#which is so weird to me considering it is clearly Four Thoughts On Names

[a-third-attempt]

iv,

My grandmother Janet is 96 years old. The last time I visited, while drinking the traditional after-dinner gin and tonics, we got to talking about the treasures lying around her house. Somehow we settled on a particular needlepoint hanging on the wall.

She asked: Who made that one, does it say?

And I said: It says "Deedee".

And she laughed: I didn't remember making that one!

My brain wasn't working as fast as my tongue that night— perhaps on account of the gin— and I said: Wait, who is Deedee?

She laughed again, and explained. It was what her parents called her, and the name that she used until she went to high school. All her best friends, everyone who knew her from back in the day, they still call her Deedee.

And then she said to me: You know, Janet is not my real name either. Nobody calls me by my real name, because nobody alive remembers it. And I'm not telling anyone now. It is just for me.

iii,

I was studying abroad in Budapest when I received a facebook message from Rob. A friend, not quite 21, from college back home, saying: I have a secret to tell you, but I do not want anyone else to know. I don't even want to write it here.

I replied, Here is my address. Write it down and mail it to me. I will read it, and then I will burn it; and he agreed.

I left the house, went all the way to the end of the metro, found a convenience store, bought a pack of matches, and sat down in the nearby park.

The three sentences at the start of the letter were: I am transgender. I am a man. My name is not [what we once called him], it is Rob.

This much is no longer a secret, but the three pages that followed are not my stories to tell.

(Have you ever tried to burn a letter? With a match. It is harder than you’d think.)

It is common now for a trans person to refer to their "old" name, the one assigned to them that they no longer use, as their deadname. Rob did not use this language in the letter, probably only because he did not know it yet.

Some of the debris from the letter made it into a trash can. But most blew away into the Hungarian landscape, white flecks scattered in the wind.

ii,

I set my father into the ground in October. He would have been 71.

It was a whirlwind of a weekend, of a week, really. Gatherings every night, friends and family buzzing in the house all day, as if the collective strength of so many silent prayers might summon him, Christ-like, into our midst.

Flying was my dad's first love. I was born near the end of his distinguished career as a fighter pilot in the Air Force. He continued flying, commercially, for as long as I lived under his roof.

A fighter's call sign is what the other fighters call them over the radio when flying together. Pragmatically it is a mask for when enemies intercept communication. But to the squadron, there is nothing secret about this identity; it is more a name than their name is. My dad's call sign is— was— Bear. At the memorial gathering, that was the name that rang long after sundown, that echoed in the still desert air. 

Bear was rowdy, gregarious, and virile. Stories about his after-work antics sprang readily to the lips of the guests. Boozy, shirtless memories of he and his fighter friends, boys who aged but never grew up. And then, after the laughs and a moment's pause, they would add sincere praise about Bear the professional. Thoughtful. Whip-smart. Straightforward. Generous. Passionate.

This man they described was familiar enough, but deeply unrecognizable. He bore little resemblance to the temperamental and stern authority of my childhood memories. Even less to the man I knew on equal footing, after several medical emergencies brought an early and unceremonious end to a lifetime in the cockpit.

I would have liked Bear, I think, but I never met him— I knew him too late.

i,

There are many stories to tell of my father, the man-who-was-not-Bear. I never know which one to start with.

I once asked my mom if I could paint my nails red. I don't remember my mother wearing colored nail polish, it must have been a neighbor who I saw, and the idea enchanted me. And yet somehow, there was the bottle, right underneath the phone. It would have been so easy. But mom said no, dad would be furious. And we both knew that was the end of that.

I liked my hair long. My parents did not. They tolerated it, in the way that one tolerates such inconsequential teenage lashings-out. But the frequency of snide remarks would increase in proportion with its length, and roughly every 6 months I would give in.

(When I was older, I discovered that my hair actually would not get much longer than that. After about 9 months, I shed.)

And if I could see you, I would see these stories fall lighter on your brow than on they lay on my psyche. And I would be suddenly tempted to strike cheap, to scowl forty-five and let sympathy roll in. But it’s too… it’s dehumanizing, and it’s not even narratively right— it doesn’t describe the heft of the uncertainty he left me with, any more than a dumbbell thrown at your face conveys the weight of a blanket.

The household I grew up in was reductivist when not mechanistic, and my childhood gave but scant framework to understand the impact of a thousand unremarkable moments. Still, human, I could not divert myself from the creation of my personal mythology, grasping at any explanation for those forces of parental nature. Nor from this private, shameful conclusion: that this love is, perhaps, conditional. Not necessarily. But the threat was there, and I, conflict-shy, colored inside the lines.

Dharys was 29 when my father died. Or maybe he was 2. (...let's not think too hard about that one.) In any case, my father never met Dharys, and for this alone I still grieve. In the dark I wonder if he ever had these feelings about Bear— this bridgeless chasm between us, etched in time. The quiet, tugging sadness that I would never know him as he was.

Perhaps he never could have, I reason, hopefully. Tieflings learn young, after all, how to hide. Perhaps Dharys can only live because not-Bear has died.

Or perhaps he knew me too early.

* * *

A/N: The picture in this post was drawn by @parziivale; I'll be posting about it separately.

[horangare]

my babysitter’s a vampire

pairing : vampire!hoshi x human!reader

content : smut (mdni), strangers to ???

in which : your parents hired a babysitter after deeming you as the “irresponsible” older sibling. when someone who isn’t junhui shows up in his place, you’re instantly captivated by this handsome stranger and his shiny white teeth.

warnings : grinding, fingering, finger sucking, big dick soonyoung, blood, mentions of a knife and minimal bodily harm (you cut your finger), unprotected sex (but mentions of birth control, be safe either way), cocky soonyoung (ugh i want him so bad), you threaten him with a fork, bff!chaeryeong, dirty talk, pet names, bulge kink (i think that’s everything but pls let me know if i forgot anything)

wc : 4.8K words

note : look y’all i am the youngest of four sisters so idk if my portrayal of a younger brother is a good one but…this is for u hoshi nation horanghae.

“What do you mean?! I don’t need a babysitter!”

Your mom sighed deeply, searching her jewelry box for her matching earring. “I’m sorry honey, but you do. Your sister clearly isn’t responsible enough.” You rolled your eyes, but remained quiet. “And I know Junhui’s mom. She says he’s a very nice boy who’s good with children.”

Ever since you and Chaeryeong shut yourselves in your room to rewatch Girl From Nowhere for the millionth time again and speculate if there would really be a third season, (Chaeryeong insisted there would be, while you thought the opposite) the fact that you were supposed to be babysitting your younger brother had completely slipped your mind. When your parents returned from their date, they pulled into the driveway only to find Leo out there screaming his head off.

After that, you were quickly deemed “irresponsible” by your parents and no longer allowed to be Leo’s babysitter. What did they want you to do? You couldn’t spend all summer break looking after the little brat. Anyway, it’s not like that was the part that bothered you, but the fact that you couldn’t talk or beg her out of it either.

“Mom, come on! I’m eight and a half now! I can pretty much babysit myself!” Leo crossed his arms over his chest, standing in the doorway so your mother couldn’t leave the room without giving him, in all his childhood glory, the explanation he felt he so richly deserved.

“It’s too late. Junhui is already on his way and we’ve already paid him.” She leaned down, kissing him on the forehead. “Promise me you’ll be good.”

Your brother glanced to the side, like he was actually considering not being on his best behavior, before nodding and smiling at your mom. “I promise.” What a little shit.

“That’s my boy. And the same goes for you, [Y/n]. Chaeryeong over but she cannot stay the night. Am I clear?”

You smiled, not even bothering to make it seem real or genuine. “Crystal clear, mom. Have fun with dad.”

“Yeah, yeah. We should be back at around eleven.” Your mom mumbled, making her way down the stairs and to the front door where your dad was waiting. You followed behind her, mostly so you could slam the door in a pitiful act of retaliation and lock it shut until your friend arrived, but also because you wanted to see what this Junhui kid looked like up close.

You’d seen him maybe once or twice before around campus or at the cute little coffee shop you frequented, but you had never gotten a close hard look at his face before. Some of your friends knew him, according to them he was kind of weird, but made up for it with his sense of humor. Maybe he could keep you some decent company before Chaeryeong showed up.

The boy on the other side of the door was not Junhui. At least, you didn’t think so. This boy was a little shorter, a little blonder, and a lot finer than you’ve ever seen Junhui look.

“Oh! Hello, are you…Junhui?” Your mom asked, raking her eyes over the boy standing before her.

“Hi. No, sorry, Jun couldn’t make it. I’m Soonyoung, I’m a friend of his. Can I come in?”

“Oh, sure. Leo? Your babysitter’s here!”

“He’s so hot. And he’s totally your type, don’t you think?”

“Chaeryeong, please!” You slapped your hand over her mouth, earning a dirty look from the girl standing beside you. She was right, this Soonyoung guy was super good looking, but she didn’t have to say it out loud. He was still a stranger after all. A hot one, but a stranger nonetheless, and it was only normal for you to have your reservations. “He’s not even the guy who’s supposed to be here. Junhui was supposed to be Leo’s babysitter. He says he’s his friend.”

Chaeryeong rolls her eyes, not understanding what your problem was. “I wouldn’t be complaining if I were you. Look, even Leo likes him.”

You and Chaeryeong watched from the kitchen island as Soonyoung helped Leo with his homework in the living room, and it’s the first time you’ve ever seen your brother smile while doing homework. Neither of you could hear what they were saying, for some reason you doubted it was about fractions—fractions were not funny.

The longer you observed them—mostly Soonyoung—the more you realized how right your friend was. He was fine. Really fine. It’s like there was some kind of aura around him, something almost otherworldly.

That’s when you started to stare. Like the hard, not even blinking type of stare. Soonyoung turned his head over his shoulder, the two of you making eye contact in what felt like the most awkward way ever. He smiled at you though, which made your cheeks feel embarrassingly warm, before giving his attention back to your brother. Chaeryeong, having watched the entire exchange, grinned while looking you up and down.

“You’re staring.” She mumbled.

Feeling like a stubborn child about to throw a tantrum, you narrowed your eyes and pouted. “Was not.”

Your friend was no doubt satisfied with herself, cooing at you and cupping your face with her hands to squish your cheeks together. “Denial is not a good look for you. Come on,” she released your face to pat you on the shoulder. “let’s go watch a movie before I leave.”

Looking back at the living room, you saw your brother sitting on the couch alone with no signs of Soonyoung. Some babysitter, you thought, leaving the kid he’s supposed to be looking after alone. How could your parents leave someone so irresponsible in charge of your brother?

Oh, wait…

“Just wait for me in my room. I’ve gotta use the bathroom.” She nodded, heading upstairs to your room while you made your way to the bathroom in the hall and swinging open the door.

“What the fuck?” Soonyoung shouted, tearing his eyes away from the mirror above the bathroom sink to look at you. Gasping, you took a step back from him.

“I’m so sorry, I didn’t know—” You started to apologize, glancing behind him into the mirror and you froze. The spot where his reflection should be was empty. You took another step back.

“You didn’t know…what?”

If you weren’t so scared right now, you would’ve definitely been offended by the way he was speaking to you like you owed him an explanation for wanting to use the bathroom in your house. You looked at him, then the mirror once more, trying to make it as subtle as possible.

“Uh…nothing! So sorry again.” You said, laughing awkwardly to diffuse the tension and backing away from him far enough until you were close enough to retreat up the stairs and to your room. Chearyeong, seated comfortably in your bed, snapped her head away from her phone to see you clutching your chest and panting.

“Woah, what happened?” She asked as she sat upright. “Why do you look like you just ran a marathon?” With one of your hands, you gestured that you needed more time to catch your breath before taking a deep breath and stepping closer to the bed.

“He doesn’t have a reflection.”

Chaeryeong raised one of her eyebrows. “The babysitter? Are you sure?”

“Yes, of course I’m sure! He was in front of the bathroom mirror but the mirror was, like, empty!”

You could tell she wasn’t really sure whether you were telling the truth or not, making you groan and cover your face with your hands. “I’m really fucking serious! There’s something wrong with him, Chaeryeong!”

A heavy sigh sounded from Chaeryeong’s place on your bed. “I don’t know…what kind of person doesn’t have a reflection?”

“All humans have reflections,” you shrugged, your head tilted as your mind considered each and every possibility. “maybe he isn’t human.”

Chaeryeong snorted and rolled her eyes. “What is he then? A vampire?” The comment was definitely meant to be a joke given the way she’d said it, but the way your eyes widened and jaw drop was all too serious. “Oh my god, is he really a vampire?”

You looked around your room frantically, feeling the smallest bit of relief when you saw your laptop resting on your beside table. Chaeryeong made room for you in the bed, watching as your fingers flew over the keys.

How to identify a vampire.

“Asks to be invited into your home…no reflection…powerful presence or aura,” you skimmed over the first three bullet points shown before you and felt your mouth go dry. Soonyoung, so far, was definitely fitting the description of a vampire.

“Look,” Chaeryeong pointed to the next bullet point and read it aloud. “When a person is injured, make sure to find out if their focus is more on the injured person or the injury itself.” You looked at her, unsure of what his point was. Nobody in the house had been injured?

“Yeah, so?”

“So we’ve gotta injure you.” She scoffed, a little confused as to how you weren’t following her crazy thought process.

You leaned away from her. “What? Why does it have to be me?”

“You’re the one that wants to prove it so bad, aren’t you?” It was hard to argue with that one, you were the one who brought it up in the first place. You grumbled and slammed your laptop shut.

“Fine! But if we do all this and he ends up being just some guy I’m expecting a very long apology from you.”

Chaeryeong just smiled brightly at you. “Yes, ma’am.”

Soonyoung had brought Leo up to bed much earlier than he thought he would; your brother mumbled something about using all his brainpower on the fractions, and Soonyoung had laughed and tucked him into the covers. When he returned downstairs, he noticed the kitchen lights were on. Once he reached the bottom, he could see Chaeryeong holding your quivering body in the kitchen, a knife and an apple discarded on the kitchen island.

“What happened?” He asked, the faintest hint of worry in his voice.

The truth of what happened is quite simple; you and Chaeryeong snuck down here while Soonyoung was putting Leo to bed, she gave you a small (but still painful) cut on your index finger, and now you were standing here trying to sell it.

“[Y/n] was gonna split this apple with me, but I totally forgot how awful she is with knives. I think she cut her finger open, does it look bad?” Chaeryeong grabbed your wrist, holding your now opened hand closer to Soonyoung’s face. The blood had pooled where the cut was and started to streak down your finger. He sucked in a breath, struggling to look away from it.

“Y-Yeah, it looks pretty bad.” Soonyoung gulped, watching the red liquid falling down past your knuckles. He licked his lips, an action that didn’t go unnoticed by you, and you pulled your finger away. Then and only then did Soonyoung look at you in the eyes again.

“Everything okay? You seemed kind of distracted.” You tilted your head to the side. “You seemed really focused on the blood, don’t you think?”

Soonyoung scoffed, crossing his arms over his chest. “Oh please, I was not.” You and Chaeryeong exchanged a look, and you held up your bleeding finger in front of his face again. Soonyoung’s focus shifted once more, his eyes zeroing in on the streak of blood that was beginning to go dry. You turned away to rinse it under the sink and shook off the water once it was all washed away.

“Yeah, okay.” Chaeryeong said, reaching into her pocket and handing you a band-aid. “So you’re a vampire, right?”

To say the least, Soonyoung seemed shocked and offended that you had caught him so easily, as if he hadn’t been the most obvious vampire ever. “What? A vampire? Please, how could you ever think that?” It was almost pathetic how he was actually trying to convince you otherwise when the evidence was already there, maybe he actually thought he could wiggle his way out of this.

“Look, we already know. Just drop it.” You sighed, and Soonyoung did the same.

“Aw, mannnnnnn.” He whined. “What gave it away?”

“Do you really want us to answer that?” Chaeryeong asked him, her voice riddled with sarcasm. Soonyoung looked down and mumbled the word “no,” and Chaeryeong nodded pointedly. “Thought so.”

So you were right. Soonyoung was a vampire. He was also your little brother’s babysitter. It’s funny, you could’ve sworn you’ve seen a show like this before a really long time ago, one whose name wasn’t coming to mind right now. Whatever, back to the main point. Soonyoung was a vampire.

“Why are you here?” You questioned him, holding up a fork to his neck. “Are you gonna kill us?”

“Woah, um, first of all,” He closed his hands around yours and lowered it, and you noticed how cold he felt. Probably another vampire thing. You snatched your hand away, and he seemed confused, but shook his head and continued on. “That silver thing? It’s just a myth. Second of all, why would I wanna kill you? It’s not like your parents wouldn’t notice. Not to mention we don’t go feeding on people randomly, consent is a thing, you know.” You could’ve laughed at that. A creature that survived off of draining the blood of others caring about their right to say no seemed ironic.

“And anyway, did you seriously expect to kill me with a fork?”

Chaeryeong burst into laughter, though she tried to play it off by coughing when she saw you glaring at her. “Sorry…” She picked up the fork and the knife and dumped them back into the silverware drawer to prevent you from making any more threats against Soonyoung. Your parents also didn’t trust you with metal utensils for…reasons similar to this.

You rolled your eyes. “So what happened to Junhui? Why couldn’t he come?”

The blond shrugged. “I dunno, he said that he was feeling sick, so he asked me to come in his place. Does that really matter?”

“Of course it matters! I don’t want some freaky undead creature looking after my little brother!” You retorted, raising your voice just a little. He might’ve been against eating people, but that didn’t change the fact that he was still a monster.

“[Y/n], that’s kinda…” Soonyoung held up one of his hands, signaling for Chaeryeong to stop talking.

“How do you know Jun isn’t a vampire?” He tilted his head as he asked that, then pursed his lips while he waited for your answer.

So he was a vampire and a smart-ass. Great.

“I don’t know!” You turned your head away from him. “This is just…freaky. I didn’t know vampires could be so—”

“Witty? Handsome? Charming? I know, I get that all the time.”

“Stupid.”

Chaeryeong laughed again.

Soonyoung raised one of his eyebrows. “Stupid guys must be your type then. Well, according to Chaeryeong, if I heard correctly.”

You looked at him, eyes wide. “You heard all that?” Soonyoung nodded, smiling when he noticed the way you reacted.

“Every single word. You know, maybe you should do more research.” He flicked you on the forehead and grinned when you let out a yelp of pain.

“Anyway.” Chaeryeong mumbled. “It’s getting late, my sister is on her way to get me. Good luck with…” She gestured between Soonyoung and you. “whatever you’ve got going on.” She reached forward and grabbed the discarded apple from its place on the island and padded upstairs to get her stuff from your room.

A gleeful smile crept its way onto his lips as he turned his head to look at you. “She’s leaving. You know what that means, it’ll just be me and you once she’s gone.”

“If you try anything, I will go get the fork. I don’t care if it kills you or not.”

He laughed, and the sound echoed through the kitchen. It was weird, he didn’t sound or look like an evil blood-sucking monster. He just looked and sounded…normal. And a little shiny.

“Later [Y/n]! Bye Soonyoung. Have fun!” Chaeryeong waved to you from the stairs. You replied with a goodbye of your own, and Soonyoung hummed, listening for the sound of the door closing shut before turning you around and pushing you against the island.

You gasped. “What are you doing?” The way you squirmed in his hold was amusing to Soonyoung, acting as if you could get away. You were so cute, thinking you could get away from him. This would be more enjoyable than he thought.

“I don’t understand why you’re so afraid of me. I can make you feel so good, baby.” You scoffed, the sound turning into a low moan when he started grinding his hard cock against your ass.

“I’m not afraid of you,” The shakiness in your voice poked a hole in your believability, but Soonyoung didn’t think too much of it. He lowered his head to the side of your neck, pressing a kiss to your pulse point before licking a stripe up the side of your neck. You shivered with a horrible realization; you liked it.

“Mmm, then maybe you like me. Is that why your heart is beating so fast?” You could feel him smiling against your skin.

A whine echoed through the kitchen. Your whine. “Wait, my parents…”

You gasped a second time when Soonyoung turned you so you were facing him, and you watched him roll his eyes with that annoying smile plastered on his face. “Oh, them? They’re coming home late. Your mom locked the keys in the car, so they’ll be a while.” Just when you were about to respond, he turned you around again, the feeling of his breath on your neck making you shiver. “So just focus on me, got it?”

His hands traveled over your body, stopping to squeeze your chest or your ass. You should’ve been embarrassed with how you reacted so eagerly to his touch, but he was actually making you feel good. Well, whatever. It’s not like you’d actually let him know—

“I can get rid of these, right?” He hooked his fingers underneath the waistband of your pajama pants, pulling them down along with your underwear the second you gave him a nod of confirmation. The fabric drops down your legs and pools at your feet and you kicked it aside. Soonyoung reached between your legs, collecting the wetness between them and holding it up to your face, fingers glistening with your arousal. “Look how wet you are for the freaky undead creature. You like this, don’t you?”

“N-no. I don’t like this or you.” Even though you said all that and shook your head, Soonyoung could tell you didn’t mean it. He reached between your legs again, this time to ease one of his fingers inside of you.

“The way you’re moaning for me says otherwise.” As he said that, he pushed another one of his fingers past your walls and eliciting another one of those not so subtle sounds from you that he loved. You didn’t even have to see him to know that he was pleased with himself getting you all worked up like this.

He was arrogant. He was full of himself. He was a smug bastard. He was all of that and more, and it was making you weak in the fucking knees.

Three of his fingers were inside of you now, stretching you so good that it made your head spin, and you bucked your hips against his hands like you’ve never been touched a day in your life.

God, you’d never live this down.

You bit your lip so that he didn’t get the satisfaction of hearing how you were falling apart over his fingers, or how good it felt when he curled them inside of you just right, or how he had your legs shaking every time he reached your sweet spot. As if he needed the vocal confirmation (he heard the noises you were making regardless), the way you were trembling was pretty much a dead giveaway.

“You know, you still owe me a little blood.”

“What?” You turned your head as much as you could to look at him over your shoulder. Soonyoung’s eyes were darker than they were before, his hunger evident through his gaze.

How could you owe him blood? What did that even mean?

“You owe me some blood,” he repeated. “Waving your finger around in my face and refusing me a taste. You have no idea how worked up you got me all over that flimsy little cut.”

Judging by how his dick was still poking you, you seriously doubted that.

You turned your head back around, not wanting him to see your face as you weighed your options. You didn’t really know what would happen if he did bite you. Would it hurt? Would it feel good?

Only one way to find out.

“Just…do it fast.” You tilted your head to give him better access to your neck. Soonyoung smiles wide—not like you could see it, but you were imagining that he was in this situation. He withdraws his fingers from their place inside you, much to your dismay, but he’s now holding them to your lips. He groans when you open your mouth and allows him to slip his fingers in and mumbling something that you can’t pick up over the sound of your thumping heartbeat.

“It shouldn’t hurt too much, but let me know if I need to stop.”

He pressed a quick kiss to the spot on your neck that he was sinking his fangs into no more than a second later, giving you no time to process his little act of intimacy. It stung for a moment, but what followed the initial sting of pain was the most intense and overwhelming sense of pleasure.

Soonyoung moans with absolutely no shame when your blood fills his mouth. He’s never tasted anyone as good as you, and he realizes that he could quickly become addicted to you. Your sounds, your blood, your pussy, each and every part of you inside and out was intoxicating.

You wrap your hands around his wrist and pull his fingers out of your mouth, wanting to have him hear your next words clearly. “Fuck me…please.”

He nearly chokes when you ask him that, forcing himself to pull away just so he can ask you to repeat yourself. He licks the remnants of your blood from his lips and your wound so that it’ll seal. “Anything for you, sweetheart.”

Clearly your expectations for him were still far too high, because instead of taking you to bed or at least the couch, he had you laid on the kitchen floor. Yeah, you’re definitely never living this down.

And yet despite all this, you can’t help but drool when you finally got to see Soonyoung’s cock beyond the confines of his sweatpants. He looks down at you, smirking, and despite your heightened arousal you still feel an urge to kick his cocky little ass.

“Can you get down here before I change my mind?”

He waves at you dismissively as if he hadn’t been the one all over you. “Need a condom. Got one on you?”

You roll your eyes. “I’m clean and on the pill. Come on, just fuck me already, oh my—”

Soonyoung happily lowered himself onto the floor, his lips on yours as he guided himself inside of you inch by inch. He tasted like your blood, obviously, but there was an also a faint taste of pink starburst too. Something he probably got from Leo, no doubt. The combination was weird, but somehow you figured it suited him.

“God. So f-fucking big, Soonie!”

Gone is the last bit of your composure with Soonyoung’s cock buried inside of you, blurting out any thought that came to your head against his lips.

“Shhh, not so loud, baby,” he whispers. “Wouldn’t want to have your bother wake up and find out what a slut you are, would you?” Yeah right, you think. Leo could sleep through anything, including you getting dicked down by his babysitter. But getting called a slut by him in that sickly sweet way had you clenching around him. “Fuck, warn me if you’re gonna do that.”

“Like I knew it would happen.” You hissed, making him laugh. He found this back and forth thing going on between the two of you fun, especially when he could get you so worked up and vice versa.

He waited until your body had relaxed to start moving, having to keep one of his hands over your mouth each time he thrusted into you because despite what he’d said earlier you just couldn’t seem to stop yourself. It wasn’t your fault that the kitchen was so echoey or that Soonyoung was giving it to you so fucking good.

“You’re such a cute little thing,” He laughed breathily into your neck. “I loved how much of a fight you put up for me baby. Now look at you. You’re mine.”

“All—ah—yours,” your words were muffled by his hands, but he understood you perfectly. The embarrassment you felt earlier was gone, completely replaced with thoughts of him and his cock splitting you open right here on the floor.

You felt him nod, “Mhm, you’re all mine, and I’m all yours. God, wish I could just fuck this sweet little pussy forever.”

A laugh managed slipped past your lips and he finally moved his hand away from your mouth. “You can say that?”

“God? Duh.” He sneered, becoming more and more aware of just how clueless you really were about vampire culture. “Can’t believe I’m having this conversation with you right now.”

You were just about to say something else when Soonyoung changed the angle of his hips, slamming into you even deeper than before. Your back arched, chest pressed to his, and a second later you let out a frustrated groan.

“You still fucking suck.”

“I’m glad you noticed.”

He opts for a faster pace after that, spurred on by the way you close your eyes and babble his name over and over again as if it’s the only word you can say. He’s so desperate to cum, to get you to cum, to have him be the only thing on your mind when you make a mess of yourself all over him. He whispers for you to keep your eyes closed, taking your wrist in his hand and bringing it to your stomach.

“Can you feel me? Right…” He moves your hand around a little before he finds the correct place, “here?” Blindly, you press down on the spot, and your eyes shoot open. He’s so, so deep, you can’t keep it together anymore.

“F-Fuck, feels so good,” your breath hitches at the end of the sentence. “Need more…”

“Yeah? Pretty baby needs more?” Soonyoung raises one of your legs over his shoulders and you swear you start seeing stars with the way he’s fucking you. “You’re so t-tight, sweetheart. Gonna cum?”

“Mmm, yeah, so c-close. Make me cum, Soonie, need it so bad.”

Soonyoung lifts his head so that he can kiss you, only breaking it to quickly mumble the words “me too” before his lips are back on yours and his finger is rubbing your clit until your body goes limp beneath his and he feels you squeezing him so tight it triggers his own orgasm, slowing the speed of his thrusts as he floods your pussy with his cum.

Your head feels fuzzy, and you barely register the feeling of him pulling out or lifting himself off of you while you lay there and catch your breath. “Soonyoung?”

There’s no immediate response, and it makes you confused as to why. You try to lift yourself off the floor but the soreness hasn’t quite subsided, so you’ve no choice but to stay put. “Yeah, just leave me on the floor. Not like I need your help or anything.”

“Well excuse me for not wanting you to be all sticky.” He huffs, wiping the insides of your thighs with a damp washcloth, then proceeding to wipe down the floor and the top of the island.

“I’m still on the floor, Soonyoung.”

Smiling, he helps you to stand and even manages to get you back into your underwear and pajama pants. He won’t stop looking at you like he has something to say. Maybe, for once, it’s something important.

“What?”

“You wanna go again? I’ve still got a ton of energy.” You rolled your eyes. Of course he did. “Oh come on, I know you liked it.”

“That’s it, I’m getting the fork.”

[octo-in-the-mainframe]

Side Order Spoilers!!!

Okay does anyone else find it weird that Smollusk and Pearl referred to both DJ Octavio and Agent 4 as "big shots"?

And that Pearl says Agent 4 "was supposed to be such a big shot"??

And that even though pieces of their souls got sucked into the Memverse they canonically have not been seen after the events of Splatoon 2 and 3 respectively???

Knowing that characters were added to Tableturf after the DLC, namely, Pearl, Marina and Acht, I wouldn't be surprised if more characters are added later.

"But Octo, didn't Nintendo say there would only be two waves of DLC?"

Well, yes...but I have reason to believe otherwise.

First, when announcing the two waves of DLC, yellow and blue were used for the first and second waves, but despite there being four colors used for the announcement, red and green made no further appearance.

I'm sure if Nintendo really wanted to, they could have found a way to make just the yellow and blue look nice, but they specifically added those two colors. Red, I get, that's Big Man's color, even if they don't use it much in promotional material, but GREEN?

If Nintendo were to make more DLC, three waves WOULD make sense, considering the leitmotif of threes throughout the game. It's the third game, there's 3 idols, 3 forces united as one, 3 Splatfest teams to choose from, etc.

But that still doesn't explain the fourth color. It breaks the pattern of threes and uses a color that is barely anywhere among our cast of characters, besides Marie, DJ Octavio, and maybe Callie.

And then I thought...what if it's to give us a taste of the next game? Next IS Splatoon 4, so I wouldn't put it past them for a sneak peek.

My other, and more likely idea was that it would center around Agent 4, which kind of ties in with the weird wording used for both Octavio and them. Perhaps we'll finally get to see what they've been up to, maybe even teaming up with a certain DJ?

As for the third wave...I'm not too sure. I think it might have to do with Lil' Judd and Marigold, though.

As we collect scrolls in Alterna, we get tidbits of the other characters' lives and some info on the Splatoon world itself.

But something that stood out to me is when we get to Pearl and Marina's scroll.

It's their outfits from the DLC, clearly meant to foreshadow their next appearance. And right before that was a scroll for the Squid Sister's podcast (and that dried up squid), which lines up since their hub world was brought to the game in the first wave of DLC.

But after Pearl and Marina, it's Lil' Judd.

Lil' Judd planning for Judd's demise.

Which has not been brought up seriously in the main game.

That...that means nothing, right? I mean, more DLC hasn't even been announced, ha-ha!!

But then the next page is Marigold, with her many pictures crossed out, with multiple names to the same-ish face. It's secretive; does she have various clones, multiple siblings? What is she?

And then, there's also the concerning connection between her and Lil' Judd.

Marigold works at Grizzco, evidenced by her voice at the counter and her vocabulary. Lil' Judd...is in CHARGE of Grizzco now, majorly implied by the new inclusion of a headpiece on him after you finish fighting Mr. Grizz.

I think the third wave of DLC will be focusing on Lil' Judd's plans to get rid of Judd and will involve a further look into Marigold and how Grizzco operates.

I mean, we can't keep stealing Salmonid eggs forever, can we? Eventually they'll run out. This endless back and forth has resulted in Big Run's happening, so it's not out of the question that we get a resolution to this.

(I personally think Big Run will have its own version of an ending, one where whenever you play Salmon Run after it it's "in the past," so that it doesn't affect whatever the conclusion was. Otherwise, the Big Runs would likely just get worse.)

Maybe we'll get to be Neo 3 this time and learn more Salmonid lore with our Smallfry friend!!

Of course, most of these concepts are speculation, but I do want to show off one last piece of evidence that I think can be rather damning.

The roped off barrier by the Metro. (Sorry I don't have an image of it, and I don't want to use anyone else's footage.)

Only removed once the DLC trailer was shown.

And look what we have here, as far back as the original Splatoon 3 Direct...

Another roped off barrier in front of the arch. Not just construction, like how Splatoon always sets up new places for the next game, no. It's a barrier, with a big empty space behind it.

I always thought it was so weird we weren't allowed to go over there, and now it seems so obvious to me what Splatoon has been implying.

I don't want to get my hopes up, or anyone else's, but I'm finding it exceedingly difficult to just move past these details and pretend like they're nothing.

What about you guys? Do you also think all of this is mighty suspicious? Do you have any theories regarding more waves of DLC, and what they could possibly be? Oh, and if you have more evidence for there being four waves, please feel free to tell me in the comments or through message. (I might not see the messages, though, because mine haven't been working that well, so mostly stick to comments and reblogs.)

Lastly, I did want to ask if anyone knows what the European version of the shop for the DLC means by “It’s possible that additional DLC, not listed above will also be distributed with the Expansion Pass.” I saw somebody mention it, I don't remember what post, but I was wondering if that was just a standard description for the European page or if it was just for this DLC. I'm in the US, and mine doesn't say that. If I'm completely wrong about this fact please tell me,,,

That's all I got though!! So, buh-bye!!!!

[sineala]

So, Tony’s marrying Emma Frost now? I feel like Tony’s the only character that toss around like this, in that sense. What number wife will this be?

Uh... one, assuming it happens? Tony has never been canonically married before in 616.

He has had one retconned engagement to a woman named Joanna Nivena, who left him when he decided to be Iron Man. He was serious enough about Rumiko Fujikawa to want to marry her, IIRC, but he never had the chance to propose to her before she was killed. He proposed to Patsy and she said no. As far as I know, that's it. He's dated a lot of characters and he's generally very serious about them and I wouldn't be surprised if canon had said he had seriously considered marrying at least a few others that I can't name off the top of my head, but, yeah, he's only been engaged once.

(Across the multiverse, he's clearly been in serious relationships at least a few other times and famously engaged to Natasha in Ults, but the only non-MCU universe I can think of right now where canon has focused on him being married to anyone is the one where he's married to... Steve.)

Also, this shouldn't really be a surprise to anyone? We have known Tony and Emma have had a Friends With Benefits thing going, as was established in Civil War, like, fifteen years ago. We have specifically known for the past four years that the wedding was coming, ever since History of the Marvel Universe came out in 2019, and made several prophetic statements about the future, including this:

This is not coming out of nowhere; we have had four years of lead time. So far I think about half the things on that page have come true. Maybe more? I haven't checked in a while. So honestly for the past four years of comics I have been saying that I was still waiting for the Tony/Emma wedding, as the prophecy foretold, and that it seemed likely to be some kind of politically-motivated marriage for mutant/human relations especially given that Tony is canonically a member of the Hellfire Club, which has also been true for years, and that seems to be exactly how this is playing out, judging by today's announcement. As I was expecting.

I really like how Duggan has been writing Tony, and how he's been writing Tony and Emma, and I've always thought it would be interesting to see more Tony/Emma in canon, so I think this is gonna be a lot of fun while it happens and maybe there will be more Tony/Emma fic because the few I have read have been great. Tony in relationships with telepaths has been something I've thought was interesting for a while and I don't think we're ever getting Marianne Rodgers back, so Emma it is.

Given Marvel's track record with their characters' marriages I feel that there's no way this is lasting more than six months assuming the marriage happens at all (as the prophecy only foretells a wedding) and honestly I'm hoping no one sells them to Mephisto because seriously, he already also collected Strange and Clea's marriage for a bit in addition to Peter/MJ. I don't know why that dude wants marriages so much.

Honestly, if you want to talk about weird and unexpected canonical relationships involving Emma Frost, I am STILL not over the part where it appears to be canon right now that (1) Steve and Sharon have been in an open relationship for a while, (2) Steve and Emma slept together at the last Hellfire Gala, and (3) it was mommy kink. Because I assure you I absolutely didn't see that coming.

So basically I am intrigued now that the time of Tony/Emma is upon us as foretold in the prophecy. Also I hope fandom brings me some It's Complicated Steve/Tony/Emma because I can't believe we're really just going to leave the canon Steve/Emma thing alone, fandom, and oh my God it is all SO MUCH. Comics. Comics are so Very Comics sometimes.

[dreamdepot]

Dreams of the Kingdom - Chapter 21: Dusk and Dawn

Previous < First > Next

AO3 Wattpad or below!

It is never comforting to wake up somewhere unfamiliar, especially when waking up in an entirely different plane of existence, in a body that was unfamiliar to you.

The entire room was obsidian black, made of unnaturally smooth, square stone. Everything just felt wrong, sending your new fur on end. At the very least, the bed was warm and comfortable – save for the woman sitting at the end. “Hmm, two and six but fifteen spaces…” she muttered, looking down at a puzzle of some kind. She then looked up, noticing you.

She was a gorgeous woman, but just as unsettling as your new surroundings. Her skin was black and pale blue with glowing tattoos. Her fiery orange hair and equally bright eyes were the only burst of color in this monochrome room. Just one look felt as if she was able to read your deepest thoughts, and her mischievous smile seemed to hold secrets of her own. “Ah, you’re awake. That’s good, not many of your kind handle the trip to my realm so well… considering most are reduced to a shade, but you became a beast. Who are you?”

“I feel like I should be asking you the same,” you said. Talking felt strange with your new mouth. You looked down at your body. While you were foxlike now, you were at least still somewhat human shaped.

“You should be thankful I stopped the transformation before you turned fully into a fox. The last Hylian I knew that became a beast was stuck on all fours.” She narrowed her eyes. “Now, again, who are you?”

You decided to yield, given you were in no shape to fight if things went south. “My name is [Y/n]. Now who are you, where am I, and…” You stopped, suddenly remembering what she said before you blacked out. “I’m in the Twilight Realm. But wait, yeah, I should be a shade, not a fox! A-and last Hylian would mean…” You looked back up at her. “Princess Midna?”

“Queen Midna, ruler of the Twilight Realm,” she corrected. She studied you. “And you are still hiding things from me. The way you sit, the way you look like you’re on a mission… you remind me far too much of Zelda. So what? Did she finally get hitched and have a kid or what?”

You sputtered. “What? No, I’m not…”

She suddenly burst into laughter. “Can’t you tell when someone is messing with you? You really must be related to her if you’re this up tight.” Your new fur bristled, which did not go unnoticed. “Oh, no, you are?”

“It’s… complicated.” You were about to explain when your hand fell to your bare wrist. Your heart turned to ice. “Wait, where is it, where is it?!” You patted around the sheets.

“You mean this?” Midna held out Link’s hair band. “The strap snapped. Here, one second.” She ran her hands through your fur, carefully combing it back and threading it through the band. As she brushed and braided, you told your story. She quietly listened as she took one of her own hair sticks and locked the band in place. You looked up into the mirror, seeing the hair band glinting against your red fur. “Hair bands are meant to be worn, not sure why you’d wear it on your wrist.”

Your face fell. “It’s not mine, it belongs to my boyfriend.”

Her gaze softened, if for a moment. “Then I’m sure he’d rather you wear it to keep him close to you, than on an old bit of leather.”

“It felt a bit weird to wear it, but… kinda feels nice now. Like he’s here.” Your fingers brushed the band. “Guess being a fox isn’t the worst thing to happen to me.”

“Like I said, you’re lucky,” Midna said. “Lingering light energy was enough to give you a form here in the Twilight Realm instead of becoming a shade. However, without my power, it would have been snuffed out. The Twilight eventually warps anyone from the Light World without proper protection. Be thankful you didn’t become a monster.” She stopped, the mischievous twinkle in her eye again. “In fact…”

“Uh oh.”

She shrugged. “Well, I did stop your transformation and you’re clearly some kind of warrior. Therefore, I’d say you owe me a favor, don’t you think?”

You swallowed hard. “What kind of favor?”

“You’re not the only visitor I have from Hyrule today, though I can’t explain how he got here – let alone with an interesting present…” She looked you up and down. “First though, you should change.”

She was right. Your Sheikah armor was torn and unsuitable for battle, partially from the transformation and partially from your constant battling without a chance to do any maintenance in the previous eras. You made your way behind a privacy screen and started to change. “So, if you’re in need of a warrior, what kind of ‘present’ are we talking about?”

“You catch on quick. My people were cast out from Hyrule many years ago. Our ancestor’s shadow magic was considered dangerous and for good reason: their anger, hatred, and sorrow created several dark artifacts that threatened the light.”

You simply hummed in agreement; you had heard stories of things such as the Fused Shadow, the vessel that held the bound shadow magic that once was used to try and steal the Triforce.

“I’m afraid one of these artifacts has found its way back to us after it was long thought destroyed. I simply need you to… get rid of it. I really don’t care how, I just want it as far as possible from my realm.”

“You don’t want to destroy it? Or maybe seal it away?”

You could feel Midna’s judgmental glare through the screen. “Prince [Y/n], you obviously have studied the history of Hyrule. Explain to me how many times sealing something away has gone well for the people of Hyrule.”

“Point taken, but what about destroying it.”

“Not an option. Doing so would likely release all of the bound magic and make things worse. You’re a time traveler, take it somewhere where no one will ever find it.” Midna sighed. “Are you done yet?”

You decided not to comment on the unease in Midna’s voice. Now in your Royal Guard armor, you followed her down the halls. Your new tail slipped out, thankfully without needing to tear a hole in your old uniform. “Oh, I’m going to need a weapon.”

“Suppose that would help,” Midna stopped off at an armory, pulling down an old box. She tossed something to you. “Here, use this old thing.”

A shiny ivory and gold crossbow landed in your hands. “Oh hey, always wanted to try one of these.”

“Just make sure to give it back, it belonged to an old friend.”

You tested the crossbow’s weight. “You wouldn’t happen to have a sword too, would you?”

She grabbed a longsword from one of the Twili guards as you passed toward one of the courtyards. “This good enough?”

You held the twisted blade. It was unlike anything you’d seen before but looked deadly as any sword you’d used before. “Oh yeah, this is perfect. So, what’s the target?”

“That.”

You looked out at the courtyard where a grotesque scene lay before you. Several Twili guards were dead. The body at the center thankfully appeared to be clinging to life. What wasn’t so great was that the body was definitely from Hyrule, a Zora. To make matters worse, the Zora was almost completely enveloped in a mass of gloom tentacles, all feeding up to the source, firmly fixed to the Zora’s face – a terrible nightmare you long thought merely a story.

“Majora?! You want me to fight Majora?!” Midna shrugged. “Majora should be dead. Hero of Time destroyed all the evil in the mask!”

“Yes, interesting, isn’t it? It’s as if another evil has resurrected it.”

This voice was new, and Midna seemed rather tired by it. “Oh yes, there’s him too.”

A strange man sat near the edge of the courtyard, seemingly ignored by the other Twili guards and he ignored them. The oddest part was that he simultaneously looked Hylian and yet not, as if it was someone or something pretending to be Hylian. Unlike with the others, he looked at you with a smile that was just a little too wide, wringing his hands. “You… you’re an interesting one, aren’t you?”

A chill crawled down your back as he almost scuttled closer to you. “Yes, yes, very interesting indeed. You’re an intruder too. Not quite an Interloper, no, no, but you really are someplace you don’t belong.” An unsettling laugh dripped out his grin.

“Who are you?”

“No one important as a prince,” he snickered, instantly raising your guard. “Just a salesman, selling his masks far and wide. But one day, that very important mask of mine was stolen away and infested by an evil hand. Of course, a mask needs a wearer, so it decided to grab the nearest body strong enough…”

“Okay, get it yourself, it’s right there.”

“Oh no, I’m not a fighter. Quite the contrary, just a humble mask salesman. Someone will need to tame the evil within.”

“What happens to the Zora?”

“I can help you restore that poor Zora to his rightful self, if necessary. All I ask is that you get back my precious mask, and we all avoid a truly terrible fate,” he said, suddenly behind you. His eerie grin was so fixed on his face, you half-expected that he was wearing a mask right now. “Deal?”

You clenched your jaw. “Deal.”

“Good, and good luck…”

The writhing mass of tentacles lifted from the ground, weaving itself into a body around the comatose Zora. The mask and its mutated host was twisted beyond recognition, the gloom forming limbs. Where the mask once was had transformed into a chest. The arms grew and deformed into long whips. With a shrill shriek, a head emerged from the mass, its eerie eyes locking in on you. Before you was the demon of legend, Majora’s Wrath.

The monster was deadly quick, lashing at you. Your body moved without thinking, leaping and rolling to safety. You drew the crossbow and took aim at the eye. With an almost silent thwip, the arrow sailed through the air, narrowly missing the monster. “Damn, wish I had a chance to practice with this one first.” You rolled out of the way of the whips again, reloading and trying again.

The whips snagged you, holding you as the monster flung you across the courtyard. You skidded on the ground, narrowly avoiding a fall into the void. The monster cackled as you reloaded the crossbow again, feeling a surge of energy rising within you. This time the arrow struck true, stunning the demon for a brief second. You ran in with your sword, getting in a quick strike before dodging back as it tried to wrap you in its whips. Again, you loaded your crossbow and fired before charging in again, determined to keep Majora on the defensive.

With each swing you felt strength beyond your own. Warmth flowed down your arm, as if another hand closed over yours on the blade, guiding your strikes. At first, you thought it was Link, but then you realized the invisible hand was much larger than his. Your sword began to glow faintly, channeling a forgotten power.

You…

The deep voice nearly made you jump. It sounded like it was in your ear.

You… are…

The rest was cut off as Majora shrieked in agony, its body contorting as it turned into light, before bursting into gloom mist. The mask fell to the ground with a dull thonk, lifeless once more. You ran to the Zora. “What… happened?” He wheezed. Kneeling at his side, you could see he was a regal looking Zora with pale pink scales. “Holy Nayru, are you a fox?”

“It’s complicated. Are you alright?”

He coughed. “I will be. I’m Ralis, you?”

“[Y/n].”

He gave you a wink. “Then I thank you for saving me, from the bottom of my heart.” A blue glow filled his chest before disappearing into the ether like the others.

“Well done, well done!” You turned, half shielding Ralis from the salesman. “Record time might I add, and your Zora friend is none the worse for wear!” He reached down and picked up the mask. “Hmm, yes, the evil is gone once again.”

He turned back to you. “Since there is no need for my end of the bargain, I believe I owe you something of payment.” He held out a package wrapped in old rags. Gloom seemed to seep out from the cracks. You carefully unwrapped it, careful not to let the gloom touch you as dissipated in the Twilight.

“The Fierce Deity Mask?”

“I think it’s fitting, don’t you? Or perhaps you don’t know yet. Isn’t time fun?” He turned to leave but you stopped him.

“Can I really trust you with that mask?” You asked, brandishing your sword.

He merely laughed. “If you have to ask that, you should never have let me pick it up. Now, I must be going, I have a long way to travel still.” Before your eyes, he disappeared, fading into the Twilight. A disembodied voice echoed around you. “Oh, and Prince [Y/n], shouldn’t you be getting home too?”

You could only groan.

Frustration and rage boils within you. Intriguing.

You froze, looking down at the mask. The voice again whispered in your ear as the mask seemed to glow. Slowly, it floated before you. The hollow eyes somehow still piercing you.

You fight bravely and with honor. I understand now why he chose you.

“What?”

You may have freed me from gloom and from that man, but you are not the one I seek. Farewell. We will meet again.

“Wait!” But it was too late, the mask too disappeared. Thinking to where you found the mask in your time, you could only wonder if you accidentally changed the future for the worse.

“Thank the goddesses they’re gone,” Midna muttered, strolling up to you. She looked you and Ralis over briefly, making sure you were both in one piece before relaxing. “My things please?” You, regrettably, returned the crossbow and Twili sword – much to the guard’s happiness. “Now, let’s get you two back to the Light World.”

You frowned. “I thought the Mirror of Twilight was destroyed?”

“It was, and that was for the best. That said, Zelda and I have had ways to speak with each other over the years. Being a queen does have its privileges.”

“Okay… then how are we supposed to get back?”

Midna simply smiled.

==============================

You and Ralis tumbled out of a mirror onto the cold stone floors of Hyrule Castle. Two gasps met you as you tried to stand. You looked down to your hands, happy to see they were back to normal Hylian hands. You then reached back to feel Link’s hair band, still braided into your hair.

“Well, this certainly raises some questions.” You then remembered you had two people watching. You looked up to see an older man peering at you through his spectacles, helping Ralis to his feet. He was dressed formally, though the fashions were very different from the ones of your Hyrule. You half-wondered how Cece would react.

“Ah, so you’re the one Midna mentioned.” You turned to find an older Zelda, standing tall and regal with the scarcest hint of a smile. By your guess, she must have been in her late thirties, well after Zant’s invasion. “I am Queen Zelda XIV, and from what Midna suggested, you are my future successor. That uniform of yours certainly helps seal it.”

“I’m sorry, it’s the only armor I really have right now. It’s better than my torn set.”

“That would be quite unbecoming for our family,” Zelda replied, stifling a laugh as she helped you up. “Shad, would you be so kind as to help our friend? I would like a moment with our new guest.”

The scholar bowed. “Of course, your majesty. I will see to it that King Ralis is escorted safely back to the Domain.”

Before he left, Ralis clasped his hand on your shoulder with a bright smile. “Thank you friend, I and the Zora people owe you a great debt.”

You laughed. “Believe me, your descendant would do the same for me any day of the week.”

As they left, Zelda moved to her desk and took a seat, motioning for you to do the same across from her. Her expression was unreadable. “You have me at a disadvantage.”

Manners aside, you felt it important to be honest. “I am [Y/n] Daltus Hyrule, ma’am.”

“I see. I am glad to hear that you were able to assist Midna in securing the safety of the Twilight Realm.” She poured you a cup of tea. “I hope you don’t mind Ceylon tea?”

“Not at all.” Your posture straightened as you accepted the teacup, a bit surprised how quickly castle etiquette came back to you after all these years. You took a sip, almost instantly feeling your aches and pains soothed.

Zelda savored the tea as well. “This blend is a particular favorite of mine; it’s unique as it uses a pinch of dried mushrooms. It’s a gift from a dear friend from a distant kingdom. You aren’t the only one who has seen other worlds and other times. I should write her a letter…” She seemed lost for a moment before turning back to you. “I apologize, it’s a bit daunting to meet a descendant when… well, I haven’t exactly been interested in anyone.”

“Your majesty, believe me, I understand the awkwardness.”

“Then perhaps an icebreaker. Do you play?” She asked, pulling out an intricately crafted chess set.

“Not for some time I’m afraid, but I used to play with my sister.” Given your military mind and Zelda’s analytical prowess, the matches would often go on for hours.

As the two of you started to play, you explained the situation, and Zelda opened with her pawn. You blocked it as you told her about the Calamity. Zelda would nod, casually moving her bishop. By the time you explained how you found the Gate of Time, her queen was in your back row, moments from locking you in checkmate. “Wow, I can’t believe I fell for that.”

“That’s alright, Shad and I play often, and you did outlast him.” She took another sip of her tea. “I was thinking of giving you something if you won, but I think you’ll need it regardless. Your uniform is very nice, but hardly what I’d call a strong armor.” She stood, walking to a chest in the back of her office, returning with a large bundle. “Perhaps you should try this.”

The armor in question was gold and silver, inlaid with a gemstone in the center of the chest and carved details of the Triforce. Under the plates was a scaled hauberk, partly covered by a tunic, not unlike the Links of the past. However, instead of green, this tunic was wine-red. All of it was topped off by a circlet, serving both as protection and crown. “This armor was designed for a prince,” Zelda said. “Of course, I’m an only child, so think of this as a gift for a future grandson.”

“Thank you.” You held the armor, the sturdy weaving and hefty plates were oddly comforting.

“I should mention,” Zelda added, “this is technically a copy of a different armor the Link of my time has, called the Magic Armor. It isn’t impenetrable like that armor, though I will say that this set doesn’t carry the rather significant drawback that one has. It wouldn’t do for you to run out of protection the second you run out of rupees.”

“No, not at all,” you muttered, considering you rarely carried many rupees if you knew you were headed into a battle. Still, holding this armor, something so regal and nice felt strange after years living in a Hyrule struggling to recover. “Are you sure it’s okay?”

“Of course. If you are to face the Ganondorf of your time, I would want to give you every advantage. Never hesitate to stack the deck in your favor. Even if you must make sacrifices, you have a responsibility to yourself and your people.” She motioned back to the chess set. “I used to think fighting against Zant and Ganondorf was like a chess game. I admit it’s not quite a perfect analogy, but you must consider where to make your gambles and where to make your sacrifices. And,” she said, picking up the king. “If someone was going to give you a few more knights on your side, why would you ever disagree?”

You laughed. “Maybe I shouldn’t play against you anymore.”

“You just need to learn the better way to play,” she said with a smile. “No holding back, but no rushing in blind either. Look at all of your resources, [Y/n]. Which reminds me… I do have one more gift for you.” She took a cloak off her coatrack and draped it over her shoulders. “Come along, the gardens are quite lovely this time of day.”

==============================

Zelda led you to a part of the grounds that was walled off. She pressed in on a brick, and a small secret doorway folded inward. “This way please.” As you followed, you noticed the grounds grew colder and colder. Mist rolled in around you as the doorway closed behind you. This section was poorly maintained and overgrown, despite the trees seeming dead. “This is the old graveyard,” Zelda explained. “It has been sealed to hide one of our greatest secrets. Thankfully, even when he attacked us, Ganondorf never fully understood what was hidden here.”

She stopped before an old grave, marked with the Triforce. Time had long worn away the writing. “This is where I leave you, future grandson.” She smiled softly.

“But what am I supposed to do?”

“Just be patient. He has never let our family down before. I doubt he’ll start now. Good luck.” With that, she left you standing alone in the eerie graveyard.

You waited, half expecting a Poe to leap out at you, but you were alone except for the wind. Some of the stones in the graveyard were notched or carved with holes, reminding you a bit of the odd stones Kass once showed you near Jeddo Bridge. The wind whistled through them, playing different notes. Soon, you realized they were carefully designed to play a song, each stone contributing a different note to each chord. You started to sing along, easily placing it as the Song of Time.

The third time you sang with the stones, you realized your voice was accompanied by an ocarina. The wind shifted, seeming to blow in reverse as a blue glow appeared before you. The light steadily glowed brighter and brighter until a figure emerged from the light before you. He was tall and strong, a seasoned warrior – but the blond hair and blue eyes were unmistakable.

“You’re a hard man to track down.” You stared at this other Link. It was like looking into the future, seeing this thirty-something version of your boyfriend. He had a scar over one eye, and wore a set of armor and chainmail with a heavy broadsword strapped at his waist. Most eye catching was the royal blue ocarina in his hand. “It’s good to see you again, Prince [Y/n].”

“Y-you’re the Hero of Time!”

He grinned. “You’d be surprised how rare it is people notice me right away.”

You looked him over, enjoying the idea of what your Link might look like in a decade or so. “So, I guess this means you ended up finding the Fire Sage?”

“I did. Gotta say, I was pretty disappointed you never came back to visit after. Need to give you this back.” He reached into his pack and pulled out a glass bottle, the same one you used to heal him.

You couldn’t help but laugh. “Honestly, it’s fine if you want to keep it.”

“Suit yourself,” he shrugged. “Can’t imagine anyone willingly give up these things, but maybe that’s just a difference in generations.”

“Sure, grandpa.”

“Hey, I’m not that much older than you, and you were the old one when we first met!” He tried his best to look upset, but a smile cracked through. “Well, if you won’t take the bottle, at least I can help you out a different way.”

“I wouldn’t mind a ride to another time.” Your face fell. “And maybe some advice. You’re the time travel expert.”

He held up the ocarina. “I have been doing this for a bit. I don’t usually get involved in the other Links, but… well, you’re a bit of a special case. Ganondorf has been messing with time itself.”

“Yeah, Link and the Sages turned to stone, and I know Ganondorf is doing everything he can to make himself more powerful in my time. I know if I fix the problems in the past, it’s a step closer to beating him, but trying to figure out which Link will help my Link…” You finished with a groan. “Honestly feels like my brain is going to pop.”  

“I know the feeling,” he said, patting you on the back. “How about we start with the simple stuff first. Just call me Time for now. I think it’ll help with the confusion, not thinking of me as a Link and all.”

“Alright, Time,” you said, “you wouldn’t have any ideas, would you? I don’t suppose it’s as easy as just jumping back in to stop Ganondorf while he’s still mummified?”

He sighed. “No, it doesn’t work like that. My hands are tied in many ways. I can’t change the events of past to stop Ganondorf’s rise to power, in your time or mine. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

“What do you mean? You beat Ganondorf!” Suddenly your head swam. “Wait… did you?”

Time gave you an uneasy smile. “That will be you getting used to the timestream. Ganondorf shattered time in my era, leading to three possible outcomes. Unfortunately, I only win in two of them, which in the long run was a net-win for Ganondorf.”

“Wait, what do you mean you failed? I remember every book I read saying you won?”

“The timestream heals leading to a future filled with anachronisms, the Hyrule you come from. Your Hyrule is an anomaly, but that really isn’t saying much when you look back at our history. I guess in one way, you wouldn’t exist without Ganondorf’s meddling.” He stopped to think for a moment. “Actually yeah, you wouldn’t exist at all, considering your ancestors come from the timeline I failed in.”

“But in the timeline, you succeeded in, you-”

“Let’s keep it simple,” he said, holding up his hand. “Ganondorf shattering time only gave him more chances to gather his strength. Even with the other heroes stopping him, he always got one step closer to his goal, getting the Triforce.”

“And I practically delivered two pieces to him on a silver platter,” you groaned.

Time shrugged. “It wouldn’t be the first time. What worries me more is that all of us in your past only fought incarnations of Ganondorf or Demise – or on occasion another dark wizard. The Ganondorf you face in your time is the source of all evil. That doesn’t mean he’s undefeatable though.” He thought for a moment. “You already found two pieces of the Triforce, so where is the third?”

“I… don’t know. It’s not with my Link. Do you have it?”

“My piece of the Triforce returned to the Sacred Realm. And since that time, the Triforce seems to have been moved somewhere else.” Time frowned. “I haven’t been able to track it at all across any era. At some point or another, the Triforce simply disappeared. Besides, even if I did have it, I couldn’t give it to you, given how often it is needed between our times.”

You thought for a moment, back to your dreams and Sheik’s message. “The answer is nothing but silence.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s what Sheik said… it’s some kind of hint to where the Shadow Temple is in my time. Maybe it has the final piece. Maybe it means the temple is hidden somewhere so far in the past, it’s before Hyrule ever existed?”

“Perhaps,” Time muttered. “Though that does get a bit messy with Demise and Hylia.”

It was as if the puzzle solved itself, jingle and all playing in your head. If anyone would know… “Time, what can you tell me about the cycle?”

“The cycle? That thing Sky and Wild rode in that race?”

“What? And who?”

“Never mind. I’m sure you’ll meet Sky later, and Wild’s what I call your boyfriend.” Fitting. “What do you mean by cycle?”

“The cycle, the whole reincarnation thing. Sahasrahla said it was the cycle of a hero, a princess, and an evil, over and over throughout our history. My friend Sharpe said I have to break it, but I don’t even know how or why. Not only that, when I was in the Era of the Great Sea, it was pretty obvious the cycle doesn’t always work. I’m not sure where any of this goes.”

“Ah, that cycle…” He sat on his gravestone. “Listen, Sahasrahla knows his stuff, but he doesn’t know everything, especially with the Curse of Demise.”

“Curse? But Sharpe called it a cycle?”

“Most people see it as a cycle, a never-ending loop of hero, princess, and darkness, fighting as long as Hyrule exists, but it’s not really accurate to say that.”

“So, what is it?”

“Like I said, it’s a curse, and most of us will tell you the same. Where to start…” Time thought for a moment. “Long ago, before Hyrule, before the Zonai, there was a great war between the forces of Demise and the mortal races. Demise was defeated by the Goddess Hylia who imprisoned him, but at great cost. Hylia gave her life to be reborn in a time when her chosen hero would be strong enough to fight and destroy him forever. You probably know this as the Legend of Skyloft and the First Hero.”

“Yeah, mother used to tell it to me, She said that Hylia rose our people into the sky before being reborn as the first Zelda, and her chosen hero came back to slay Demise.”

“Yes, but when Demise was struck down by the Hero of the Skies, he vowed to return, laying a curse upon the three, starting what Sahasrahla and your friend call the cycle. There would always be three, forever reborn and forced to fight over and over until the end of time itself. Demise just never anticipated there being a greater evil than him – the Demon King of your era.”

“Okay I get that part, what didn’t Sahasrahla understand?”

“First, like you said, the curse isn’t ironclad. There are times when there’s been no hero, and times when Ganondorf didn’t actually bother to bring about a great evil, the evil just managed to worm itself in regardless – like in Hytopia. Second, the curse is really about a legacy instead of true reincarnation. While many times Ganondorf or whoever would return, it was because of your Ganondorf’s meddling. On the other hand, the Link and Zelda were always different. I am not your Link, but he carries my spirit with him, as well as all of the other heroes.”

“And me?”

“You’re not part of the cycle, but I think that’s a good thing. Ganondorf may have forced you – or your past self, Sheik – to reincarnate in the future so that he could have his revenge, but that makes you different. For the entire history of Hyrule, the three have been locked in replaying this curse on and on, three forces forever balanced, unable to overtake the others. And now, here comes you, a new force who has already disrupted balance by carrying two pieces of the Triforce. You’re the fourth force that will destabilize the curse.

“This war is finally going to come to a close soon, and I think you are the deciding factor, Prince [Y/n]. You are the one who stands a chance to break the Curse of Demise and end this forever.” He stood. “My greatest regret was that I could only seal Ganondorf away, and in doing so, the curse continued. The good news is you’re outside the cycle, so you can change time more easily than I can. You’re the only one that can undo what Ganondorf has done, and you’ve already made great headway.”

He was right, three sages were now free, leaving Yunobo, the Master Sword, and Link. Perhaps though, there was someone else you could save. “One step at a time,” you sighed. “If you can pick where to travel in time, can you take me all the way back? Back to the reign of King Rauru and Queen Sonia?”

Time shook his head. “I can’t take you to the Age of the Zonai; you’re too closely tied with the events then. One wrong move and you could be erased from existence. I might, however, be able to take you back to your Hyrule, prior to the Calamity.”

“Heh,” you said. “That was my original target.”

“Then let’s see if I can get you home, your majesty,” Time said, picking up his ocarina.  

==============================

A/N: While he only appeared briefly, I did have to include Shad as a cameo for a fellow Zelda fic writer. If you haven’t had the chance, please check out ShadyScripter’s stories on AO3, which also like to play with time travel in the Zelda universe.

Next time, we travel back to a Hyrule familiar to you and rescue a stranded friend.

[pinkmarbella2050]

A Wild ETN Wattpad Fic I Read

So... I just remembered this really wild ETN fic I read from when I was still on Wattpad. So wild, I've decided to summarise it and share my thoughts. This is probably gonna get REALLY long, so buckle up! (TW: This fic summary/review contains mentions of parent murder, childhood trauma, an affair, bulimia, suicide, just a ton of smut and a lot of death, period. There's also an arson in Chapter 6. If any of that is a trigger, do not read below the 'Keep Reading').

P.S: I'm not naming the fic because I don't want the author getting shamed. Not that I think anybody on here would, but just to be safe. P.P.S: This isn't me shaming writers for writing what they want. I can tell the writer clearly enjoyed writing this fic in question and I'm under the assumption that they were young and didn't know any better. This is just my opinion, I'm not trying to attack anyone and also, this author's been inactive for about four years now.

OK, so for some context, this fic is set in an AU of Escape The Night Season 2 where the cast are actually in the Victorian Era (specifically 1897) as their roles and nobody dies... at least in the way they do in canon.

So there's no supernatural sorceress murder shit going on, OK?

Just so you can see how unhinged this is... I'm just gonna summarise it chapter-by-chapter. I apologise now.

Chapter 1: The Trip

So the fic opens with DeStorm getting out of his carriage and going into a library. He peruses through some books he hasn't read and doesn't find them interesting, but then he finds one - Escape The Night.

Yes, that's right. Escape The Night in this universe is a book. And at that moment, DeStorm's so excited to read it... that he doesn't check who wrote it. Keep that in mind, its important for later.

So he checks the book out of the library, races home and reads it. He reads the whole book in a night and then, the next morning, he checks who wrote it in case the library has any more books by them.

...The book was written by Alex - who goes by his real surname Burriss in this version - who DeStorm has despised since he was eight.

MY THOUGHTS

So this chapter was actually alright. It was by far the least strange chapter of the fic (which you will see later).

One major thing I had an issue with, though, is that for some really weird reason, the writer kept shifting between the first and third person, sometimes even in the same paragraph.

Here's some examples:

I read the blurb and it was VERY interesting I was dying to read it. I eagerly checked the book out and ran back to the carriage.We arrived home and took off. DeStorm ran up to his room, coat tails flying behind him. He sped through the book catching every detail in the first chapter. He then closed the book. 

When DeStorm woke up, the only thing on his mind was the book. DeStorm quickly got up, undressed and headed into the shower. I lathered myself in body wash and rinsed it off. I dressed and headed to the book.

So that was a bit strange. Also, before anybody asks, yes, the lack of description is recurring throughout the fic.

Another thing - which is just another pet peeve of mine - is that the name on the book is literally just Alex Burriss. I find it weird that, considering his full name is Alexander, they wouldn't just put Alexander. They were probably really posh like that.

But all in all, it was decent.

Chapter 2: 29 Years Back

OK, so this part of the fic is set in 1868 (yes, I did the maths) and gives us the backstory as to why DeStorm hates Alex so much, which is pretty traumatic, yet a tad confusing in places.

So what happened is that basically... Alex's parents murdered DeStorm's parents when he was eight, and he saw their dead bodies. Since his parents were high in power, Alex's parents went to jail for life and both boys were left orphans.

He met Alex two years later and 'accidentally' shoved him over at a local playground, starting their rivalry. Then its randomly mentioned that Alex's adopted parents had a son named Andrew (which is important for later, even if handled very weirdly) and then, when DeStorm and Alex were in their 20s, they saw each other again and had a fight.

The chapter ends like this: Neither Alex or DeStorm would've expected what would happen next.....

MY THOUGHTS

OK, so the part where they were kids was actually OK. I mean, it makes sense that they'd both hate each other's guts considering their circumstances. The only issue I had with that section is that its mentioned that DeStorm was told about Alex by another child, to which I'm like:

Why do these kids know DeStorm's parents are dead? I didn't know kids could read newspapers.

2. WHO JUST SAYS THAT TO A GRIEVING CHILD?!

But outside of all that confusion about how fucked up Victorian children are, it actually made sense.

Also, the playgrounds in Victorian times were really dangerous, so IDK why the hell these rich people were sending their kids there, but that's just me being a history nerd and being a bit nitpicky.

When it came to the mention of Alex's brother and DeStorm and Alex meeting up in their 20s, I really think this could've been handled better, especially because, later in the fic, we see Alex's POV, so we easily could've worked in the mention of the brother through there. The fight in their 20s was also handled messily because it just gives off the vibe that they were shouting at each other in public and, assuming they're both upper class, I don't think that'd be good for their image and they'd know that, so what the hell?

But outside of that, it can stand on its own and it was fairly enjoyable if you ignore the shock value of it.

Chapter 3: Tea

So now we're back in 1897 - presumably - and we're in Alex's POV. And based on the chapter title, I think you can guess how this chapter opens.

That's right! Alex is pouring a cup of tea!

So after the tea shenanigans, Alex gets given a letter from DeStorm that says this:

Dear Alex Burriss,

I have become a big fan of you when I read one book. I know we are sworn enemies, but you are interesting. Maybe it wasn't you fault, Mr. Burriss. Could you please stop by my house so we could talk about it?

Sincerely, Destorm Power.

So he's reading it and then Lauren - Alex's girlfriend, just like in canon - comes in. Alex prepares to go write something, but then he agrees to help with cooking because Alex's brother, Aaron (yes, the Andrew from earlier - IDK how the author got his name wrong either), is coming over.

So they cook a bit, then Aaron finally arrives, but then Alex leaves to go visit DeStorm, questioning why he suddenly wants to be friends (just like I was when I reread this fic).

So then we end on a cliffhanger, shift to Lauren's POV... AND SHE'S HAVING A FUCKING AFFAIR WITH AARON. OUT OF NOWHERE!

So Alex gets to DeStorm's house, gets a tour (which takes an hour and a half, for some reason), goes into the bathroom and gives himself a pep talk, gives DeStorm some cornbread he made for Aaron as a gift and the pair agree to be friends.

DeStorm asks him to stay for dinner, but Alex declines since he told Lauren he'd be home by then.

MY THOUGHTS

This chapter is so weird and I have so many things to say.

First of all, the letter is kinda shitty, in my opinion, especially considering the context backing it. I get the point is to acknowledge that they are making amends and we're showing DeStorm 'grew up' or whatever because he finally realises that Alex isn't the same as his parents, but they still got into a fight last time they saw each other... which was over a decade ago (going off of the math, DeStorm would be at least 37 in this).

But Alex just accepts this and is like 'I didn't think he'd... apologise!'. I also understand that he probably felt victimised by everything and just wanted to forget, but I don't really understand why these two are associating with each other, tbh. If I was either of them, I'd wanna avoid the other person to forget my past. I wouldn't wanna be around them, period.

But that aside...

The whole thing with Aaron is really weird. The author not only got his name wrong last chapter and spelled it wrong several times here (it was spelled Arron several times), but the affair really just felt like shock value and like it was vilifying Lauren just to have DeStorm and Alex get together.

On the topic of DeStorm and Alex, it really feels like its moving too fast. Like, DeStorm read one of his books - just one - and now wants to get over the fact that ALEX WAS LINKED TO THE TWO PEOPLE WHO MURDERED HIS PARENTS and be friends again!

Where's the tension? Where's the 'will they, won't they'? Where's the bonding?

...Yeah, I hated this chapter. And the fact it only gets worse from here makes me die a little inside.

Chapter 4: Two Fingers

So we open in Alex's POV. He and DeStorm are hanging out and the latter decides to draw his house. Alex decides to draw some roses because he got Lauren them for his first date. At the mention, DeStorm opens up about how everyone who dates him is a gold digger, but Alex reassures him how he'll find love.

As DeStorm draws his house, he admires Alex and thinks he's pretty. Meanwhile, the roses Alex are drawing are FUCKING DEAD and CRYING. How lovely!

He then draws Alex asleep in the guest bedroom (I'll rant about logistics later), and they exchange drawings, with Alex getting the drawing of DeStorm's house. Then they go out to somewhere Alex picked, with him being in awe of DeStorm's carriage.

They sit by a pond and talk for a bit, then they go home and DeStorm makes chicken pasta for dinner. They have it, but then Alex asks to go to the bathroom.

...OK, so then it turns out Alex has bulimia and skipped dessert because of it.

DeStorm offers Alex a place to stay at his house because it started raining and he didn't want him getting sick from going home in the rain. DeStorm then kisses Alex on the head at the latter's childlike excitement. Alex goes to sleep.

We then randomly jump to Lauren and Aaron fucking because THAT makes a ton of sense.

So then we're back in DeStorm's POV and he's rereading Escape The Night. He then goes to check on the sleeping Alex, and his drawing of him asleep in the guest room is exactly what he sees when he goes into the room. DeStorm can't find him the next morning... but then Alex comes in with a batch of black roses. After breakfast, Alex leaves.

So then we're back in Alex's head. He goes home, catches Lauren cheating with Aaron, gets his bag and then RUNS to DeStorm's house. He then goes to the bathroom and throws up, gets rid of the evidence and then explains to DeStorm what happened, with the latter comforting him.

The chapter ends with Lauren (naked, for some reason) finding the drawing of DeStorm's house.

MY THOUGHTS

OK, I'd prefer if the chapter meant two fingers getting cut off than this shit.

It really feels like the author skipped over the bonding because the chapters opens with: DeStorm is so sweet! I didn't think he'd open up so easily. Too easily.

So we just skipped the whole-ass bonding conversation, the whole appeal of enemies-to-lovers! I don't even like that trope and I know that.

We do get some instances of them talking, such as them at the pond, but even then, its incredibly rushed and we don't go very deep, and pretty much all their conversations feel like it because we skipped the main one due to the way the chapter opened.

With the drawings, I'm very confused because how would DeStorm draw Alex in the guest room if he was drawing the front of his house? I had to assume it was two separate drawings, but even then, getting to that conclusion took a hot second.

The two bulimia instances read really badly to me. IDK that much about bulimia and I've never experienced it in any capacity (the only instance I've really seen of it is through Melanie Martinez in the K-12 movie and the song Orange Juice), so I don't think I can comment on it from a place of experience or extensive knowledge. However, from some research I've done and what I do know about it, I do feel that it was used as a form of shock value and wasn't handled respectfully, especially because Alex is only shown throwing up throughout the fic and doesn't show any other signs of symptoms throughout the entire story, such as body image issues or having binge eating sessions, just to name two.

The guest room thing, though cute, is a little weird because DeStorm just casually kissed Alex on the head and we're expected to just go with it. Dude, its the first kiss of the fic. Why are we being so nonchalant about it? I don't think the affair thing should've been in the fic at all, but even with it being there, I still feel like it got resolved too quickly. Like, we've only known about it for a chapter. I also still don't understand why we needed to even villify Lauren for this ship to work; this could've been so touching and interesting to see Alex grapple with his feelings for DeStorm despite having a girlfriend, but NOPE.

We could've had a Malec moment! Lauren as Lydia would've been amazing! But we got THIS.

I will say, though: The drawing scene, for all its confusion and the somewhat clunky writing, was interesting. I did enjoy the drawing scene. It was just everything after that that went downhill.

Chapter 5: Drawings

OK, so we open with Alex going into DeStorm's room whilst the latter is still asleep. There's a ton of papers on the floor, each predicting what happened towards the backend of the previous chapter (i.e: Alex calling Lauren's name and running to DeStorm's house and sleeping on the couch in Chapter 3 while DeStorm made dinner).

...Oh, yeah; DeStorm has this weird power where what he draws can predict the future and its mostly just becoming relevant now.

DeStorm wakes up and is chill about Alex 1) being shirtless, for some reason and 2) randomly coming into his room. They have breakfast and DeStorm gives Alex the option to move in, which he gladly accepts.

So they buy Alex some new clothes and decorate the guest room (which is Alex's room now), but whilst thinking about DeStorm... Alex gets hard.

Eventually, it goes down, DeStorm finds Alex's journal (and the latter freaks out) and they have dinner. Alex then charms his way into DeStorm's bed and the pair screw.

As they're coming down, they both finally say 'I love you'.

MY THOUGHTS

All in all, this chapter was fairly decent, better than Chapters 3 and 4.

I really liked the opening with the papers. The visual just scratched my brain in all the right places, even if part of me was like 'wait, so was he drawing while Alex was running to his house? When did he draw the couch drawing?', that kinda thing.

After he offered to move in... I started getting a bit iffy, especially considering that Alex just got cheated on, like, a day ago. Like, dude, we're moving a bit quick here.

And as much as they are cute together at times, I'm still struggling to shake the fact that this relationship started off as two people who hated each other because one party's parents murdered the other party's parents... and that childhood trauma is just kinda ignored.

I get that the writer just probably did it so one character could have a tragic backstory because who doesn't love a good one of those - emphasis on good - but at the same time, if you're not gonna do anything with it... yeah.

The sex scene between DeStorm and Alex made me uncomfortable. It was very clinical and just off-putting and, even in the lead-up with Alex charming his way into DeStorm's room, it all felt a bit sudden. Additionally, its a bit weird, to me, that the author warned for the two sex scenes with Lauren and Aaron, but never any of the sex scenes for DeStorm and Alex. Like, what the hell? Keep it consistent.

I did like the chapter. Its just in some places, it got a bit iffy.

Chapter 6: It All Goes Wrong

So the chapter opens with Lauren and Aaron planning to get revenge on Alex. Lauren's plan is to set wherever Alex and DeStorm are going on fire and then make a run for it.

Alex is gardening when DeStorm tells him they're going to see a play, so he goes to get ready (and also throws up while he's at it) and takes a shower before getting dressed. They then get in the carriage, but are followed by Aaron and Lauren unknowingly.

So they go to the play (which is being put on by Gabbie - go figure), but then suddenly, flames start flicking up everywhere so everyone, including Alex and DeStorm, legs it out of there.

The place is burning, but Alex and DeStorm manage to get out. When they get there, Lauren tells Alex this: "Well, you're ugly, a bitch, and don't deserve to live. Go kill yourself."

DeStorm and Alex go home, with DeStorm rereading Alex's book for the THIRD TIME NOW, and the chapter ends with Alex purging again.

MY THOUGHTS

So outside of the obvious vilification of Lauren that I've talked about several times now, I had a major issue with this chapter in the form of the headhopping. This chapter jumped between four POVs; DeStorm's, Alex's, Lauren's and Aaron's.

Everyone's POVs were really short and we were jumping all over the place all the time and it got a bit confusing.

Also, Lauren's line was so laughable and it gave off so many 'evil promiscuous ex in a romance novel' vibes that it was ridiculous. And I also understand that Alex was hurt by that line considering he did love her and she cheated on him with his own brother, but the fact he was crying feels a bit melodramatic, at least to me.

It would've been more interesting if Lauren used some of the things she knew about Alex when they were dating to her advantage to hit Alex where it hurt and didn't just swing and miss like a blindfolded child trying to hit a piñata.

Also, this plan was worded terribly. The author worded it like they were gonna burn down DeStorm's house, so when they burned the theatre down, I was SO CONFUSED.

But I liked the play aspect and the cameos from the Season 2 cast (since Tyler appeared along with Gabbie), so it could've been worse.

Chapter 7: Secrets Come Out One Way Or Another

So we open with these two diary entries from Alex:

April 7th, 1897

Sometimes I think about burning all my stories and killing myself. Lauren always stopped me, but I don't know about DeStorm. He just randomly sent me a letter. Yeah he's good in bed, but I don't know if I can trust him. My whole childhood I felt guilty for killing someone's parents when I didn't even do it. I don't hate DeStorm. I just feel out of place. Why would he be interesting in me?

April 8th, 1897

I really hope DeStorm doesn't find out about my bulimia. If he did, he would be pissed. I can't imagine that. I was trying to get better, but DeStorm is so fancy and I always want to look my best. I don't know what's going on. Lauren is also not who I thought she was. Ever since she cheated on me, I've felt depressed all the time. Life just isn't going my way.

So DeStorm made breakfast and Alex goes to shower, but then DeStorm finds the journal and reads it, finding out everything.

They have breakfast and Alex says he's gonna go use the bathroom, but then DeStorm confronts him. Alex gets upset, then pictures Lauren and Aaron happy together, so he grabs a bucket and starts throwing up to the point he gets a hole in his oesophagus and ends up passing out.

DeStorm takes him to the hospital and he recovers, but after he gets out, we get more smut OUT OF NOWHERE. They go for, like, three hours, too!

So a bit later, Alex and DeStorm go have a picnic, with the former trying to forget Lauren and Aaron's happiness. After the picnic, they go home and Alex has a dream about cutting open Lauren's body and ripping her guts out, same with Aaron.

We then end the chapter with Alex revealing that he threw his journal away since he had no reason to keep it.

MY THOUGHTS

I have several issues with this chapter and its portrayal of Alex's issues, especially extending upon his bulimia and making him suicidal basically out of nowhere. Like, I get he's had a hard time, but stop giving him mental health issues just to advance the plot. It looks really bad.

Speaking of which, the way DeStorm confronted Alex was so weird and honestly insensitive. Like, he said that he knew why Alex was going to the bathroom after he ate all the time, but then started SCREAMING at him, which led to Alex getting the hole in his oesophagus. Like, dude! I get your hurt that he didn't tell you, but screaming 'WHY DON'T YOU TRUST ME?!' at him?! Like, did you not read the entries?! That explained it!

Also, that is not how you help and support someone with an eating disorder. You don't criticise or judge them, you explain why you're concerned, which DeStorm clearly didn't do. And yes, he did realise what he did wrong and apologised once Alex got upset, by the way, but still. I also have an issue with how DeStorm confronted Alex. He confronted him right before he was going to purge again. Like, THAT IS TERRIBLE TIMING! I think it would've been more realistic if DeStorm found the journal, sat with his thoughts for a bit and THEN talked to Alex instead of springing it on him right then and there.

But for all the shitty eating disorder/helping a person with an ED portrayals in this fic, one thing I will give the author credit for is that getting a hole in your oesophagus is a real thing. Its called perforation of the oesophagus and it can be caused by prolonged vomiting and forceful retching, both of which Alex has been doing throughout the fic. The fic also acknowledges that DeStorm is glad that they got to the hospital quickly (within the first 14 hours) since the chances of Alex's survival are high as a result. Perforated oesophagi have an 85% survival rate if treated within the first 24 hours, so I will give the author points here for medical accuracy.

However, the descriptions here were also a bit weird because the author just described it as Alex feeling a hole in his oesophagus getting bigger and bigger. Why not describe the pain? Its not like he can see the hole.

The sex scene felt very out of place and strange considering Alex just got out of hospital for his oesophagus and DeStorm was shoving his dick down his throat. Like, DUDE.

I also find it very weird - and a bit disconcerting - that Alex's form of a happy dream is violently murdering his ex and his brother. Like, dude, I know you got cheated on, but we don't need any more men writing women! Or worse, any more incels.

Yeah. I was very mixed on this chapter.

Chapter 8: Happy? Hell No.

So this chapter is in the 3rd person and serves as the epilogue of the fic.

Alex goes out into the backyard and DeStorm's dead there with a knife through his head and, obviously, he's a mess and he falls to his knees crying.

DeStorm's funeral is the next week and, after that, Alex ends up cutting his wrists and killing himself in the kitchen.

Jump to 2019, and a man called Ryder now lives in DeStorm's old house. There's also a vase that used to contain the black roses that Alex gave to DeStorm.

MY THOUGHTS

...This is giving off similar vibes as Me Before You. Not because anyone here's disabled, but because of the whole idea of ADVOCATING FOR SUICIDE.

I'm genuinely tryna wrap my head around how in what world this would make sense. Alex killed himself for the man who he probably believed, for the longest time, got his parents put in jail. I get he got fucked up along the way because his girlfriend cheated on him with his brother and all, but WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?!

I also get what the writer was trying to do via tryna get the fic to go full circle with the black roses which Alex gave to DeStorm, but it did feel a bit forced and I don't think we needed to introduce a whole other character and a time jump to do it. You could've had someone visit the house, find Alex dead and then explore the house and discover all the symbols of their love (like the drawings from Chapter 5) and then find the roses last.

Yes, it wouldn't ignore all the glaring shoehorning of several mental health stereotypes to make this fic a 'tragic love story', but it would make a lot more sense and contain some neat callbacks.

Another thing I didn't like about the timejump is that the author didn't really go very deep into anything. They just said the floorboards didn't creak as much as they did when Alex lived there. Why not explore other things? Like, was there blood on the floor from when Alex cut his wrist? Give us SOMETHING!

There was so much wasted potential here!

OVERALL THOUGHTS

On the surface, this fic seems very interesting, especially when you consider Alex and DeStorm's canon relationship. However, its not as enjoyable as the premise lets on, mostly due to the forced twists, the barely-there bonding and, by extension, rushed relationship between the main pairing and also some pretty shitty portrayals of bulimia and suicidal idealisations.

I'm trying not to knock the author for this, though, and I don't think that what they wrote here is a reflection of who they are as a person, since I'm assuming that they were quite young when they wrote this and didn't know any better, but I still think this is something that should be discussed.

Another thing I didn't enjoy about the fic is the vilification of Lauren. She's an absolute sweetheart in canon and, in this fic, she's such a bitch and really plays into some 'promiscuous ex' stereotypes from a lot of romance stories, original or fanfiction. Once again, I'm not knocking the author since Lord knows they're not the only one whose done this - hell, I did it at one point - but it still really took me out of things.

Despite that, I did enjoy some parts of it. I liked the initial cameos and Alex and DeStorm had some pretty cute moments together, but all in all, I really found this fic to be rocky.

But anyway, all of the above is just me and my opinions on this fanfic! I really hope my review wasn't too harsh, especially because this is my first time really reviewing any fics and I'm just tryna dip my toes into the wide variety of fics this fandom has to offer, but I hope you all enjoyed my first attempt!

Thanks for reading, Your Author, Marbella. <3

[late-to-the-magnus-archives]

Fed - a Magnus Archives fanfic

So. This was just what it was, now. Hardly the first time in my life I’d faced challenges, gray morality, and a strange situation in which I wasn’t precisely trapped, but all my other options were worse than the one I was considering.

It was heavy. Too heavy.

“Take a moment,” said Spider Martin. “Looks like you need it.”

I eyed him. “Reading my thoughts?”

“No, your face. It’s quite expressive. Whatever you’re thinking about, it’s clearly a lot?”

I hated his blue eyes.

That wasn’t his fault. Something about him just made me remember how I had watched him die.

(Then is your Martin really your Martin?)

Yes. Shut up. I couldn’t… That was not a box we were opening this afternoon.

Spoilers for the whole show. This is post-MAG 200.

Part four of the Magnus Monsterverse AU.

AO3

--------

The fog took me, and as if I’d spent a thousand years there instead of my own metamorphosis, I immediately succumbed.

It wasn’t even conscious: just a completion, a sense of self and no other, an aching, longing magnificence that hurt like pure joy, flooding through me. I think I cried out. I might have come. I definitely wept.

This place… oh. Oh. I ate it up. It ate it up. We ate it up, together. There was such strange joy in me. It was such a wondrously terrible new thing. It drank it in, and I drank it in, and I may have cried out again, because this time, he answered.

“I’m here. I’ve got you. I’m here.” And Martin pulled me in, shocking in his there-ness, his solidity, his presence, the very miracle of his existence.

He was the only thing that was real, and We loved it that way.

I clung to him and cried. I could not get close enough. I never could, not ever; it would never be enough, and I embraced that, painted my body, rolled my eyes back in my head to bask in its glorious void.

He breathed deeply, slowly, and his heart beat strong. “It was you,” he said. “While I was in the waves, it was you, missing you, thinking of you, grieving you… that’s what did it. That’s what powered everything.”

And suddenly, I saw.

Saw him in strange, wild waves, surfacing to stare at a gray sky that matched his eyes.

Saw that he rarely surfaced. He spent most of his time under, in the broad, booming silence, the current pulling him along, far from everyone and everything. The isolation under pressure; the magnificence of loneliness in a world with other living things—

He rejoiced in his pain, felt he deserved it—but it didn’t last.

“They died,” he whispered, and tears kissed his cheeks, so I kissed them off.

He felt them dying; felt the people—so far away their absence made him ache—winking out like lights.

Martin breathed in the water (and I did with him) and mourned and lost.

And when it happened, and all were gone, his god fed on him.

Because of me.

“It was you,” he whispered. “Missing you was… it became everything. I missed you so much that I…”

He lost himself.

I could look up at him, now, and saw him like burning mist, saw his perfect eyes with limbal rings I could tumble into and drown.

“When they found me…” He swallowed. “When Tim leaned through the door of fire that Maneula somehow got him to make and found me, I didn’t know his name. I knew his face, but it just made me cry.”

I understood that. I knew I’d cry when I met him, too. I was sure he still hadn’t forgiven me.

“When they came, I fought them. I thought that if they took me away from here, I’d lose missing you. That’s bonkers, isn’t it?”

“No,” I said.

He touched my lips. His eyes were wide. “What?”

“No,” I repeated.

He looked stunned. “You’re in my silence. You can’t speak.”

Oh. I felt what he meant; he had this weird, Lonely power, this silence he could enforce, but, I—ah. “Yes, I can.” I knew how to talk.

Martin still stared. He looked spooked. “We… we should go back.”

I’d scared him. That would not do, so I kissed him instead.

He made a sound and responded, clutching me, his blazing eyes sliding shut. Color washed his cheeks, and as it did, we became real.

The fog vanished as if eaten by summer sun. We stood together in our apartment block, in the central courtyard, under blue spring sky, in sight of all the windows.

We both breathed hard, shudders trembling through us like aftershocks.

“What did you do?” he whispered.

“I kissed you,” I said, still dazed. “Was I not supposed to?”

“You… you became the Lonely,” said Martin. “You were the Lonely. You… I don’t understand.”

Eh?

What?

Eh?

“I what?”

“Hey, kiddos,” said Mike, coming out from the same building I lived in. “We’re heading out to get a bite. Want to come?”

We had no time for this. We had to deal with what just happened. We—

Oh. Behind him came a rogue’s gallery.

That was Michael Shelley. Right behind him came Helen Richardson, scowling.

There was Arthur Nolan—an angry, angry man, made worse because there were two of him in a row. They had not bothered to be anything but identical.

Sarah Baldwin came out beside Jane Prentiss, both of them chattering away about something called Brother Love I’d never heard of.

(The Eye dropped three seasons’ worth of this bizarre forbidden-love-among-the-cloisters “reality” show into my head. Thanks. You shouldn’t have.)

(Drama! It happily tremored at me.)

I stared at the lot of them, frozen. So many of them had tried to kill me, or been part of my torment. My actions had led to their deaths, as well—and some of them, I’d never even seen in the light of day.

I made a small noise. I don’t know what it was. Some panicked thing.

“I've got you,” said Martin. “It's okay. They’re not going to hurt you.”

I couldn’t believe that.

They greeted Martin with smiles, though no touches, no personal space invasions (and I could appreciate that). Me, however… no one seemed to know what to do with. They eyed me. Jane stared. Michael tilted his head. Helen rolled her eyes.

“We going, or what?” snapped Nolan One with all the grace of a bulldozer. “I’m fuckin’ hungry,” said Nolan Two.

“I think we should initiate our new friend and make him join,” said Mike Crew.

Sarah Baldwin laughed. It wasn’t a nice sound. “He looks like a scared rabbit.”

“He’s fine,” said Martin.

Was this happening? This was happening. “You’re going?” I said to Martin.

He looked grim. “We should.”

He was trying not to be lonely. Trying so hard.

I would never get in the way of that. “I’ll go, sure,” I said, staring at Jane (whose skin boasted numerous scars, even more than my own, but no sign of worms just yet). “I, uh. I’m Jon. Hi.” So graceful. My face burned.

Jane grinned, stretching her scars. "Hi."

Helen laughed. As she did, her face shifted; she was still Helen, still herself, but she’d changed, like distortion through glass. “Hi, Jon. I’m Helen.”

Michael tilted his head further. Too far. Smiling in an utterly banal manner. "Archivist."

“I… yes. It’s weird to see you both at the same time.”

They just looked at me.

(It was thrilled. If I could have shrunk small enough to hide in Martin’s pocket, I would have, and It loved my misery.)

“Oh, I like this one,” said Michael. “You’re much less human than before.”

“Ah. Well,” I said. “That’s true, I suppose.”

“Still a prick,” said Helen.

“Hey,” I protested.

“From what I recall,” said Martin, “you were the one so obsessed with him that you wanted to keep him in your corridors until everybody else he ever knew died so you could have him all to yourself.”

And everyone turned to stare at her.

Helen’s dark cheeks blushed darker. “Well. Desperate times, and all that.”

Michael cracked up.

Crew followed, and Sarah, and soon everyone was laughing, even the Nolans—and it wasn’t a bad laugh, it really was not, but I felt no better.

“We’ve all come a long way,” said Jane.

“Archivist,” said Michael. “Come to us. Join us. Let us see your skill.”

“My what?”

“We’re, uh. We… can you guys go ahead? We’ll meet you at the curb.”

“Ooh,” said Nolan One, low. “Somebody hasn’t been told about the birds and the bees yet.”

“Be nice,” said Sarah, and swatted his arm.

Nolan Two bared his teeth at her.

“Sure,” said Crew, and gestured to them all. They all walked on, continuing their conversations or lack thereof.

Michael winked at me over his shoulder, then loudly said to Helen, “So what did that feel like, all trapped inside you?”

“Kill me now,” I muttered, covering my face.

Martin kissed my forehead. He’d lost just a shade of the color he’d had, but seemed to be holding steady. “So. Here’s how this works. We go and meet at a pre-set point in the city. Then we, uh. He gives us a list of people.”

I looked up slowly. “To what end?”

He just looked back.

“To what? To… to feed on?”

“It’s that, or we feed the Fears through ourselves—and something about us, about what we were at the ends of our worlds means that if we let them feed on us, we supercharge them. We could end it here all over again. So we don’t do that. Instead, we… Annabelle calls it ‘hummingbirds.’”

Flitting from person to person, sipping the nectar of fear. “So it’s all even less stable than Leitner said. This is horrible.”

“It’s not that bad. The people we see don’t even realize it’s happening, usually—we keep it light. Besides, we don’t do it to nice people.”

My look was dry.

“I mean it, Jon. People who hurt animals. That sort of thing.”

“A lot of those in London, are there?”

“You’d be surprised. There’s less fear in this world in general; it’s less spread out, so it’s potent. We only need a little.”

“This is insane. You know that, right? You must see it. This is lunacy.”

“It’s surviving. Which is a choice.”

Oh, how I hated that, but I understood. I knew. I got it. We could all do the world a favor and die, but none of us truly wanted to. Or at least… knew we should not want that. How did one judge the worth of a life? The risk of that life doing wrong? At what point could I or anyone say, you’re too dangerous to live because of what you might do?

“You’re right,” I whispered.

“It's going to be okay. I promise. Come on and join us today.” His smile was small, but real. “Keeps you from going crazy.”

And I knew that was true for him.

And I knew it was true for them.

And I knew it was not true for me.

Something weird was happening here. Or I was delusional.

Or maybe It was lying to me, wanting me so hungry I would make a mistake.

(I knew, though: It could not lie.)

“I’ll join you,” I said, softly. “But I swear, if I see actual innocent people being… being…”

“You won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do. I trust the people we’re working with.”

“Web.” I clenched my jaw. (Were my teeth made of eyes, too? Calcified, maybe?)

“I don’t expect you to be there right away,” he said, and kissed my forehead again. “I don’t expect you to adjust to all this quickly. But I hope you can at least trust me.”

I stared. “That is a hell of a thing to leverage, Martin.”

“It’s that important. I wouldn’t just say that, you know.”

I did know. “You’re really serious about this.”

“I need you so much.” It was a whisper. “I’ll do anything I have to do in order to keep you from… burning out, or getting devoured by your stupid Eye, or falling afoul of the hunters.”

“Hunters?” I said.

“Later.”

We were growing quite a pile of things to talk about later. “All right. All right. I’ll come with you. Show me, Martin. I trust you.”

So help me, he regained some of his color as we walked out of the courtyard to join the others, who’d waited by the curb.

#

I had never been good with groups of people.

The theater group in which I met Georgie (and through her, gained at least some social skills) had helped a little.

The Magnus Institute Library employees, of whom I was merely one of many, also helped—I could tag along without pressure, camouflaged by their gregariousness.

The Archives… that group was considerably less comfortable because I felt like it was all on me.

It wasn’t. I know that now, but my promotion went straight to my head, and not in a confident way. I’d felt immediately underqualified and out of place, and wondered daily why the hell I’d accepted the position.

I knew now. I could not have refused. I didn’t know that, then. I’m not sure that understanding would have helped, either.

Still, the social aspect of things had only meant stress. To this day, I did not recall going to Martin’s birthday party and rambling about emulsions while eating rum and raisin ice cream. The Eye did not give me that memory back. I knew it happened only because Tim and Martin and Sasha had never stopped teasing me over it. Very funny, really.

(Tim. Sasha. Oh, gods…)

(Right, Archive, focus, you’re all right, they’re here now—)

(Jon. Dear lord. Focus, Jon.)

So I was obviously in a good head space for something like this.

“So you’re really Jon,” said Jane Prentiss, and something that wasn’t a tongue moved in her mouth as she spoke.

I choked a little. “Y… yeah. Hi.”

“Huh. I killed you in my world,” she said.

“I’m hearing that a lot today,” I muttered.

She smiled, and dear gods, her teeth were squirming. “I’m glad they found you. I wanted to apologize.”

“To… wh… why?”

“Well, it wasn’t really you I was mad at. It was your Eye.”

“Oh.”

Her grin made it more awkward, not less; she stepped closer. “You smell delicious, by the way.”

“Martin,” I said in a tiny, pitiful voice.

“Jane, come on, be nice,” said Martin, pulling me closer.

She laughed and backed away.

“Did everybody here kill me?” I whispered.

“Not all of them, but, uh. Possibly most?”

Fuck.

We walked past the park and into the city. It was clean; the vehicles genuinely were all electric. I saw no one who seemed down on their luck, either, which was bizarre.

What kind of idealized place was this? And what, exactly, was the hidden underside?

They were all talking, and because I have terrible timing, I decided this was the moment to whisper to Martin, “What did you mean by, ‘don’t you try to take my choices and blame yourself for them?’”

He stiffened. “I’m not ready to talk about it.”

“All right. I can wait.”

“Liar.”

I laughed. “I am not lying.”

“You can’t wait to find out,” he teased.

Gods, I wanted to kiss him. “I may have learned a little patience in a thousand years.”

“I’ll believe it when I see it,” he challenged.

I grinned, but before I could respond, he spoke.

No. Another him spoke.

“Right,” said his voice, but it wasn’t him, and I turned slowly to find the other Martin waiting for us all on the corner.

The moment I saw him in the light of day, I knew: this Martin was Web.

Completely Web, all the way through; his smile was perfect, and his stance, and the way he shifted his weight and barely met other people’s eyes and laughed easily.

It was completely fake, and I could see it, and I felt like my skin was going to crawl right off my bones. Or whatever I had under there. Eye-bones.

He seemed to know, and he stopped to stare at me. For one moment, when I met his eyes, they were dead. Flat. Dull. There in place to hide the spiders behind them, utterly without anything resembling emotion or true life.

Then he was just Martin (so similar to my Martin, or… no. What Martin had been before everything), and smiling at everybody. “I’ve got all kinds of assignments for you today,” he said, handing out Post-It notes.

“Sure, but did you account for our latest acquisition?” said Nolan One.

Sarah Baldwin barked a laugh, and Jane elbowed her.

“I did!” said Spider Martin happily. “Jon? It’s okay if I call you Jon, right? You’re starting out with me today.” He approached me.

Don’t reach for the Eye, I told myself. Don’t. Don’t. Don’t.

On my bright green Post-It was Martin’s flowing script with two addresses and the instructions, 1:30pm Martin B.; 3:00pm Mike C. “What?” I said.

“Why?” said my Martin.

“Because we’ve all got split shifts, and it seems like a good idea to help Jon get along with everybody?” said Spider Martin. “His second will be with Mike.”

“Not fair,” said my Martin, but without anguish.

Spider Martin shrugged. “It’s the best one for this afternoon. Trust me on this.”

Everyone seemed to accept this with ease. Great. They were all drinking the arachnidian Kool-Aid.

“Can I get him next time?” said Michael.

Spider Martin beamed. “Yes! Jane after that.”

“Yipee!” said Michael.

“What is happening right now?” I said.

“I think you’re popular?” said my Martin.

I did not feel popular.

“Shall we?” said Spider Martin.

“I don’t even know what we’re doing. I don’t understand. I don’t—”

My Martin cupped my cheek, turned me to him, and kissed me. Lingering. Slow. A delicate tasting of lips and tongue, a gentle whisper of love and attention, a promise. “You’ll be fine,” he murmured.

“I don’t have a box for any of this,” I murmured back. “And I think my label maker is broken.”

Martin laughed. “Your label maker of doom?”

“Something like that.”

He nuzzled me. “See you in a little bit.”

And he pulled away, paired up with Sarah Baldwin. (Stranger—and if she did anything to him, I would…)

(Would what? Would what? I didn’t know. Something terrible. Something…)

“I don’t bite,” said Spider Martin.

I looked at him.

Martin’s smile. Martin’s face. Martin’s body. No—Martin’s skin. I could feel he was crawling on the inside.

I turned away. Whatever happened to him was done. He wasn’t mine, never had been. I still wanted to react. Violently. As if to his murder.

“I’m not dead, you know,” he said.

“Yes, you are,” I whispered.

“No more than Annabelle. I know—or I’m pretty sure, anyway—that you’ll struggle with this, but I chose this path. I did. I’m happy with it, too.”

“You ended your world.”

“Pot, kettle?”

I swallowed. “Knowing I did wrong hardly exonerates you.”

“We didn’t really get to know you in my world,” said Spider Martin. “You caught up with Darren and took the book back right at Mister Spider’s front door.”

Darren. That’s what the bully’s name was. “Did I?”

“Yeah. You died pretty quickly. Your mind snapped before they could get much fear out of you, so there wasn’t a point to dragging it out.”

I turned to stare at him.

“There you are!” he said cheerily. “Your eyes were brown originally, weren’t they?”

“They were. And yours should be green.”

He beamed. “Naw.”

“Naw?”

“Blue tends to be trusted more easily. It’s racially offensive, and largely due to media influence, but there you go.”

I stared harder.

“Would you rather me pretend to be something I’m not?” he asked, putting genuine curiosity into it.

“No,” I said quietly. “I… it’s a nightmare. This. Is all.”

“Because you think it’s losing someone.”

“It is.”

“No. The Stranger—that’s losing someone. A weird ingestion and rebirth like the Distortion—that’s losing someone. This?” He gestures at himself. “This isn’t losing someone any more than you were lost.”

I wasn’t sure I hadn't been lost.

He smiled so easily. “Come on. Let me show you how this works. You’ll think better when fed,” he said, as harmless and bright as a children’s mascot.

I was already fed. Somehow. But I didn’t want to try to get into it. “Lead the way, I suppose.” Everyone else had already paired off and left. “Do you always assign partners?”

“And areas, yes. We wouldn’t want to cause harm, and the buddy system helps prevent that.”

I snorted.

“It’s true! Your Beholding might lack the ability to consider consequences, but surely you don’t think we do.”

“What, the Web has a stance against overfishing?”

“Yes! Exactly so. We didn’t even mean to end the world when we did. We’re significantly more careful now to avoid it ever happening again.”

“How did it happen, then?”

(The Eye offered to show me. I refused.)

“Get to know me a little bit better, and I’ll tell you.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to get to know him better, but I also didn’t feel like I had a choice.

In silence, he led me north, past old buildings I sort of knew, past silent cars I’d never imagined, past lovely boutiques and pubs with a distinct lack of loud music or voices coming from them.

I’d never seen a London like this. I had no idea how to feel about it.

Neither did It, and the drive to know why this was so grew in me with anticipatory joy like a child looking forward to their birthday.

I couldn’t blame It. This was absolutely unexpected. The differences in history must have been significant.

“How did your world end, anyway?” said Spider Martin. “You hardly have to tell me, of course, but I rather thought you’d prefer we hear your understanding over Manuela’s.”

I really needed to meet this woman. “And how the hell would she even know anything?”

“Same way she found you.” We turned a corner, and finally there was sound—a busker, just beginning to tune his violin. “She calculates things. Honestly, if she weren’t so firmly entrenched in the Eye, she'd have made a lovely sister.”

I stopped walking. “She’s Eye?”

“That she is. It was her desire to see more and know every world that had her prepared and able to escape when the time came.”

I couldn’t imagine Manuela Dominguez as Eye. “Then she didn’t build a Dark Sun. She didn’t hole up at Ny-Ålesund. She didn’t try to summon Mister Pitch.”

“Not her. Some of her alternates, yes, but they’re secondaries. She’s Prime.”

“Prime?”

“The first one of her kind rescued. In her case, the actual rescuer, too.” Martin produced paper money from his pocket.

It wasn’t a design I’d ever seen. “May I?”

“Of course.” He handed it over.

It was a ten-pound banknote. Julius Caesar glowered on the front of it, stern and uncompromising. The bill itself was cornflower blue; intricate guilloche in a gradient from orange to purple subtly deepened the design, and it bore such phrases as The Bank of Holy England and Toward the Greatest Empire.

Damn. I really needed to get hold of some history books.

(The Eye offered to show me how this banknote existed. How it had been designed. What the phrases meant. Why a long-dead Roman emperor decorated the front. No, I told It, firm and tamping down my need. Let me find out on my own.)

This delighted It. The joy of discovery through me was apparently worth the wait.

“What did money look like where you came from?” said Spider Martin.

“Do you actually care?” I drawled.

“Inasmuch as I’m trying to establish a decent working relationship with you, yes, I absolutely do.”

“Then surely you know telling me things is more valuable than asking.”

“What do you think I've been doing?” said Spider Martin. “We are here to pay that man over there to play ‘The Outlandish Knight,’ which he associates with a past girlfriend, with whom he associates the feeling of being trapped and controlled, and playing it makes him afraid he’ll never get free. Thus, shall I be fed. And you, my dear Archivist, merely need to watch him—because he’ll feel very, very watched, and thus shall you be fed.”

I frowned. “And he deserves this, does he?”

“In revenge against that girlfriend, he poisoned her cat.”

“He what?” Well, now I was furious.

Which (calm down, Jon) was probably on purpose. It was calculated.

“He did,” said Spider Martin. “What happened to him wasn’t nice, but he isn’t very nice, either.”

“Did the cat… die?”

“No, fortunately, though it did go blind.”

I clenched my jaw. Anger against this random man tempted. (Easy, Jon. Easy.) “If you’re lying to me, we’re going to have a problem.”

Spider Martin looked at me. “Jon, I’m not stupid enough to lie to you. You could just see it. If I lie, it’ll undo any attempts to build trust between us. All right?”

That… made sense. “All right. Why do you want to work with me, then?”

“Because we all need to work together. All of us. We’re unique in all the world, and we have a challenging existence. We need each other to keep each other balanced and prevent the world from ending again.”

Damn, but it was all logical. “Why did you call me Archivist a moment ago?”

“Because that’s what you are—and I suspected it would be easier to think of eating a bit of this man’s fear with that reminder.”

This honesty was refreshing. Maybe a little too refreshing. It was all calculated, every bit of it.

But then, it was calculated because it would be effective, and I couldn’t fault him for trying to be effective. Web was just… so disturbing about it, which was the entire point. “Will this mark him?”

“No. We’re getting a taste, caring for ourselves, but not doing enough harm to mark anyone. Most of them don’t even remember it happened after; they just shrug it off.”

I exhaled shakily.

So. This was just what it was, now. Hardly the first time in my life I’d faced challenges, gray morality, and a strange situation in which I wasn’t precisely trapped, but all my other options were worse than the one I was considering.

It was heavy. Too heavy.

“Take a moment,” said Spider Martin. “Looks like you need it.”

I eyed him. “Reading my thoughts?”

“No, your face. It’s quite expressive. Whatever you’re thinking about, it’s clearly a lot?”

I hated his blue eyes.

That wasn’t his fault. Something about him just made me remember how I had watched him die.

(Then is your Martin really your Martin?)

Yes. Shut up. I couldn’t… That was not a box we were opening this afternoon. No.

Maybe not ever.

“If you’re really not ready, it’s okay,” said Spider Martin. “Last thing I want to do is upset you.”

“Sure. Because I’m so dangerous compared to the lot of you.”

“You are, actually.” Spider Martin shrugged.

I rolled my eyes. “No, I’m really not. I can hardly damage anyone the way I could at the end of my world, and I was nothing but a punching bag before that.”

He tilted his head. “Really?”

“Really.”

“That’s not what we—oh, pardon.” He took out his phone.

“Not what you what?”

Spider Martin’s eyes went wide. “Shit,” he said. “Keep up!” And he turned and ran.

Spider Martin could move. That was not at all how my Martin ran, not at all his body language or motion or mobility, and the smooth, loping speed of it was freakishly comforting compared to the mask of the one I loved.

I ran after him.

#

Fun fact: being made of eyes and/or light beams made me better at running than I would have guessed.

I mean. I wasn’t good at it. But I also didn’t run out of breath, or stumble, both of which would have been the case before.

I kept up with Spider Martin, who I swear was running with the use of six extra invisible legs, and that was no small thing.

“What is it?” I called at his back.

“Get ready for a fight!” he said.

“A fight? A fight with wh-”

I saw.

Hunters, Martin had said.

Nolan Two on the ground with smoke pouring out of his chest instead of blood.

Nolan One behind a car flipped onto its side, unable to stick his head around it at all because of—

What was—

What WAS that, that was—

I couldn’t understand what I saw. Purple, green, wisps of things like tentacles, not solid, and yet they were, punching holes into that car, not just reaching around it but building Nolan’s fear, and—

We turned the corner at the same time as Mike Crew and Helen Richardson, and everyone acted at once.

Coordinated? No. They’d just done this before.

Helen distorted into a tall and mutated and terrible thing and dropped straight into the sidewalk—and at the same time, a yellow door opened beneath Nolan Two, and he fell out of sight.

(I couldn’t see the attacker. I needed to see it.)

Mike bared his teeth—a horrifying look, actual anger, which he had not shown with me the day he threw me into the sky—and gestured.

Lightning struck.

Struck… what?

(I couldn’t see it! I needed to see it!)

Mike couldn’t see it, either; he struck where those tendrils were coming from, the central invisible knot of them, but evidently did not hit it, because now, it threw tendril-attacks at him. He moved, guessing as much (he could not see them, I knew he could not), staying out of the way of whatever it was punching holes where he’d been.

Spider Martin picked up another car and threw it.

That one connected; the car hit something, but was not enough to stop it, and more tendrils shot out toward Mike and Spider Martin.

I didn’t move. I couldn’t move. My eyes burned, my head throbbed—I couldn’t see it, I had to see it, I needed to see—

Michael grabbed me and pulled me into a yellow door in a wall just as one of those purple-green tendrils slammed into the sidewalk where I’d been, cracking it, penetrating below the concrete.

The Corridors. So familiar. I knew this well.

“No!” I cried, throwing myself at the door.

“Easy, Archivist,” said Michael, right up behind me, long hands draping over my shoulders to pull me back. “You aren’t ready to deal with them.”

“No! I need to see it! I need to see it!”

“Archivist,” Michael thrummed at me. “You’ll make your Martin cry.”

Martin?

Martin.

I stopped, gripping the door handle. “I… I need to… see it?”

“You will be hurt. Maybe killed. That would be terrible.”

He did not sound like it would be terrible.

I shook. “I couldn’t see it. Michael. Please. I have to see it. I have to try.”

He sighed. “Silly Archivist. As you wish.” He reached past me, all around me, and opened the door.

We were on a nearby roof, and I could look down and see.

I looked.

Looked.

(Use me, It beckoned.)

And I did.

My vision opened as it had not since I arrived here, and I saw.

Connected it was all connected

Powers like the Fears but different

All through this world every living thing everyone was marked or

Not marked something like marked already connected

Connected it was all

The thing

There

A person but not

It was three persons in one

Three of them together standing there strange dark bodysuit a gas mask

No hands

No hands only those tendrils sprouting from their arms, tendrils which now seemed so solid

Each of them moving independently (three person in there, three minds to work them) trying actively to kill us all

To kill the Nolans the Mike the Helen the

I saw, and as I did, I broke the attacker apart.

I didn't even mean to. I just saw it for what it truly was, and made reality real.

One second, it was invisible, impossible to harm, its tendrils unseen by the others. The next it stood there, a person in a weird suit—and it shuddered, and then it was three. They exploded apart, splitting the uniform and popping the gas mask like a hatched egg in rapid-time.

And now, the others could see them. Could see three naked people on the sidewalk, gasping, shuddering, heads down, vomiting.

Nolan, Mike, and Helen surged in without hesitation, all at once.

I looked away, swaying, gasping.

Michael kept me from falling off the roof. He looked amazed. “What did you do?”

Fed.

I was so fed.

I felt rich with it, blissful, drugged. Absolutely relaxed and warm and tingling to the edges of every inch of my form.

Sirens. Coming.

“Time to go!” said Michael, pulling me back through his yellow door.

The Corridors did their thing, and I felt it, and floated in it, and spun and flew and was.

Michael cried out.

So did I. We became colors and swirling paint, flowing out of the drain against gravity in beauty and madness and bliss. And then—

#

I woke up.

I was back in my little bed in my gray apartment. My hair was wet; I smelled of soap. My heart pounded. (Benign essential blepharospasm, perhaps?)

Martin was next to me, asleep. I stared at my boring popcorn ceiling.

Had that… happened?

Next to me, on the nightstand, was a bright green Post-It note with handwriting I didn’t know. It said, Jon. We need to talk.—JL

Leitner.

Sure. Sure, we could talk. Fuck if I knew about what, though because I had no idea what had occurred.

It was four twenty-two in the morning. Martin slept. Leitner could wait.

I watched Martin, trying to understand (had I slept? If so, it was the first time in a thousand years), trying to parse what I’d seen and what I’d done.

The Eye did not help me because It could not. It didn’t know, either, and that frightened me more than anything else I’d seen.

------

NOTES

He's like a shammy; he's like a towel; he's like a sponge! A regular towel doesn't work wet, but Jon works wet or dry. Holds 12 times his weight in trauma!

[zelda-photography]

Tears of the Kingdom - Plot Ending Thoughts

Alright, I've officially finished the main story line of Tears of the Kingdom. I still have a lot to do in the game so I'll still be playing for a while, but I can finally focus on other things (yay!) and I can finally talk about what I thought of it!

My general and non-spoilery thoughts are: I think it was okay, the ending battle in particular felt very grand. What bugs me most about the story is not necessary what it did but more what it didn't do.

EDIT: Now with the Ganondorf Problem

The Fifth Sage

I go back and fourth about Mineru and what I think. Some of you probably saw my post where I was PRAYING for a plot twist and all of my hopes were hanging on her for my plot twist. Instead, she's not the sage of shadow, but the sage of spirit. I'm really glad that the sages got brought back, especially because you ended up with a team that can help you fight. They also changed some of the names to better fit the abilities of the sages which... I'm not super psyched about it. I mean, They got rid of shadow altogether!

Mineru is an okay character. I think she has a pretty good design, she has the whole 'trying to atone for what happened thing' but I feel like it could've been presented a little stronger. I'm not huge on the construct that goes places with you, it feels so weird compared to all the spirits you have hanging around you. It does fit in well with the constructs you've been seeing around, I guess. I'm also really surprised that the sheikah don't come up at all, considering they have an eye motif and the Zonai have a strong eye motif.

(Quickly back to Mineru, I love Zelink but I feel like there was at least a little moment between Mineru and Zelda lol)

I also find it a little strange that there are more or less five sages. I know there's technically seven, and Link does have all seven if you could the time power from Zelda and the arm from Rauru, but it still feels weird to me.

Like I said before, my biggest problem with the story is what is not done. I realize this is somewhat a 'me' problem, Nintendo can't anticipate the expectations of a single person.

Which lead to my tangent for the Fifth Sage section:

Fifth Sage Twists I Would've Liked Better

Mineru ended up betraying Rauru, at least in the past. It would've been a better set up I think for why she was so insistent on redeeming herself for making up for past transgressions

Mineru passes on the secret stone to someone else

Paya ends up being the fifth sage - get some Sheikah rep in there, and she also doesn't ahve much to do in this story at all

Tauro ends up being the fifth sage - I think he's Lurien, which are somewhat associated with the Zonai, and also I think he's interesting enough it would've been fun to have a new character

Before I close out this section, I will say that I am very happy there was a fifth sage at all. It looked like there would be, but also, considering only the four areas were highlighted, I wouldn't have been surprised if it ended at the four, other than the fact that it left Link without a ring on his middle finger.

Finding Zelda

I really liked that throughout the game, the search for Zelda is ongoing and constant. Not only do you get the feeling that Link is concerned, you understand that everyone is very concerned.

I figured out the twist to who Zelda was about 3/4 of the way through the tears, but it was still SO good to be rewarded by being right, the final tear made me cry especially when you wake up from it surrounded by the silent princesses. It also meant that I could visit her whenever I wanted <3 It does feel a little silly at times after that when people are still going 'where's zelda?' but you know the whole time, and Link himself clearly knows as well, but I also get it.

Yiga

I don't have much to say here. The Yiga are fine. I like that Kohga was in the Depths because he fell down the big hole. Tracking them down in the depths isn't that big of a deal, and I did all of it before I actually hit the point in the game where they explicitly tell you to go there. I've had most fun with the Yiga side quest where you get the uniform and go do their base.

Final Boss Ganondorf

I made it down to the final boss chamber pretty early on in the game, after Rito village, because I wanted to get past the bombable walls you see in the beginning. I teleported out of there as soon as it became clear this was the final boss area.

I love that at one point, you get deep enough below Hyrule Castle that the sages stop showing up and you're on your own; it sets the atmosphere greatly and makes it so perfectly spooky. I think the enemy rush is great, though it probably would've gone better if I was better at utilizing the sages powers. Having you get separated from them because they have to fight the other bosses on their own was also okay by me as a reason to get them away from you.

The battle with Ganondorf was good! It was a struggle, and for a while I thought I wasn't going to make it and would need to regroup and come back with better supplies. And then he eats the secret stone and also becomes a dragon and you're caught in his teeth?!?!

The final fight against Dragon Ganondorf is so good!!! I think his design is great, he's so BIG, and it's not htat hard of a fight, but for a third phase of a final boss, I think that's fine. it's not about being hard at that point, in my opinion, it's about feeling really awesome as you're flying through the air, climbing on dragons, and beating up the weak points. Zelda coming to help you out, even as a dragon, was perfect. It felt like we were really working together to do this.

And then, when you're falling, and you finally catch her this time, just like you failed to do before?!?! The ending is SO SO GOOD!!!

My only problem is I wish that Link's arm was gone, still Rauru-ified, or at the very least scarred from what happened to him.

The Ganondorf Problem

This seems like as good a place of any to talk about my thoughts on Ganondorf. For years, fans have been begging for a nuanced Ganondorf, like Wind Waker but better! This... is not that. This Ganondorf is evil looking, almost comically evil in the memory cutscenes, and I'll be honest, it was pretty disappointing. Without changing up the plot entirely, there are two ways I think they could've made this Ganondorf at least a little bit better of a character.

They make him charismatic. Ganondorf as a man who knows how to manipulate people in order to get what he wanted. You can at least see or buy Ganondorf as someone that people may trust, or who can trick people.

He's doing it for his people. See yourself as Ganondorf, first Gerudo Male in a hundred years, already burdened with great purpose, and now the Kingdom of Hyrule exists with god-like power and is growing fast. So you do what you can to get that power so you can save your people, and then maybe he got lost in the lust for power along the way.

Ending Cutscene

The ending cutscene seemed to be mostly a big send off for Mineru, which felt weird. Again I don't have a huge problem with her, and I'm glad she got to pass on, but I don't think it really warranted such a big part of the scene?

Again, here I thought Mineru would pass on her secret stone to Purah, but she didn't.

I liked all the sages swearing their loyalty to Hyrule and Zelda, that was nice, but I don't know. It just felt like it was missing a little something to me. What? Hard to say.

Last Thoughts

These last thoughts are going to be mostly problems I had, so I want to start it by saying that I loved this game! There's so much to do, it's so distinct from Breath of the Wild while also still being a sequel. Having played Breath of the Wild, I was able to explore Hyrule again, and I loved going back to places that I had been before and seeing what had changed about them. I'll be playing this game for a while :D

The Zonai were... hm, well I liked them over all... I think? I liked their designs, but I wished we got to learn more about them or see more than just Rauru and Mineru.

There's a lot of talk about the imprisoning war and people coming from the sky, so I thought there's be more connection to Skyward Sword, but there was hardly any, and I'll admit I was a little disappointed. We come to the whole 'zelda timeline theory' 'problem' here, which is that this worked more like a parallel to the events of skyward sword than a reference. Ultimately, I view the Zelda Timeline as a lense through which to view Zelda, not canonical but also something that still holds weight to how you consume Zelda. That being said, I was really REALLY hoping for Skyward Sword stuff to be prominent.

I wish there was a stronger second act or some kind of plot twist. You visit each region only once really, and it would've been much better if you ended up having to visit all of them again for some reason or other.

The names for the secret stones sucked and I think there should've been a different name for them.

The game focused a lot on Rauru. This is another thing that I can't decide whether it bothers me or not. It takes a step away from the the triforce and the goddesses. Considering the focus on Hylia Breath of the Wild had, this is probably a good thing. Still, at times it felt like the Rauru game instead of the Zelda game. However, Rauru is an interesting character and i liked learning more about him.

Again, over all, I like the game! It feels weird to say this a week after the game came out, but it makes me excited for future Zelda games and where they'll go from there. Really hoping for a 2D Zelda between now and the next one :)

I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on the game!

[newcontinent]

ot4

okay so i made this largely ryden/polypanic reclist before i know, but i wanted to make a complete list of all my favourite longer ot4 fics as well as just smut. it’s fair to say this list is extensive and ever-expanding. enjoy!

(note: it’s safe to assume all these fics are nc-17 unless otherwise stated)

***

a sense of touch by liketheroad (16,000, rated PG)

from the very beginning, slowly at first but always steadily growing towards more, they touched. so much and eventually so without thought that they never had to wonder why it felt wrong when they didn’t, because that itself happened so infrequently.

(this is so so lovely it makes me cry tbh. canon compliant and delicate and wonderful)

all in by fictionalaspect (8000)

"last person still in wins the pot," jon says. he finishes with a flourish, folding up his two pieces of paper and dropping them on top of the folded twenty at the bottom of their empty weed jar.

brendon pushes his hair out of his eyes, bites his lip, and stares at his two scraps of paper. he writes the first two things that come to mind.

(well written, well read, well loved. brendon gets rimmed, ryan wears lingerie, we’re all happy)

be(side) the sea by liketheroad (21,000, rated T)

ryan and spencer grow up on a lonely island by the sea, two against the world, and then comes jon walker to make it three.

(and then brendon arrives too! this is so sad in places but exceptionally pretty in others and i just really really like it)

burn up in love love love by dsudis (12,000)

miss you miss you miss you

(who knew jon getting gang banged could be so sweet??)

circus verse by mokuyoubi (38,000 altogether)

spencer and ryan are part of pete's travelling circus. jon and brendon come for the show, but there's something about the place that keeps them coming back for more.

(this is ryan/brendon and jon/spencer in the first part, but it’s so good and i love the idea of this au tbh)

clearly aware of the stars by jenish (18,000)

(bby!brendon has a huge crush on jon, so spencer and ryan decide to, ahem, help him out. aka cute tiny gay boys having feelings)

different names for the same thing by liketheroad (24,000, rated PG)

wherein ryan, spencer, brendon and jon live in a house in chicago and go to school and work and make waffles and have misunderstandings and fall in love. also wherein tom conrad is kind of magic.

(i love everything this author writes to be honest, but this and the other 2 fics by them on here are just so cute and awesome and everything i love about polypanic)

discussion of children at prayer (divine in accepting your defeat) by ignite_it (4500)

in which ryan, spencer and brendon died before they could live forever, pete is ruthless and possibly crazy, the world might be ending, and jon walker just wants his family back. (sad and far-fetched, but it made me cry so it belongs on this list)

every turn a surprise by mixtapestar (56,000)

when brendon is 10 years old, weird things start happening. he quickly discovers his ability to read minds, and then he spends several years at the academy, learning how to control it. after he is forced to run away to avoid being drafted for his ability, he gets hired onto a spaceship, where he meets spencer, ryan, and jon. things just get crazier from there, especially when he starts to fall in love with more than one of his coworkers.

(considering the length, the plot is kind of underdeveloped in places, but still - space au ot4!!! with superpowers!!!)

find what you need by lady_deathangel (5000)

(this was written for a bottom!jon meme and it actually has a bit of a plot. what more needs to be said)

four men and a little cabin by gigantic (9000)

unrelated, non-linear scenes from a recording cabin

(i constantly thank god for cabin fic)

from countess to cabin boy by formerlydf (35,000)

to be fair, brendon never truly intends to join the crew of a pirate ship. It just sort of... happens. she's sitting at a table in the corner, sipping her water and trying to figure out where to go next, when a boy about her age sits down at the table with her. "have you ever considered a life of action and adventure on the high seas?" he asks her cheerfully. brendon stares at him. she also stares at his hair — at least, she thinks it's his hair. It could be some sort of weird, hair-like hat gone terribly, terribly wrong. "um. what?"

(pirate au!! is it kind of ridiculous? yes. is the genderswap awkward and/or offensive? surprisingly not! overall p adorable tbh)

high school verse 1 and 2 by softlyforgotten (38,000 altogether, rated T)

(the reigning monarch of high school aus writes more high school au. the first part is mostly vicky/greta, but seriously this entire thing is so good and the polypanic in both parts is so well done i love it a lot)

(i’ll be) the only thing between you and the stars by mokuyoubi (68,000)

pete likes to be the admiral of the fleet in his free time, the cobra is after the academy, the helena is after the cobra, and brendon gets caught in the middle, leaving it up to spencer, jon and ryan to come to his rescue. oh yeah. star trek au.

(*bangs on table* star trek au!! star trek au!!! star! trek!! au!!!! amazing tbh)

the less specific i become by notamagnet (21,000)

brendon was found wandering the desert when he was two and was later adopted by the uries. he’s never felt as though he fits in with them, but he loves them regardless. everywhere he goes he can’t help but wonder if he’s passing someone who knows what happened to him. one day on tour, he meets someone who does.

(brendon is adopted and his real dad is the president???? idek man but there’s just something about this fic that i really, really like)

let each who is worthy by mokuyoubi (86,000)

“it was probably just some shitty band, you know? i mean, how many high school bands ever go anywhere, what are the odds? but i still can’t help wondering how things might have been different, if i’d joined them. like. that was a bad time for me, and what if i had found a place where i fit in? where would i be now?"

brendon has his religious crisis but never meets panic! and goes away on his mission after high school.

(hugely long and ambitious considering, but it still works and it’s kind of amazing. absolutely worth a read)

one more than three by cynthia_arrow (9000)

"i think i want to have sex with ryan ross," jon says as he spills across the threshold.

to his credit, gabe doesn't laugh, doesn't even so much as smirk.

(brendonryanspencer are together, jon is sad and wants in, and gabe is actually a very good friend)

panic! at the discworld by imperfectcircle (+ podfic by reena_jenkins) (5000, rated G)

brendon came from a tiny farm in the ramtop mountains half a cow and two acorns short of being a hovel, and had assumed the city of ankh-morpork would be similar in size and variety to the kingdom of lancre. it might even be smaller, he had supposed, because lancre -- that huddled collection of villages, mountains and goats -- was a kingdom, whereas ankh-morpork was merely a city.

this was much like using height to deduce that a baby made less mess than a hat stand, and tended to have the same effect on one's shoes.

(oh man this fic THIS FIC. 100% as good as it sounds, it captures pterry’s voice perfectly, it features otto!!!, and it is just so fucking great i cry. podfic is a++ as well)

so tonight that we might see by softlyforgotten (32,000)

adventures and reunions of a spacely sort.

(more spaceship aus!!! okay ngl this fic p much broke my heart but i love it very dearly and there’s a happy ending i promise!!)

(songs about fighting for boys who don’t fight) by jae (17,000)

right when jon was joining, william had said to him, “you know, they’re a - tight-knit bunch.

(new beginnings are hard to navigate, and ryan is a little bitch (as per usual). jon centric and wonderful if painful)

spyro! by solarcat (9000)

in which spencer smith is a small, purple dragon, ryan ross makes magical scarves, brendon urie writes songs about lonely manticores, and jon walker is magic!

(okay so part of me can’t even believe i’m even putting this in this list, but i couldn’t not do it. it’s ridiculous, it’s hilarious, but it’s also well written and it’s sure as hell original!)

that’s what he said by cyclogenesis (23,000)

truckstops and statelines and boyfriends, etc.

(okay so this is, to be truthfully honest, mostly just smut, but it is smut that is very important from me. take it from rosie, i never shut up about this fic)

there’s no ‘i’ in ryan ross by jzbell (9500)

jon walker attempts the impossible: to make the gayest band on the planet even gayer.

(group sex as organised by jwalk - what’s not to love?)

triangulation and other games of numbers by redsnake05 (24,000)

spencer doesn't think he should believe mike or tom, at first, but he finds himself wanting to trust them. when he finds out what they've really been doing, he's lucky to also find something else that he actually can trust in. (features various permutations of tom conrad/mike carden/spencer, but ultimately a great polypanic fic about trust and boundaries. and sex. obviously)

the way you make me feel (it knocks me off my feet) by dishonestdreams (9000)

jon doesn't know how he ever got by without this. without them. (i’m not super down for dom!ryan but i am incredibly down for sub!jon so there we have it. also v well written)

***

(side note: because this list was getting kind of ridiculously long, i decided to split it into 2. my other ot4 reclist can be found here, and it contains smaller fics/pure smut fic that i didn’t want to put into this list)a

[matcheadz]

THIS IS NOT A TUTORIAL

So I like to draw. That much is clear. In fact, I went to school for it! For an exorbadent amount of money, actually. Well, not drawing. Animation specifically but thats not the point.

I like to draw, but for a long time I felt like I couldn't because my 'process' was rather ridiculous. Or at least, I felt like it. I still sort of feel like it. I want to remind people here that your process doesn't have to look clean or pretty or whatever, because nobody (unless you go to an art college in that case just get in the habit of saving custom layouts for projects, trust me) is going to see it.

I call my sketchbook my 'shitbook' because its full of stuff that will never see the light of day. Blind contour drawings. Random mixtures of shapes. Observational drawings with little notes to myself. Don't worry about those 'aesthetic journals.' Fuck 'em, I say. Life is messy as shit, let your sketchbook show that.

So today I wanna show you the absolute mess that is my process. I like to take screenshots during a painting or sketch that I feel is pivotal in my learning process so I can see if I took the right direction or not. As a result, I have a ton of these .pngs lying around. Lets look at one:

What the fuck is that? EW! THATS UGLY! Hold on, what about this one:

Hmm, well what about this- wait what the fuck is this

These are all thumbnails/sketches from IT projects I did maybe two or three yearrs ago. These never saw the light of day, save for maybe a joke post or to a partner involved in a project. These were for me to look at, to carve out. These don't have good anatomy. They're not the final composition. Sometimes they're in a completely different style. Point is,

These are my versions of thumbnails. It's how I plan my shots, my layout, my composition, my expressions. Is some of it pretty? Maybe? Is most of it absolutely vile? YES. And I love it that way. The dirtier the better, as I like to think. Its a thought process. I want my thumbnails to look like I'm thinking so I can combine those thoughts. For example, I'll show you the last Vergil painting I just did and all the steps I did with that. Look at this ugly little motherfucker:

This is a strange sketch considering the final product. What I did here was look at the 'jinx pose' from Arcane and be like "hmm. Vergil?" and tried to use the perspective and anatomy. it did NOT work out in this sketch because as you'll see in a second, the rough colors did not work for me. But in this specifically, I focused on the musculatory anatomy of his shoulders, because I knew that was going to be something super defined and important to understand with how odd his vest is. So here are my flats. Sorta:

So at this point I'm clearly focused on the face and my file is still named Vergil Thirst Trap Lol and something clearly isnt working with my perspective. His head and arms are huge, and Vergil might have a grabable waist for some of you but this isn't it. So At this point I'm done with my first sit down and I step away. I come back the next day (during work hehehe) and I get to this at the end.

Alright! Color is looking a little better. Arms are more sculpted and while I'm aligning myself to my sketch more than anything, I'm also very closely looking at my pose reference, thinking about anatomy and my color palette. I step away (I clock out) and I take a minute to look at it. Its... looking better? But theres something off still about that perspective. At this point I'm a little frustrated with this vest and its weird rules. So I bare my teeth and gnash at it:

WHOA WHY THE FUCK HE LOOK SO WEIRD HERE?? Cause I flipped the canvas after painting and didn't realize how odd it looked oops. We'll do some fixing but that face looks nice for now and I think im better understanding the contrast I need through some actual photo editing. So let me tell you the story of Vergil's hair. Its a sad one. It will enrage you. This man had four different itterations. Most of which I can't show you because I painted over them so many times. But heres a screencap of the one I thought was gonna work.

Its NICE. I liked it alot. But the I realized this was not the way things were heading. Hair too swaggy. IMO anyway. I was slowly editing the name from Vergil Thirst Trap lol to Vergil to Vergil has mommy issues. and this hair? It matches the lightning well, but this was more Vergil Fucks. so what was the end result of the body?

more or less this (Those buttons didnt look like that I just realized this screenshot is fucked but you get the idea.) I did some composition editing, some contrast play and more effects, but this was pretty much done. So, like, shit gets messy. Thats not even counting the layer of overlapping reference photos I used because I don't use art boards like a normal person. shit gets messy! Let it get messy. Just clean up when you're done and hopefully you get something you're proud of >:)

[silentheiss]

This Is How I Disappear

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

TROUBLE TROUBLE MKER YEAH THATS YOUR MIDDLE NAME

I KNOW YOURE NO GOOD BUT YOURE

STUCK IN MY BRAIN!!!

just like this fucking song

save me

I’ve been like that since the early morning

well

since 10.30, when I woke up

which is an early morning, considering I went to bed at four in the morning

i was binge watching shitty horror movies

was fun until it wasn’t

and I had to watch shrek to calm down

Geralt laughs, hard.

Two hours later he almost texts the man back, just to yell at him for putting that stupid song in his head.

***

almost halloween!!

It’s October 20th, so it is definitely not almost halloween, but the man does seem like a type to hype it up.

ive been thinking about a costume

catwoman

danny zuko

princess di

spongebob

daryl dixon

and before you ask, yeah, I can definitely pull these off

except maybe for daryl, I might not have enough of that ruggish charm

and a crossbow

i most definitely don’t have one

you should be daryl, actually

you seem like a quiet type lol

Geralt also owns a pretty cool crossbow. It’s a tempting thought, to send the man a picture of it, but it might look a bit creepy.

***

Geralt is having dinner with his brothers, when he gets a text that makes his heart stop short.

do you want to know where I got your number from?

He’s been receiving texts for two months and for all this time he thought the man just accidentally texted the wrong number and once he realized no one is going to answer decided to keep texting. Like a diary or something.

But now he is confronted with the thought of being known by this stranger.

I wasn’t really planning to tell you this, but I’ve had some excellent wine and I’m feeling quite melodramatic

so, the day I texted you I got in a fight with my dad

i was working a shitty barista job at a time, and was running late

because of a fight, you see

so I got fired

threw a great scene about it, too

and as I was sitting in the parking lot, at 8.15 in the morning, I saw a business card on the ground

it was clearly stepped on maaaaany times, I couldn’t even read what was written on it

entertained myself for good fifteen minutes trying to do so, too

but I could make out a phone number

so I texted

didn’t expect the answer

was right about it at least, huh?

dk why I kept texting

maybe I should stop, actually

“No.” Geralt mutters.

“What?” Eskel looks at him over his beer.

“Nothing.” Geralt quickly puts his phone away.

“You’ve been acting weird lately.” Lambert puts his fork down and exchanges a glance with Eskel.

“Is it a fucking intervention?” His brothers’ curiosity isn’t surprising, and he doesn’t mean to actually snap at them, but the prospect of loosing his mystery texter makes him feel… uneasy.

“Who are you keep texting?” Lambert presses.

“I’m not texting anyone.” Geralt answers.

“But you’re always on your phone.” Eskel’s voice is mild, clearly not wanting to start a fight.

“Are you Vesemir now?” He grumbles. “I’m just reading. A book.”

“Oka-ay.” Lambert drawls, clearly unconvinced. Geralt doesn’t care.

He doesn’t look at his phone, not until his brothers leave later in the evening.

I don’t think I will.

guess you’d tell me if I were annoying

god knows people have no problem doing that.

but you read all my texts, so

maybe you laugh at me

and that’s okay, I guess

good night, parking lot business card person

Geralt lets out a breath he feels he was holding all evening.

“Good night.” He whispers.

[casspurrjoybell-25]

Cold as Ice - Chapter 50 - Part 1

*Warning - Adult Content*

Landon Reilly

I didn't really know how it happened but somehow I ended up eating breakfast at a diner with Rojas, Jess and Anthony one day.

I wasn't even sure the three of them had ever said more than a passing word to one another but I was walking with Jess one morning when we ran into Rojas, who then decided to join us at the coffee shop where Anthony worked.

Then Jess just probably assumed that made us all friends and now we were hanging out as the four of us, which felt weird.

It felt like the three of them all came from different parts of my life and shouldn't have been mixing together.

"Chris, pass me the salt," Jess said to Rojas.

She insisted on calling him by his first name, which he didn't seem to mind.

He said that it was really only the hockey guys that called him by his last name.

Jess was sitting next to me on the outside of the booth while Anthony sat across from her with Rojas next to him.

I couldn't get over how strange it felt to be sitting here with all of them but I knew Jess probably wanted to make sure I wasn't going to just sit in my dorm and wallow in self pity over my break up with Wren.

Without her, that was probably what I would have been doing but she made sure to keep me busy.

Even with keeping busy, my heart didn't hurt any less.

I still felt lonely at the end of the night when I got back to the dorm, even if my roommate, Kyle, was there.

Part of me wanted to just go back to Wren and tell him he didn't need to love me and being together was enough but I couldn't do that.

It would just end up hurting me more in the end and there was no way Jess would let me do that.

"You guys seriously need to start winning games," Jess said to Rojas.

They had already been talking but I was zoned out of the conversation.

Rojas just laughed then looked over at me, his expression changing to a puzzled one.

"Earth to Landon," Rojas said, waving a hand in front of my face.

"I'm here," I said, swatting his hand away.

"Didn't seem like it," he replied, leaning back in his seat.

"You looked far away."

"Are we not doing a good enough job distracting you?" Jess asked, looking genuinely concerned.

"I don't think anything could distract me right now," I told her with a sad smile.

"Well, if we're talking about it... I saw..." Anthony started but paused when Jess shot him a look.

"I saw, he who shall not be named, the other day."

"Yeah, so did I," I said, remembering the way we had run into each other.

It was reminiscent of one of our first encounters earlier on in the school year.

The thought made me sad, how we went from being basically strangers to so much more and how much had changed between us in such a short amount of time.

I wished Wren could just say what I needed to hear because I knew he loved me.

There was no way what either of us felt for the other wasn't enough but I supposed that just loving each other wasn't enough.

He didn't love me enough to say it back.

He didn't love me enough to hold onto me.

That was what my life had always been like.

No one ever loved me enough but that had never affected me as much as it was right now.

I wanted so badly for Wren to love me enough.

"He looked kinda rough," Anthony continued.

"He sat in the coffee shop for hours without even realizing."

The last time Wren and I had broken up, it was apparent that he was not as good at dealing with emotions as he liked to pretend.

He was actually quite bad it, so this news didn't surprise me but it did cause a squeeze in my chest as I thought about him feeling down and being alone.

"What if you try to make him jealous?" Jess asked, turning toward me.

"Let him see what he's missing. If he's going through it, he clearly wants you back. He just needs a kick in the ass."

"And how would I do that?" I muttered, not that I was seriously considering her suggestion.

I wasn't entirely sure Wren would even be jealous if I tried, though he seemed jealous back when Micah visited and our relationship was new but I didn't want to do that to him purposely and there was no way I was going to be able to find anyone to make him jealous with.

"You could pretend to be seeing Chris," Jess suggested, motioning toward Rojas, who stopped reaching for his food the moment his name was mentioned.

"Yeah, not happening," I said, shaking my head.

"I think it's a good idea," Anthony said, earning a look of appreciation from Jess.

"You would," I retorted.

"I'd do it with you but he knows I'm with James," Anthony said.

"And James would be pissed. He is the jealous type."

"It wouldn't really work if it was you though," Jess said.

"Because he knows you but he doesn't know Chris."

Rojas cleared his throat, causing the rest of us to look at him.

I was embarrassed this conversation was even happening.

"I don't mind, if Landon thinks this would help," Rojas said.

He sounded genuine but I was still embarrassed about him being dragged into this.

"No, I'm not doing it," I said, my tone making it clear that this was my final decision.

********

A couple days later, Jess invited Rojas and I to the coffee shop where Anthony worked and then conveniently something came up so she couldn't go with us, leaving just Rojas and me while Anthony was working and even more conveniently, Wren happened to be there.

I knew without even knowing that Jess and Anthony set this up.

Anthony must have told her Wren was there, so she got Rojas and me to show up as if the two of us being there together was enough to make Wren jealous.

Wren didn't even look up when we walked in there.

He was too focused on whatever he was doing on his laptop, which was probably the novel he had been working on.

"I swear I had nothing to do with this," Rojas whispered to me as we waited for our coffees.

"Oh, I know," I replied, shooting daggers at Anthony who was smiling to himself behind the counter.

"I know exactly who had something to do with this."

"We can leave," Rojas offered.

"Coffee for Landon," Anthony called out with a grin, placing my coffee down on the counter.

I didn't even know if Wren noticed or looked in my direction because I was too busy glaring at Anthony and wanting to shrivel up and die of embarrassment.

After Rojas got his drink, the two of us found a place to sit beside each other, which happened to be in view of Wren.

He still had his eyes glued to his computer, giving me no indication he even knew I was here.

I couldn't tell if I wanted him to look at me or if I wanted him to remain unaware.

"That's him, right?" Rojas said, nodding in Wren's direction.

I sighed.

"Yeah, that's him."

"Do you want to tell me what happened with you two?" he asked.

"I mean, obviously you don't have to but if you want to talk about it, I'm all ears."

The truth was I didn't want to talk about it.

I gave the whole story to Jess and she had been nothing but supportive, though what she did this morning might have been stepping too far.

I gave a brief rundown to Micah who did his best to be supportive but wasn't that good at it without knowing all the details or having to talk through text.

It was too embarrassing to tell it all to Rojas.

The two of us were friends but he we weren't that close and he was the Captain of my hockey team, so he kind of had to make sure I was good.

Being setup to be there with him at the coffee shop and pretend we were on a date was embarrassing enough.

I didn't need to tell him that this was happening because my boyfriend basically told me he couldn't love me.

"There's really nothing to talk about," I told him, taking a sip of my coffee while still looking over at Wren.

"It doesn't seem like either of you even want to be broken up," Rojas said.

"At least from what Anthony and Jess were saying, so why are you?"

"It's... complicated."

'Complicated and mortifying'.

Just then, Wren's eyes moved from his screen and looked right at me.

The world stopped for a moment until Wren moved his gaze to Rojas sitting beside me.

Rojas had gotten closer without me realizing, like he didn't know if I wanted to go through with the jealousy plan but he was ready for it if I decided to.

Wren studied us for a moment, like we were one of the only things he couldn't figure out.

I couldn't read his expression.

He was always able to keep his face blank and hide his true feelings from any outsider that tried to read him.

I liked to think that I had broken through him a little bit, that I could read him better the closer I got to him.

It was like all of that went away as soon as we broke up because as I looked at his face now, there was nothing I could gather from it.

Wren had put a wall up that I couldn't break through.

Part of me wanted to move closer to Rojas, let him put his arm around me just to see if there would be a reaction from Wren but I couldn't make myself do it.

It didn't seem to matter whether or not I tried to make Wren jealous because he quickly packed up his things and left, his expression never changing.

I felt myself deflate a little.

"Well, that might have worked," Rojas said after Wren was gone.

"And we didn't even have to do anything."

"No, he just didn't want to see me," I mumbled, looking down at the table.

Probably because when he tried talking to me the other day, I turned and left without giving him the chance.

Maybe he was ready to open himself up for me at that moment, to be vulnerable and I didn't let him.

Maybe he wouldn't be ready to do that again and I blew any chance I had of him coming clean about his feelings and the two of us getting back together.

Rojas and I didn't talk much the rest of the time we were there at the coffee shop.

We finished our drinks and headed back toward campus in time for my first class.

[cassandrasimplex]

CW: creepy predatory dude vs teenagers story, teenagers win unscathed, flawless victory (starts in fourth paragraph) (not counting this warning) (Dee Snider is the hero-in-effigy, not personally present and definitely not the yikes part)

Straying almost but not quite completely from the topic here...

My all-time favorite compliment I've ever received was a time I was in a corner store and the cashier looked up at me, messy long brown hair and black leather jacket, and just blurted out, "Oh my god, you look just like Joey Ramone!"

He immediately started apologizing because that's not something it was considered kind in the mid-90s to say to someone presenting as female. I just asked him to stop apologizing and not ruin the moment for me, and I've treasured it for decades.

But my second favorite compliment... was accidentally being compared to Dee Snider. Or, kind of, tricking someone into it.

I was sleeping over at a friend's house at the time. We were both in high school, somewhere around 15 or 16 years old. Her mom smoked, her dad smoked, she smoked, and her parents knew she smoked... but there was some weird house rule about her not underage-smoking in front of other underage people in front of her parents, or in front of her parents in front of other underage people, or something. I dunno. I think it had to do with her dad being a lawyer and needing to pretend he didn't know.

So anyway, that's why we snuck out sometimes at night or in the early morning and walked down the street to a playground, in our pajamas, so she could smoke.

And there we were, a couple of decidedly underage girl looking people, in pajamas, sitting on a swingset at a neighborhood playground, when some very middle-aged dude walked up and started talking to us. Extremely awkwardly. Talking about how pretty we were. At four in the morning.

(This is, I promise, as gross as the story gets. "The princess doesn't get eaten by eels at this time.")

The guy was trying to figure out who to compare me to so I would feel flattered, but clearly didn't know (or didn't feel he knew) enough about teen pop culture or Young People Those Days (the 80s) so he just said, "You remind me of that singer. You know, that band? What's the name of that band?"

And then he paused, waiting for me to fill in the blank for him.

Now the weird thing about being autistic is that there's a lot about social interaction I Do Not Grok, but because I've never grokked it instinctively, I've spent a lot of time consciously analyzing it. So there's this weird side effect, where even though I still don't pick up on things allistics think are glaringly obvious, I DO pick up on things they think are cleverly hidden from everyone else's view.

Which is why I could immediately tell that this guy had precisely and exactly NO.FUCKING.BODY in mind and played that whole "Golly gee gosh, that name has just completely slipped my mind" game, assuming that whoever came to MY mind would be someone I admired and wanted to be compared to. And one thing a lot of autistics learn early, or at least earlier than most of our peers, is malicious compliance. So I played along.

"Which band? I don't know who you mean. Can you tell me one of their songs?"

He did not expect to start a conversation about music. He'd expected me to immediately blurt out whoever I thought was really pretty and wanted to be like. He had no idea what to do when I switched gears to, uh. The actual topic of conversation he introduced. He started fumbling around, trying to be as vague as possible. "Uh... Woman? Girl? Something Girl? Or no, wait... Sister, maybe? Something Sister? Or is 'Sister' in the name of the band? I just... I can't quite bring it to mind..."

"Sisters of Mercy?"

This irritated him. I liked irritating him, so I just started throwing out every band name I could think of with "Sister" in it, and a few I made up.

Finally, I got to "Twisted Sister?" and for some reason he jumped on that like it was the last life boat leaving a sinking ship. "YES! Twisted Sister. You look just like their lead singer! What's her name again?"

"You mean Dee?"

"Yeah, that sounds right, Dee. You look just like her."

And that's when my friend and I lost it. We were laughing so hard she almost fell off her swing. I managed to gasp out something along the lines "...never thought I'd be told I look like Dee Snider" and when I added the last name, dude finally figured out that he'd slipped up.

He started insisting he meant Swing Out Sister, which is weird because I look (and looked) nothing like Corinne Drewery. It was just such a weird "Hello kids, I also am a fellow kid" kind of moment, especially because my friend by that time was pissed and kept trying to get him to name one single Swing Out Sister song and he had no idea. But he couldn't really get a full sentence out by that point, because every time he got three words into a sentence, I would just yell "I LOOK LIKE DEE SNIDER!" and collapse into laughter again.

Eventually he got really mad that these two actual literal children wouldn't follow the script for whatever gross fantasy he was trying to play out, plus he was worried that my shouting "DEE SNIDER!" at four in the morning would wake up neighbors and call attention, so he stomped off.

My friend and I were pretty much too young to really have felt like the situation was genuinely dangerous (me more so than her), but looking back with the perspective of intervening decades, it still gives me shivers.

Anyway. My second favorite compliment is the time I tricked a guy into telling me I looked just like the singer for Twisted Sister and found out that Dee Snider's mere name is my own personal talisman versus creepy gross dudes with an air of vaguely threatening assault.

I have not, since then, ever found another opportunity to yell "DEE SNIDER!" instead of, you know, "help!" or "I don't know you!" or any of the other things people tend to ignore as not their problem when a child or woman-looking-person shouts them in a panic. But I've always known I have that in reserve.

I LOOK LIKE DEE SNIDER.

[flightless-rising]

Made a new Flight Rising iceberg and also wrote an explanation.. man, this took way longer than it should have.

Anyways, I hope you enjoy :D

Iceberg explanation

( If there are any mistakes please let me know and I’ll edit this asap. Also, English isn't my first language so please forgive me for any grammatical errors)

EDIT 28/06: Added some new info! Thanks to everyone who tagged and responded with new stuff to add, I really appreciate it!

The Sky

Naomi

Back in the day, whenever you bought or sold something on the auction house a message would show up in your inbox confirming the transaction. These messages were sent by one of the dragon couriers: Pearl, Spitfire or Edgar.

On January 2016, a strange glitch occurred that replaced the images and names of couriers with the ones of a female fae named “Naomi”.

It goes deeper than that, though: if you looked up her name in the user search menu, a clan would pop up with over 15 million dragons.

It was quickly discovered that all exalted dragons had somehow become part of her clan. Naomi herself apparently didn’t exist, and clicking on her page redirected to an error page. This was later fixed and the original Naomi page can be now visited.

What exactly caused this glitch is still a mystery and today Naomi is still a well-known piece of Flight Rising history.

Missing Tidelord

In the official lore, the deity of the water flight disappeared in early 2018, as described in the short story “Hear Today, Gone Tomorrow”.

In the follow up story (Mixed Elements) posted in April of the next year it is confirmed that the Tidelord is still missing, but alive. This coincides with the fact that the Tidelord account hasn’t made any forum posts aside from festival announcements.

Emperors

Emperors are a type of unobtainable dragon that are formed when several Imperial corpses are left in close proximity to each other, which then fuse forming a multi-headed chimera.

Emperors are described in the lore as having an animal-like behavior and destroying everything in sight. They are extremely difficult to kill, which is the reason why in-universe Imperials have such strange burial rites.

An emperor named Luminax is first described in the Raising a Family short story, and their sprite can be seen walking around on the world map.

The Surface

Old color wheel

Originally, there were only 67 available colors for dragons. On June 8th 2016, 110 more colors were added, meaning that currently there are a total of 177 colors available.

When making a custom progenitor dragon, it is only possible to choose among the 67 original colors because it would be otherwise unfair for those who made their account before the new colors were added.

Imperial breed scrolls

Imperial breed change scrolls are one of, if not the most, rare type of item on the site. They were given only to those who pledged 30 dollars or more on the original Flight Rising kickstarter.

At the time, this was the only way of obtaining an Imperial dragon, which meant that the breed as a whole was pretty valuable. Now that Imperials are abundant this is no longer the case, but First generation Imperials are still extremely sought and probably the most expensive type of dragon on the site.

There were also other items that were only given to Kickstarted backers, namely Skycats, Bonefiend, Golden Idol and Cogfrog familiars, and those are also pretty much impossible to obtain.

Baldwin breed change

When Baldwin was introduced in 2015 he was originally a Pearlcatcher. On September 14th of 2016 however his site art started to gradually change, until his transformation was completed five days later.

In-universe, Baldwin started to change after a lightning strike hit his cauldron during an experiment, which made him slowly mutate into the breed we now know as Bogsneaks.

Trans Fiona

When Fiona was added as a trading post dragon people speculated that she was trans, because the female pose for Skydancers only displays two antennae, while the male one has four.

Since Fiona has four antennae in her site art, many wondered whether it was an oversight or actually intended. Aequorin later confirmed in a forum thread that Fiona is indeed trans.

Boolean

Speaking of rare items, the Boolean familiar was only given to a handful of Flight rising beta testers and as such is extremely rare and valuable.

Plaguebringer coli team

On the Plaguebringer’s page she is listed as being part of a coliseum team.

As of now we have no clue as to why this is, and even more strangely she is the only deity that does this.

Boston & Hope

This story is a bit complicated. I’ve scoured the forums in search of info but it seems like there are still some pieces missing. I’ll try my best to explain anyway.

So, for a long while the Lightweaver was the only deity that had other dragons aside from herself in her lair: these dragons were a Spiral named Boston and a Tundra named Hope. Strangely, they were both Earth dragons and apparently have been there since the beginning (?). When asked why (this happened back when deities would interact on the forums) the Lightweaver responded that they were having a dinner party together.

In August 2014 during a pretty heated dominance battle between Shadow and Light Boston and Hope disappeared from the Lightweaver’s lair.

The Shadowbinder now had them, and both their elements were alsochanged to Shadow. The two deities acknowledged this and changed their broadcast messages accordingly.

If I had to guess this was some kind of inside joke that the admins had, although some people got angry that the Shadowbinder now had both Hope and Boston. Some time later(?) Boston was returned to the Lightweaver and for some reason his element was changed to wind.

I don’t have any more info on the matter but if some of you do I would appreciate it if you tell me.

Shallow Waters

Eyepocalypse

On June 8th 2018 eye type variants were introduced. This update was pretty controversial for a bunch of reasons, and the topic is still discussed today. The majority of people(?) seemed to be upset by the fact the “best” eye types (primarily goat, primal and multi-gaze) could only be displayed on dragons that were born with them, and the fact that every dragon born prior to the update couldn’t have these eye types at all displeased a lot of users.

Another problem was the fact that most of the non-special eye types (i.e the only ones that could be applied to already existing dragons using a vial of Scattersight) were not clearly visible on the grand majority of adult dragons.

A smaller(?) complaint was that two of the primal eye types, Shadow and Plague, were seen as kind of disturbing by some people.

Three years later staff attempted to fix this issue by adding Eye type vials for every available eye type. This resulted in a market crash for special eye typed dragons, as now these eye types could be applied to any dragon. The value of Scattersights also tanked, and the people bought them and hadn’t used them yet lost money as now they were infinitely less useful.

EDIT 28/06: Goat isn’t actually obtainable via breeding, faceted is. Bad mistake on my part.

Also, Scattersights were given away freely by Galore on Flight Rising’s fifth anniversary in 2018 and could not be bought afterwards. I admit that I thought people could be able to buy Scattersights due to how upset people were that the value went down, but whatever.

Courier Breed

The courier dragons (Edgar, Spitfire, and Pearl) are part of an exclusive dragon breed that is currently unobtainable. Even though their eye color still reflects the flight they were born in, in-universe they are considered to be “neutral” and they are granted free access to all domains. This raises the question as to which deity created them, as every other dragon breed (Bogsneaks being the only exception) has been created by one of The Eleven.

Multiaccounting

According to the site’s terms of service, no one is allowed to have more than one account. This is pretty standard for pet sites, as having multiple accounts grants unfair advantages and can mess up the site economy. This doesn’t completely stop people for having more than one account, and the practice as a whole is called “Multiaccounting” or “having multis”.

Some people only do this to have multiple clans or reboot their account without deleting their old one. They mostly do no harm but it is reasonable that the site wouldn’t allow this because of how easy it is exploit.

The real harm of multis comes from a practice called “funneling” which is when someone creates multiple accounts only for the purpose of giving items to their main account. This practice violates the game’s rules and can result in a ban. Funneling is not limited to multiaccounting though, and having an account only to feed another is against the site’s rules whether or not the account in question belongs to another person or not.

Some people fear of being banned for multiaccounting even if they haven’t done so, especially if they share a computer with other people.

Purble

“he purble” is probably among the most famous Flight Rising memes.

In 2016(?) a rant was submitted to the original Dramarising blog by a very angry user that wanted to buy an XXX Purple Ridgeback back when triples were pretty expensive, but got beat by someone else.

I’m not going to copy paste it here because in my opinion it’s one of the funniest Flight Rising related posts ever and I don’t want to spoil the experience of reading it for the first time. You can find it pretty easily by searching it up.

Tert Picking

This is something that refaced recently, even though I’ve seen people talking about this for a while. Some people vividly remember being able to pick their custom progenitor’s tertiary color, even though the developers have made it clear that such thing would be impossible. This is without a doubt just one of those weird situations where a lot of people somehow remember the same thing wrong.

Still, it’s fascinating just how many people claim to remember doing picking their tert.

Swiftwings

Swiftwings were a dragon breed that was scrapped in development. The design was rejected because it didn’t fit the 2 arms 2 legs 2 wings format that every dragon design had to follow before the introduction of ancient breeds.

The reason for this rule is that otherwise it would mess up apparel placement. Although the concept was scrapped, echoes of the design were scattered throughout the site: for example, the empty dragon slots that were present prior to 2019 had the silhouette of a Swiftwings dragon. They are also mentioned in the April Fool’s update of 2018.

“Real” Lore dragons

Most people don’t know that some of the dragons featured on the lore stories are actually real, and you can visit their pages. This is the case for Tetra, Cracklinne, Velya, Liefa, Garote and Mirth, which are currently chilling in Aequorin’s lair.

All of the other dragons in the developers’ lairs are not canon and are used to test bugs and features on the site.

The Middle ground

True deity names

When the site first started the deities used to have actual names instead of titles. Some of these names were based off of the site founders’s usernames on other sites.

The names are the following:

Amogayvhi - Gladekeeper Xhaztol - Arcanist Rhenik - Tidelord Akiri - Flamecaller Thrage - Stormcatcher Undel - Shadowbinder Jhortanas - Plaguebringer Ghurab - Windsinger Artaios - Earthshaker Rhiow – Lightweaver

As you can tell, Xhaztol, Akiri, Thrage and Undel are the usernames of some of the admins of the site, and the flight they are a part of corresponds with the previous name of their deity.

No leg coatls

On January 16, 2015 an iconic thread was posted in the flight rising discussion forum, which displayed a photoshopped image of a coatl with its legs removed. Quickly the thread devolved into a general photoshop thread were people took official site art of dragons and modified it.

The thread was eventually locked due to spam and quote pyramids, but spiritual successors of the original “phoatlshop” thread still exist today.

Dress slot unlocking

A thing that a surprising amount of people don’t know is the fact that when buy an additional apparel slot, the slot opens for every dragon in your lair and not just the one you bought it on.

This is something I also discovered very recently and it’s kind of funny that so many people that have been on the site for very long don’t know this.

Clanbound scatterscrolls

I think the wiki explains it best, so I’ll just copy paste this here:

“Tri-Color Scatterscrolls suffered from an issue where they would only scatter a random range from colors 1-47 (white through sunshine) rather than 1-67 (white through rose). They have been fixed and are now functioning correctly with a random range within the 67 color set. The affected timeframe was from August 15th, 2013 until September 22nd, 2013. The admins allowed users who were unsatisfied with their bugged Tri-Color Scatterscrolls to receive the same amount of them back in the form of Clanbound Scatterscrolls to try scattering their own dragons again with the full color range.”

Beta Mirrors

Ever wondered why they’re called Mirrors?

According to Undel, the main artist of Flight Rising, mirrors originally were supposed to have every part of their body “mirrored”, meaning they had two sets of eyes, two pairs of wings, two tails, and so on.

This design ended up being too cluttered and looked weird shrunken down. The name was kept the same, even though the only mirrored part of the design are the eyes.

Dragons are evil

If you read the “Beastclans on the rise” lore bit, the dragons come across as… very evil, stealing territory from the beastclans when they have been living on Sornieth way longer than the dragons have and killing them for loot.

Furthermore, in the Bounty of the Elements lore bit the Beastclan rebellion guided by Talona is seen by the dragons as unreasonable and wrong even when in canon Beastclans are framed as the innocent party.

The Depths

Scroll of Divorce

In the alpha stage dragons were supposed to be monogamous and could only breed with the dragon they were “paired” with. To break their bond you had to use an item called “Scroll of Divorce” which even featured broken marriage rings in the art.

If I had to guess, this item and the concept as a whole were scrapped because the idea of dragons having “weddings” and needing to divorce before breeding with another dragon felt kind of weird, especially in a game targeted towards teens.

First Festival

The first Holiday festival in Flight rising history was the 2013 Brightshine Jubilee. The items that were available for this festival only are incredibly rare, particularily the Light Sprite which is one of the most valuable items on the site. Apart from that and the fact that the skincent contest only had 6 winners, not much is notable about it.

Offsite drama

Flight Rising has had its fair share of drama both on and off site, but due to the fact that it’s against the site’s rule to discuss user drama on the forums most of the notable drama happened off site (mainly tumblr).

Egg rot

Egg rot was a very early mechanic that was pretty quickly removed from the site. If you forgot to incubate your eggs, they would “rot” and no longer hatch.

It’s the reason why in the nesting grounds the text reads “Eggs healthy” and also the reason why on the stats section of the Account settings it says “Eggs discarded”. The mechanic was removed because it heavily punished casual players and the frequent downtimes of the site meant that even if someone logged in every day they could still have their eggs die.

Also, the images of egg rot look extremely cursed.

Pablo

From what I could gather, Pablo is a dragon which became somewhat popular after user “Desmondtiny” wrote a very long and detailed backstory of them being the Arcanist’s lost boyfriend.

I’m pretty sure it gues deeper than that but I couldn’t find any further information. As usual, if you know something more let me know.

Latest News

On November 12, 2014, a glitch(?) occurred that let anyone post in the Announcements thread. Anything that was posted went directly to the front page, which resulted in quite a bit of chaos.

This was fixed only half an hour later, but the screenshots people have from that time are extremely funny.

Lameforger

On the 2014 Flameforger’s festival announcement Undel accidentally misspelled “Flameforger” as “Lameforger”, which prompted the official account of the Flamecaller to respond aggressively. Lameforger is still jokingly used by users, even after the typo was fixed.

Festival of one (1)

On the first day of the 2014 Greenskeeper Gathering a glitch occurred which switched the site banner for the Starfall celebration banner instead of the Greenskeeper one.

It didn’t end there, in the coliseum Magical shards dropped instead of Bladed Flatleaves, even though skin chests dropped as normal(?).

The weirdest thing about it all was Joxar’s Space inventory, which didn’t display any items at all and had glitched dialogue.

The event was nicknamed by the fanbase “Festival of 1” and even the deity’s official accounts acknowledged the incident.

Vape Juice

As far as I know the original forum thread as been lost, but the vape juice fiasco will always remain cemented in Flight Rising History.

A company called Vape Daugz was making vape juice with Flight Rising dragons plastered on their packaging, completely violating the site’s policy.

The company’s site still exists, and browsing through their products I found that the products that previously had Flight Rising dragons on them still exist, but now feature completely different packaging.

I have no idea whether they changed the packaging spontaneously or staff did something about it.

I think there’s a potentially interesting story buried down there, but we’ll likely never the truth behind the Flight Rising vape juice.

The Abyss

Humans

There’s been some speculation over the years as to whether or not humans are canon in the Flight Rising universe. Some people believe that the “Mages” of the second age in the official lore are actually humans, but we can’t be sure because they are depicted with long robes that cover their whole bodies.

The idea of humans existing in canon has spawned a couple of memes, most infamously Thomas.

Plague healers

Again, I think the wiki explains this one better:

“According to Aequorin, Plague healers are an interesting bunch because rather than administer treatments that counter illness, they use a mixture of magic and contagion that stress the affected dragon further, allowing them to reach a stronger, healed, and resistant state faster than other elements. Plague healers will treat physical injuries with sutures, bandages, and braces, but they won't clean the wounds or apply ointments."

Akitla

As described in the original thread, Akitla was a dragon that user “qunii” saw on the front page, but noticed that she wasn’t accompanied by the username of the person owning them.

After clicking on her, an error page loaded. It was discovered that putting her color combination or ID in the search bar would result in an error page. This was later fixed, and both Akitla and her mate were now displayed as being exalted to the Arcanist. T

here are some theories as to what happened to the Akitla’s user, some think that she belonged to a deleted account, others that it was the result of an incomplete account creation.

As with a lot of things on this iceberg, it will likely remain a mystery forever.

Arcane sprite book

“what is the arcane sprite reading??” is probably one of the oldest still active threads on the forums.

On September 25, 2013 user “Kaadashi” started a joke thread were they wondered what exactly is the arcane sprite reading, and playfully suggested that it could be erotic fanfiction. People went crazy of course, and started to wonder what kind of juicy secrets were hidden within the pages of that book.

I don’t want to say too much because I really don’t want to spoil the experience of reading through this very cursed tread.

Sunshine

Sunshine is one of the most… interesting lairs on the site, and certainly one of the most well-known.

They(?) have a lair (almost) completely full of triple basic sunshine dragons, most of which are Tundras. So far they have collected about 320 triple hundred Sunshine dragons, almost all of which are also named “Sunshine”. They’re not all the same, some of them have apparel, some of them are gened and some have unique art and descriptions.

They’re dedicated and I respect that.

EDIT 28/06: Apparently some people seem to think that the sunshine-dedicated lair is based on a meme concerning the announcement of the color wheel expansion, which became so discussed that the itself site broke. The two things are unrelated however, as the Sunshine lair has been around for much longer.

The announcement of the color wheel expansion was cryptic, with only a few post showing off differently colored coatls and then 3 pages of reserved posts, with no explanation whatsoever.

Simple Farmer

Another very famous thread is the “I am but a simple farmer” thread started by user “someKindOfGenius”. It’s not really about anything specific, it’s just a rather silly thread were people photoshop flight rising dragons onto various crops.

Still, this thread is iconic so I had to include it.

Dragon Deaths

Way back in 2014 former flight rising programmer Thrage revealed on a forum thread that way back before the beta, dragons could actually starve to death if left unfed.

Yep.

Obviously they had to remove this mechanic because it would have been extremely harsh to casual players and make people frustrated with the game.

Zalvador

User “manojalpa” became fairly well-known for the extremely dark lore they(?) had written for their Clan, it was so dark in fact that every single one of their dragon’s bios had to moved to their tumblr where they couldn’t be easily seen by the site’s mainly underage usebase.

Their lore centered around their progen dragon, a tundra named Zalvador, which behaved and had the same powers as a flight rising user: buying dragons off of the action house, having “breeding projects”, exalting dragons, etc.

These things seem pretty normal when done by a player, but when taking them as actual real things that happen in universe… yeah, it was way too morbid for the site.

The Pit

Black linen neck wraps

For some weird reason, the apparel piece “Black linen neck wrap” when put on a male pose Coatl wraps around the dragon’s throat instead of it’s neck. It’s kind of subtle and hard to see, but if you compare it with the female pose the difference is clear. This is probably just an art error, although it’s weird that it hasn’t been fixed yet, since linen wraps are a very old piece of apparel.

Another weird thing about linen wraps in general is that the wing wraps just sort of… go through the membrane? This is not possible. These dragons are in pain.

Icewarden ears

Another very remarkably popular thread is the Icewarden ears thread.

In 2014 user “Llanai” simply makes note of the fact that the Icewarden has teeny tiny ears.

As we have come to expect from these threads, it quickly devolved into nonsense.

Forbidden Snapper lore

Snappers used to have a way different lore section that was changed because it deemed too similar to the lore of another petsite.

This is what the original section read:

"Snapper dragons do not sleep, but exist in a constant state of reverie. They receive and catalogue all experiences and stories told within their dreams. This persistent state of awakened dreaming awards them the longest memory of any dragon species. They are living encyclopedias, and any dragon who is seeking difficult-to-obtain information will have the most luck unearthing it from a Snapper clan - provided they have the patience for it. If you want two dozen quick answers, talk to a spiral. If you want a fully developed answer, camp out around a Snapper. These dreamers move at their own pace, which varies from dragon to dragon. For some, the awakened dream can prove to be more interesting than their surroundings. This leads to a focus upon the dream, and the waking world as filtered background noise. Interacting with these sleepwalkers can be a trying and repetitive task. Other Snappers may be fairly lucid, with a focus upon their surroundings and the constant hum of the dream pushed aside."

Bee movie script

I’ve seen this story around the forums a few times but I’ve never been able to learn the details.

From what I’ve heard someone copy pasted the entire bee movie script into their clan bio in a drop down text format, which completely broke the page for anyone who visited it. This was fixed, apparently, although I have no clue as to who this user is.

EDIT 28/06: Zeus

Zeus is an XXX gold g1 permababy imperial that used to belong to user "happywing".

Their account is now locked because Zeus was created with the use of a duplication glitch on an imperial breed change scroll, which is obviously not allowed (although I've heard some people say that the dragon was hacked in altogether). Before the account was locked, people speculated that Zeus was the most valuable dragon on the site, because an XXX g1 imperial is impossibly rare.

Wegg shaming

On July 2017 user “Dreamnorn” made a thread were they(?) claimed to have a dream where everything was the same except people used the term “wegged” when two dragons would lay only one egg in a nest.

Ex. Aw man! I’ve been wegged again! = Aw man! I bred two dragons and they only had one egg!

The dream ended up being prophetic, as the term catched on and people started to use it unironically.

The practice of “Wegg shaming” I think refers to the trend of people posting pictures of the dragons that “wegged” them in order to “shame” them.

Plague nest skull

The site art of the plague nest features an unique dragon skull that doesn’t match with any currently existing dragon breed or creature: It appears to have two sets of eyes, like a mirror, but also long and curled horns.

It’s probably just for decoration and it likely doesn’t have any significance whatsoever, but personally I believe it would be pretty cool if when they eventually release plague ancient it at least somewhat resembled this skull.

EDIT 28/06: On second thought, the skull doesn’t seem to have two pairs of eyes, It just has the generic shape of a carnivore.

Rock bottom

CAPTAINPLANET

…this is CAPTAINPLANET. Somehow, user “Decres”' managed to overlay a Fae skin on top of a Tundra, creating this horrifyingly fascinating abomination.

I have no idea how she did this, and she seems pretty adamant to tell.

EDIT 28/06: People have pointed out that this skin overlay glitch was actually somewhat common (although I still haven't found another dragon like CAPTAINPLANET). What you had to do was breed change a dragon while attaching a skin to them in another tab.

This glitch has been patched and such thing is no longer possible.

Lair 46264

A cursed lair.

Dreams

I’ve seen a lot of people, both on forums and on Tumblr, sharing dreams they had about Flight Rising.

A lot of people dream of just being on the site, while occasionally weird things happen.

I’ve read of people who dreamed the distribution of a new breed, buying an exclusive item, a new Fiona feat or Swipp trade, or just browsing the forums.

The most common type of Flight rising-associated dream I’ve seen however is being caught multiaccounting and having their account banned.

I’m no psychoanalyst, but I think it’s pretty clear that these nightmares stem from the paranoia of being banned from their beloved petsite instead of showing any actual intention of doing the “crime” in question.

Anyways, I think it’s fascinating how so many people dream about this site, and it reminds me of the dreams people claimed to have about Mario 64 where completely new levels were added or a scary monster appeared.

Dragon Slime

Dragon Slime was an infamous thread which was supposed to be start off point for an ARG.

It was deleted because it was considered too “spammy” and also because ARGs are banned from the forums. The thread has been lost, unfortunately.

EDIT 28/06: Thanks to @randompurple-fr for providing screenshots of the dragon slime tutorial! You can find them here

Cucumber

Cucumber is the only dragon ever to have been exalted with a skin, which is something that should not be possible. This raises some questions as to what exactly did the person that exalted them do to achieve this, but we have no way of knowing who Cucumber belonged to.

EDIT 28/06: Actually, we do know who used to Cucumber belonged to! Its owner was Osiem: an official flight rising artist. I couldn’t find the thread where they(?) acknowledged the glitch though, if someone has it please let me know!

[boytouya]

𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘭𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 𝘖𝘧 𝘈 𝘚𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘦

words:2.3k

WARNING: graphic depictions of violence, blood, angst, open ended/ambiguous ending, descriptions of death.

request: “Can i request sukuna x male reader. Where reader keeps reincarnating with each lifetime for a curse and every time he remembers sukuna, he dies after gaining memories back. You can choose if theres a good ending or angst. Thank you king! I fell in love with him especially after reading that one shot i had to watch jjk and hes hot! Thank you for turning me into a sukuna simp! Much love”

a/n: i went,,,overboard with this request 🗿 BUT IT'S ONE OF MY FAVORITESSIJEHSHE i’m honored to have introduced you to such a foine man

When you were five, only then had you understood the curse deemed ‘Ryoumen Sukuna.’ A rather tall man with two heads, one of which had splattered blood onto your sneakers. You understood the concept of death, of course, but could never truly comprehend the feeling of nothingness after watching your life flash before your eyes until nineteen. But there you stood, clutching the loop of your shorts when you witnessed the murder of your entire village. You didn’t know evil could have a moral compass, but the tall curse seemed to exclude half of the women and children. After the widening of youthful eyes and curdling screams you learned the monster took likings to things too. Women, with shaking forms and broken spirits. He’d stop before them, stare at them with eyes that could- in fact- kill, if they truly wanted to. But then he stopped in front of you.

“Close your eyes, Brat.” Death's hands were just as large as your family painted them out to be, if not larger. Calloused and riddled with blood as they are placed over your ears. You do as he- it says, squeezing your eyes shut and enclosing your eyes behind the meat of your palms just to be extra careful. You can see stars behind your eyelids, just as you can feel the sickening twang of death lingering in the air. You were aware it would happen at some point, Death would find its place for you over and over and over again, you’d been told since the day you were born.

There’s another sound, only muted under large palms. You don’t need your sense of sight or hearing to know what it was, the warm chunks splattering onto your skin was enough. Immediately, you flinched. When you opened your eyes, there were piercing eyes staring straight into your own. It looked so human, but something was off. Uncanny, as if it took years to manipulate its flesh and bone to emulate humans to a T. But there was nothing human behind those eyes, instead a void of nothingness. Death itself. If Death could express interest, you’d have thought that was the expression it was imitating. It offers a hand, one of four. Larger than your face, with sharp claws that could almost be described as talons. Darkened by dirt and remains of your loved ones, if it truly wanted to kill you, it could. It could tear you limb from limb with the wave of a finger. And it knew that.

So you took the hand, and he became your second home.

When you were ten, you learned about the red string of fate. It could never be broken, and those connected by it would always reunite, no matter the circumstances. You often had nightmares, those of which filled with blurred faces and sharp pain that reached you in your lucid state. Dreams of talons, piercing eyes, and double headed monsters. You dreamt under the stars, tasted metal on your tongue, and choked on smoke that wasn’t actually there. You dreamt of facial markings, details that you couldn’t exactly place, a name that you couldn’t quite remember. It left your tongue feeling thick in your mouth, racked tremors through your body, and caused premature dark circles to accumulate under your eyes.

When you were nineteen, you experienced your last breath. The air was stolen from your lungs, crushed under years of heartbreak and terror, and snatched from you in the dead of night. Your eyes glazed over, and nothingness overtook you. It left you for someone else to find, cold and lifeless. A void, similar to the eyes you had finally placed. But that didn’t matter much then, you had already drifted away from your body.

And that was that.

Thus, the cycle repeated. Under different names, different ages, different genders. There was always something gnawing away at your conscience, you felt as though you were forgetting something. But when you finally remembered, it was too late. And there was nothing you could do about it.

It was almost like deja vu, stepping outside your home to find blood splattered on the concrete floor. It made your blood run cold, sent a tremor through your body and made you feel like you were five again. Small and defenseless. You take it as your best interest to go back inside before you pass out, but the second you whip your body around you meet something- someone?- large and sturdy.

“Sukuna.” That was it, the sour taste at the tip of your tongue, the lingering sensation at the back of your brain. Him. He didn’t look the same, no, much smaller with tufts of pink hair. There’s something behind his eyes this time, something almost irrevocably human. For some reason that’s much scarier than what you remember. What you think you remember. He’s much more human, but the way he looks at you is everything but humane. He looks frustrated, angry at something, as if he’ll implode any second and go on a rampage. Dread bubbles up in your stomach, nearly erupting through your mouth as bile. It felt as though something should be happening, like something usually happened when the itch went away. He chuckles, low in his throat as he cranes his neck to put his face uncomfortably close to your own. His hands, still large, find their way to your wrist, gripping your right hand uncomfortably tight. For a moment, you consider how long a trip to the hospital would be if he shattered the bone beneath his fingers. But instead there’s a jolt of electricity that would’ve had you yanking your hand back if he weren’t holding it.

“What? You look different.” He all but purrs, inspecting your palm with long nails. Not long enough to be talons, but longer than those of a claw. It was true, you did look different. He wondered if you spent your lifetimes looking exactly the same. That couldn’t have been possible, he would’ve found you much easier, then. Still quite boyish, as if the body you were in didn’t originally belong to you. Clearly grown out of cargo shorts and polos, much taller than you were before. There was no way he could have forgotten you, the way you jumped when the remains of your loved one splattered across your legs. The way you stared back at him with a look of acceptance, the way you grabbed his hand and allowed him to lead you out of the village. It explained the body memories perfectly, the feeling of large palms on your head and remnants of a brain splattering onto your knees.

“Last time I saw you,” He let’s go of your wrist with a bored expression, then replaces its spot with the top of your head. He shoves you down, and you make an effort to ignore the crack your knees make when they smack against the concrete. Then, he crouches down to stare you directly in the eye, just like he had the first time you met. His eyes were no longer dark, instead a deep shade of red that caught light from the moon. They reminded you of vials of blood. “You were this tall. Much cuter in this century.”

“And you were bigger.” Sukuna laughs as if hearing that was the funniest thing in the world. He leans his weight into you and uses you as a support beam, laughing until his ribs burn and beg for a break. But how could he laugh at a time like this? He didn’t think it was weird? He’s existed for centuries, murdered for millennias and only now has he seen you. That wasn’t how it worked, when you died, you died. But Sukuna was a walking oxymoron to that statement. When he died, if he died, he would return. He’d return through you, the last fragments of his soul would stay bound to yours until the end of time. Perhaps that’s how he knew, how he remembered. Perhaps that’s why he still took the time to find you, even after countless years of failure. It was peculiar, but not as much as being bound to Death himself. It was a sick game of turning the phrase ‘Til’ death do you part,’ because in your case it was literal.

“You’re still a brat.” His voice is closest to something fond, as if he’s reminiscing sweet memories. It was much different on your account, and part of you wondered if Sukuna understood that. He makes no effort to help you up (he explains that you’re “a big boy now”) as he invites himself into your apartment. Nothing special, he doesn’t care much for family photos or if you have them, but the stacks of letters and books on your table peak his interest. He tears apart envelopes as if he owns them, reads through the contents and discards them to the floor if he deems them useless. The way he sits nearly breaks your chair, and, honestly, you weren’t sure what to do with yourself.

So you sit beside him.

“You were so scared,” He says, almost as if he were bragging. But he was known to be arrogant and cocky, that was just his nature. He didn’t truly mean it like that, in fact, he looked quite reverent after letting the thought drift into the air. It was kind of funny, such a powerful thing fawning over past memories. But that wasn���t how this should go, you had your memory back, so why hasn’t anything happened? “When you grabbed my hand you stopped shaking.”

“...”

“It’s a shame I couldn’t keep you long,” He visibly frowns, the skin around his lips worry, but you can't tell if it’s genuine or not. He looks at you with something knowing the second the thought enters your head. “I looked for you, at first. You died young, for a human.”

Ninteen. ‘I should have been there,” he wants to add.

“Why aren’t I dying now?” You interrupt and let the panic sink in, the thought of impending doom sits on your shoulders because, really, it could happen at any moment. But this time, you don’t want it to. You remember accepting death when it came to your door at the young age of five, nineteen, countless times over and over. You had only ever gotten this far, you weren’t ready yet. You couldn’t start over, not now. “Sukuna?”

The question sours his mood in the blink of an eye, and instead of looking through your things, he raises himself from his seat to rest his palms on the table. It seemed he had a thing for staring down at people, making them cower under his stone cold gaze. You note the way his jaw clenches. You open your mouth to speak again, but he seems to have other plans. He squeezes your cheeks, making your lips purse together under the pressure of his large fingers. The movement feels familiar, like he’s done it before. The five years you spent with him were still a bit of a blur, but you remembered holding his hand quite often. He’d tell you to close your eyes if there was something he didn’t want you to see, he’d ruffle your hair a bit too hard, let you sleep on his back if he was out in the town. But that was all you remembered. He remembered it all.

“Respect your elders,” He lets go and sits back down as if he hadn’t just thrown a tantrum over you interrupting him. Sukuna was centuries old, but even then, he’d exhibit immature behavior sometimes. Living for so long had to get boring (and lonely) at some point, perhaps that was why he looked for you. He did consider you something close to family, after all. In truth, there were some lifetimes where you met. Some when you were friends, something more than that, and something inseparable. And that’s why you hadn’t died yet, you didn’t remember it all. “It’s rude to interrupt someone when they’re talking.”

“You’re much more handsome in this life.” His smile is much more intimidating than sweet, the sinister curl to his lips would only ever be associated with bloodshed in your eyes. But it was much more than that. Nights of sleeping together, days of laughter and flirtatious comments, soft moments that only you had seen. And it was bittersweet, because he knew the second he’d jog your memory you’d be gone. It wasn’t just a curse for you, but for him. Maybe it was his punishment for hurting so many people, dragging an innocent soul down with him and hanging them by the red string of fate. The comment makes your skin prickle with heat. Sukuna was quite the charmer when he wanted to be, easily picking at your weak spots with whatever you wanted to hear. But the comment was much more for the sake of his own, instead of yours.

Sukuna stands, hot on his heels as he holds out his hand one last time. If something were to happen to you tonight he’d make the most out of it, just as he did countless times over and over. So many years of starting over, getting to know you in various different bodies, realizing that being trapped away was the only way you’d get to live a full life, it was always on his mind. You were always on his mind.

So you take his hand. And for the millionth time, he’d become your second home.

taglist:

@ryoukuna @indigowren21 @cannedfoodisbestfood @junkwhoore @kissesdenji @sanderssidesangsttrash @i-d0g @kaito-asmr @jream-23 @princejasno @mel-bigia04 @mhasimp666 @onehellofasimp @corporeal-terrestrial @angelaturservice @shadows-of-nightmares @rinkindaugly

[nataliedanovelist]

GF - Timestuck AU: The Power of Mabel ch.1

While fighting over a time machine so one twin can win a pig or the other can win the heart of a girl, Mabel is left stranded in a snowy forest with no time machine and no brother. Oops.

ch.2

Beautiful artwork was created by @starstruck-loner​! THANK YOU SO MUCH SWEETIE I LOVE IT!!!

~~~~~~~~~~

Snow freckled the chilly January day lightly, like powdered sugar over a freshly baked pastry, sticking to each layer effortlessly and creating a blanket that completely covered the woods and the cabin nested between the trees. The atmosphere was still and stiff, like frozen icicles that were not going to start dripping any time soon. The air was bitter and unwelcoming, which was probably why no living thing was outside today. Today was the perfect day to burrow and sleep and keep warm with your own body heat.

A crack through space-time cut through the air. The crushing of tiny ice particles followed as two twelve-year-olds ran, one chasing the other, as the time-tape was heating up and buzzing. “This thing is getting hotter! Hot! Hot, hot, hot!” Mabel attempted to save her palms from burns by bouncing the tiny machine between her hands.

“What are you doing?!” Dipper demanded as Mabel bounced the tape-measure too hard and her twin reached a hand to catch it. He managed to catch it perfectly, like an athlete catching a baseball, and then was gone in a flash of baby-blue lightning.

Mabel’s eyes widened in sheer panic and she held her arms as a gust of wind blew and nearly froze her to her core. It felt like her skin was being pricked by mean sewing needles. She looked around wildly for her brother, for him to come back to this time and place immediately, because surely he would use the time machine to come back, but seconds ticked by and she was still alone.

Puffs of smoke decorated the wintry scene as she held her shivering body and looked at the shack. It wasn’t as colorful and welcoming and loud as the shack Mabel remembered, but she made herself consider that it was because there was no big sign or tourist-y things, and it was winter. Then a light turned on, the hall if Mabel remembered her summer home correctly, and the door opened.

The hope that Mabel had in her chest of seeing her great-uncle was gone, and replaced with fear and confusion. This man looked very much like Stan, though much younger, quite chubby and youthful, wearing a black t-shirt and blue plaid pajama-pants. He had the same face as a young-Stan, but with a more pink than orange nose, a cleft chin, fluffier hair that reminded Mabel of her’s when it was short, and different glasses. 

Mabel didn’t know what to do or how to react or how to feel. People change a lot when they age, sure, but this much? It was possible this person wasn’t Stan, but who else would look so similar to him and live in this house? Maybe this is the guy who lived here before Stan, and they just happen to look very similar. This is Gravity Falls, and though she and Dipper were still new to the town, it was a weird place where something like this could happen.

It also came to Mabel how odd the situation was for the man: a little girl was standing in a sweater and skirt outside his house in the winter. Would he try to send her home? She had no home to go to. She didn’t know what year this was, but if it was a time Stan didn’t live here, it must have been way before she was born, maybe even before her parents met. She was stranded.

But the man looked at her sympathetically and he seemed kind and worried. He grabbed a trenchcoat and called gently, “Hello. Are you okay?”

Mabel bit her lip. His voice was definitely not Grunkle Stan’s. A gust of wind made her shiver and her teeth chatter, and the man stepped into some slippers and walked up to her, draping the trenchcoat over her shoulders. “There there, that’s a very nice sweater, but it doesn’t seem to be keeping you warm, is it?”

“N-No.” Mabel shivered. “I… I used breathable yarn for…” She stopped. She was going to say how she used breathable yarn for the warm California weather, but she decided not to.

“You used?” The man repeated, rubbing her shoulders to try to make the trenchcoat work faster. “You made this?”

Mabel saw his excited grin and she smiled nervously. “Y-Yeah. I knit sweaters.”

The man bent his knees in front of her and studied her sweater. She held out an arm so he could see and his brown eyes sparkled. “That’s very impressive! I love sweaters!”

Mabel gasped happily. “C-C-Can I m-make you one?!”

The man looked taken back, but chuckled and stood. “Of course, but first let’s get you warm. How does hot chocolate sound?”

“Y-Yes, p-p-please.” Mabel shivered, and allowed the man to walk her into the house.

It was scaringly like the Mystery Shack, but so much was different. It was the same layout, the same house, but there was so much that was different. A coat rack stood by the door, holding a white lab coat with black rubber gloves in the pocket, some safety goggles like the ones in Mabel’s science classes, and Stan’s fez. Mabel stared at it. Well, okay it probably wasn’t Stan’s fez, but it was a maroon fez with a golden fish and a black tassle. 

There was a wood-burning stove alive in the living room, with a small box full of wood by it and a tiny stool. Instead of Grunkle Stan’s armchair, there was a red-velvet couch, a large writing desk, and the room was decorated with books, desks, papers, and jars and experiments. It was all strange, but warm and cozy with the fire going.

Mabel smiled as the man pulled out the tiny stool and gestured for her to sit by the stove. She obeyed and the coat was removed from her shoulders, but quickly replaced with a dark-green blanket.

“There, do you mind warming up here while I make your hot chocolate?” He asked, draping his trenchcoat over his arm.

Mabel shook her head and held her cold hands in front of the stove. “Thank you.”

The man smiled. “You’re welcome.” And he turned and left for where Mabel knew the kitchen was.

Sitting alone and feeling better as her body was getting warm, Mabel thought it all over. This man was clearly not her Grunkle Stan, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t nice or couldn’t help her. Any minute Dipper was going to come back for her, but until then she had to stay where she was. That’s what grown-ups told her to do if she was ever lost. Stay where you are until you’re found.

By the time Mabel was very comfortable, the man returned with two mugs of steaming hot chocolate with extra marshmallows, and handed one to the girl. “Here you are, my dear.”

“Thank you, sir.” Mabel sipped and hummed in delight as the man sat on the floor next to her.

“You’re very welcome.” He sipped his drink and added, “Now then, I have to ask, what were you doing out there? Did you get lost?”

Mabel’s face dropped and she nodded. “Uh, huh.”

“Hm, very well. That can easily happen when playing on a snow day.” The man said with a smile. “Why don’t I call our parents and we can arrange to have you back home safe?”

Mabel swallowed nervously. She bit her lip, looking down at her mug. She didn’t know what to say to that.

The man looked at her and noticed how scared she was. “Is something wrong?”

Mabel looked up at him, was met with a kind face, and whimpered, “I can’t call them.”

The man smiled sympathetically. “I’m sure you won’t get into too much trouble. Maybe a little, but it’s for the best to call them so we can get you home soon.”

Mabel shook her head and squeezed her stinging eyes shut. “They’re… not around.”

The man’s face dropped as Mabel scrubbed at her eyes. “Oh. I’m so sorry.”

Mabel only replied with a sniff and she sipped her hot chocolate.

“Is there someone I can call for you?” The man asked. “I’m sure there’s someone out there worried about you.”

Mabel bit her lip. “M-My brother… He’s still out there…”

“Is he lost, too?”

Mabel shrugged.

“Well,” The man held his cleft chin in thought. “I’m sure he’s out there looking for you. Perhaps then you should wait here until he comes here, and then we can send you to your guardian.”

“It’s just us.” Mabel muttered. “Just us.”

The man smiled. Mabel hoped he believed her brother was much older than her, or at least old enough to take care of her. That way she wasn’t really lying, just letting this man believe what he wanted to believe. Nothing wrong with that. “Okay. Still, you may stay here until he finds you.”

Mabel sniffed and wiped her nose with her sweater sleeve. “Thank you, sir.”

“Please, call me Ford.” He said and held out a hand to her.

Mabel smiled and shook his hand. “I’m Mabel.”

“Mabel, huh? That’s a beautiful name.”

“Thanks.” She looked down at their hands and her eyes widened. One, two, three, four, five, s-...

Ford pulled his hand free, his cheeks reddening as he sipped his hot chocolate, but Mabel was grinning at him happily and she gasped with joy, “You have six fingers?!”

Ford blinked at her, reminding Mabel of a startled owl, and he cleared his throat. “Um, y-yes. It’s a birth defect.”

“Nuh, huh! It’s cool! Can I see, please?” Mabel sat her mug on the floor by her feet.

The researcher didn’t like people staring at his hands, but this young girl wanted to look, it appears, in admiration, so Ford hesitantly gave her his hands and she held them lovingly, her eyes sparkling like stars.

“Wow! That’s neat! No wonder your hand shake was so friendly! It’s a whole finger friendlier than normal!” Mabel was then reminded that Dipper’s journal had a six-fingered hand on it.

The girl’s eyes widened as she wondered if she was meeting Dipper’s idol. It was possible. The journal Dipper had dated it in the 80s, and Dipper said that the author mysteriously disappeared. As exciting as it was to meet the Author of the Journals, all it did was put Mabel more at ease. If anyone can help her, he can.

Ford laughed and gave her hands a soft squeeze. “I like you! You’re weird.”

Mabel grinned, distracted from her thoughts and grateful for it. “I like you, too, Ford!”