogues always get a kick out of it when they see you too snuggled in the morning. they even take pictures, a lot of pictures of everything and anything they can.

• their fav times to take pictures is when you both are off guard: like when he’s putting his hat on you, he’s sharing his juul with you, you guys are laying together on the boat or maybe your surfing together in the water.

• he’s surprisingly intimate about everything even though they’re such mundane things for him.

• he expresses his love for you by actions rather than words. for example, he has a guitar (an absolutely beat up one with missing strings and chipped wood, but he says it has more character that way as well as your signature on the back of it)—

• —and just strums it for you absolutely whenever and however your mood is because no matter what its always calming. sometimes he even hums a little tune or starts singing a bit.

• another few ways he depicts his love for you is by shoving his baseball hat on your head (the one that absolutely nobody is allowed to wear) because he doesn’t want you frying in the sun or dying of heatstroke.

• a lot of his tank tops are now yours because they’re so comfortable and you can wear them literally anywhere.

• he shares, only with you but, he shares. his rings are on your fingers, his bandana is around your neck, his boxers are your sleep shorts, and he absolutely eats that shit up.

• he also gets extremely comfortable with you, like even more than john b in a way. example: you could just be chilling, his arm wrapped around your neck and — boom — he’s shoving your face in his armpit and trying to tickle you.

• it gets to the point where the pogues are so used to it and sometimes even they join in because they even like being included in on your affections but would absolutely rather drown than admit it. they love watching their two best friends love grow for each other, and they're happy jj has found sanctuary to love and be with someone freely.

• speaking of love, jj is also like a puppy: praise, reassurance and kisses are the way to his heart and staying there.

• i’m gonna say it, jj has self confidence and love issues. they are not detectable at all but with his mother gone and the way his father treated him, there’s shit buried in his heart that it takes awhile for him to open up about.

• once he does: he cries, and he cried a lot. but after that it was like never letting go again. he trusts you with his whole heart and soul and he knows you won’t take advantage of that.

• the way you both accept each other into each others lives is so important to him no matter where you live, who you are and what your family is like everything counts for him and that just makes you the person who you are.

• dating jj can be complicated and messy and wonderful and passionate and relationships aren’t easy but he would def be worth it <3

#jj maybank x routledge!reader #jj maybank x pogue!reader #jj maybank x kook!reader #jj maybank x plus size reader #jj maybank x oc #jj maybank x y/n #jj maybank x you #jj maybank fanfiction #jj maybank x reader #jj maybank #jj maybank fluff #jj maybank fic #jj maybank hc #jj maybank headcanon #outerbanks fic #outerbanks smut #outerbanks fanfiction #outer banks

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qqueenofhades · 3 years ago

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The Green Knight and Medieval Metatextuality: An Essay

Right, so. Finally watched it last night, and I’ve been thinking about it literally ever since, except for the part where I was asleep. As I said to fellow medievalist and admirer of Dev Patel @oldshrewsburyian, it’s possibly the most fascinating piece of medieval-inspired media that I’ve seen in ages, and how refreshing to have something in this genre that actually rewards critical thought and deep analysis, rather than me just fulminating fruitlessly about how popular media thinks that slapping blood, filth, and misogyny onto some swords and castles is “historically accurate.” I read a review of TGK somewhere that described it as the anti-Game of Thrones, and I’m inclined to think that’s accurate. I didn’t agree with all of the film’s tonal, thematic, or interpretative choices, but I found them consistently stylish, compelling, and subversive in ways both small and large, and I’m gonna have to write about it or I’ll go crazy. So. Brace yourselves.

(Note: My PhD is in medieval history, not medieval literature, and I haven’t worked on SGGK specifically, but I am familiar with it, its general cultural context, and the historical influences, images, and debates that both the poem and the film referenced and drew upon, so that’s where this meta is coming from.)

First, obviously, while the film is not a straight-up text-to-screen version of the poem (though it is by and large relatively faithful), it is a multi-layered meta-text that comments on the original Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the archetypes of chivalric literature as a whole, modern expectations for medieval films, the hero’s journey, the requirements of being an “honorable knight,” and the nature of death, fate, magic, and religion, just to name a few. Given that the Arthurian legendarium, otherwise known as the Matter of Britain, was written and rewritten over several centuries by countless authors, drawing on and changing and hybridizing interpretations that sometimes challenged or outright contradicted earlier versions, it makes sense for the film to chart its own path and make its own adaptational decisions as part of this multivalent, multivocal literary canon. Sir Gawain himself is a canonically and textually inconsistent figure; in the movie, the characters merrily pronounce his name in several different ways, most notably as Sean Harris/King Arthur’s somewhat inexplicable “Garr-win.” He might be a man without a consistent identity, but that’s pointed out within the film itself. What has he done to define himself, aside from being the king’s nephew? Is his quixotic quest for the Green Knight actually going to resolve the question of his identity and his honor – and if so, is it even going to matter, given that successful completion of the “game” seemingly equates with death?

Likewise, as the anti-Game of Thrones, the film is deliberately and sometimes maddeningly non-commercial. For an adaptation coming from a studio known primarily for horror, it almost completely eschews the cliché that gory bloodshed equals authentic medievalism; the only graphic scene is the Green Knight’s original beheading. The violence is only hinted at, subtextual, suspenseful; it is kept out of sight, around the corner, never entirely played out or resolved. In other words, if anyone came in thinking that they were going to watch Dev Patel luridly swashbuckle his way through some CGI monsters like bad Beowulf adaptations of yore, they were swiftly disappointed. In fact, he seems to spend most of his time being wet, sad, and failing to meet the moment at hand (with a few important exceptions).

The film unhurriedly evokes a medieval setting that is both surreal and defiantly non-historical. We travel (in roughly chronological order) from Anglo-Saxon huts to Romanesque halls to high-Gothic cathedrals to Tudor villages and half-timbered houses, culminating in the eerie neo-Renaissance splendor of the Lord and Lady’s hall, before returning to the ancient trees of the Green Chapel and its immortal occupant: everything that has come before has now returned to dust. We have been removed even from imagined time and place and into a moment where it ceases to function altogether. We move forward, backward, and sideways, as Gawain experiences past, present, and future in unison. He is dislocated from his own sense of himself, just as we, the viewers, are dislocated from our sense of what is the “true” reality or filmic narrative; what we think is real turns out not to be the case at all. If, of course, such a thing even exists at all.

This visual evocation of the entire medieval era also creates a setting that, unlike GOT, takes pride in rejecting absolutely all political context or Machiavellian maneuvering. The film acknowledges its own cultural ubiquity and the question of whether we really need yet another King Arthur adaptation: none of the characters aside from Gawain himself are credited by name. We all know it’s Arthur, but he’s listed only as “king.” We know the spooky druid-like old man with the white beard is Merlin, but it’s never required to spell it out. The film gestures at our pre-existing understanding; it relies on us to fill in the gaps, cuing us to collaboratively produce the story with it, positioning us as listeners as if we were gathered to hear the original poem. Just like fanfiction, it knows that it doesn’t need to waste time introducing every single character or filling in ultimately unnecessary background knowledge, when the audience can be relied upon to bring their own.

As for that, the film explicitly frames itself as a “filmed adaptation of the chivalric romance” in its opening credits, and continues to play with textual referents and cues throughout: telling us where we are, what’s happening, or what’s coming next, rather like the rubrics or headings within a medieval manuscript. As noted, its historical/architectural references span the entire medieval European world, as does its costume design. I was particularly struck by the fact that Arthur and Guinevere’s crowns resemble those from illuminated monastic manuscripts or Eastern Orthodox iconography: they are both crown and halo, they confer an air of both secular kingship and religious sanctity. The question in the film’s imagined epilogue thus becomes one familiar to Shakespeare’s Henry V: heavy is the head that wears the crown. Does Gawain want to earn his uncle’s crown, take over his place as king, bear the fate of Camelot, become a great ruler, a husband and father in ways that even Arthur never did, only to see it all brought to dust by his cowardice, his reliance on unscrupulous sorcery, and his unfulfilled promise to the Green Knight? Is it better to have that entire life and then lose it, or to make the right choice now, even if it means death?

Likewise, Arthur’s kingly mantle is Byzantine in inspiration, as is the icon of the Virgin Mary-as-Theotokos painted on Gawain’s shield (which we see broken apart during the attack by the scavengers). The film only glances at its religious themes rather than harping on them explicitly; we do have the cliché scene of the male churchmen praying for Gawain’s safety, opposite Gawain’s mother and her female attendants working witchcraft to protect him. (When oh when will I get my film that treats medieval magic and medieval religion as the complementary and co-existing epistemological systems that they were, rather than portraying them as diametrically binary and disparagingly gendered opposites?) But despite the interim setbacks borne from the failure of Christian icons, the overall resolution of the film could serve as the culmination of a medieval Christian morality tale: Gawain can buy himself a great future in the short term if he relies on the protection of the enchanted green belt to avoid the Green Knight’s killing stroke, but then he will have to watch it all crumble until he is sitting alone in his own hall, his children dead and his kingdom destroyed, as a headless corpse who only now has been brave enough to accept his proper fate. By removing the belt from his person in the film’s Inception-like final scene, he relinquishes the taint of black magic and regains his religious honor, even at the likely cost of death. That, the medieval Christian morality tale would agree, is the correct course of action.

Gawain’s encounter with St. Winifred likewise presents a more subtle vision of medieval Christianity. Winifred was an eighth-century Welsh saint known for being beheaded, after which (by the power of another saint) her head was miraculously restored to her body and she went on to live a long and holy life. It doesn’t quite work that way in TGK. (St Winifred’s Well is mentioned in the original SGGK, but as far as I recall, Gawain doesn’t meet the saint in person.) In the film, Gawain encounters Winifred’s lifelike apparition, who begs him to dive into the mere and retrieve her head (despite appearances, she warns him, it is not attached to her body). This fits into the pattern of medieval ghost stories, where the dead often return to entreat the living to help them finish their business; they must be heeded, but when they are encountered in places they shouldn’t be, they must be put back into their proper physical space and reminded of their real fate. Gawain doesn’t follow William of Newburgh’s practical recommendation to just fetch some brawny young men with shovels to beat the wandering corpse back into its grave. Instead, in one of his few moments of unqualified heroism, he dives into the dark water and retrieves Winifred’s skull from the bottom of the lake. Then when he returns to the house, he finds the rest of her skeleton lying in the bed where he was earlier sleeping, and carefully reunites the skull with its body, finally allowing it to rest in peace.

However, Gawain’s involvement with Winifred doesn’t end there. The fox that he sees on the bank after emerging with her skull, who then accompanies him for the rest of the film, is strongly implied to be her spirit, or at least a companion that she has sent for him. Gawain has handled a saint’s holy bones; her relics, which were well known to grant protection in the medieval world. He has done the saint a service, and in return, she extends her favor to him. At the end of the film, the fox finally speaks in a human voice, warning him not to proceed to the fateful final encounter with the Green Knight; it will mean his death. The symbolism of having a beheaded saint serve as Gawain’s guide and protector is obvious, since it is the fate that may or may not lie in store for him. As I said, the ending is Inception-like in that it steadfastly refuses to tell you if the hero is alive (or will live) or dead (or will die). In the original SGGK, of course, the Green Knight and the Lord turn out to be the same person, Gawain survives, it was all just a test of chivalric will and honor, and a trap put together by Morgan Le Fay in an attempt to frighten Guinevere. It’s essentially able to be laughed off: a game, an adventure, not real. TGK takes this paradigm and flips it (to speak…) on its head.

Gawain’s rescue of Winifred’s head also rewards him in more immediate terms: his/the Green Knight’s axe, stolen by the scavengers, is miraculously restored to him in her cottage, immediately and concretely demonstrating the virtue of his actions. This is one of the points where the film most stubbornly resists modern storytelling conventions: it simply refuses to add in any kind of “rational” or “empirical” explanation of how else it got there, aside from the grace and intercession of the saint. This is indeed how it works in medieval hagiography: things simply reappear, are returned, reattached, repaired, made whole again, and Gawain’s lost weapon is thus restored, symbolizing that he has passed the test and is worthy to continue with the quest. The film’s narrative is not modernizing its underlying medieval logic here, and it doesn’t particularly care if a modern audience finds it “convincing” or not. As noted, the film never makes any attempt to temporalize or localize itself; it exists in a determinedly surrealist and ahistorical landscape, where naked female giants who look suspiciously like Tilda Swinton roam across the wild with no necessary explanation. While this might be frustrating for some people, I actually found it a huge relief that a clearly fantastic and fictional literary adaptation was not acting like it was qualified to teach “real history” to its audience. Nobody would come out of TGK thinking that they had seen the “actual” medieval world, and since we have enough of a problem with that sort of thing thanks to GOT, I for one welcome the creation of a medieval imaginative space that embraces its eccentric and unrealistic elements, rather than trying to fit them into the Real Life box.

This plays into the fact that the film, like a reused medieval manuscript containing more than one text, is a palimpsest: for one, it audaciously rewrites the entire Arthurian canon in the wordless vision of Gawain’s life after escaping the Green Knight (I could write another meta on that dream-epilogue alone). It moves fluidly through time and creates alternate universes in at least two major points: one, the scene where Gawain is tied up and abandoned by the scavengers and that long circling shot reveals his skeletal corpse rotting on the sward, only to return to our original universe as Gawain decides that he doesn’t want that fate, and two, Gawain as King. In this alternate ending, Arthur doesn’t die in battle with Mordred, but peaceably in bed, having anointed his worthy nephew as his heir. Gawain becomes king, has children, gets married, governs Camelot, becomes a ruler surpassing even Arthur, but then watches his son get killed in battle, his subjects turn on him, and his family vanish into the dust of his broken hall before he himself, in despair, pulls the enchanted scarf out of his clothing and succumbs to his fate.

In this version, Gawain takes on the responsibility for the fall of Camelot, not Arthur. This is the hero’s burden, but he’s obtained it dishonorably, by cheating. It is a vivid but mimetic future which Gawain (to all appearances) ultimately rejects, returning the film to the realm of traditional Arthurian canon – but not quite. After all, if Gawain does get beheaded after that final fade to black, it would represent a significant alteration from the poem and the character’s usual arc. Are we back in traditional canon or aren’t we? Did Gawain reject that future or didn’t he? Do all these alterities still exist within the visual medium of the meta-text, and have any of them been definitely foreclosed?

Furthermore, the film interrogates itself and its own tropes in explicit and overt ways. In Gawain’s conversation with the Lord, the Lord poses the question that many members of the audience might have: is Gawain going to carry out this potentially pointless and suicidal quest and then be an honorable hero, just like that? What is he actually getting by staggering through assorted Irish bogs and seeming to reject, rather than embrace, the paradigms of a proper quest and that of an honorable knight? He lies about being a knight to the scavengers, clearly out of fear, and ends up cravenly bound and robbed rather than fighting back. He denies knowing anything about love to the Lady (played by Alicia Vikander, who also plays his lover at the start of the film with a decidedly ropey Yorkshire accent, sorry to say). He seems to shrink from the responsibility thrust on him, rather than rise to meet it (his only honorable act, retrieving Winifred’s head, is discussed above) and yet here he still is, plugging away. Why is he doing this? What does he really stand to gain, other than accepting a choice and its consequences (somewhat?) The film raises these questions, but it has no plans to answer them. It’s going to leave you to think about them for yourself, and it isn’t going to spoon-feed you any ultimate moral or neat resolution. In this interchange, it’s easy to see both the echoes of a formal dialogue between two speakers (a favored medieval didactic tactic) and the broader purpose of chivalric literature: to interrogate what it actually means to be a knight, how personal honor is generated, acquired, and increased, and whether engaging in these pointless and bloody “war games” is actually any kind of real path to lasting glory.

The film’s treatment of race, gender, and queerness obviously also merits comment. By casting Dev Patel, an Indian-born actor, as an Arthurian hero, the film is… actually being quite accurate to the original legends, doubtless much to the disappointment of assorted internet racists. The thirteenth-century Arthurian romance Parzival (Percival) by the German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach notably features the character of Percival’s mixed-race half-brother, Feirefiz, son of their father by his first marriage to a Muslim princess. Feirefiz is just as heroic as Percival (Gawaine, for the record, also plays a major role in the story) and assists in the quest for the Holy Grail, though it takes his conversion to Christianity for him to properly behold it.

By introducing Patel (and Sarita Chowdhury as Morgause) to the visual representation of Arthuriana, the film quietly does away with the “white Middle Ages” cliché that I have complained about ad nauseam; we see background Asian and black members of Camelot, who just exist there without having to conjure up some complicated rationale to explain their presence. The Lady also uses a camera obscura to make Gawain’s portrait. Contrary to those who might howl about anachronism, this technique was known in China as early as the fourth century BCE and the tenth/eleventh century Islamic scholar Ibn al-Haytham was probably the best-known medieval authority to write on it extensively; Latin translations of his work inspired European scientists from Roger Bacon to Leonardo da Vinci. Aside from the symbolism of an upside-down Gawain (and when he sees the portrait again during the ‘fall of Camelot’, it is right-side-up, representing that Gawain himself is in an upside-down world), this presents a subtle challenge to the prevailing Eurocentric imagination of the medieval world, and draws on other global influences.

As for gender, we have briefly touched on it above; in the original SGGK, Gawain’s entire journey is revealed to be just a cruel trick of Morgan Le Fay, simply trying to destabilize Arthur’s court and upset his queen. (Morgan is the old blindfolded woman who appears in the Lord and Lady’s castle and briefly approaches Gawain, but her identity is never explicitly spelled out.) This is, obviously, an implicitly misogynistic setup: an evil woman plays a trick on honorable men for the purpose of upsetting another woman, the honorable men overcome it, the hero survives, and everyone presumably lives happily ever after (at least until Mordred arrives).

Instead, by plunging the outcome into doubt and the hero into a much darker and more fallible moral universe, TGK shifts the blame for Gawain’s adventure and ultimate fate from Morgan to Gawain himself. Likewise, Guinevere is not the passive recipient of an evil deception but in a way, the catalyst for the whole thing. She breaks the seal on the Green Knight’s message with a weighty snap; she becomes the oracle who reads it out, she is alarming rather than alarmed, she disrupts the complacency of the court and silently shows up all the other knights who refuse to step forward and answer the Green Knight’s challenge. Gawain is not given the ontological reassurance that it’s just a practical joke and he’s going to be fine (and thanks to the unresolved ending, neither are we). The film instead takes the concept at face value in order to push the envelope and ask the simple question: if a man was going to be actually-for-real beheaded in a year, why would he set out on a suicidal quest? Would you, in Gawain’s place, make the same decision to cast aside the enchanted belt and accept your fate? Has he made his name, will he be remembered well? What is his legacy?

Indeed, if there is any hint of feminine connivance and manipulation, it arrives in the form of the implication that Gawain’s mother has deliberately summoned the Green Knight to test her son, prove his worth, and position him as his childless uncle’s heir; she gives him the protective belt to make sure he won’t actually die, and her intention all along was for the future shown in the epilogue to truly play out (minus the collapse of Camelot). Only Gawain loses the belt thanks to his cowardice in the encounter with the scavengers, regains it in a somewhat underhanded and morally questionable way when the Lady is attempting to seduce him, and by ultimately rejecting it altogether and submitting to his uncertain fate, totally mucks up his mother’s painstaking dynastic plans for his future. In this reading, Gawain could be king, and his mother’s efforts are meant to achieve that goal, rather than thwart it. He is thus required to shoulder his own responsibility for this outcome, rather than conveniently pawning it off on an “evil woman,” and by extension, the film asks the question: What would the world be like if men, especially those who make war on others as a way of life, were actually forced to face the consequences of their reckless and violent actions? Is it actually a “game” in any sense of the word, especially when chivalric literature is constantly preoccupied with the question of how much glorious violence is too much glorious violence? If you structure social prestige for the king and the noble male elite entirely around winning battles and existing in a state of perpetual war, when does that begin to backfire and devour the knightly class – and the rest of society – instead?

This leads into the central theme of Gawain’s relationships with the Lord and Lady, and how they’re treated in the film. The poem has been repeatedly studied in terms of its latent (and sometimes… less than latent) queer subtext: when the Lord asks Gawain to pay back to him whatever he should receive from his wife, does he already know what this involves; i.e. a physical and romantic encounter? When the Lady gives kisses to Gawain, which he is then obliged to return to the Lord as a condition of the agreement, is this all part of a dastardly plot to seduce him into a kinky green-themed threesome with a probably-not-human married couple looking to spice up their sex life? Why do we read the Lady’s kisses to Gawain as romantic but Gawain’s kisses to the Lord as filial, fraternal, or the standard “kiss of peace” exchanged between a liege lord and his vassal? Is Gawain simply being a dutiful guest by honoring the bargain with his host, actually just kissing the Lady again via the proxy of her husband, or somewhat more into this whole thing with the Lord than he (or the poet) would like to admit? Is the homosocial turning homoerotic, and how is Gawain going to navigate this tension and temptation?

If the question is never resolved: well, welcome to one of the central medieval anxieties about chivalry, knighthood, and male bonds! As I have written about before, medieval society needed to simultaneously exalt this as the most honored and noble form of love, and make sure it didn’t accidentally turn sexual (once again: how much male love is too much male love?). Does the poem raise the possibility of serious disruption to the dominant heteronormative paradigm, only to solve the problem by interpreting the Gawain/Lady male/female kisses as romantic and sexual and the Gawain/Lord male/male kisses as chaste and formal? In other words, acknowledging the underlying anxiety of possible homoeroticism but ultimately reasserting the heterosexual norm? The answer: Probably?!?! Maybe?!?! Hell if we know??! To say the least, this has been argued over to no end, and if you locked a lot of medieval history/literature scholars into a room and told them that they couldn’t come out until they decided on one clear answer, they would be in there for a very long time. The poem seemingly invokes the possibility of a queer reading only to reject it – but once again, as in the question of which canon we end up in at the film’s end, does it?

In some lights, the film’s treatment of this potential queer reading comes off like a cop-out: there is only one kiss between Gawain and the Lord, and it is something that the Lord has to initiate after Gawain has already fled the hall. Gawain himself appears to reject it; he tells the Lord to let go of him and runs off into the wilderness, rather than deal with or accept whatever has been suggested to him. However, this fits with film!Gawain’s pattern of rejecting that which fundamentally makes him who he is; like Peter in the Bible, he has now denied the truth three times. With the scavengers he denies being a knight; with the Lady he denies knowing about courtly love; with the Lord he denies the central bond of brotherhood with his fellows, whether homosocial or homoerotic in nature. I would go so far as to argue that if Gawain does die at the end of the film, it is this rejected kiss which truly seals his fate. In the poem, the Lord and the Green Knight are revealed to be the same person; in the film, it’s not clear if that’s the case, or they are separate characters, even if thematically interrelated. If we assume, however, that the Lord is in fact still the human form of the Green Knight, then Gawain has rejected both his kiss of peace (the standard gesture of protection offered from lord to vassal) and any deeper emotional bond that it can be read to signify. The Green Knight could decide to spare Gawain in recognition of the courage he has shown in relinquishing the enchanted belt – or he could just as easily decide to kill him, which he is legally free to do since Gawain has symbolically rejected the offer of brotherhood, vassalage, or knight-bonding by his unwise denial of the Lord’s freely given kiss. Once again, the film raises the overall thematic and moral question and then doesn’t give one straight (ahem) answer. As with the medieval anxieties and chivalric texts that it is based on, it invokes the specter of queerness and then doesn’t neatly resolve it. As a modern audience, we find this unsatisfying, but once again, the film is refusing to conform to our expectations.

As has been said before, there is so much kissing between men in medieval contexts, both ceremonial and otherwise, that we’re left to wonder: “is it gay or is it feudalism?” Is there an overtly erotic element in Gawain and the Green Knight’s mutual “beheading” of each other (especially since in the original version, this frees the Lord from his curse, functioning like a true love’s kiss in a fairytale). While it is certainly possible to argue that the film has “straightwashed” its subject material by removing the entire sequence of kisses between Gawain and the Lord and the unresolved motives for their existence, it is a fairly accurate, if condensed, representation of the anxieties around medieval knightly bonds and whether, as Carolyn Dinshaw put it, a (male/male) “kiss is just a kiss.” After all, the kiss between Gawain and the Lady is uncomplicatedly read as sexual/romantic, and that context doesn’t go away when Gawain is kissing the Lord instead. Just as with its multiple futurities, the film leaves the question open-ended. Is it that third and final denial that seals Gawain’s fate, and if so, is it asking us to reflect on why, specifically, he does so?

The film could play with both this question and its overall tone quite a bit more: it sometimes comes off as a grim, wooden, over-directed Shakespearean tragedy, rather than incorporating the lively and irreverent tone that the poem often takes. It’s almost totally devoid of humor, which is unfortunate, and the Grim Middle Ages aesthetic is in definite evidence. Nonetheless, because of the comprehensive de-historicizing and the obvious lack of effort to claim the film as any sort of authentic representation of the medieval past, it works. We are not meant to understand this as a historical document, and so we have to treat it on its terms, by its own logic, and by its own frames of reference. In some ways, its consistent opacity and its refusal to abide by modern rules and common narrative conventions is deliberately meant to challenge us: as before, when we recognize Arthur, Merlin, the Round Table, and the other stock characters because we know them already and not because the film tells us so, we have to fill in the gaps ourselves. We are watching the film not because it tells us a simple adventure story – there is, as noted, shockingly little action overall – but because we have to piece together the metatext independently and ponder the philosophical questions that it leaves us with. What conclusion do we reach? What canon do we settle in? What future or resolution is ultimately made real? That, the film says, it can’t decide for us. As ever, it is up to future generations to carry on the story, and decide how, if at all, it is going to survive.

(And to close, I desperately want them to make my much-coveted Bisclavret adaptation now in more or less the same style, albeit with some tweaks. Please.)

Further Reading

Ailes, Marianne J. ‘The Medieval Male Couple and the Language of Homosociality’, in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. by Dawn M. Hadley (Harlow: Longman, 1999), pp. 214–37.

Ashton, Gail. ‘The Perverse Dynamics of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 15 (2005), 51–74.

Boyd, David L. ‘Sodomy, Misogyny, and Displacement: Occluding Queer Desire in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Arthuriana 8 (1998), 77–113.

Busse, Peter. ‘The Poet as Spouse of his Patron: Homoerotic Love in Medieval Welsh and Irish Poetry?’, Studi Celtici 2 (2003), 175–92.

Dinshaw, Carolyn. ‘A Kiss Is Just a Kiss: Heterosexuality and Its Consolations in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, Diacritics 24 (1994), 205–226.

Kocher, Suzanne. ‘Gay Knights in Medieval French Fiction: Constructs of Queerness and Non-Transgression’, Mediaevalia 29 (2008), 51–66.

Karras, Ruth Mazo. ‘Knighthood, Compulsory Heterosexuality, and Sodomy’ in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 273–86.

Kuefler, Matthew. ‘Male Friendship and the Suspicion of Sodomy in Twelfth-Century France’, in The Boswell Thesis: Essays on Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality, ed. Matthew Kuefler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), pp. 179–214.

McVitty, E. Amanda, ‘False Knights and True Men: Contesting Chivalric Masculinity in English Treason Trials, 1388–1415,’ Journal of Medieval History 40 (2014), 458–77.

Mieszkowski, Gretchen. ‘The Prose Lancelot's Galehot, Malory's Lavain, and the Queering of Late Medieval Literature’, Arthuriana 5 (1995), 21–51.

Moss, Rachel E. ‘ “And much more I am soryat for my good knyghts’ ”: Fainting, Homosociality, and Elite Male Culture in Middle English Romance’, Historical Reflections / Réflexions historiques 42 (2016), 101–13.

Zeikowitz, Richard E. ‘Befriending the Medieval Queer: A Pedagogy for Literature Classes’, College English 65 (2002), 67–80.

#the green knight #the green knight meta #sir gawain and the green knight #medieval literature #medieval history #this meta is goddamn 5.2k words #and has its own reading list #i uh #said i had a lot of thoughts?

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blueskittlesart · 2 years ago

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So I just started Genshin Impact cause of your blog. I'm a bit confused by some of the lore. Wanna lore dump about Genshin???

ok im going to extensively spoiler-mark this so do NOT go past parts you haven't played through yet. the lore of genshin is arranged so that most of it you learn slowly through story quests. if you want to experience it as intended, don't read past quests you haven't played through yet! Also i genuinely tried to keep this as brief and barebones as physically possible but the google doc i wrote it in is seven pages long. So. brace yourself.

NOTE. for the purposes of this explanation, the sibling you choose in the opening cutscene will be referred to as "playable sibling/PS" and the sibling who disappears as a result of that choice as "abyss sibling/AS." keep this in mind

SO. opening of the game. playable and abyss are introduced to us as twin travelers who came from "beyond the stars," meaning they did not originate from teyvat (the world which genshin takes place in). they somehow enter teyvat, and as they are about to leave and move on to the "next world" (whatever that may mean) they are stopped by an unknown figure that calls themself "the sustainer of heavenly principles." (for simplicity, heavenly principles/HP) this figure blocks their exit from teyvat, captures AS and sends PS crashing down to earth. In the next scene we see, PS tells paimon (who they have supposedly recently fished out of a lake???) that HP cast them down to the surface of teyvat and they haven't seen their sibling since. their ultimate goal as stated at this point is to find their sibling and leave teyvat together.

PS begins their journey through teyvat in mondstadt. Paimon explains to them that teyvat is made up of seven nations, each with a different god, called an archon, governing the nation. Each god has a specific guiding principle and an element associated with them, for a total of 7 elements and archons for 7 nations. (these 7 elements also make up the combat system of the game, which i will not go into bc i dont hate myself.) there are also people in these nations who have been granted “visions” by the archons, which are physical objects that allow them to control a specific element. For whatever reason, PS discovers that by “resonating” with the different statues of mondstadt’s archons in the different nations, they can also control these elements despite not having a vision.

Anyways, Mondstadt's archon is called barbatos, and his element is anemo (wind.) the governing principle of barbatos, and by extension mondstadt, is freedom. Paimon suggests that PS should attempt to find barbatos, and eventually the gods of the other 6 nations, because they believe the HP to be a god and therefore think that other gods will likely have information on them.

SPOILERS: MONDSTADT ARCHON QUEST

PS and paimon travel to mondstadt. I’m actually going to skip a lot of the mondstadt story quest because it’s long as hell and most of it doesn’t have any impact on the larger lore, but I will go over the key points you need to know. PS and paimon meet the governing party of the nation: the knights of favonius. The current leader of the knights is acting grandmaster Jeanvgunnhildr, but she is only ACTING grandmaster. The official grandmaster, Varka, left shortly before PS came to mondstadt and took almost half of the knights with him, on an expedition which has yet to be explained in-game. For whatever reason, though, mondstadt's government is currently operating at essentially half capacity. PS meets several other knights besides jean, including cavalry captain Kaeya, who i mention here because he will be relevant later. they also learn that mondstadt is dealing with multiple diplomatic/military crises at once. there have been a series of attacks by the "east wind" dragon stormterror (true name dvalin.) At the same time, the knights and church of favonius are enduring diplomatic pressure from a group of people from the nation sznezhnaya, which is a far-northern nation governed by the archon of cryo (ice.) they are attempting to use the stormterror crisis to seize power from the knights, and generally making life very difficult for poor jean. on top of this, the archon barbatos has not been seen for several hundred years, which isn't uncommon for him, but is not exactly helping with all the shit mondstadt is going through right now.

PS defeats dvalin once (with the help of barbatos, unbeknownst to them at the time), earning them the title “honorary knight of favonius.” They meet barbatos, who has taken on the form of a young bard named venti so that he can get drunk and ignore the glaring problems with his nation. Venti explains to PS that dvalin is actually a good wind spirit, but he has been corrupted by an organized force of inhuman monsters known as the "abyss order," who were hoping to turn him into a weapon for their own purposes. Venti has a plan to save both mondstadt and dvalin, requiring PS to do a bunch of dungeons and steal an ancient artifact, the holy lyre, from the church of favonius, briefly turning them into a wanted criminal in mondstadt. (this will be a recurring motif throughout this story.) Venti, PS, and a few of the other mondstadt playable characters use the holy lyre to summon dvalin, hoping to purify him, but the abyss order interferes and drives dvalin away. The party switches to plan B and goes directly to stormterror’s lair to confront, battle, and purify him directly. They succeed. When they get back to mondstadt, kaeya lets them know that he has learned that the abyss order is unified under one leader. The end of the quest reveals to the player (but not PS) that that leader is PS’s missing sibling, AS, hence why i called them “abyss sibling.”

In the final moments of the quest, venti and PS return the lyre to mondstadt’s cathedral. On their way out, fatui agents ambush and restrain them. Here, we meet one of the eleven fatui harbingers, La Signora. She is one of the highest authorities of the fatui, just under the cryo archon. She physically rips venti’s “gnosis” out of him--a chess piece-shaped relic that is essentially the “heart” of an archon, (in the japanese dub it’s literally called a ‘god’s heart.’ why they called it a gnosis in english i have no idea.) and then knocks out PS and flees the scene, giving no indication of why she wanted the gnosis at all. This is the end of the mondstadt archon quest.

SPOILERS: LIYUE ARCHON QUEST

Onto liyue. Jesus christ. Im going to make this as brief as possible but this game’s plot is insanely complicated. Liyue is the geo (rock) nation, with the governing principle “contracts.” it’s governed half by humans and half by adepti, which are liyue’s minor gods. The huamn leader of liyue is named ningguang, and her crowning achievement is a floating castle called the jade chamber, which is supposedly representative of the achievement of liyue’s human government. The main internal conflict in liyue is between the governing forces of the adepti and humans.

So PS and paimon are going into liyue to try and get into contact with the geo archon rex lapis when he comes down to the surface of teyvat for a yearly ceremony. (if they miss it they’ll have to wait another year to see him.)

They get to liyue harbor, the main city in liyue, and witness the ceremony, but halfway through chaos ensues as rex lapis is shot and killed before the eyes of everyone watching the ceremony. Because PS isn’t from liyue, they’re suspected of being the killer and immediately become an outlaw in liyue. They are rescued from the guards trying to capture them by Childe, the second fatui harbinger we have the pleasure of meeting in this game. Childe’s defining character trait is that he is literally insane. Childe introduces PS to a funeral director named Zhongli, who is in charge of funeral arrangements for rex lapis. They help him out for a while, and then return to liyue harbor to find it in chaos. The human government and the adepti have finally had a direct confrontation, and childe has used the chaos to slip away and attempt to steal rex lapis’s gnosis from his corpse. PS and paimon follow him and battle him, only for both PS and childe to discover that the gnosis is not in the corpse of rex lapis. PS defeats childe, who then switches to plan B and revives an ancient god, osail, to destroy liyue entirely. The humans and adepti are forced to work together to fight osail, and ningguang eventually sacrifices the jade chamber to save liyue harbor, prompting the adepti to acknowledge her as a worthy leader of liyue. The adepti agree to retreat and allow the humans to self-govern from now on without divine interference.

Zhongli reveals himself to be rex lapis, which is why the gnosis wasn’t in the (fake) corpse childe tried to steal it from.he faked his death as a test to see if liyue could survive without him, and, satisfied with the outcome, he decides to retire as a god entirely and live as zhongli from now on. Everything PS fought for was bullshit anyway, though, because zhongli made a CONTRACT with the cryo archon and signed his goddamn gnosis away anyway. PS is still no closer to finding their sibling, who zhongli admits he knows about but is under contract not to say anything. I fucking hate contracts.

SPOILERS: WE WILL BE REUNITED/KAEYA STORY SEGMENTS

We will be reunited. The only quest in this entire goddamn game that has ever actually felt like payoff. In this quest we meet dainsleif, a strange man with ties to the abyss. He reveals to us that 500 years ago, teyvat suffered a horrible calamity after the destruction of a nation called khaenriah. Khaenriah, as explained by dain, was a nation which existed without the governance of an archon and flourished, making incredibly advanced technological discoveries. It was destroyed by the gods 500 years ago. The ruin machines that populate teyvat were supposedly built by khaenrians. PS begins to regain vague memories about khaenriah, but nothing concrete. PS discovers an archon statue underground in liyue which has been chained up upside down, and dain explains that the abyss order are planning to use the inverted statue to make a weapon, but in order to power it they need the eye of the first ruin guard created by khaenrians, which currently resides in stormterror’s lair in mondstadt. (up until this quest activates, the ruin guard sits motionless in stormterror’s lair and can be interacted with, where the interact box refers to it as a “strange statue.” after this quest, it’s referred to as “the first field tiller” (field tiller being a term used by khaenrians to refer to the ruin guards.) they find the ruin guard and dainsleif takes its eye. PS and dain then return to the inverted statue, intending to destroy it, but are interrupted by a high-ranking member of the abyss order, an abyss herald, which battles PS until AS appears to stop the battle.

AS seems more surprised to see PS and dain together than anything else. AS reveals that dain was a member of khaenriah’s royal guard, and was cursed with immortality and forced to watch his people turn into monsters after it fell. PS begs AS to come with them, so they can go home together, but AS says they can’t because unless they fulfil their goal with the abyss order, their “war on destiny will not end.” AS says that they have already traveled teyvat, and that once PS finishes their journey they will understand AS’s actions. AS leaves through an abyss portal, and dain follows them. PS is left alone in the underground ruins with more questions than answers.

TLDR for what we know so far: 500 years ago, khaenriah was destroyed by the gods for some reason. (Dain implies that it was because the gods feared a human nation with no god to govern them, but some dialog from playable archons suggests this may not be entirely accurate.) The inhabitants of khaenriah were cursed to become monsters, and dain was cursed with immortality. Kaeya, the cavalry captain of the knights of favonius, is khaenrian and somehow either escaped this curse or managed to retain human form despite it, making him one of the sole survivors of khaenriah and suggesting that there may be more to the story than we already know. (that’s speculation so i won’t get too into it, but the kaeya thing is too important to exclude imo). PS and AS were both in khaenriah at some point prior to this catastrophe, but only AS remembers exactly what happened. AS has aligned themself with the abyss order after traveling teyvat fully themself, and are now working with the abyss to try to revive khaenriah. Meanwhile, the fatui and the cryo archon are collecting gnoses from other archons for some purpose that has yet to be revealed to us.

SPOILERS: INAZUMA ARCHON QUEST

Now we move to inazuma. Here, we are going to basically ignore the abyss order entirely bc they aren’t relevant and focus back in on the fatui. Rather than recount the whole archon quest from PS’s perspective i’m just going to tell you everything in chronological order this time bc it’s SO long and confusing otherwise. Fair warning i did not like this quest

Inazuma’s archon is named Ei. her governing principle is “eternity” (stupid ass principle) and her element is electro (electricity). Ei was not the original electro archon, however. The first electro archon was ei’s sister, makoto. Makoto was killed during the khaenriah cataclysm, and ei took on her role in her place.

Ei sucks at being an archon. She becomes obsessed with the idea of an unchanging eternal nation, and decided to remove herself from the equation entirely. To do this, she created a sentient puppet look-alike to rule in her place. There were two of these puppets, one of which ei threw out after she saw it cry, deciding it would be too soft to endure the pressures of ruling a nation. (we will come back to this puppet in sumeru. Dont worry.) the other puppet was her success story. The puppet, known as the raiden shogun, ruled inazuma militantly and with a complete lack of emotion, using only the guiding principles ei had instilled in her. Because of this, and because ei never bothered to check in or do any maintenance on the damn thing, the puppet became incredibly susceptible to manipulation by, you guessed it, the fucking fatui. The fatui talked the shogun into enstating a total ban on travel in and out of inazuma, as well as the “vision hunt decree” which meant that the inazuman government began seizing people’s visions.

Enter PS. they are pissed off and tired at this point. They just want to meet the goddamn archon and get out, but they, of course, end up starting a revolution in inazuma (that somehow has no actual lasting consequences btw. Help me.) Eventually they figure out that this whole thing was an elaborate plot by the fatui to destabilize inazuma, and that the raiden shogun is a puppet and not the actual archon. In order to get to the actual archon and force her to fix shit, they talk to yae miko, ei’s “oldest friend” (read: wife.) Miko tells them how to get into ei’s mind palace and snap her out of it. PS does this. Ei, after several real-life hours of bullshit dialog, agrees that she fucked up and shuts down the shogun and promises to fix everything.

Ei also does not know anything about PS’s sibling or the abyss order, and woah would you look at that!! MIKO FUCKING GAVE AWAY THE GNOSIS TO THE FATUI WITHOUT EVEN A GODDAMN DEAL. THANKS SO MUCH GUYS. WE ARE ZERO PERCENT CLOSER TO ANY ANSWERS WHATSOEVER.

God. at least that one was short.

SPOILERS: SUMERU ARCHON QUEST

Sumeru. Christ almighty. Im skipping the chasm because it doesn’t fucking matter. So we get to sumeru right. Sumeru has a bunch of really weird and vaguely racist lore that i will be skipping because it doesnt matter but. prepare yourself.

Sumeru’s archon is the dendro (plant) archon, and her governing principle is “wisdom.” HOWEVER, there are a bunch of weird godly politics going on here that are unfortunately integral to our understanding of the story. So basically, there used to be 2 gods in Sumeru: the dendro archon/the greater lord, and the scarlet king. The scarlet king was the ruler of the desert and the greater lord ruled the rainforest, but the scarlet king was killed, leaving only the greater lord to govern all of sumeru. The scarlet king’s people were largely not happy about this.

Fast forward to the khaenriah cataclysm. The greater lord is killed, but in her dying moments a new dendro archon is born: the lesser lord kusanali. Immediately, the lesser lord is swept away by the akademiya, which is the human governing power of sumeru. The akademiya resented the lesser lord and refused to acknowledge her as the new archon, instead keeping her sealed away and relying on what was left of the greater lord’s power instead. The akademiya slowly became corrupt as time went on and they didn’t have an archon to keep them in check.

Fast forward again to present day. PS comes to sumeru, immediately passes out and connects accidentally to the consciousnes of the greater lord. During this dream sequence, they hear the words “world… forget me” and see an image of a giant tree. They proceed to ignore this vision for the next quarter of the quest.

They get to sumeru city only to discover that the entire city is seemingly stuck in a time loop of the same day over and over again. with the help of lesser lord kusanali, who calls herself nahida and projects herself into the consciousnesses of others in order to communicate with them, PS discovers that the entire city is actually trapped in a dream, which the akademiya is using to harvest knowledge from the city in order to carry out their ultimate plan: creating a new god to replace lesser lord kusanali as the governing archon of sumeru.

They break out of the dream, but nahida is trapped by the akademiya and imprisoned in a deep sleep again. PS discovers that the akademiya has been working with yet another fatui harbinger: the doctor/il dottore, to carry out their plan. They plan to use the gnosis the fatui stole from inazuma to create their new god, and as for the being they plan to use to house it? They’re going to use Ei’s discarded prototype puppet, also known as the fatui harbinger scaramouche.

After being abandoned by ei, his mother, scaramouche became a directionless wanderer in inazuma. With no gnosis, he was essentially a being without a heart, always lacking something. He was hardened by several tragedies until he eventually rejected his past and decided the only way out was to fulfill his original purpose and become a god, with or without ei’s approval. He turned to the fatui to help him fulfil this wish, and sumeru’s akademiya, desperate for a new god to replace kusanali, were all too happy to help the fatui out. Il dottore and the akademiya supplied him with a gnosis and a godly body, and they nearly complete the process entirely, but they are thwarted by PS and nahida just before scaramouche loses his past self entirely and attains godhood. Nahida takes the gnosis from scaramouche.

After this battle, nahida and PS enter what remains of the consciousness of the greater lord one final time, hoping to understand the circumstances surrounding her death and nahida’s birth. They speak to the remains of the greater lord, who reveals that as the god of wisdom, her consciousness is connected to irminsul, the tree of life and the “collective consciousness” of teyvat. When the khaenriah cataclysm occurred, the tree was poisoned by “forbidden knowledge,” the greater lord claims (what this means is your guess as well as mine) and she had to basically kill herself in order to stop this forbidden knowledge from polluting all of teyvat. In creating nahida, she hoped to give sumeru a new archon to look to when she was gone, but because her memory, tainted by forbidden knowledge, still remained in the collective consciousness of teyvat, nahida could never be accepted as sumeru’s true archon. This was the meaning of the words “world, forget me” that PS hears early on in the quest: the greater lord wanted the world to forget her so that the tree of knowledge would no longer be poisoned by her tainted memory.

With this revelation, the greater lord disappears completely, removing all memory of herself from teyvat’s collective consciousness. Even nahida no longer remembers the greater lord’s existence. PS, however, still remembers the greater lord, supposedly because they aren’t from teyvat and therefore their memories aren’t governed by what is and isn’t inscribed in the tree of knowledge.

After all this, il dottore appears and knocks out PS and paimon so he can speak with nahida privately. Nahida offers to give him the electro gnosis in exchange for him killing the clones of himself he’s made (she reveals that she knows he has made hundreds of clones of himself. He immediately agrees to kill them in exchange for the gnosis, though, so this doesn’t really matter.) during this exchange, she also suggests that destroying the gnosis would “awaken the heavenly principles,” the first mention of HP in game since the opening cutscene. She does not elaborate about what HP is. as for HER gnosis, dottore offers her a bit of knowledge in exchange for it. The player doesn’t get to hear the knowledge itself, only dottore’s pitch: “Have you heard of the rumor that the sky in teyvat is fake?” (note: it should be mentioned that back in the 1.0 patch series there was a limited-time event in which scaramouche was briefly introduced for the first time, and this event also very briefly mentioned that teyvat’s sky might be fake. There are also a ton of references to stars controlling one’s fate in teyvat, and celestia, the realm of the gods, exists in the sky. anyways.) nahida gives away her gnosis in exchange for this information.

When PS wakes up, nahida becomes the first archon in the history of this game to give you useful information that you don’t already fucking have. She tells PS that because of her connection to the tree of knowledge, she has been able to learn a bit about them and their sibling.

PS is what is called a “descender,” meaning someone who came to teyvat from beyond the stars and did not originate there. They are not the first descender to teyvat, in fact there have been four others throughout history. The first of these descenders is the heavenly principles. AS is NOT a descender.

Descenders are known as such because, since they are not from teyvat, no information about them is recorded in the tree of knowledge. PS is not recorded in the tree, but AS is. AS’s record begins when they showed up in khaenriah, and parts of it are “fuzzy” as though they have been scrubbed out. From this, Nahida draws the conclusion that AS is from teyvat and PS isn’t, which PS is convinced is impossible because they traveled with their sibling together for years before coming to teyvat, so they’re sure AS didn’t originate there.

This is essentially where we are left as of the current patch. There’s a ton of branch-off lore and little connecting pieces i could go into but i typed this in a google doc and it was literally seven pages long and this is BARE BONES i swear there was nothing in here that i could leave out. So. i am not going to bother trying to get any more specific unless someone asks me to because jesus christ. Anyways thats the genshin story as succinctly as i could possibly put it thank you for coming to my ted talk

#jesus christ this game is long and complicated #asks #long post

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cornfarm · 3 years ago

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hi! love your work! it genuinely makes my day, and I'm not exaggerating! :D can I request B and N for saiki? thank you again!

hi!! omg!! i'm so glad that my silly writing can make your day a little bit better ;__;

this is part of an alphabet event! click here to view!

B eauty - What do they admire about their s/o? What do they think is beautiful about them?

saiki isn't really too keen on physical beauty. he'd definitely acknolwedge you as attractive upon meeting you, but he wouldn't really feel a strong sense of physical attraction until after you two are together. blame his lack of experience as well as his xray vision. if he wants to take a good look at you he'll have to blink rapidly to reset his vision. he secretly hopes kusuke will develop something to block his xray vision, but there's no way in hell he's gonna ask.

saiki finds a lot of beauty in your character. here are some things i think he'd find admirable in a partner:

honesty: he can read minds, so it's impossible for someone to hide their "true nature" from him. he likes how honest your self-expression is. you're not shameless, but you don't approach things with ulterior motives, or behave in ways that contradict your inner monologue. he likes that; the smaller the gap is between your presented self and your inner thoughts, the more comfortable he feels.

empathy: saiki isn't really sensitive as he is perceptive, but he'd find your empathy and sensitivity very charming. you can read him pretty well, you even feel his own feelings. are you a wizard or something? you give him space, waxing and waning as he needs it, and he finds that your respect for him is more than easy to reciprocate. it's not a surprise that he doesn't get burnt out by you, since you're never forcing him to be with you at all in the first place! his efforts to be with you are done out of his on volition, which is definitely surprising for his ~onlookers~.

passion: saiki isn't passionate about anything, everything in his life is so grey and apathetic. when he sees you get so excited over the things you like, and spend hours upon hours trying to perfect whatever it is you're doing, he can't help but feel it rub off on him. he finds that part of you wonderful- you care so much about the things around you. he's a bit jealous, and almost lives vicariously through you. he'll learn to like everything you like just so you can talk about it to someone.

humor: he thinks you're funny. he laughs at your jokes and wisecracks even if his expression is a bit neutral. you're witty and dry, a bit cynical without being too dark. the pride on your face when you successfully make him smile is priceless.

he loves everything about you, but these are just some things i think he'd be particularly fond of.

N icknames - What do they call their s/o?

saiki wouldn't really use any petnames or nicknames. the most he's doing is he's calling you by your first name, which is already saying a lot. he doesn't call anyone by their first name except you. he's a little embarrassed by it because one time he referred to you by your first name to nendou and kaidou and they made a huge deal about it to the point where half their class was yelling about how saiki and you are on "first name basis".

he was very embarrassed.

however: saiki will absolutely tease you. i'll elaborate in later headcanons. remember when he was at kaidou's house and he teased him for what his mom calls him? he'll do shit like that with you. he'll slap on a cute honorific, or shorten your name when you're acting childish, embarrass yourself, or if you're trying to one-up him at something.

he remains pretty stoic through it but he'll break into a smile.

this form of teasing is uncommon though, so it'll always catch you off guard.

unfortunately, i don't think he'll ever have it in you to call you a proper petname. the most you'll get is he'll add a "my" before addressing you (awww!). he'll crumple up in humiliation if you call him by any petnames, and he'll get very angry at you if you do it around other people.

#saiki headcanons #saiki x reader #saiki no psi nan #saiki k x reader #saiki k imagines #saiki kusuo x reader #saiki kusuo #the disasterous life of saiki k #the disaster of psi kusuo saiki #saiki k

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kurimiaki · 4 years ago

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T, R, N and P with Diluc please?

the uncrowned king of mondstadt, diluc ragnvindr.

yandere alphabet via dear-yandere! revisions i made are flaky so. my bad wwwww

cw: dark content, physical abuse, kidnapping, confinement, claustrophobia, extremely unhealthy relationship.

Tears: How do they feel about seeing their darling scream, cry, and/or isolate themselves?

Just because Diluc may be attending to business elsewhere, does not mean you are free from his heady grasp. Distant yet coddling; his attentiveness is a curse just as much as it can be a blessing. You’re never without security, that much is true. Dawn Winery is his eyes and ears, every single servant wrapped around his finger, wrapping around and constricting you. Self isolation could never be a possibility, not when Adelinde ushers you out of bed without a minute left to spare, always in such a hurry, as if wallowing in utter boredom for days on end is anything of importance. From the very beginning, Diluc had made it a point to ensure your physical health was a top priority to those surrounding you; strict itineraries have maids silently mourning over their packed workload. A plethora of duties— take you on brief walks outside the winery, never longer than 15 minutes, feed and serve meals delicately planned and catered to your health, eyes and ears constantly watching, watching, watching. They keep you like a dog on a leash, no matter how pampered. They do so dutifully. They must. Who could possibly decline such a hefty pay at the expense of silence?

It would be a blatant lie to say your physical health had declined any whilst under his... care, however, the same cannot be said for your mental well being. He can’t, despite how much he hates his inability to do so, prevent your tears. And by the archons, do you cry. Diluc is unable to approach you some days, those days when the illusion of normalcy and domestic living he works so hard to put up simply melts away, when you can do little more than curl in on yourself and wretch into your silk sheets with a litany of tears flush in your eyes. He wills himself to allow you the mercy of a few hours alone, albeit with check ups and that blatant discomfort of his when you wail at the slightest touch to your shoulder. Of course, it’s a different case entirely when such cries are symptom of punishment— whereas Diluc will weakly attempt to comfort you with softened eyes when you work yourself up, flaky and visibly uncomfortable, his resolution is unflinching and unwavering should you choose to act out of turn. Wail, sob, beg and beg for mercy, for forgiveness, his mask of nonchalance will stay firm.

Regret: Would they ever feel guilty about abducting their darling? Would they ever let their darling go?

No. Diluc is understanding that the situation he has thrust you into may not be ideal, he anticipates a lack of reciprocation and overall resistance, but he feels absolutely no guilt. In his eyes, this is for the best, the world is much too cruel— who better than him to make that judgement for you? Even if you do prove yourself to be capable of taking care of yourself, (with Diluc himself to measure up to) this Darknight Hero will find every minute, minuscule little thing to prove you otherwise. Just about every one of your shortcomings Diluc will try and use to his advantage, to put himself in a better light. Who else is as capable as he is, who else can prove themselves worthy of your companionship, your devotion, in the ways that he has? The longer you stay in his grasp, not that the possibility of leaving will come otherwise, the more difficult it becomes to prove him wrong. He feeds you with the utmost care, keeps you healthy, entertains you should you need conversation or otherwise, and provides, provides, provides. There may be a lack of freedom on your end, but really, do you have much room to complain? Without him, you may very well be dead. He ensures that point is driven straight to your heart, however many times is necessary until you grow compliant.

His will and rationality is fully reasonable, in his mind, hence why his wishes to keep you by his side shall forever remain solid. Perhaps it is the idea of you keeping close to him that entraptures Diluc so entirely, for he is a distant admirer. He would be contented growing old and without your touch, merely sharing your company for as long as life allows. All the same, he wishes to swallow you whole, skin, blood, guts and tears, if only to keep you with him. It is selfish, but he tells himself that is something of which he is deserving. He must.

Naughty: How would they punish their darling?

Diluc is nothing if not dedicated to his goals, a driven man in everything he sets his mind to. In order to maintain the position he thrives in, he is forever alert, forever adapting, prepared for any strenuous situation thrown his way. Should you push past a line you are never meant to cross, jab at him a tad too harshly, well... it’s not as if he gives no thought as to how to keep you in line. Rarely are you knowing enough of his inner workings to be able to push him past the point of no return, a point where even you, his dearest, are not spared from his wrath. Emphasis on rare, for he is wholly tolerant and gentle with you, to an extent. Any person has a breaking point, and Diluc, despite his detached disposition and stoic attitude, can only withstand so much. He bottles up so much to remain composed, after all. When he snaps, he is unable to hold himself back any longer.

He is not one to take pleasure from the suffering of others. Lest they truly deserve it, is what he’ll tell himself, to at the very least maintain the illusion of normalcy. Sway not from the path of righteousness, forget not the splendor of dawn. His mind is able to concoct the most horrific scenarios he could possibly put you through, for he does the same with his enemies. In a way, when you act out of turn, an instinctual part of him, cultivated after years spent at the whims of the dangerous and unknown, sees you as just that— an enemy. He doesn’t often choose the more unsavory methods to keeping you in line, ie: beating or threatening you with his vision, further keeping true to said threats should you continue. Diluc is wholly capable of restraining the urge to simply slap the snark off of your face (he had done so regardless, once or twice), and much prefers isolating you on his own terms, away from everyone and everything, even himself. It’s a small room, not even on par with that of your shared bedroom, much more similar to a closet or crawlspace.

A room, but a cage all the same. Splintered wood floors, dank cobblestone surrounds you and few cracks in the stone leaves room for bugs of all nature to crawl through, allows the elements to rain hell upon you should you end up locked up during the harsher months. A lone maid, not even Adelinde, the head, attends to you, sparing meek glances should you call out when she gently places a meal of one roll, a piece of meat, and a few shoddily cut slabs of potato. No begging and weeping and screaming you may do will soften Diluc into coming back for you- again, his resolve is akin to that of steel, his will forever unyielding. He decides when you are thoroughly broken in, and when it is time to hold you in kind, he shines through like that of The Darknight Hero the people proclaim him to be. In the end, what is necessary is that he shows you how much better off you are when with him. He’s much too possessive and to a point, coddling, to ever consider discarding you into the wild and at the whims of hilichurl camps and abyss mages alike.

His hold is firm and grounding. Had he always been able to hold you with such ease? Had he ever truly held you in kind, as he does now? He’s warm. A familiar, comforting scent of smoke and acidic wine fills your senses and him, oh, him. He had left you, left you alone, all alone, in that room, not even a room, all alone, and yet you can do little more than gag and writhe and latch onto him with pleas of his name whispered hoarsely— ‘Diluc, Diluc, Diluc’. A cry of your savior.

He can’t look at you, won’t look at you. Won’t give you the mercy, but he couldn’t be angry. Not anymore. He holds you tighter and so flush to himself, with a ferocity narly shown to anyone but you, not in kind, not with this passion. You smell of dust, a husk of yourself. Faintly of his sheets, faintly of iron, of vomit, of filth.

Fresh memories of your betrayal burn hot in his mind. He’s contradicting himself. He cannot relent. It comes out as a whisper, barely even heard to himself, and he curses his very soul the moment it passes his lips.

“Strive to do better. Lest you want your time there to increase tenfold.”

Patience: How patient are they with their darling?

He can bear with defiance and unwillingness on your part, to an extent. He can anticipate as much, for he is not delusional enough to fool himself into thinking your relationship is even somewhat typical to that of a normal couple, no matter how much he wishes that to be the case. No, for the initial few weeks of your captivity (he’s always gotten so mad when you refer to him as such, a captor) Diluc allows you to lash and sob and attempt to reason with him, attempt to soften him, attempt to hurt him. He’ll allow you to do so, but he himself remains impenetrable, unblinking, almost uncaring. He is prepared for about anything and everything, always expecting the worse possibilities as to save himself from further harm. For you, as well, he is constantly anticipating and observing. In hidden, minute little ways. It may even come as a shame to him if the fact that he enforces the maids to note down your every little move ever reaches your ears.

All in all, Diluc’s complete preparation for anything and everything you may throw his way makes him extremely patient, for better or for worse. Difficult to crack, impenetrable, almost— on one hand, the distance he keeps from you to accommodate for your lack of reciprocation may come as a blessing, but it makes it all too difficult to try and pester him into letting you go, to try and understand his goals and motivations in keeping you locked right away. Your complacency is inevitable, sooner or later, Diluc will begin approaching and weaseling his way into your routine in the smallest of ways, gradually and unconsciously causing you to grow fonder of his presence. It’s a slow process, one he had planned from the very moment his wishes of a domestic life with you grew much too much to handle. He loves you completely, yearns for your love, and for it, he will wait as long as necessary.

Blazing red eyes leer down upon you, your shame increasing tenfold for each second that passes subjected to that gaze of his. A fit of expaseration, you will admit, had sent the cutlery dear Hillie had so delicately prepared flying off of the white tablecloth and onto the hardwood floors, further staining the expensive rugs with wines and crumbs and oils from his favorite meal, a concoction of pasta and steak and cheese. He had prepared yours alongside with it, striking tonight as a tad more special than the rest. You didn’t blame yourself for what you did, not when he had proposed something as outlandish as marriage.

He keeps silent, leaning back in his seat, his throne, as if he were a king observing a mere peasant begging for mercy— quite frankly, you should be. But perhaps tonight he will be more lenient, you ponder, averting your gaze to the flickering embers sparking from the fireplace beside you.

He sighs, suddenly, worn and thoroughly put out by your antics, further embarrassing you by his facade of nonchalance. No, you could tell from the way his leather gloves creaked from gripping himself too hard, he was barely concealing his own anger.

“You hardly let me finish my scentence. Come, we’ll continue this conversation upstairs.”

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