#wrote this between orders so hopefully its not too cringe

[fashionredalert]

Wrote something short and sweet for @hibiscusseaart between orders during my shift at work!

They have an amazing time travel AU that I'm so blessed that they found me worthy enough to tell me about!

You should all check them out and show them some love!

I won't spoil their plans, but the setting for this blurb is that they're between the ages 13 and 11.

“Hey.”

Madara looks up from behind his wet and sodden bangs, blinking river water from his eyes.

Tobirama stands on the river back, the water lapping at his bare feet. Should he take two more steps, the water would be up to his ankles.

“What is it?” Madara asks warily.

He watches Hashirama's younger brother grimace for a split second, chewing on his lip, as though he were trying to decide on what to say.

It's in that very moment Madara becomes hyper aware of what he looks like. Up to his waist in the river, completely soaked with mud caked in his hair.

It's enough to make Madara flush.

“I don't have all day you know.” Madara snips, “I need to catch that bastard of a brother of yours, he's gonna pay for dumping me into this river.”

“It's your fault for falling for his prank.” Tobirama says with a raised eyebrow.

“A mistake I won't be making again!” Madara yells, waving a fist in the air.

Tobirama simply huffs before glancing around, as though searching for his brother.

“He'd be long gone by now. If you're good maybe I'll show you one of his hiding places.”

Shocked, Madara blinks at him dumbly.

“You- you'd do that?”

Tobirama shrugs, “he ate the last of my favorite dango. You need to get out of that river though, you'll never catch anija from there.”

Madara quickly scrambles to wade through the water, absolutely drenched and caked in mud.

“How do I know you're not on his side?” Madara squints at Tobirama.

He watches as Tobirama lightly kicks a srtay rock into the river.

“You don't. All I can say is that you want revenge as do I, plus…”

Madara's eyes catch the way the sun reflects off Tobirama’s face, casting it into an almost ethereal glow as Tobirama’s lips turn up at the corners in a low smile.

“I thought you looked really cool today.” Tobirama says.

Madara's heart skips a beat and he remains frozen, eyes wide open in shock as a flush makes its way onto his face.

Tobirama spins on his heel and he begins to walk away, not even bothering to see if Madara would follow.

Love drunk and stupid, Madara stumbles after him.

[id-rather-be-an-outsider]

Take Your Time

Bertholdt Hoover x nb!reader

word count: 2360

summary: the warriors are in uni together. reader gets the news their older sister’s cancer is back, bertie boi tries to be a grounding presence for them. did I say it’s a modern/college au? it’s a modern/college au. fluff, angst???

a/n: yessirrr it’s another fic I wrote to cope w not having a good support system irl, we love moving away from toxic home environments :))) also there will be a part 2 to this for a happy ending. if there are any pronoun inconsistencies LET ME KNOW!!! I would like to fix that, reader uses they/them uwu

tw: cancer mention, pre-mourning, poverty??? if that’s triggering for u

masterlist

Professor Erwin begins taking attendance, and I can’t help but feel like something is off. Missing. Annie nudges me and whispers, “Have you seen y/n?” I shake my head, no.

Reiner mentions, “Last I saw them, they got a phone call and looked like they’d seen a ghost when they answered it.”

Annie’s face drops. “It might’ve been something about their sister.”

“Something?” Reiner asks. “Or cancer again?”

Annie quickly elbows him in the gut. “Don’t talk about it like that. You know what they told us last time.”

His tone shifts. “O-Oh. Right.”

I rise from my seat. “I’m gonna go check on them. Can I copy notes later? I’ll be back soon, hopefully.” Annie and Reiner nod, content to take studious notes. I know I’ll owe them favors.

As soon as I’m out the door, I run all the way to y/n’s dorm. It’s across campus, and I have all my stuff with me, so five minutes later I’m sweating and out of breath as I reach their dorm. I can already hear their sobs. My heart drops.

I knock on their door as lightly as I can, cringing at the thought of interrupting them during such a private moment.

“I’ll be right there!” I hear them call as they weakly try to quiet themself down. As they open the door, they stare at their feet and say, “Hey Hange, sorry I’m being so loud, I know that’s-“ A gasp strangles its way out of their throat midsentence- “Probably why you’re knocking, I just got some bad news, but I’ll try to tone it down a couple notches.”

I’m not quite sure how to respond to their apology, so I stand there awkwardly until they look up at me. Their eyes have never looked so dark, and I’ve never seen their face look so sorrowful in the entire time I’ve known them. They stand there for a moment in realization, then launch into me with a hug that knocks me back a step and start sobbing again.

I return their embrace, and walk them backwards into the dorm they share with Annie, closing it behind us. They start to sink to their knees, but I pull them up. “Stay with me, y/n.” I guide them to the couch and they slump, beside themself, only held up by my arms around them. I push their hair back behind their ears, unable to say anything as their cries echo through the room, splotches of salty tears staining my pant legs and shirt. Their crying cuts off, turning into a coughing fit for a minute.

“It’s back.” They finally whisper, voice hoarse, neck muscles straining. “And it’s in her heart. We-“ They let out another breathy sob. “We can’t afford to buy her a heart. Even if we sold all of our things, it wouldn’t add up to a heart.” Their crying starts again, and another one of their gasps breaks off into a cough. Suddenly, their cough stops, and they cover their face, hopping up and running to the bathroom. I follow them, and watch with gritted teeth as they lose their entire breakfast in the toilet. They keep crying, using toilet paper to wipe the puke from their mouth, blowing their nose with another strip. I see blood and puke on the second strip and almost hurl myself, but I steel myself and keep it together. Coming undone right now will only make it worse.

“Y-you got vomit in your hair. Let me help.” I offer my hand and pull y/n up to their feet, flushing the toilet for them and maneuvering them around to the bathtub. They kneel, and I turn on the faucet, instructing them to tip their head over. I run the warm water over their head with a cup sitting on the side of the bathtub and pretend not to hear their whimpers. They either don’t realize the roaring water in their ears isn’t actually drowning them out, or they don’t care. Perhaps both.

Once the mess is gone, I turn the water off and grab a nearby towel, helping them wrap their hair in it. They sit on the bathtub edge, looking absolutely miserable and empty of all happiness, so I head to their bedroom and rummage through their drawers until I find the softest pair of pajamas they own and a pair of plush fuzzy socks. I bring them back to them, and they shut the door to change.

In the meantime, I text Annie to tell the profs I’m gonna be absent today, and y/n will likely be absent the entire week due to a family emergency, I order their favorite pizza, and find their favorite movie on Disney+. I peel back the covers of their bed and change into my own pajamas (they’re nice enough to let everybody in the group keep a pair in the extra dresser drawer in the event of an unexpected sleepover) and head back to the bathroom, tapping lightly.

Y/n opens the door, fully changed, so I help them remove the towel and comb through their hair as gently as I can, not wanting to yank on their scalp. I try to apply their serums and creams like I remember, but they step in after I almost do the wrong order. I just grab the towel and their dirty clothes and toss them in the hamper.

A knock at the door tells me the pizza’s here, so while they handle their curly mane, I find their favorite plates and serve us up slices. Chicken-bacon-spinach alfredo, just how they like it.

When they finally exit the bathroom, they eye the smaller serving almost like it’s poison, and whisper in a tone barely audible: “I don’t think I can eat right now.”

“That’s okay. I’ll come grab it if you get hungry later.” I say, sticking their plate in the microwave and putting the box in the oven to lock in their heat. I lead them into the bedroom and plop down on the bed, inviting them to sit between my legs. When they’re settled in, I pull the covers up and grab their stuffed animals for them when they can’t reach them.

The movie starts and eventually I find myself holding y/n and their head tucked into my chest. If I’m being honest, I’ve watched this movie with them a million times, so I don’t need to see it to know what’s going on. Good thing, too, because I can’t keep my eyes off their face even though it pains me to look at them. How can someone so beautiful know so much pain?

And their sister. They have two. I’ve seen them before, in pictures. Even when they’re mad at them, the way they talk about them, you can just tell how much y/n loves them. They’ve always been protective over them both, especially so their younger sister, but since their older sister’s first run-in with cancer, y/n almost talked about her like she was fragile, to be handled with care.

I can’t imagine what their sister’s feeling right now. Anguish, for sure. I’m sure losing your own life is worse than mourning. At least when you’re the one alive, you can remember them.

“Thank you,” Y/n says, voice barely above a murmur, “For helping me. I... I think I’m going to need a lot of help to get through this.”

I say, “It’s no problem, really. That’s what friends are for. I’m here for you, and so is everyone else.”

They wince. “Everyone else already knows?”

I shrug. “Well, maybe not everyone. But me, Annie and Reiner connected the dots when you didn’t show up to class.” They nod in understanding. “I don’t think they’ll tell anyone, though. Not unless you want them to.”

They suggest, “I think I should be the one to break the news. I’m probably gonna take time to visit, spend as much time with her as possible.”

I rub their back supportively. “We can visit you while you’re away. Or, if you’d rather, we can wait here for you to come back. When you’re ready, of course.”

“One of the two.” They murmur. They look up at me, eyes glassy. “I’m really glad you’re here, Bertholdt. You’ll never know how much it means to me.” We share a look, communicating what words don’t want to, and suddenly I feel myself leaning in, and I see their eyes fluttering closed, I feel their breath lightly fanning my face, then my lips as I get closer, until-

“Y/n!” Annie’s voice rings out as the front door all but slams open. We both sigh quietly, scooting away from each other. “Y/n, I’m so sorry, I came as fast as I could after class got out, where are you?” She pushes the bedroom door open, dropping her bag, then looks over and sees us, but not the tender moment we nearly shared. She runs over, sinking to her knees and pulling y/n into her signature crusher hug. “Y/n, I love you so much, you have to know that, and I’m here for you. Roommate or not, I’m here for you. You’re my best friend, don’t forget that.”

Y/n quickly finds themself and returns the hug with only half as much power, weakly saying, “Thanks, Annie. I love you too. Today’s been... tough.”

“It’ll be tough for awhile. The important thing right now is figuring out what you need and doing that.” Annie reassured them. “Also, if you’re worried that Reiner’s going to barge in here and say something stupid-but-well-intentioned, he’s not.” She pauses, looking y/n in the eye. “He’s waiting outside to do that.”

A knowing smile passes between them, and y/n actually huffs, the happiest noise they’ve made all day.

“Well.” Y/n says, “I can’t keep him waiting out there forever, now can I?” And pushes themself up off the bed. I follow, hoping against hope Reiner manages not to say anything insensitive. When they pull the door open, lo and behold, Reiner is indeed waiting outside awkwardly. He dips his head in greeting to me and pulls y/n into the gentlest hug I’ve ever seen him give.

“I’m so sorry, y/n. I don’t know what else to say to make you feel better, but I’m here if you need me.” He says, and his eyes reflect the sincerity of his tone.

Y/n sniffs again. “That’s all you need to say.”

Annie interrupts, “I hate to be a downer, but there’s a pizza box in the oven and me and y/n had a movie night planned. Unless you’re not up for it anymore?” She turns her gaze to y/n questioningly.

“No, yea, a plan is a plan. I could never skip our movie nights!” They respond, cracking another small smile.

Annie returns the smile, then fixes Reiner and I with her signature cool stare. “Get out. Roommate night is commencing.”

Reiner mutters, “Don’t have to tell me twice.” And slips out the door, while I linger. Annie looks at me and arches her brow.

“I’d like to get a word or two in with y/n.” I input. She sighs, walking into the bedroom to afford us some privacy. She does mother y/n a lot, I think.

Y/n looks up at me expectantly. I start, “Y/n, I- I want to- I really like you. But I don’t want to push you into anything you’re not ready for.”

They nod, frowning a bit. “I figured you’d say that. But you’re right. Realistically, it just doesn’t make sense for us to jump into anything when I’m probably about to leave. But?” They perk up again, hope in their eyes.

“Eventually, yes,” I say, nerves making my stomach flutter a bit. “I’ll be waiting for you. But I only want to explore that when it’s the right time. I want you to *take* your time.”

They grab my hand. “And I will. I will take my time. Just- don’t forget about me.”

I laugh, the smile impossible to wipe from my face. “I can’t ever forget about you when you’re always on my mind.”

“You guys disgust me!” Annie calls from the other room. “Hurry up! The movie’s starting!”

Y/n laughs. “You better go, you know how serious Annie is about our movie nights.”

I give their hand a squeeze and say, “Try to have fun, okay? And eat some of that pizza. It was expensive, as far as pizza goes. Don’t neglect yourself.”

They walk me to the door as they say, “I’ll try. Don’t let Reiner get into any trouble. I’m pretty sure Annie’s not the only one eavesdropping on us right now.”

Annie calls again, “It’s impossible to not hear you guys! Learn to whisper!”

“You’re no fun!” I retort, a bit louder for Annie. “And I shall do. When can I see you again?” I ask y/n.

They smile. “Whenever you want. I’m gonna need the company now, anyway. Goodbye, Bertholdt.”

“Goodbye, y/n.” The door clicks into place after they shut it behind me. I’m feeling such a mix of emotions right now. Longing? Sadness? Sympathy? Happiness? It’s all so jumbled up. There could’ve been much better timing for me to admit that. Much better timing for everything, though I suppose just because there’s a better time for something doesn’t mean it won’t happen when it wants to.

There’s a slight bounce to my step as I meet Reiner who’s already halfway down the hall after he got all his juicy details. I’m not sure where everything is going to go from here, but I know my next step is going to be taking life as it comes, and doing what I can to be supportive of y/n. I smile to myself, ignoring Reiner rolling his eyes and saying something about me being lovestruck. As terrible as today’s news was, it wasn’t all bad. At least the person I’ve crushed on forever feels the same way. The hope I feel in my heart sparks something in me.

“Reiner... we have to help them.” I say, determination running through my veins.

“How?” He asks.

“We have to help them get their sister a heart.”

[roseofithaca]

First Strike

One last mini-fic before it’s back to work for me. Inspired by something @cecret-with-c said months ago about if Chris revealing himself had been more intense. It’s been a while since I wrote some whump as well.

What if Chris had done more than punch Eleanor in the face? (Sort of a sequel to Let Me In).

Once again, Michael is grateful that he was given a human suit with such long legs to help him sprint in such far strides. He’s had to do more running than he ever expected to do in the past couple of years and the only time he was ever ‘caught’ was when he willingly gave himself up, not that he counts that time as a loss.

He races across the town, ignoring the heads of the Janet babies who turn in his direction out of vague, programmed curiosity, making his way towards the most dull-looking beige bungalow on the corner. It’s the house of the grandmother no kid ever wanted to visit because all she did was sit in her armchair and forbid laughter while she ranted about the noisy ‘illegals’ living next door.

The door is closed. From the outside, there’s no obvious sign of distress. 

And of course, every resident’s home is made to be sound-proof in the interest of privacy (a feature Tahani pushed on when Janet revealed the ‘surveillance’ feature of Michael’s previous experiment. They weren’t happy about that). It explains why the others are all going about town as normal despite being close enough to hear any sort of ruckus.

He braces himself before rushing forward, finding the door unlocked as he turns the handle.

“Eleanor?” He calls, immediately. 

What awaits him inside is as bad as he predicted, furniture turned aside, a few smashed vases and torn, hideous flowery wallpaper. But at least nothing is on fire. Michael feels that’s always a plus to be counted in most situations.

He stumbles in, almost tripping over the leg of an upturned side-table. 

“Shirt...Eleanor?!” Michael tries again, looking down the hall, the house seeming like a small bull just charged through the place.

“I’m here.”

He follows the dejected voice to the living room, finding her sat on the one half that remains of broken sofa. The tiny bit of relief he feels at first to see her in once piece shatters when she raises her head up from her hands.

An uneven pattern of swollen bruises decorate her face, tearful eyes shining between the puffy lids, blood still dripping from a cut on her lip and to the side of her left eyebrow. There’s marks on her throat, her hands and where her jacket has been torn on her arm as well.

One would think Michael had seen enough beaten up humans in his existence for it to no longer affect him, but the sight of Eleanor in this state cuts deep.

“Shirt...”

She braves the smallest smile; “You should see the other guy.” She then winces, possibly regretting speaking.

“Linda?!” He still can’t believe it. It doesn’t make sense!

He’d been leaving his office to head over to Tahani’s when he’d bumped into a furious Janet, frog-marching a pissed off looking Linda in her grip. Before Michael could ask what the fork she was doing, Janet simply ordered him to get over to Linda’s house, for no other reason than ‘Eleanor is there’. He didn’t need more than that.

It was only after he’d left he smelled the blood on Linda’s hands. Eleanor’s blood. The same that is sprinkled around the room in its destruction and still leaking from her fresh wounds.

“Turns out Linda’s not as boring as we thought.” Eleanor scoffs, raising one of her blackened hands and cringing in further pain; “Fork...”

He puts aside the issue of Linda for a moment as he goes to kneel in front of her.

“Here...” He gently takes her wrists, cradling what looks to be an almost crushed set of fingers, delicately; “It’s okay...”

He snaps his fingers.

Eleanor hisses again, in discomfort more than pain this time, as the bones reset and fuse, her cuts seal up and the bruising settles down, hopefully taking the pain away with it. She lets out a deep sigh, now simply looking pained with exhaustion. 

“Thanks, bud...” 

He stays kneeling before her, eyes full of concern.

“What happened?” He asks, carefully; “Why didn’t Janet do that?”

Eleanor shakes her head, “Y’know what? It’s crazy. I don’t even remember...I just came here, wanting to try again with Linda, see if I could have a talk and understand her...For a few minutes she was just quiet, sitting and sucking on her mints while I did all the talking...And then out of nowhere...she got up and...”

She clenches her fingers on her lap, clenching her jaw to the point Michael hears her teeth grind.

“Take your time.” He tells her; “What did she do?”

“Not she...He.” Eleanor smirks again, annoyed; “Suddenly Linda was speaking in a guy’s voice...Calling me an annoying little bench, raging at me about how he got so sick of having to ‘play nice’ around me, and put up with me, when all he wanted to do whenever I opened my mouth was...Well. You saw for yourself.”

Michael takes a breath. He saw the result. He dreads to imagine what actions the clearly-not-human took to leave Eleanor looking like that.

“I just kinda blacked out, I guess. At first it was almost funny...this little old woman picking her chair up and throwing it at the radio, that was kinda neat. Then he started throwing things at me and I wasn’t ready to get out the way. And then, when I tried to call for Janet...his hands were on me and...” 

It might be more terrifying than the scene he walked in on, to see Eleanor Shellstrop this shaken and struggling to form a sentence. 

He flips the coffee table back upright and slides it close so he can sit and take Eleanor’s healed hands in his. He cages them safely in his own, rubbing them warm.

She laughs again, tears spilling; “Fork, Michael....I dunno what’s wrong with me!”

“You just took ten rounds from a demon, no one is going to judge you for not being yourself.” At least, that’s what he’s assuming. If Linda isn’t a human then angel is also very improbable, which leaves one last option. 

“I’ve dealt with ashholes on Earth trying to cup a feel when I wasn’t interested and I had no trouble handling myself or knowing how to get help. But this...” She trembles in his grip; “I was so....frozen. Like I couldn’t do anything! It was only when I thought he was gonna throw me through the window, I managed to call for Janet. She did offer to fix...” Eleanor gestures to her face; “But I just told her to get that motherforker out and somewhere secure...And I asked for you.”

She...wanted him? That causes a selfish little ball of light to glow inside of him, that he was the first one she wanted, out of the others. 

Then he reminds himself that he’s the only one out of them with magic to heal.

“You said this guy talked about having to put up with you before?”

She nods; “Yeah, I can’t remember if he was in those memories I saw...He might have been at that bar in Canada, I don’t remember. Might be the concussion.”

“Ah...I think I know who Linda might be underneath. I...put you with a lot of demons who posed as your fake soul mate and...one of them kept coming to me with a lot of complaints by the end because he was sick of it. It was only because he had the most handsome skin suit out of them all, he claimed I was being objectifying.” Michael waves off that bit; “His name was Chris.”

If he was working for Shawn to infiltrate them, posing as one of the humans, did he agree to it purely for the chance to finally get to physically hurt Eleanor like he always begged Michael permission for? He feels sick at the idea that he contributed to this in a way. 

“Well I’m glad Chrissy got it out of his system, now I know how guys really feel after having to put up with me.” Eleanor lightly jokes.

“No guy who’s been close to you would ever dream of hurting you like this.” He says that, earnestly.

Even before he changed sides, no matter how crazy Eleanor drove him, no matter how often she foiled his designs, he never wished physical hurt on her. Just to make her miserable by pranks and mind games. Nothing like this.

This was the last thing he ever wanted.

“I’m so sorry, Eleanor.” He brings one of her hands to his lips, “This is my fault.”

“No it’s not, dude.” She says, tired; “I should’ve waited for you to be done at Tahani’s before we checked on Linda...We agreed to do these things together...”

Damn, will he and Janet have to chaperone all the humans now until this is over, in case something else threatens them?

“I’m just pissed that we didn’t see through Linda’s whole boring schtick. Tahani even said something was up with her but I ignored it.” She groans and rubs her head.

“Does it still hurt?” Michael frowns. It shouldn’t do, if he did it right.

Eleanor shakes her head; “No...Not from the fight, just...all of this. I was so sure I could handle it but this...I wasn’t ready for...”

“Blame me. You wouldn’t be in this position if I hadn’t had that break down at the start.” Michael tells her, feeling twisted with guilt.

“You didn’t make me choose to take this on, Michael. Stop it. None of this is on you...I’m just glad you’re here now.”

“Of course.” He gets to his feet and offers her his hand; “C’mon. I think we better call Shawn and tell him we’ve got something of his. And the Judge too while we’re at it.”

Eleanor looks up at him and gives a smile, then a nod, before taking his hand and standing up.

They’re half-way to the door when there’s a sudden tug on his hand.

Michael turns, frowning, seeing Eleanor standing motionless behind him. Her fingers are gripping his with such ferocity, his fingers would probably crunch if he was human, while her shoulders tremble, the smallest wince of panic on her face.

“What is it?” 

Her bottom lip wobbles, her eyes on the ajar pink door; “I...I dunno, I just...I d-don’t wanna go there yet.”

“Eleanor, he’s restrained. Janet’s way stronger than any demon, remember? And I wouldn’t let him touch you agai-.”

“I know that, dude, all right?!” She raises her volume, frustrated; “I don’t need your forking rational argument - I know that he’s all chained up and I’m safe and, whatever, because I’m a sexy badash who doesn’t get scared of anything so, fork you, this isn’t because I’m scared because I’m not! I’m fine! You’re the one who’s scared, I’m just protecting you, got it?! So lay the fork-.”

Once Michael has pulled her into his arms, she shuts up. It’s hard for her to keep babbling once her face is smothered into his chest. He waits for the resistance, to be shoved back, but nothing comes. Instead she stills, before her knees buckle, and her arms slip around his middle to cling to him. He places one hand on her neck and the other on the top of her head, stroking gently.

He just holds her tight for a moment, closing his eyes to stop his senses from seeing all the clear signs in the mess around them of what that deckhead did to her. How there’s a dent on the wall from where she was clearly thrown, or how that particular drop of blood stained on the carpet must have come from a blow to her mouth.

“Michael...Bit too tight, bud, you just fixed these ribs...” Eleanor sniffs against him.

“Sorry, sorry.” He loosens a little, still keeping her close, for as long as she clings to him. He pulls back after another minute to touch her face, searching for those green-blue eyes; “Listen. I know you, remember? No one’s aware of what a badash bench you are more than me, okay? But I also know you’re still human...And humans break, that’s what you guys do, it’s what makes you so amazing. That you can be so spunky even when you’re so stupidly fragile.”

And the more vulnerable they are, such as the small woman in his arms, the more courage they seem to hold to compensate. 

“I know how often you’ve wanted to break down when things got tough but you always had to put up a front to save face. You don’t have to do that with me, remember?” He whispers, softly, his thumb brushing a tear from her face; “You were there for me when I collapsed like a Tahani being told she has to fly economy. You trust me to be still be there for you if you do the same right?”

She sniffs again, nodding.

“It’s not just you, bud. God can’t be seen weeping, can she?” She japes.

With a wave of his hand, the blinds close and the door shuts.

“God can have some privacy. You’ve earned it.” Michael smiles at her and brings her back in again, letting her curl into him, one of her hands grabbing at his jacket; “Take as long as you need. I’m sure Janet can have fun with Chris while he waits for us. Make him sweat. We’ll go when you’re ready.”

Perhaps he’ll ask Janet to have some ‘time alone’ in a quiet room with Chris, even after they’ve called Shawn and the Judge. He might not be Chris’ boss anymore but he still feels the need to offer some ‘managerial feedback’. Which is a euphemism, by the way, he plans on eviscerating the forknut.

He hears the smallest hum.

“Thanks, bud. I dunno what I’d do without you.” Eleanor whispers, still shaky, clinging onto him; “We should’ve known they’d be too dumb to use something like a Michael-suit and instead they pull a stunt like this that gives them away. Forking idiots.”

He chuckles with her, resting his cheek on her head as he keeps her close.

“They’re no match for us. Say it with me...We’ve got this.”

“That’s my line.”

“Our line.” He jostles her a little, delighted by the sound of her laughter, more so when she smiles up at him, that fire slowly starting to ignite in her eyes again. 

Michael moves a strand of her hair away before planting a kiss on her forehead. Only fair, as she kissed his cheek last time, and it had felt...oddly pleasant. 

She sighs, “Fine. We’ve got this.”

He looks down at her, feeling ready to burst with admiration. There she is. Eleanor Shellstrop. Holding it together after taking a pummelling from an immortal being. 

Unstoppable, as always. 

Better luck next time, Shawn, old pal. But try to lay a finger his humans again and there will be Here to pay.

[sultrysirens]

Story Time

Out of nowhere I decided to share a bit of my story as a fanfiction writer, starting with my original introduction into the profession. It’s going to be a long one, but hopefully, and inspiring one. Skip if you’re not interested.

NOTE: This includes spoilers for certain anime and fandoms. If you don’t know Dragonball Z or Inuyasha, specifically, you’ll be quite lost.

The Beginning

How everything started was just through surfing the net. Back then my interest was Dragonball Z. I was 14. I had only had the internet for a few months, so everything about it was new. This was 20 years ago, now, back in 2000. I used Yahoo! for all my searches. Google had not yet been born. Fanfiction.net was the main hub where all these amazing stories were birthed, and yet at this point I had not yet found it.

What I found, first, was a fanfiction writer who had a website. Geocities, I believe. I can’t recall how I found it, exactly, except that I had only just learned about Bulma and Vegeta getting together and thought they were an amazing couple. I looked up art, and it led me to this site. I can’t recall the site’s name anymore, but I remember the tagline for it was something like, “Bulma and Vegeta’s Cove.”

One thing I can distinctly recall is a small gif in one corner of the main page, displaying a chibi Vegeta with a microphone in one hand, going between 2 or 3 singing poses. It was cute.

This site was coded in such a way that it linked directly to fanfiction.net, displaying the owner’s many, many, many fanfictions in an embedded window. The stories were largely explicit, included sex and, in a few stories, rape, all of them AUs from all the rest. But each had a singular goal: Bulma and Vegeta’s romance, how they ended up getting together.

Some of the stories I remember very clearly. Others have faded. Some were modern AUs, one included dimension-hopping via a magical device Bulma created and recharged every 24 hours (sound familiar, anyone?), and some were painfully OOC but in very sweet ways.

I devoured these stories. There must have been two dozen, with most of them multi-chapter works. And, eventually, I started to notice the format with these stories, how it seemed to be a miniature explorer window within the website. Eventually, I clicked on the mini website and was given a full introduction to fanfiction.net and its massive breadth.

Back in those days, fanfiction.net (or FF.net, as it was usually called) allowed explicit content. And this I looked for very directly. I enjoyed the “lemons” more than anything, easily reading the most ridiculous stories just for the porn therein.

Eventually, I figured it out. I understood fanfiction and what it meant. And though I’d only been using a computer for a few months, I started writing.

It was a painful process at first. Think back to your first months with a keyboard and how difficult it was to get used to the format, how to move your fingers. I had to stare directly at the keyboard to write anything and it was a pain, a slow-going endeavor of passion.

My first fanfictions were Dragonball Z, unsurprisingly. I made a few silly ones, a few serious ones, a few sexual ones. At 14, with no grasp of the anatomy of sex, I was writing porn, using the porn I’d already read as resources. I didn’t know what a clitoris was, but I knew ladies apparently went nuts when men tongued them, so that’s what I wrote.

Eventually I got my first hit: Temptation. It was a Bulma/Vegeta story. I don’t remember it very clearly, and this is probably for the best. The plot, as I recall, was Bulma getting sick and Vegeta having to be her nurse for a time. Eventually she got worse and worse, until she recognized why she was sick: she’d cut herself one night with a device that’d had a compound on it. I can’t recall what the compound was designed to do, but the short version is it made you feel weaker and sicker until you increased your physical activity to burn it out.

This led to wild sex. Like, very wild sex. For hours. My lack of experience evidently was not a consideration; I was given compliments by the dozens. I’d done good.

And now I was addicted.

The Second Hit

I was 16 now. We’d be moving out of my childhood home soon, but I didn’t know this yet. I’d been spending a lot of time with my sister, who was 26, and soaking up Adult Swim shows on her cable. Inuyasha was my new obsession, as well as a liberal amount of Trigun. I lived, slept, ate, and breathed these shows. My head was constantly alight with ideas, concepts, and desires. I wrote near-constantly.

Through this, I managed my second big hit: Transformations.

It’s been a long time, now, and I can’t recall the beginning as much as the ending. I think perhaps I called it something else at the start.

The premise was simple: Kagome, the main character, suddenly transforms into a half-demon, a hanyou, after a demon bites her in battle. I remember that initially I was just writing bullshit; I had no filter and didn’t edit or delete anything. What I wrote got posted verbatim. And, at first, it was cringe-worthy.

I can distinctly recall two things: first, Sesshomaru -- Inuyasha’s full-demon elder brother -- caught Kagome’s scent and investigated and had difficulty resisting her. She was a half-wolf demon, and he was attracted to that. Earlier she and Inuyasha were together in a cave, and her transformation had given her a tail -- which she didn’t like. She chased it, trying to catch it and rip it off.

That’s when the accusations started coming in.

Out of nowhere, and totally unexpectedly, I was getting a slew of comments accusing me of copying another popular fanfiction. I’d legitimately never heard of it, and I had to search it out. I remember reading the first chapter or two and feeling surprised; they were very similar, to the point where I couldn’t blame anyone for thinking I’d copied it.

This was a case of great minds thinking alike, or so I said at the time. I was amused more than anything, but it was clear the accusations weren’t going to stop. Eventually I deleted the story and started over. I’d learned a bit in those few chapters I’d posted and decided that I didn’t really want the events to unfold the way they had, so starting over sounded like a great idea.

And it was.

Now came Transformations as it remains today. The beginning is the same -- Kagome is bitten by a demon and transforms into a half-wolf demon -- but the events following take a different turn from the original.

It was a monster of a hit. I got multiple comments and reviews on every chapter, and I can remember doing this thing for a long time in which I threaten the readers at the end of each chapter with various weapons, only to have the weapon backfire somehow and hurt and/or kill me. The readers seemed to enjoy it, and soon they were suggesting new weapons for me to use.

I loved it.

Eventually the story ended at 64 chapter, but back then my chapters weren’t nearly as long as I write them now, and the final chapter was just a family tree of sorts leading the characters from Feudal Japan to modern day. It was a great, beautiful monster and I had drawn dozens of pictures to go along with it.

It was actually through this that I decided I needed a better place to post my art and thus discovered DeviantART.com. That’s been my main art gallery ever since, around 16 years now (I believe I created it in 2004, a year after I started the fic). If you go there and head all the way back to the first images I posted, you’ll find all of that art remaining even today.

It’s...pretty bad. X’D

But the story doesn’t end there. I wanted my fic to have a greater reach, so I started looking for more websites. I found MediaMiner.org, which was appealing because it hosted both written works and art. And once Transformation was finished, the story concluded, I found I couldn’t quite let it go.

So I did something I’ve not done since: I created an alternate ending.

Titled Changing Lives, this story picked up after chapter 28 of Transformations and went a different way. It treated the story of Transformations as just that: a story, written by Kagome, which Inuyasha read while she was gone one day. He was thunderstruck by it, given it so clearly screamed “I love you” and was full of romance -- and sex.

This led to them getting together, but soon thereafter, tragedy struck.

Kagome was kidnapped on her way home from school. By the time Inuyasha found her, she’d been gang-raped and discarded.

The story very deeply included time travel and revenge aspects from that point on, and I can also recall giving the character Miroku a reincarnation as a detective. He was put on the case, and with Inuyasha’s help, had all the men arrested -- there were seven of them.

Then they started dying.

Inuyasha wasn’t doing this, but he was happy to allow it to happen. The detective did his job per the law, trying to keep the criminals safe as they started dropping like flies. The killer left notes written on the cell walls in the criminal’s own blood, though I can’t quite recall the sequence anymore.

What I do remember is this: the first one read, “He touched her first.” The rest followed that sequence, killing the men in order -- second, third, fourth, etc. I remember one said “hurt her”, one said “made her cry”, and so on.

Eventually, the truth was discovered: Inuyasha was killing them, but not “young” Inuyasha. “Old” Inuyasha. The one who’d lived through the centuries. And his story was the most tragic of all.

In his time, Kagome had been raped and her rapists arrested, as normal. Then, years later, they were freed, having served their time, and immediately they tried to track her down. She was pregnant at the time with Inuyasha’s child. When she saw she was being chased, she jumped down the well back to his time, and the men followed her.

They traveled through time with her but had no idea. They killed her there, then climbed out, and Inuyasha arrived too late to help. But the men were there, confused and lost, and the blood of his wife and child were on them. He slaughtered them all.

But now the well had ceased functioning. He couldn’t return to her time. And, at first, he was just...sad. He mourned. Then, with time, he began to plan. For five centuries, he planned.

His plan was to keep Kagome from ever getting raped. Alas, he failed in this, so instead he decided to get pre-revenge and kill the men while they were imprisoned. He succeeded, but along the way grew...exhausted. By the time he murdered the last man, he had little will left to do so.

But he finished it. For her.

Then he showed himself to Kagome and Inuyasha, explaining what had happened. And he wished them well.

Changing Lives was significantly shorter than its predecessor, only 35 chapters, but I felt it was the better story, overall. I never made art for it, I don’t think, but it was more emotional.

To Present Day

I kept writing, on and off, ever since. Any time I got sufficiently involved in a story, my mind immediately began making my own stories for it. Movies, shows, video games; nothing remained untouched by my mind. I made stories for Labyrinth, Dragon Age, Trigun, Spyro, Jak & Daxter, Naruto...the list went on. I started posted on a third site, adultfanfiction.net (comprised specifically of explicit stories), and I started existing solely on my stories and the feedback I received from them.

I got better. And better. And better. I started looking back on my first stories, my first “hits”, and cringed at the horrendous grammar and articulation of my youth. But it was nostalgic as well, bringing back fond memories of writing on my home computer before we had internet and then rushing to my sister’s with a 3.5″ disc to post them via her internet.

I had a friend around this time, named Leila (Lee-lah), and drew and wrote together. We came up with original stories and though we never really posted them, we had so much fun it didn’t matter. Mostly we talked and drew together, and while I considered myself the better artist, I considered her far better at clothes designs.

Then...a dry spell. I went into college at age 20 and there I met my husband, Eric. He was 17 at the time. And he introduced me to so many more worlds than I’d known before, including the aforementioned Jak & Daxter series and the Sims 2.

Years passed. I still wrote from time to time, but it wasn’t such an obsession as it’d been before. If I had a good enough idea, I’d write it, but I tried to keep my things to oneshots. I posted many such stories on adultfanfiction.net, and I generally got positive reviews and ratings. In the meantime we were more addicted to World of Warcraft, us two and a few friends, and we played that often.

Eventually I slowed down. Time blurred together. I had a lot of good stories, but no major hits. Then came Megamind, and with it, an interesting idea that a lot of people took a liking to: Megamind as the indirect hero, and Metro Man as an abusive spouse of Roxanne. I titled it Bad to be Good, and it was an incredible story.

I started counting words with this one, only posting chapters when they reached around 6,000 words.

The story was a very serious one. It struck cords with a lot of readers, one in particular saying it helped her through some similar times with her abusive husband. We eventually became friends and remain to this day. (She since divorced him, so don’t worry about her. ♥)

Ultimately I never truly completed that story. I remember getting up to 12 chapters and then having difficulty figuring out how to proceed. I used to open the Word document from time to time, check what I’d written, and try to edit things or continue it, but it never really took. Eventually I abandoned it, but luckily the 12th chapter was a softer ending of sorts, so my readers were satisfied.

Then came the Marvel films and, with it, a resurgence in an activity I’d long since stopped participating: roleplaying.

The Crazy Train

It started simple enough. The Avengers just came out, and I was starting to see Facebook RPs popping up between the characters. Curious, I tried to find the pages in question but couldn’t locate them. I did, however, come to find out that there were dozens of pages dedicated to the main characters, alone, with dozens more popping up by the month.

Eventually I stepped in. I’d grown to love Loki’s character and subsequently found he had a canonical wife, Sigyn, but hadn’t found any pages for her. So I made one. Without checking with the other RPer, I just threw myself into a Loki page and, thankfully, that Loki accepted his “wife’s” presence.

We had fun. And our group steadily grew. A Thor, another Loki, and Odin, a Sleipnir, and a whole slew of original characters joined the ranks. I, too, began adding more pages to my roleplays, starting with Narfi and Vali -- Loki and Sigyn’s twin sons.

At the start, these two shared a page. Then, when it became increasingly obvious that people had their favorite of the two boys, I separated them. Funny enough, Vali started off as the clear favorite (he was flirty AF), but Narfi steadily became more so.

Their relationships grew. They both fell in love. They were both tricked by a succubus, giving each an unwanted child at different intervals. Narfi soon had a family of his own, as his lover had an adopted daughter and he was given a daughter of his own.

We spent years here, six or seven I think, just roleplaying with one another. Our group grew and shrank as people joined our circles or left it. There was drama in and out of the roleplay setting. Friendships were forged and abandoned. At one point a Thor page (titled Fatty Thor) targeted me for my roleplay choices and tried to get his followers to harass me. Eventually he left, deleting his page, and our RPs continued without him, never addressing his disappearance.

Then Ragnarok struck -- but not the film’s Rangarok. No, this was worse. We were impatient to have the event occur, me in large part because the mythology says that Vali slays Narfi during the sequence and I couldn’t wait to put all that pain into writing. But what really kicked this off was a friend’s page getting repeatedly deleted.

Sleipnir.

In this RP setting, Sleipnir was a fully intelligent horse capable of speech and even transforming for short periods of time into a humanoid form. He fell in love with a half-demon woman and they had a son together, a centaur named Grani. And then his page kept vanishing.

Initially, we believed the page was reported because there was a rape sequence between his character and the half-demon, though -- and this is imperative -- the two RPers had discussed this in detail before agreeing to the RP. A great deal of thought went into it before they started the roleplay.

And yet, Sleipnir’s page went down.

The RPer made a new one, and that too, went down a short time later. This was disheartening for her, and though we all did our best to help, even creating the page for her in case it was her account getting it flagged, the pages kept getting deleted. The only cause we could work out was that Microsoft just came out with a Sleipnir program of some form and were removing all other pages with that name regardless of content.

So we kicked off Ragnarok and wrecked our Facebook RP world, killing off some of the characters and leaving others behind. We moved platforms, taking our remaining world to Gaia Online, but it wasn’t to be.

Though the RPs increased in quality while there and we created avatars for each of our characters and it definitely helped the process, we just couldn’t keep it up. We were too disheartened for our friend and how things had ended on Facebook.

Slowly but surely, our RPs died. We tried just once more by moving to a new forum called Valucre, but we couldn’t quite get steam going there, either. Eventually all of the RPs died, most of them without conclusions. In some ways, we mourned the loss.

But our remaining group, a total of four of us, remained friends for a great while longer. Three of us, in particular created this very blog some years later with the purpose of posting all of our NSFW works here.

Art, writing, roleplays, etc; this blog was meant to be a joint page to display all of our wicked wiles.

For several months we didn’t post much. Kyone did the most posting during this time, art for her favorite yaoi couple of the time, both NSFW and SFW, and it was moderately popular. Then came my contribution: The Dancer.

The Resurgence

To this day, I’m not sure what really got me back into TMNT. I know I was tired of RPs but wanted the stories to continue, and thus did I begin writing fanfictions again after years of never touching them -- or, at least, never posting them.

The Bayverse movies kicked this off. I’d always loved TMNT, since I was a kid, but the Bayverse films put them in a new light. They weren’t anthropomorphic turtles under 5′ tall anymore, naked 100% of the time. They were tall, big bois, more humanoid, and more like hybrids. I loved them. I wanted them.

I wanted them to be loved.

At the start, I was under the false belief that they didn’t get much love -- i.e., no romance. I especially believed Raphael didn’t get much affection, being such an angry and brash character. Oh, how wrong I was, lol.

Thus did I start with Raphael.

At the beginning I was inspired by a story written by another page, @teradoration, featuring a merman. I wasn’t too interested in the story, personally, as it’s m|m and I’ve never enjoyed those types of stories, but the inspiration came from the fact that it was a multi-chapter work -- on Tumblr.

So I decided to write some porn.

Initially, the idea was to make a short story, something like 10 chapters. I put thought into it, into the character I wanted to create and introduce, into her appearance and history and passions. I considered Raphael, his personality, and crafted a character designed to intrigue and challenge him. Then I looked at both popular and unique character tropes and the kinds of characters I’d made and turned in another direction.

Thus was Jocelyn born, a half-black, half-Polynesian ballet dancer with blonde hair and freckles. And, at first...it was a dead story. No one saw it. No one liked it. No one took a chance on Jocelyn.

For nearly a year, I wrote chapters to an empty audience. I tried not to let it get me down, but the consensus seemed clear: no one was interested in reading it. Still, I’d started it and come to love the characters very dearly, and so I continued. For my sake, for their sake, I continued.

Then came my first big break: tmnttrashcan. If you’re wondering why I didn’t @ that one, it’s because it’s been deactivated. But this amazing woman found my story, loved it, and began sharing it. And because her blog was one driven by reblogs and gifsets, it was far more popular than this one despite its younger age.

And thus did The Dancer begin drawing attention, fans, and feedback. Thus did I finally feel as if this labor of love was validated, that I wasn’t posting just for me anymore. People were enjoying the story, and in return, I poured more effort and love into it.

This is how I thanked my readers: with better content. More drama, more emotion, more love, more heartache, more sex, more everything.

Even before this happened, however, my head had continued the story far into the future. I made a sequel -- The Dragon -- before I’d even had a concept of The DJ. But in this sequel I’d begun laying the groundwork for something in between the two, and through this I began creating Lisa.

With Lisa, I wanted to create a character that fit more securely with the next turtle on my list: Michelangelo. Rather than opposing the turtle in many ways, as Jocelyn does with Raphael, I wanted Lisa to mesh very easily with him.

The DJ had begun.

For a time, tmnttrashcan’s admin and I were fantastic friends. We talked often, over text and over voice chatting. I told her ideas I had for the future, plans going years down the line both in and out of the story, and even let her read what I’d written of The Dragon thus far. She loved it, every last word, and heaped praise at me.

I loved this woman very deeply. I’d tell her as much from time to time, and she echoed the sentiment.

Then she simply...vanished. She stopped talking to me, stopped responding. Eventually I asked her if we were no longer friends. She never answered.

It was heartbreaking.

Soon thereafter, I was also left behind by Kyone. She unfriended me. And then Tumblr decided to ban all NSFW content, so in order to preserve this blog, I was forced to delete all her NSFW art. And when she went further and removed herself from the blog, I went further too and removed all of her posts. But it wasn’t easy.

It’s been a few years since then and I remain heartbroken. We’d been friends for over a decade. I saw her grow up (we met when she was 16), saw her graduate, saw her go through schooling and jobs and hard times. Between her, myself, and Fluxx, we’d amassed a mountain of great times and greater stories. We’d been a sisterhood in all but blood. We’d even called ourselves such.

To this day there remains a hollow place in me. In short, I’ve been jaded. My whole life, I’d seen this pattern repeated: I make a friend, we become close, then they abandon me, usually within a year or two. But with Fluxx and Kyone, I’d truly believed this pattern had finally been broken. I’d believed I finally had friends for life.

Between the loss of tmnttrashcan and Kyone, however, I learned a hard lesson: not to trust so deeply.

This was repeated twice more before I gave up on sharing. With Blue Blood, twice I made a close friend, got to the point of talking near-constantly and voice chatting. Twice I shared previews of what was to come. Once I even told the entire story, everything, every last detail I have planned to the end of the series. And twice, after hearing so much of the tale, the friend vanished from me. They stopped responding. I was talking to air.

It hurt.

By now you may be wondering why this is included in my fanfiction autobiography. Well, because it spurred me on. If I can’t keep friends for long, then I’ll keep my own company. I won’t let myself down. I decided to focus on my stories, for in this I am always the most important person. I am the one who will never be abandoned. I am the creator, the god, of the worlds I shape for the entertainment of others. Readers may come and go, as much a slave to their interests as I am, but I remain. For those who stay and those who arrive later, I remain.

There is a power in this which cannot be matched, but more so, there’s an enjoyment and responsibility. My stories are unfinished but demand an ending from a slew of followers. And so I keep writing, even though the stories are largely complete in my own mind. I know how they end. I know how they intertwine, how they connect. I know the backstage dancers, how the plot lines link together, where each thread is leading; my readers do not.

And so I continue writing, even as I remain cautious about how much I share.

To The Future

What comes next is largely unknown, even to me. I have many, many, many stories, both in original settings and fandoms. I work on some of them from time to time, in between trying to focus on my bigger hits. Sometimes I just open one and begin reading what I’d already written, refreshing my memory and contemplating where I want the story to go.

I’ve considered other forms of storytelling as well. Otome games have my interest, specifically, because of the nature of them; a single protagonist and multiple love interests with their own unique tales to tell. I love that format and have tried crafting numerous stories for them, but they’ve yet to gain any real ground.

This is partly because it’s a huge undertaking. It’d require more than myself to get them made. I can do art and writing, but I know little to nothing of coding. I’m unsure how I would turn words and images into a novella-type game. Originally I wanted Fluxx and Kyone’s help -- Kyone because I felt her art is better than mine, and Fluxx because she has experience coding. I tried to get them involved. They did not get involved.

As far as otome games are concerned, I am alone.

But this is fine. I am a better writer than anything else -- better than I am an artist, a gamer, or a friend, based on my history. So I’ll continue to write. And if I never truly create an original story, if I never get published, if I never receive royalties for my years of painstaking effort, then so be it.

I made people happy. I made people gush and scream and keyboard-smash. I made people laugh and cry. I made people fall in love with that which I love.

That’s enough.

I’ll see you soon with more updates. My stories are not yet finished.

- Nightshade

[starshinegoblin]

The Lyrics Trapped in My Mind

Writer’s Note: This is my second attempt at writing MingXicheng and I wrote it for #XichenWeek2020, This is a soulmate au where if one gets a song stuck in their head it’s because their soulmate is singing it. ♥

—-

Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes as he set down his brush. The sound of his older brother’s loud annoying flirty voice coming through the closed door of his bedroom to his boyfriend over the phone made him cringe. There was no way he was going to be able to work and listen to that nonsense. He walked across the room to his desk grabbing his airpods connecting them to his cellphone.

As he walked back to his easel he went through his playlists wondering what he wanted to play. It didn’t take him along after he glanced at the painting to give him inspiration. He went to the one song that’d been stuck in his head since Wen Ning had sent him the link to Advance Bravely. The mind plaguing song was Everything Will Say GoodBye by Jason Zhang Jie. He tapped on it and put it on repeat before stuffing the phone in his back pocket. Jiang Cheng felt a renewed sense of inspiration as he started singing the lyrics while he continued to paint. 

“Everything will say goodbye, sometimes calm like the water…” Jiang Cheng sang not caring about being heard, that is until he heard a sharp loud knock on his door. He took one of the pods out, “Yes?”

The door opened to reveal his brother. “So, Lan Zhan, A-Sang and I were wondering if you wanted to join us for dinner and  some drinks?” Wei Wuxian asked, eyes fluttering in a plea for him to say yes . However, Jiang Cheng really wasn’t in the mood to deal with an intoxicated Wei Wuxian or Nie Huaisang (who’s a clinger and a crier at the drop of a hat) in public. Nope, Lan Wangji could deal with that gremlin on his own and though he felt awful for Mo Xuanyu, the man was dating the little beastie, Nie Huaisang.

“Nope.” Jiang Cheng reaffirmed.

“Please? It’s at House Koi. I know you like it there.”

“You’re allowed to go back? I vaguely remember that you got drunk and punched the owner. Who specifically told you that you weren’t welcome on the premises. And that was putting it lightly.”

“It was the one time and I stand by what I did.” Wei Wuxian replied, firmly. The memory of seeing Jin Guangshan leering at his little brother had made his skin crawl. He never told why he’d been banned but didn’t regret it. Jiang Cheng smiled hearing the protectiveness in Wei Wuxian’s tone. “Besides, it’s under the new management of the peacock and Yao-ge.”

“I still say no.” Jiang Cheng replied, turning back to paint. His mind trying to focus on the music still playing in his one ear. 

“Oh come on, didi!” Wei Wuxian begged, leaning against the doorway of Jiang Cheng’s bedroom of their shared apartment. “It will be good for you!”

“What part of no are you not understanding?” Jiang Cheng sighed, serving his older brother a glare that was dull as a baby spoon. Despite his expression the both of them knew that he was right. Jiang Cheng needed to get out and see everyone. It’d been so long since they’d seen him. The whole breakup with Wen Zhuliu had gone to utter shit leaving Jiang Cheng in shambles. But that was nine months ago and while he was making great strides with painting again, going on his morning runs, and picking up Jin Ling from day care for their sister and the peacock, Jiang Cheng mostly stayed in their apartment. 

Wei Wuxian wasn’t going to let him isolate himself anymore. If his little brother was going to be free of that loser then he needed to get out. He didn’t want to truly make him angry because it would ruin his, Lan Wangji’s, and Nie Huaisang’s plan. He schooled his face into his best pout and pleaded again leaning on something that only he knew as his brother. 

“Besides I heard from A- Sang that Xichen-ge and Mingjue-ge will be there too. Xichen-ge got back last night from Tokyo.” Wei Wuxian stated, grinning from ear to ear when Jiang Cheng actually paused mid stroke the paint dripping a bit onto the canvas. Jiang Cheng’s normally pale neck tingeing red. 

Jiang Cheng’s heart started to race at the mention of their names. He had the biggest crush on both of them since he was in high school and that spark of attraction to both of them never faded. Damn his brother for knowing his weak spot and using it was a weapon to manipulate him. 

“Fine.” Jiang Cheng grumbled, even though he was actually starting to feel excited. His mind accepted the idea that it would be nice to get out with the added bonus of seeing Nie Mingjue and Lan Xichen.

“YES!” Wei Wuxian yelped, suddenly across the room,  wrapping him up in a tight hug, “You won’t regret it, didi! ” 

“Hopefully.” Jiang Cheng sighed, as Wei Wuxian bounced towards the door probably to go call his boyfriend and brag about his victory. Jiang Cheng shook his head, putting his pod back in before trying to save his painting. He’d have just enough time to finish and get ready for dinner.

“I knew that we shouldn’t have watched that series.” Nie Mingjue complained as he stepped into the living room of his shared apartment with his boyfriend. The theme song of the show continued  playing in his mind as he spoke. Lan Xichen chuckled from where he sat on the couch relaxing with a cup of fresh tea in his hands. His hair down and wearing his glasses for once. He looked warm and cozy in Nie Mingjue’s forest green henley over his t-shirt and jeans. 

“I’m sorry, I can’t get it out of my head too. Can you imagine listening to Director Wu going on and on with that song on repeat.” Lan Xichen chuckled, as Nie Minjgue lifted his legs up by Lan Xichen’s calves so that he could sit down on the couch with him.

“It’s alright.” Nie Mingjue smiled warmly at his adorable boyfriend and soulmate as he put the man’s feet in his lap. His hands moved to gently massage his feet. 

“Since we agreed to meet A-Sang and the other’s for dinner later. Perhaps it will finally go away.” Lan Xichen laughed, making Nie Mingjue laugh. 

“Or at least distract us for a little bit.” Nie Minjgue replied hoping that it did work. The song was good but he needed a different song to think about when working on his logistics reports. 

“A-Xian said that they would be here in a moment. They just pulled in.” Nie Huaisang informed them, looking up from his phone. A smile on his face as he looked at his older brother and Lan Xichen. Since finding out that Nie Minjgue was his soulmate in high school, Lan Xichen knows that something is up. That type of smile always meant that Nie Huaisang has a plan cooked up. Lan Xichen only hoped that it wasn’t tonight. Nie Mingjue was in a good mood. 

“It’s alright, A-Yao, hasn’t come back yet.” Lan Xichen replied. Meng Yao had left the table to take care of something in the kitchen. That’d been about fifteen minutes ago.

“If he’s any longer Xichen-ge, I’ll go back and save him.” Mo Xuanyu stated as he took a sip of the sparkling pink chardonnay that Meng Yao had brought him. Nie Mingjue gave a nod. Meng Yao had been working tirelessly with his older brother to get the exclusive restaurant back to its former glory. Their careless father had left it bankrupt when he forcibly retired. 

The restaurant is a two story tea house that had been remodeled after years of neglect. The first floor contained the bar, kitchen, restrooms, and a dance floor with a koi pond beneath it. Where they are on the second floor, is where the private booths and rooms are. Tonight they were occupying the second largest room, The Room of Fragrance. Meng Yao and Jin Zixuan had gone with the minimalist but elegant accents to decorate the room. Lan Xichen’s favorite thing about the room is the chandelier hanging above their low table. It’s design being branches from a plum blossom tree dangling down from the ceiling and the blooms giving light to the room. 

“There they are.” Nie Huaisang said happily waving his hand at them like he’s not seen them in years, stirring Lan Xichen’s attention, as the shoji door slid open to reveal: Lan Wangji, Wei Wuxian, Meng Yao, and Jiang Cheng.  He felt Nie Mingjue suddenly reach over resting his hand on his upper thigh, and he knew that he wasn’t the only who’s breath had gotten stuck in their throat. Jiang Cheng looked good no, damn good. 

His black hair that’d been kept short during his previous relationship was now long enough that he was able to braid it off to one side showing off his stunning sapphire eyes and that long neck. As he took off his pea coat, it revealed he’d chosen a black turtleneck with some very well fitted jeans. He looked healthier than he’d been in the past few months that Lan Xichen had seen through Wei Wuxian’s social media accounts and occasionally Wangji’s instagram when Jiang Cheng was with them. 

“We are sooo glad you decided to join us tonight, A-Cheng!” Nie Huaisang declared way too cheerfully, making Jiang Cheng flush as he turned around. Which of course made Lan Xichen’s heart skip a beat and by the squeezing of Nie Mingjue’s hand he knows the other is feeling the same as him. 

“I just bet you are.” Jiang Cheng bites out teasingly as he rounds the table to sit in between Nie Huaisang and Wei Wuxian.

“Oh we are.” Nie Huaisang teases, bumping Jiang Cheng’s shoulder as the latter sits down directly across from Lan Xichen and Nie Mingjue. Which of course makes it click in his mind why Nie Huaisang had been insistent that they sit where they are now earlier when they first arrived. His gaze flickering from Jiang Cheng to see the wide cheshire grin spreading across his boyfriend’s little brother’s face. 

“That little…” Lan Xichen hears Nie Mingjue grumble but fade out as Jiang Cheng gives them both a soft smile making Lan Xichen’s brain check out for a few seconds till Wei Wuxian loudly exclaims that he is starving. Then they are all passing around the tablet to order their food.

They are halfway into their dinner when Nie Huaisang says, “You know what I heard today from one of my patients? I heard that when a song gets stuck in your head. That it is because you can hear your soulmate singing it.” 

“Then didi's soulmate has blessed with him non stop singing Everyday Will Say Goodbye, because he’s been singing it for two weeks now.” Wei Wuxian teased Jiang Cheng, making the latter flush and nudge him sharply with his elbow, not seeing how both Lan Xichen and Nie Mingjue had stilled across from him. 

“Then Lan Wangji has been blessed with your horrible belting of No Feelings.” Jiang Cheng teased back. 

“Hey, Lan Zhan loves my singing.” Wei Wuxian sticks out his lower lip in a pout,  dramatically turning to look at his boyfriend and soulmate with puppy eyes. Lan Wangji’s small smile and soft nod only makes Wei Wuxian preen turning back around with a smirk and sticking his tongue childishly out at his brother.

“Spoiled.” Jiang Cheng says rolling his eyes despite the smile on his own face. He reaches out for his glass when he notices that Nie Mingjue and Lan Xichen are staring at him with a look that makes him still, hand hovering in the air. He blinks looking down at his glass. His cheeks flushing a deeper shade of red that had nothing to do with the wine he was drinking. 

“You’ve been singing Everyday Will Say Goodbye?” Lan Xichen asked, a smile spreading across his face as Jiang Cheng nodded. 

“It’s this opening song to a show that A-Ning sent me.” Jiang Cheng explained.

“Good song.” Nie Mingjue replied, sharing a knowing look with Lan Xichen. It made more sense now. While the two of them love each other deeply. It had always felt like there was a missing piece. Their other half hadn’t been with them but now he’d been found. 

“Yes it is.” Lan Xichen agreed, gaze shifting back to Jiang Cheng. 

----

Refs: 

Idea for prompt from this post by  3rdgymbros

No Feelings by Wang Yibo - https://youtu.be/7dG4yShmxIM

Everyday Will Say Goodbye by Jason Zhang Jie -  https://youtu.be/QI6WHyiFLdc

House Koi is based loosely off the japanese restaurant Gonpachi that was used in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) 

[tessatechaitea]

Cerebus #18 (1980)

This is the kind of cover that probably kept me thinking this book was too adult for me and that I should just stick to Groo and Elfquest.

In Dave's Swords of Cerebus essay, he explains how he didn't know what the fuck he was doing when he was writing this story and I'll tell you a secret: it fucking shows. He explains how he wrote one idea but realized that idea wasn't going to work and then wrote some other ideas but they weren't going anywhere and then he went back to the first idea and wrote a small novella which still wasn't going to work so then he tried some other idea but couldn't really get anywhere and pretty soon his week that he plans for writing was over and he just had to start drawing one of the scenes. So he picked one and strung it out and then he needed a new scene and took the Lord Julius epilogue and stick that on page 5 and 6. By that time, he sort of had a new idea with the help of his brother-in-law and even though that new idea was pretty lame, what more could he do?! He doesn't admit that his new story is lame; I think he thinks he really pulled one out at the last minute. But it's really kind of lame. I get it though! He's written seventeen previous stories (plus some Cerebus stories that appeared in other magazines) and they were all pretty good and working toward building a portrait of Estarcion and Cerebus and some kind of weird aardvark mystery. He was due to slip up some time! I'm just glad he was honest about how the writing part when all wrong and since he couldn't fall behind on the art, he had to just kind of start drawing and hope for the best. I suppose in that regard, the comic wasn't so bad. It told a coherent story that moves Cerebus' plans for the invasion of Palnu ahead and Dave even gets some funny jokes in. But as far as the extended story goes, not much happens? Cerebus and the T'gitans took over Fluroc by murdering everybody in it and then needed more money for troops and they got more money for troops by conning a merchant that came to town. That's it! That's the whole story! Did we need this story? Probably not! But did we really need any Cerebus story so far? Almost certainly not (with the exception of all the stories that showcased new characters!). But what I really liked about this comic book was the Aardvark Comments section! Things are really getting good finally! It's not just a few nerdy nerds nerding it up for Dave Sim.

I mean, it is some nerdy nerds nerding it up nerdily!

The first letter is what I'm assuming was the introductory or cover letter from Marvel's Jim Shooter when he sent out contracts to prospective employees.

Is this the worst thing Jim Shooter ever wrote? Sadly, it is not.

If you're one of those people who like to describe 95% of everything as "cringe," you'll love Dave Sim's response:

Remember, this was 1980 and "written blackface as hyperbolic response" was probably just something taught in creative writing classes.

Casually whistling past the terrible method of his response the way you simply steer the conversation away from racist tirades every time your grandfather speaks up at Thanksgiving dinner, this feels like the first time Sim really calls out the two big publishers and how they conduct business. It'll become a hallmark of Dave Sim in his crusade for independent publishers. And this sarcastic and also racist response (I can only whistle nonchalantly for so long!) isn't his only response in this Aardvark Comments. But as his first response, I'll assume it's the most closest to how he truly feels about Marvel and DC. In 1980, he's already calling them out on their practice of stealing their employees' intellectual properties. Okay, "stealing." The contract is to make the "stealing" legal so they don't wind up in constant lawsuits and can continue to offer the artists whose creations make them scads of money little to no future compensation on their efforts. Dave Sim could think of no other attack on Marvel than to pretend he's a caricature of a slave. I'm not in disagreement with Dave here and, believe me, in 1980, I almost certainly wouldn't have thought the mintrelesque response was anything but a clever way of making his point. Although I was also 9 in 1980 so I probably would have had to ask an adult why the fuck Dave was writing like that. But as I said, there's more! The next letter is a bit of a response to Dave's crusade against the Big Two Corporations. And from his peers!

I guessed I missed the comments in Issue #15. I'd better go back and see what the Pinis were talking about.

Here's what Dave said in Issue #15's "Aardvark Comment": "Maybe Marvel can turn its corporate back on you. As they never grow tired of explaining, fan sales make up a very small fraction of their profits. They don't think much of your taste in comics, artists, writers or anything else." It's a little hard to parse this comment being that I don't know what was happening in comic books in 1980 concerning the fans and Marvel but doesn't this sound a lot like the Comicsgate argument of today? That Marvel doesn't give a shit about what its "real fans" want? Anyway, back to the Pini's letter. The Pinis' letter reads like Elfquest trying to talk Cerebus out of gutting a merchant. I suppose when you point out that artists and writers working for Marvel and DC are idiots for not publishing their work as an independent, I can see how they might get upset with you. I'm sure Richard and Wendy had a number of discussions with Marv Wolfman where Marv would say things like "I'm not dumb! You're dumb!" or "I'm not a piece of property! You are!" or "I'll show you who's a slave to the man! I'll kill Cyborg!" After that, the Pinis were probably all, "You know what? Criticizing work-for-hire in the comic book arts just isn't worth all these Marv Wolfman tantrums. Let's just bite our tongues." After a couple of letters from some nerd groupies in which Dave laments the target audience of comic books, he responds more in length to the . . . well, wait. Let's first look at his response about his core audience!

I'm offended! I always fix it immediately when a headlight goes out.

I mean, after seventeen issues, "Aardvark Comment" is finally getting interesting! Okay, so now to Sim's actual response to Wendy and Richard Pini.

Dave Sim being serious. Probably.

I'd like to point out the end of this letter in which Dave states fairly plainly the main theme of criticism behind Eee! Tess Ate Chai Tea for nearly a decade: "I just don't happen to think that the system in operation now is the best thing for this medium and that it is not the most conducive way to get the best from the creative talents that exist. Quite the opposite, it seems to encourage half-assed efforts in order to guarantee that you are not surrendering your rights to something of value. And how many of us, Steve Gerber included, could know in advance that our ducks were of any value?" This was as true in 1980 as it is now. It's just that in 1980, it was much harder and a lot more work to retain the rights to your creations through self-publishing. So most comic book writers and artists were doing their best work at DC and Marvel. What other reasonable choice was there? Dave and Deni have discussed multiple times across the last dozen and a half issues how hard self-publishing has been for them. Now imagine a company like Image exists or a place like Kickstarter. Creators now know to save their best ideas for places that will give them full control and full potential earnings on their creations. DC and Marvel can't help but be full of writers doing half-assed jobs with their half-assed ideas and saving their truly monumental and mind-blowing work for Image or another, now more easily accessible independent publishing venture. This was in 1980 and Dave Sim was seeing creators screwed out of future royalties on ideas that wound up making fortunes for the parent companies. Some people accept this as business as usual and would be able to garner no sympathy for a creator stiffed out of royalties. But those people are unimaginative, pitiable, and sad. Something being legal has never in the history of everything been a convincing argument that that something is ethical, moral, or just fucking compassionate. Hopefully this "Aardvark Comment" begins to stir some serious discussion with Cerebus readers because I'm eager to read a lot more of Dave's thoughts about comic book publishing and fandom. Eventually there won't be a whole lot of separation between the comic book and the letters page. I mean, when the author inserts himself into the story as both some sort of omniscient being and also another fictionalized author, it gets hard to separate what you believe from the ideas expressed within the story. Cerebus #18 Rating: B-. That rating was for the lackluster story! The "Aardvark Comment" page gets an A! Oh, and I forgot to mention "The Single Page!" Imagine my surprise when I turned the page and saw this:

Tim Kreider in 1989! (Remember, this is from the 1989 Bi-weekly reprints of the 1980 Cerebus #18.)

You can just see Tim's eventual style in these early characters. The main male character is basically a baby-faced version and immature style of his eventual renditions of himself.

This is from Tim Kreider's book of essays and cartoons, We Learn Nothing.

I can't recommend Tim Kreider's essays and cartoons highly enough. Read his books, We Learn Nothing and I Wrote This Book Because I Love You and maybe search the Internet for a cache of his old cartooning website. You probably won't be disappointed. I say probably because I've learned that a lot of people on the Internet aren't exactly like me like I expect you all to be. Idiots.

[killthecount]

A Walk to the Docks

I wrote another fanfic. It’s angsty and it’s about Muriel finding MC while she’s dying. You can read it here or check it on my recently started AO3 page.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/19290895

I’m too tired to proofread it AGAIN, so I hope it’s okay.

He rapped at the door softly, frowning. He did not want to be here. This might have even been the last place he wanted to be, right now. But he knew Asra would be upset with him if he didn’t watch out for her from time to time. He could usually keep an eye on her from afar; mostly spotting her as she scoped out the market or while she was headed to her voluntary work with the doctor. She never saw him, it seemed, and he was perfectly fine with that. In fact, he wished nobody could ever spot him and he could live his life in peace. 

Anyway, Muriel never stuck around long enough to actually watch her for any length of time. What did he care? He just wanted to make sure she seemed well. That was good enough for him. He wasn’t a stalker, after all — just trying to be a good friend. Asra had left angrily, off to who-knows-where, but he knew his friend would still want to know that his love was safe. His love…Muriel didn’t like to dwell on it. Asra had never admitted his love for MC to him, but he had a feeling it was there. Ugh. He didn’t care for most people that Asra hung out with. Why did he want to be with those people at all? Where was this town when they were young and out on the streets? Now Asra wanted to live with the same people who shunned and neglected them, living with them as if everything was normal? Whatever. He knocked again, a little louder this time. Paused. Still no answer. Allowing a loud sigh to escape his lips he began feeling around inside the chest pocket on his cloak. Asra had given him a key to the magic shop ���for emergencies”, whatever that meant. He had never used it, obviously. Why would he come here if there was an emergency? Finding the key, he fumbled with it a bit before sliding it into its respective keyhole and pushing down on the latch of the door handle. Pushing the door open, with a bit of a creak, Muriel peered inside. He had no intentions of stepping inside. “…hello?” he asked. No response. “……is anyone here?” He spoke barely above a mumble; it just wasn’t in his nature. But he was certain someone on the main level would be able to hear him if there was anyone around. He had become very familiar with MC’s routine over the last few weeks and even when she did change it up from time to time, he would usually find her wandering about the town within the next day or so. But, now, the first week of summer was coming to a close and he hadn’t seen her the entire time. Strange? Sure, but he wasn’t too concerned. Maybe the doctor had her working long shifts and staying in his clinic? He couldn’t stop himself from rolling his eyes when thinking about Julian. Muriel lowered his head, carefully, as he stepped inside the magic shop. He hadn’t been inside it before despite Asra’s occasional pleas of, “You should get out more, Muriel! Meet new people. They’re not all as bad as you think,” and, “Come hang out with us at the shop. MC is nice. She likes you!” His eyes darted around the room, adjusting to the mere amount of stuff. Colorful books, cards, herbs, and various knick-knacks of all sorts, in seemingly no particular order, decorated the many shelves around him. He carefully moved further into the shop, pulling his large arms tightly against his body to make sure not to knock into anything. Hunched forward, Muriel checked out the kitchen area before peaking his head past a curtain and into a back room. The room, full of pillows and one low table in the center where readings were done for customers, seemed lifeless. He ducked back out, turning around and shrugged. “Fine. She isn’t home,” he mumbled to himself. “I’ve done the most I can do.” But before he had his chance to move towards the front door, he caught sight of a staircase he had missed upon the first inspection of the shop. He paused and briefly considered leaving anyway, before sighing once more. Shoulders slumped, he moved heavy footsteps towards the stairs and began climbing up the many steps. Once at the top, he noticed he was in a hallway with several rooms leading off of it. He decided on the closest one first but realized, as he reached it, there would be no need to check the others. Peering into the doorway of the bedroom, he noticed it was a much simpler in decoration than the downstairs entryway. Sure, there was still plenty of stuff, but it wasn’t nearly as difficult on his eyes. He focused, first, on a small, cluttered table momentarily. If he had been thinking properly, this should have been the first clue that something was wrong. Curtains pulled back on the window nearby allowed the warm sunshine to almost highlight the bed. He then saw her there. Muriel’s eyes widened, feeling a sudden rush of embarrassment for being inside of her house. She was just sleeping. Sure, it was the late afternoon and the sun was starting to move lower in the sky, but maybe the doctor had her working late hours? Muriel must have just missed her coming home, right? Yes, that was it. It was easily explained and now he needed to go. All of this uncomfortable hassle for Asra. Why wasn’t he the one here right now if he cared so much? What would she think when she saw him there? Would she be freaked out? Think he’s some sort of pervert? His flight senses were kicking into overdrive; his mind racing. He was just about sold on the idea of sneaking out before she woke up and spotted him when…another thought popped up. Was…she breathing? He couldn’t tell from the doorway. She looked…still. “I’m just overreacting,” he thought but made no movements to leave. He stood for a moment, weighing the options in his head before deciding. A lump formed in his throat as he edged deliberately towards the bed, cringing a bit as the wood floor creaked below his weight. He hadn’t completely thrown out the idea that she was still just asleep; the awkwardness of trying to explain his actions was still not a situation he wanted to experience. Just a quick check to make sure she was breathing and then he’d get the hell out of there. Unintentionally holding his breath, Muriel made his way past the round center room table when his eye caught suddenly noticed what he should have noticed sooner — blood. Several cloths, some seemingly damp, were scattered around the table. Many of them seemed to only be dampened with water, but the unmistakable deep crimson color painted several of the others. Not sure what to make of it, he turned back towards the bed. He was within just a couple of feet from her now. After a few agonizingly long moments, he found his courage once more and, allowing himself to breathe again, inched closer towards the body. Meanwhile, his brain worked on catching up to what he had been staring at. Laying straight ahead from him was MC like he had never seen her before; a shell of the person she once was. Bundled tightly in several blankets, she trembled and shivered, contrasted by her hair which was sweaty, some of it sticking messily to her forehead. Her face was pale and flush but she still managed to reflect a bit of her normal beauty.  She was breathing, barely, he realized at this point, but his feet felt frozen in place. Muriel cleared his throat, unsure of what to do next. While he was trying to figure it all out, life intervened for him. His knees felt weak as he watched, seemingly with great struggle, as MC unexpectedly turned her head in his direction. Her eyes just barely parted but revealed, clearly, the crimson sclera that was ubiquitous with everyone who had caught the plague. “…Asra? I hoped you’d come back,” she spoke, barely above a whisper. Her chapped lips formed a slight, smile across her face, as she closed her eyes once again. “I’ve missed you.” Muriel took a half step forward. His mind was racing again, frantic with completely different worries from before. Could he get sick? No, they didn’t know what was causing the plague, but they were pretty sure it wasn’t contagious. She was clearly hallucinating; should he tell her he wasn’t who she thought? What could he do for her? How could he contact Asra? “I wish you didn’t have to see me like this. …and I’m sorry. You were right,” she spoke again, faintly. “I tried not to believe I was sick. I tried to fight it…” her words trailed off. “I shouldn’t be here,” Muriel thought, feeling intense amounts of sadness, empathy, and guilt for hearing her words — words that weren’t meant for his ears. “Hopefully, I helped some people…” she began again, and when she paused, Muriel secretly hoped that maybe she had fallen back asleep, “…I wouldn’t change staying to help those people, Asra. But I’m sorry it came between us.” A large shiver and she was pulling the blankets tighter to her body. Before he knew what he was doing, Muriel moved to her side, placing a large hand on her shoulder. He couldn’t think of anything better to do. The plague had been going on for so long now, almost everyone knew the symptoms. They came on strong and fast and most people, once showing the signs familiar signs of the red eyes, were gone within the week. Frequent fluctuations of the body’s temperature were just another one of the usual symptom. He knew what he needed to do now. Everyone who was sick was required to get on the boat. Of course, they lead you to believe it was an act of sympathy; that once taken to The Lazaret, the deaths of people’s loved ones would be swift and painless. Plus, it kept the bodies from piling up around the city. Muriel wasn’t sure he believed anything “they” had to say but…It didn’t seem right to just leave her here. Closing his eyes, Muriel took a moment to center himself before reacting again. He opened his mouth to say something, but couldn’t manage to figure out anything important enough to say. Instead, he slid his large hand behind the curve of MC’s upper back and sat her up, gradually. Her eyes fluttered lightly, still clutching the blankets and looking barely strong enough to sit up on her own or hold up her own head. “Let me help you…” he finally said, barely above a whisper, his eyes beginning to well up. He wasn’t sure why this was affecting him so much. After all, he had never bothered to get close to MC. Was it because he knew how much she had meant to Asra, despite their argument? No, it was more. Despite not caring much for humanity, Muriel knew that he would have never wished this fate on, well, many people. Just one person came to mind, really. MC nodded, weakly. He had worried about the possibility of having to somehow, gently, break it to her that he was going to be escorting her to the docks. So, an action as simple as a nod, he felt a slight sense of relief that she seemed to know and was, at this point, accepting of her future. Muriel steadied her as she stood. Too tired to remove the dressing gown she wore, she dressed to go out, simply sliding the clothes over what she was already wearing. Patiently, Muriel helped her with that too. He considered how normal her actions seemed. She was just getting dressed…except she wouldn’t be returning here again. Once she had wrapped herself in her warmest cloak, he held onto her once again. It was difficult, in the small shop, but he managed to never let go of her as they exited her bedroom and made their way down the tight stairwell. He worked his damnedest to make sure she didn’t fall, especially when she took a few wobbly steps that put him on high alert. They shuffled slowly through the front room of the magic shop. It was painful, but Muriel knew he would stay by her side for as long as he could. As Muriel opened the door for them, MC paused in the doorway, as if saying goodbye for just a few seconds, before stepping out into the almost darkened streets. They made their way mostly in silence, walking at an almost snail's pace, as far as Muriel was concerned. His large frame didn’t allow him many of the luxuries he would have liked, but his long legs did allow him to move quickly when he wanted to get away. Not that he was in a particular hurry. The boats came and went from the island 24 hours a day. There were always bodies needing to be removed.  But, besides that, he hated his entire role in this play but he certainly wasn’t looking forward to…arriving at their destination. At the docks, he knew he would say goodbye to someone he barely knew, and yet the guilt and sadness was boring a way into his heart. He shook his head, looking down at MC from time to time, frail as an old woman, but still in a young woman’s frame. She was clearly foggy, her eyes barely ever finding the strength to completely open, nor her head ever lifting for any length of time. Plus, several times, despite her feet continuing to shuffle forward, he wasn’t 100% sure if she had dozed off. He just continued to walk with her, holding on to her upper arm, and supporting her weight with his when necessary. The docks were in sight now, just a few minutes way and Muriel’s heart was aching. It was a careless moment from Muriel as, for the first time, he looked up towards the docks with anxiety. Because of this, he hadn’t seen the small rock in front of MC before her foot landed it, causing her ankle to twist. He jumped in alarm, kneeling down before her and thankfully, able to catch her before it was too late. She gripped his black cloak tightly, leaning into his large arms. At that moment, as MC calmed her own nerves, the zombie-like fog around her lifted, albeit briefly, and she lifted her face calmly towards him. “…You’re not Asra…” she whispered, blinking aggressively as if to try to clear her eyes. Muriel didn’t know what to say to that. Frowning and looking ahead so to not have to make eye contact, he simply nodded. He glanced tears in her eyes before she allowed her head to fall back towards the ground, “Thank you for helping me.” “I just really had hoped…he’d come back…” And that was the last thing she said to him.

[mizukixtsukiyomi]

i just saw your response, sorry about that! if i could then still high&low; scenario where kagome saves the leader of one of the gangs (anyone of your choosing) so then the gang tries to convince her to join? please and thank you!

The love High & Low is getting makes me so happy! Keep it coming!

As always, since people are still new to this series or may not know who they are, I will add pictures at the end of who is who so you get an idea on what they look like. There hasn’t been enough Hyuga yet, so I wrote him. Hopefully you like it, hon!

Spitting out the blood collected in his mouth, the back of his hand swiped over his bottom lip. Dark hues landed on the red spots now dying on his skin before a smirk appeared and teased. Looking up to his attacker, the Daruma Ikka leader could only muster a snicker before bringing his body to a sluggish stand.

“The Kuryuu Group never keeps its promises, huh?” His eyes narrowed on male with black hair slicked back wearing a dark maroon tux. The small circular pin on his tux worn with pride to be part of the infamou Kuryuu Group, or more specifically, Iemura Group. “Kaijo, was it?”

“Kirinji, you dimwit!” He growled back. Cracking his knuckles, Kirinji looked around Daruma Ikka’s hideout. He chuckled back as he watched his men kicked the last standing Daruma members down. A warning he loved to use and became useful. “Hyuga-san, I had overheard you were working with Sannoh Rengokai.” He scoffed, as he cracked his last finger. “You? Working with Cobra? Last I heard, S.W.O.R.D had no alliance with each other.”

Hyuga raised a brow once more before his smirk mocked back. “You are believing rumors? And here I thought the Kuryuu Group would be smarter than that-”.

Punching him down once more, Kirinji’s chest heaved as the fury bloated within. Growling under his breath, Kirinji’s eyes narrowed on the black haired male on the floor. “You know better, Hyuga-san; keep your mouth shut or you will be facing death.” He squatted down to his eye level and grabbed a handful of Hyuga’s hair. Pulling his head back, Kirinji gritted his teeth. “Kuryuu ordered you to finish off S.W.O.R.D and you failed. You know what comes next right-?”

Watching one of his men being thrown to his left, both Kirinji and Hyuga watched as one of Kuryuu’s henchmen struggled to get back on his feet.

“W-What…?” Kirinji immediately turned his head over his shoulder. Eyes widened at the sight of their new challenger holding a conbini plastic bag. He was speechless at the fact of the female standing a few feet away from him and glaring him down. “The girl…”.

Hyuga’s lips curved once more at the sight of the girl. A girl he had heard had softened the tides between S.W.O.R.D, or at least, with the other groups. His group was another matter. With his head still locked in Kirinji’s grip, Hyuga sent the girl a wave with two fingers tipping from his head. “Are you here for another debate, woman?”

“It’s Ka-go-me!” Her glare tightened, “I came to have another talk with you, but it looks like Kuryuu got to you first.” She scanned the area. Daruma Ikka was cornered and by the looks of it, Hyuga had decided to betray Kuryuu. So she only needed to cut her talk in half. That could save her a headache.

“You!”

Kagome’s attention landed on Kirinji.

Roughly letting go of Hyuga’s hair, Kirinji straightened up before adjusting the front of his suit. The corner of his lips twitched as he saw no fear trying to make her back down. “You’re the girl that has been meddling with S.W.O.R.D and Kuryuu, right?”

She blinked, observing him as he took one step at a time towards her.

“HUH!?” He shouted. “Don’t make me repeat myself, girl!”

Cringing at his tone, Kagome covered her ear with her free hand. “Excuse me, but is it necessary to be yelling?”

Kirinji stopped in his steps; brow twitched. This girl was mocking him, wasn’t she? He quickened his steps. “What did you say!?”

Eyes locked on his hand extending to grab her by her jacket. Swiftly dodging his hand, Kagome jabbed her elbow over his elbow joint to weaken his arm. Dropping her plastic bag on the floor, Kagome took the one second he was down to push the bottom of her palm up his chin.

Hyuga nodded slowly, admitting to himself the girl had moves to fight. He had always believed her to be a defenseless woman who was a damsel in distress, but she was a damsel who knew how to throw punch or two.

He watched Kirinji fall back on the ground.

And those hits were usually hard.

Kirinji snapped his head up only to see Kagome curling her fingers into her palm. “D-Did you just-!?”

“Yeah, and so what?” She jerked her punch forward in a false punch to intimidate. “You were going to grab me first, weren’t you?”

“Bravo.”

Kagome’s attention was fished forward to see Hyuga now walking towards her. Brows furrowed in return the moment she saw his grin.

“Now I can see why the other S.W.O.R.D members don’t mind you being around.” Hyuga swatted away the dirt from his red leather kimono jacket. “You’re feisty, aren’t you?”

“Do you want a punch, too?” She raised a brow. “I got more to share.” If he was trying to harass her, she wouldn’t hesitate to throw the punch first. It would put her in a lot of trouble with Cobra and the others in Sannoh Rengokai, but she didn’t care if it meant she could feel the satisfaction to punch his smug look away.

Hyuga laughed at her defensiveness. She was definitely bold. Taking a look at Kirinji on the ground, he tilted his head to the side. “How about we deal with this first before we have that talk.”

Kagome lowered her punch. “I’m here with a topic already in mind, Hyuga-san.”

“And I just thought of one, too.” He cracked his neck, “I think it would have the other S.W.O.R.D leaders raging, though.”

She blinked, “h-huh?”

Norihisa Hyuga ^

Kirinji ^

[angeltriestoblog]

I Miss 5 Seconds of Summer???

A few days after 5 Seconds of Summer held their concert in the Philippines last 2016, I wrote a blog post with this exact same title then went on to elaborate that I missed the version of them that I fell in love with. I’ve unarchived it so anyone who bothers to read this has a salient starting point, but be warned: I seriously can’t make it through the entire thing without suffering from a chronic cringe attack—who ever told 16-year-old me that she could write?!

—

I have listened to 5SOS’ entire discography almost exclusively today. But my Spotify followers wouldn’t know. In an expert attempt to evade their judgment, I go on Private Mode so I can cry to their music in peace. I’ve also been watching a couple of their videos too. My favorite is this live performance of Ghost of You where Calum Hood does some immaculate vocal blending at the 1:26 mark. I have my watch history paused though so I don’t get bombarded with more recommendations and end up spiraling further down the hole.

It’s funny how I think that removing every trace of related activity on my corner of the Internet could also erase it from my own memory, render it as a mere figment of my imagination instead of a clear manifestation that I’m starting to like them again. And it might seem even funnier that I am convinced that people care! But then again, I did unstan them pretty publicly a few years back following a misogynistic interview they did for an issue of Rolling Stone, which also featured all four of them almost fully nude on the cover.

To this day, I continue to dissect the piece with one part of me thinking that I might have overreacted, having seen and read it for the first time when I was 14 and much more of a prude, and the other knowing that I did not. In one paragraph, Luke Hemmings admits that during the early years of the band, they took advantage of the amount of female attention they were at the center of. “They were wildest on their early tours, when they’d go to bars to mingle with fans after shows,” it read.

In another, Hood talks quite nonchalantly about his infamous dick pic that made its rounds on the Internet the year before, and how it surprisingly gave the band a lot of publicity. “Now I’m just working on the sex tape,” he jokes. “I’ll call Pamela up, like, ‘Hey, it’s been a while. We really need to hype this band up!’”

Having risen to fame as the opening act of the clean-cut British-Irish group One Direction, 5SOS was immediately touted as a boyband—next in line to 1D’s throne, or competing with them for the crown, depends on which magazine you read. Though this exposure granted them a huge teenage fanbase (myself included), they hated the label that came with it. They constantly asserted that they played their own instruments and wrote their own songs, and behaved in a way that well-curated, expertly marketed groups would not: carefree, loud, playfully and forgivably naughty. No one would believe them though. People would say it’s the curse of being conventionally attractive in the music industry. You were almost always expected to be a popstar, a commodity that catered to the masses. But they tried anyway: maybe a lip ring and a couple of tattoos would do the trick, sprinkle some curse words here and there in interviews, get caught smoking or drinking.

That interview was their final act: their big-time effort to break away and hopefully land a spot amongst the rock bands they looked up to and wanted so desperately to impress. Even if it meant objectifying, mocking, and taking advantage of the girls who propelled them to stardom in the first place. Simply put, that interview was them desperately trying to get rid of fans like me. And so, I obliged.

—

Now that I’ve been staying at home for almost three months straight, I have revisited a lot of old favorites: poorly written fan fiction I used to eat up in my early teenage years, full seasons of Nickelodeon TV shows (only the good ones) downloaded off sketchy places on the Internet, my childhood journals filled with my loopy handwriting and family of stick figures. I know I’m not alone in this pursuit: it seems like we’re all holding on to remnants of our past to remind us that we have experienced better days, and they will surely come again soon.

I felt like it was inevitable I’d return to 5SOS because they had released their fourth full-length album during the first few weeks of the quarantine. Everywhere on social media, I was reminded that one single was out, and then another, and then another and I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to give it a try. After all, I did give Youngblood, their third record, a spin when it first came out as well. I thought their attempts at experimentation bordered on pretentiousness, and figured that if this was the musical direction they wanted to take, I’d surely hate every succeeding record as well.

But the problem was I really liked it. Although it wasn’t a no-skip album, each track was different from the rest, all showing a level of inventiveness and mastery of musical technique not present in previous releases. After playing the entire thing again and again, even the songs I didn’t vibe with at first started to grow on me. Turns out the beauty of Easier and Teeth is in the details: the thrumming bass at the beginning, the unconventional vocal inflections, best appreciated in an enclosed area with the volume on high. My amazement at how their musical style had progressed over the years led to me listening to all of their albums in chronological order, then rewatching some of their funniest interviews which were alarmingly easy to retrieve from memory.

During these times, I’ve wondered why I still remain curious about what they’re doing, why I still give their music a shot when I see it on my Release Radar. They never apologized for the article and I assume that they talk about things of that sort even more now that they’re older.

And I guess the answer is simple. Besides the fact that the music is honest to God amazing, they kind of made me who I am. Having found them during the height of my teen angst phase, I reveled in having idols who were open about rebelling against the system and forging our own paths despite being looked down on by those older than us. It was through them that I was introduced to bands that further diversified my taste in music, that I started experimenting with a more introspective type of writing that led to the style I employ to this day. I made so many good friends because of them, some of which are still in my life today. Looking back, I wouldn’t consider it the best version of myself but she was different. More importantly, she was really happy.

—

I am well-versed in the discourse surrounding problematic faves, and I know that if I ever find myself in such a situation, I have two options: either go down the productive, politically correct road and steer clear from them, or continue to consume their work but with the knowledge that what they did was inexcusable. I teeter between boycotting their music altogether—because even Spotify streams can be translated into revenue and there’s nothing that powers oppressors like financial stability and fame—and choosing to separate the art from the artist so I can appreciate good work without the reputation of its creator clouding my judgment.

I guess at this point, I probably am looking at them with rose-tinted glasses. I heard that some victims of even the most abusive and toxic relationships look back at their time with their former significant others with fondness. Though what I had with Calum, Ashton, Luke, and Michael was nowhere near romantic, and their transgressions far from a personal attack, maybe it applies to my situation too. I look at 5SOS now through the lens of the 14-year-old who embedded watching Keeks into her daily routine, or fell asleep listening to Heartbreak Girl on repeat and rejoiced when it hit 1,000 plays on her iTunes. They are no longer that band, and I am no longer that girl. And while it doesn’t hurt to remember the times when we were those people, I must remind myself that things can never go back to the way they were.

Maybe this doesn’t have to be as dramatic as I’m making it. But that’s the good thing about keeping this blog despite getting published on other corners of the Internet—I can make it as dramatic as I want to be.

[singingwordwright]

Shadowhunters recap - s2ep18 “Awake, Arise, or Be Forever Fallen”

SHADOWHUNTERS Recaps Intro and Masterlist

These recaps may contain spoilers from the books (that may or may not happen in the show.) Proceed at your own risk.

Recap and meta under the cut.

Gotta give it to Max, he’s a little badass. Temper that with a bit of discretion and maybe he’ll actually live to reach adulthood, contrary to all book canon. Like, seriously Max, you couldn’t have gone to find Alec or Izzy once you realized what the hair leading you to Sebastian meant, instead of confronting Sebastian yourself?

Gratifying just how many times Sebastian gets stabbed in this episode. Of course, I’d prefer it if one of them was a mortal wound, but alas…

If Lindsay was lurking in the hall outside Alec’s office, she should have heard Max’s head crack against the desk. A blow hard enough to knock someone out and cause them to bleed from their nose and ears would be LOUD. I’ve literally heard real people hit their heads in ways that do much less damage and it sounded like a melon exploding.

Now that the banter and fun goofing around is back, so is Simon and Maia’s chemistry. I think this is the magic of Simon. I bought the Climon relationship the most when he and Clary were being giggly and having fun together. I found Simon and Maia’s chemistry in s2ep06 to be off the charts, again, when they were bantering and laughing. For some reason, whenever Simon forgets to be that guy whom women can laugh and have fun with, he loses a lot of what makes him click in his various potential pairings.

My frustration hit its peak with the fact that Sebastian was right there in the middle of everything while everyone was all, “Where is Jonathan?” There’s only so many times you can yell “HE’S THERE!!! HE’S RIGHT FUCKING THERE IN FRONT OF YOU!!!” at the TV before you just throw your hands up in the air and say, “You know what? Fuck it. You’re too stupid to live. I hope he guts you all.”

They carried this plotline right up to the brink of me hitting that point.

Current sexuality: Magnus saying, “m’lady.”

“Your crush” Oh, I’ll show you a fucking crush, you pint-sized wretch!

Let’s all take a moment to bow our heads and be grateful the producers are making a young-adult urban fantasy show and not a hospital drama. Because they would be really, really bad at it. Seriously I was cringing.

And what the fuck were the runes flashing on the monitor over Max’s head about? Are they there to remind the infirmary medics “This is how you draw an iratze. This is how you draw Nourishment. This is how…” (I’m not sure what that last one was, but it looked like some Shadowhunter stylized version of the Caduceus or the rod of Asclepius.)

Of all the times for Magnus to refuse to take Alec’s call.

Wow. I’d forgotten what an asshole Season 1 Alec could be. He’s come a long way, considering that in-universe it has literally been six weeks since he and Magnus met (No, seriously, check out my timeline if you doubt me. I did the math so you don’t have to.)

I say “asshole” in the most loving way possible, of course. He had his reasons, but he was indeed an asshole. It just goes to show how unhappy and uncomfortable in his own skin he was, and how much losing that burden of hiding himself away from the world impacted him.

Still, I sort of wanted Magnus to push back a little harder when Alec low-key threatened him. “If you let anyone know…”/“Oh, you’ll do what, Shadowhunter?” Because Magnus could almost certainly kick Alec’s ass with all but one of his little pinky fingers broken.

I’m glad we’re finally getting down to business with the whole Ollie thing. But IIRC it’s against the Accords (or Covenant?) to let mundanes know anything about the Shadow world. Which means Luke could be in trouble if the Clave gets wind of her finding out.

And why is so so eager to know, anyway? Like, why was she all up in his business?

I’m wondering if it doesn’t actually have something to do with Maia, considering the way Ollie zeroed right in on her. Say, Ollie’s a cop, but she also, idk, moonlights helping Sam (who maybe is a private investigator?) by taking on missing person cases at the behest of desperate families. Contrary to book canon, we’ve been given some indication that Maia’s parents may actually care for her, so what if they hired Sam and Ollie to track Maia down, and find out she’s gotten mixed up in what might look to be (on the surface) a weird wolf-worshipping cult?

IDK I’m just spinning bullshit theories.

I like how at SDCC Isaiah said that Luke is grooming Maia to take over the pack someday, and how we actually sort of saw that in action here.

I liked Jace’s distress here, because with the exception of s2ep08 and a pat on the head in the last episode, we haven’t really seen him and Max interact or gotten any impression of how his relationship is with Max. And his distress here feels a lot more…sincere? relatable, maybe?...than his oft-repeated bouts of brooding manpain over his upbringing under Valentine.

And, strangely, his pain feeling more genuine also made Clary’s empathy and support feel more genuine. This moment made me feel more of a connection between them than just about any other moment they’ve had on-screen together.

Funny how when you build a relationship between characters out of moments and situations that are arise organically within the plot—rather than forcing it—it just works better, isn’t it?

I feel like I should say something about Bat, but I just don’t have much of an impression of him or what part he’s going to play within the plot, yet. Kevin Alves seems incredibly sweet and eager to be a part of the show, however, so there’s that?

“Rebooting of the brain.” Really? (The part of me that actually knows something about medicine is rolling its eyes so hard right now. This was badly done. Suspension of disbelief in one area only works if you are meticulously grounded in accurate reality in other areas, and this would have been a good area to do that. Massive head trauma that can’t be magically woo-wooed away.)

I have lots of thoughts on the decision to keep Max alive, most of them not good. I was prepared for the pain of him dying, which would have struck pretty close to home because I have a 10yo son. And as a storyteller, I think it would have gone a long way to establishing the stakes for this story.

Like, Valentine wants to commit genocide, and Sebastian wants to help him. We all get that. And we’re all horrified by it. But genocide is a MASSIVE concept to try to really wrap your head around. The human brain, I think, tends to shield you from really grasping it. It’s just too much.

This is a problem faced often by storytellers who are writing stories in which the fate of the world is at stake. It’s too big. The audience can’t connect with it personally, can’t internalize it. So you take that, and you distill it to make the stakes personal. One death, of a character who is beloved by your protagonists and hopefully by your audience, an innocent with all the potential in the world that will now never manifest, stands in for the thousands or millions who will actually die if the bad guy isn’t stopped. That death becomes a rallying point for your protagonists, and a symbol to your audience of just how evil your bad guy is and how much he needs to be stopped.

In short, Max needed to die. He needed to die as tragically as possible. It would have had a lot more storytelling mileage.

God. This scene was just everything I could have asked for their first time to be. I’m pretty sure I wrote a line in a fanfic once about Magnus telling Alec that one of the rules of his bed was that you had to be able to laugh in it, so the giggling and giddiness was just so perfect. And the fact that Magnus responded “No such thing” when Alec expressed concern that he might be doing something wrong is really something else I could have written myself.

It was tender and sweet and sexy without being objectifying and I loved it.

I will say, though, I’m probably in the minority in that I never wanted or needed to see a scene where Alec was confronted with Magnus’s cat eyes for the first time and explicitly stated his unstinting acceptance of him. I always felt it would be othering to go that route. And I felt like this idea that Magnus, who is so incredibly powerful, would lose control so easily a little absurd. I always liked to imagine that the idea that Alec would find NOT being accepting of Magnus unthinkable, that he would be honestly and sincerely befuddled by the idea that Magnus’s eyes might be a Big Deal. “Yeah, he’s a warlock, he has a warlock mark, I’m not sure why that’s supposed to be something that matters.”

That said, if they were going to go there, then this was the way to do it. The thread that weaves through Magnus and Alec’s story in this episode and ties past to present is the fact that they come from different worlds, and with those different worlds come different obligations and priorities. So in this case, the othering was entirely the point and it played into that theme.

So, if it had to happen, I’m glad it at least happened within this context and wasn’t just schmaltzy.

I really loved Luke being such a badass here but I’m certain allowing Russell to live is a bad idea.

Seriously, though, Russell. Not only is Luke a badass just as a werewolf, but he’s got the martial training of a Shadowhunter. How do you imagine you’re going to win this?

Probably one of the most realistic fight scenes I’ve ever seen in terms of showing just how exhausting fighting becomes in very short order. Too many drag out too long before the combatants start to show fatigue.

I really want to know about the cooks at the Jade Wolf. Are they werewolves themselves? Is that why the kitchen staff never bats an eye at anything, including these people waltzing in and out of the kitchen and storeroom?

The scene with Maia explaining her backstory was extremely well done and Alisha Wainwright is all things wonderful and I love her.

“This is what love got me.” Let’s take a moment to recognize the symmetry of Maia and Simon’s stories though. Becoming a vampire, a Downworlder, is what love got Simon as well.

I can’t say anything about this scene that hasn’t been said before, and better, since they released it as a sneak peek. But it’s so beautiful and my heart hurts.

Magnus’s moment with the Lightwoods all together on one side of the hall and him by himself on the other is incredibly poignant but I can’t find the words to really examine it properly. This is the point at which things just began to hurt too much and my brain stopped being able to cope with it.

I’d really like to know how Jace, who can sense Alec’s happiness over things like having sex with his boyfriend for the first time, couldn’t sense the lack of a spike in grief that would have surely occurred upon Max’s death. Grrr.

The fight sequence with Sebastian taking out all the guards was amazing and Will Tudor is brilliant. Did he really use a sword that was still stuck through someone’s body to parry a blow?

What the hell was with him just using his hand to open the crypt, though? No rune or anything. Can Sebastian somehow channel magic?

This whole thing with Clary was awesome and for once she seemed to be working for her miracles so I’ll ungrudgingly let her have this. The one thing I don’t know is what finally tipped her off about Sebastian. Was the electrum nugget thing too warm after he handled it? Did she just realize she never saw his palm? What made her chase after him and check his palm?

I loved her stabbing him. Twice. I’m fully in support of stabbing Sebastian. Yes. Please. Let’s stab Sebastian more. Sebastian for Pincushion 2k17.

Sebastian continues to be a creepy-ass fuck. Seriously, WHY did they decide to go with the incestuous obsession thing? There are so many other places they could have taken that story.

I like that her Open rune that burned through Magnus’s wards also exploded the Institute security doors. I appreciated that for a couple reasons. First, because Sebastian taught her to do that, to use her runes and make them more powerful. Second, it’s also a nice little nod to the books, since we didn’t get that scene of Clary totally disintegrating and blowing up Valentine’s barge with that rune.

Sebastian has vamp speed, too?

I want to ship them, but I haven’t managed it yet. In-universe it’s been like, a week, since Clary and Simon broke up. And of course we know they’re not end-game. But the writers ended up making me buy Climon more than I ever expected to, so maybe they’ll do the same with this one.

I just don’t want to see either of them hurt, so if Simon ends up ending it with Maia, I’m going to be upset, and if Maia ends up ending it with Simon I’ll be upset. *sigh*

I hated seeing the home Simon has been making for himself torn apart like that.

This is the moment of my first death and the beginning of buckets of tears. This look on Magnus’s face after Alec says “our way back to each other.” I can’t. I just can’t. He’s just so heartbroken here.

And the way Alec’s eyes close when Magnus touches him.

And the way Magnus’s voice almost breaks when he says “I love you, too.”

And the way Magnus is trying to smile, just a little. To hold on to some of the joy he’s found with Alec. To file this portion of his life away as a happy memory. To remember Alec as a good thing and not a source of sorrow.

There are so many nuances here and every single one of them fucking slays me dead.

Alec’s disbelief and denial.

Alec’s youthful, naïve insistence that if they just work hard enough, if they’re just determined enough, they can find a way, and Magnus’s world-weary wisdom and centuries of experience telling him there’s just no chance for them.

“You once asked me what I was afraid of. It’s this.”

And here’s my second death. That all along we thought that Magnus was afraid of being alone, being abandoned, like Camille said, he never does well losing the people he cares about.

So, we’ve always thought he was afraid Alec would break his heart. Leave him. Be repulsed by him. Choose duty over him.

We should have known better. Magnus has lived long enough to have his heart broken before, and he knows he’ll survive it.

His real fear is inflicting that pain, that loss, on someone else.

My third and finale death. Alec stifling a sob is where I just lose it entirely.

So I guess what I’m saying here?

Yes, this is a break-up. That’s my read on it. Sorry. It just is.

I don’t believe it’s a permanent one. Of course it’s not. If they’re not back together by the end of the season, at least on some sort of tentative, provisional basis, I’ll be very surprised and extremely pissed off. If I’m left with this boulder sitting on my chest over the hiatus I’m not sure I’ll survive. This show is supposed to be my happy place and I think if they leave me in this hurty place for very long it’s going to ruin it for me.

I don’t think the producers will let this linger long.

But this scene right here? As far as Magnus is concerned in this exact moment as he’s walking away from Alec?

He thinks they’re done. He thinks they’re over. He means it to be that way.

Something will happen to make him change his mind, though, and that’s important. Because here’s the thing:

We’ve seen Alec choose Magnus over and over and over.

He chose Magnus in s1ep06 when he walked away from the Institute and duty to take an evening to at least investigate the possibility of doing something that wasn’t about duty.

He chose Magnus in s1ep12 when he walked away from his own wedding.

He chose Magnus in s2ep06 when he turned his back on his own fears and misgivings and plunged into this relationship.

He chose Magnus in s2ep08 when he challenged his mother’s lack of acceptance repeatedly and sent her a very pointed message about their relationship.

He chose Magnus in s2ep10 when he rejected Aldertree’s words about the impossibility of relationships between Shadowhunters and Downworlders.

He chose Magnus in s2ep13 when he risked censure from the Inquisitor to take a stand for what’s right.

Even when everything he’s ever been trained and brought up to do is telling him to do the opposite, he has chosen Magnus repeatedly.

The only time we haven’t seen him choose Magnus was with regard to keeping the secret about the Soul Sword, and even then, his choice was about Magnus, even if it was paternalistic and wrong-headed.

What we haven’t seen, though?

We haven’t seen Magnus choosing Alec. We see him clearly aware of the difficulty in their situation, especially since s2ep12, but he never really chooses to stand against it. Which is not to say he’s not committed, not at all. We’ve seen Magnus put himself on the line and expose himself and make himself vulnerable for Alec. That’s huge. But with the exception of his hesitation to keep pursuing Alec in s1ep12, we haven’t seen him make that same deliberate decision to damn the obstacles between them and make this relationship happen. His commitment has been more along the lines of ducking and covering and hoping whatever is heading toward them blows over before it pushes them to this critical juncture.

We need to see him make that choice. Everything since s2ep12 has been leading to him making that choice.

Now, I don’t want to step outside my lane, so I’m gonna tread carefully here. 

The thing we have to remember is that Alec, coming from the privileged group, is much safer choosing Magnus than Magnus is in choosing Alec. He’s got that safety net built in, so it’s easier for him. He may face censure and perhaps a decrease in some of his advantages (like being passed over for job promotions) but no consequences that he might face are on the same level of what Magnus might face.

So the two dilemmas and the choice to stand against their respective obstacles are not equal. If Magnus choses their relationship over his people, he doesn’t just face censure, he faces genocide. Pretty big difference there. The only possible way he can justifiably choose Alec at all is if he somehow discovers that choosing Alec dovetails conveniently with the best way to protect himself and his people.

My prediction is that something in the next episode, or in the finale at the latest, is going to bring Magnus to that decision point and make him turn around.

But for the moment? Right now, this scene?

I know it’s going to be an unpopular opinion, but Magnus really does mean this to be a breakup.

[saiyanshewolf]

*slides into your ask box* Yes hello maybe #80 for Meihem!!?? :D

Eeeeeeeep Jamie and Mei being married gives me all kinds of warm fuzzies, so naturally I got really carried away and wrote this angsty dramatic ten-years-later thing and kind of ended up not doing the prompt exactly right, but hopefully you enjoy it anyway! (Also 35 year old Jamie has the half-shaved head from that one Junkrat art that I saw going around awhile back…just…bc reasons.)

Yin & Jin belong to @fire-shadow-dragon-god Quinn belongs to @aly-the-alligatorLin belongs to @rinshi-chan Written for @poisonous-angel

Full of my own headcanons (Blackwatch Junkrat) and me making shit up (bionics and biotics).

The Outback has gotten worse.

Jamie has been in and out countless times over the past ten years, acting on behalf of Blackwatch to maintain some semblance of stability, so he knows the reasons why, can rattle them off like a kid reciting his ABCs: The Second Omnic Crisis. Continuing repercussions of climate change, like the Warrender Tsunami. The emergence of rival factions besides the Junkers in the Outback. An Australian government as ruthless as it is useless. The rest of the world turning a blind eye - some in selfishness, others in guilt.

The Warrender Tsunami had altered the coastline, pushing it inward and effectively giving the Outback its first seaport. Not long after that, new factions began to spring up in the wastelands. Scattered remnants of terrorist organizations long thought to be defunct regrouped in the desert; new ones began to form as well. The Junkers were forced to band together in order to protect themselves. Some of the new factions began to push outward, capturing towns, villages, even small cities. The Australian government responded with bombs, chemical weapons, biological agents, and no regard for its own people.

The Australian government calls it the Outback Territory. News media refers to it as the Outback Wasteland. Australian citizens on the coasts try not to mention it; if they do, it’s referred to with disdain as wasteland territory.

As far as Jamie is concerned, however, the Outback is still the Outback.

Just worse.

His current situation is a testament to just how much worse.

Jamie snarls around the gag in his mouth; it tastes like sweat and smoke and blood and it turns his stomach, but he refuses to give these ex-military mercs the satisfaction of watching him choke to death on his own vomit.

Well, that, and if he dies he’ll never get the chance to see his wife again.

Or their kids.

His mind rejects that idea so violently and absolutely that for the first time in a long time he feels the mania creeping up on him, feels the mad laughter bubbling up in his throat like acid.

After everything he did to get out of this hellhole and everything he did to make it less hellish…trust him to go and find a way to fucking die there anyway.

The mercs have been debating what to do with him over a campfire for hours now. Half of them want to turn him in to some faction full of ex-Talon, certain they’ll be rewarded for delivering a Blackwatch agent.

The other half just want to torture him to death.

Jamie has no preference between the two. If he can’t get away, or if he isn’t rescued, it’s a matter of being tortured to death sooner rather than later. He is pretty sure his situation already qualifies as torture, anyway.

He has been bound to some Frankensteined vehicle with duct tape for the past…Christ, he doesn’t even know how many days, he keeps passing out in the hellish Outback sun, but the monstrous thing seems to be part ute, part tank, and part torture device, covered in spikes made of sharp hunks of scrap metal. The biggest spike of them all points out from the hood, and it is that one that Jamie is bound to, with his wrists behind his back and his ankles taped to the roo bar.

He is dehydrated and feverish, nearly to the point of delirium. His skin is blistered. The shaved half of his head is the worst - it is so raw that even the feeling of his hair growing back in is painful. Everywhere but beneath his ragged shorts the gritty spray of sand is like having his skin rubbed with ground glass. It’s in his eyes, eyes that are half-blinded already from the glare of the desert.

His metal arm is twisted, smashed, near unusable, and Jamie wishes he had never let Dr. Ziegler upgrade him to an integrated model; his stump keeps sending agonizing bolts of pain all the way up into his shoulder, far worse than anything he ever endured with the malfunctioning nerve cap system.

His left shoulder is dislocated. It also has goddamn bullet in it; there are angry red lines spidering out from the point of entry and and Jamie will not let himself wish it had struck lower, he will not, just like he will not let himself think about how he doesn’t even know what happened to Mei.

They had not even working for Blackwatch or Overwatch when they were ambushed; they were on leave, for fuck sake, none of this was supposed to happen.

Mei had never been to the Outback despite asking God knows how many times over the years, just like she had asked him to marry her God knows how many times before he finally stopped holding himself apart, because he has never in his heart of hearts felt that he deserves her, or Yin and Jin, or Quinn and Lin…but whether he deserves them or not is irrelevant because God he loves them so much and he is two inches away from losing his mind but he is dying and if he has to die, if he has to die in the middle of a hellscape like this without ever even seeing 40, he wants to die thinking of them instead of the sun and the pain and the blood that reminds him too much of all the reasons why he does not to deserve them in the first place.

She’d wanted soil samples, water samples, wanted to know exact temperatures, exact radiation levels, wanted to know so much about Jamie’s hell-on-Earth of a homeland that he both hates and loves and Jamie had never understood why -

“Because this is where you came from,” she had said, “What brought you to me, when you think about it. I want to help save it.”

She had been smiling up at him under the light of the moon, and even then, even there, here, her bangs stuck to her forehead with the heat, with her shorts and hiking boots and pale blue tank top, with pink sunburn spread like frosting over her nose and shoulders and chest despite Jamie’s insistence on scheduled applications of sunblock…she was still his Snowflake.

He doesn’t know what happened to her. He doesn’t remember. There was gas - some kind of struggle, a fight, but it all blurs into a terrible ethereal nightmare in his mind.

Engines roar in the distance.

Jamie cringes. He knows that the mercs are either going to move on and run away or stand and fight, so he braces himself; if they run, the pain of being strung up and jogged around will knock him out, and as dehydrated as he is he may never wake up. If they fight he’ll either die or end up worse off than he already is…and he can’t get much worse without being dead.

The Outback is unforgiving like that.

The rumble of the engines grows closer and the mercs are laughing and the pit of Jamie’s stomach is full of lead.

Fighting, then.

He is going to die.

The mercs will kill him before they let anyone else take their fun - or their reward - away.

Gunshots. Laughter. The mercs are shouting, cheering -

Something explodes.

It is close, close enough that Jamie feels the heat from the blast, and he cranes his neck to see but all he can make out are shapes, shadows, blurry images; he is painfully glare blind and his eyes are full of sand and grit.

But he can hear, and he hears screaming, he knows screaming, knows agony when he hears it and the mercs are all shouting at one another, scrambling, and then there is another explosion and sand blasts into Jamie’s side, scouring his blistered skin like steel wool, and the realization that he is never going to see his family again, that he is never going to know what happened to Mei, settles like a stone in his throat.

More screams. The mercs are losing it. Jamie hears Kill him, kill the Junker, kill the fuckin’ Junk -

The voice chokes off into a thick, wet gurgle, like too much water draining too fast down a pipe.

He is going to die.

He is going to die and he doesn’t know if Mei is even -

She is! He bashes his skull backward against the spike until his ears ring and the blood runs down his neck. She is, she is, she’s gotta be, ya hear me?

Jamie does not  much believe in a higher power, but all he can see in his mind are Yin and Jin’s devilish faces, little Quinn and Lin with books spread open on their laps and this is the last time he will ever see them again, the only way he can see them, and he holds on to that and he prays, it isn’t very nice or polite or reverent but he prays -

She’s gotta be all right, ya hear me? He tunes out the screaming, the gunfire, the heat and the pain and blood and the sweat and every other hellish thing going on around him. She’s gotta be all right, damn it, ya can take me from ‘em but for god sake don’t take her don’t ya take her away from ‘em too let her get back to ‘em let her be all right -

He hears the familiar fwoosh of flames, hears more agonized screams, and he wonders if he is already dead because this must be hell -

“Hái méi dǎ wán ne!”

- it must be, because he’s hearing things, hearing Chinese and Mei is -

“Qīfu rén!” FWOOSH. “Zhè kěyǐ zǔzhǐ nǐ!”

“Oi, what’s she sayin’, mate?”

“No idea, but she’s bloody terrifyin’ and I’m glad we’re on her side - oh no ya don’t!”

Gunshots. Smoke, so much smoke, and it reeks, the stench of burnt hair and charred human flesh is so thick that Jamie can scarcely breathe and the tumult is at fever pitch, voices screaming and snarling and shouting, gunfire and flames and heat and that smell and his mind cannot seem to take it -

He wakes to strange hands on his body, lowering him to the ground, lowering him onto a makeshift stretcher of some kind, and he is so out of it that when his eyelids are pried open he tries to fight the shadow-figure off, certain that it’s some demon from hell, and then something is dropped into each of his eyes and they go numb.

“You’re safe. It’s okay, you’re safe.” There is a sharp prick in the crook of his left elbow. “I promise you’re safe.”

Maybe he’s in heaven after all, if he’s hearing his wife’s voice…

“Oi, li’l Trash Panda, ya need ta be still - !”

“Stop calling me that. I’m fine, take care of him.”

Before Jamie hears anything else the world goes very soft and quiet…and then it goes black.

When he comes to again he wonders if he has been reincarnated as himself, or if his life has been nothing but a fever-dream, because he has been here before, can tell by the smell that he’s been here before, can never forget the rotgut moonshine and charred flesh reek of Junkertown’s excuse for a hospital, and it terrifies him, sickens him, he still can’t see and the stump of his right arm is still firing agony into his shoulder and he panics, flailing, screaming, suddenly fifteen years old strapped to an operating table with ragged leather belts and rope, confused and nauseated -

Another pinch in the crook of his left arm.

More softness. More silence. More black.

The next time he wakes, he can see.

He is in a hospital - a real hospital - and his bionic arm has been repaired. He glances down at it, flexing the fingers, the wrist, the elbow, and there is no more pain.

His skin smells like biotic burn gel, which explains why his shoulders are barely pink instead of scorched red. The buzz-cut half of his head still aches, but compared to how it had felt, the ache is more than bearable.

His left shoulder and the left half of his chest are the worst; he is so sore that he feels as if he has taken a sucker punch from Mako, or maybe Zarya. The bullet wound has been bandaged rather than healed via biotics, which strikes him as odd until he remembers those creeping red lines.

Infected, then. Jamie flexes his left arm, looking down at the IV. Lucky I ain’t dead.

“Jamie?”

Jamie sits bolt upright at the sound of Mei’s voice; she is in the room and nearly in his hospital bed almost before he can blink, and when she throws her arms around him Jamie finds himself clutching her as if he will never, ever, ever be able to let go of her again.

“Jamie, oh my god,” she murmurs, her voice breaking, “I’m sorry, I’m probably hurting you I’m sorry I was j-just so scared -”

“Snowflake.” Jamie only distantly registers the ache in his shoulder. Tears are streaming down his face, landing on Mei’s skin; she pulls back a little and swipes her thumbs beneath his eyes.

“No more dehydration,” she says softly, giving him a tiny smile. “That’s good.”

Jamie can’t breathe.

Across Mei’s throat is a stripe of raw, burned skin, clearly the result of hamfisted cauterization. It has not been treated with biotics, either, meaning that some sort of infection was present when she came in, may still be present.

He glances up at her face. Fading bruises are shadowed beneath both her eyes. There is a burn on one of her cheeks, a minor one that has been treated biotically, but it is a burn nonetheless and there are more down her arms.

Jamie grabs her hands; her blue nail polish is chipped and faded and a couple of her fingernails are missing entirely. When he turns her hands over in his he finds that her palms are burned as well.

He feels sick, sick and ashamed and guilty, so intensely guilty that he is shaking.

“Mei, love,” he mumbles, “I’m so sorry - I’m so fuckin’ sorry.”

“Jamie, it isn’t your fault,” she says softly.

“I shoulda protected ya,” he says, tears pricking his eyes again. “Why’d I marry ya, I’m so fuckin’ useless I can’t even fuckin’ take care of ya like I’m s’posed to…”

“It took a lot of convincing,” Mei answers, her lips quirking into a small smile. “And the day you said yes was the happiest day of my life and still is. So hush.”

He leans in and kisses her, not trusting himself to speak; she kisses him back with a heated intensity that soon has him forgetting everything except how lucky he is to have her in his arms again.

She is perched astride his lap when she finally pulls back, her cheeks flushed pink beneath the burns and the bruises.

“Down, boy,” she murmurs, breathless. “Angela hasn’t cleared you for any kind of strenuous activity just yet.”

Jamie snorts. He leans back against the propped-up mattress, both hands on Mei’s hips.

“Kiddos all right?” he asks.

Mei nods. “They’re still with Ana and Reinhardt. They know we got into trouble and got hurt, but they don’t know how close it was.”

“Good.” Jamie reaches up and tucks Mei’s hair behind her ears. “I know how close it was with me, but…Mei, love, what happened ta ya…?”

“The mercs gassed us. I got my shirt over my nose and it kept me at least semi-conscious, but.” Mei smiles. “Well. You don’t wear shirts. The mercs knocked me around a little, then tried to kill me by cutting my throat. It didn’t work well. I played dead. They destroyed everything in camp, left, and took you with them, yelling about Ex-Talon. I panicked, ran…I blanked out for a little while. Probably a fever from the infection. I got lost. A Junker found me, and I…um…”

She flushes scarlet. Jamie cocks an eyebrow, waiting.

“I, er…might have punched him in the nose,” she murmurs. “And, um…stolen his laser rifle…okay, I threatened his life. I made him take me to Junkertown. They tried to kill the infection that had set in by cauterizing the wound in my throat, but I wouldn’t listen to them when they told me I needed to rest. When I told them that Junkrat had been kidnapped that got them moving, but I…I don’t think I ever actually told them I was your wife. I couldn’t think straight. don’t think I ever even told them my name, I was so preoccupied with finding a weapon in Junkertown I could actually use and when I found the flamethrower I had to get it working again, that’s how I got my nails ripped off, where all these other burns came from -”

Jamie remembers the whooosh of flames, the smell of burned flesh, the screams of the mercs, the nervous voices that sounded much like his own.

His mouth drops open.

“Snowflake,” he says, “Did ya - was that - ya led a bunch’a armed Junkers inta the Outback? Ta hunt down mercs?”

“No,” she answers. “I led a bunch of armed Junkers into the Outback to save my husband.”

Jamie opens his mouth to speak, but nothing comes out. He hides his face against Mei’s chest and she holds him close, quietly stroking his hair.

And when Dr. Ziegler comes in a couple hours later to find them curled up together in Jamie’s hospital bed, she leaves them be.

Bonus:

“Okay, but what did they call ya?”

“Jamie, I don’t see why it matters.”

“‘Cause it’s me culture, Snowflake, c’mon -”

“Culture?!”

“Oi, I never said they was cultured.”

“…*mumblemumble*…”

“What was that?”

“It was because of the black eyes…ugh, they called me Trash Panda, okay?”

“T-trash…oh my fuck, that’s bloody perfect, I love it -”

“Don’t you dare start -”

*smeck* “My li’l Trash Panda!”

“…shut up, Junkrat.”

[fiendfluid]

i can’t believe im posting this but here we are. i haven’t wrote anything serious in 3 years so its probably not amazing but ya gotta start somewhere, and where better then the destruction of fang and kerry’s friendship?

“We're just friends.”

It shouldn't feel weird to hear that coming from Kerry. Because its true; they are friends. The best of friends hopefully, if you figured out how many years they had maintained this relationship despite their differences. Just.. friends.

It makes Fang's stomach feel queasy, his face heats up at the words even though there's no reason to have a reaction to them. Of course they're friends, what kind of question was that? Kerry stuck around through all of Fang's bullshit and whining, they had to be friends.

But here they are, sitting on the bus in excruciatingly awkward silence.

Its partly Fang's fault, they realize, after having a minor freak out for no reason and then not explaining the freak out, Kerry is giving them the cold shoulder. Which isn't too different from being around Kerry normally, but instead of comfortable silence in which Fang could rattle on about stupid things, they're both  tensed up and avoiding any form of contact as if they aren't just sitting right beside each other.

“We're just friends.”

Some part of Fang rises up, petty and vicious. 'That's not what you said last night, or when you were high in my lap, whispering in my ear.'

He can't say that to Kerry, though. There's a shred of self preservation still intact inside of Fang to keep him from saying something that mean to his best friend. The bucket load of abandonment issues helps keep the words down, too.

Kerry is watching them quietly fight with themself, concerned but prideful.

Fang drags his fingernails down his arm, catching on the plastic band aids by his wrist. They almost laugh out loud at the absurdity of it all; Kerry's the one who's in love with them, not the other way around.

Kerry's staring openly, still silent as fucking ever but the concerned look has morphed into something new and raw, and it hurts to see him looking at them like that and he won't stop-

“Stop looking at me.” Is what Fang snarls, glaring venomously at Kerry. He's screaming in his head to shut up and stop making things worse but auto pilot Fang the Idiot is running the show now and its a sold out crowd to watch him ruin his one and only relationship worth a damn.

To Kerry's credit, he doesn't even stop to look hurt. No, he rises to the jab and fires straight back at Fang, voice slightly hoarse from drowsiness, “Then stop getting angry over nothing!”

It hurts. It hurts a lot and it shouldn't.

And Kerry isn't done talking yet.

“You can't just get pissy at me because something random set you off again.” Kerry snaps, “That's not fair.”

He's right.

Fuck him for being right.

What's not fair is this bullshit Kerry's dragged them into, they didn't ask for whatever this is to go this far. It was clean cut and simple for so long, why did he have to complicate it by making Fang feel things?

Fang's aware that Kerry is getting angrier and angrier the more the silence drags on without a response. A part of Fang wonders if just kissing Kerry would fix things. It worked during a few fights before, yanking him down from his high perch and knocking the wind out of him had stopped arguments in their tracks.

And it felt nice, with an arm slung around Kerry's shoulders to keep him within reach--as if he'd try to move away—the other hand weaving into his hair. Last time Fang kissed him, he was didn't see it coming at all. He had gasped against Fang's lips softly, and a little bit delighted. He was bent basically in half to meet Fang, gangly limbs wrapping quickly around them.

This wasn't helping, some miserable part of Fang pointed out.

But Fang wants to hold Kerry right now, keep him close and never let anything take him away. They want to get high together again, have Kerry sit in their lap all relaxed and laughing softly over some dumb shit. Wants to relive all those times sitting outside the hospital room on the verge of tears, but feeling safe because Kerry was there, and nothing was going to happen if he was there.

The jolt of the bus startles Fang out of his thoughts. Kerry doesn't say a word as he grabs both their bags and stomps toward the bus's exit. He's waiting on the pavement silently when Fang finally stumbles out, and completely ignores Fang's half-assed offer to carry their own bag.

If Fang thought the bus ride had been awful, the walk back home was even worse, and Kerry didn't seem to be in the mood to change it any time soon. Not that Fang was even trying to make things better, currently desperately searching through memories for some warning that this moment was going to happen eventually.

This isn't their worst fight, not even close. They've had bigger arguments over dumber things and gotten over it in a matter of minutes. This doesn't feel like something that's going to fix itself over a half order of french fries from the food vendor they pass every day on the way to Fang's apartment. There's something that's fundamentally important to their relationship just hanging in the air between them right now, and it wants two, emotionally stunted people, to delicately talk this through.

Fang lags behind, listening to Kerry's repetitive, loud foot falls, trying not to stare at his ass too much, afraid that Kerry might have some freaky third eye on his ass waiting to call them a fucking loser. Fang's procrastinating.

The chance to say something-anything is rapidly slipping away. Kerry's buzzing up to Fang's apartment and soon he's gonna leave, and you're gonna be alone again and he's not coming back-

“Why'd you say that.” Fang blurts out, it doesn't even sound like a question.

Kerry swings around slowly, staring down at Fang with a look of annoyance, but he's gone a little red around his ears. “Say what, Fang?” he sounds strained.

“You know what,” Fang says, fiddling over and over with the hem of their shirt, “'We're just friends.'”

He barely reacts to his own words back in his face. Just a raised eyebrow and a sigh that's almost a growl of frustration. He looks really pretty.

“Because, that's what we are.” His voice is clipped, “What do you want from me?”

And that surprises Fang for some stupid reason; what the fuck did he want from Kerry right now? What even was the point of bringing this up and breaking apart something that was working soundly so far.

Kerry's biting his lip, not looking at them save a few nervous glances. He decides to busy himself by buzzing the apartment to let them in again and sighs with what sounds like relief when the door unlocks.

“I'll see you later.” Kerry says, bumping into Fang as he steps away from the door to let them pass.

Say sorry, say you're sorry, say you're sorry you asshole.

“H-hey wait!” Fang cringes, that was so desperate, but it works and Kerry actually stops.

He doesn't say anything, just waves his arms in a vague, tense motion to say whatever Fang wanted to convey. Kerry's eyes are flitting everywhere, clearly uncomfortable.

“I-” I'm sorry. “I-”

“What?”

“I-uhm-” I'm sorry, just say it-

“I'm in love with you?”

Good job.

Kerry goes ridged, a blush instantly breaks out across his face. Fang wants to die and then come back to life just to die again.

“Wha-Y-you? I-I'm??-” Kerry is stuttering, arms flailing alarmingly.

Fang opens their mouth, then closes it again after a second thought. There's a ringing in their ears that's hopefully the sound of their brain self destructing so they don't have to exist in this universe any longer.

“I'm sorry-” So now you can say it?!

That was the wrong thing to say, apparently. Kerry whirls on Fang, shaking furiously, pointing an accusing finger at their face. He looks like he's about to cry and oh god, Fang fucked up.

“Sorry? What even—how do you think any of that was okay?” Kerry shouts, its slightly terrifying. “You can't just say whatever the fuck comes to your head and hope it makes things better! What is wrong with you?”

Fang wants to yell, wants to scream that he's not just saying shit because holy fuck he's in love with Kerry and he doesn't want this to be it. But his voice abandons him when tears spill from Kerry's eyes and he's glaring at Fang like they've killed him.

“Just--don't talk to me.” Kerry chokes, stumbling back, wiping his palms against his face, valiantly trying to remain stoic.

Fang actually manages to step forward as Kerry starts moving away, arms outstretched to do something.

“Welp,” Fang says to no one, when Kerry is out of sight, and everything is awful again. “I fffffucked up.”