#oshy writes

[oshygoshy]

1:38 am

word count - 524 words

warnings - slightly suggestive

a/n - wow 2 whole writings?? yeah ik im spoiling my 23 followers...get ready for 4 months of radio silence from me after this though

"how would you describe me to the police if i went missing?" 

"...i'm sorry?"

miya atsumu, professional volleyball player (and who should be asleep by now...!) rolls over, unceremoniously plopping his elbow next to your nose. his shifting weight caused the bed to dip, and you felt your body tipping towards his (because of physics, not for any other reason...!!).

he squinted at you in the dark. "ya heard what i said."

"yeah, and it was stupid. and i'm tired. so please repeat it?" you say, holding back a yawn. "don't you have practice in like...4 and a half hours anyway-"

"hush, baby." (you'd be lying if you didn't get tingles from the pet name.) "jus' answer me?"

you rested your temple on his bicep, curling your body against his (again, physics), and hummed absentmindedly. what a strange question. 

"uhh...suspect has an ath-"

"suspect?? not victim???" he whispered furiously. in the dim moonlight, you could see his eyebrows furrow in mock anger. "whaddya mean suspect??" 

you smirked at his indignation. placing your pointer finger gently over his lips, you gently shushed him. "hush, baby," you mirror him. you could feel his lips twitch down in a frown. 

"ok let me start again. the suspect has an athletic build, is tall, and..." your eyes flit downward (respectfully, to answer his question. nothing more.) "'s pretty muscular."

"pretty mus-excuse me?? i'm very muscular-"

this time, you silence him with a kiss (to shut him up, not for any other reason!!) which works very effectively. he immediately stops talking and places his free hand on your waist. 

"yeah, petty muscular. strong abs-" you punctuate this statement by taking a hand and gently tracing his stomach under his shirt. you could hear his breath stutter, but pretend you don't notice. "great ass," you say with a cheeky giggle as your hand wanders, and he lets out a snort. "and a waist that would make any girl jealous. oh, and the best part?" you move your hand downward. his eyebrows raise but fall back when your hand stops at his thigh. "really nice thighs. like, really nice. they're really juicy, trust me, officer. you'd recognize them from an ocean away." 

your hand pats his thigh politely before you move it back up. 

"got me excited for a sec. yer hand was awfully close to something else for a bit," he mumbled into your hair. 

"whoops," you say, not very apologetic. 

"i don't like it when ya tease me," he continued. 

you push yourself back against his chest, looking at him with a raised brow. "oh, we both know that's a lie." 

he blushed, which you also pretended to not notice. "i don't like it when you tease me and do nothing about it. correction."

you sigh, setting yourself against his body. "well, i'm sleepy and you need to get up early. but.."

"...but?"

"i'm free this weekend," you say nonchalantly. 

he kissed the top of your head, grinning. "deal."

...

"so, who do you think is more muscular than me?"

"tsumu, please."

"it's bokkun, isn't it? it's ok, that's valid. he's really beefy."

"atsumu."

"okay, okay. sorry, sweets. goodnight."

[lupamoe]

It's always "haha ruby loves her brother thats incest"

but never "ruby lacks any emotional love and support in her entire life as a bed-ridden kid and skipped the emotional developmental stages of her childhood so she dosen't know whats normal or disgusting, likewise, this makes her like gorou. it's a sign that she will cling desperately to anyone who cares for her the slightest because ruby's 'love for her doctor' is a coping mechanism formed to forget and shield everything she's been through and because she has no options. this makes her genuinely not know the difference between platonic and romantic love as she has never experienced either in her miserable life."

[myaatwins]

fuck tragic bittersweet endings!!!!!!!!!!!! if you show me a character that has always longed for happiness and freedom and love but who has never thought they were deserving of/that they could have it only to kill them off at the end of the story i'm sorry but that's no longer your character. you've lost the custody battle. i will treat them much better than you ever could <3

[yuseirra]

I'm sure he wanted to listen to Ai's wishes too

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

triple j

I usually drop a single 10 roll on the limited banners just to grab a single copy of the event SR! … SO SoMEONE PLEASE TWLL ME WhY I DIDNmT GET A SiNGKE FLOYD AnD INSTEAD gOT THE jACK SSR I WAS NR EvEN AnGLING FoR????? 😭 😭 😭 (It took me 20 rolls total to yoink Floyd… Guess he didn’t feel like coming/j)

Oh well… I guess I’m starting off the new year strong, cuz I pulled a dupe of Dorm Uniform J word and the New Year’s Attire Jamil on the other banner ^^

[brainrot-jikan]

im not the biggest alhaitham/kaveh shipper (because im a rare pair ho) but it seems to me that in alhaitham/kaveh getting-together fics tend to be... unequal.

the beautiful thing about alhaitham and kaveh is that they're both equally right and equally wrong and equally dicks about it. but the writers for alhaitham/kaveh much more frequently seem to give alhaitham the burden change (the burden of the character flaw) instead of kaveh.

in any good character arc, the main character has a fatal flaw or misconception, and by the end of that arc they have addressed that flaw in some definitive way. scrooge was a scrooge and learned that being that way was detrimental; merlin from finding nemo was overprotective to a fault and had to learn that he couldn't (and shouldn't) control everything and to let go; the wolf from little red riding hood learns that you should stop while you're ahead.

stories centering around romance tend to lean heavily on character arcs, which makes sense. and since romance generally requires two individuals to be vulnerable and open and emotional with each other, it makes double sense that alhaitham/kaveh authors zoom straight into alhaitham's lack of emotional vulnerability.

this bothers me.

in society, individuals are expected to experience and present emotions in a specific way. if someone dies, you cry. if someone smiles at you, you smile back. if you're at a party, you're supposed to be having fun. if you don't do these things, you're seen as impolite at best and a inhuman freak at worst. when these behaviors are frequent it's often viewed as emotional immaturity, or a lack of ability to feel at all. the inability or lack of willingness to conform to societies emotional expectations of you is seen as a flaw and a reason for exclusion.

alhaitham is canonically disliked and avoided for being the way he is. he prefers it this way, but that doesn't mean the people perpetuating this avoidance are in the right. they are the societal pressure to conform that alhaitham blows off. alhaitham could be the way he is for a lot of reasons: avoidant attachment style, trauma, following someone else's example (eg. his grandmother), or just his base personality. it doesn't MATTER. he is the way he is. kaveh having to accept that should be part of the story.

putting the burden of the fatal flaw on alhaitham, making the way alhaitham treats kaveh and the people around him the problem, feels invalidating. it implies heavily that alhaitham's way of interfacing with the world, alhaitham's very SELF, is incorrect. my suggestion is to flip a larger portion of that burden onto kaveh. kaveh 👏 character 👏 arcs 👏

some examples/recommendations:

- make kaveh project his insecurities onto other people but especially onto alhaitham; he's overly reliant on other people for his own self worth, and he perceives alhaitham's lack of positive feedback as a direct reflection of how alhaitham feels about him. but learns along the way that alhaitham doesn't hate him, kaveh's actual struggle is with hating himself and being unable to his own self as worthy of love. maybe throw in how you are responsible for your own recovery, other people can help but you can't rely on them to carry you through self actualization.

- or, kaveh tries to make alhaitham behave more like a "normal" person, to be more pleasant and emotive and forthcoming, and then realizes he's in the wrong for trying to make alhaitham into something he's not, possibly for all the wrong reasons (not because he likes alhaitham better like that, but bc society says that's healthier and a better/more conforming way to be)

- or you could go ahead make alhaitham's issues the main problem but they're too complicated to overcome in a short period of time, so kaveh has to accept alhaitham is doing his best in his own way and not push for unrealistic and unhealthy changes. he could alter his own behavior to give alhaitham space and time and a safe place to land.

that got sappy so it's past time for me to dip out. go forth and ship things; but maybe consider letting alhaitham be a rude stone-faced bastard if he wants to be.

[surelynotshirley]

Truly the funniest thing about Gnosia is how Raqio can be definite human by virtue of being Guard Duty and they'll still have people throwing shade at them for absolutely no reason

[rampaging-lolitaholic]

i lowkey ship aqua hoshino with the director from oshinoko. if they didn't want this to be the case they wouldn't have petnames for each other

(i can't find any images with the director with teenage aqua 💔)

[dio-icarticaae]

_Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: DCU, DCU (Comics), Young Justice (Comics) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: Anita Fite & Donald Fite & Oshi Sin Gaaz & Ishido Maad, Anita Fite & Ishido Maad, Anita Fite & Donald Fite, Anita Fite & Oshi Sin Gaaz, Donald Fite & Ishido Maad, Oshi Sin Gaaz & Ishido Maad, Anita Fite & Cissie King-Jones, Anita Fite & Kon-El | Conner Kent, Bart Allen & Tim Drake & Anita Fite & Cissie King-Jones & Kon-El | Conner Kent & Cassie Sandsmark Characters: Anita Fite, Ishido Maad, Donald Fite, Oshi Sin Gaaz, Cissie King-Jones, Kon-El | Conner Kent, Cassie Sandsmark, Bart Allen, Tim Drake (DCU) Additional Tags: Character Study, Post-Canon Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, Good Uncle/Godparent Ishido Maad, Comic: Young Justice (1998-2003), Support Networks, Family, Family Dynamics, Post-Crisis (DCU) Summary:

It started slowly. Just little things, like Dad Don making a face about mushrooms in his food, when he’d previously loved them. Or Mom Oshi’s disinterest in the little window planter that she and Dad and now Uncle Ish and her maintained, when gardening was one of the things Anita remembered about her mother clearly. Things like that changed with time – lots of little kids changed their minds on these things as they grew up and this would be no different, Anita told herself. This was totally fine and normal.

Or: Anita reckons with the inherent weirdness of watching her parents grow up, and whether they'll ever be the people she remembers. Fortunately, she doesn't have to do so alone. For @womenincomicsminibang Reverse Mini Bang!

Accompanying wonderful art is here !!!

[oshygoshy]

2:07 pm

word count - 570 words

warnings - none

a/n - omg this is based off my own experience working at bath n body works BRO. i was asking this older guy if he needed anything special today and he was like, "my wife! who's pretty special to me" like alskdfhskafash let me find someone who loves me like that

sakusa kiyoomi didn't particularly like nor care for shopping, instead opting for whatever athleisure was the highest quality, or whatever the newest brand deal msby signed with. (seriously, the amount of free nike promo the team got was kind of insane.) he especially doesn’t like the bright, heavily scented body care store you frequently shopped at. the loud music, cheery (read: plastic) decor, and strong, swirling scents messed with his head, causing headaches and itchy skin. and don't get him started on the testers...! just how many people could've potentially touched them by now?

"hello! are you looking for something special today?" an employee asked with a picturesque fake customer service voice and smile voice plastered on thickly. 

he gave a brisk nod at them back. "nothing much, just my spouse." he paused. "although, you could say they're very special to me," he said, icy exterior melting and a warm smile peeping through. 

she laughed, a genuine smile appearing on her face this time. “aww, cute! well, we do have a buy 3 get 2 free sale going on right now on our full-sized body care items, so maybe you could help her shop for something special," she said before heading off to greet another customer. 

he nodded absentmindedly, glancing at some of the select items. although the store itself was too much to bear, whenever you put something scented on yourself, it was much nicer. less overbearing compared to the store, and it was like a secret surprise every time he leaned in for a hug. would he smell a hint of vanilla or pear wafting against your skin today?

"omi? you're in here?" 

he was startled at your sudden voice. "huh? oh, yeah, you were taking a while," he explained, turning around to see you peering up at him. he didn’t see anything in your hands, so he supposed nothing piqued your interest. (this time, anyway…)

"whoops! got carried away looking at the samples,” you say, abashed, as you stick out your hand. he holds it in his palm obediently. “anyways, i'm done here. i didn't find anything i liked, so we can head out now," you say, leading him out of the store. 

“have a good day, you two! and good luck on your marriage," said the employee from before, smiling at you both. he nodded back, and couldn’t help but smirk a little as he felt your steps falter. 

“m-marriage?!“

“now now dear, let’s not bother the poor working lady,” he murmured low into your ear. you gave him a flat look in return. 

“omi-omi, please-“

“don’t call me that! you know i don’t like it.”

“omi.” you stop in your tracks, frowning at him. “if you’re going to go around announcing that we're married, why don’t you at least…i don’t know…propose to me first?” you say, raising an eyebrow.

(unbeknownst to you, the ring was waiting underneath his boxers back at your shared apartment.)

“yeah, alright,” he hummed. “just wanted to test it out first.”

you hug his arm, a small smile on your face. “you’re so cute! who would've thought you’re capable of being emotive, let alone adorable?”

he gently pushed you off his arm, using just enough force to loosen your grip on him. “fuck off. i take everything i just said back.” 

“nope! no take-backsies! you’re my cute little wifey now!” 

he sighed incredulously. “i’m the wife?” 

[redge]

Things I read on the internet that's a declaration of hate for Kana and my reaction (hoping I feel better after typing them all out)

"Kana makes everything about herself"

Did she want to be an idol? Did she want to be a center girl? (Girlie don't even know what a center girl is hahahaha). In Tokyo Blade, did she want the spotlight? That one time Kana wanted anything for herself is when she told Aqua her new dream. She did not even have a graduation concert. She did not have that movie that director told her about. In 137, she was praised for being a handy actor that can uplift others and improve herself and was described as "lacks opportunity" and many chapters after that, she still did not have an opportunity for herself. Kaburagi said they'd sell her as genius actor but that was not addressed anymore. So where is that she makes everything about herself when nothing was sbout her anyway? Not the idol career. Not as an actress. Not as a human loved back by the one she loves. She did not become anything she ever wanted so really how was this all about her? No I really want to know, how did Kana make everything about herself? Like I am really curious where this is coming from ah why do you hate Kana so much? 🥺

"___ best girl compared to Kana who only cries all the time"

Why can't we just go with the "____ best girl." period. Why do you need to put down a character to praise another character I am genuinely curious. I mean my favourite character has always been Kana but not ever did I hate on Akane or Ruby or anyone because why would I when all these characters have different stories of their own? And why do these girls need to compete with each other anyway?! Who's giving out the crown and sash? What's the point??? Your favourite is the best girl for you. Okay! Other's favourite is best girl for them. Okay, too! That's perfectly normal so why are you fighting each other I do not understand 😭

"despicable for slapping a corpse"

Kana slapping Aqua was something that belonged to them. No one knows that conversation except Aqua and Kana (and us, the readers). Miyako's reaction was very valid because she does not know anything about that conversation. Which is why when Kana told that to the dead Aqua, Miyako's reaction wasn't angry anymore. Miyako was in tears. I honestly would have killed Aqua twice if I were Kana really so a slap is nothing compared to the emotional wreck being in their lives brought her. Kana deserves to be slapped for hurting a corpse yes I agree but Aqua deserves that slap too for thinking that him dying is the great solution to whatever problem they're trying to solve.

"Kana is useless"

And what a heartbreak that is. Kana is perservering, patiently working on all the things she want to happen and absolutely nothing went her way. Kana is a representation of someone that tried and tried patiently but everything she did just made her feel useless. She grabs every opportunity, creates opportunity for herself but she is never enough. If killing one's self was a contest, I'd definitely compete Arima Kana as candidate. I would even forgive her if she just goes feral all of a sudden with all of the things that happened to her. She's useless, you say, but was that her fault?

"Kana does not deserve to be happy"

and why not? I say everyone in Oshi no Ko deserves to be happy. So why deny that to Kana?

But really. Why is she getting so much hate?

[yuseirra]

realities

...seeing how things are in the current story..; why do I feel like we landed on a bad ending in a game with multiple ends...it feels like a wrong timeline where everyone failed

I hope we do get some sort of message out of it all...

[aihoshiino]

Hi, anon from the Ai and Hikaru break up ask again! I agree with everything you say and already had such an idea in mind, so I think the fault is at my side and I'm not formulating my question correctly, my apologies. I hope I'm not pestering you, but this is something that I would like to have an answer to and you still seem like the best source. So, I understand that Ai had knowledge of Hikaru's situation, but why say it out loud and not stay quiet? She hid her pregnancy from almost everyone, so why not him? From what the manga portrays, I think she cares at least a little bit about him, so why not lie? Is there a reason she didn't lie when Hikaru asked why she wanted to break up? Or why did she not avoid mentioning her pregnancy or his situation? As I think that would be more in line with Ruby's portrayal of her in chapter 146 where she said that lies would not work on Hikaru and also her general avoidance of answering certain questions. Why not break up with him without mentioning her pregnancy or Taiki or anything from that sort, as that would automatically hurt him? I think you esthablised that deliberately hurting him was not her intention and I agree, so why not avoid answering him honestly? Does this have something to do with what Akane said in chapter 28, with "secretive but had a desire for exposure"? Or is it something else I'm missing? Or are there no answers from canon? Or am I overseeing something simple? Or am I just not getting it?

There's no need to apologize, anon!! Honestly what am I here for if not to post at length about Hoshino Ai lol

and tbh, more seriously. I really don't blame anyone for being confused about the HikaAi stuff because as compelled as I am by the broad strokes of what's suggested in the text, it is ultimately a direly underwritten relationship especially in comparison for how loadbearing it is for the series. One of the things I was most excited about in the Movie Arc were those scraps of info about how things went between them - I think it did a really good job of making me believe these two characters fell in love and made me want to root for them even knowing how it all ended, which ofc makes the tragedy of it all that much more effective. The fact that the story chooses to undermine itself by definitively stating in no uncertain terms that all these sweet and enjoyable scenes that properly sell the HikaAi romance are completely made up fiction by someone who had never met either of them is… not the most baffling decision Aka makes in the Movie Arc but it sure as hell is up there.

This isn't helped by the fact that both within the fiction of 15 Year Lie and in the tiny scattering of real flashbacks to that relationship, Ai's perspective is almost entirely absent. While we do get that little snippet from the DVD, that was primarily about Ai's feelings in the wake of the breakup, reflecting on the relationship in hindsight and not really about how it felt for her in the moment or how much pressure there was on her to be Kamiki's one and only sole pillar of happiness. There's a really interesting little tidbit in Kamiki's telling of events where Ai is smiling brightly when he's looking right at her but the panels in which his attention is away from her face, she looks troubled - but without any extrapolation as to Ai's perspective or a look into how she experienced the relationship, Kamiki's perspective and what ultimately turns out to be an uncharitable characterization of Ai in relation to it is the final word that is only partially refuted by the reveal of the DVD's message.

And like, that lack of Ai's perspective is interesting in its own way, at least for how it ties into what the Movie Arc tries to touch on where no matter how hard everyone here tries to portray 'the real Ai', they have to make peace with the fact that they don't know if what they're showing to the public is truth because Ai herself is not here to make herself understood. But it doesn't really feel intentional. One of the biggest problems with 15 Year Lie as an object in the narrative is that it's a story about Ai's life that completely fails to be about her story or to engage with any of the themes present in her wider arc and this failure to consider her perspective on her most narratively weighty relationship aside from the twins speaks to that lack of consideration.

Actually, now I'm saying all this - I kind of wonder if some of the really bonkers uncharitable takes about Ai in the fandom following that reveal are because she isn't given the chance to tell her side of the story. I mentioned this in an earlier post but there were a lot of people (not so much on onkblr but defo in other parts of the fandom) who turned on Ai pretty extremely when we actually saw how the HikaAi breakup went - basically just a load of the victim-blaming misogyny and "why did this fictional character not do the emotionless logical course of action that i, the detached reader, would have logically taken? is she an evil, lying whore?" you can expect whenever a fictional teenage girl makes a social blunder. And while I don't think it would have entirely shut down that sort of backlash because this fandom is just kind is weirdly misogynistic in general sometimes, I do wonder if the story properly exploring Ai's experience of the relationship and letting her give voice more extensively to her own misgiving about the direction it took would have mitigated that sort of response.

UM. SEVEN HUNDRED WORDS AND I HAVEN'T EVEN STARTED PROPERLY ADDRESSING YOUR QUESTION YET. GONNA BE ONE OF THOSE POSTS, HUH!!!!

Anyway to uh. finally wind my way back to a response to your actual question, I think the most straightforward way to answer this is that Ai did not lie to Hikaru about her pregnancy because she did not want to lie.

edit from future Claire: 'at length' rly wasn't a joke............. this ended up being basically an analysis of Ai's relationship to dishonesty and authenticity and the ways her relationships with people in general are affected by it, on top of the hikaai analysis

Generally speaking, one of the most important things to key into when analyzing Ai as a character is that Ai doesn't lie even half as much as you might otherwise think and the reasons that she lies are ultimately much more important than the end point of this behaviour. Ai's core motivation is, under everything else, to connect with other people and to love and be loved in an honest and authentic way. But as both an abuse victim and someone commodified into a role like an idol, she holds the belief that her true, unvarnished self is unworthy of giving and receiving love and that she must lie just to be treated with like… basic kindness on a day to day basis.

But at the end of the day, Ai's 'lie' is really just the maintaining of her public persona and a fervent protection of the boundary between her public and true selves, to the point of essentially committing to a narrative that her 'true self' does not exist. Anything that would shatter the illusion that "Ai of B-Komachi", the flawless and invincible genius idol, is her whole true self with absolutely nothing else going on in her life that could spoil the image is not just omitted but actively obfuscated, to the point that even her surname is not public knowledge. In addition, a lot of the mythology surrounding 'Ai of B-Komachi' as this unassailable, inhuman force of star power, whose every single word and breath was precision point calculated to never let any of her true feelings show is a narrative that other people made up and projected onto Ai, especially in the wake of her death. 45510 and POV B are both really great examples of how this happened within Ai's personal relationships and how each narrator's respective self-awareness of that fact impacted the way they interacted with her and how it affects their ability to engage with Ai's true self - Kyun doesn't just accept her but seems to prefer her to the inhumanly polished idol whereas Nino is so repulsed by even the slightest hint of her vulnerability that she has to permanently erase it to make sure nobody ever stumbles across it again.

An important thing to note, however, is that 'Ai Hoshino' and 'Ai of B-Komachi' are not really entirely distinct nor is the 'real Ai' really all that meaningfully different from her public persona, at least to the extent that you can consider them separate from each other. This is something Rie Takahashi (and implicitly through her, Aka Akasaka) mentions as being key in her First Report interview - that 'Ai of B-Komachi' isn't a distinct, separate self as much as she is just a different facet of Ai's authentic self that she shows depending on the situation, just as all people do.

A lot of this is also further complicated by the fact that Ai isn't just performing a public persona, she's also masking - Ai is canonically neurodivergent, with the terminology used specifically referring to developmental disorders such as autism which seems to be how Akasaka intends her to be read. The conclusion of her chapter in Spica - itself at least partially about the difficulty of navigating neurotypical society as a neurodivergent person - is about Ai learning to mask and her recognizing that while it requires some effort, performing this version of herself allows her to navigate, socially speaking, without facing anywhere near as much hostility. This speaks to what's at the core of the 'Ai of B-Komachi' performance - all Ai is really doing is performing the most socially acceptable version of herself in the hopes that other people will respond by being kind to her.

But that isn't really something Ai wants. This is where Akane's observation of Ai's 'secrecy with a desire for exposure' comes from - or, to phrase it another way, Ai's warring terror of and desire for understanding and vulnerability. Ai believes (and quite frankly, has been taught) that people will react to her unvarnished self with revulsion, rejection and sometimes even violence. This is why the 'Ai of B-Komachi' mask is necessary. But the kindness and warmth she receives as a result is not only conditional on her continuing to play that role but it's emotionally unfulfilling for her because it's plastic and shallow. It's reliant on Ai endlessly contorting herself into the shapes other people want her to make without ever being recognized as a fellow human being. This is why, as she expresses in 45510, that she wants there to be people who actually will recognize her as she is, a flawed, impure and cowardly person, and to understand and accept her all the same. We can see this in multiple times across the text, where Ai is surprisingly quick to open up and start spilling her guts out to people who seem as if they have the potential to accept her - or at least who treat her kindly enough to give her hope. She's simply that lonely and that desperate to connect with other people.

In that sense, Ai's desire to sincerely say "I love you" and know she's speaking the truth can be understood as a microcosm of her more broad wish to be able to express herself sincerely and authentically and be understood by the people around her. It is a wish, specifically, to be able to speak of her deepest and most intimate feelings, to know that she is saying them sincerely and with truth and for the person she is expressing these feelings to to accept her, even if they can't fully understand her. She wants to 'unmask' in a very real way - trusting someone enough to, as Ai herself puts it, let them see the dirty, ugly parts of herself that she otherwise has to hide for her own safety with the knowledge that they will not reject her.

So because of… ^ ALL THAT ^, when Ai is relatively secure in her relationship with someone, she's actually surprisingly frank with them. Her relationship with Miyako in ep/vol1 is a good example of this - they aren't necessarily close but Miyako is someone who is both in on the secret of Ai's motherhood and somebody who already knows how the sausage gets made in terms of the 'illusion' of Ai's public persona. As such, Ai doesn't necessarily have anything to lose by opening up to Miyako and while there's still plenty of times that she conceals the proper depths of her thoughts and feelings, she also clearly feels comfortable enough just straightforwardly expressing dismay and frustration and her insecurities to Miyako and asking her advice. Or even purposely getting on Miyako's nerves purely for the purposes of being a little gremlin, just like she does with Ichigo.

So to sum all this up, Ai is already characterized as someone who very much wants to be authentic in her relationships with other people, is dishonest not out of a desire to straightforwardly deceive others but because she has been taught that she will face active rejection and hostility if she doesn't put on a mask and who demonstrates the willingness and ability to unmask and be pretty straightforwardly honest in the context of relationships where she feels any sense of security or warmth. Put all that together and you can already see the seeds of why Ai would have not wanted to lie to Hikaru.

What further complicates this, though, is that this was not just any old relationship that Ai felt secure in but one in which disclosure and honesty were - at least hypothetically - the foundation on which it stood. When describing their relationship in 153, Hikaru says of it that "Ai accepted me and loved me" and that "We were the same. We understood each other." and frames 'supporting each other' as one of the cores of their togetherness. As established, 'understanding' and 'love' for Ai are being able to unmask and be honest, to stop telling lies and cease putting on a performance and Ai didn't stop wanting to do any of that even once they broke up.

Because even once they were no longer together, I do get the impression that Ai wanted him to be in the twins' lives. She was the one who reached out to him to come meet them in The Doomed Phonecall but it's also worth considering that Ai is the only person who could have given Hikaru the address for the hospital and her due date - and with the way Hikaru talks about that night, I think it's implicit that she contacted him and invited him to the birth. And as Ai herself says in the DVD, she wanted to have a family with him and for them to properly carry each others' burdens. Their relationship didn't end out of a lack of love, but because Ai recognized that she simply did not have the capacity to be the mom to a baby and - lbr - mom to her boyfriend, too.

Also something I think shouldn't go unsaid - if some of Ai's decisions regarding her pregnancy seem illogical and erratic, they almost certainly were! She was a teenage girl suddenly and unexpectedly pregnant which would be bad enough without her also being in a social role that requires her to perform virginal purity day in, day out. She was almost certainly not making clearminded or logical decisions because she was simply emotionally not capable of doing so in the situation she was in.

[arcaderot]

so kohammy

[fealy-writes]

° • stubbles... • °

just imagine, you really want him to not shave his stubbles because you love them a lot..!! everytime he comes back home, you'll just ran up to him and nuzzles on his spikey little stubbles... 'how cute' he thought.

he makes sure not to shave them because he knows how much you love em!! if it's something you like, then he gotta do it.

-

"heh, are you that obsessed with them? not saying it's a bad thing, i think it's adorable."

-

aizawa, gallagher, taishi gotanda, kishibe, +your fave <3

[jobrrr]

Even in the Next One - Epilogue

And with that, EitNO comes to a close. It’s been a wonderful trip and I’m so glad to have shared it with y'all. Thank you for reading and maybe one day, cya you all in the next one♥️

https://archiveofourown.org/works/52852468/chapters/172182559

New art by @yayi-fuji, it's so good