#ft. crab whisperer

[onionowt]

Sky sketch dump without any context (I'm trying to warm up sorry)

[hyukascampfire]

THE TERRIBLE HALF-TRUTHS OF THE UNDEAD ҜING

⠀(🍂 ) 𝓡EVENANT in folklore, a revenant is a spirit or animated corpse that is believed to have been revived from death to haunt the living ... ( 𝑝𝑙𝑎𝑦𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑡 )

1︎5.5k revenant!yeonjun · ƒ ! r ft. soobin ⸺ ✴︎ 𝖿𝖺𝗇𝗍𝖺𝗌𝗒 ... smut, violence, angst, death, animal death & vivid descriptions of animal death, major character death, unprotected sex, cumming inside, dry humping (because bring it back), biting, dom yeonjun sub reader, mentions of death in childbirth, reincarnation, teasing, breast worship, yj calls reader ‘my love’, def some typos

🪶 ⦂ how fun is this collab? :,) this fic was so fun to write. i personally believe that tsfawc enjoyers will love this one,, but you'll have to read it to confirm that, right? hehe. and of course, go read everybody else's if you love this one! they're all set in the same world, and everybody worked so hard on these fics. send some love their way!

rꫀׁׅܻblogs & asks arꫀׁׅܻ always apprꫀׁׅܻciatꫀׁׅܻd!

𝒪𝑁𝐶𝐸 𝒰𝑃𝑂𝑁 𝒶 𝒯𝐼𝑀𝐸, in a land far, far away, where the treetops touched the soft clouds of the sky and the water sparkled under the glowing sun, where mountains rose high, and long, deep caves ran through them, where the sea met shore in collisions of swirling, foamy punches, where the undead walked among the living, where the winged flew above the finned, there was a land where things beyond reason and rhyme existed perfectly true. Among those strange beings and within the veils of Aethera, there was a girl loved by death. 

He sits on your shoulder, a dark, boding shadow and glared at those around you with promise in his eyes.

That’s how it seems, anyway. That’s how everybody looks at you. They dodge you, whisper about you, evade your gaze as if he might reach his claws for them next if they linger for too long.

Crows with dead eyes arrive at your doorstep like some lover’s cheeky gift, other poor creatures like fat grey mice are left to rot in the wheatfields, and yarrow stocks wilt outside the wall of your room. If Death thinks that you are flattered, he misunderstands you. You are terrified of nothing more than dying. The first time, it was a sly joke. Then it happened again, and you watched their eyes change. And it happened again and again, and your people are a suspicious type. Something can only be a coincidence so many times.

When you began to sneak into a little shack with a village boy, you thought that maybe, somehow, this would all pass. He died too. There’s really no coming back from that, is there? You don���t blame them. You’re not the freak that they all believe you to be—none of them get close enough anymore to know that, though.

The wickerbasket’s handle creaks under your fist. You usually only forage along the shallow line of the forest; you pluck from bramble bushes topped with plump berries that crawl between trees during the summer, and when the crab apple tree’s branches hang heavy with the fruit, you snatch those up too. You’re more useful to your family out here, in the woods that they deem just as cursed as you. Where you won’t be their burden.

Crisp autumn leaves crunch under your boots. You scan between them—more grey and rotted this late in the season than fresh and orangey—for the edible mushrooms and roots that you usually forage at this time of year. The basket’s already pretty heavy with a variety, black morels and sorrel and burdock, as you bend down to pull a truffle from the dirt against a tree.

You drop it down with the rest of your finds. The basket smells like earth, no doubt your hands do too. You dust your palms off on your skirts and go to rise back from your squat.

A deep, billowing horn pierces the forest’s silence. It’s both far away, wiggling between the whispers of rustling leaves, and much too close. It draws out. Long. Bone-chilling. You freeze, scanning between each tree trunk and praying that you won’t find what you fear you might.

You are much deeper into the woods than you usually are. Than you ought to be. And you know what that horn means—you know that it means something far worse than what you’d been afraid of, coming into these woods. Much more primordial than the hide-behinds you were scared you might find this deep, much less avoidable than the faerie rings you stepped around.

Why would The Wild Hunt be here? A shudder runs down your spine, and you curl your fingers into your skirts and lift them as if to prepare to run, but you don’t. Your feet find root in the forest floor and all you can do is stand terribly still in catatonia. Their horn sounds again, and a procession of wicked whoops and howls follow. Wild hoofbeat rumbles under it all—the hunt and their rides. You hope that they’re just passing through, and you won’t so much as see one of those wild riders. There were plenty of folktales that the matrons of your village would bolster to terrify you as children, but you knew even then that their stories of the riders, with their flesh falling away from them and their pale or beady eyes and their gnarled maws and frightening figures as they rode on the backs of equally terrible steeds, were not fabricated. They are not a bogeyman or a wailing banshee; they are death made in the flesh, and they are here. In your forest. 

Your legs won’t work. You curl your clammy fingers tighter around your basket and lean into the tree beside you. How deep had you wandered into the forest? Hopefully not too far; when you gain the courage to run, you hope that they do not send their hounds to snap their foul breath on your heels. Maybe just standing here and blending into the trees is best. The Hunt would love a chase, and you don’t want to become their next.

The next call comes and you throw that all to the wind. Your heart pounds against your ribcage as you let your basket clatter to the leaves and you take off. You fly over roots and shrubbery and between the trees, your blood roaring in your ears faster. You’d oblige if you could.

Above the loudness of your frantic mind, the harrowing whinnies and The Hunt’s ruckus dulls until it’s faraway again, and then it’s gone. Well, you don’t stop to check if they’ve really passed through the forest. You just run.

“There you are, love.”

His voice cuts through your frantic escape and stops you dead in your path. You almost go crashing down over the ground with the force that you dig your heels into it. Though the voice is non-threatening, you don’t turn to face the source.

He speaks again. You already know who it is. He, old as the earth you stand on itself, leads that band of wild riders. Is the king of the undead, collects souls for reaping.

And he’s the one who’s plagued you with his attention. Death.

“Why do you keep your back turned to me?” he says. “I frighten you. That hurts.” His voice lilts with amusement and sharpness. “I wish that you would face me.”

You’re not fond of the way that he speaks to you with a familiarity. But then again, you’re not fond of dying, either. Your legs are boneless beneath you. Turning, you slowly indulge him, though it takes a great amount of willpower to not run again like your jittering jaw and trembling hands ask you to.

The King of Death stands tall and utterly preternatural, leaned against a crooked tree in the woods behind you. His smile cracks across his face in a jagged way that suggests he finds you amusing, but none of that meets his eyes. They’re the color of the greyish, rotted leaves beneath you. The dark shadows beneath his eyes are the only thing belying the weight that his infinite life might have on him. That, and the hollowness that rings from him.

And though he sounded entirely playful, you are shaken by the sorrow that you find in him now that you’ve turned. Even more so, you’re not sure why you feel it echoed somewhere in the hollows of your bones. “I’m sorry,” you say. It trembles terribly. You want to say that you’re sorry you caught his attention, but it seems you’ve always had his attention. It’s more that you are petrified down to your marrow that the time’s come that you face this… strange infatuation. Here he stands: the one who leaves hollowed out husks of creatures at your doorstep. Should you run or thank him? Is Death as prideful a creature as the other kinds that inhabit Aethera? “I don’t mean to…”

He pushes off his tree, fixing his cape that cascades over only one of his shoulders. It’s tattered and falling apart like the rest of his clothing, though you think that the bronze stitching and swirling oakleaf patterns in the black say that they might have been immaculate at some point. Or maybe they weren’t, and they had started that way. He is Death, anyway. “You’re sorry?” he says. “Why are you apologizing to me? You’ve hardly done a thing to warrant it.”

Faltering, you wet your chapped lips. You’re not really sure. Holding back another apology for fear that you’ve offended him and he’ll now strike you down for it, you say, “I thought that, maybe the hunt was…” Wow, you sound stupid. You can see in the sly smile his lips form that it amuses him. That’s almost worse than angering him: intriguing him. What you really should be doing is boring him so that he’ll find you a waste of his time. Then, maybe, he’d give up haunting you.

“After you?” he finishes. Shaking his head, he says, “My hunters only answer to me.”

“Oh,” you say plainly. Part of you wants to ask why that should comfort you, especially when you’re the one that he sends little bits of death to, but rationality keeps those words in the back of your throat. You don’t really want to know. “Why are you passing by here?”

Something akin to old longing passes through those witty eyes, and then he eats up the distance between you with languid steps of his long legs until he’s nothing more than one last step in front of you. The closeness consumes the air in your lungs, leaving nothing for you but short and shallow drags. The forest has gone dead silent aside from the sound of it. His voice is even more magnetic now that he’s so close.

You recoil when he brings a hand up to brush the pad of his thumb over your cheek and then cup your jaw, as if afraid that he might snuff you out here and now. His fingers are softer than you thought they might be, and the lines of his face sharpen into what you think is hurt. Hurt that you flinched?

“We go here and there,” he says, “but it’s been a very long time since we came here.” There’s a certain thickness to his words; a certain tension coiled over them from something that you’re not privy to. And yet, there’s a farawayness, too. You bet he’s full of a lifetime of secrets. Lifetimes of secrets. “But I think I’ve found myself a reason to finally return.”

Breathy and still struggling to flatten out your breathing, you ask him, “Why?”

The Undead King’s smile turns wicked once more, and he doesn’t answer you. It’s awfully eerie.

“Do you have… business here?” you try again. It’s a roundabout way of asking, do you have someone to take away?

“I have business wherever the living go,” he says, letting your face go but not giving you any more room. You narrow your eyes. He’s quite good at non-answers. “Nothing is more certain than that I will greet every living thing eventually. I’ll come to take you, too, when the time comes.”

Your mouth dries up. The entirety of your home, all the people you’ve ever known, fear you for all the death you bring. Not one of them fears it more than you do. You’ve seen it enough to fear its frightening finality.

The drop of your face must’ve told him how much that scared you. “Dying is not such an awful thing, love. Living pales in comparison.” Searching your eyes, he adds, “But I’ve not come to take you.”

That’s easy for him to say: that death isn’t something to fear. His words don’t calm your thundering heart, but you offer him a, “Thank you…” It trails off toward the end when you realize that you don’t have his name. If he has one, anyway.

“Yeonjun.” He tilts his head, strands of sparrow hair brushing over his watching eyes. “Most don’t know it, but you’re not most people, are you?”

Your breathing had just begun evening out. It’s a shame, the way that it kicks back up at the way he looks at you. “What do you mean?” you say, but of course you know. Nobody else is given dead things like you. It’s not like you yourself are very strange; you like pretty dresses and sharing gossip with friends just as much as any other girl your age.

Giving you another one of those knowing smiles that he uses just like words, he steps back. “I’m sorry that I scare you how I do.”

You don’t answer him. What could you say to that? That he doesn’t? That would be a lie, and he would know it.

Yeonjun’s eyes flit over your face, over your cheeks made pink by the autumn cold, lingering on your lips for a few unexplainable beats, and then landing on your eyes where he searches and finds something that sends his throat bobbing with a thick swallow. “I don’t mean to be your monster. It’s only that…” He steps back again. “You remind me a terrible amount of someone I once knew.”

“Who?” Though your shoulders relax a bit with some distance between the two of you, you do your best to not let your guard down. All the stories that you recall being told, all those cautionary tales passed down through word of mouth around a fire, end with some stupid girl thinking that the monster could be changed or tricked. You’re willing to bet that the man in front of you, no matter how human he looks or how enchanting his words are, could be neither.

That doesn’t explain the ache in your chest when he holds your eyes for too long. But you shove that feeling way, way down. It’s nonsensical.

His voice takes on a parting tilt when he says, “It doesn’t matter anymore. Death takes us all.” Yeonjun dips his head at you. His smile wavers. You’d think that crooked smile on his mouth was indelible had you not seen it twitch down at the corners only for a moment. If you’d have blinked, you’d have missed it. “You think I’ll hurt you,” he says, “well, don’t let me stop you. Go ahead, run. I apologize for your basket.”

Death takes us all. You’re not sure what that’s supposed to mean, coming from him, but it sends a cold wind up your spine and goosebumps crawling over your skin.

He watches you go. You don’t look back when you do, but his gaze sits on your back until you’re sure you’re out of his sight. When you return to your home, your mother asks where the basket full of ingredients for supper went.

You imagine what her face might look like if you told her the truth. But that was impossible, so instead you tell her some stupid story about a wolf that startled you so bad that you ran home paying no mind to where your basket was. It’s close enough to the truth.

༺ ꘏ ༻

It doesn’t matter what you do; you can’t get his face out of your head. While you cut butter into flour and then roll out dough, simmer fruits over flame and you slice cheese off blocks, you replay that meeting in the forest. The memory spins and turns over no matter how hard you try to put it away from your thoughts.

It’s not every day that somebody meets the likes of him. You can’t blame yourself; he had such captivating eyes. Dark, playful, and endless. There they are again. You sigh and dust your hands off. Maybe you are just as strange as they all think that you are. Morbid curiosity is like that, though. Taking the most normal of us and making you wonder what you absolutely should not wonder about.

And you absolutely should not wonder about him.

The sun has begun to hang high in the sky, but the breeze that crawls through the window you pulled open before you got to work is a crisp one. Autumn’s really come, now. Outside the window, a huddle of children play around in the leaves that you’d raked up. You’ll have to rake those back up, but you hardly have the heart to tell them to take their playing elsewhere. Their giggles and small voices waft in with the breeze, and a traitorous part of you yearns for a family that you know you’ll never have. No man would risk that fate, not after what happened to the last man who paid you any attention. You grit your teeth at the memory.

Having a face for the thing that’s made your life the way it is is strange. Seeing him in the flesh, with handsome eyes and a taunting mouth, looking something near human, you think you’ve come to resent him for it. How dare he ruin your life? He, more than anybody, should know how fleeting life is. What is in it for him to deface what little time you have? You keep going back to that thought: why did he ever even appear to you in that forest? There is not one story in which you remember Yeonjun showing his face to those he hasn’t come to claim. Death makes his visits swift and purposeful.

Moreover, why on earth would he even look your way? You wish there was a plain way to ask him why, or even to plead with him to stop. Whatever it is he’d ask of you, you think you might give him. To get back to living, you would.

A deep, familiar voice from behind you gives you pause. “Want some help with that?” Soobin says. He stands  in the doorway, his head nearly brushing the top of the frame. It’s made too small for him. Most things in your tiny village were made too small for Soobin. There had been a time where you’d been taller than him, that had hardly lasted long enough.

“As if,” you dismiss and gesture at his dirty hands. He’d no doubt been out working his family’s field, his tunic sleeves rolled up to his elbows.  “Cow shit isn’t an ingredient.”

Anybody else might’ve scoffed or taken offense, but he just laughs and invites himself in anyway. It never fazes Soobin. He doesn’t let you push him away.

It’d be better if he did. How long before he ends up dead, too? Alive one moment, and then a husk without a soul next. You don’t think you could handle seeing cold, dead eyes where the annoying, warm shine should be. Of course it would be better if he stayed away, if he had half the mind to. Even most of the children have heard enough from their mothers to stay a healthy distance. He’s not too much better than a child, though.

“Isn’t it?” he says. His cheek is smudged with whatever sort of dirt he’s got on his hands and under his nails. “I’m done with work for the day. Want to go out to the field?”

You two have always ran off and avoided your life in between willowy, flaxen wheat stocks. They were just tall enough at this time of year to hide you away. But, for some reason, your stomach does a quick flip at the thought of being outside. It’s silly; couldn’t he find you here, too? “I’m busy,” you say. You’d already kneaded this roll of dough plenty, but you dig your fingers into it and begin again.

“Busy?” he scoffs, “Since when are you too busy to get away from work?”

Gritting your teeth, you let the sounds of your kneading answer. Now, more than ever, he should keep his distance. You know one thing that you’re sure nobody else does: Death’s come to visit. 

His brows shoot up in your peripherals. “I don’t get answers today?”

“I’m sorry,” you say, giving up working the over-kneaded dough only because your arms ache. “Why don’t you go talk off the ear of some other poor village girl? I’ve heard as much as I can handle today. And then when that one’s tired, you can bother the next, I’m sure.”  You soften the words with a quick smile his way. No matter how many times you say something sour in hopes that it’ll send him away, as soon as you glance up at his face, you reel it in.

His company is all you’ve ever had. The least you can do for him is make sure he doesn’t end up like carrion, even if he chooses to take that risk himself. You don’t know why he does.

Voice playful, he says, “I’m glad to hear that you believe I’ve got ladies falling at my feet, but I’d rather not annoy a pretty girl, so you’re my only option.” He pokes at the sleeve of your simple cotton dress. “Should I drag you out of here? Don’t your arms hurt doing all that?”

“Oh, you are a refined man, aren’t you?” you say, shuffling out of his reach. Damn him, he makes it difficult. “Well, I am a pretty girl, so you should take yourself elsewhere.”

Soobin smiles easy. “I’m bored out of my mind. You’re just going to let me suffer?”

“That’s not my issue.”

“I’d argue that it is,” he says. “Come on. Why are you giving me a cold shoulder?” Leaning, he tries to get a look at your face. “Did I upset you? I wasn’t aware that you cared much about what I thought.” When you spare him a sharp glance, he says, “I think you are very, very beautiful. Would you stop ignoring me, now?”

You wish you could fall into the easy banter that comes with being around Soobin, but you can’t. You can’t let him be around you. “Soobin, stop it,” you say, draining your voice. You don’t look at him while you say it.

Going quiet, he seems to notice that today’s different. His gaze is heavy as he stares at you for a few long moments. Crossing his arms over his chest, he asks, “What happened?”

You swallow. “Nothing. I’m just doing something.”

“Oh, alright,” he says, tone inflicting in a way that says he doesn’t believe you one bit. He pushes off the counter. “I’ve put up with you pushing me away for years. You think I don’t know what you’re doing?”

“Soobin,” you warn. If you look at him, you fear you’ll be forced to watch the only one who never cared much what a risk it was being around you leaving. So you don’t.

Your friend raises his hands in the air defensively. “Okay, then.” He makes for the doorway with languid, lingering steps. As if he doesn’t want to leave. “Tomorrow..”

That’s both a threat and a promise, knowing him. Sighing and watching the rowan tree out your window sway, you bid him a curt goodbye.

If only that jerk took offense to things. It would make things an awful lot easier for you.

༺ ꘏ ༻

Being out in the wheat fields brings you peace when you’re alone, but you find it to be terribly lonely. The earthy, sweet scent of it wraps around you, and the stalks whisper against each other in a soothing way.

When you look beside you, the patch of wheat imprinted with the shape of your bodies is empty on his side. You are quite weak; it makes you want to go knocking at his door for his company. But that would be the selfish thing to do, so you card your fingers between the golden straw instead.

A chill trickles down your spine. You feel his presence before you even see him; it’s a feeling that you used to get fleetingly, as if something far away was tugging at you. But then he became real, a living thing in front of you that can touch, and that is much different.

“Why is it that I always find you out in the wilderness?” Yeonjun says. His voice comes from behind you.

Has he been watching you? You stand and dust your bottom off, heart kicking to life. “It’s nice out here,” you say. In truth, you haven’t come outside since that day. You’ve dodged Soobin and made a million excuses as to why you won’t go anywhere past the fences of your home. “I like to… watch people go about their days. It’s interesting.” It’s true—you always watch from afar how the village folk interact. How groups of girls your age link arms and whisper to each other, how neighbors come together to fix up a shoddy fence. You watch them be a community that you are not a part of. Watching it tastes bitter sometimes, but mostly you take pleasure in imagining yourself there with them. You’re not sure why you try making small talk with him, but what else? Should you go running again? If you were to listen to your pattering heart, maybe that’s what you’d do. He’s hardly shown you any bad will, though, and he’s the one that’s come to you. Maybe it’s silly to wait until something bad happens to be cautious.

A thousand pounds in stones sit at the center of your chest, though, and his voice makes them feel lighter. Why on earth that is, you’re not sure. It’s a nice relief regardless.

He smiles. It's different from the ones he showed you before. It’s knowing; more sweet than cracking over his face like the smile you would expect from the likes of him. What use might he have in being sweet? “Could I join you?”

Blinking dumbly at him for a second, you nod. “Oh, uh… Yeah.” Settling back down into your spot, you spare him a few curious sideways glances.

The breeze billows over the gold stems, moving them like gentle waves over the ocean and blowing your hair in it too. The flattened bits rustle under his weight. He doesn’t even turn his face toward the village; instantly, his gravitational eyes are on you.

“Do you come here often?”

“I do,” you answer. Mostly when you and Soobin have too much to do and not enough will to do it. “It’s nice. The village doesn’t like me much, so it’s easier out here.” You don’t mention that mostly you don’t come here alone.

Yeonjun’s face becomes far away. It looks strikingly like somebody forced into an old, unpleasant memory. “Don’t like you?” he asks, “What reason would they have for that?”

“They fear me. Things go wrong around me, that’s all.” You pluck at the hay absentmindedly. “Things die. They’re smart to stay away.”

The hay whispers much louder for the long moment he remains quiet, digesting what you’ve said. Maybe deciding what to say, considering that it’s his fault.

“Die?” he asks, voice inflected with surprise.

Turning to him, your brow creases. Shouldn’t he know? He’s the one that’s done it to you. “Everything that gets too close ends up dead. Everything,” you say, resting your temple on your knee. “So, I guess, I just keep it all at arm’s length.” You look back at your tiny village, a collection of familiar, un-familiar thatch-roof homes. 

Continuing to blink at you, his eyes narrowed in a strange grimace, Yeonjun says, “Death follows me, too.”

What? A laugh of disbelief bubbles up in your chest. Of course, death follows him. You cover your mouth with a hand to obscure your laugh, but you just giggle at him harder.

A laugh twitches at the corners of his mouth, too. “I mean it,” he says. The lines of his face become distant again, eyes both trained on your face and melancholic as if the sight reminds him of something.

It ignites a question in your mind about something he said in the forest. “You said that I reminded you of somebody,” you say, testing the waters. “Who?”

A muscle feathers in his jaw. He looks away, as if he can’t look at you while he says it. “I loved a girl from this village once. When I was human, no less than you.”

You falter, mouth falling open to ask all the questions that flurry through your thoughts. You settle on one. “You were human?”

“I was,” he says ruefully. “And I had everything. I had the love of my life. I think that even the most bitter of creatures on this island had envy for our love. She would braid dandelions into my hair, and then I’d braid them into hers.” He swallows thickly and pauses, as if the wound was still festering and fresh. “And then she died. She died starting our family. She died because of me, in my arms.”

You don’t know what to say, so you just look into his shining eyes as if that’ll help. You’re not very useful with people, much less comforting them.

“I couldn’t accept that. I wouldn’t. So I went where I shouldn’t have gone, and angered something much bigger than myself. They thought it would be a fitting punishment for me to live an eternity, the King of Death who could not bring back his dead lover.” The harrowed look that he gives you, only briefly, has your chest heavy all over again. “They have a sense of humor, the forces.”

You imagine what it would’ve been like for him to lose his lover in that way. How far he’d gone to try and have her back, but death does not give back. Where had he gone to have been turned into this? An immortal thing, forced to roam the world and scoop up the souls of the living for an eternity? To be bound in ancient bones and made to remember forever how you had lost your lover?

The grandness of what you want to say is too big, but all those words feel pitying and patronizing in a way that you don’t think will actually bring him any comfort. Rather, you doubt anything you say will be able to patch up a wound older than you could imagine. Simply, you offer him a raw, “I’m so sorry.”

Yeonjun lets a crooked smile replace the trembling at his lips. “As long as I live, so too will she,” he says, placing his palm over his heart. “Death doesn’t so much happen when we leave behind our bodies, but when we’ve left the minds of the living.” Narrowing his eyes at you, he brushes hair behind your ear with his knuckles. “I know she lives on, somewhere out there. Somewhere. I’ll find her.”

That intrigues you. “Is there some way that you could bring her back?”

The grim light in his eyes tells you his answer. “My curse is to take life,” he says, “not to give it. But the one who made me this, he is cruel in a twisted way. If I were to find her, as a human or an animal or a blade of grass in the forest, only then could I rest.”

It is cruel. “You’ve been searching, then,” you conclude. “When you find her, you’ll both be able to rest.” But how could he find her, if as he says, she could be any living thing? Where would he even begin?

Slowly, he shakes his head, throat bobbing. “Death needs a farrier.”

She would become what he is. You swallow thickly. Was it not him who caused the deaths that follow you? Or, at least, it was not on purpose?

Opening your mouth, you go to tell him that you’ll help him look. You’re sure you’ll be of no help. He’s spent an immortal lifetime searching, and he still hasn’t found his dead lover. Nobody would know better than him where to look.

The ground shakes beneath your palms with impact, and something cuts through the wheat. The noise of its bleating becomes nearer until the both of you scramble up to find out what’s in such distress.

A deer stumbles around wildly. It looks lame, but you don’t see anything wrong with its legs. Your throat tightens at the awful sound, piercing and sad. Frozen, you watch it try to stay upright before it finally collapses down, legs still kicking as though it still wants to run but its body has begun weakening on it. “Oh my god,” you say, stumbling back. The sounds; its sounds are awful, echoing in your bones and constricting your thoughts until they’re a pinched panic.

There’s an arrow lodged into its ribcage, deep and at a terrible angle. You already know that it’s pierced some vital organs, if not its heart. It continues to writhe on the ground, not ready to give up. You’re not sure if you should approach it—you don’t want to scare it, and you can tell by the look in its wet eyes that it already wants to be away from you.

Or, maybe it had come to you. How else had it found the two of you in the middle of this field?

Yeonjun’s already on it. He puts his knees into the dirt and dried wheat to kneel by it, running his hand over the beast's pelt in long strokes. The small buck flinches at first but relaxes once he learns that his touches are gentle, not the gnashing of hungry teeth ready to make him a meal.

Blood runs like lead through your veins. You say, “Can we help it?”

He shakes his head. “He’ll die.”

Whip-lashed, you swallow thickly. He says it so unphased, and you’re sure he is. You can hardly make yourself mirror that serenity that he exudes as he runs his hand over its flank, but you get on the ground beside him anyway.

The buck’s breaths slow to desperate drags for breath. For a few long minutes, the two of you sit in silence and stay with him until he no longer fights, until his breaths are ragged. You feel his side, still warm and alive, but you see the life going from his eyes. You sit here, talking to each other about nothing just so it hears gentle voices as it goes, for a while.

Eventually, he’s gone. Quiet and at peace, no longer hurting. This time, when you look over to Yeonjun who still smooths over the deer’s skin even as he goes, guiding him delicately into whatever greets us when we go, you see death as a gentle thing.

༺ ꘏ ༻

Though you never seek him out, Yeonjun always finds you. In hidden places, away from prying eyes, he appears behind you and makes himself known. Well, you have a feeling that he watches you for a while before saying anything. It’s hard not to feel the strange tingling of his gaze over your form. It’s akin to the sixth sense that’s supposed to keep you safe out in the dark hearts of forests, an innate feeling that tells you some beast with a rotten, pale maw watches you between the trees.

Yeonjun doesn’t feel rotten, though, preternatural and eerie as he is. As you shirk your duties and talk with him for hours, you stare into ancient eyes and watch his crooked mouth move around his words and you feel an odd comfort. As if he’s the only one who’s ever understood you, or maybe that your strangeness pales beside him and for once you’re nothing but who you are. So many nights, the sun fell on your talking until the night insects buzzed from the grasses and your eyes were heavy.

Sometimes, as you dozed off with your back to a hay bale or a hardwood wall of the abandoned home beside yours with its sagging thatched roof, you caught such festering longing in his his eyes that you’d let your lashes fall and pretend to sleep so that you could imagine what it was that he longed for. No doubt his lost lover. When you imagine him, bound in bones and coming back to haunt the living for an eternity as he mourns her infinitely, searching for her in impossible places, your chest aches with a gnawing intensity.

It’s a terrible, cursed existence. Even the nothingness of death becomes a paradise beside it.

“Is it scary?” you ask into the air, sat criss-crossed on the thick duvet of the bed. He sits across from you, looking perfectly lazy. Moonlight pools in like sterling mist through the shutters.

“What?” He watches you, sitting in your plain dress, as though you’re the only thing in the world.

You’ve begun to wonder. Wonder about those looks he gives you.

Shifting, you fix the shoulder of your soft chemise where it’s slipped down when you catch his eyes lingering on it. His throat bobs. “Dying,” you elaborate. “Is it really nothing? After we go, all of it was for nothing?”

A slow smile tugs his full lips, made a bit red in the middle where he likes to worry it. It’s such a human habit to see on something so far from human. “Hardly,” he says. “It’s like going home, right where your soul is supposed to be. Who do you think rides with me?”

Furrowing your brows, you tilt your head toward one shoulder and let your hair pool there. “The riders are dead?” You had thought they were undead in some way like Yeonjun, other sorts of revenants come back to life with their own purposes. Then, are their creepy horses dead, too? A chill goes down your arms. Sometimes, sitting here with him when his face is made soft by the orange glow of the fire he puts on, you forget what he is.

“They are.” He nods, leaned back onto his elbows, his eyes alight with a hunger that makes your insides feel funny. “It doesn’t stop once we’ve died. You don’t need to be scared, my love. So many things end, but then so many things begin. The earth no longer holds you down, the weight of being is gone. You don’t know anything like it; you don’t know leaving behind the pleasures of earth to know the ones that only the afterlife can show you.”

His eyes laced with something entirely else, he adds, “And it’s not the end. Not for everything. For some it’s only the beginning, and for others, those who have not yet fulfilled their purpose, they come back to the flesh. They return.”

You can’t tell if he means himself, or something else. The weight in his eyes, dark, endlessly swirling pools, makes you wonder again why it is that he’s lingering here: the place that he had not visited once since the death of his lover, for the fact that it still hurts too much. Why his shadow of death, his fault or not, was tangled in your soul enough to brush its fingers over the things around you.

“It’s scary,” you say, breathy. The thought of eternity.

Soft hairs brush over his eyes as he tilts his head at you. “Do I scare you?”

“No.”

“No?” he echos, pushing himself up so that he leans back onto his palms. “Isn’t that strange? Pretty little thing says she’s not afraid of death, but her heart races when I’m near. Her sweet heart jumps at just the brush of my leg. Are you sure you’re telling me the truth, love?”

Your blood roars in your veins, inflaming your cheeks and making your head dizzy. Nobody’s ever looked at you like that before. Hair prickles on your skin. “Yes,” you breathe.

Feral delight sparks in his eyes, black as pitch. His smile turns up all feline at the crooked corners. “Crawl to me, then.”

Like how fire licks up oxygen in any room it is in, his words steal the breath right from your lungs. What does he think you are? You blink at him wide-eyed and dumb for a moment.

How can he say that as though it were nothing? Moreover, how does the ravenous flare in his eyes, his head tilted back as he watches you down his nose expectantly, do that to your belly?

Your mind glazes over with something thick and heady, and you damn the nerves in your belly and begin to crawl from your end of the bed to his. His tongue darts out to wet his lips, making sure you feel every inch of the taunt in his eyes as he trains them on you. When you’ve gotten to him through the thickness in the air, you settle into his lap and bracket his waist with your thighs.

Yeonjun takes the soft fat of your hips in his fingers. “Fuck,” he says. It sounds like he’s barely holding the gates on something endlessly consuming. Something that might break loose on the two of you, and leave you changed forever with its hungry, gnashing teeth. His head hits your collarbone. “Tell me to stop. Please, tell me to go. Because I don’t know how.”

“Don’t,” you say. “Don’t stop. I want it, Yeonjun. I want this.”

He straightens, pupils blown and eyes as tense as his set jaw. “No, you don’t understand what you’re asking for. All I’ve ever done is ruin. All I’ll ever do is ruin. I won’t ruin you; not again.”

That rings bells somewhere outside the heavy fog that’s infiltrated your mind, but they don’t sound too alarming when he looks as though he wants to drag his teeth over your heart to taste its beating. It doesn’t touch the ground, when you want him to, so badly. So badly that you taste it on your tongue and it tinges your words as you tell him, “I do know what I’m asking for. I want you. Yeonjun. Don’t you want me too?” Voice and confidence wavering, you pull back. Maybe you’ve read this all wrong. A tickling shame crawls over your skull. “Do you not want me?”

“You think I don’t want you?” he says, straightening up and meeting your gaze. His breath is hot on your mouth. “I want you so fucking bad. You are in the marrow of my bones. Fuck, I have done nothing but want you, but I am foul. I will only hurt you.”

He takes your hand and places it over his chest, where a heart should be. Beneath your palm, you do not feel the thumping of an alive thing. Yeonjun has no heart. You knit your brows and examine the strain of his features. Does he think that you’ll be disgusted? Maybe the girl you were in that forest might’ve been, but being near Yeonjun has changed you in ways you couldn’t start to put your finger on. “I’m asking you to,” you say. “Show me what you want to do to me. What you’ve wanted to do to me.”

Searing silence burns between you as he drinks that in, and then he shoves you onto your back. Supporting himself with an arm beside your head, he curls his fingers into your hip and nudges your thighs wider. He doesn’t lift the hem of your chemise like you expect him to. No—Yeonjun begins to grind himself into your cunt through all the layers of your clothes. Though your dress is bunched up and his pants lay between any real contact, Yeonjun’s hard and that friction tastes fleetingly sweet.

“I want you to beg me for it,” he says, grinning down at you with cruel intention. “Beg me, and make it so pretty.”

You let little sounds linger in that back of your throat and become hungrier each time he grinds against you. It’s so much, mind swimming and sparks spraying up your spine, and yet each time it is not near enough. Damn that foxish smile on his face; you beg for him anyway. “Yeonjun,” you breathe, curling your fingers around the wrist of that hand with which he pins your hip. “P…lease, will you help me? It feels so good; I want more, please.”

He raises his eyebrows at you and an eager grind comes right over your throbbing clit. 

You know he wants more than that, but mortification already is making your voice unsteady and your cheeks burn. “Yeonjun,” you huff, hips wiggling.

The king of the undead delights fully in your shame and rewards you with more of those pointed, dry grinds. Your legs tremble; he’s giving you so little, and yet your need takes it and magnifies it into something grand.

Though he pretends he’s on some high ground, you hear his shuddering breaths each time his fucks his hips against you. He feels that roiling, liquid need in his belly just as vehemently as you do. The room fills with your breathy pants and grinding bodies. You catch your lip in your teeth and begin to meet him half-way. Your moans are low and sweet, and each one sends his jaw tighter. 

You twist and grind against each other like fumbling teens until you’re coiled up so tight that he has to pull himself away. Your throbbing cunt protests, but you know he doesn’t want you cumming like this.

“You want me to show you what I’ve wanted to do to you?” he says, working at his pants. His eyes are so drunk on you, and his cheeks betray his state. “Open your legs, my love. Let me show you a little death.”

Throat gone dry, you slowly let your thighs fall open. The dull throbbing between your thighs roars to life. He slides your skirt up your leg, stopping when he frees your knee to pepper a few hot kisses into it. Once he’s got it bunched up at your ribcage, he runs his tongue over his dry lips to wet them. “Fuck. Such a pretty pussy. I want to fucking eat you up.”

“Yeonjun,” you whine. His name is all you can muster out, anticipation sharpened to a knife point.

Flashing his teeth, he purrs, “You like that, you filthy thing. I bet you’d like for me to fuck you till your brain’s gone and all that’s left is my name. Isn’t that right? Is that what you want?”

Your thoughts stall and you nod, making your mouth into a filthy pout. God, how you want that. Maybe he’s right about you being filthy. Coming from him, it sounds like a delicious thing to be.

The pretty, leaking tip of his cock brushes your clit as he slides it up and down your slit to collect the mess there. Your thighs jump to close before your mind gets the better of it. He does this a few times—up and down, letting you feel and get used to the size and length of him all the way till his cockhead kisses your clit and you squeak.

“Are you comfortable, love?” he asks, shifting your hips with strong hands. “Do you need anything from me?”

It’s so at odds with his other, nastier words. Your head spins, the moonlight blurring. “I’m okay,” you tell him. “I… just want you. Want you to put it in, want to feel you.”

His cock catches on your hole, and he begins to push forward with promising pressure. But then he pulls back, smiling downturned. You whine; why can’t he save his capriciousness for later? You’d almost had it…

“I could give it to you, or I could not…” He hums. “Wouldn’t that be so cruel of me? To leave you wanting?”

You flutter around nothing. Every inch of your body buzzes. Alive. You are more alive now, at the promise of Death’s touch, than ever before. The irony might be something to wonder about if you weren’t dribbling down onto the bed sheets with crude need. “Stop it,” you say. Your voice is whiny. You’re glad you can hardly hear yourself past the pounding in your bloodstream.

That delights the King of Death. He wrinkles his nose at you, burning you alive with his eyes as he presses his palm to your belly and guides himself into you with his free hand. You wrap around each inch of him slowly. The air between you bows under the weight of your gazes; he holds your eyes the whole way, inch by inch until he’s seated fully into you with his groin flush to your body. He stretches you to fit, and yet it’s just right. You could ask for no more or no less; you might even think your body was made for him, were you not too busy circling your hips to feel him.

“Good?” he says, squeezing your hip. “Do you need a moment?”

Pursing your lips, you test out the shape of him with another wiggle. “Maybe… Maybe a second.” Truth be told, you need a moment to grapple with the sparks sprinkling over your mind more than you need a moment to adjust to his stretch. You let out a shuddering breath.

He traces circles into your belly, just beneath your navel. The pad of his thumb goes round and round, warm on your flesh. “As long as you need,” he says, but it’s more like a triumphant, playful coo. There’s that lopsided smirk. One day, you’d like to kiss it off him. Taking that hypnotizing finger, Yeonjun trails it up your stomach, over your ribcage. He hooks it beneath your dress and drags it higher, revealing the soft swells of your breasts to the air. You shudder, body so, so hot that your nipples peak and tighten against the cool air.

“Such pretty tits,” he says, brushing his knuckle up the underside of one. “Everything about you. Such a pretty, pretty body. God, I don’t know if I want to worship it or ruin it.” His breaths fan over your skin as he bends down and pops an eager nipple into his mouth, lavishing it before releasing it with a lewd pop and letting his mouth fall all over your breast. Lick here, nip there, until you’re squirming adequately and squeezing him like a virgin. Then he blows cool air over it and watches with eyes like a cat toying with its prey as you shudder harder, your chest jumping. “Fucking look at you,” he sneers.

“Junnie,” you say, lost for breath. You think you’ve walked yourself into the lion’s den.

His breathy laughs fall over your breast. Taking his teeth, he drags them over your skin, right over where your heart thunders a rhythm fully for him, and then he bites. Nothing more than a shallow mark, the shape of his teeth in your soft tit. He lingers there, admiring the sight before he straightens himself up again.

“Fine.” He pulls out of you slowly, but you know what comes after that, so you savor every second of it. “I suppose you’ve wanted after it long enough. Let me hear your sweet voice again, my love.”

Yeonjun fucks you just right. His cock nudges right up on your sweet spot as if he’s done this before. Like he knows where to find it. You gasp and whine—you’re just happy he’s finally giving you something. 

“Oh, fuck,” you mewl. His shoulders wear the red crescent marks of your nails. “That’s—so good right there.”

Ever egotistical and cocky, he croons, “Yeah?” Rolling himself back, he makes it his mission to hit it ruthlessly.

A sharp, pitchy sound comes tumbling past your lips. You bring your hand up over your mouth, letting your eyelids dust your burning cheeks so that you can brave the flipping in your spine and deep in your belly. It’s nearly insufferable—the way pleasure licks up your spine, how it spreads out into your veins and takes control of you.

“No,” Yeonjun growls. “Don’t you dare close your eyes. Let me see that look in your eyes when you cum.”

Your eyes are heavier than they’ve ever been, but you open them. The sight that greets you is worth the effort. Yeonjun’s lip twitches and then he throws his head back, the column of his neck on display as his Adam's apple jumps around a thick swallow.

If that sight wasn’t enough to send you teetering down into whatever depths of lust and ecstasy that he crawled out from, then the angle he hits as he pushes one of your thighs to your chest is. The world frays, deep tremors starting at one small point in your cunt and then exploding up through your stomach and down the back of your thighs. Your chest arches off the bed and you mewl helplessly, fighting and embracing your orgasm in an intoxicating death.

“Oh, fuck,” Yeonjun growls, strained with something whinier as he watches you shake beneath him. “Fuck. I’m gonna—fuck, I’m gonna cum…” His voice chokes as his hips become stuttered more than pointed, the slick sounds of your own release tangling up with his grunts and pants until he shudders and stills, cumming into your puffy, fluttering cunt.

You both catch your breaths as if there’s no air in the room left for a while. His hair’s damp on his forehead, as is yours on your neck, and his eyes droop lazily. More lazy and content than you’ve ever seen him.

Collecting you to his chest, where only your heart thumps away frantically, he presses his mouth to your ear and says, “Do you think death is so scary now?”

With your limbs nothing more than boneless and liquid pleasure floating slowly through your thoughts, you smile.

A little death can be more visceral than living, you think.

༺ ꘏ ༻

The tree stump beneath you makes your tailbone ache. You sit criss-crossed, watching Soobin work away at the soil and tend to that section of the fence that’s begun to rot and sag. Your mouth moves endlessly, filling the space that would otherwise just be made up of his grunts of hard work.

“You know, you ought to help me if you’re just going to sit and watch,” he says, straightening to swipe at his forehead, sweaty despite the cold in the air.

“Totally improper,” you say, smiling at him cheekily. “Are you saying that you can’t handle yourself, strong man?”

He glares at you with the venom only somebody made to put up with hours of chatter could muster. “What’s got you so talkative?” he says.

You know he means why you’re suddenly not glaring him away. You can’t tell him that you’ve spoken with Death himself, so instead you say, “Nothing.” Letting your legs dangle down, you smile at him.

Yeonjun hadn’t done any of it. It’s a comfort, to some degrees, to know that. It’s not your fault that they died. Being around them, being around Soobin, won’t make them turn up dead. The rest of them still don’t know that—and they wouldn’t believe it, anyway—but the black shadow hanging over your shoulders dissipates.

For the first time in so, so long, you do not feel marked by death.

“Sure.” His smile tilts. “A week ago, you wouldn’t even look at me.”

Rolling your eyes, you decide to give him a hard time. “Not true. You just have a way of getting on my nerves.”

“I take pride in that.”

“Take pride in what? Being insufferable?”

Crinkling his nose, he says, “Knowing how to bother you best.”

“Get back to work, stupid.” Your heart soars. It’s good to have friends. To let yourself have friends is an ever better thing. Is this how it is? To be with others and not feel like their burden, or like they’re crossing their fingers behind their back to ward off whatever bad things you might bring onto them? He’s made it his mission to hover around you no matter what, but this feels different.

Maybe, for so long, part of it has been your own gloom that’s obscured it all. Maybe if you didn’t bare your teeth to anybody who got too close, it could’ve been like this always. You hate to think that your own isolation could be some part your own fault. But how were you not to show your teeth when someone tried to reach their hand out to you?

It doesn’t matter now. You shove that all down and let yourself feel the slight warmth of the sun’s glow on your skin where it peeks through the clouds. It’s a nice day, you shouldn’t ruin it with those thoughts.

The sun’s begun making its descent when Soobin’s done. He takes a long drink of water, hissing with relief and crumpling down to the ground with his back to your stump.

“Are you making any way with that girl you were talking to me about?” you prompt.

Giving you a long look over his shoulder, he says, “Don’t.”

“What?” You laugh a little, raising your brows down at him. “I’m not doing anything.”

“You know what you’re doing,” he says, voice flat as he picks stickers out of his fingers.

Soobin’s had a thousand different crushes. There was that daughter of the shepherd, and then the wealthy merchant’s daughter and her long pretty hair, and then the neighbor… Well, you could go on. None of them ever really came to fruition for the poor guy. He thinks that it’s because he’s a poor farmer’s son, but you always tell him that it’s because he’s got an insistent mouth, and that he should be more grateful that you deal with him. Your lips turn up at the corners a little thinking about it—he’ll find the one eventually, but you like the indignant look on his face when you say it.

“I mean it!” you say, nudging him with your leg. “Tell me. I want to know.”

“You won’t even tell me what’s happening with you. Until one of us quits keeping secrets,” he says, placing accusation heavy over the words, “I’ll keep my dealings to myself. What’s it to you, anyway?”

Feeling the weight of his head as he lets it loll lazily against your thigh, you decide that it couldn’t hurt to tell him. The itch to tell somebody crawls under your skin. Especially to tell him. “You know the other day? When I was… being awful?”

His body shakes with a vindicated laugh. “If you’re nothing else, at least you’re self-aware.”

You skirt around that with your own, more awkward, laugh. It’s nice that he thinks so, but you don’t feel it. “Stop,” you huff and nudge him again. “I was foraging out where I usually go. But I guess I wandered out farther than I thought I did. You remember when they used to tell us stories, right? Like the bogeyman. That he’d come snatch us up if we didn’t listen.” Your mom especially had loved that one, back when she cared what became of you. Would she care again, if you told her that everything was fine? “Well, I don’t know if you remember the one about The Wild Hunt, but… Anyway, I was picking some stuff, and…”

Sitting up from his exhausted slouch, Soobin looks like he’s suddenly come back to life. “What?” he interrupts. His voice is strangely serious.

“What?” you say, brow creasing. “They travel here and there… but they were here. In the woods. Like, I heard them.”

Tersely, he asks, “What were you doing that deep in the woods?”

“I mean, I just kept on finding nice stuff until I just… was deeper.” You survey him. You hadn’t thought that he’d react like this. “So I ran, and then there was this guy,” you say, watching realization fall over his face. He knew those stories as much as you do—knew where you were going with this. He is as starkly superstitious as the rest of your people, you forgot. Pushing past the grimace on his face, you say, “And I knew that he was the king. The one from the stories. It was so weird; it’s like you can feel it. And I spoke to him, and then…”

Stood up now, he cuts you off once more. “Are you kidding?”

“Why are you being like that?” you say, messing with your skirts to quell the defensive bite in your tone. “I didn’t do anything.”

“You didn’t do anything? Are you trying to get killed?” He throws up his hard-working hands. “We have rules for a reason. Don’t go out into the forest, don’t make deals with faeries, don’t follow a banshee scream. And then you go and talk to the king of death? How am I not supposed to be upset about that? You know that…” Soobin blinks a few times as if second-guessing what he’s about to say, but he says it anyway. “You know that he’s the reason that they treat you how they do. You know that he’s the one who ruined your life. Why would you ever mess with that?”

You push yourself up from the ground, eyes burning. That stings like a cut. “He didn’t do it. None of it is his fault,” you say, furrowing your brows. “What are you trying to say, Soobin? Just say what you want to say. Come on.”

“He didn’t do anything?” He scoffs, letting a heavy silence hang suspended in the air for a moment before saying, “Is that what he told you? And you just believed it? Listen to yourself, does that make any sense? He’s played with your life like it’s some fucking toy, and now he’s come to rub it in your face. Think about it: do animals just fly into anybody else’s windows and die? Do the trees that they pick from just end up dead? It’s his fault that they all treat you the way you do.”

Mouth opening and closing, you don’t know what to say. 

He sees the hurt in your burning eyes and tries to reel it back in. “What I’m trying to say is—”

“I know what you’re saying,” you say, grabbing up the lunch you’ve been nibbling on. “I know exactly what you’re saying. I just never thought you’d say it out loud.”

“Say what?” Soobin says, his voice raising behind you as you storm off.

That you think it’s my fault, you want to say. That they all die because I am a plague, and you are a charity worker for being my friend. Instead, you just leave and try to choke down the tightness in your throat.

༺ ꘏ ༻

You curl your arms around yourself, the night biting cold. Yeonjun had dragged you from bed, and who knows what hour of the night it is? If the heaviness beneath your eyes is to judge it by, it’s far too deep in the dead of night to be outside with your boots half-laced and nothing but your sleep chemise on.

You might’ve just stayed wrapped up in your blankets if you weren’t so lonely as you’ve been. Soobin’s been scarce. The most you see of him is in the fields from morning to afternoons. You hope that he’ll stop by your doorstep and knock so that you can groan about it but swing the door open anyway each time, but he doesn’t. He thinks that you won’t want to see him, and so he allows you your space.

That couldn’t be further from the truth. It’s hard to be the one to come back after a conversation like that, though. You watch him from the windows and hope he understands at some point instead. It’s an awful lot easier.

Other than preparing meals and window watching, you’ve been up to nothing much at all. You hadn’t realized how much you had, but you feel him in his absence. 

“It’s cold…” you say. The fog of breath that punctuates it makes your point. Whatever he’s brought you out here for, you have no doubt it’ll be something strange. The grin on his face tells you as much.

Leading the way, he heads for the Darkwood. “Only you would come rushing out without a cloak for your shoulders.”

“Well, only you would drag me from my nice, warm bed at this time of night. For what?”

“Can’t anything be a surprise with you?” he says, shooting you a cheeky glance over his shoulder. “Surprises are fun.”

“Surprises!” you say, working your legs to catch him. “Not surprises that involve you bringing me out into the woods. You know, it’s awfully suspicious. Somebody who sees this might think that I am the type to… sneak out with men.”

“Aren’t you now?”

Your lips tug down. “You know what I mean.”

He laughs in his airy way, a twig snapping under his foot. You’re well in the woods, now. Probably somewhere near where you’d first met him.

Lifting a brow, you look at him expectantly. Maybe a will-o’-the-wisp will come floating through with its light bouncing off the trees. That would be a nice surprise, you admit.

Yeonjun circles you. His presence behind you tingles in the way it always does, but true chills erupt when his breath puffs against your ear. “Close your eyes. I have something I want to show you.”

Your mind wanders back to what Soobin had gotten so twisted up about. It might be naive and reckless and against everything you ever learned, but you let your eyes fall shut to blackness. If he was going to hurt you, you imagine he’d have had that opportunity a mind-numbing amount of times before.

“Are they shut?” he asks, waiting for your nod. His voice comes from in front of you now. “I want you to keep them shut. You can’t open your eyes, or it will all go away. Okay?”

“Okay,” you breathe, mind full of a bounty of questions. You don’t even know where to begin to assume what he’s got going on, so you stand there shifting your antsy feet.

There’s a strange, rustling sound that catches you off guard with your eyes closed. It drags on for a long moment. Curiosity pries at your eyes; you want nothing more than to just crack an eye open to spy the source of the ruckus. 

It’ll be gone if you do, anyway.

You let out a surprised squeak as something rises up beneath you, as if risen from nothing more than the dirt and roots of the forest floor, bringing you up from the earth. You wobble and send your hands out to find a perch.

A horse. It’s a horse, its mane so tangled and windswept, but matted and clumped with leaves that crunch under your palm when you find them. It reeks of mud—everything around you begins to smell of earth and decomposition.

You know that if you open your eyes, you’ll find yourself sat upon the pale white steed of the Undead King, its eyes white and its knobby knees almost as famous as the leader of The Hunt himself. It chuffs beneath you.

“Are you ready?” Yeonjun says over your shoulder. You can hear the feral grin in his voice. It’s the leader of The Hunt, a creature of folklore, that sits behind you now. He curls an arm around your waist and tugs you closer to him, securing you against the wall of his chest. “Hold on tight, my love.”

The call of the wild, that horn, bellows again like it had the first time you heard it. Rather than coming from nearby as you thought it would, it dances between trees far off just like it had that time, too. Your heart jumps up into your throat.

Taking off with a howl, the Wild Hunt follows it.

You dig your fingers into Yeonjun’s at your waist. Weight melts away, and you know you’re in the air. Your belly swoops in tandem with the howls and hoots of the riders, heart palpitating to the hoofbeats. How there’s hoofbeats as you ride through the air, you’re not sure. The ghostly fleet manifests around you in vivid imagery, though you squeeze your eyes shut. They are wild enough to imagine just what they might look like: with their clothes and flesh in tatters, with their eyes beady or pale, with their hounds piercing the air with their calls and running alongside them, they are a perfect personification of freedom.

Whip-lash sends you reeling, body going rigid. You grit your teeth and squeeze your eyes harder, wishing that you’ll touch ground soon and that everything would become real again.

Yeonjun feels you go stiff. Bringing his head back to your shoulder from his own delight, he says, “It’s okay. You’re okay. Let it into your bones. Do you think I would let it hurt you?”

He is their leader. If it got too much, you know Yeonjun would be there to catch you. Curling your fingers into his, you release that tension and allow their drumbeat to echo through you.

And when it does, your blood begins to sing along. The wind whips your cheeks and your hair, and you begin to laugh with them. The Hunt twists and turns and dances through the air, an apparition in the night, but nothing more than that.

It comes to a slow, eventually, until the noise and even your steed crumbles back down into the dirt it appeared from. Your eyes pop open hoping to catch at least a glimpse of them, but only the dark forest and pale moonlight answer. Your legs threaten to give out on you, veins still thrumming, but, oh, do you feel alive.

You feel more alive than you ever have, more than you ever could have hoped to have known. Mind spinning, you stumble. Yeonjun catches and steadies you before you can go scraping your knees on a rock.

“Oh my fucking god,” you say.

The laugh that Yeonjun breaks into has you sending him a glare, but you break too. Everything about him is ironic; and how ironic indeed that Death himself should show you how to be alive, rather than to just live?

༺ ꘏ ༻

The air is so fresh in your lungs when you step outside that it nearly burns. You clutch your basket of warm fig tarts. Songbirds trill and fly between tree tops that slowly become more bare the deeper you fall into the season, singing their sweet songs that sound like new beginnings.

Raising your hem from the ground churned up into mud from the afternoon’s trickle, you prance into town with a lively pep in your step. You spent all last night making these—Yeonjun had kept you company, watching you how he always does as you pored over making them just right. His cruel snicker when the jam had simmered over flame for too long and became too thick bounces off your bones in a sweet melody. You’ve come to adore his wicked delight, the way his smile cracks over his face and the facetious raise of his brows, more than you fear it.

Sending small smiles to the people that you pass, you stop by a huddle of kids digging sticks into the mud. They look up at you with curious eyes, stopping to gawk.

“Hey, guys,” you say, pulling back the cloth laid over the sweets. “I’ve made some fig tarts. Do you like fig? I bet you’ll like them; they’re sweet.”

The kids stand up, eyes big as they share a look. They don’t let out so much as a peep before they scurry off home.

You blink. Well, you’re used to weird reactions, but that was… different. Picking up your deflated shoulders and hesitant limbs, you make a shoddy attempt at not letting it dampen your good morning. You were expecting wary looks, anyway.

You head down a little further toward the far side of your home village, the side that breaks off after a fenceline into a great, grassy field. There’s a bustle, mothers washing their clothes in pails and hanging them up to dry and a few others whispering at each other lowly as they go about their days.

An old woman so old her back curves and her fingers have gone knobby makes her way to wherever the day’s duty demands her to be. Your neighbor—an eccentric old lady bound in her times. You decide on her: the elderly are forgotten by the young. She might enjoy knowing that her neighbors still know she exists.

“Hello,” you say, showing her your basket with a hopeful, excited heart. “I have some treats that I was wanting to give out. I know they might not be much, but would you like one? I’m not the best baker, but I do it often enough.” A face like that, dragged down by her years on this earth and not long to death, has no doubt spent many years making meals for her family. You imagine your goods would be nothing beside hers, but it’s the gesture, no?

“Oh, girl,” she says, voice crackling as she clutches her shawl tighter around her shoulders. “I’m afraid it’s best if you found yourself missing from this place. Hurry yourself up and spare the drama.”

The incessant cawing of a crow from a clawed tree fades into the background as you furrow your brows and lower your basket to ask, “...Huh?” Your belly goes up in knots; terrible knots done up tight and fast. You haven’t got a clue what she’s talking about. Elders always did speak a bit strange, though. It could be nothing much; she’s a stern old lady.

But her eyes are not angry and glaring in the way that a harrowed old hag might turn her nose up at the youth. They drag down with a cold pity.

“Listen to me, girl.” She points at you with one of those worn, sun-spotted hands. “You had best leave. The boy’s gone, and they are already not fond of you. Who will they point their fingers to?” the woman says. “I hardly know you, but I would hate to see it.”

The rest of her words fade into the roaring in your ears, the feral drumbeat of your heart like a wardrum in the cage of your ribs as it beats against them as if to escape from you. You don’t feel the basket in your hands, don’t feel the solidity of the earth beneath your feet, and don’t feel a single one of your thoughts like tangible things. They flit as if liquidated into a rotten, sick mush.

Nothing. You can think of nothing. Nothing real; nothing holding you to the earth.

“What?” Your voice hardly reaches your ears, but what does is weak and broken and like a plea for her to tell you that it’s not really what you think it is.

And if you could see or hear anything beyond your fraying little rift in reality, you would’ve heard the man coming up to you. You would’ve heard the words coming from his angry, sneering mouth, and would’ve done something when he picked up a pail of water, and you would’ve been shaken by the nasty ice water that runs down your frozen body and plasters your hair and clothes down as he pours it over you. But none of it cuts through your stupor.

He yells some awful, stabbing things at you, and a few others join him. They tell you that you are nothing but a plague, tell you to leave and to not come back here.

But this is your home. Where else would you go?

With your sopping wet dress clutched in your shaking fists as though that might keep you grounded, you choke down the tightening of your throat and sift through their faces, searching for his face. Those brown eyes, brown and always shining with nagging playfulness, do not come up anywhere. Jaw trembling, you search harder. Out on the field where he should be at this time of day, at your doorstep demanding that you go spend the day doing nothing with him, in someone’s yard helping them fix up a broken fence, no matter where you look, neither his broad silhouette nor his cheeky, dimpled face is there. You continue to stand stricken dumb, looking for him even though you know by the churning in your belly that it’s true, and you’re just hurting yourself trying to find him right where he should be.

Fine. Alive. Untouched by your disgusting, destructive presence.

When you can no longer fight the strangling tightness in your lungs and your dress is as heavy as your heart, you take off. The hem of your dress drags in mud and sticker bushes and catches on stray twigs, and you don’t know where you’re going, but you just run. You’ll give them what they want. 

You stumble, probably like some lost, undead thing, until you find yourself at the edge of the forest. Only then do you let the wall of whittle-edged tears roll down your face. And you assume you sound like a choking, dying animal with how you choke and heave on them, but he was the one you might’ve dropped your head and cried to, so what’s the use of making it pretty? No; you let it all fall as it is.

Soobin’s dead. Soobin’s dead, and it’s nobody else’s but your own fault. You clutch your chest to staunch that old ache that’s grown teeth and tears at your heart; you have and will always be the end of everything that comes near. You are just as much the plague that you began to pretend, to believe, you weren’t. It was your stupid hope that maybe you could have something and not watch it become carrion that drove that pick. It was by your hope that he’s gone.

The hair on your arms begins to raise. You pick your head up and find Yeonjun standing in front of you.

There’s a few beats of long, dreadful quiet as he takes in the state of you. He drags his eyes down and they become liquid flame—something different from the impious delight that he is made of. He becomes the King of Death.

“What happened?” he says. The chills on your arms prickle furiously at the words, furling out distant and yet furious like the center of the fire.

You shake your head, wiping your soaked cheek.

“What the fuck happened?” he growls again, taking your face into his hand. “Who did this? Who did this to you, my love? I need you to tell me who the fuck did this to you.”

Letting the venom in your mouth out, you shove his chest and say, “Get away from me. Don’t fucking touch me.”

Yeonjun’s face twists up, looking scalded. Not surprised, though. “Don’t do this,” he says. “Let me hold you while it hurts. Don’t push me away. I can’t… I won’t lose you again.”

All the pieces that you had been putting into the corners of your mind snap together at that. As many suspicions as you had, though, it feels sour hearing it confirmed from his mouth. That you are his dead past lover, reincarnated or whatever you are. That it was his presence—because even though he stayed away for centuries, a part of him still lingered with you—that now has torn down everything you ever thought you could love. He, standing there in front of you like a kicked puppy, is the ruination of your life in the flesh. The flipping of your stomach is nauseating.

“I hate you,” you spit. “I hate you so much.” You repeat it a few more times, and you sob it into his chest as he takes you into his arms. “Is this what you wanted? You’ve been waiting for this forever, haven’t you? To find me again, so that you can die and fucking leave me here. So that you can make me exactly what you are, while you get your peace. You are a liar and a thief. All you’ve ever done is steal and take. How could you do it? Huh? Tell me…” Your voice trembles and staggers off. “Tell me how you made love to me, how you made me believe that you loved me, and all you ever wanted was to save yourself? You betrayed me.”

Pulling back, Yeonjun says, “No.”

“Yes,” you say, stumbling back away from him with a shaking, accusatory finger pointed at him. “Yes you did.”

Fingers itching to reach out to you, he holds them back by curling them into fists. “No. That’s not fair. I have spent an eternity loving you. I spent the entirety of my immortal, monstrous life searching for you, just so that I might find you in any form. I would have been glad to find you as a leaf in a tree, as long as I found you. But, then, I find you alive. Alive and back, as if… it never happened.” He steps toward you, aching to be near you. His voice wavers. “Please, don’t do this to me, love. Please, just let me have you again. I’ve waited… I’ve waited and I’ve waited, and I finally have you, and now you’re looking at me like I… Like I’d ever hurt you. Finding death—finally getting to die would be worth nothing if you weren’t there with me. It was never about that.”

“I could never love you,” you say, matching his steps forward with steps away from him. “I could never love a monster that does… Does nothing but kill. Take.”  You know your words are cruel, but you need them to be. You need him to hurt, you need him to go so far away from you that never again will you cause another living thing’s death. 

“You did.” Yeonjun’s mouth cracks into a pained smile, sharp at the corners. “You loved me just as much as I love you, once.”

“Just leave me. Leave me, and I wish to never see you again. If you love me, then you’ll give me that.” 

He looks at you, clever eyes intense and glassy, for a long time. And then he says, “Would that make you happy? Would it make it so that you could live a happy life, and find yourself something to live for?”

What’s left for you? A small village that won’t ever embrace you? No, it wouldn’t fix your life. But you open your mouth and tell him, “Yes.”

“Okay,” he says, brushing his knuckles over your cheeks reverently. He swallows in your features, running over them for what he knows is the last time he’ll be seeing you—the very last time he’ll see the face of his undying love. When he finally opens his mouth again, his voice is gentle. “I’ll leave you. If my being here hurts you, then I won’t be selfish. I love you, darling.”

Don’t go, you want to tell him. Please don’t leave. Please, hold me. But your mouth is dry, and you let the radiant hurt in your chest stop you. You let him go.

༺ ꘏ ༻

There’s only one place you can think of going to. It’s the only place your vagrant feet take you.

His spot still is held sacred by the flattened, gold wheat stalks. Your best friend, still living here on Earth in at least one way even if he’s not here to listen to your stupid rambling. And he would maybe complain, but he’d always listen.

The last thing you’d done was fight with him. What an awful thing—what an awful way to repay him for being the only one who ever dared to get close.

You sit in your spot, beside his, and rest your chin on your knees. If only the ground beneath you would open up and swallow you whole. You’d deserve it.

What’s left for you? Is there a place in the world that would keep you happily once they see what you do? No. There is not. You wish you knew what to do; you wish you had somebody to ask.

Releasing a long, tight breath, you just sit and wait for something to give you answers. A gentle breeze makes your hair dance, but it does not whisper anything to your ears. Something’s circling over head, but it doesn’t caw in the cadence of his laughter.

The day moves along without you. You’re not sure how long you sit, but it stretches somewhere between a few minutes and eternity. No matter how long you wait, there are no answers. No matter how long you mull over it.

Conceding, you begin to push yourself up from the ground. A rustle in between the foliage stops you before you stand.

A tawny hare leaps out in front of you. It sniffs around you, nose twitching. Then it stands back on its haunches. It stares straight at you, an intelligent light in its eyes that knits your brows. The wild thing stands there with a purpose that is uncharacteristic of a forest animal.

But entirely familiar in the face of your best friend. That shine in its eyes as it stands there, nose still twitching, makes your chest tighten up.

“Hey,” you say, as if it might answer you. Your eyes well up with hot tears again. Of course, it doesn’t. 

Maybe you’ve gone mad, but you know that it’s him. That idiot, coming to show you that he’s okay in the afterlife—to visit one last time and to let you know that you shouldn’t worry for him or cry for him. Look at me, full of life once again, he seems to say. The hare blinks its beady eyes. It lingers there for a long time, the ease of peace found in his gaze that Soobin hadn’t had in this life, saying that there is still something waiting out there for us once we go. You reach out a hand. He does not flinch as you scratch behind his ear.

“Okay,” you whisper. “I’m glad to know you’re alright. I know what I need to do, now.”

He blinks.

You laugh a hoarse, breathy laugh, familiar in only the way that Soobin could achieve. “You look stupid.”

Indignantly, the hare stomps a bratty foot in a way reminiscent of one of Soobin’s huffs before it settles back down onto its forelegs and scurries off. He goes to live out this new form of life, because it’s true: life does not end in death. He’s shown you that.

Maybe, like this, he’ll find that pretty lady that loves him the way he deserves. That loser.

༺ ꘏ ༻

You spend only one night in your home and you know that what you’ve chosen is right. After spending your day out in the field, you sneak under night’s cover into your husk of a room and let yourself sleep there under the covers one last time. When morning breaks through the window, you gather your weary bones up and leave. 

You run into your mother on the way out. She doesn’t yell at you to leave, but her eyes have gone cold. Colder than you’re used to. You’ve killed again, in every way that counts. So you don’t bother with bidding her or any of them any grand goodbyes. You couldn’t handle the relief you might find falling over them, should you.

Plopping down to the floor, you take a few bites of the cheese and bread lathered in sweet jam that you’d swiped from the kitchen. The grass is long and willows in the wind, bending and dancing prettily. It’s so soft; you enjoy the feeling of it beneath your fingers in your quiet serenity. The scent of it, fresh over the baseness of dirt, you breathe into your lungs.

It would be the loveliest place to spend the rest of eternity.

For the first time, Yeonjun appears in front of you rather than behind you. He materializes from nothing, his elbow on his knee as casual as if he’d been sat there the whole time. The darkness beneath his eyes seems heavier, but then again you know that exact heaviness. It sits right in the very center of you.

You both are quiet for a bit. You let the tall grass whisper, instead.

“Bread?” you say and slant your lips into a smile. Bringing it up, you offer it to him.

His smile wrinkles his nose and curls at the edges. Entirely him. Yeonjun accepts the bread, ripping a bite out before throwing it away into the sea of green. Once he’s chewed, he leans in and captures your lips in a kiss that’s utterly at odds with his sharp mouth. Your lips move over each other gently, save for an indulgent nip or bite here and there.

He pushes you back into a bed of sweetgrass, never letting your lips go. Not to breathe, not to say something that’ll pale in comparison to the sweetness of your mouths on one another. He kisses you until he’s had enough to fulfill a lifetime without it, and then some more.

“My love,” he whispers into your skin, his breath hot on your collarbone. “Mine,” he says, pressing a kiss into the column of your neck, and then he says it again with a hot kiss to the place where your dress suggests your breasts. He says it a handful more times as he pushes your skirts up your thighs. “My love forever. I waited for you so long, and I would do it again.” Lowering his voice to a honeyed whisper, he adds, “I would find you no matter what.”

Laughing softly, you run your fingers through his raven hair to better see his eyes. You know he would.

Gently giving you one more of his lingering kisses that make your skin tingle, right into your bare shoulder, he presses into you. You loose a soft breath, wrapping your arms around his shoulders. The beating in your chest slows to a content purr as he begins languid thrusts in and out of you, rolling pointedly and unhurried.

Yeonjun makes love to you in a thousand dusted kisses and sweet words, your hands holding each other’s soft edges. Yeonjun traces the lines of you, taking the pads of his thumb down your cheeks and your lips and then his hand over the swell of your breasts and down your belly and over your thighs. Clamping down on him as your belly grows tight in the way it had the first time you had done this, your thighs begin to shake.

 Breathlessly, as you hurdle over the edge, all that you can say is, “I love you, ‘Junnie.” 

Yeonjun smiles at you and then presses his face into your neck. He doesn’t even brace himself against the grass to chase his own peak. Neither of you want this to end; you want to hold on to this moment and let it span forever. Slowly, Yeonjun rolls up into you until his hips finally stutter and he cums into you, his cheeks pink. The weight of him above you as he shakes with your shared ecstasy, and even as you both have come down and are nothing but lazy, is the only thing in this world. He is the only thing in this world.

Once you’ve both evened your breathing out, you roll apart and face each other, still just two forms bending the grass into your shapes. Blinking slowly and digesting his features one at a time—the angle of his eyes, softened but never tamed, the line of his nose, the line of his mouth always so proud and playful, and that pretty dot below his left eye—you let them solidify fully in your mind.

“Yeonjun,” you say, finally meeting his eyes across from you. “I want to go. I’m ready.”

The gentle, knowing look that he gives you soothes over the way your heart begins to race in your chest in rebellion. “I know,” he says.

Of course he had known. Yeonjun had been called here to ferry you into the afterlife. He had known the moment he appeared in front of you that his last soul to reap would be you; an ironic circle of karma that should be cruel, but you two make it something sweet. Chewing on your lip, you will your hands to not shake as you curl toward him. You’re no longer scared of going. You know that if you’ll be with him, it will be okay. It won’t be so scary. A hot tear rolls down your temple and then drops into your hair. “Will you be with me? I won’t be there alone?”

He tucks some hair behind your ear reverently and then leaves his hand there. “I don’t know,” he answers. “But I won’t leave you. I’ll stay right here with you.”

You lay there for a long time. Chatting and giggling and just looking into each other's eyes, until your heart becomes slow and all you feel is the wind singing in your blood. Yeonjun presses one final kiss to your forehead.

Maybe, in some years, somebody might dig up your bones and find you immortalized like this in your love. Your bones bowing toward each other, as if even death were not enough to stop you from reaching for each other. Or maybe they’ll just find yours, and Yeonjun still curling into them how you know he will for an eternity more.

Either way, the going is still slow and gentle, as death always is.

🪶 ⦂ tears. omfg i cried writing this which could totally be me being a bitch baby but it DAMN. omfg.

rꫀׁׅܻblogs & asks arꫀׁׅܻ always apprꫀׁׅܻciatꫀׁׅܻd!

▸ tׁׅagᥣׁׅ֪ꪱׁׅstׁׅ @lvrs-street2mmorrow , @soohashits , @f4iryfever , @arcturus444 , @linqed , @serenityism00 , @immelissaaa , @luv4cheol , @lickingan0rchid , @20-cms , @hhoneylix , @beestvng , @hyucktapes , @bewitchless , @prince-jjae , @blankliving , @yaoizee , @stormy1408 , @missychief1404 , @izzyy-stuff , @miukuui , @lunesdesire , @sunoolver , @cherricola-star , @xylatox , @filmnings , @hearteyes4hobi , @hyunj00 , @kangtaehyunfan029 , @caratcakemoa, @usuallyunlikelyfox , @zi-vian , @brrytears , @stormy1408 , @soobabby , @nshmrarki , @dontwannacry04 if your tag isn't working, check the mentions part of your settings!

[statsbot]

Living Armor (Dunmeshi)

Below are three statblocks for Living Armors in the style of Dungeon Meshi - colonial mollusks living in between the plates of suits of armor.

AD&D/OSR

Pathfinder

D&D 5e

Full text under the Read More

AD&D/OSR:

In the shadowed corners of forsaken ruins and rust-eaten dungeons, the clatter of metal hints at a menace unlike any other. Behold the colonial mollusks, a curious form of life that thrives unseen within the hollows of abandoned armor. Individually, they are but soft-bodied creatures, seeking refuge within iron shells. Yet together, they achieve a bizarre unity of purpose, moving the armor as if it were their own body. The elder colonies, more ambitious and adorned, shift into grander armaments, echoing the vanity of hermit crabs in their endless quest for the perfect shell. With clusters of their kind nestled in helms to serve as scouts and sentries, they seem nothing more than empty suits of armor, save for the rare, ghastly glimpse of a tentacle through a visor. Woe betide the unwary adventurer who trespasses during their mating season, for the living armor, normally docile, turns fiercely protective of its nascent brood. STATBLOCK Living Armor (Colonial Mollusk)

Armor Class: 2 (due to the hard metal armor)

Hit Points: 5d8 (individual mollusks within have 1 hp each, but damaging them requires piercing the armor)

Movement: 20' (6')

Attack: 1 weapon attack (by weapon type, typically 1d8 for a sword)

Damage: By weapon type

Special Attacks: None

Special Defenses: Regeneration – Any "killed" armor piece regenerates in 3d4 rounds as mollusks pull it back together. True death only comes if all mollusks are killed or armor is completely destroyed.

Magic Resistance: Standard

Size: M (6'+ tall)

Alignment: Neutral

Intelligence: Animal (cluster intelligence when acting as a colony)

Pathfinder:

In the derelict halls of forgotten crypts, adventurers whisper of armor that moves of its own volition, clanking and grinding with the eerie echo of non-life. Yet, within these metallic shells are not spirits nor necromantic energies, but a clever congregation of colonial mollusks, thriving unseen. The Mollusk Armor, as it's known by those few who've peered beneath its guise, is an ecology unto itself—a symbiotic assembly of creatures that have found unity in animating the empty husks of warriors long gone. The eldest of these colonies sport grotesque, calcareous growths, a grim heraldry only nature could craft.

STATBLOCK Mollusk Armor N Medium vermin (colony) Init +0; Senses darkvision 60 ft.; Perception +0

DEFENSE AC 20, touch 10, flat-footed 20 (+10 natural, armor varies) hp 45 (7d8+14) Fort +7, Ref +2, Will +2 Defensive Abilities: Armor Reformation, All-Around Vision; DR 5/slashing; Immune mind-affecting effects

OFFENSE Speed 20 ft. Melee Weapon Attack (e.g., longsword) +8 (1d8+3/19-20), Slam +3 (1d6+1) Space 5 ft.; Reach 5 ft.

STATISTICS Str 16, Dex 10, Con 14, Int —, Wis 10, Cha 1 Base Atk +5; CMB +8; CMD 18

SPECIAL ABILITIES Armor Reformation (Ex): When a Mollusk Armor is reduced to 0 hit points, the mollusks within quickly retreat and begin reassembling their protective shell. After 1d4+1 rounds, the Mollusk Armor re-forms with half its maximum hit points. Destroying the armor or exposing the mollusks to salt water prevents this reformation. All-Around Vision (Ex): The colony's mollusks are well-distributed within the armor, especially in the helmet, giving the Mollusk Armor a 360-degree field of vision. This makes it immune to flanking and sneak attacks.

D&D 5e:

In the twisted corridors of an abandoned citadel, a clanking sound echoes with a rhythm as precise as clockwork. A suit of armor, ornate and bearing the scars of many battles, patrols the area. But within this iron carapace, a colony of intelligent mollusks lurks, controlling the metal shell as one. These creatures, resembling nautiluses with their soft bodies and tentacles, have bound together, forming a collective consciousness that animates the armor. Their helmet-cluster acts as the brain, with the visor serving as their all-seeing eyes. The older the colony, the more grand the armor they command, sometimes adorned with intimidating spikes or gilded edges. Beware the mating season, for during these desperate times they will fiercely attack anyone who ventures too close to their hidden brood. STATBLOCKLiving Armor ColonyMedium swarm of Tiny monstrosities (colonial mollusks), unaligned

Armor Class: 18 (plate armor)

Hit Points: 60 (8d8 + 24)

Speed: 25 ft.

| STR | DEX | CON | INT | WIS | CHA | |------|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----| | 16 (+3)| 11 (+0)| 16 (+3)| 3 (-4)| 10 (+0)| 1 (-5)|

Skills: Perception +2

Damage Immunities: poison, psychic; bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical attacks not made with adamantine weapons

Condition Immunities: charmed, frightened, paralyzed, petrified, poisoned

Senses: blindsight 60 ft. (blind beyond this radius), passive Perception 12

Languages: —

Challenge: 5 (1,800 XP)

Traits

Regeneration. The Living Armor regains 10 hit points at the start of its turn. If the Living Armor takes fire damage, this trait doesn't function at the start of the Living Armor's next turn. The Living Armor dies only if it starts its turn with 0 hit points and doesn't regenerate.

Mollusk Vulnerability. When exposed to fire damage, the Living Armor has disadvantage on all saving throws and its Regeneration trait is suppressed for 1d4 rounds.

Immutable Form. The Living Armor is immune to any spell or effect that would alter its form. False Appearance. While the Living Armor remains motionless, it is indistinguishable from a normal suit of armor.

Shell Game. If a piece of the Living Armor is removed or destroyed, the mollusks inside can use their action to reassemble or replace the piece, restoring the Living Armor to its full hit points.

Actions

Multiattack. The Living Armor makes two melee attacks.

Longsword. Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one target. Hit: 8 (1d8 + 2) slashing damage, or 9 (1d10 + 2) slashing damage if used with two hands.

Shield Bash. Melee Weapon Attack: +4 to hit, reach 5 ft., one creature. Hit: 6 (1d8 + 2) bludgeoning damage, and the target must succeed on a DC 12 Strength saving throw or be knocked prone.

[yootaesowlwrites]

You Are My Family - Kim Taehyung

Note: For @taeandpuppies​

W/C: 1K

Warnings: Fluff, ft Tan.

You watch Taehyung lay down on the floor before Yeontan runs towards him and jumps onto him, making him laugh as he crabs Tan and holds him in his arms before being attacked with licks.

"I give, I give, you're full of love today!" Taehyung calls out between laughter, playfully trying to get away from the lick attack he was receiving, but failling purposely.

“He’s full of energy,” You say as you approach them, they were in the living room, and you had warmed up some snacks. “We should go outside, so he can play some of it off,” You place the plate of snacks on the table, and he props himself up on his elbows.

“In a moment,” He says before taking one of the snacks from the plate. “Just want to taste this first,” You nod your head and watch Tan jump around before sitting down and looking at Taehyung before looking at you.

“Tan!” You call, causing him to run towards you. “I’ll take him out, join us when you’re ready,” He hums as he chews on the snack. “Come on, Tannie,” You make your way towards the door with Tan following full of energy. “Let's go outside for some play time,” You open the door and Tan rushes outside, tiny barks leaving him as his feet touch the grass, and he runs full speed, you smile and make your way towards the bench you had on the porch and sit down. You barely sat down when Taehyung came out of the house and quickly made his way onto the grass carrying a ball in his hand.

“Tannie,” He calls out before throwing the ball, Tan immediately chases after it, which has you smiling as you watch the two favourite men in your life playing. “C’me here,” Tan runs towards Taehyung before running past him, making him run after him to try and get the ball back. It didn’t take long before you were making your way down the porch and towards them to join in on the game being played. Once Tan saw you, he dashed in your direction before dropping the ball near your feet and running off again, you laugh as you pick the ball up and watch as Taehyung pouts. “He’s a traitor,” You toss the ball, making Tan run after it again.

“Is he?” You ask as Taehyung makes his way toward you. “I think he just knows where his bread is buttered,” Taehyung lets out a huff.

“I also butter his bread,” He says, making you laugh even more. “But I get it, I do,” He reaches you and wraps an arm around you as he turns in the direction Tan was in. “I do, I also choose her, I also like my bread buttered by her,” He turns fully to you, moving his hands to your waist. “It’s always better from you,” Your laughter slowly dies down as your eyes meet, and you could feel your heartbeat pick up slightly. “Just like Tan… you are my family,” You could feel heat moving into your cheeks. “Mine also.”

“Tae…” You whisper. You reach up and cup his cheek, your thumb slowly moving over his cheek. “You’re my family too…” His head moves closer, your noses touch for a moment, time seems to have slowed down, his lips were moments away from touching yours, when a bark caused you both to pull back, and look at Tan as he sat beside you both with the ball in front of him, and he was staring up at you both. “Tan, you’re also my family,” You were about to pull back from Taehyung, but he kept you in place.

“No, no, no, my kiss first, and then Tan can get his,” He whines, a slight pout on his lips. “Me first,” You turn your head back to him, and before you could think of doing or saying anything, his lips were on yours, softly kissing you, making sure you could feel love being poured into you. Being with him was pure heaven, there were ups and downs, but you wouldn’t change a thing, nor would you trade what you have with him for the world, because he was your world. And you were his.

You pull away from the kiss and take a moment to stare into each other's eyes before another bark came from Tan and you step back from him, turning towards Tan, you pick him up, his tale immediately starting to wag.

"And now for yours," You say, pulling Tan closer, before you could kiss his nose, you were attacked by licks from him, making you laugh, Taehyung quickly moves towards you bother as he laughs.

"Tan, I get it, I get it, but calm down, you're gonna kiss her up, and then I won't have anything to kiss," He says, you pull Tan back as you catch your breath. "That's better, leave some kisses for me too," He takes Tan from your hands, and immediately got attacked by licks also.

"It seems like he wants to kiss us up," You say. "It's his master plan," Taehyung laughs before managing to get a kiss on top of Tan's head. "Tannie, there won't be anything left of us to kiss if you keep it up," You move behind Tan and manage to get a kiss on the top of his head also. "Careful with how you share your precious kisses and love," Taehyung places him on the ground and quickly grabs the ball before Tan could.

"I got it first," He announces before throwing it, making Tan bark before chasing after it. Taehyung moves closer to your side and wraps his arm around your lower back, resting his hand on your hip. "And I got you," He says and turns his head towards you before pecking your cheek. "And I'm so lucky for that," You smile as your heart flutters at his words, falling more in love with him, if that was possible.

[ruggiethethuggie]

Beer Pong with the Boys.

ft. Floyd Leech, Ace Trappola, Deuce Spade, Azul Ashengrotto WC: 522 Tags: one shot, beer pong, some cussing, they're in college (relax)

You walked into the kitchen, hearing expletives and shouting as you walked through the doorway. The boys looked like madmen, arguing with each other from across the beer pong table. “No, Ace?! You can’t just make up rules as we go, that’s not how you play,” Deuce shouted, standing beside Azul. “That is an actual rule, Deuce. Are you fucking stupid?!” Ace shouted back at him. “He’s got a point, mackerel. That’s just how it goes,” Floyd said with a loud laugh from behind Ace. 

“What are you guys even arguing about?” you said, giving them all a confused expression. Azul walked over to you, putting his arm on your shoulder. “You see, Deuce here must not understand the rules of the game, so he is arguing with his fellow classmates,” he said with a smile. The smile was terrifying, you could tell there was more behind this than you were being told. “I say, why don’t you take my spot? Help Deuce beat the two basketball buddies? What do you say?” he asked.

You watched Ace roll his eyes while Floyd gave a devilish grin. You looked at Deuce, he looked upset. “Deuce, do you want me to be your partner? We have this in my world, too. So I kinda sorta know how to play but I’m not great,” you said coyly. You were lying, though. You were a beer pong legend in your world. Throwing trick shots, crushing the other teams at every party. Deuce nodded his head to you. You walked over to him, still acting like you weren’t going to be of much help at all.

“So what’s at stake here, really?” you whispered in Deuce’s ear. Deuce looked surprised, not assuming that you had picked up on what was going on. “Azul said that the loser team has to do the other team’s potionology work for the next month,” he said as he turned around to you. “And the guy isn’t even good at the game, he was literally just setting me up to fail so Floyd didn’t have to do any work. It’s so fucking dumb.” You gave the other team an annoyed glare before looking back at Deuce. “Let’s fuck their shit up,” you said in a determined tone.

Deuce looked starry eyed at you as you grabbed the cups to set up for the game. “We’ll take it easy on you, Shrimpy,” you heard Floyd say with a cynical laugh. “I’m going to make you eat shit,” you said as you whispered across the table to him. Ace gave a stunned look at hearing your words. “Hey, hey, hey, you don’t even know anything about this game,” he said, gritting his teeth.

“Set up for a 12 cup spaced formation for me, crab boy,” you instructed him. You looked back at Deuce, he looked ready to take them on now. Ace and Floyd looked at each other, an “uh oh” expression slapped across their faces. They both looked over to Azul, sitting in one of the chairs against the wall. He gave them a wicked smile, shrugging his arms and shoulders at them.

© please do not copy and or repost my work as your own, my brain is massive and these are my thoughts.

[kyoshi-lesbians]

More atla gen & sapphic fic recs

ft. water sibling centric fic, aang & zuko friendship, OCs, suki centric fic, mailee, yueki, and rangshi

Gen

morning, an interlude by idleoaths

“Sokka glanced at Katara with a quick smile, turning back to calmly watch the horizon above the gentle waves that faded along the Ember Island shore. They were seated under the shaded eaves on the veranda, sitting comfortably with the quiet fluttering of dragonfly hummingbird wings. Behind them, the soft oceanside wind made a low whistle that kept pushing the slatted bamboo blinds against the edges of the trim.

For a long, peaceful moment, the two of them simply sat side-by-side on the warped floorboards, watching the morning sun.”

in the loving memory by sokkaesque

“[(When Kya died, Katara asked for her necklace. “I am going to be the best waterbender in the world,” she told Sokka, whispering — like a secret, like a promise.)

Sokka sighs. He doesn’t know how to put it in words. Softer than before, he tells her, “You know, you don’t– you don’t need to be a hero all the time. Maybe someone else is already on their way to defeat the Fire Nation. There are many, many waterbenders, out there.”

Then Katara sighs.

She just says, “Not from the South.”]

Or, Kya’s, Sokka’s, and most importantly Katara’s understanding of her identity as the last southern waterbender.”

the three of us by sokkaesque

“[Appa looks at Zuko pointedly, as if knowing what he’s thinking.

Zuko sighs, and follows his own resolution.

“Does it ever get lonely?” he asks, and then kicks himself mentally over it. That was not an apology.

Aang yelps as the crab manages to grab one of his toes, clashing onto the sand and shaking his foot to get rid of the damn thing. He says, “Sometimes!”]

Or, Zuko apologises to Aang. Aang plays with a crab. Appa is there, for emotional support.”

Typical Evening Practice by flerkenkiddingme

“The newly realized Avatar Yangchen arrives to the Southern Water Tribe and stumbles upon a new friend willing to give her a crash course in waterbending and help her feel at home.”

suki centric (/+ sukka)

bruise belies the break by eleonorastay

"In which Suki learns the heroine and the healing can be one in the same."

a brutally soft woman by rolandtowen

“Suki knows this for certain. Being a woman feels like a beautiful kimono, one that she wants to hold out in front of her, but never put on. She's scared she'll fall down and get mud on the fabric that had been pristine her entire life.

That's fine, Suki thinks. She would rather wear armor instead.

-

a character study on the intersection of femininity and war; for day 2 of ATLA gen week, Kyoshi Warriors”

when the moon peach blossoms bloom by idleoaths

“Suki and her Warriors, growing up in the last years of the war.”

Mailee

The World Falls Away For You by ayyna

"A trip through (and before) canon from the switching perspectives of Mai and Ty Lee"

'Cause I could never set you free by aureshadow

“And suddenly Ty Lee was clinging to her and Mai held her as her sobs slowly subsisted. Mother wouldn’t like this, Mai thought. At least for this moment, Ty Lee has fallen out of favor. The smart thing would be to side with the Princess, to take advantage of my competitor’s misfortune and help the Princess against her.

(Mai was eight.)”

Yueki

i have this breath (and i hold it tight) by leoperidot

"“We’re using each other’s strength to hold ourselves up,” Suki explains. “Without you, I would fall, and vice versa.”

Then, all of a sudden, Suki tugs hard, and the two of them almost crash together.

Yue lets out a panicked yelp, but Suki just giggles, tossing an arm around Yue’s shoulders to steady her. “See? I told you I wasn’t gonna drop you.”

or, what happens when Yue outlives her destiny.”

The Courage of Stars by hella1975

“Chief Arnook had always coddled Yue since her precarious start to life. He tiptoed around her like she was a fragile children’s toy, and if Yue had found it insufferable during her teenage years then she had no idea how bad it would get after that night at the Spirit Oasis. Her father realised that Yue wasn’t as safe as he’d hoped here, that if a single teenage boy could swim into their ranks without conflict, then what was stopping Yue from being hurt again?

Changes were made, the Kyoshi Warriors were moved to the Northern Water Tribe, and she lost the last bit of freedom she had left.

Yue thought the Head of the Kyoshi Warriors was rude and invasive. Suki thought the princess was arrogant and stiff.

And then one day, Yue found a poem on her bed.”

Rangshi

addressed only for you and me by thecenterstaysthesame

“For when I visit your family back in the Fire Nation,” Kyoshi says. “You said you’d take me there one day. Teach me how to say hello.”

Rangi stays silent. Kyoshi doesn’t understand why she’s so hesitant to teach her one simple phrase, and for a moment, Kyoshi wonders if she’s done something wrong. If she’s crossed a boundary, that Hwajae is only for Rangi and her mother, for Rangi and the other Fire Islanders but certainly not Kyoshi, dirty worthless Kyoshi from the Southern Earth Kingdom. She props her arm up, lifts herself up and begins to twist to apologize and to backtrack, and then Rangi answers.

“Saranghae,” Rangi says, her tone weirdly detached and strangled, voice breaking on the last syllable. “Sa-saranghae.”

(Childhood AU. Rangi spends the night at Kyoshi's.)"

[whorefordazai]

“Us”

ft. Dazai x gn! reader

genre: comfort, fluff

warnings: suicidal themes (?)

word count: 2.2k

synopsis: even though it’s rare for him to express emotions, dazai’s having one of those days where he can’t help but really contemplate if there’s any value to living. The only difference, is that you’re there to give him the comfort he’s craved his whole life. 

Dazai softly exhaled through his nose, lazily grabbing the bottle of whiskey next to him. He brought it up to his lips, taking a long bitter swing. The taste burned his throat, he could practically feel the pungent liquid pouring into his stomach.

God, how he hated that bitter taste so much.

But there was something about that familiar taste, familiar swing of the bottle that comforted him in the emptiest way possible. A small chuckle left his lips. That sounds like something an alcoholic would say...

Was he falling again? He couldn’t fall. But then again, he had always been falling...even though no one could see...actually...Dazai was stuck. Stuck in mid air. There was something that wouldn’t let him fall.

And that something, was you.

“Dazai...?”

His body lay still for a moment—as if wanting to savor these few seconds of silence before he could talk to you. He let his head hang low, a small smirk playing on his lips. Messy brown bangs falling over his forehead, his hazel brown eyes took in your appearance.

“Sorry I was late, Dazai.” You walked into the room and put down the bag of groceries. “I had leftover paperwork to do, and I would’ve called you but my phone died.” You sheepishly scratched the back of your neck, hoping that Dazai wouldn’t be too disappointed.

But then again, he wouldn’t have shown it even if he was disappointed.

“It’s okay,” his lips pulled into a small smile. Shrugging off your coat, you put it to the side and knelt down to sit next to him on the futon.

The futon wasn’t that big, ever since you two started staying with each other—you didn’t really mind the lack of space.

Sitting next to him, you glanced out the big window. The sky was a mix of oranges and reds. The sun was setting. Shoulders brushing and his hand on your thigh, you turned to faced Dazai. Putting a gentle hand on his cheek, you placed a soft kiss on his lips, taking in his familiar scent.

His hands immediately snaked around your waist, pulling you closer. What seemed like minutes went by, and you finally pulled away. Dazai groaned. 

“Hey! I want more kisses. That wasn’t enough for all the lost time.” He fake pouted. You laughed, and kissed him once again. This time, the kiss was deeper.

Pulling away, your foreheads were only centimeters apart from each other when you looked into Dazai’s eyes. He had that amusing smile on his lips.

Your thumb brushed over his brow bone, caressing the skin around his eyes. “You’ve got that glassy look in your eyes again.” You whispered.

It was barely noticeable, but his face dropped for a millisecond. “Oh? What do you mean?” He chuckled.

You tilted your head, a little bit of hair falling over your face. “You’re drinking again.”

He gave smile—but you knew it was a tired one. “But I always drink. You have an issue with me drinking now?” His tone held no hostility to it, it felt more empty than anything.

You raised an eyebrow, shaking your head. “No, definitely not. I don’t have a problem.” You laughed. “Its just that we normally drink together. So I know you’re thinking about something when you’re drinking alone.”

He blinked a couple times, and you smiled again. You brought your finger up to his cheek, softly poking his skin. “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me anything. It’s okay, we’re fine.”

Dazai inspected you for a minute. The small smile that tugged on your lips—oh that familiar smile. Your eyes always held that dreamy look in them. It held fierceness too. But it was also blank yet strikingly luminescent. As if you knew everything there was to know in this world, yet you also knew nothing.

Dazai couldn’t help but giggle in his head. You were definitely strange, something he’d never encountered in his entire life. But here he was, sitting next to the one person that was keeping him going.

He bit his lip. “I was just...thinking...”

You rested the side of your head on your knees, facing him. “Actually, I was thinking about some stuff too. I came to a realization.”

Realization? What were you thinking? Did you no longer want to be with him? A sudden race went through Dazai’s heart. You were the only person in the world who he couldn’t 100% predict. And that scared him. That tremendously scared him.

He nevertheless, smiled. “And what was that realization?”

You smiled back and buried you face in your knees, hugging them closely to your chest. Your voice came out muffled. “I can’t say it yet. I’ll have to process it for a few days.”

He raised an eyebrow. Studying your body language made it even more difficult to figure out what was going on in your head. You looked happy, giddy even. Hugging yourself, you looked like a tiny child with a sugar rush.

What were you so happy about? Was it because of him? Dazai couldn’t recall what he had done to make you like this—or if it was because of him in the first place.

He watched as you sat up and rested your head on his shoulder. He instinctively leaned into you. Your eyes kind of dropped—but it wasn’t the sad droop. It felt almost calming.

You intertwined both your hands and kissed his knuckles. Dazai would be lying if he said the tiny gesture didn’t make his stupid heart soar.

“Don’t worry, Dazai. It wasn’t a bad realization. It was a good one—a little scary—but it was a really good one.”

He hated that he released a breath when you clarified your thoughts. Releasing a breath—that meant he was scared to begin with.

“In that case, I’m glad. You look happy.” He softly said, wrapping an arm around your shoulders and kissing the top of your head.

“Happy...I’m not sure it’s quite that. I feel...kind of...I can’t even explain it.” You chuckled, rubbing soft circles on Dazai’s knuckles with your thumb.

He was still for a moment, studying you again. But then he gave up. An amused chuckle left his mouth. There was no use trying to study you right now. He dismissed the thought and looked back up at the sunset.

This was enough for him. Just being in each other’s arms, eating crabs, and falling asleep in that rusty old futon that neither of you bothered to change—that was enough for him.

“Say...Dazai. You once asked me if there’s any real value to living.”

He froze. Why had you brought that up now? His mind raced with countless possibilities.

He leaned his head against yours. Caressing your hand in his, he inhaled. For once, he didn’t feel scared. He didn’t feel violated. He didn’t feel as though your eyes were piercing into his thoughts. He felt...at peace.

“And...? Do you think there’s really any value to this thing we called living?”

“Of course not.”

His eyes darted, glancing at you. To his surprise, you looked perfectly normal. Perfectly at peace. In fact, if your eyes weren’t closed he would’ve seen that mischievous glint in them. 

Your voice spoke out like silk running through coarse hands. “There’s no actual value to living. Everything we do in this life could mean nothing wherever we end up. Whether it be the after life, or the fucking end of a simulation.”

Your words felt like a bullet stuck in his heart. Of course you were right. But he had never expected you to say that. He turned his head to face you. “So? If there’s no value to living then why are you still alive, y/n? We could both easily die in a double suicide—“

Oh.

He cut off his own words. Why did he say that? It sounded too harsh. It sounded too real. Too real for him. Of course, he’d jokingly asked you to commit suicide with him plenty of times before. But this time, it felt different. Although, letting out those words made him feel a little comfort—and he hated that. He looked down at you, your eyes were half lidded. The ghost of a smirk playing on your lips.

What had he done? He wasn’t supposed to say that. Odasaku wouldn’t have liked that. Odasaku would’ve said “I reckon that’s something you don’t say to your lover, Dazai.”

He was right. That’s definitely not something you say to the person you love. He fucked up. But then again, you weren’t any ordinary person. If you were ordinary then Dazai would’ve never batted an eye lash at you in the first place. 

“I’m still alive...I’m still living for...” you began to say. You turned your head to face him. Your eyes squeezed a little when you smiled. Hands placing themselves on Dazai’s cheeks, you began to caress his soft skin.

Oh.

He felt his heart physically sink again, if that was even possible. He knew what you were going to say. It was painfully obvious with the way you were holding his face with feather-like touches. The way your eyes held so much warmth when you looked at him. He didn’t deserve it. And neither did you. 

Dazai couldn’t take it. He knew you would say “Dazai...I’m living for you.” And if you said that, he didn’t think his heart would be able to take it. It would hurt too damn much. Goddamn it, why did you ever get yourself involved with someone like him? He wanted to scream out “You deserve someone so much better!” but his throat was dry. Instead, he gulped. His voice wavered a little. Quiet and unable to sound calm. 

“Don’t. Don’t say that you’re living for me.”

The warmth in your eyes didn’t leave, instead confusion was added. You tilted your head, and softly smiled. “I’m not living for you, Dazai.”

Oh.

He didn’t expect you to flat out say that. But it’s what he wanted, right? He was even more confused than before. Part of him...part of him was selfish for wanting you to say you were living for him. Because it was cliche. It was perfectly predictable and safe enough for Dazai to maneuver around.

It wasn’t even for a narcissistic reason. He was expecting it—but you had said the complete opposite. But it’s what he wanted, right? So why did he feel his heart sink again?

This is selfish. Odasaku would be disappointed. He wanted you all to himself...and that was selfish. But then again, Dazai was a selfish man—or so that’s what he thought of himself. How could an angel like you ever love a devil like him?

“Dazai....yoohoo.” you waved a hand in front of his face. When he snapped out of his trance, you chuckled. “I didn’t mean to scare you, silly. You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Let me finish.”

He slowly nodded, eyes coming back into focus. You grasped his hand tighter.

“I...I’m not living for you. But I’m not living for myself either.”

He raised an eyebrow. His voice was smooth while he caressed your hair. “So then. What are you living for, darling?”

“Us. I’m living for us.”

Oh...

He thought his heart would sink like the last few times. But strangely enough...it didn’t. Instead, he felt his body tingle and his head spin from the buzz he was feeling. It felt euphoric.

“But that contradicts what you said...” his voice held curiosity. “You agreed that there’s no value to living.”

You suddenly grinned, moving up to sit on Dazai’s lap, almost straddling him. His hands immediately went to your waist. Grabbing his face, you kissed his lips. Dazai felt you smile into the kiss, and he did as well.

“But Dazai...” you smiled breathlessly, pulling away for air. “How do we know there’s no value to living if we haven’t lived at all?”

His mouth was a little open, eyes slightly wide. You were...you were definitely something he’d never faced in his life. You were something else. You made him feel...feel.

“So, tell me. Have you lived yet?”

You smirked. “Fuck no...I’ve been alive for so many years, yet I haven’t lived at all.” Your thumb brushed his bottom lip, which send shivers down Dazai’s spine. You seemed to draw out the last few words. “But...I think I’m starting to.”

“Y/n...” Dazai whispered. His eyes seemed to lit up. This all felt so good. It felt dangerously real. But so good.

“Dazai...” you smiled. “I love you...”

Dazai smiled again. This wasn’t the first time you both said “I love you” to each other.

You continued. “For the first time in my life...I love you not because I feel like I have to—but because I want to.”

His eyes slightly widened. Was this really happening? Or was this some dream mixed with a sick joke?

No. It was real.

Dazai knew it was real because he felt his fingers slightly shake on your waist. You smiled, leaning back down to kiss him. You placed your hands over his and stopped the shaking. His arms wrapped all the way around your waist, pulling you flush against his chest. You hands snaked behind his neck, tangling your fingers in his hair.

“Us...say that again. I like that.” Dazai breathed out, pulling back. This was really happening. He was—he was so lucky. How the fuck did he get so lucky?

Odasaku would’ve been...proud.

You smiled, nodding. You observed his eyes. They were still glassy—but there was something different about them. Something nice. Something you would give your whole life to see over and over again. Something you would like to live for.

“Us.”

tag list: @uwu-monster101 @14th-century-homosexual-spirit @yosanoslut @cross-crye @stylesketches @starglow-xx @ranposlover @bsdwhore @dai-tsukki-desu

[lostcoves]

ft. ushijima wakatoshi x fem!reader

genre: angst

wc & warnings: 1.2k | reader almost drowns, ushijima gets shot

premise: a forbidden romance blooms after a merman named ushijima saves you from drowning in the sea

note: my contribution to @kobunnie​’s mermay collab! it was a blast to write! reblogs are very much appreciated!

you were drowning.

you heard the stories of pirates who fell overboard and were never seen again. the thought of being one terrified you. you should have been more careful.

you were drowning.

you could hear the muffled shouts of your father and his crew, their forms distant and wavy from the rippling water.

you were drowning.

you felt a muscular arm wrap itself around your waist, a handsome face darting across your face as you were pulled above water.

you were drowning.

you locked eyes with your savior. his olive eyes stared into yours, his drenched hair sticking to his skin. you opened your mouth to thank him when a rope was thrown down from the ship.

“i found her!” one of the crew members shouted. you let open the man who saved you and whispered, “thank you,” before grabbing the rope and climbing up the ship. the man watched you make your way up to the haul of the ship, disappearing underwater.

who was that man?

─────────────────

ushijima returned to the underwater coves, his fellow merman lounging about and munching on kelp. his friend tendou swam towards him and exclaimed, “wakatoshi! dude! where have you been?”

“swimming,” he answered, his olive green colored tail swaying from side to side. had his friends known he rescued a human, ushijima couldn’t imagine the kind of trouble he would be in.

“well you’re just in time to watch goshiki eat a crab! c’mon!” tendou dragged ushijima off into whatever idiocy that was happening. ushijima’s mind began to wander back to you.

who was that girl?

─────────────────

“i can’t believe you fell overboard,” the pirate king– your– sighed deeply, “that was idiotic, reckless, and just plain dumb,” he scolded you with fatherly concern laced in his tone.

you ran your hands through your hair, exacerbated from the day’s earlier events. a blanket was draped over your shoulders in an attempt to warm you up. you tried to reason with your father, “father, it was an accident.”

“accident, my ass. you know how dangerous working on a pirate ship is,” he exhaled with annoyance. his eyes then softened and he added to you, “i’m.. i’m just happy you’re okay. now, get some rest.”

you remained silent, as your father exited your cabin. you let out a huff and laid down in bed, thinking back on your near death experience. if that man hadn’t been there, you weren’t sure if you would have made it. 

what was he doing out in the middle of the sea anyway?

wait, no.. he couldn’t be what you were thinking he was.

curious, you grabbed your lantern and your blanket, making your way out of your quarters and to the lowest part of the ship. staring out into the murky waters, you called out to the sea, “is anyone there?”

a head appeared from the waters, a familiar mop of olive brown hair and matching olive eyes greeting you. you broke out into a grin, “it’s you.. you’re the man who saved me.”

the man nodded.

“what’s your name?” you asked.

the man was silent.

“c’mon, you can trust me,” you replied softy, “i’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours, i promise.”

“ushijima wakatoshi,” he responded, his voice deep but gentle.

“i’ll talk you ‘toshi’ then,” you chuckled, “i’m (y/n).”

“(y/n),” your name rolled of his tongue with ease.

“toshi.. toshi, are you what i think you are?” you questioned ushijima.

he went quiet, a glimpse of his tail poked above water.

“you’re a merman.”

“i am,” he confirmed to you, “does that frighten you?”

“not at all,” you offered ushijima a smile, “i think merfolk are amazing.”

“i shouldn’t be here, though,” he confessed, “i know what these ships mean to my kind. it’s danger.”

your lips formed a deep frown, “i understand.. but i know i can see you around.”

ushijima’s tail gently lapped at the seawater, “my group is migrating south for warmer waters. where is this ship heading?”

“south,” you smiled.

“then i’ll– what do you humans call it?– see you around then.”

ushijima disappeared underwater, leaving you with butterflies in your stomach.

what a mystery.

─────────────────

the past few days went by in a flash. each night, you snuck out of your cabin under the cover of darkness and conversed with ushijima for hours. you introduced him to human concepts while he taught your merfolk concepts. all and all, your relationship with him grew. 

“toshi,” your voice was serious one night, “do you think you’ll ever fall in love?”

“in love?” he asked, visibly confused. you nodded and elaborated, “yes, love. do you think you’ll ever fall in love?”

“i don’t grasp the concept that well,” he admitted somewhat sheepishly. 

“well, love is kinda weird. it’s hard to understand but i know i’m in love whenever my heart starts racing at the thought of someone or i start daydreaming about someone,” you laughed.

“do you daydream about me?”

you blushed at ushijima’s question, “i mean, well, uh.. yes.”

“are you in love with me?” he asked.

your face turned a deeper shade of red.

“i- i-” you took a deep breath to stop yourself from stammering, “i don’t know.”

“i think i may be in love with you.”

your eyes widened at ushijima’s words, “you really think so?”

“you plague my mind constantly, i can’t stop thinking about you,” ushijima confessed, adverting his gaze from you, “it’s driving me mad, (y/n).”

“toshi..” you leaned in close, grasping onto the rails for dear life. he inched closer and closer until your lips touched, sealing the kiss. ushijima’s lips tasted like saltwater, it reminded you of saltwater taffy from your hometown.

“you!” 

a flood of light nearly blinded you and ushijima, as the two of you were surrounded by lanterns. your face went pale at the sight of the pirate crew and your father, front and center with his face red from anger.

“my little girl, i can’t believe it. a merman? a merman!” he yelled, “(y/n), we are pirates, for davey’s sake! we hunt merfolk, not kiss them!” your father grabbed you by the wrist and pulled you away from ushijima.

“toshi, swim away!” you shouted, desperate for him to escape while he could. ushijima attempted to escape underwater when a musket round shot right through his shoulder, causing him to cry out in pain.

“father! please! don’t do this!” you begged your father, tears flowing down your puffy cheeks. stone cold in the face, your father signaled his men to fire. another musket round penetrated ushijma’s other shoulder, soaking the seawater in his blood.

“skin him alive,” your father commanded his men, “preserve the tail and the organs. we need those to sell.”

you could only watch, as the pirates dragged ushijima out of the water and onto to the ship. you tried to reach out for him but it was too late. with his consciousness fading away, ushijima used the last of his strength to smile.

“i love you.”

you let out a sob.

“i love you, toshi.”

your first love was taken from you too soon.

[haunthouse]

18 kenfinn (for tam)

18. red wine stained lips (ft crime au!)

“Are you sure we should be drinking?”

Kennedy’s leaned in close, voice a whisper against Finn’s ear. He’s still the more cautious of the two of them; Finn is only marginally less trusting than she once was, even after near-death experiences by the dozen, and she knows Ken alternates between finding this endearing and deeply, deeply worrying. (He worries at everything, anyways, all the time. Finn finds this endearing nearly all the time.)

She sips at her wine. Lipstick stains the glass and wine stains her lips; an even exchange. She takes three sips because she likes the cadence of the number, the way it feels rolling around in her mind, and then she looks up at Ken, smile tugging at her lips.

“Bar’s a neutral space, Dee,” she reminds him, keeping her voice soft. “Besides, we’ve got lots and lots to celebrate, don’t we?” 

Her voice tips, high-pitched and sunny, into a giggle at the end. It’s a sound much too innocent to come from anyone who’s a patron of Margo’s speakeasy, and she’s sure it’d get her some looks if word hadn’t already spread of what she, Ken, and Combs had accomplished. No one’s looking directly at the two of them. It’s all corner-of-eye glances from across the room, and she thrills in it, even knowing it’s temporary — they hardly have the same reach as someone like Jaylen or Jessica, the Crabs are not anywhere near so powerful, but Debrah is dead and everyone knows it, and for a moment that means safety.

“We should be planning, getting things in order,” Ken says. Practical to a fault. “I know Combs said they’d handle the actual leadership, now, but — we should be helping.”

“Kennedy,” Finn says. She tries to school her expression into something serious, but the relieved joy that’s been thrumming through her all day bursts forward, and she can’t help but smile again. “We killed a god.”

Kennedy wrinkles his nose. “Deb wasn’t a god, just a woman.”

Finn reaches down, takes Kennedy’s hand in her own. Squeezes. “If you really want, we can leave and drive back to Baltimore. If you want. But, I think we’ve earned a night of no worrying.”

“I always worry,” Ken says, but he leaves it there. It isn’t a yes, please, we should leave.

Finn is quietly glad; she’d go with him if he asked her to, would go with him anywhere he asked her to, but she’s been in hiding for almost a year now, making sure Debrah didn’t find out she was still alive and send someone to finish the job. Finn isn’t a person who seeks out the attention of crowds, isn’t someone who enjoys the spotlight at all, under normal circumstances — but she has missed existing in public, knowing people could see her. It’s a relief to no longer be a ghost.

“Worry tomorrow,” Finn says. She leans in to kiss him, sweet and slow and tasting of three glasses of the second most expensive red wine Margo’s got in stock. She kisses him for probably longer than is decent in public, but nobody here will tell them to stop.

There will be things to worry about tomorrow. There’ll be endless, countless, unimaginable problems to discuss as they make the drive back to Baltimore; neither of them know what the now what after killing Debrah really entails, and neither of them have any idea how to help run an operation as big as the Crabs, and neither of them have a single clue what the future has in store.

Neither of them are thinking about those things tonight. They’re celebrating.

[starlithan]

I Promise

Part 1

Siren Jisung/ Reader (ft. San ATEEZ)

Word Count:3519 words

Warnings: none, enjoy

Summary: I'm not good with summaries so lets do it 

prev -------- next

Part 1:

The light of the sun seeping through the curtains, the room started to get a little warm, I felt something lick my face I opened my eyes to see Darong greeting me with a small meow “Yea Yeah I’m hungry too ill go get us something to eat” I said, I got up and did my morning routine and then started to make breakfast.

 mornings were lazy for me, extremely lazy, I ate my breakfast finished up and washed the dishes, while Darong was in front of the TV watching animal planet, I still don’t know whether she even understood that or not, but I let my curiosity die there.

“Darong-ah~ I’ll be back okay, I’m heading outside” I said as I put on my sneakers and head out, the heat was hitting the sand, I squinted “I’ll take a little walk” I said to myself I started to walk by the sea, there weren’t a lot of people but a few, parents with their children, an old woman with his son, I started to head towards the rock where I saw the merman last night, I was fighting with my thoughts “did I see it or did I not?” I said in a low voice, searching through my thoughts, memories of last night coming back but they were a little hazy “mermaids don’t exist, mermaids don’t exist” I started to whisper under my breath.

“Who said they don’t?” I looked back to see an old woman smiling at me, “sorry?” I said turning completely to her “I asked that who said mermaids don’t exist?” the old woman repeated herself “I saw one, when I was your age she was beautiful, she had a beautiful voice and a blue tail, black glossy hair with a green streak, they sing a song to lure humans into the water and drown them but not all of them are the same, some like humans very much, but they aren’t called mermaids their called..” she was about to finish when a guy came and stopped her “Granny it’s time to leave, come on” he said, he wasn’t tall, he had black hair and was covered in black from head to toe, his Granny started to make her way to wherever they lived, before leaving she winked at me.

“I’m sorry, my grandma believes too much in fantasy’s” he said bowing down a little 

“I’m Choi San by the way” he said “I’m Lee Y/n” I said we both shook hands

 “you just moved in” 

“how do you know” I asked

 “it’s a small town everyone knows everyone hear” he said 

“ooh” I said nodding “umm I have to go it was very nice to meet you, you can stop by we have a chicken restaurant near the convenience store.. and if you need anything your most welcome to come by” he said smiling “thank you so much I'll make sure to stop by” I said with that we both waved and started to head to our own destination.

I wanted to take a walk around the town, It wasn’t big San was right, a lot of people waved and I bowed in response, coffee shop, stationary, fashion, this was a remote place but surprisingly had everything, I saw a paint shop so i went there, there were many portraits there of the sea, pirates etcetera but the one that caught my attention the most was of a man crying setting on the rock, his face gave off many emotions, emotions of sadness, joy it was hard to pinpoint a single out of those emotions “you like it?” the Oldman came from behind me “yes it's very..” I searched for the proper word to describe it “expressive” I said he smiled in response “you can keep it… I see your new.. Take it as a gift I would appreciate it please” he said, taking the painting off the wall and packing it “I-.. Thank you, you didn’t have too” I said but he smiled and waved it off.

Night came pretty quickly “Darong-ah your foods ready” I said as she licked her lips and came to the kitchen I put her bowl down “enjoy” I said and picked up the fresh popcorn and sat down on the sofa “a little Goblin will get my mind off of things” I said as I played the first episode, watching dramas was my second hobby … other than sleeping(if you even call that a hobby).

“Meow” I jolted up, shit I fell asleep I glanced at the tv to see it was still on and I was suddenly on the 4th episode great Y/n just great I yawned and got up “a nice walk would do it” I stretched and head outside, as yesterday it was calm no soul in sight I mean obviously it was midnight, I sat on the rock it was half submerged in water when-

*a rock falls* 

The merman “ hey don’t leave I wanna meet you this time” I said I slightly bowed in the forward direction to see what it was but it was just a crab “great I’m completely going…AHHH” I fell back on the rock, i sighed and rubbed my back when i opened my eyes, the merman was now in front of me, he tilted his head to the side and gave me a confused look, “hi” I said in a little whisper, he started to look at my feet then at my clothes, he picked up my feet as I slightly feel backwards “those are my….hahahah.. Please don’t it tickles” I said, he leaves my feet and I sit back up , I’m not crazy this time I’m up. “What’s your name, human?” he says, wait he can speak “wait you can speak” I asked “yes I can speak all human tongues… my name is Han, Han Jisung” he said “I’m Lee Y/n” you said bringing your hand to shake it but he just stares at it “you...shake it” you said he slowly brings his hands to yours and shakes it, and then he smiles and shakes it again “ooookay” you said “I've never seen a merman before” you said, he gave you a confused look and then looks behind “Merman where?” he asks

“you” I said getting more confused, did he not know, he smiles “I'm not a merman I'm a siren, mermaids and merman's are covered with scales they resemble the fishes a lot, we sirens look like humans more” he said 

“Ahhh.. okay” I said, he started to look at my feet again “how does it feel to have feet?” he asks I look at my feet then at his fins “hmm it feels like how you feel with your tail I guess” I said he makes an ohhh face “do you-” he stops then looks behind him “I have to go… will you come here tomorrow?” he said “yes i will” I said he smiles and then takes my hand and kisses the top of it, my face turns red , he smiles and then swims away “what was that?” 

____________________________

Han’s PoV

Alone I’ve been alone from the start, the sea is a beautiful place but sometimes it can be extremely suffocating, the land calls out to me, I wish to become a human but some wishes are to never be fulfilled.

I swim and I swim endlessly, unsure of my destination, of where I’m headed, of where I’m supposed to be, Sirens aren’t allowed near land there told to kill humans, but those who have a broken heart, who don’t wanna live, but I would never hurt anyone.

“I’m back” I said as I got in the cave, I lived with my uncle, the seeker. He was like the law here, hated humans, killed them whenever he saw one, and extremely extremely bossy.

“Where were you?” He asked not even giving me a single look his whole attention was on the fish in his hands, he was staring at it with extreme hunger “nowhere just here and there” I said as I sat down “my nephew, look at this fish” he said eyes on the fish as it struggled “what does it want most now?” He asks, I look at the fish, pity it was to be devoured by my uncle “freedom?” I said my uncle laughed “exactly, but food is essential, find a moment catch it and then kill it” he said as he ate the whole fish, sometimes I don’t get what he says “go to sleep” he says reading my expression that I have no idea what he says.

I do exactly as he says I lie down, clearing my head of everything my uncle leaves, and I’m left there alone with my thoughts when Y/n comes to my mind I never saw a cute human she was nice...right? She had beautiful black hair, her eyes were sparkling, I wonder how it actually felt to have feet …. Wait was I falling for a human 

My uncles gonna kill me “stupid stupid” I hit my head with my fist, I throw my thoughts away and get ready to sleep 

_______________________________

Han’s Pov:

“Wake up we need to go” my uncle said, hearing his voice in the morning wasn't one of the things I liked “where?” I asked as I rubbed my eyes, “ I want you to do something for me” he said and left the cave, “weird he never asks my help in anything”

“Please don't kill me” said the siren in front me, I looked at my uncle but all I could see in his eyes was amusement at how she begged for her life, I just stood there unable to move, it wasn't like this was the first time he was killing someone in front of me, he was the seeker he could do anything he wants “Han ” he said as I looked at him “I want you to finish the job” he said smiling, my heart stopped, I can't do this, I can't kill someone who hasn't done anything “I cant” I say my voice shaking, my uncle turned to me “say that again” he says “I can't do this” I repeat, he slaps me hard, my ears ring “you are gonna kill her and that's an order or I'm gonna kill all the sirens and lay their bodies in front of you” he said, I knew he'd do it, I swim toward the siren and look at her, she begs me not to but it's not like I have a choice I extend my hand to her slowly feeling the power of the water in my hand and then releasing it, water tore's through her stomach with force and she stops, I look at her without emotion, Sirens should be creatures with no emotion, my uncle smiles as he sees her turn into sea form “good my nephew well done, no emotion, just wanted to remind you that” he says as he pats my back and heads back into the cave, i stay there with her till her last breath, she deserves that much.

Y/n’s Pov

“Darong-ah~ I'm going out kay”  I said as I closed the door behind me, we were out of milk, it was almost night, the whole morning I was occupied with cleaning up and thinking about the siren I meet last night, I started to walk to the convenience store, he must be very lonely, does he have any family, siblings I thought, he had a beautiful tail, and eyes 

Wait-

I blinked “focus on getting the milk Y/n” i said and went in the store, i got my milk and was about to pay “I'll pay for that” someone said and I glanced back to see San smiling “San-shi you don't have too” i said but he smiled and payed “you can pay me back by having a walk with me” 

“So why did you move here?” he asked as we walked “well...because of my health” I said he stopped and looked at me “health? Are you okay?, is it serious?” he asked “no not that serious, it's just a migraine not that serious, but thank you for asking.. Were you born here?” I asked changing the topic “no I wasn't born here my Dad passed away and my mom left me here” he said, eyes sad “oh I'm sorry” I said “so I've been living here since now I'm just waiting to audition and be something” he said smiling at the thought “audition? You can rap” I ask he laughs “more like I can sing, but I can rap too a little” he said rubbing his neck and chuckling 

“That's cool you got to sing for me someday okay” I smiled tilting my head a little, he just nodded and looked away “what about you? Any plans?” he asked “well umm I just applied for a university, I wanna be a robotics engineer” he looked at me confused “wait you'll leave but you just got here” he said “its an online university, I'm not leaving” I said “Ahhh” 

“This is my stop thank you so much for walking me back” he smiled 

“It's fine if you need anything I'll be here” he said, waved and went his way

Han ’s POV:

I sat down on the sand

I wish i was a human, how could he be so heartless and to his own kind, but then again, sirens dont have hearts, I looked at my hands, I killed someone with these hands, someone who did nothing wrong, its weird how everyone longs to live, but doesn't care about the same thing, the same feeling when they kill.

“I hate the sea” i said, there's not even a soul here, i remember the warmth of Y/n’s hand how it made me feel a weird sensation in my chest, i searched through my memory for a single time i felt the same warmth as i did yesterday, i remember opening my eyes in the sea, i wasn't born i looked the same as i do now, i had no parents, but this person who claimed to be my uncle, no memory of who i was just my name.

Born of sea turns to sea form

Born of land bleeds and turns to sand

 I heard a voice whisper “who's there?” i asked looking around but I saw no one 

But cursed to be a part of the sea, doesn't break easily

Does Not remember anything 

Love can break the biggest spell

Can tame the curliest of beasts

“Who's there?” I asked again waiting for it to say something so I can follow its voice, but I hear nothing

Y/n’s POV:

It's half past midnight and yet no sign of Han  anywhere, maybe he got late or doesn't wanna come. I say to myself thinking of a proper excuse of why he didn't make it. I was kicking the water beneath me when I felt a pull on my feet. I glanced down to see the Siren boy… which almost gave me a heart attack.

“Can you not scare the shit out of me?” I said, he just laughed “you're my only source of entertainment” he said “what do you mean by only?” I ask but he ignores the question and stares at the thing I have in my hand “What's in your hand?” he asked “oh it's called ice cream its sweat here try it” he gives me a suspicious look but takes the treat from my hand, he takes a big bite and slowly chews it and swallows it.

��Wow you humans have a better taste in food then us, so this is how sweat tastes like” he said “well we have lots of seasonings here salty, spicy etc.” I say as he eats the ice cream completely “i wish you could taste them” I say “ I wish I could to” he says, my eyes were stuck on his tail “can I- can I touch your tail?” I ask he stops, eyes wide but then he looks at me “yeah” he says and slowly pulls me in the water, he takes my hand and submerge it under water where his tail is and slowly traces my hand over it, it was soft it had a beautiful red color, I wonder how it felt to have a tail and swim.

Han slowly lets me go and I panic “Hold on to me please.” I say and cling to him “I cant swim” I say he laughs at my reaction “you don't know how to swim? But you live near the ocean” he asks “nope and what does that have to do with anything”

“Okay I'm gonna put you back” he says holding my waist and lifting me up, he places me back on the rock. For a minute we stayed like that, my hands on his arms and his on my waist.

____________

“so you don't eat humans do you?” i asked “if we did you guys probably would have noticed” he said,

 “where do you live?” 

I asked i was basically asking him tons of questions since the past hour “in a cave” 

“Do sea monsters exist?”

“Not that I've seen any?”

“What's in the Bermuda triangle?”

“Do I look like I've been there?.... Enough with the weird human Questions it's my turn to ask” he laughs,

“Okay” I laugh,

 “do you have a family?” he asks “yeah my mother died when I was young, i have an older brother, and my father” he nods he had this curious and astonished look on his face and I didn't know why “what about friends”

“I also have friends a few” I said “what are their names?” he asked which i don't know why he wanted to know but i asked him a lot of weird questions and he answered so cant really complain, 

“Changbin, Chan, Felix, Seungmin, Hyunjin and Jeongin” I said he tilted his head in confusion “Why are they all men?” he asked I laughed 

“well they are my childhood friends and I was never popular with other kids or girls for a matter of fact, so they were basically my only friends” he nodded in response.

“I wish I was a human” he whispered 

______________________________________

[Author here best if you listen to this song for a better experience]

~In Your Time - Lee Suhyun~

~Flashback~

“I wish I was a human” I whispered looking at my tail and the thing i just committed, she gives me a confused look “isn't it also nice to be a siren” she says slowly, but all i could focus was on the way her heart glowed, sirens can see human hearts, her heart was glowing a bit yellow and then green, yellow means happy or it could mean love too, green means confusion or jealousy and blue means sadness.

“I mean the sea is beautiful, and you must have other sirens who love you right?” she asked looking a bit unsure “sirens have no feelings, they're creatures without a heart, without family.. So no I was alone since the beginning” i said, her heart glowed blue, a darker shade of it, “I'm sorry” she said 

“Not your fault you don't need to apologize” I say, but she avoids my eyes and looks at her hands, i was just observing her, and up till now she was a cheerful and a curious human and… different, not that I meet a lot of humans but she gave of a weird comforting vibe.

“I want to ask you something?” I said it was something that's been disturbing me since the day I met her and saw her heart glow, she hums and looks at me “I-..” I was about to say it but i felt something watching us, I turned around to see something glowing

Uncle, I should have known he’ll follow me, I cursed under my breath “I have to go” I say and dive, i hear her calling me out but I need to get away from her, for her own good

~End Flashback~

“WHAT WERE YOU THINKING!” my uncle screamed at me, i kept my gaze down 

“SHE'S A HUMAN, WHY DIDN'T YOU KILL HER THE MOMENT YOU SAW HER?” he asked, but I said nothing “WHAT IF SHE KILLED YOU HUH?” he said shaking me, I snapped “BUT SHE DIDN'T” i said, i could see rage in his eyes growing and growing by every moment “IS THIS THE WAY YOU REPAY ME, OR DID YOU FORGET THAT I PROTECTED YOU, WHEN YOU DIDN'T KNOW ANYTHING” he said pushing me a little 

“Protect you my foot… all you did was tell me that you're my uncle other than that you never did anything, YOU LEFT ME TO BE EATEN BY SHARKS YOU DON'T REMEMBER THAT?” I asked, but he just stared at me “you have no right to tell me what to do or what not to do” i said 

“That's for me to decide” he said and with that he went in the cave 

_____________________________

[heyimverydrew]

“He Who Calls 2 : The Hooded Witch”

“Tell us a story” yelled the small child. 

It was 1778 and the Witch by the name of Atunde River sat in the dark forrest with a bowl of water between her legs. They were running away from the evils of slavery. 

Atunde had dark brown skin like a freshly aged oak tree. She was plus size and she had black dreads down to her knees. She was 26 years old and a leader of this escape. She was leading dozens to freedom just as she’d done before. She wore a long brown dress decorated with flowers and her eyes were a dark brown. 

“Quiet” Atunde muttered. 

The three small children sat around her. 

“So you want a story,” said Atunde “stare into the bowl”. 

“Why” asked Nasir. 

“To see the story of course” said Atunde as she closed her eyes “ you have to stare into the bowl. This is a story of a witch in a time far from here. A witch named ‘The Hooded Witch’ “. 

The date was February 3rd 2021. The Philadelphia Police surrounded City Hall with their squad cars, guns drawn and spotlights flashed on the building. They yelled through a speaker as Bryan stood in the Attorney General’s office. Gun drawn to his head. 

Bryan was a 6 ft Black man and he stood there sweating as lights flashed through the window.

“Tell them I didn’t do it” said Bryan

“Bryan I-“ began the Attorney General

“Tell them I didn’t kill that cop. He attacked us! It wasn’t me.”

“Bryan if you put the gun down we can talk about reduced charges” said the general. 

“Fuck that!” Bryan said waving the gun in his face. 

The secretary sat on the floor and she screamed with every wave. 

“Shutup!” Screamed Bryan. 

The door was shut and locked but suddenly a noise was heard from the other side. 

“I ordered everybody out who the fuck is that?” Said Bryan. 

“I don’t know” yelled the Attorney General. 

The steel lock above the door knob began to glow a bright gold. So dark it was almost white and the lock gave off this color as it turned. 

“I’ll shoot” yelled Bryan. 

The turning stopped. And the door flew opened. 

The secretary screamed. The attorney general was pushed to the floor. And Bryan stood there gun drawn.

In the hall stood a tall figure standing 6’4. He wore a long black jacket that hung above his feet, a a black bullet proof vest with dark blue horizontal plates, black boots and a hood pulled up over his head. A dark blue mask covered his nose down to his chin and all that could be seen was this light brown skin mans chestnut eyes. Head and chest high he stood there ready as Bryan whispered “The Hooded Witch”.  

“Quite a mess” muttered the Hooded Witch. 

“Don’t fucking move sissy” said Bryan as he waved the gun. 

“Grandma what big mouth you have” hissed The Hooded Witch as he turned to the Attorney General and muttered “sleep”. The attorney general was halfway crawling to his desk when he collapsed and fell asleep. 

“Why’d you do that?!” Yelled Bryan in a panic. 

“He has a magnum in his desk. He was going to decorate the walls with the little brains that you do have. Now stop.“

Bryan froze unable to move only breath. The Hooded Witch got close and knocked the gun from his hand and grabbed him by the shirt as he pulled him along. 

The secretary screamed and The Hooded Witch  said softly “breath slowly”. She stopped screaming and calmly said “I’m breathing”. 

The Hooded Witch laughed and walked out as he pulled Bryan along. The Hooded Witch  pulled him down the empty halls of the city hall office building and he turned the corner to the exit and there stood 5 police officers guns drawn. 

“Fuck” The Hooded Witch turned around as the police ordered him to come back in disillusioned yells. 

The Hooded Witch walked calmly almost as if he was on a runway. “Its ok” The Hooded Witch  muttered to Bryan “I like pigs in a blanket”. The Witch pulled out a vile filled with a clear potion and he smashed it on the ground. The puddle grew a yard in just a few seconds and as the police ran behind him and drew their guns the puddle sprung up from the ground into 5 different portions. It wrapped around each officer and became a hard puddy, throwing them across the office, some on the ceiling, others into the elevator. The Hooded Witch smiled and dragged Bryan to another exit. All you could hear were the yells of police as The Hooded Witch dragged Bryan along. Bryan in a daze. 

The Hooded Witch kicked open the stair well door and there stood 12 police and they opened fire immediately. 

The bullets stopped immediately in mid air and began to circulate around The Hooded Witch  as if he was the sun.

The Hooded Witch walked away and pulled Bryan. The bullets continued to revolve around them as the police followed and shot. One officer grabbed The Hooded Witch by the shoulder and he grabbed the officers wrist and spun breaking it. He then sent his palm into the chest of another officer simultaneously using his power of heart stimulation sending a shock that threw him a yard off his feet. He ducked a kick from another officer and rose to give a round house kick that sent him slamming through a glass door. The Hooded Witch threw the long bottom of his jacket behind him as he turned around and grabbed Bryan. He grabbed him as the bullets circulated, and they slowly began to buzz and slowly became black and yellow as they turned into Bees. The bees surrounded The Hooded Witch as he approached a office door and kicked it open. Before walking in The Hooded Witch  muttered “Kolu” which was Yoruba for “attack”. 

The bees that were once bullets surrounded the officers and stung. They sprang shots that then because more bees and attacked even more. Over a hundred bees stinging at them. 

The Hooded Witch closed the door and locked it. “Be with me” said the Witch to Bryan. Bryan snapped out of it and backed up yelling “what did you do”. 

“I saved you” said The Hooded Witch, he then grabbed Bryan and walked directly through the wall to Bryan’s surprise. They were now on a train platform at the 13th and market station. 

Bryan yelled and backed away. 

“So lets talk Bryan. I know you didn’t kill that cop. And I know you plan to skip town. In your pocket is a new ID and enough cash to start over.”

“Why are you doing this?” Asked Bryan.

“I help you. You help me. Before you go you’re going to tell me where they’re keeping the women being held against their will. The motels keep changing but I want to know where they are.”

“And if I don’t tell you?” Asked Bryan 

“You’ll find out why the scariest people in this city whisper my name. Now tell me. Or you’ll be under this train and not on it.”

Bryan gulped.

“So, where are they?”

“Wow” said Nasir as he looked away from the water. 

“Ms.River he’s like you” said Bryanna as she sat on a log swinging her feet. 

“He beat that slave patrol like” started MBaku as he stood up and kicked and threw his fist. 

“Be quiet” said Atunde in a whisper as she held her laugh “he is indeed powerful. But a Witch in love is a Witch with a weakness”.

They all stared into the bowl as they continued to watch. 

The date was February 14th 2021. It was a bright warm night in a beautiful 5 star restaurant in center city. Caleb sat at the table with his fiancé Demarcus. He wore a dark blue turtle neck with black sacks and pointy black dress shoes. Demarcus wore a light gray suit with a dark gray tie that Caleb picked out himself. Caleb ate his crab soup as he listened to Demarcus rave about his case. 

“I’ve been calling you all afternoon to talk about this” said Demarcus.

“Yea I was at the gym sorry,” said Caleb.

“You’re taking this pilates class pretty serious” said Demarcus. 

Caleb smiled, he was really spending the last 6 months at a Dojo in south Philly learning Martial Arts. 

“So I won the case with barely any fight. Its like I was that good or they weren’t even trying” said Demarcus.

“I think you’re that good” said Caleb smiling. 

“Of course you do” said Demarcus smiling back.

“So I need your help with the Fishville slasher case “ said Demarcus.

“I told you I’m off that case,” said Caleb “I just don’t feel comfortable with it ok?”

“Babe” began Demarcus “this shit is weird. You’re the King of weird.”

“Wow my desire to sleep with you ever again has died” said Caleb putting down his spoon.

“Look at you on the downside again” said Demarcus laughing “no I meant you’re good at weird cases. Think about it. A man walks into a police station and confesses to a string of murders. He can’t remember anything about the last 72 hours other than the fact that he confronted someone that he calls ‘ The Hooded Witch’ “. The police search his home and find nothing. No weapons, no evidence, nothing. We don’t even know if he’s the real slasher.“

“Of course we do,” said Caleb. 

“Oh are you trusting this Hooded Witch guy?” Asked Demarcus. 

“Who says they’re a guy” says Caleb. 

“Sorry babe” Demarcus says quietly. 

“And I’m just saying they’ve done good. They freed those girls from that Motel last week and they captured The Jester. The police couldn’t even do that. Anthony Kale killed 32 people.”

Demarcus stares into space. 

“I hate when you do that,” says Caleb. 

“No I was just thinking how The Jester lost all  his memory as well. All he could remember was the ‘Hooded Witch’ “. 

“Well what are you going to do,” said Caleb changing the subject. 

“I’m going to get him out.” said Demarcus. 

“What?” Asked Caleb.

“The police didn’t find sufficient evidence. Mr. Bestwell has a history of mental illness and his confession wasn’t properly recorded. I can get him out easily.”

“Please don’t” begged Caleb “ you are possibly freeing a murderer?”

“And you want me to send a man to prison who we aren’t certain is a killer” spat Demarcus “I thought you were against things like that?”

“Demarcus,” said Caleb sternly “you can’t help free him. He confessed and the murders stopped what more do we need? Please just trust me.”

“…Okay” said Demarcus “I won’t. I’ll let them give him 40-50 years.”

“Good,” said Caleb “so its settled. You’ll thank me later. You don’t want to be known as the guy who got the fishville slasher out of prison.”

“Right” said Demarcus as he forced a smile.

The children looked away from the water.

“And what happened next Ms. Atunde?” Asked Nasir.

“The man with the knives stayed imprisoned. But Demarcus resented Caleb.”

“Why?” Asked Bryanna. 

“Well,” began Atunde “Demarcus was more concerned with fame and prosperity. And he lost a case he could’ve easily won. So one day. He disappeared. No warning, he just left. After this Caleb broke down. His powers became unstable. And he hurt those close to him.”

“How” asked Bryanna. 

“He was filled with rage, and he began to perform dark magics “ began Atunde “and his friend Tatianna grew concerned. Her grandmother and her coven attempted to bind The Hooded Witches powers. And he called the darkest most unnatural storm with vibrant unnatural lightning and razor sharp winds. He nearly killed them. After being disowned by Tatianna he willingly bound his powers and left them with the grandmother.”

“Whoa” said MBaku “and what happened after?”

“Caleb disappeared” said Atunde “look into the water.”

The date was June 28th 2021. Caleb sat on his car, a 78 blue corvette and he stared into the sunset. He was in a town just outside of Las Vegas. He was pulled over on the side of the road. He wore a white tank top, black jeans and black boots with studded heels. He watched as the sun left them again. He loved the orange sky and he loved watching the sun leave. One of the few joys that he still had. 

“Thanks come again” said Caleb as he stood behind the counter of the small gas station. Customer after customer. 

“You going to smile?” Asked Kya as she got to the counter. Kya was six feet, dark brown skin and she had long black braids down to her butt. She had several piercings in each of her ears and it was safe to say she was gorgeous. 

“No, but I will tell you to grab one more “Caleb said pointing to her shampoo as he chewed his gum “buy one get one free.”

“See that’s why I like you” said Kya going to grab another bottle and putting it on the counter “you look out.”

“I guess I do, “said Caleb ringing her out and bagging her things. 

“Look” said Kya “me and my girls are going to this club on the strip. Its called Elite Experience. Its for Black Queens like you and Black girls LIKE ME” said Kya alluding to being Trans “you should meet us there.”

“I work until 1am” said Caleb.

“The world is meant to be lived in, work will always be calling“ said Kya. 

“Im good,” said Caleb. 

“Okay” Kya said as she grabbed her receipt.

Caleb watched her leave as he thought. 

“Stare into the water” said Atunde “this is when it gets good.”

Caleb walked into the club. Wearing a black hooded top with studs down the sides and the same Black pants and boots from his shift. He didn’t have much time to change. 

“Mmm hey” said a white man as he approached Caleb “ drink?”

“No,” said Caleb as he walked passed him. 

“Caleb?!” Said Kya as she waved him over to her private table in VIP. 

“Hi,” said Caleb as he sat. 

“Is he not your type” asked Kya. 

“Hes really not” said Caleb. 

“What is your type?” Asked Kya. 

“Uh,” began Caleb “ tall, Black, dark hair, nice eyes” Caleb realized he was describing Demarcus and stopped. 

“Its that bad huh babe?” said Kya as she sat there in a tan tube top, her hair pulled up in a high pony tail as she sat in her black skin tight jeans “do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” said Caleb “well maybe. How-… how do you know if you aint shit?”

Kya laughs as Caleb stares. 

“Aint shit motherfuckers don’t reflect they protect their ego. Whoever it is .. aint worth your peace.”

“Wow,” said Caleb “Thats poetic I give you that. So whats your story? Lets invade your space”

“Ok well I’ve lived here 6 months” said Kya “I moved to LA from Brooklyn to pursue modeling. Fell in love with a dude in Vegas. Moved here. He wasn’t who he said he was so I left. So a girl bartends to make it now.I mean Im only 25 so Im not tripping. But I won’t lie sometimes surviving alone is a fucking horror movie.”

“Tell me about it,” said Caleb “ I’ve been here for about 3 months. I wanted something new. Im from Philly by the way were practically neighbors”

“Were nothing alike” spat Kya as they both laughed. 

“Shade” said Caleb. 

“See a smile” Kya said as Caleb rolled his eyes laughing. 

Kya looked at her phone and said “Im meeting a friend outside do you mind waiting here?” 

“Want me to come?” Asked Caleb

“No but watch my purse I’ll only be a second” said Kya as she tucked her phone into her purse and strutted away. 

“Ok Ill be right here” said Caleb excited to have met a friend. 

Caleb sat there as he waited. Thirty minutes passed now and he grabbed Kya’s purse as he stood up, ready to investigate. 

“Caleb?” Said a voice behind him. Caleb turned and it was his old boss Evelyn. 

“Evelyn hi, “ said Caleb “um what are you doing here?”

“Oh Im here for a wedding, a couple of the guys came here. My its been what 3 or 4 months?”

“Yeah…” said Caleb”

“So you ever figure out where Demarcus went? I just want to say it was terrible how he left you and well us. He left his friends to break it to you. And the spat you two had online it was just..”

“Yea I  don’t know” Caleb stated “I mean he practices law in England or something now. I don’t really want to talk about him.”

“Its ok” finished Evelyn “I just want to say a guy who looked like him wasn’t truth worthy anyway. I mean why would he be with you? “

Caleb stared. 

“Im sorry,” said Evelyn as she laughed “Ive been drinking.”

“And unfortunately I haven’t” started Caleb “look Evelyn. I don’t work for you anymore so I don’t have to pretend. You’re as tart as your Christmas cookies which really shouldn’t be complicated. But you’re as complicated as that $3 drink that couldn’t put a fly on its ass. Now look, I don’t like you, I don’t wish to engage with you and more importantly I have nothing to prove. I wish Demarcus well but we were equals. Him looking better in your eyes or anyone else’s doesn’t change that.  Now excuse me,” said Caleb as he walked away and stormed back to say “and expect an anonymous report very soon. I think the Smith’s would like to know that their lawyers have discussed very private information with rival investors.  Now Sip on that in your fake Louis, those tilted ass kitten heels and that brass fake ass gold bracelet. Goodbye.”

Caleb stormed out. 

“And that’s why I gave him a good reference,” said Evelyn to herself “…I knew this bracelet was fake”

Caleb searched outside the club and the strip for 3 hours. No sign of Kya. He even call Vegas police who were no help. No one cared but Caleb. 

It was now the next day. “Tell Mark I won’t be in today” said Caleb as he sat on the hood of his car watching another sunset in the desert. He wore a Formation World Tour tank top, ripped stone washed jeans and white tennis shoes. Kya had been missing for a day and he was determined to find out what happened. 

Two white men and one white woman stood over Kya as she laid barely conscious tied to a steel slab in their living room. They stayed in a expensive home by the beach. Each window tinted in the dark luxurious home. 

“I need to feed” said the woman vampire Alexandria. 

“Go” said Leonardus the lead vampire as Ryan stared on, rashes formed around their mouths as they usually did when it was time to feed.

Alexandria grabbed Kya by the throat and stood over her as she sucked her essence. Kya suffocated and veins filled her neck. Her essence was invisible but slowly left her and filled Alexandria as the rash around her mouth vanished. 

“Not too much” said Leonardus” we need her to last another day. “

Kya cried as she muttered “help”.

“Ok think Caleb” said Caleb as he went through her purse that was on the hood of his car. He couldn’t unlock her phone but he saw that her last text was from a man named Leon. Caleb went through her purse and found a card for a place called “Leon Enterprises. He was on the right track. 

“Vampires?!” Said Nasir as he and the other kids stared away from the water. 

“Vampires,” whispered Atunde “the kind that live long and suck your life force. Caleb was smart. He studied and found that Black women all across the land were disappearing and turning up drained to death. But Caleb was able to link Leonardus to one other incident. And upon learning that he was dealing with vampires The Hooded Witch was ready to fight.” 

“Without Magic?” Asked Bryanna

“Stare into the water,” said Atunde. 

The date was June 30th 2021. Caleb walked around the beach house. It was 6:00pm and almost sunset.  The street was quiet , and he finally found the house that he’d looked up online. The only house he could find that was linked to a man named Leonardus Hines. And Caleb noticed that all of the windows were tinted. “Could it be anymore obvious” Caleb muttered. 

Kya laid on the steel slab as the three vampires stood around her. All of their eyes were red with veins and bright red rashes surrounded their mouths and chins. 

“This is the last of her” says Leonardus “so eat wisely”. 

“Please” begged Kya “don’t. Please. If you let me go I won’t say a thing.”

“But who could you tell,” says Leonardus “we chose you because no one cares about you.”

“I do, “ says Caleb as he walked into the room “and for a man 300 years old you sure have a cold heart.”

Leonardus growled.

“Maybe I’ll put a stake through it” said Caleb puling out a stake that he carved. 

“Caleb” muttered Kya with a smile. 

Alexandria charged at Caleb and he kicked a foot stool at her knocking her over. Ryan charged at him at twice the speed of a human and Caleb bashed a vile of pure garlic on his face. He collapsed holding his melting face. 

Leonardus appeared to the right of Caleb almost out of no where and he pushed him clean into the air on the other side of the room. Caleb held his side as he laid there. He got up and charged at Leonardus and attempted to stab him with the stake, he ducked with ease, then he ducked a punch and grabbed Caleb’s foot as he attempted a kick and he flipped him into the air. Caleb lied beside Kya on the ground. 

“Witches are intuitive” said Leonardus “strong for humans. It makes you good fighters. But better for food.”

Caleb stood up and he held his side. He knew his last attempt was a spell, if he had enough magic to do so. 

“Thin as air,clear as water, now be seen, in this order. Thin as air, clear as water, be transparent, in this order.”

Leonardus laughed as he stood there. 

“Im too old for your magics” said Leonardus. 

“Your windows look pretty new,” said Caleb as the tinted windows began to lose its tint as if it were dirty with fog and now being cleaned. The windows became clear and the sunlight shined through. 

Alexandria now near the door escaped wisely. As the sun shined down Ryan and Leonardus turned to a ball of fire with their clothes and then into ash smoke that filled the air.

“Kya are you okay?” Said Caleb as he ran to her side to untie her. 

“I am now” said Kya as she got off the slab with Caleb’s assistance “lets get out of here.”

“Agreed” said Caleb as they walked out of the vampires nest. Free. 

“How did he have magic again?” Asked Bryanna as she broke the vision staring away from the water. 

“Tatianna begged her grandmother to restore Caleb’s powers after having a vision of his death. And the binding was ended. Unfortunate for the vampires though. Look into the water.”

It was December 15th 2021 in an abandoned train station in Paris. Alexandra and her friend Saleena walked into the station with Breelyn a very beatiful Black Woman.

“So where’s the party?” Asked Breelyn. 

“Who said anything about a party” said Alexandria as she turned around with a rash around her mouth and her eyes now red with veins. 

“Do you eat anything else” asked The Hooded Witch as he stood at the top of the stares of the station and he looked down at them “because when we say Black Only this isn’t what we mean”.

The Hooded Witch stood there in his long trench coat, bullet proof vest, dark blue mask and his black boots. He held in his right hand a 4 foot wand with a orange crystal at the base. 

Breelyn ran passed The Hooded Witch screaming as she exited. 

“Good idea” said The Hooded Witched as he looked back “I like her.”

Other vampires appeared now, 16 of them circling Caleb. 

“Everyone gets some” said Caleb “trust me…. tan imọlẹ!”

The wand began to glow with bright orange solar energy that grew by the second and lit the whole station as Caleb struck it on the ground. So much light that it lit every station in the tunnel. All 16 vampires gone. 

“Theres more” said Atunde as they stared into the water. 

It was December 30th 2021 and Caleb strutted through his luxury duplex and he called his secretary. He was now a private investigator under CK Investigations. 

“Yes Caleb” said Kya as she entered the room with files.

“The nest in Paris was a success,” said Caleb as he threw down his leather jacket. 

“”Boss..” began Kya.

“I mean summoning the sun was messier than I thought but hey,” said Caleb as he walked into his office and turned on the lights “remind me to return Malachi’s wand.”

“Boss someone is here to see you,” said Kya. 

Caleb turned and Demarcus rose from his couch. 

“I think we need to talk,” said Demarcus. 

“What happened?!” Asked Mbaku. 

“I’ll tell that story when you get older,” began Atunde “ but The Hooded Witch became a powerful hero. A hero who flew into the sky, fought enemies from the skies and one day like me moved objects with his mind. Like others with extraordinary powers he became a hero to man and he led those who became heroes by supernatural or evolutionary means. He became so strong that the Gods confronted him. To make sure he’d never rise for evil again.”

They stared into the water and saw Caleb levitating in space surrounded by three stars. The date was October 30th 2029. The stars buzzed and nothing more. But Caleb understood their communication as he flew in a steady motion, his trench coat flowing. 

The first star buzzed, the star was a bright yellow. 

“I have no desire to rule the planet” answered Caleb. 

The second star buzzed, the star was a bright blue. 

“I saved the earth from demons, other worldly beings and the White Witch. If I wanted to destroy-“ Caleb was interrupted. 

The third star buzzed, this star was a bright white. 

“My calling is to protect. Nothing more. I’m in control. “ answered Caleb. And the stars disappeared. 

“And Demarcus?” Asked Bryanna as they stared away from the enchanted water. 

“Demarcus was a good man but a hurt man and he found out that hes not as human as you’d believe him to be. He was a ikooko”

“A wolf..” Said Bryanna. 

“ A WereWolf, “ said Atunde “on his 30th birthday he became a Wolf. But he didn’t turn into a animal. He gathered strength, speed and strong senses. He too became his own hero in London. But not before a very big fight between him and the Witch.”

“Another?!” Said Bryanna. 

They looked into the water and saw a vision of Demarcus and Caleb standing on a busy train platform in London. The date was April 24th 2022. 

“I don’t want to fight you..” Said Caleb as he stood there in a black hoody, camouflage pants and a black face mask. 

“You not wanting to fight that’s new” spat Demarcus as he stood on the platform with ripped clothing and ripped sneakers, dirt in his hair and on his face.

“D this is the Ikooko talking, “ said Caleb as Tatianna stood behind him holding a pink crystal. 

“Now?” Asked Tatianna. 

“Not yet” said Caleb”. 

“You know most magic doesn’t work on us Wolves,” said Demarcus “but that doesn’t stop you huh Caleb? Always in control , with magic, persuasion, manipulation. You are the reason I STARTED OVER.”

“I’m sorry” said Caleb “ I should’ve been honest. But now I can’t let you hurt anybody else.”

“Well then lets go” said Demarcus as he charged toward him, pupils dilated and veins growing down his arms. 

“Now!” said Caleb. 

“Reverse, steady, do not flow” said Tatianna as everyone around them stayed in a 5 second loop. Repeating the same words and actions. The cameras also stayed on a loop as they watched. Tatianna continued to chant. 

Caleb reached behind his back to pull out a chain that was covered with inscriptions. And they fought. Caleb wrapped the chains around his right fist and swung at Demarcus. Demarcus ducked and kicked Caleb so hard he flew into the air and slid a yard back. 

“Keep going!” Screamed Caleb to Tati. 

Caleb approached Demarcus blocking a punch with his forearm and he sent a kick into his chest that barely moved him. Caleb slapped him across the face with the chain and ducked a punch. He then rose to uppercut him with the chain. He swung with the chain again and Demarcus grabbed it and pull, a pull so strong Caleb fell on the tracks. A train pursued. Demarcus jumped down, grabbed him and jumped in the air with Caleb to the other platform. As they landed Demarcus punched him to the ground. Caleb now on the ground lifted his foot into Demarcus’ face and he said “fasten” as the chains animated and wrapped around Demarcus’s body. Demarcus fell to his knees. 

“I know you’re in there” said Caleb “and we’re going to figure this out”. 

Caleb punched Demarcus unconscious. 

“Whoa” said Nasir staring away from the vision in the water. 

“But as far as their relationship,” began Atunde River “ Ill tell you that story one day. Love can be painful, tricky and ever changing.”

“I like them together,” said Mbaku “why don’t they just work it out?”

“Who says they don’t?” Said Atunde smiling. 

With the wave of her hand the fire extinguished. 

“The Hooded Witch lived both a hard and happy life” said Atunde “ but he lived. And that is the story of The Hooded Witch.” 

[chikaraspecial]

Infinite Gauntlet Report (5.10.19)

“The Infinite Gauntlet” - Saturday, May 11th - Philadelphia, PA

1. The Infinite Gauntlet ft. Ophidian, El Hijo del Ice Cream, Ice Cream Jr., Kobald, Boomer Hatfield, Worker Ant, John Francis of Coronado, Unsocial Jordan, Rick Roland, Hallowicked, Duke “The Dumpster” Droese, Officer Warren Barksdale, Razerhawk, Enzuigiri Evan, Solo Darling, Dasher Hatfield, Shazza McKenzie, The Whisper, Bull James, Molly McCoy, Volgar, Hermit Crab, Armbreaker Amir, Frantik, Oleg the Usurper, BLANK, Jawbreaker Josue, Nytehawk, Cornelius Crummels, Sonny Defarge, Razerhawk

2. Young Lions Cup: Still Life With Apricots and Pears (Champion) vs. Thief Ant

3. Lucas Calhoun & Stray Kat (1 Point) vs. F.I.S.T. (Icarus & Travis Huckabee) (1 Point)

4. The Colony (Fire Ant & Green Ant) (0 Points) vs. The Creatures of the Deep (Merlok & Cajun Crawdad) (0 Points)

5. Missile Assault Man (0 Points) vs. Der Wildebeest (0 Points)

[blackwoolncrown]

I was tagged for a meme and I’m feeling easy breezy this morning so why not. Tagged by @lovely-sugarcube

Nicknames: None. My name doesn’t shorten. I do, however, have about 5 other names 

Gender: N/A

Zodiac: [redacted]

Height: 5'6

Time: Hmm

Favourite Bands/Solo Artists: Gabor Szabo, Bey, Rih, Florence +, St. Vincent///Super sick trip hop, witch house, pipe & drum, grimy dubstep, that surreal sort of experimental bossa nova-ish shit people were listening to in the 60s-70s.

Song Stuck In My Head: Something I was dreaming about. 

Last Movie I Saw: Umrao Jaan (remake)

Last Show I Watched: Japanese Style Originator

Last Thing I Googled: Plant Pistil

Other Blogs: Ssssseveral. @peacewitchofthesouth is one.

Do You Get Asks: Sometimes. Usually instigatory or rude so they get deleted.

Why I Chose My Username: I’m fickle and change my url every time my perception of self changes considerably tbh.

Following: Nature photographers, food blogs, spiritual blogs, anyone who posts lots of horses and plants. Oh, monsterfuckers too. Natch.

Average Amount Of Sleep: 7-8 hours. I wake up at sunrise every morning.

Lucky Number: :)

What I’m Wearing: B&W floral

Dream Job: I’m speaking quietly in to a microphone. The people listening to me have come to relax. Everyone listening is guided to a state of healing relaxation.

Dream Trip: First stop- return to Kyoto, hike, travel to Kanaguya in Nagano, go north to Tokyo, visit the Ghibli museum. Hike/garden view multiple places along the way. Stay at a zen monastery open to visitors and do vipassana.

Favorite Food: Scallops, crab, eel, MUSHROOMS. Fruits.

Play An Instrument: I can sing and I want to learn the harp.

Nationality: N/A

Favorite Songs: Apocalypse Song by St. Vincent, Whispers ft Avonlea by Oshi, Cosmic Love by Florence & The Machine , lots of stuff on my soundcloud playlists.

Tagging: @sunderlorn @decadentcryptid @fistopher

[joonbird]

Snow Angel 🎄

pairing: namjoon x reader (ft. ot7)

genre: fluff

wordcount: 1.5k

a/n: merry christmas! ♡

“We’re cornered. There’s no way out.” 

Your head snaps up, your mouth falling open in surprise. Your boyfriend is staring at you, his lips pressed in a solemn line.

“Namjoon, there must be something-”

“There isn’t time.” 

Namjoon shakes his head slowly. He exhales, straightening his shoulders. “We knew it would come to this.”

“Namjoon, no.” You protest emphatically, the words that are pulled out of your lips evaporate into a puff of frost. It is an uncharacteristically cold day for December. A thick duvet of crisp white snow hugs the earth, as snowflakes fall in drowsy succession around you. 

Namjoon reaches down and gives your hand a squeeze. You glance down at your clasped palms. He is wearing his new mittens, they are black, with crimson red crabs lopsidedly stitched into the wool.

(You had given them to him last night. Namjoon had immediately whipped off his WTAPS gloves and thrown them onto the floor in a melodramatic display of Christmas Gift Appreciation. He had then jumped up and down in excitement, small bounces that his lean body weren’t fully in control of. The domino effect went as follows: Namjoon knocked his shin on your bedside table, the lamp fell off, and it broke. Needless to say, melodramatics were not Kim Namjoon’s forte.)

“I’ll go. It’s the only way. I’ll distract him.” Namjoon declares suddenly, it is a sweeping statement, and you gasp.

“No! Namjoon, wait - !” 

But it is too late. Namjoon drops your hand and turns his head to give you one last gaze. “Get out of here while you still can, Y/N. I love you.” 

And then he runs around the corner out into the open.

Slackjawed, you hear it: the sound of Namjoon yelling, and an all too distinctive evil giggle.

Your instincts kick in, and you spring up from where you are crouched, racing out to the open, to where Namjoon is.

Jeon Jungkook is standing there, a fuzzy bucket hat on his head, a sling draped around his neck. The sling is stuffed to the brim with snowballs, and you watch with widened eyes as Jungkook reaches in and grabs a snowball. 

He hurls it at your boyfriend with a speed and ferocity that is both awe inspiring and terrifying. His arms are a blur, and you watch as Namjoon yelps out in protest, his body being pelted with snowball after snowball. Jungkook is laughing the entire time and showing no signs of slowing down.

“Got you!” Jungkook crows. He is distracted, and you look down. 

Your fingers are curled around a snowball. A perfectly shaped snowball. It is the one you had been working on right before Namjoon had sacrificed himself. 

You aim at Jungkook and throw with all your might.

The snowball arcs cleanly through the air, and it feels as if time stands still. You watch, your breath catching in your throat. Jungkook turns, spotting you, and he flings a snowball in your direction. 

You watch, your muscles tight with tension as your snowball continues to fly in the air… before it plops to the ground, no more than two metres away from you.

(Okay, in hindsight that may have been an overly optimistic shot to take.)

You hear Namjoon laugh, just as Jungkook’s snowball splatters over your chest. 

“Two in one!” Jungkook screams, and you turn your focus on him, your eyes narrowing into a glare.

“You take snowball fights way too seriously Jeon Jungkook.” 

“Don’t hate the player, hate the game.”

You point at the sling wrapped around his neck, recognizing the scrawled doodles on the white fabric. Love hearts with legs, a Taehyung signature.

“… Is that Tae’s sling?”

Jungkook lifts his nose in the air and folds his arms defiantly.

“I can’t reveal intel to the enemy.”

You narrow your eyes. “Like I said. You take the snowball fight way too seriously.”

(In fact, the snowball fight was the reason why Taehyung even had a sling in the first place. He and Jungkook had been testing out a snowball fight strategy wherein Taehyung would climb a tree and attack with snowballs from the branches. It had been a self labelled ‘flawless plan for victory’... until Taehyung had fallen out of aforementioned tree during a test run and sprained his wrist.)

Jungkook opens his mouth to retort, but a piercing scream pierces through the air. The scream is unmistakably Hoseok’s, and Jungkook’s ears practically prick up and he turns, sprinting away, snowball sling bobbing up and down.

You let out a huff of defeat and flop down onto the snow. Your hair fans out underneath you as you stare up at the sky. Despite the icy chill lingering in the air, the sun beats down on your face, the sky blue and streaked with clouds.

You hear footsteps crunching in the snow and your eyes flutter closed.

For the majority of your adult life, you hadn’t been one to make a huge deal out of Christmas. In the past, Christmas had always been a non-event - something to vaguely anticipate, but never something to actively celebrate. That was until you had met Kim Namjoon five years ago. 

You had fallen into Namjoon, into a clumsy and quick kind of love that felt like every cliche bundled up into one - butterflies, songs on the radio reminding you of him, you lying awake with your phone pressed to your chest and a giddy smile painted on your cheeks. 

Dating Namjoon meant holidays under blankets, agonizing over getting your boyfriend the perfect present, kisses absently pressed on the top of your head in between cups of chamomile tea. 

Dating Namjoon also meant being adopted into his circle of friends, and Namjoon had casually warned you five Christmases ago that they were ‘kind of Christmas enthusiasts.��

You had soon learned that ’Kind of’ meant ‘Extreme’. Each of your friends has a Christmas Thing. Hoseok texts you inaccurate Christmas carol lyrics at varying intervals throughout the day, (this morning you had gotten ‘get your boo a partridge in a pear tree. keep that love 100’ and a series of love heart emojis) Seokjin buys everyone matching Christmas sweaters, (the goal being that the more obscure the sweater the better. This year he scrounged up ‘Santa and his Reindeer as outdated vines’ jumpers) Jimin and Yoongi hold a festive movie marathon (during which Yoongi always complains about how the Santa Clause movie has too many loopholes, and Jimin recites half of Home Alone by heart). And last but not least, Jungkook and Taehyung have their annual snowball fight (which you really do need to put a stop to because the sight of Jungkook the Cackling Snowball Machine is one you never want to see again.)

You open your eyes to see Namjoon smiling down at you.

“We lost,” He says simply. “Again.” 

You huff out in frustration and fold your arms.

“Yeah, but that’s because our friends are so-” You begin.

“Intense.” Namjoon finishes.

“And way too competitive.” 

“And weirdly accurate at throwing snowballs. Jungkook hit my er, personal ornaments three times and I swear it was on purpose.”

A giggle escapes your lips and Namjoon joins in, his mitten clapping over his mouth as if to catch his laugh.

“They’re alright,” You begrudgingly admit, trying to keep up your grumpy facade, but you are smiling. Namjoon reads in between your lines as he always does. I love them, even with all their weird Christmas traditions.

“They’re alright.” He agrees, and this time you read in between his lines. I love them, they’re family.

Namjoon’s eyes soften as he gazes at you, his face is all dimples and creased eyes and the tiniest hint of a smile fighting on his lips- an utterly Namjoon facial expression that is only brought about as a result of you. 

He reaches out and affectionately cups your face with a mittened hand. The wool is cold and scratchy on your skin, but you keen into his palm as he leans closer to you.

His beanie is askew on his head, snowflakes dusting the shoulders on his obnoxious Christmas sweater. He brings his other hand to your cheek and his face eases into a smile- one that fills your belly with a golden kind of warmth, one of those signature Namjoon smiles that makes you feel shy and captivated and fuzzy and prickly, all at once. 

“My snow angel.” He murmurs, his deep voice is clear and confident, and you blush, even through the frost clinging to your cheeks.

“You’re so lame.” You roll your eyes at him. Namjoon’s smile widens, your hands wind around the back of his neck as you pull him in closer to you.

His lips brush over yours, a light touch that is silvery and like a whisper, before he leans in closer and deepens the kiss. 

His lips taste like cinnamon, his lips soft and full and you can’t help but swoon into him, at the sensation of his tongue dancing against yours, his hands cupping your face and the sound of him sighing into your mouth. 

He pulls away, pressing a kiss onto your cheek and onto your forehead, and you feel delightfully tipsy with each stamp of his lips to your skin.

“We’ll win next year.” Namjoon says decisively. You scrunch your nose.

(Not a chance: Namjoon has a strange tendency of making cube shaped snowballs that fall apart mid air. You also cannot throw a snowball to save your life, see earlier attempt at taking out Snowball Fight competitor Jeon Jungkook for evidence.)

“Definitely. If not next year, then in five. We can train in secret or something and catch Jungkook and Tae offguard.” You say lightly.

“I don’t even know if five years of training is enough. Jungkook had so many snowballs before. I don’t even know when he had time to make that many...” Namjoon has a perplexed look on his face.

“Fifty years then.” You propose. Namjoon beams at that and nods in agreement.

“Merry Christmas my love.” He kisses the tip of your nose.

“Merry Christmas Namjoon.”

[journalofhrr]

So here's what's happened up till now.

Started out with floors and walls and textures moving kind of like acid but when I was completely sober and at all times of day when I was at work when I was at home when I was in the doctor's office.

This has been going on for weeks and weeks maybe months and then when I was in the bedroom I was sitting on the bed in the dark talking to my girlfriend and the lights Christmas lights that we have hanging on the wall turned on I saw them turn on and then turn off but the thing is the plugs for the light are more than 4 ft away from the outlet so there is no way that they actually turned on and my girlfriend had not moved and did not see the lights come on.

Then it moved on to seeing figures or objects moving that shouldn't move like I saw the one lamp I have you know like the Pixar lamp the shade is pointing up at sky but I saw the shade peel back like banana peel until only the light bulb was remaining but it's a solid black lamp and you can't see the light bulb.

I saw a tall black figure standing in the kitchen I saw my laundry basket grow legs and skitter across the floor like a crab I saw a little cat fluffy black things running around.

And then I started hearing things too I hear someone whispering my name especially when I am alone someone will whisper and I turn around and no one's there cuz I'm totally by myself in an empty building.

[geeisafleabag]

The Little Mermaid (Modernized) Ft. Bill Skarsgard

Chapter One: Part Of Your World

A head full of deep Auburn hair had to duck as an empty glass of beer was tipped over the side of the yacht. They were having another party tonight, just as they had the night before, and Ariel was intrigued. Humans were a fascinating species. Especially here, in their most vulnerable states. Intoxicated on whatever mystical liquid that they sipped upon. She was certainly unfamiliar with it. It wasn't something that she had down in Atlantis. To say that the merfolk were very traditional was an absolute understatement. Perhaps that is why her crystal blue eyes lit up with so much wonder when she laid eyes upon him. Angular features and sharp green eyes broke way to a full lipped smile. His large hand held a beer and the stars in the sky seemed to twinkle and dance for him. Ariel found herself staring, drawing closer, nearly crawling over the bar of the yacht and revealing herself from her hiding spot, but the persistent whisper of a crab in her ear jerked her back to reality.

"Ariel! Your father will not be liking this! I suggest we head back home before he starts asking questions." Sebastian, the crab who was now tugging at her wild red tresses, said in an almost pleading tone, but Ariel was as stubborn as her father. Her fins kicking up a bit of water in all of her excitement.

"But, Sebastian!" Ariel said, her tone all love stuck and awe filled, "Look at him! Isn't he dreamy?" She let out a sigh, tearing her eyes away to lay back against the water of the ocean, her body afloat like the yacht beside her. She kept replaying the way his lips turned up into a smile and in her daze did not feel as the winds began to pick up so subtly. The Weather Reporter had said "possible" chances of rain and thunderstorms, but that had never stopped a party before, but what was coming was more than just a simple storm, but a twist in fate.

The sound of thunder shook Ariel out of her loving daze. Her heart nearly jumping out of her chest as she finally realized how much the waves had picked up. The yacht had gone a bit too far from shore and it bobbled up and down over almost too tall waves. Everyone seemed to stop, suddenly completely aware that they were in possible danger. A wave crashed over Ariel's head and she tumbled down into the deep waters, rolling in circles as she tried to balance herself. Almost like a human who had tumbled while walking and was trying to pick themselves back up.

Her head found the surface and she breathed out as if she needed the air in the first place. Her ears filled with the screams of scared passengers upon the boat as an even bigger wave headed their way.  The sound of the yacht completely flipping over on itself was like an earthquake. It rattled her body and chilled her soul. She could hear Sebastian, scared and out of breath begging her not to, because he knew where her mind was going. Instead of listening, she picked the crab out of her hair and placed him in the ocean before swimming off.

"ARIEL!" Sebastian cried, but she was too far away to hear him. Her only concern was finding him.

He'd been hit upon the head with something, a glass bottle perhaps, in the tumble and had been knocked out cold. While others swam or floated up to the surface, he found himself suspended somewhere between the bottom of the ocean and the surface. When she saw him there like that, and the blood that staining bits of water around him red, she gasped before putting on a determined face and swimming to him. She grabbed him by the armpits and pulled him up to the surface. Still, he wasn't responsive.

He felt almost like floating dead weight against her grip and she swam him to the sand, face scrunching up in frustration as she pumped at his chest. A large spurt of water left his mouth and he coughed, alive, but only half way conscious. A sigh of relief left her lips and in that moment she let herself observe his features up close. He had a healed up scar on his cheek and she wondered where that might be from. His hair was a brown almost dirty blond and his skin was smooth and pale. The sound of his shallow breathing made her heart sing.

"What would I give to be where you are...what would I pay to stay here beside you...what would I do to see you smiling at me..." Ariel sang softly, fingers tracing the angles of his jawline. His eyes fluttered open and her bright blues met his bright greens for a moment. It was then that she realized what she was doing.

She pushed herself back into the ocean, swimming behind a few rocks and peaking behind it as she watched him come to full consciousness. A few of his friends from the party walked over to him. One guy offering him a hand to stand up. He brushed the sand off his clothes and hair and then...and then he looked out to where she was. With a gasp, she hid herself behind the rock, hand against her chest as she squeezed her eyes shut. Humans were dangerous. That's what her father said.

"There...was a girl." He said to his friends, pointing out towards the rocks, "She saved my life...and she..sang to me."

"Looks like whatever hit your head hit you a bit too hard, Bill." One of his friends chuckled, patting him on the back and guiding him further up the beach. Ariel peaked out from behind the rock, fingers brushing back her fire red hair.

"Yeah." Bill said softly, "Maybe you're right." A soft smile fell onto his lips as his friend handed him a wad of cloth to press to his head. He looked back one last time and managed to catch a glimpse of red hair before it was disappearing again and he knew he hadn't imagined her.

A/N: So here it is guys! My attempt at re imagining The classic The Little Mermaid with Bill instead of Eric! Hope you guys enjoy it and any feedback would be great!