#read below is a version without lighting and shading

[vixletserenity]

"You cannot stop the Faerie Queen."

[cadelinhadaromanoff]

𝐂𝐫𝐢𝐦𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐏𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐬𝐡𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭

Sumary: Natasha didn’t mean to open up. But something in the way you listened—quiet, unflinching—made it impossible to keep the walls up. And as the smoke curled between you, and old wounds bled softly into the night air, she realized: this wasn’t about being fixed. It was about being understood. And maybe, for once, not being alone in it.

paring: Natasha Romanoff x reader

word count: 5364

warnings: age gap, grief and legacy, daddy issues, abandonment issues, torture, trauma, red room, smoking.

　 ゛ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ⋆｡˚ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ₊ ⁺ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ 𓇢𓆸 ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ˚ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ☾⋆ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ⁺ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ★ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ⊹　₊ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ✦ 　　 ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ˚　 　 ☁︎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ₊ㅤ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ 𖦹 ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ⁺

Natasha sat curled in the corner of the balcony, her back pressed against the cool iron railing, a half-read copy of Crime and Punishment resting on her knee. The cover was weathered, pages curled slightly at the edges from time and use—like her, in a way. Frayed, but still holding together. She stared down at the words, letting her eyes drag over the same sentence again and again without registering its meaning. Raskolnikov’s spiral felt like an echo of her own. Not the crime. Not the punishment. But the unbearable weight of being misunderstood.

Her breath came slow and shallow, barely visible in the cold air that clung to the evening. The city lights flickered below, painting her face in shades of orange and white, but her expression remained unreadable. Natasha was used to hiding, even from herself. But tonight, her armor felt thinner. More brittle. The wind brushed against her cheek like a question she didn’t know how to answer. She tucked a loose strand of red hair behind her ear, fingers pausing there a second too long—like maybe if she stayed still enough, the ache inside her chest might finally quiet.

It wasn’t just heartbreak that haunted her. It was the realization that she had never been truly seen. Not by Steve. Not by Bruce. Steve had looked at her like she was already redeemed. Like her past could be forgiven if she just smiled enough, fought hard enough, kept pretending she wasn’t exhausted. And Bruce… he had wanted the tragedy. The pain. The cracks. But not the mess of it all, not the woman who still woke up sweating in the middle of the night, unsure if she had ever been real. They had loved versions of her—constructs. Not the woman curled on this balcony, with her ragged breath and weary eyes, trying to hold herself together.

Her fingers clenched slightly around the spine of the book. She hadn’t wanted to feel like this again. But here it was—loneliness, not like an empty room but like a crowded space where no one saw her. Natasha didn’t know what she needed. She just knew it wasn’t another lie in the shape of love.

And then—soft footsteps. A sound that was gentle, hesitant, familiar. She didn’t look up right away, but something in her posture shifted. Her breath caught, her spine straightened just a little, and her eyes blinked slowly, once. There was a presence nearby. Not a threat. Not a memory. Something real. Someone who hadn’t come to fix her or mold her. Maybe—just maybe—someone who could sit with her in the quiet and not ask her to be anything but herself.

The air shifted before the sound even reached her. A soft tremor in the atmosphere, a ripple through the stillness that Natasha felt before she heard the quiet pad of bare feet against the concrete floor. She didn’t move at first. Didn’t even lift her eyes from the pages she still wasn’t reading. But something inside her stirred—an awareness, an instinct, maybe something older and deeper than either of those. She inhaled slowly, steadying her breath, waiting. Not for danger. For presence.

Then, you appeared at the edge of her vision. Leaning against the iron railing of the balcony with a kind of casual elegance that made the night feel warmer somehow, even in its sadness. The curve of your hip, the subtle sway of your body as you adjusted your weight—there was grace in your exhaustion, in the way you carried the fog in your mind like a velvet cloak draped across your shoulders. And when you reached into your pocket for the cigarette, Natasha finally lifted her gaze.

Her eyes found yours, and in that brief second, something flickered across her face—not surprise, not exactly. Recognition. You didn’t need to speak for her to understand that you were here for the same reason she was: not to escape, but to endure.

You struck the match with one clean motion, your fingers steady despite the weight in your chest. The flame danced briefly, warm and golden against your skin. Natasha watched the way your lips parted, the way the cigarette caught the fire and curled with that first deep inhale. You exhaled slowly, smoke curling like a whisper into the night air, and your eyes met hers again—calm, but burning underneath. You didn’t smile. You didn’t need to.

For a second, the sight of her startled you—not because she was frightening, but because you hadn’t expected anyone else to be here, and especially not her. The silence between you was soft, not sharp. Like two ghosts meeting in the same forgotten place, both unsure who died first.

You stepped closer, your voice low and unsure. “Can I sit?” It was barely a whisper. As though asking too loudly might make the moment break apart.

Natasha didn’t answer right away. She simply moved the book slightly, making room on the weathered old stretcher beside her. The kind of military issue thing that had probably been dragged up here and forgotten long ago. Now, it served as a resting place for weary minds.

When you sat beside her, neither of you touched, but the warmth of your presence felt like a balm she hadn’t known she needed. The cigarette glowed faintly in your hand, casting shadows across your face, catching in the glint of your eyes as you looked at the book resting on her lap.

“That one’s heavy,” you murmured, nodding toward it. “But I like it.”

Natasha’s eyes softened, the corner of her mouth lifting in something that was almost—but not quite—a smile. “Yeah,” she said quietly, her voice lower than usual, the sharp edge worn down by the weight she carried. “It’s not about the crime. It’s about the way guilt rots you from the inside. Slowly. Quietly.”

You nodded, taking another slow drag from your cigarette, and she watched the way your lips parted again, the way you let the smoke roll out like a secret. “And how the punishment doesn’t always come from outside,” you added. “Sometimes it’s just waking up and remembering who you are.”

She looked at you then—really looked. The curve of your neck, the faint shimmer of sweat at your temple, the way your hands moved like you had stories buried in your fingertips. There was pain behind your eyes, but it was honest pain. Pain that didn’t dress itself up in heroic ideals or self-pity. Natasha felt her chest tighten, not in fear, but in recognition.

“Raskolnikov thinks redemption is earned by suffering,” she said, her voice barely audible over the wind. “But I think… sometimes it just comes from being seen. And still being allowed to stay.”

Your breath caught for just a moment. And then you nodded again, like you understood something she hadn’t dared to say out loud before.

The city buzzed below, but here on the balcony, time slowed. Two people, wrapped in smoke and old paper and silence. Talking about guilt and books like they weren’t talking about themselves. There was no promise in the air, no fix, no future plan. Just company. Just presence.

You held the cigarette between your fingers like it was the only thing tethering you to the ground. Smoke danced upward in lazy coils, catching the light from the city below, framing your face in that fleeting, cinematic way that made Natasha ache just a little to look at you too long. The way you inhaled was slow, deliberate, like you were trying to savor the quiet, make it stretch. And when you exhaled, it wasn’t just smoke leaving your lungs—it was everything else, too. The expectations. The weight. The ache that never found the right words.

Natasha could feel it radiating off you, the pressure like static in the air, and she didn’t look away when you finally spoke.

“Being seen…” you said quietly, your voice low, husky with something raw, “…it’s never easy.”

She glanced sideways at you, the book now forgotten on her lap. The wind toyed with the ends of your hair as you lifted the cigarette to your lips again, fingers steady despite the storm behind your eyes. The ember flared, catching firelight across your cheekbones. And even in your exhaustion, even in your ache, you looked beautiful—tragically, breathlessly beautiful. Not because of the pain, but because of the honesty in it. The unmasked, unguarded kind of beauty that came when someone had nothing left to hide.

You didn’t wait for a response. The words were still gathering in your throat, spilling now in pieces, low and uneven.

“People think I’m just like him,” you said, not needing to clarify who. “That I’ll make the same mistakes. That I’ll crash the same way he did, just louder. Faster. With more fire.” Your voice faltered, just slightly, and you pressed the cigarette back between your lips, breathing in like it might steady your hands.

Natasha didn’t interrupt. She let the words bloom in the silence, like smoke curling through the cold air. She knew the kind of grief that came with legacy. Not just the loss of a person, but the crushing burden of being what they left behind.

“They look at me like I’m a bomb with a timer,” you said, exhaling again. “And they want me to be perfect. To be brilliant and funny and strong and impossible and kind and all the things he was when they chose to love him. But I’m not him. I never was. And some days I wonder if that’s why they’re always waiting for me to fail.”

Your thumb rolled over the edge of the cigarette, flicking ash down onto the breeze. Natasha watched your profile, every word digging a little deeper into something she recognized—something unspoken in herself.

“You don’t get to belong,” you added, voice quieter now, “unless you fit the version they’ve already made up in their heads.”

The night felt heavier around those words. Natasha didn’t speak right away. She leaned her elbows on her knees, her fingers brushing the book absently as her mind sifted through the past like ashes. Everything you were saying—it echoed her own story. The versions of herself that had been loved. Feared. Rewritten. Broken.

She turned her head slowly, her gaze softening when it met yours again. “And even then,” she murmured, “they only love the version they understand.”

You nodded, jaw clenched just slightly. The cigarette had burned halfway now, and you tapped it gently over the balcony edge, watching the ash fall like snow into the dark.

Natasha breathed in deeply, then exhaled through her nose. “It’s easier to be a story than a person,” she said. “Stories don’t talk back. They don’t break.”

The silence after that wasn’t cold. It wasn’t awkward. It felt… sacred, somehow. Like two people sitting in a cathedral built from smoke and shared grief. The buzz of traffic far below became background music, distant and unimportant. All that mattered was the way your shoulders eased just slightly. The way you turned toward her a little more. The way you were still here.

You didn’t have to say thank you. She wouldn’t have accepted it anyway.

And Natasha didn’t tell you she understood. She simply stayed beside you, her presence steady, quiet, unwavering. She didn’t try to fix it. She didn’t try to tell you who you should be. She just saw you.

The book sat open between you, the lines of Dostoevsky waiting in silence. And somewhere beyond the grief and expectations, there was still room for the comfort of company. Of not being alone on a night that felt like it could swallow you whole.

Natasha leaned back against the railing, just enough to glance at you again—not analyzing, not reading, just… seeing.

“You have a favorite line in it?” she asked softly, nodding toward the book. A simple question. A door left open.

Because she wanted you to stay. She was almost afraid of losing that sparkle of connection that she have been craving for years.

The words slipped from your mouth like they’d been waiting there—resting just behind your lips for years, maybe. Natasha turned her head, watching the way your eyes flicked down to the book, not to find the line, but to remember it. You didn’t say it like someone quoting literature. You said it like someone bleeding.

“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”

The air hung still around it. That one sentence rang with too much truth, too much ache, too much you. It wasn’t just a favorite line. It was a mirror.

You took another drag from your cigarette, slower this time. Your fingers trembled just a little—so subtly no one else would’ve noticed—but Natasha did. You exhaled with a quiet, tight breath, letting the smoke roll out like a confession, your eyes not quite meeting hers as you said it. And yet, she could feel you there with her. Honest. Unarmored. Exposed.

And still trying to hold yourself together.

Natasha let the silence answer first. A long beat, the wind whispering against the railing, the distant hum of the city below like a memory that wouldn’t leave. Then she spoke—low and even, the way she always did when something mattered too much.

“I used to think I had reasons,” she murmured. “Reasons for all the damage. That it was survival. Necessary. Justified.” Her fingers slid over the spine of the book, her gaze drifting into the dark horizon. “But the truth is… some of it wasn’t. Some of it was just me being afraid of being seen. Of being chosen for the wrong reasons. Or not being chosen at all.”

She looked at you again, something unbearably soft in her eyes. Not pity. Not concern. Something else. Something far more dangerous. Recognition.

“You didn’t destroy yourself for nothing,” she said, her voice quieter now, raw and bare. “You destroyed yourself because no one ever told you that you didn’t have to earn your place. That you were already enough.”

The cigarette burned closer to your fingers, and you glanced at it briefly, eyes glassy in the light, before bringing it to your lips one more time. Natasha watched every motion like it mattered. The way you breathed, the way your shoulders tensed and released, the way your mouth moved slightly when you held the smoke in just a second longer than necessary.

You weren’t dramatic. You weren’t asking for sympathy. That’s what made it feel so damn real.

“I hate that line,” you said after a long pause, your voice just above a whisper. “Because it’s me.”

And Natasha nodded slowly, the kind of nod that said me too without needing to say a word.

The book rested quietly between you both again. The world still turning below. But here, in this high place above the chaos, it was just two people with matching scars, breathing the same cold night air. No heroism. No masks. Just this.

And it wasn’t healing, not yet.

But maybe, just maybe, it was the beginning of it.

The cigarette was nearly gone. The smoke had begun to thin. And Natasha, without really thinking, tilted her head slightly, her shoulder brushing just faintly against yours. Not to comfort. Not to claim. Just to be near.

She didn’t need to fix you.

She just wanted to know more.

Still watching the shadows across your face, she asked gently, “When did you first feel it—that pressure to be perfect?” A simple question. The story could go on.

You scoffed, not bitterly—but like someone who’d long outgrown the need to soften your truths for other people’s comfort. Your voice came low, taut with exhaustion and something deeper that never quite let go.

“Since I joined this shitty team and SHIELD,” you muttered, eyes fixed somewhere past the skyline. “That’s when it started. When people looked at me and saw him. And started expecting the impossible.”

You paused to take one last slow drag from your cigarette, like you needed it to keep the walls up just a little longer. Your fingers were steady, but your breath wavered on the exhale. The glow dimmed, the ember fading, and then you flicked the filter away with care—watching it vanish into the dark like a secret.

The air shifted slightly as you leaned back, shoulder brushing the canvas edge of the stretcher, your gaze still heavy with questions. Then, softer this time, you turned your head and looked at her.

“What about you?” you asked. “What’s your line, Natasha? Which one is you?”

The question hung in the air with the weight of quiet trust. Natasha didn’t answer right away.

Her eyes dropped to the book still resting on her lap, fingers trailing the page like they were reading something written in invisible ink—something she already knew by heart. The silence wasn’t hesitation. It was memory.

She exhaled through her nose, and when she finally spoke, her voice was even, but laced with a sadness so well worn it had settled into the fabric of her.

“There is immeasurably more left inside than what comes out in words.”

The line came gently. But it hit like a confession.

She didn’t look at you right away. Her eyes stayed on the words in front of her, as if she still wasn’t sure she was allowed to speak them out loud. As if saying them would open a door she’d spent years keeping locked.

“I used to think… with him, that maybe it could be different,” she said, and there was no need to say Bruce’s name. It was there—in the pause, in the soft way her voice lowered. “That someone so quiet, so kind, might know how to see the things I never said.”

Her thumb pressed into the corner of the page, and she finally glanced at you, not searching for understanding—just… sharing it.

“But even then,” she added, barely audible, “he only ever wanted the part of me that hurt the least.”

The wind passed between you both like a sigh, brushing through her hair, rustling the page. The line she chose was no longer just about intelligence or suffering or truth—it was about the quiet devastation of being loved for the version of you that didn’t ask for too much. The version that stayed small and survivable.

And now, sitting beside you in the low hum of night, Natasha wasn’t small. She wasn’t quiet. She was just there—solid, scarred, seen.

The book stayed open between you both, untouched now. The silence wasn’t empty anymore—it was full of all the things no one else had made room for.

You turned toward her a little more now, elbow resting against the back of the stretcher, one leg pulled up beneath you. The night was colder, or maybe it just felt colder after the weight of what she’d said. You were still quiet, but your eyes searched her face carefully—like you were trying to read something there beyond what she’d given.

Your voice came softly, low and careful, like you didn’t want to step on something fragile. But it needed to be said.

“…What did he do to you?”

Natasha didn’t flinch. Not exactly. But something in her shifted. Her posture didn’t change, her hands didn’t tremble—but there was a tightening behind her eyes, a sudden stillness in her breath that only someone who understood would notice.

She didn’t answer right away. The words hovered, threatening to rot before they reached the air. Her gaze slipped down to the book again, like the page might offer her shelter. But after a long, brittle silence, she finally spoke.

“We were in that damn safehouse. After that mission in Sokovia,” she said slowly, like each memory was being pulled from somewhere rusted shut. “Everything was quiet. And it should’ve been a moment… a breath.”

You watched her closely, the gentle sway of her red hair in the breeze, the way her voice tried to stay flat but couldn’t quite hold it.

“I told him something I’d never told anyone,” she continued. “About the Red Room. About what they did to us. The graduation ceremony.”

Your brows furrowed gently, lips parting as the weight of her words began to register. She didn’t need to explain. You knew what she meant. But she did anyway.

“They sterilized us,” she said, voice steady now—deadly calm, like a blade across silk. “Cut out everything. No choice. No anesthetic. Just… silence, and pain, and the idea that it would make us easier to control.”

Your breath caught, and Natasha glanced at you for a second—just a second—to make sure you were still with her. That you heard her.

“I told him,” she said, quieter now, “because I thought he’d understand. Because he said he couldn’t have a future. That he was a monster.”

You felt your stomach twist, like something was clawing at the inside of your ribs. The way her voice cracked ever so slightly on the word monster was more painful than any scream.

“And I thought—I thought we were meeting halfway. That he’d see me for what I was too. That maybe we were both broken in different ways, and that was okay.”

Natasha finally looked up. Right at you. And there was no anger in her face—only devastation so long buried it had started to look like acceptance.

“But he didn’t see me,” she said. “Not really. He flinched. Shut down. Changed the subject. Pulled away.”

You felt your fingers tighten into your palm. Your chest was tight.

“He didn’t ask what it meant to me. He didn’t want to hold it. He didn’t even look at me the same after that,” she added, voice thinning to a whisper. “Like I was too much. Too dark. Too real.”

And there it was. The wound. Not from what had been done to her in the Red Room—but from what followed. From trying to be vulnerable with someone who only ever wanted the safe version of her pain. The digestible version.

Natasha stared down at her hands like she was ashamed of them. But her jaw held firm, like she was done apologizing.

She looked up again, slower this time. Her voice was quieter now, but her gaze never wavered.

“He wanted someone tragic,” she said. “Not someone ruined.”

The wind moved gently through the balcony, brushing against both of you like a sigh neither of you had the strength to breathe.

And the silence that followed wasn’t empty.

It was full of everything she’d never been allowed to say—until now.

And you stayed. You didn’t speak yet. You didn’t move. You just stayed.Because for once, she wasn’t too much. And maybe, neither were you.

You didn’t speak right away. You let the quiet hold her—let the truth she had just given you exist in the air without rushing to fix it or soften it. But something inside you tightened, curled up like a fist in your chest. It wasn’t pity. It wasn’t sadness. It was fury. Cold and quiet and sharp, because she hadn’t deserved any of that.

Not the sterilization. Not the silence. Not the way Bruce had turned his back the moment she handed him the most delicate piece of herself.

And it came out slowly—your voice low, but sure. No hesitation. No softness in the truth.

“You’re not ruined.”

She blinked. A small shift. Just enough to let you know she’d heard you.

“You’re not a monster either,” you said, firmer this time, your eyes locked on hers, unwavering. “I don’t care what they did to you. What they made you believe. That doesn’t define you.”

The wind swept her hair across her face, but she didn’t brush it away. She just sat there, still and listening, like maybe—just maybe—she needed to hear this more than she wanted to admit.

You leaned forward a little, elbows resting on your knees now, voice roughened with emotion you weren’t bothering to hide.

“Bruce wanted you to carry his pain,” you said. “But he never wanted to carry yours. He just wanted someone who’d feel bad for him. Someone who’d look at him and say ‘you’re not the monster.’”

Natasha’s breath hitched, almost imperceptibly. Your words were slicing close, but she didn’t pull back. She didn’t look away.

You tilted your head slightly, eyes narrowing with heat. “But when you needed to be seen… when you needed someone to hold space for everything you’d survived? He flinched.”

The disgust in your voice was quiet, but unmistakable. And it wasn’t performative. It wasn’t about proving a point. It was for her. For the girl who had sat in that safehouse, trying to be soft in a world that only saw her as a weapon.

“He didn’t deserve to know your story,” you said. “Not if he couldn’t handle the truth of it.”

Natasha stared at you now, and her face didn’t move much—but her eyes… her eyes were glassy. Not from tears. From recognition. From the shock of hearing the thing no one else had ever had the courage—or the care—to say out loud.

You reached for your pack, fingers brushing another cigarette from the box, slow and casual. But the motion didn’t steal from the weight of your words. If anything, the way you lit it, the soft flick of the lighter in your palm, the way the flame kissed the end before you inhaled—it made it feel more intimate. Like this was just how you shared truths. Smoke and silence and raw, unfiltered honesty.

You exhaled slowly, the smoke drifting up in lazy spirals toward the stars. And when you turned your head again to look at her, your voice dropped into something softer.

“You didn’t deserve to be met with fear when all you offered was trust.”

You let that settle between you both.

And then, because the night wasn’t done yet—because maybe this was only the beginning of something real—you said, “If you want to tell me more, I’ll listen. Not because I think you need to. But because I think you’ve been carrying all of it alone for too long.”

You tapped ash over the edge of the balcony. The cigarette burned steady in your hand.

And you waited. Not to rescue her. Not to solve her.

You let the silence linger for a moment—long enough for the wind to pass between you both again, brushing your hair back from your face as you stared at her. And something bloomed in your chest—warm, aching, undeniable. It wasn’t pity. It wasn’t admiration. It was deeper than that. Something closer to reverence.

You took another drag from the cigarette, the ember glowing between your fingers like a tiny, defiant star. The smoke curled around your lips as you exhaled slowly, and then, with your voice low and steady, you turned your body slightly toward her. Looked her in the eye.

“You know,” you said, almost like a secret, “you’re probably the gentlest person I’ve ever met.”

Her brows twitched, surprised. Like she didn’t quite believe it. Like no one had ever called her that before.

But you weren’t finished.

“You hold everyone’s pain like it’s nothing. You never ask for credit. You just do it—you carry people, even when no one sees the weight it puts on you. You protect people who’d never survive a day in your shoes. You fight for people who’d never fight for you.”

You looked away for a second, staring at the skyline, breath catching a little.

“And then they call you a monster?” you scoffed. “They don’t see you at all.”

You turned back to her, and this time, you didn’t blink.

“You’re not a monster, Natasha. You’re everything but. You’re the reason half of us didn’t fall apart a long time ago. You’re the one we look to. Even when we don’t say it.”

Her eyes were glassy again, jaw tight. But she didn’t look away. She took it in. All of it. Like it was the first time someone had really seen her.

And then she leaned forward, elbows resting on her knees the same way you had a moment ago, her voice soft and low.

“You know what I see when I look at you?” she asked.

You blinked. A little caught off guard.

“I see someone who’s been carrying a name that never belonged to her,” she said. “Someone who’s constantly being measured against a man she never asked to become. Against mistakes she never made.”

You felt your throat tighten.

“You’re not your father,” she said plainly, but her voice held something fierce. “You’re not arrogant, you’re not selfish, and you’re not reckless. You care more than anyone I’ve ever met. You feel more. You take responsibility for everything, even things that aren’t yours to fix. And you still show up.”

Her voice didn’t waver. Not once.

“And if they can’t see the difference, that’s on them.”

You stared at her, cigarette burning slow between your fingers now, your breath caught somewhere in your chest.

“You are not in his shadow,” she said, softer now. “You’re standing in your own light. Even if it doesn’t feel like it yet.”

The wind brushed between you both again, but it was different now. Softer. Like something had shifted, opened, made room.

And she looked at you—not like she was offering comfort, or sympathy. But like she understood. Completely.

Like maybe—for once—you didn’t have to carry that shadow alone.

The city below murmured in its endless rhythm.

And above, the stars didn’t judge. They just kept burning.

You looked at her for a long moment, your smile slow and small—like something blooming through ash. The cigarette still burned between your fingers, smoke curling lazily in the air, but your gaze never left hers. Not anymore.

There was a tenderness behind your eyes now. The kind that came only after everything else had fallen away—after the armor, the sharpness, the weight. And with a voice barely above the hush of the wind, you let it slip out, almost like a joke, but not really.

“Two halves… can make a whole?”

You tilted your head just a little, the edge of a smirk pulling at your lips—not arrogant, not cocky. Just soft. Curious. Hopeful.

And Natasha—

She didn’t laugh. She didn’t roll her eyes. She looked at you. Like something in her stilled.

Like maybe she hadn’t known it before, but she did now.

The idea of wholeness had always felt foreign to her, like something people made up to survive the loneliness. But with you? Sitting here, night folded gently around you both, your pain laid bare in mirrored pieces?

It made a strange kind of sense.

You were like her in all the quiet ways. In the ways that mattered.

Her lips parted slightly, no words yet—just breath. And then, slowly, her mouth curved into the smallest, realest smile you’d ever seen from her. Not the polite one. Not the warrior’s grin. This one was just… hers.

“Maybe,” she murmured, almost to herself, eyes still on you like you’d just said something she’d been waiting years to hear. “Maybe we were never meant to be understood by them.”

A beat passed. Her fingers brushed lightly over the corner of the open book still sitting between you both—Crime and Punishment, forgotten, yet somehow the quiet thread tying you together.

“Maybe we were meant to find each other instead.”

Her voice was barely there, but you felt every syllable like gravity pulling you closer.

She let out a breath that almost sounded like a laugh. Not because anything was funny—but because the moment was too strange and tender and alive not to.

“Forget SHIELD,” she added softly, “Forget fate. Dostoevsky did what no mission could.”

You both smiled now.

Not because everything was fixed. Not because either of you had finally found peace.

But because for once, there was someone sitting next to you who didn’t just see the wreckage—but wanted to build something beautiful from it.

And neither of you moved.

You didn’t have to.

The whole world had already shifted.

[selysie]

hii can I please ask what psd you use? liek the pink/grey/black one? its supar pretty... thank u if u respond... :3 ♥︎

henloo!! thank chu 04 liking mi cwoloring !! (⁠*⁠´⁠ω⁠｀⁠*⁠) bwut 04 this ,,, ki did nwot use a psd !! instead ki used a gradient mwap ! so hwere it is ^_^ :

(pt: hello!! thank you for liking my coloring !! (⁠*⁠´⁠ω⁠｀⁠*⁠) but for this, i did not use a psd!! instead i used a gradient map! so here it is! ^_^ /end pt.)

if kyu want a tutorial on how ki mwade thy cwoloring without ibis premium ,, then hwere is the free version below under thy cwut!

(pt: if you want a tutorial on how i made the coloring without ibis premium, then here is the free version below under the cut! /end pt.)

i will not be using typing quirks for this since it may occur for some users not being able to read! ^_^♡

so step 1: you can go to ibis paint then click the brush button at the bottom, then you might find a button called filter! which looks like this

then, click adjust color after u got into filter, u may see it since there's a corner with the effects in order

after that, scroll on the right side a bit then you might appear to see a button called grayscale.

my settings: copy if needed!

then your image will appear in the colors black and white! for me it looks like this:

then you can add a new layer and put on clipping mode, then choose a light shade of pink! then go to blending mode then choose "overlay" in the lighten section (⁠*⁠´⁠ω⁠｀⁠*⁠)

here are some examples with the shades i used below, i will be including the hex codes so that you may use it too!

#FFD8EE

#FFE0F2 (brighter)

#FFA5D9

sorry if this sounds complexed or messy! send asks or questions here and I will be happy to answer all of them! 🫶🏻

+ here are some free gradient map websites ^_^

[silkentine]

An anatomy and lighting practice that turned into Ichiji! 😊❤️🎇✨🔥 I’ve been really inspired by @dannymans66 lately so I’ve got #1 on the mind.

ALSO!!! I HAVE AN OPPORTUNITY TO WIN A FREE COMMISSION BELOW (Check it out and see if you can win!)

So I jokingly shared the lineart for this piece with my friend and said that it looked like a page from a coloring book and the idea humored me so much that I decided to hold a competition. I’ll give you all TWO WEEKS (ending June 4th 2024 at 23:59 EST) to color this picture of Ichiji using the blanks provided below and submit your illustrations here on tumblr with the tag #ichijirecolor (and it’s probably best if you @ me as well @silkentine). I’ll judge all the submissions (with the help of my unbiased mom) and the one that I like the best* will receive a free commission from yours truly :) anything you want!!! Feel free to color outside the lines, add stuff to the illustration, use the “wrong” colors, print it out and color it traditionally, whatever floats your snail-boat! 🐌 The only requirement is that my original illustration is included in some way (it doesn’t even have to look like Ichiji at the end, I suppose!)

*If my first place winner declines the prize or fails to respond with a week of the announcement, I’ll move on to the second place and so on and so forth.

Below the Read More, I’ve provided two versions of the lineart with and without the tattoo. Also, they are all 1526x2048 pngs either with a white background or no background at all. To color using a white background, place it as your top layer and set it to a Multiply blending mode, then you can add colors on a layer below without having to fuss with the lineart or delete the background. I’m not going to check if you keep the original size or ratio of the images; I like to work really big, so feel free to compress it if necessary. Feel free to move the watermark around, and it would delight me so if you added yours alongside mine!

Thanks in advance to all who decide to participate!!! I’m so excited to see what you can create!!!

Also here’s my version without any shading, you could use this too if you wanted to but isn’t it more fun to start blank? Idk I just think this is fun to look at.

If you made it this far and you’re still not sure if you want to participate or not, let me sweeten the pot and let you know that I’m a very small creator and I’m not expecting to get many submissions, so your chances of winning could be much higher than usual with these kinds of things!!! I’m not someone who judges on technical skill either, it’s purely my own taste that will decide the winner, so don’t let your skill level hold you back! I love funny things and getting to know people in the One Piece community!!! This is all my selfish attempt at making some new friends hahaha!! Thanks for reading all of this 😋🥰 you mean the world to me.

[ritornello]

since i can't answer myself so well, what would you say are asada nemui's distinctive storytelling traits and on a personal matter if you'd like what makes you like her stories? not so much tropes but running themes, art and such. i hope it's not too heavy of a question and thanks ^_^

Hi, this is a great question. For anyone with the patience to read all this I think it might help explain what makes Asada Nemui such an intriguing manga artist. (especially without the "it's because X reminded me of Y! - type analysis that occurs very frequently in english fandom communities)

There's a lot of images in this post, but it's not too spoiler-ish.

Comments about art

The first aspect of Asada's art I would want to praise endlessly are the page layouts. Dear, My God was one of the first stories I read by her and the flow of the panels is what really stuck out to me. I like using this sequence of pages as an example - can you guess what's going on?

I removed all of the dialogue and SFX, and it's so well laid out that the sight-to-panel direction, background design and expressions of the characters are enough to understand what's happening. It almost feels like you're looking at a scene from a movie or storyboard.

Text version:

While reading The Sound of the Waves, a page describing the plot of a writer's story more or less summarizes Asada's layout style. It generally begins with an establishing shot before laying out the rest of the scene, which with a longer story may take a few more pages to conclude.

The divisions of pages seems to average around four to seven panels, and pages with three or fewer panels show up very sparingly - likely saved for more impactful scenes.

(I'll just take a second here to add how much I love that she generally sticks to one shade of screentone. Limiting the palette to just three values is a great way to create shadows and dramatic lighting effects!)

Asada's direction is very focused on telling a story - there is always some type of visual cue that the scene is actively present and happening in front of us, the readers. I like this continuity compared to a series that might have excessive headshots or pages of flashbacks during a scene with a lot of action.

One of my favorite scenes in Sleeping Dead is in the second volume, when Mamiya is out in his van and attempting to construct a conversation. It fills an entire page, but his entire monologue could have been condensed into one "thinking" panel.

It doesn't necessarily look bad like if it were like this, but Asada intentionally uses the entire page to emphasize Mamiya's expressions, his awkwardness as he slowly loses confidence in himself. (Plus he's actively driving and looking at the road.) I like that this is a very private scene that reveals the inner character he tries to hide during the majority of the first volume.

I also like that she understands the importance of a readable layout enough to redraw areas that might be confusing to look at, like this one from the magazine version of Sleeping Dead (left side) :

In the last panel it's difficult to tell who's talking, because there are four detached bubbles and you can't see Sada or Mamiya. I wasn't sure if Sada was talking in the first bubble since it's directly below him, but the second seemed like Mamiya since it's drawn so awkwardly. For the paperback release she added a line to connect the two bubbles - obviously it's Mamiya saying both and becoming nervous as he brings up the possibility of having more sexual activities with Sada.

If you noticed the changes in the other panels of that page it also goes into her tendency to do redraws. Some of them look quite different after they've been changed - from the series I've read I noticed major redrawing for Dear, My God, the older short stories republished in Ai, Sei, and even Takatora and the Omegas (though Asada credited changes in that one to the fact that she's now working 100% digitally).

My opinion for these is kind of mixed, sometimes they do look better and sometimes I prefer her original style. This one from Dean My Love that appears in Ai, Sei is a crime lol.

There was a two-volume manga called Mangaka Gohan Nishi (Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Comic Artists) published in 2015, and it has one page comics by mangaka discussing food they eat. Asada appears in the second volume and her page mentions watching movies.

(basically it's about being bad at / injured by stovetop cooking so she prefers the safety of the microwave. But in the unidentified movie the characters make an explosive device with a microwave…)

I would undoubtedly say films are a large influence to her, and I've caught some parallels/references in her work, but it's kind of a disservice to only point out similarities in characters or genre tropes rather than her skill as an artist and storyteller.

During the last couple years Asada's also been fairly active on Twitter where she shares concept art and extra comics that add more to what she was limited to write in the published works.

For Takatora she's even been live-streamed the planning and inking of its (as of now) upcoming chapter on Pixiv Sketch. The series already has over two dozen pages of extra content judging by a numbered page she shared on Twitter.

Overall I appreciate that on top of having a high output she seems to care a lot about the quality of content her readers are getting. Not every artist makes redraws for their series on top of doing multiple serializations and lots of fanart/doujin content.

(And she has made a lot of fanart and doujinshi. For 10+ years.)

Comments about storytelling

I'm probably going to sound more rambly here, because I'm not a writer or a critic. Regardless of which series I enjoyed or disliked, I think most of them have an element of pushing boundaries in BL manga.

As one Japanese reviewer said when commenting about Sleeping Dead - Asada's manga are the type you want to recommend anyone to read...except you can't.

I think it goes without saying that the focus of sex in her manga can be a barrier, but there is enough range in her work that a reader (with some help) would be able to find a story with an amount of sexual content they'd be comfortable with. I could definitely see Asada working on more non-BL titles like The Swerve, Yoi and A Friend's Funeral, but to be blunt...she seems to really enjoy drawing men having sex.

Boundary-pushing can be apparent in most of her manga, especially when it starts as early as the first chapter. In the least extreme variation, her titles like Sleeping Dead and Call feature somewhat jarring love interests - middle-aged, sexually awkward men that are unconventionally designed compared to other BL love interests.

When the second volume of Sleeping Dead was nominated a Chil-Chil award for its story, Asada shared this illustration of Mamiya in a boxing ring. I love to imagine it as him squaring off with the much more handsome and less follicly-challenged ukes of the other nominated series.

If you check out her earlier series there are a few subjects considered taboo to look at. Sexual violence occurs pretty frequently. Surprisingly (or not, if you've been around long enough), it's not even rape that's considered risky subject matter in BL magazines.

According to a recent interview with Chil-Chil, Asada originally planned to publish Takatora and the Omegas with a different publisher (my guess is Shodensha, since they serialized My Little Inferno in OnBlue), but its inclusion of sexual health topics was considered too extreme:

[Interview translation credit goes to Ikari of Bottom of the Sea Scans, which currently scanlates Takatora and the Omegas.]

Thanks to Canna being willing to publish her more explicit story ideas, we might be able to see how far she planned to go with Takatora. The published chapters have already broached subjects including hysterectomies, abortion and sexual autonomy. I think this situation with Takatora has parallels to the struggles female shoujo mangaka faced in the early decades of manga publishing for girls.

The magazine Canna tends to serialize BL stories that include elements of science fiction and fantasy, which I think has made it a place where artists like Asada can have less restriction in their storytelling.

But...I don't want to praise Asada just for tackling difficult topics. Going back to the comments about page design, there's a huge focus on dialogue. Characters are frequently conversing and making eye contact with each other. She's amazing at writing characters with unlikable traits that are still enjoyable to read about, or are paired with a partner that helps balance out, or even tolerates their faults.

I think it can be easy to drop a series if it has unlikable characters, but she tends to put them in situations that question their ideologies, and we get to see how they change over the course of the story. Even Asada commented that she's not a huge fan of how the protagonist of Takatora and the Omegas acts:

Takatora could wind up being one of the most extreme examples of an unlikable protagonist, but we'll get to see if his bigoted views are changed as he's challenged by his peers, and as he offers his own support to solve their troubles.

At this point I totally got lost in the Takatora sauce, but other little aspects I love about her manga are the humorous moments, the sometimes getting too over-her-head writing, and endings that can be unexpectedly gut-punching yet written in a way that's the most grounded in reality. And in Sleeping Dead's case, immediately followed by a whiplash of silly extras.

I hope that with Takatora and Yoi - which seemed to have planned out for a while - Asada can continue to do her own thing, because I think it's a much better creative output to make whatever the hell you want instead of conforming to the preferences of the publishers.

In conclusion:

[emmg]

Chapter 2: There Are Two Kinds of Forgiveness in the World

(The dove isn’t dead, but it’s limping and dragging itself along. This isn’t meant to be comfortable. But then again, you all know how I feel about lichdom. Heh. Rating changed, tags added.)

Below or on ao3

It doesn’t come all at once. It shouldn’t, she supposes, though some small, absurd part of her almost wishes it would. One clean break, a single moment of unraveling rather than this slow, miserable bleed of awareness. 

Which is why a book bound in red, READ ME, MORON gouged into its spine, becomes her Chant of Light.

She does not read it. Not at first. She only looks. At the letters, at the way they sit on the page, some pressed deep, others barely clinging to the surface, their shapes more weight than meaning. She traces them with her eyes, committing their particular motifs and curves to memory, as though understanding their structure will somehow return their sense. 

Then, after a while, she picks up a quill. She writes beneath the words, not out of any real desire to respond but because the silence is unbearable. 

A fruit—its name, its texture, how it would feel against the blade of a knife. The precise shade of the bedcover, whether it leans toward blue or green, whether it has always been that color or if it only seems that way now. An almost obsessive description of the painting above the fireplace, the one that should lend warmth to the room but does not, the one she never quite believes is real. 

After a time, she sees it.

Her script, fading into the page, identical in slant, in weight, in pressure to the words already there. As if she had written it before. 

She reads, then.

The words sit heavy on the page, worn down in places, as if someone has run their fingers over them a thousand times before, as if they have been waiting for her, knowing she would come back, knowing she would need them. 

You will always return.

You will always ask stupid questions.

You will always remember the answer right after you ask. That’s all right. Ask them anyway.

You are always Rook. You are always born with the name. It does not change.

You will always be afraid, and then you will be in love.

You will always think of the Lighthouse. The walls will crumble and you will still think of it.

You will always hate the stone, and the stone will always hate you back. (Give it a kick. Emmrich will sigh, but he will defend you, because he cannot help himself. Spit on it if you feel like it—what is it going to do? Love you twice?)

You will always die.

Never let him not let you die.

****

She sees him everywhere after that; sees him without seeing, the way one perceives the wind by the obedient dance of autumn leaves. His face is a flicker, a suggestion, like the afterimage of something too bright to look at directly. 

Between the shelves of a book, his voice materializes, sharp and petulant, engaged in some quarrel with a taller figure. 

"It's a figure of speech," he protests, irritated and upset. 

At a kitchen table that is not there, he reclines, fingers curled loosely around a glass he seems to dislike, regarding it with a half-lidded scorn. 

She sees him even as he stands there speaking, but it is another voice she hears, plucked from some other moment, some other version of him. 

"It is not so different..." says the Emmrich of bone. 

"Ah, those happy hours testing acids in the mortuary chambers," sighs the Emmrich of flesh—but not quite flesh—his voice thick with nostalgia. He strolls beside a jittery companion, their shapes dissolving the instant she blinks, 

"Stay there," she whispers, nearly tripping over herself in her need to get closer. "Just stay there, just like that." 

Because if she tilts her head just so, if she squints past the edges of sight, she can almost make the one she does not quite see slip into the outline of the one who is here. A trembling superimposition, a ghost pressing against its own reflection. Perhaps if one steps into the other, if the alignment is perfect, she will sleep. Or remember what it was he said she meant to steal. Or herself. Or him. Or— 

A garden. Flowers. No light, yet somehow day. A strange, root-born daylight, pressing through the soil. They are underground, as they are now. Graves. Two of them. Graves that matter to him. 

She stands there, her hair heavier, longer, raising a hand in awkward greeting. Hello, hello. No answer—naturally. Graves do not answer. 

But he is pleased. Emmrich smiles, that sweet little smile of his, and plucks a flower for her, something delicate, something steeped in a legend so quaint it might have been invented solely to accompany this gesture. A pretty flower for a pretty hope. He kisses her, she kisses him, and behind them, the dead remain artfully arranged, posed for a tableau, their bones twined together in silent, satisfied testament of love. 

That Emmrich did not wear a crown. This one does. She reaches out, lets her fingers ghost over the golden spikes, drags her nails into the cracks where the gems nestle like tiny, unblinking eyes. She remembers silver hair, stiff with pomade, smelling of potash and soap; soap that scoured and stripped. 

"I think," she says, and then again, again, "I think, I think." But the thought never finds its end. 

She sees sickness crawl over the land, a bloom of boils and blackened tendrils, a slithering rot. She sees a beach, its sand pale and coarse, where Emmrich stumbles. Emmrich, always so effortless, now graceless, the sand pouring into his boots as he frowns. She sees a waterfall and a chest, half-hidden behind the frothing cascade. She sees a dragon, dead, felled, great and crumpled. Lightning sizzles off its carcass, fizzing into the puddles around, the charge leaping up her legs, a brief, stinging caress when she wanders near. 

Just before it, a bird, sharp-beaked, darting skyward with some glinting scrap of stolen treasure. Greedy, so greedy, but willing to trade. And Emmrich, the other Emmrich, the one with the sand clinging wetly between his toes, watching it go and remarking, "All like shiny things, it seems." 

She touches his chin next. Then his shoulders, the stiff, weighty folds of his regalia. 

"That is lovely," he says. "Thank you." 

Soft, simple, sincere. It makes her think. Not conjure, not imagine, but recall.

Praise. Praise of a different kind. 

She feels her leg move. It does not move. But once, it did. It shot out, struck something—no, someone—sent them stumbling, nose breaking and crunching, blood pouring hot and foul. 

“Well struck, dearest!” 

A shiver. A different sort of praise, a different setting, private, charged. A voice against her skin, fingers trailing in the dark, coaxing, enticing. Please, please, yes, like that—wonderful, marvelous. Long legs—her legs—bare, stretched out, muscles flexed, toes curled. 

Another shiver, this one with heat curling at its edges. 

She kisses his cheek. First because she is moving, and it is simply where she lands. Then again, because she means it. 

"I think, I think," she hears herself say, catching the frayed thread of an earlier though and reeling it in. "I'm supposed to love you very much."

****

She bribes the Necropolis with kindness. 

"I called you creepy," she says, fingers pressing to the back of her skull, to the spot that still pulses with dull pain. "But you hurt my head. Apparently, I tried to steal from you. I am sorry. You are not creepy. Will you open up?" 

A rumble, low and thoughtful, like a vast, unseen thing shifting in its sleep. The great structure considers, groans, wavers between indulgence and irritation. Then, with a final, weary sigh, it relents. The wall slides apart, and she steps forward, though forward may not be the right word. 

Urns, stacked in careful rows. Plates lining the walls like ceremonial shields. Wisps, faint and gliding, circling one another in soundless games. A room—empty but for a single coffin and a coffee table. On it, a chessboard, the bishop already halfway across, caught mid-strategy. Something about it stirs recognition. Perhaps she has never played, not on this board, not in this room, but she can imagine herself here, seated in one of the two dusty chairs, waiting for a move that never came. 

Staircases, staircases, staircases. Some obedient and logical. Others leading nowhere, ending bluntly at brick walls. She knocks, leans in, listens. Silence. She turns back, retracing her steps, only to glance over her shoulder and find the staircase has vanished altogether. 

Pools of still, black water. She dips in a foot, then stops. She doesn’t think she can swim. 

She considers leaving. But where? And how? And more importantly, which direction—if any—would let her leave at all? 

It would be nice, she thinks, not to see ghosts. But now that she does, what is she meant to do with the absence of them? 

Because they are hers now. Not quite friends, not quite shadows, but something closer than either. No, she corrects herself—they are friends, in their way, pressed to her vision like sap. If she ever wished to be rid of them, truly rid of them, she would have to run her nails across her eyes, scrape, scrape, scrape, until the pulp gathered under her fingertips, and even then—she knows—they would still be there, waiting behind her lids.

"You have come far. Are you not tired? Shall we head back, dear?"

She startles, but only slightly. In the water, the reflection of veilfire flickers, and over her shoulder, Emmrich. 

Her feet throb. She is tired. 

“How did you find me?” she asks, not in alarm but in genuine curiosity. It feels as though she has spent hours threading through a labyrinth that dissolved behind her with every step. The way back, she suspects, does not exist. A new one will have to be made. 

“The Necropolis told me, of course,” Emmrich says, offering his hand. “It has a fondness for you, I think, though it expresses itself in riddles and inconveniences.” 

“What else does it tell you?” 

“Oh, many things.” He inclines his head, listening. “At this moment, it tells me it has restored the ledge I asked it to conceal from you because, once, you fell from it and shattered your leg. It sighs about the enchantments in the Vault of the Beloved, delicate as old embroidery, in need of careful restoration. It recounts the small triumphs of a rat, more cunning than its kin, who has stolen the finger of a recently embalmed baron. The Necropolis finds it amusing; the baron does not. He was quarrelsome in life, and death has done little to temper him.” 

His gaze flickers toward the distant halls. “It murmurs of lovers who have stolen away from their lessons, who seek refuge within its walls. It shelters them, reshapes itself, grants them a room without doors, a quiet haven where time itself will not intrude until they have finished kissing.” 

She takes his hand, lets him draw her up, and rests her hand in the crook of his arm. 

"And now,” he says, looking down at her, “it wonders—shall it guide us home without delay, or shall it let us meander a while longer, as it did you?” 

****

She wants to see him, desperately so. As if she has not already, as if she has not seen him a thousand times, a million, in some other life, some other dream, only for his face to blur, to sink into that same stubborn fog that steals the details of forgotten mornings. 

So she asks. 

And he agrees. 

A soft light drapes itself over him, stretching across bone like fabric pulled over a frame, and then he begins to become. Skin rises, settling with a peculiar laziness, as though it has always belonged there but had simply been absent for a time. The veilfire retreats inward, disappearing into eyes that are, quite suddenly, tired. A nose takes shape where there was none—long, slightly aquiline, too much detail given to something that did not exist a moment ago. And the hair, of course, the hair—grey, neatly coiffed.

She remembers something—a theory, a whisper, a half-heard fact—that the mind cannot create faces in dreams. Behind closed lids, the strangers who appear have been seen before, in some fleeting instant, a passing glance at the market, a face in a window, a pair of eyes that never quite met hers. 

It feels like that. 

She is not surprised. No more than one is surprised by the familiar silhouette of a man who walks the same route every morning, who stands at the same corner, always just on the periphery. Never acknowledged, never named, but known, in the way that repetition makes a stranger more intimate than a friend.

“Oh,” she says, and her voice is thinner than she expects. Her hand lifts, then hesitates midair. “Can you stay like that? Can you please stay like that?” 

Emmrich sighs as if he has been expecting this request. He raises his own hand to meet hers, folding it gently in his grasp. 

Immediately, she shivers. 

She sees skin, pale and strangely luminous in the dim light, as though softened by years rather than shaped by them. The whites of his eyes are not quite white but faintly dulled. He looks so ordinary, so carefully, exquisitely assembled, the human shape rendered with just enough imperfection to make it convincing. But his hands remain wrapped, the cloth crisp. And beneath it, the illusion falters. She feels the ridges of bone pressing through, the unpadded swell of the knuckles, the shallow depressions where tendons should soften the joints but do not. 

"You always ask," Emmrich says, quietly. "You never get used to it." 

"No?"

"No," he confirms. A wisp drifts toward him, bright and weightless, orbiting him without aim. He regards it for a moment—perhaps fondly, perhaps not—before dismissing it with a wave.

“You gasp, you argue. You tell me it is cold—yes, I agree, it is, it must be, though I cannot feel it.” He leans forward, fastening the two forgotten buttons of her jacket. "Sometimes, you declare that you must leave," he continues. "And then, of course, you do. You return, always in pieces. A broken arm, a cracked rib, a nose that no longer sits quite where it should. But never all at once—no, your body is more stubborn than that. It parcels out its disasters, metes them out like rationed sugar. And I watch. And I wait. And I think to myself, this is quite unbearable." 

His fingertips graze her sleeve before straightening the cuff. 

"Perhaps," he muses, "perhaps you need not break anymore. There is nothing to trip over here, nothing to fall from. No rooftops, no knives glinting between ribs, no horses startled into a gallop at just the wrong moment. We could read instead, as we once did. You always turned the pages too quickly, impatient to reach the end before you had lived in the middle. Always rushing, always certain there was something waiting just beyond the next chapter." 

She remembers pain—deep, blooming, the sharp inhalation of something fractured—but not how it happened. 

"Sometimes—" his fingers lace through hers—"sometimes, you do not return at all. You die before you are able." 

She feels her pulse in her wrist, steady, insistent, alive. More unsettling is how it spills into him, how the rhythm transfers, absorbed into the absence where his own should be. 

"Eventually, you come back." 

A pause, long enough to suggest fatigue, long enough to feel like waiting. 

"Introductions are made again." His thumb brushes the back of her hand. "And always—" 

Something flickers across his face, too quick to name. Not quite sadness. Not quite anything. 

"Always, you ask for this face." 

"It is a handsome face," she says.

He smiles. "As always, I am grateful you think so."

****

She decides that she wants to love him very much.

His hands move over her, unfastening, loosening, undoing. Not rushed, not hesitant, just thorough, as if dressing and undressing were all the same to him, an idle exercise in precision. It isn’t uncomfortable, not exactly, just cold, the kind of cold that does not announce itself but lingers patiently. And then her fingers brush his face, expecting warmth, the pliant give of flesh, but instead—nothing. 

She shivers. 

“Hush, hush,” Emmrich soothes, his hands pausing their careful work to cradle her face, his thumbs grazing circles into her skin, tracing the shape of her, smoothing her resistance down like creased fabric. “Simply feel me. See me.” 

She does. She sees his not-face, his smile so terribly gentle, the careful arrangement of features that should comfort but somehow do not. But the longer he touches her, the less she can hold onto the distinction. The wrongness of it dulls, softens, flees. She does feel him—his breath against her cheek, the sweat between them, the steady weight of him above her. 

“Rook, Rook,” he murmurs, lowering his face to her neck as he moves, as she gasps, as her body pulls itself tight and then—loosens. The heat is slow, creeping, something that does not burn so much as fill.

To the left, the bookcase runs the length of the wall, heavy with volumes that do not gather dust, their spines softened by hands that have lingered too long. One tome juts forward, just slightly, a deliberate imperfection, a decoy. Behind it, the wall is not quite shut. A sliver of space remains, just enough for a thread of light to slip through. 

She knows what waits beyond. 

A laboratory, too neat to be frantic, too cluttered to be precise, where beakers and vials glow faintly with their own quiet thoughts, flanked by skulls and scrolls, where tools sit where they were last placed, waiting, expecting. His room.  

Beyond that, a staircase coils in on itself, spiraling downward—or perhaps upward, depending on how one chooses to step. It leads to a library where books climb toward a ceiling that may or may not exist, their spines leaning, whispering, conspiring. One would need a hundred eyes to see where they end, a hundred hands to pull them all free. And past that, a door. Not to outside, not to here, but to something altogether other. The Fade—vast, unbroken, fixed in the uncanny hush of an eternal morning, a world forever paused.

If she were to step beyond, past the bridge of floating stones, and veer just slightly to the right, she would find a room thick with green, thick with breathing. The air itself seems tangled in it, vines creeping up walls as if trying to press through, to keep going. A garden that has long since stopped obeying the limits of its pots, its borders, its intended shape. 

At the center, a pond: still, contemplative, the kind that collects things. A petal, a stray leaf, a sliver of sky caught in its surface, the reflection shivering but never breaking. The window above it is filmed with grime, filtering the light into something softer, something homely. 

It is tended by someone with red hair, dirt pressed into the creases of their fingers, moving with a patience reserved for those who have no need to hurry. Someone who wrinkles their nose at coffee but drinks it anyway just to be likeable. Someone who prefers the sharper, more lingering bitterness of tea steeped to the point of ruin and drowned in sugar. 

Were she to retrace her steps, to head left next, she would find another room. Less alive, more… assembled. Trinkets in various stages of deconstruction, artifacts splayed out in quiet dissection, as if understanding is something best accomplished by breaking things apart. In the middle of it, something that might be a bed if beds were made of stray cushions and half-read books, pages bent where they had been held open too long. Someone sleeps there, though not easily; someone who speaks in uninterrupted sentences, who does not pause, does not breathe between thoughts, whose mind unfurls like a thread rolling off a spool, never quite reaching the floor.

A touch. A sweet pass over her head, and the world shifts. The bookcase still ajar, the dim light folding gently over the room. A warmth spreads through her, thick and languid, a warmth that feels earned. 

She reaches for Emmrich’s face, fingertips trailing the flushed heat of his cheeks, the damp strands of his hair curling out of place. He is undone, and the sight of it pleases her. She murmurs something, but the words dissolve before they ever reach her own ears, meaningless the moment they are freed. 

"It feels good," she thinks she says. "You feel good." 

Then, something more fragmented, less language than sensation; words spoken not to be understood but to be said, the kind of thing people whisper when thought is secondary to rhythm. Something about how good he feels inside her. 

A hesitation in his hips, the tightening of his fingers against her skin, a breath stolen from somewhere deep in his throat. His rhythm falters, a hitch in movement, a misstep he cannot correct. His fingers, too tight at her waist, leave nothing but pressure, blunt and urgent, grasping at something already slipping from his reach. A sharp breath, half-stifled, like he has been caught in the act of something shameful. 

"It’s all right, it’s all right," she murmurs. 

He sags against her, his weight no longer held, no longer controlled, pressing her down, down, into the mattress. She feels the tremor break over him, a violent, helpless thing, starting at the base of his spine and shuddering its way through his ribs, his shoulders, his arms. His fingers, still clutching at her, twitch once, then go slack. A final thrust, or maybe two—she loses count, loses everything but the sensation of him stilled above her, inside her, before he pulls away and warmth follows, thick, slow, spilling in a lazy, viscous flow between her thighs. 

A whispered apology into her neck. 

"It’s all right," she says, or maybe just thinks, "it was lovely." 

Oh, but she is cold now.

She turns her head. Emmrich is still there. But not as he was. His skin is not warm. His hands are not bare. 

She remembers. 

But she does not stop. She will not stop. Not when she is this, not when her body still hums with something fragile, urgent. A flame reduced to ember, yes, but ember is enough. Ember can grow. 

“Can you be like that again?” she asks, not knowing what that even means, only knowing she wants.

“Yes,” he says, leaning over her, his voice slipping between her ear and hair. 

His hands resume their drifting, tracing the sharp plane of her hip, the soft, tense curve of her inner thigh, the warmth gathered where she is already slick, already waiting. His fingers press, coax, part. Then, the slow push of him, sliding into her, stretching, filling, the ache of intrusion melting into something else entirely. 

She turns her head again, and this time the air is thick. Moss, damp earth, the heaviness of rain-soaked canvas. The tent flaps in the wind, but it will not lift; she knows this. She staked it down herself, hammered the pegs deep into the soil with the pommel of a borrowed sword. 

Hot hands, warm hands, her hands—yes, her hands, undoing the fastenings of a high-waisted pair of trousers, a giggle bubbling up before she can stop it.

“Now?” The voice is scandalized, high-pitched. 

Emmrich’s voice. 

“Here?” 

“Here.” She presses her palm to his abdomen. 

His breath catches at the coolness of her touch. She smirks. 

“What if they hear us?” 

They?

“Then they should learn to mind their own fucking business.” 

Shuffling, breathless laughter, fabric pushed aside in frantic, clumsy motions. His hands fumbling at her waist, hers swatting them away, then pulling him closer. A scrape of teeth against lips, a kiss half-missed, too eager, a sharp inhale where there should have been a sigh. 

Then panting, gripping, bodies twisting into place, the shifting of weight, her pressing back, his hands finding purchase—spine, hip, the soft flesh of her stomach. There, there, a repositioning, a nudge of his knee between hers, the awkward hurry of it all, the graceless choreography of lovers who cannot wait.

She loves it. She loves him. 

She grinds against him, rolling her hips, feels him thicken in response, hardening against the heat of her, against the damp fabric between them. She reaches back, fingers curling around his cock, feels him jerk in her grasp, hears the broken sound that leaves him as she strokes him to full, aching stiffness. His mouth on her shoulder, open, desperate, in a breathless gasp. 

Her fingers find the edge of her smallclothes, drag them just barely aside, the fabric still clinging to the slick of her. Guides him there, the blunt, leaking head pressing, slipping, pushing in. A stretch, a burn, a breath caught between a sigh and a sharp, stuttered moan. 

Stale water, the kind that never dries, only thickens. The air clings, damp, sour, something rotting but not close enough to see, just near enough to settle behind the eyes, at the back of the throat. The sky—grey, always grey. A dull, lifeless expanse, heavy as wet wool. The same color as the order that keeps the land quiet, pressed flat, stripped of movement. 

Wine. Or what was once wine. Now a sharp, acrid thing, more vinegar than drink, curling its bitterness into the hollow beneath her tongue. 

A cave. Closed off, sealed as if something inside had tried to force its way out and failed. She remembers hacking at it, blade meeting resistance—not stone, something softer, something that gave way with a sick, wet pull. And then— 

Inside. 

Flowers, pale and too many, clustering where they shouldn’t, pressing up between cracks in the stone. A stream, thin as a vein, silver where the light catches. But there is no light, no moon, and yet— 

Emmrich kneeling. 

Emmrich smiling. 

Emmrich gathering a bloom for his herbarium.

Pleasure. A kiss to her neck.

The rhythm is desperate, frantic, an unmeasured rut—hips snapping forward, her pushing back to meet him, to take him deeper. His hand clamps over her mouth, hers claw into the dirt, a bracing, an anchoring. A single, shuddering wave of pleasure crests inside her, legs tightening, back arching, muscles seizing around him as she comes. It takes her under, drags her somewhere thoughtless. 

But he is not there himself. His hands still grip her too tightly, his movements still searching, still restless, still chasing.

She shifts, tilts back, presses her hands against his chest—down, down, quiet now. He lets her move him, body folding beneath her, breath catching. The back of his head lands against a makeshift pillow, a provision sack clumsily arranged, and she takes a moment, just a moment, to smooth his hair where it has gone astray. She kisses his mouth, his jaw, the pale line of his throat, down, down.

She frees him, entirely this time; exposed, flushed, stiff against her palm. Aching. A small, helpless motion of his hips, an unformed sound in his throat. She strokes once, testing, feeling the heat, the dampness at the tip, the way his stomach tenses beneath her. Uses the pad of her middle finger to follow the thick vein running along the underside of his cock, pressing into it just enough to feel the way he pulses beneath her hand.

She smells herself on him before she tastes it, tongue laving over him, gathering what she has already left behind.  

There is no time for indulgence. They are not alone. 

Her lips part, widen, stretch over him. She takes him in, lets him feel the wet heat of her, the pull of her tongue, the way she presses down past the point where it should be comfortable, past the point where he should let her. Past her molars, past the cushiony seat of her tonsils. She finds his hand, guides it into her hair, wordlessly telling him: hold me here, use me, move if you want to. Her nose buries in the damp, musky tangle of his groin, sweat-slicked, the scent thick, heady, him. A tickle at the edges of her nostrils, something vaguely obscene about it, about how deep she’s taken him, about the way her lips, stretched too wide, are already dry, cracking at the corners. Saliva pools beneath her tongue, dripping down his shaft, trailing over her chin, filthy and fitting.

A stifled groan. The twitch of his fingers. 

His hips snap forward, a deep, instinctual push that she does not resist, throat tightening around him, breath hitching in a strangled little sound that seems to drive him further. She hollows her cheeks, swallows, lets him feel it. The burn, the restriction, the wet. 

A squeeze to his knee—let go, let go, now, now.

Finally, a shudder overtakes him all at once. His spine bows, his breath snags, a quiet, ruined noise muffled into his palm as he releases into her mouth. She swallows, tries to take it all, but he keeps giving, keeps twitching against her tongue, and it nearly overwhelms her, nearly pushes too far, nearly makes her gag, makes her feel it everywhere, thick in her throat, at the edges of her sinuses, threatening to spill back up. She chokes once, recovers, forces herself to swallow again, to take it all. 

She pulls off with a smile. Licks the mess from the corner of her mouth, then from the softening length of him, patient, thorough, indulgent. Presses her mouth to his stomach, breathes him in. 

She knows he is sensitive. She knows. 

With the same care she unmade him, she tucks him away, covers what was undone, fixes what was left disheveled. Crawls back up his body, presses her weight against him, kisses him—deep, soft, slow, salty. 

A sob, half-swallowed, his face hidden in her hair when he shifts it to conceal his tears, his body wracked.  

The whispered, frantic aftermath—I love you, I love you, I love you.

Candles, a ridiculous number of them, flickering in every corner, their wax pooling lazily. Wine, not cheap but rare, absurdly so, the sort cellared for decades, waiting for an occasion grander than this. Sweets from Orlais, dusted with sugar, a feast for the eyes first, the tongue second. 

Her words—though she isn’t entirely sure she speaks them, isn’t sure her throat moves at all, isn’t sure she has ever said them aloud: 

"You are ridiculous. Why did you get all of this?" 

Trembling hands—not hers, not at first. His fingers unsteady as they reach, as they hesitate. Her laughter breaks, ugly, nervous, warping into a snort. 

"No, Emmrich. We are not going to the opera and then a restaurant and then to the finest, stupidest inn in all of Nevarra." 

"Would you truly not enjoy an evening of splendid—" 

"If, and only if, you lost your virginity to a string quartet, will I do the same." 

"... It was in the apprentices’ dormitory." 

"Exactly." 

"There were... bunk beds." 

"Oof. That's tragic. How did that even go?"

"Poorly. The next morning, a warning pamphlet had been distributed." 

The wine—shared, but barely tasted. Kisses, half-finished things, exchanged absently, nervously. Words—so many words, a deluge, a dam breaking, a flood meant to carry them both away before they reach where they are going. Reassurances, murmured into hair, into the hollow beneath a jaw, against a trembling wrist. 

His hand, tentative, a ghost of pressure at her knee. A question in the form of touch. A response in the way she opens, shifts, allows. Nothing between them now, no more fastenings, no more places to hide. 

A sob, sharp, quick—hers. A whimper, a clench of fingers, a quiet please.

A moan, a helpless litany of I am sorry, I am sorry, I am sorry—his.

Blood, after. Staining the sheets in small, quiet proof. 

"I love you, I love you, I love you," breathed into her skin, pressed against her temple. And then—"Let me make you a tea." 

Mint and elderflower, chamomile, hands shaking as they pour. 

She gasps, her back arching clean off the bed. A sudden, desperate motion—her hand flying between her thighs, grasping blindly, trying to still the one working her open so thoroughly. 

Above her, Emmrich watches. His other hand never stops moving, his thumb still tracing tender circles over the curve of her cheek. 

"Did you feel us?" he asks. 

"Yes," she murmurs, dazed, and after a moment, her grip on his wrist loosens, her body slowly surrendering again, the overstimulation retreating just enough for him to continue. 

"It is still just me," he says, curling his fingers inside her just as he speaks, pressing up into that devastating spot. She clenches around him, a fluttering, involuntary squeeze around wrapped bone. 

"It is still just us." 

Words abandon her entirely. She tilts her head back, her throat bared, and immediately feels the press of him—lips or teeth or breath—against the sensitive skin there. A kiss, a bite. She cannot tell. It does not matter. 

Whimpers spill freely from her mouth as something else reaches, stretching deep inside, something hot, something licking at her heart. A presence. A second touch without a second hand. Him, but not quite him. 

Again, she catches his wrist, this time not to stop him but to anchor herself, holding him firm as she fucks herself against his hand, grinding down, seeking, taking—one roll of the hips, another, a third, and then— 

Release, flooding her limbs, softening her body, warmth overtaking everything. Her muscles slacken, her breath leaves her in a long, shivering exhale, and when her mouth finally falls open, it is only to smile. 

****

“The first three times you died were the worst,” he confesses. “It is… difficult, you must understand, to maintain faith in an eventuality when confronted with immediate evidence to the contrary—when you are lying there, your chest still, your limbs cooling, all the physiological indicators of death firmly in place. And yet, I knew—with certainty, not speculation—that I could override the process. That I could force the lungs to draw air again, compel the heart to resume its rhythm. And so I did. The eventuality would have to wait.”

"Just like that?" 

Emmrich places a hand on his hip, as though mildly disappointed in her need to ask. “What I do,” he says, his tone bordering on smug, “no one else can.” 

“I see.” 

"But," he continues, and here the rhythm of his speech slows, his voice lowering, tapering off into something quieter, “as with all such interventions, there is a cost.” 

He begins to pace, as if the movement might align his thoughts more precisely, as if careful articulation requires a certain rhythm, a certain physicality. His robes trail behind him, the fabric dragging against the floor in slow, sweeping arcs. A glance toward her, a moment of expectation, as if she should already follow, as if the conclusion should be self-evident. 

"You weaken,” he explains, instructive, “not in any overt or immediate way, but at a structural level. Internally. The damage is… accumulative.” 

She does not speak. 

“The first time—ah, the first time—it was almost ideal. A textbook revival,” he muses. “You convulsed, as the body reoriented itself. You coughed, violently at times, but I assumed—quite reasonably, I thought—that this was an expected response. You had, after all, been without oxygen for days. The lungs resist at first, then recalibrate. It was all very promising." 

A brief delay, as if reviewing his own reasoning. 

“But then you coughed so hard that a piece of it came out.” 

She stares at the settee because, quite suddenly, she is there. Or rather, she sees herself sitting exactly as she is now, the same curve of the spine, the same set of the shoulders, as if she has stepped outside her own skin and turned back to look. She does not know if this is seeing or merely an elaborate trick of the mind, but the version of her across from her feels tangible, whole, present in a way no hallucination should be. If she reached forward, she is certain she would find the warmth of her own palm, the familiar shape of her own fingers, a pulse steady beneath the skin. 

A convulsion, a heaving from deep inside, from somewhere untouched until now. The copy's breath catches, turns brittle. She coughs, retches, and then—there it is. In the palm of her hand. 

Blood-streaked, thick. Tissue. An offering.

“The second time, it was the lungs and the liver,” Emmrich recites, lowering two fingers as though marking a tally. “Both are stubborn in their own ways. The lungs resist reanimation; they do not want to breathe again once they have collapsed. The liver, well… the liver is less dramatic but infinitely more petulant. It does not forgive.”

Beside her, the vision shifts. It—she—catches her attention, then, slowly, presses a finger beneath the fragile skin of her lower lid, pulling it down to expose the gleaming wet curve of her eye. She is showing her something.

She leans in. 

The sclera is no longer white but yellow, like something left too long in oil, something diseased from the inside out. The color sits thick in the tissue, clinging like wax melted too deep into cloth. 

The other Rook winces, releases her eye, and immediately, as if completing the thought, begins to scratch at her wrist. First lightly, idly, then harder, her nails dragging deep enough to leave red, rising welts, then breaking skin, then pulling blood. 

“Then it was the bones,” Emmrich laments. At once, his voice changes, quickens, lifts. “Oh, but the bones,” he repeats, newly absorbed. “Those I could fix. No mystery there, no great philosophical conundrum. A spell to mend. The most elementary form of repair. Structural integrity." 

He gestures around, sketching the absent shape of his work into the air. “I had to remove a rib from your lung, you know. The former had collapsed the latter—punctured, rather, though that is a much less elegant term for it. A predictable failure of form, the kind one sees in improperly built scaffolding or poorly jointed furniture. You were—ah, what is the term?—caving in on yourself." 

A humming, a tune softly sung. "But no matter, no matter," he says, hands in motion, as verbose as him. "These things can be corrected."

"In botany," he describes, "when a specimen begins to rot, one has several viable options. You can disinfect and repot, introduce new soil, better drainage—but I had no spare lungs at the time. Ribs, however, I could acquire in multitudes." He traces his own in emphasis. 

"You can improve airflow—simple enough. The rib was misplaced, certainly, but not irredeemable. A matter of realignment, of restoring function, of letting the body do what it was meant to do." His hands mimic the motion, the subtle lift of expansion, the repositioning of something unseen. And then—“a-ha!”—his fingers snap, delighted, as though striking upon a thought just now, as though he has not played through this exact recollection a thousand times before.

"Or, you apply a fungicide. Something that devours the damage before the damage can devour you." He tilts his head slightly, admiring the elegance of the solution. “A countermeasure, a correction. I inscribed a rune, very small, affixed to your inner abdominal wall. A self-regulating mechanism. Quite effective.” 

He does not stop pacing. His hands, however, for the first time, still. 

"But I should have done it sooner," he whispers and when she tries to catch his gaze, he avoids her. 

The Rook beside her shrugs, an exaggerated, almost heavy movement, as if to say what can you do? Her lips part but do not shape sound, only the impression of it—sucks to suck—a phrase without breath, without voice, just the careless curl of a mouth forming something useless.

She extends her hands, expectant. Rook takes them, turning them over in her own, inspecting the fingertips—blackened, as if dipped in ink, but too deep, too sick in color, not stain but something seeping.

Her gaze lifts. There, at the tip of her nose, the same creeping darkness. 

"Rot sets in," Emmrich mutters, distantly, as if arriving at a thought mid-sentence. "I could have… I could have replaced your fingers with vitriol." An uneasy pause, like he is searching for the correct phrasing, the right way to outline something very simple to someone very slow. "A malleable metal, highly conductive to enchantment. You would not have lost sensation. In fact, had I calibrated it properly, you might have gained additional feedback. It would have been quite functional." 

His fingers twitch, recalling the weight of the possibility, the shape of what could have been. "It is what you do with flowers," he insists. "Prune away the rotting leaves before the disease spreads. It is standard practice. Sensible. Necessary." A faint narrowing of his eyes, almost a reproach. "But you refused." 

She nods.

"I respected that." 

The Rook with yellowed eyes and blackened fingers cocks her head in a way that is almost sympathetic, then lifts a hand to her throat, dragging a line across it—slice. With her free hand comes a wave, a child losing interest in a game.

Bye-bye.

She swallows. Once, twice. A second nod follows the first, dragged out, mechanical, as if doubling the gesture might make it mean something, might anchor her in the present moment instead of whatever cold, spiraling future he is so carefully, so enthusiastically constructing. She sits there, unmoving, wishing—so fiercely it makes her teeth ache—that she had not heard any of it. That the words had slipped past her, dissolved into the air before reaching her ears, that she could fold this conversation into some impossible pocket of time where it would stay, unwitnessed, unspoken. 

But instead, she extends her hands. 

Emmrich accepts them eagerly. He lifts them, presses the ridges of her knuckles to his mouth, or what she has to think of as his mouth. 

She forces herself to imagine lips, soft, warm, moist. To pretend. Because she is still uncomfortable by the bones beneath the linen, by the teeth that remain bared, by the sockets where his eyes should be, by the ribs outside of him, gold-dipped, almost decorative. 

"My darling," he murmurs. 

Her throat tightens. "If you do any of this to me—" She stops, swallows again, a fifth time, as if that might push the rest of it down, keep it from surfacing. "Now or later, to me, or... to another me... if you do it, Emmrich, any of it, I... I..." The words resist, drag against her teeth, catch behind her tongue, but she forces them out anyway. "There will be no more eventually." 

He drops to his knees so abruptly that for a moment she wonders if he has lost control of his own body. The sound is immediate and brutal; the hollow clank of bone against the floor, sharp enough to make her flinch.

If he could cry, she thinks, he would. The absence of it makes everything worse. Instead, he folds against her, his skull pressing into her knees, and simply stays there, motionless except for the slight, involuntary shudder running through him. It is not prayer—he is no supplicant, and she is no saint—but it is something like it, something closer to pleading than she has ever heard from him before. 

"No, no, no, I will not," he says, again and again, and at first, it holds—rigid, certain, a vow carved into something harder than stone. But repetition undoes him, undoes the words, strips them of their shape until they are just sounds strung together. Like trying to speak through sobs, when the body betrays the voice, when language collapses under the weight of phlegm and air and suddenly nothing means anything at all. You could be lying, you could be confessing to murder, and it would sound the same. 

"Please do not die, Rook, please stop dying, my dear, my heart." 

"I will try," she whispers. 

Maybe she can cry for him. Maybe she can cry for both of them. 

"I love you." 

"I love you," she echoes, and she does, yes, she does, but more than that, she must, because what else could this be? What else could keep them here, together, in this terrible, endless repetition?

His fingers tighten at the fabric of her clothes, as if that alone might keep her here, intact, alive. She looks down at him—at the crown resting in her lap, at the ribs that should be inside his body but are not, at the hands that would shake if there were any flesh left to tremble—and wonders if this is grief or simply possession by another name. 

[raintailed]

art for a patrol scenario :] basically, while in moonlit cave Shockpaw encounters a fledgeling murkrow who had fallen out of their nest. Shockpaw helps the murkrow find a safe path back to their nest :]

uhhhhh. alternate versions and progress shots and stuff under the cut as usual

rough sketch for figuring out the composition n stuff! the text below the murkrow reads "guide eye;" i planned on having a light-colored floor combine with shockpaw's webs and the rays of light to guide the viewer's eye up to the nest.

the final sketch. once again, doing rough shading to figure out the shape of rocks and stuff is a method i highly recommend using!

lineart and stuff :] i put different color segments (ex. murkrow's eyes and tail band, the tops of the rock pile, etc) on different layers to make coloring significantly easier

the final color! murkrow has slightly different colors from the ken sugimori art for the species. most noticeably, their eyes are more pinkish. also, murkrow is pretty scruffy - that's because they're a fledgeling and fledgeling crows just look like that hehe

version with shading but without effects! the final version has glowing crystals/stars, blurred foreground, and light rays. shading was one of the most time-consuming stages since there were so many objects that needed it. i ended up splitting shading layers into multiple folders so it would take less effort to clean up.

[albacanta-art]

Opening 3 commission slots to afford furniture and other basics!

The pricing for sketches and TOS can be found below the cut. Lineart will be +100% of the prices below.

You may reach me via DM on here, via Dis//cord alba_canta or albacanta@yahoo.com. I look forward to your ideas!

TOS:

General Procedures

-I reserve the right to deny or turn down any commission request I do not feel comfortable with, be it due to skill or topics I do not agree with.

-Commissions are for personal use only. I do not allow my art to be fed to any kind of A//I engines, nor for any kind of commercial use; there will be additional fees for commercial use.

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-I accept requests to change only during the rough sketching phase. If you can't settle for a design and keep changing your mind, I reserve the right to deny continuing on your piece. After the sketching phase, I only allow 3-4 minor changes that don't drastically change the final piece. Any changes beyond that will increase the price of the commission.

-In order to start on your commission, I need as many details as possible: be it in written form, ref sheets, previous commissions, and so on. The more things you make clear are important for you in the beginning, the easier it will be for me to make your vision a reality.

-Please understand that excessive detail or complexity (such as intricate tattoos, clothing, or patterns) may increase the base price shown above.

Payment

-Payments are solely via Pay//Pal. Once we agree on a price and I put together the first sketch, I expect 50% of the full price to be forwarded in advance. I will forward the final product only after the full payment has gone through. All payments are final, I do not accept refunds.

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Other specifics

-Please be patient and allow me up to 3 months for your piece. I put a lot of care into quality and detail and that takes time. I will make sure to update you on my process, but you may also ask for them in moderation. Pestering me won't make me want to work for you any faster. Rushed art is only available for additional fees.

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By commissioning me, you confirm that you have read my terms of service and agree to them.

Thank you for your interest!

Examples:

Rough Sketch: Quick and dirty, with or without faded first sketch lines underneath and minimal shading/detailing (Different line colours are optional, the norm is black)

Clean sketch: Carefully cleaned up lines and punctual highlighting / details

Greyscale sketch: Varying degrees of shading and lighting, including a simple background unless a detailed background is specifically requested (as was the case for this commission)

Full-colour sketch: Complete colouring and shading on a clean sketch with or without a simplistic background unless a detailed background is specifically requested.

Character Sheet Bundle: Includes a colour palette and 3-5 detail drawings depending on the pieces you choose to include besides the two full-body sketches (I will charge an additional fee for any more details you wish to include). I will provide a censored and uncensored version upon completion, but request that only the censored version is shared on social media. The character sheet will be flat colours only for the sake of being a reference sheet, e.g. for future commissions.

[soulless-angel25]

ok so im reading "The Price Is Your Everything" on webtoon and im on chapter 59 and I hate the dress they put Nerys in. more under the cut (might not make complete sense its almost 1 am for me and i need sleep)

Ok! So starting off, this is the dress they put her in.

Which it is a pretty dress! But it doesn't work for Nerys. I understand that the intent behind this dress was for it to compliment her eyes, but the color is just different enough that instead of complimenting it clashes. If we were to compare the dress that she ordered for herself versus this one there are many notable differences.

The dress she chose for herself was a green with a straight across neckline and long sleeves. Shown below are the references for what Nerys's dress was going to look like and the (torn up) version of her dress

The chosen dress would have had a straight across neckline with long sleeves that were off her shoulders and a simple skirt that appears to have a slight amount of volume and some kind of ruffle at the conjoined point of the skirt and top. And actually taking another look at the torn up dress, that doesn't even seem to be the fabric that she'd chosen.

Nerys had chosen this plain green in a shade that would compliment her appearance. But the torn up dress is a much duller shade and also has a design of some kind on it. It's actually commented on in the story by the dress-maker(?) that the fabric Nerys had chosen was high quality and that to embroider or place a design on it would make it worse, she also made note of the fact that the clothing Nerys was wearing was also very high quality.

Which I'm not sure whether or not this was a deliberate choice or not, maybe it gets explained in the story but I have little hope for that.

But back on track! The choices that Nerys made for her dress were ones that would compliment her appearance but also make her stand out, since its stated that a lot of ladies are wearing purple for the graduation ceremony. And that green would (in my opinion) make her eyes pop more than putting her in a dress that has a similar color to her eyes.

2. Shown below are two fully body shots of the dress, one with Nerys wearing it and one without her wearing it. The other is the front-facing view of Nerys with the dress on.

Right off the bat, the color of the dress does not suit her. Like I said before the color is off just enough that it clashes with her eyes rather than complimenting them. Moving on we have the complete difference in style, this is something that someone else chose for her and it shows.

From the brightness of the gown, the volume of her skirt, and the type of sleeves. None of this is something that she chose for herself, which honestly... kinda sucks. She also only has a bow on one of her shoulders which makes the piece look worse, it also is more red toned compared to the other pieces of the outfit.

The neckline on it also reminds me more of a boat neck, though a case could be made for another kind of neckline, such as a beteau neckline. Which is that sort of higher neckline that falls more around the collarbone rather than lower down.

And I understand why the artist gave the dress a belt/ribbon piece around the middle since it allows the pieces of the dress to pop a bit more rather than have them blur together when looking at it as one whole piece however.... The decor piece on the dead center makes it feel a little gaudy. Actually the entire piece feels sort of gaudy, not in the way that you'd usually think of 'gaudy' but it is nonetheless.

3. The Jewelry

Its...... fine? I guess? Just, too light. A more rich color would have suited her better, this is where you could pull in her eye color to have something compliment it. Or if we go with the imaginary scenario where she is wearing the green dress, you could have the jewels be some sort of green. Because the green jewelry could provide a sharp contrast (in a good way)

I also have issues with her hair but I'm running out of energy. So I'll leave off with this- her hair should be in more of an updo, not a partial updo with a bunch of hair down. But a full nice hairdo, in a bun or something similar with some strands framing her face and maybe some hair down. Since otherwise her hair, skin, and jewelry all sort of blend together with them all being very light colors and having her hair up would lessen that issue.

but uh... yeah. thats all ive got, im gonna go to bed now (or try... we'll see)

[rjalker]

Free to use for whatever you want Flatlander basic anatomy design! It's public domain because I made it and I said so!

Web archive link for these two, plus my pencil drawings that I'll finish tomorrow. Also includes the one short story I wrote so far.

(Edit since I forgot to make it clear: You are 100% encouraged to download, share/repost these images, including the pencil drawings you can find at the link, as long as you link back to the web archive link so people can download the originals, include an image description for accessibility, and don't claim you made them!)

Please consider donating to the Web Archive if you've got any spare change!

You can buy the first design from my Threadless store :) I'll make more versions of it tomorrow.

Anyways I decided Flatlanders are monoecious like snails.

(Let me know if you would like this tagged as anything specific for filtering purposes! You can send anonymous asks to @neopronouns-in-action)

[ID: Three images. The first is a flat color digital drawing entitled, "Color-coded your convenience, An Adult Flatlander As Seen From the 3rd Dimension. [Warning: Do not poke internal organs!] Below the title is a drawing of an upward pointing triangle with color-coded internal organs each with a label of the corresponding color, connected with a line. In clockwise direction, they are: "Eyes: [Cannot see you unless you intersect Flatland in front of them]". The eyes are very small andinside a short opening at the tip of the triangle. "Brain" - A small pink blob along the right inside of the Flatlander, curving. "Proboscis / esophagus" - A light blue tube reaching from the eye and down to the: "Stomach" - a large green sack. "Nervous system" - Dark blue squiggly tubes branching across and around all the other organs in a random pattern. "Blood" - The purple-red color filling in the background behind all the organs rather than being in veins. "Birth canal" - An interlocking section in the outer wall of the Flatlander's skin, currently closed. Next to the birth canal is a tiny version of the larger triangle that is rotated 90 degrees, labeled "Newborns tend to be one-twelfth the size of their parent at birth". "Skin" - the dark grey outer layer that separates the Flatlander's insides from the outside world. It is intersperced with short black lines. "Womb" an orange sack in the bottom right corner of the Flatlander's insides. "Gonads: Sperm / Ova" - Two connected small sacs marked dark pink and gold on the triangle's flat side.

Below the Flatlander is black text that reads: "[Warning: Do not reveal a Flatlander's pregnancy status without permission!] Under The Current Regime, it is illegal for any Flatlander other than a Straight Line to carry a pregnancy, and illegal for a line to impregnate anyone. Attempting to congratulate a Flatlander on their pregnancy could get them killed! Discretion is the better part of valor! Keep their secrets to yourself!" Continuing along clockwise: "Unrealistic heart (the artist got lazy)." - a red heart-shape in the bottom left corner of the triangle. "Butt" - a short black line on the outer skin, connecting to the: "Kidney" - a dark red shape like a bean. "Lung" - a long, royal blue sack near the top of the triangle, next to the esophagus. "Cilia" - two thin, grey tendrils emerging from near all points of the triangle. The next image is a divider with black text below a black line, reading, "A Flatlander as seen from the 3rd dimension (true to color)" The last image is the same triangle Flatlander seen in the first diagram, now with the labels and text removed, with all of the internal organs in different shades of pink and purple. End ID.]

[ardraws]

Unless stated otherwise, all original works (except commissions) by ardraws are licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

this means you as an individual are free to share and even modify my work as long as you credit.

corporations, you gotta pay me and credit me.

if you see my works posted without credit, please bring it to my attention, but do not harass the person who posted them.

commissions are private, and will only be posted with permission from the commissioner. please do not repost or modify commission pieces.

ideally I'd like my works to be used to spread acceptance, solidarity, and kindness.

FAQ and commission info below cut!

Also I, a trans nonbinary person, love and respect my trans siblings. transphobia is not welcome here.

Commissions

• do you do comissions?

yes! I love drawing for anyone and everyone. if you have a commission, just send me something in my ask or a private message and we can discuss details. I will ask for your email and send an invoice to you through your email.

I will send you updates as I work to make sure you’re happy with your final product. I like posting my art and usually post a signed version here, but I will always ask permission first.

• if I want to support you but don’t have much money, what can I do?

if you desperately want to give me monetary support, but only have a few dollars to spare, I have a ko-fi! if you buy me a coffee, I’ll do a cute doodle for you, and if you want something in particular, leave it in the note.

you can also support my wor without money, by reblogging my stuff! always feel free to tag generously (I love reading the tags on my posts) and send me asks!

• wills/wont's

will draw: nsfw, some mechanical, armor, light body horror

my style does well with cute things with bright colors, but I will stretch my artistic muscles from time to time and attempt realistic art and creepy/horror art.

will not draw: things that squick me out or that I find morally objectionable, overly mechanical pieces

I reserve the right to turn down a commission if the content is too heavy for me, or too technically challenging. in this case, I will do my best to connect you with other artists who can better execute your commission if I can.

• how do I pay for commissions?

I usually will send an invoice via Paypal when I start on your commission, but I can also do Venmo invoices. I will always send you an invoice if this is the first time we've worked together. if you decide to commission me, we can talk about pricing over private messages, either on tumblr or in emails, whichever you feel most comfortable doing! the final pricing will be based on the complexity, content, and size of the piece (e.g. more color and shading, higher complexity, additional subjects, backgrounds, etc. all cost more). I am happy to do installments on more expensive pieces, and I welcome tips but do not require them.

• examples:

sketch

cell-shading

full color

[number1leaf]

Chessesntic

A gender related to a strong connection to chess

Chessesntic is a gender also connected to the feeling of old wood or marble specifically the ones used to make current or old chess boards, usually also being related to the greys inside what people believe in black and light, Chessesntic people can also feel a connection to old aesthetics or more, light academia or dark academia aesthetics but they are not limited to that. Chessesntic is also connected to being calculating at most times, while also being connected to the increase or keeping of knowledge on a pedestal over other traits.

The feeling of Chesseantic can also be related to the feeling of hearing chess pieces hit the board or an object, aswell as the smell of fresh or old books and rain

The letters and numbers on the flag represent the numbers on the chess board as well as a show of not everything being black and white in the flag always being shades of grey

The chess pieces (aswell as the chess board on alternate versions) seen on the flag is a sign is the main relation to chess on the flag.

The colors serve the same purpose when using the flag without any design on it — the first two colors on the flag represent the first move in the chess game, the last two colors represent the deciding moves for the game, the middle stripe represents the grey area or deciding portion of a chess game or in life in general.

(Noungender, gamegender)

Pronouns that you can use for chessesntic (please note that you can use any these are just general ones you could use for an idea, any gender can use any pronouns they want!): Chess/chess-self check/checkself

Coined by me / Coined by Number1leaf — if you repost please credit me as the person who coined and please include the description of the flag in you’re repost.

Coined on Sat June 15th 2024 / 6/15/2024

(I apologize if this looks weird or ugly or incoherent I am not familiar with tumblr as I just joined tumblr back again after a few years I forgot I even had an account haha… this took awhile to write out and create the flag so I hope people like it or relate to it and use it, thank you for reading yes ik their is stuff below!

This is also my first coined xenogender so please excuse that their might be a lot of mistakes or things that I did not list on accident or things that were not expanded upon)

Additional information: ⚠️ The base flag was checked to see if it was color blind safe (which it should be), if their is color blind complications with the flag please tell me so I can make an alternative version that is more color blind safe I want the flag to be able to be used by everyone ⚠️

!!!This flag is for everyone not just ND people!!!

The fade was an attempt to avoid eyestrain ect+ if their is a problem with that please notify me, the version without the designs just the numbers was made to try and have everyone be able to create the flag albeit traditionally finding the flags colors would be hard which I apologize for

I am aware I probably went super far for “just a gender” to some people, but I wanted to make sure everyone who wanted to use this xenogender was able to, I don’t expect people to wear this in their every day life or anything I expect to just see it online probably mainly posted by me but I still wanted to do something to include everyone I could.

Alt Versions include (as seen below) version with chess board, version without chess pieces, version without chess pieces and the numbers + letters

DNI LIST

[cleverhottubmiracle]

Summer skin is all about looking fresh, glowy, breathable – basically like you just got back from the most relaxing beach weekend ever. Even if the closest you’ve been to sand is a local golf course or children’s park! As you might have realized, I did not post last Saturday because I took some time off to take a girls’ trip to St. Maarten for my friend’s 50th birthday, which I wrote about pre-trip packing here if you missed it. I also posted a cute reel on my Instagram here if you’d like to see it.  It was certainly a trip of a lifetime. It goes without saying that when the temps rise during this summer season, heavy makeup looks can feel, and appear, a little out of place. Effortless summer skin is actually about choosing the right products that work with your skin, along with layering correctly. Utilizing sheer layers of certain products is a biggie in creating a long-lasting look.  I’m aiming for polished and perfected skin that looks like I just got off my private yacht, ya know??! Ha Ha! Keep reading to see my exact steps and products for achieving this summer glow-up. I’ve even got a handful of brand new launches included that are must-sees… Turn on your JavaScript to view content Pre-makeup Steps – Clean, Exfoliated Skin Pre-makeup steps – Clean, Exfoliated Skin: Urban Skin Rx Even tone cleansing bar 3 in 1 treatment, $16. I know it goes without saying at this point, but I have to remind women that rough, unkempt bare skin will ruin ANY makeup look. Be sure before you attempt any of these steps below that your skin is clean and exfoliated. The above bar does both in one step so well – I’m on my third one. 1. Tinted Moisturizer + Skin Oil tarte BB Blur tinted moisturizer with SPF 30, shade medium, $42 + Good Molecules Ultra hydrating facial oil, $10. Start with a multitasking base. A tinted sunscreen like this tarte one, evens and literally blurs out the skin while protecting it from harmful UV rays—because nothing ruins a summer glow like a sunburn! I’ve recently stumbled upon this one, and I’m in LOVE with it- just check the reviews!  It’s comfy and lightweight on the skin, and it does seriously blur pores, it’s wild! It has a naturally satin finish, but when my skin is feeling extra dry, I supercharge any foundation product by simply adding a skin oil to give me a dewier finish, mimicking that lit-from-within look. I apply a large squirt of the tarte and a couple drops of oil on the back of my hand like a palette,  mix together with my finger,  pat it onto my skin in dots, then use a buffing foundation brush, $15, to apply it with for the smoothest look. 2. Sheer Concealer Revolution Skin Silk Under Eye Brightener + Concealer, $10. Shade “light peach.” Always apply your concealer AFTER your tinted moisturizer or foundation, for the best outcome.  Ditch the full-coverage, thick concealers, and try a lightweight, hydrating concealer that can cover dark circles without caking. If you’re terrified of heavier concealers, this is the answer to your prayers. It’s SO sheer, yet SO effective at brightening like it says, but does not look like makeup once buffed in. I’m very impressed with this $10 dupe version of the Rare Beauty positive light under eye brightener, $24, that I used to love, but this one has an even better steel applicator. 3. Soft Focus Finishing Powder  Hourglass Ambient Lighting Palette, $73. Shade “volume 1.” I don’t think a lot of powder is necessary, but adding a thin layer of it is useful for setting that tinted moisturizer and concealer. I swoosh together all 3 shades in this palette and apply just in the T-zone area of my face. If you are mega oily skinned though, this won’t be your best bet. I’d go for a blotting powder like this Fenty Beauty Invisimatte powder, $38, but it will still give you that blurred, beautiful effect. Turn on your JavaScript to view content 4. Liquid Blush Nars Afterglow Liquid Blush, “Aragon,” $32.I received a few shades of this Nars liquid blush before I left on my trip, and this chestnut brown shade, Aragon, I ended up basically wearing every day while we were in St. Maarten!  I swiped this warm chestnut shade high across my cheekbones, temples, and a bit on the bridge of my nose to fake that sun-kissed glow. The easy-to-apply sponge tip applicator and this non-streaky formula are wonderful. As for this specific shade, the words I would use to explain how it made me feel and look are “expensive” and “bronzed,” without needing a pink or peach, which are usually my go-to blush shades. Always using this Rare Beauty soft pinch cream blush brush, $23, to apply my cream and liquid blushes best with. 5. Skin-Enhancing Highlighter (can double as eyeshadow touches!) Dior Backstage Glow palette, $48. Shade 001 Universal. A highlighter adds that final touch of summer skin radiance. I tap a bit on the tops of my cheekbones, the inner corners of my eyes, and then right into the center of my lids. It gives that angel eyes + skin effect without the shimmer overload. This 4-shade palette will forever be my go-to highlighter choice. It’s an iconic Dior product, and I love using all 4 shades on my eyelids as well! I mixed the white and gold to use on my eyes here, and a bit of the pink just on top of the liquid blush. Turn on your JavaScript to view content 6. Finishing Touches. Lip Liner + Max Gloss + Setting Spray Smashbox Be Legendary line and prime liner, $24. Shade: “medium brown.” + Milk Makeup Balmade Hydrating lip gloss, $18. Shade: “Quench.” + Revolution Makeup Superfix Setting spray, $15. Keeping with the warm nude brown vibe, this lip combo is a beautiful choice. This soft liner in medium brown is a very neutral but healthy lip choice. Make sure, once applied, to blur edges with your finger. And the brand new Balmade glosses are about the most hydrating I’ve used because of their electrolyte-rich complex (magnesium, copper, zinc) that gives lasting hydration, while coconut and aloe extracts help soothe and condition lips. My shade “quench” here is the perfect partner to my chestnut blush shade too. All of the shades are very, very sheer, though, so don’t go buying these expecting opaque color for your summer skin.  Now remember to lock in all of these layers with a setting mist – and I like the Revolution one linked above because it gives a soft matte finish with the help of soothing aloe and vitamin E. Turn on your JavaScript to view content The Rest of My Look Details A crisp white crochet or lace vest over a simple white tank is a chic summer vibe. I even wore this same vest over my swimsuit on my trip to St. Barts, as you can see in the above photo. So many options to get this look from Free People here, $68, Macy’s lace vest, $40, and Revolve pretty here $118. // Gold layered necklaces of all kinds is my fave. Similar waterproof Herringbone necklace here, $68, and charm necklaces from Anthropologie here, $65,  and Revolve here $53. // My pale pink impress press-on nails in shade “brushed pale,” $8. They look like a $60 manicure! // Black lightweight split leg pants for a breezy beach vibe – similar ones here $35 and here $26 // My clear gold ring toe Target sandals on sale for $20 Stay radiant, my friends! How’s your summer going so far? About The Author Jennifer Duvall Jennifer is our beauty & makeup contributor. She posts a weekly column on Saturdays She also runs her own website & YouTube channel, which you can find by clicking below. Source link

[norajworld]

Summer skin is all about looking fresh, glowy, breathable – basically like you just got back from the most relaxing beach weekend ever. Even if the closest you’ve been to sand is a local golf course or children’s park! As you might have realized, I did not post last Saturday because I took some time off to take a girls’ trip to St. Maarten for my friend’s 50th birthday, which I wrote about pre-trip packing here if you missed it. I also posted a cute reel on my Instagram here if you’d like to see it.  It was certainly a trip of a lifetime. It goes without saying that when the temps rise during this summer season, heavy makeup looks can feel, and appear, a little out of place. Effortless summer skin is actually about choosing the right products that work with your skin, along with layering correctly. Utilizing sheer layers of certain products is a biggie in creating a long-lasting look.  I’m aiming for polished and perfected skin that looks like I just got off my private yacht, ya know??! Ha Ha! Keep reading to see my exact steps and products for achieving this summer glow-up. I’ve even got a handful of brand new launches included that are must-sees… Turn on your JavaScript to view content Pre-makeup Steps – Clean, Exfoliated Skin Pre-makeup steps – Clean, Exfoliated Skin: Urban Skin Rx Even tone cleansing bar 3 in 1 treatment, $16. I know it goes without saying at this point, but I have to remind women that rough, unkempt bare skin will ruin ANY makeup look. Be sure before you attempt any of these steps below that your skin is clean and exfoliated. The above bar does both in one step so well – I’m on my third one. 1. Tinted Moisturizer + Skin Oil tarte BB Blur tinted moisturizer with SPF 30, shade medium, $42 + Good Molecules Ultra hydrating facial oil, $10. Start with a multitasking base. A tinted sunscreen like this tarte one, evens and literally blurs out the skin while protecting it from harmful UV rays—because nothing ruins a summer glow like a sunburn! I’ve recently stumbled upon this one, and I’m in LOVE with it- just check the reviews!  It’s comfy and lightweight on the skin, and it does seriously blur pores, it’s wild! It has a naturally satin finish, but when my skin is feeling extra dry, I supercharge any foundation product by simply adding a skin oil to give me a dewier finish, mimicking that lit-from-within look. I apply a large squirt of the tarte and a couple drops of oil on the back of my hand like a palette,  mix together with my finger,  pat it onto my skin in dots, then use a buffing foundation brush, $15, to apply it with for the smoothest look. 2. Sheer Concealer Revolution Skin Silk Under Eye Brightener + Concealer, $10. Shade “light peach.” Always apply your concealer AFTER your tinted moisturizer or foundation, for the best outcome.  Ditch the full-coverage, thick concealers, and try a lightweight, hydrating concealer that can cover dark circles without caking. If you’re terrified of heavier concealers, this is the answer to your prayers. It’s SO sheer, yet SO effective at brightening like it says, but does not look like makeup once buffed in. I’m very impressed with this $10 dupe version of the Rare Beauty positive light under eye brightener, $24, that I used to love, but this one has an even better steel applicator. 3. Soft Focus Finishing Powder  Hourglass Ambient Lighting Palette, $73. Shade “volume 1.” I don’t think a lot of powder is necessary, but adding a thin layer of it is useful for setting that tinted moisturizer and concealer. I swoosh together all 3 shades in this palette and apply just in the T-zone area of my face. If you are mega oily skinned though, this won’t be your best bet. I’d go for a blotting powder like this Fenty Beauty Invisimatte powder, $38, but it will still give you that blurred, beautiful effect. Turn on your JavaScript to view content 4. Liquid Blush Nars Afterglow Liquid Blush, “Aragon,” $32.I received a few shades of this Nars liquid blush before I left on my trip, and this chestnut brown shade, Aragon, I ended up basically wearing every day while we were in St. Maarten!  I swiped this warm chestnut shade high across my cheekbones, temples, and a bit on the bridge of my nose to fake that sun-kissed glow. The easy-to-apply sponge tip applicator and this non-streaky formula are wonderful. As for this specific shade, the words I would use to explain how it made me feel and look are “expensive” and “bronzed,” without needing a pink or peach, which are usually my go-to blush shades. Always using this Rare Beauty soft pinch cream blush brush, $23, to apply my cream and liquid blushes best with. 5. Skin-Enhancing Highlighter (can double as eyeshadow touches!) Dior Backstage Glow palette, $48. Shade 001 Universal. A highlighter adds that final touch of summer skin radiance. I tap a bit on the tops of my cheekbones, the inner corners of my eyes, and then right into the center of my lids. It gives that angel eyes + skin effect without the shimmer overload. This 4-shade palette will forever be my go-to highlighter choice. It’s an iconic Dior product, and I love using all 4 shades on my eyelids as well! I mixed the white and gold to use on my eyes here, and a bit of the pink just on top of the liquid blush. Turn on your JavaScript to view content 6. Finishing Touches. Lip Liner + Max Gloss + Setting Spray Smashbox Be Legendary line and prime liner, $24. Shade: “medium brown.” + Milk Makeup Balmade Hydrating lip gloss, $18. Shade: “Quench.” + Revolution Makeup Superfix Setting spray, $15. Keeping with the warm nude brown vibe, this lip combo is a beautiful choice. This soft liner in medium brown is a very neutral but healthy lip choice. Make sure, once applied, to blur edges with your finger. And the brand new Balmade glosses are about the most hydrating I’ve used because of their electrolyte-rich complex (magnesium, copper, zinc) that gives lasting hydration, while coconut and aloe extracts help soothe and condition lips. My shade “quench” here is the perfect partner to my chestnut blush shade too. All of the shades are very, very sheer, though, so don’t go buying these expecting opaque color for your summer skin.  Now remember to lock in all of these layers with a setting mist – and I like the Revolution one linked above because it gives a soft matte finish with the help of soothing aloe and vitamin E. Turn on your JavaScript to view content The Rest of My Look Details A crisp white crochet or lace vest over a simple white tank is a chic summer vibe. I even wore this same vest over my swimsuit on my trip to St. Barts, as you can see in the above photo. So many options to get this look from Free People here, $68, Macy’s lace vest, $40, and Revolve pretty here $118. // Gold layered necklaces of all kinds is my fave. Similar waterproof Herringbone necklace here, $68, and charm necklaces from Anthropologie here, $65,  and Revolve here $53. // My pale pink impress press-on nails in shade “brushed pale,” $8. They look like a $60 manicure! // Black lightweight split leg pants for a breezy beach vibe – similar ones here $35 and here $26 // My clear gold ring toe Target sandals on sale for $20 Stay radiant, my friends! How’s your summer going so far? About The Author Jennifer Duvall Jennifer is our beauty & makeup contributor. She posts a weekly column on Saturdays She also runs her own website & YouTube channel, which you can find by clicking below. Source link

[whirligig-girl]

D'v: "Hahaa... we're holding hands again... I’m so sorry I wasn't watching where I was going and I was just reading up on--well what I was reading wasn’t important--I was..."

T'l: silent Vulcan noises and depraved illogical thoughts

some artist’s notes and fic snippets below the break:

Getting the pose right was a nightmare!

I drew Tendi and T’lyn on different layers with different colors because otherwise it’d be too confusing. The mess going on in their legs and hands especially. It was a challenge to find a relatively natural looking pose that allowed their hands to match up without hiding anything important. I found i could draw a four-segment stick-figure limb connecting their shoulders, and that helped me get their arms right. The legs were also a mess to figure out, but mostly just because they’re a confusing mess of limbs--they don’t have to intertwine nice.

Also, T’lyn is going to make me learn to draw hands right I swear to god. I could not half-ass the hands on this one.

narrative snipets break:

at that second panel, when Tendi realizes what's happened and gets embarassed, she immediately like, tries to let go and raise her hands respectfully......... but t'lyn just... doesn't let go. for a moment.

Ray Daly’s contribution. (Actually Ray contributed to feedback while I was drawing it, but...)

Mariner: it couldn't have been that bad, tendi Tendi, still flustered: not that bad?? Not that bad?!? would it be fine if you tripped and Bradward’s D--?! Mariner: eekaaay! you've made your point!!

Earlier version when I thought I was finished:

It’s good to go the extra mile on your art. I think this plainer version would still have been fine, but since I went so far as to actually draw the background for a change, adding the dropped/thrown clutter (PADDs and Tricorder) helped a lot.

T’lyn and Tendi’s mess of legs was hard to differentiate (though adding the shading helps). I made Tendi’s pants slightly darker, though with the shading you can barely tell. I also gave them different boot colors. The original idea was that pure science officers have black and blue boots and medical officers have white and blue boots. We can see that in a few places in season 1. But it seems like they eventually abandoned that concept and just give all science officers white and blue boots. T’lyn is not a medical officer, so obviously she gets black boots. Technically since Tendi is in Senior Science Officer training instead of Medical, she should have black boots, but I gave her white boots so you could tell them apart more easily.

I wasn’t even going to add the facial expressions. I drew this to figure out which one I wanted to use:

Then I put it in the drawing.

But I just kept looking at the sketch and thinking “both are good. Both are good!”

So I made it two panels. Because of how the layers were set up this was easier said than done. But I managed it just fine in the end. I really like how she’s backlit by the ceiling lights in the inset panels. Some kind of like, contrast between the angelic goddess looking down at you and the reality that she’s an emotional mess who wears her emotions on her sleeve.

It was also really important to add the inset panels because I don’t want to give the impression that either Tendi is doing this on purpose nor any orion fem dom stereotypes. It’s way funnier and cuter if she just keeps accidentally finding herself in these scenarios, worried that T’lyn’s resentment for her is growing because SHE KEEPS AVOIDING ME OUTSIDE OF STUDY SESSIONS! AND WHEN WE MAKE EYE CONTACT SHE LOOKS AWAY! I FUCKED UP! but actually T’lyn is just struggling to control her mad nasty thoughts about just what she’d like to do to Tendi (she’d like to hold her hands some more)

Adding the inset panels lets me make sure Tendi’s character is adequately captured so she’s not just A Thing Happening To T’lyn.

The dropped PADDs and Tricorder make the scene seem more diagetic, and just more real/plausible. They’re busy looking at their PADDs and not looking where they’re going, see? The one that’s face down is T’lyn’s, the two face up are Tendi’s. The PADD screens are cropped screenshots from the show that have been edited and then skewed/rotated/rescaled into place

The first PADD is Tendi doing research on Vulcan touch telepathy (after being told by someone else what the significance of handholding is to Vulcans), the second one is actually breaking the fourth wall and addressing the viewer directly.

one of the last touches I added was to erase the line-art around her pupils, so the pupils would look smaller (aids to the feeling of shock) and add a nostril (Dunno why--I never draw nostrils on Lower Decks characters, but it just seemed correct in this case) and a little wrinkle on her eye. All this was added because, when I drew Tendi’s face, it felt more detailed than T’lyn’s for some reason (freckles I think?) and I felt I had to make them match.

T’lyn’s face here was fun and took a while to get right. She (and all Vulcans in Lower Decks) are usually half-lidded, but we see T’lyn’s kinda shock when Tendi grabs her hand in the One Canon T’lyndi Scene We Have At Least Until Next Year--even then she looks attentive, not necessarily shocked.

I just think it’s kind of cool that they both have non-red blood and colorful blush.

[kariokiipeaches]

I did it!

I really actually did it!

I drew part of the elevator scene in Chapter 4 of Poor Little Meow Meow on Ao3!

The idea of Killer being a smug-as-f*ck asshole (even going as far as saying “you’re welcome”) after destroying the elevator panel was HILARIOUS and stuck with me even after Chapters 5 and 6 were released/added to the story!

It was something I HAD to draw and have a visual of, lol.

Here’s 63 layers of Killer, and 30 layers of elevator!

FUN FACTS!

•I hate drawing shoes when legs are crossed!

•his legs, shoelaces, socks, the ring in his SOUL, and the top of his head are all different shades of white, even though you probably can’t tell without zooming in a WHOOOOOOLE lot!

•I had to cut Killer up (heh) a bunch of times to fix his proportions (first he was too wide, then his torso was too long, then his jacket was too wide, then his arms were too long for his new body, then his arms were too thick and puffy)!

•this started out as my oldest child posing the way I wanted, and I traced the photo to get all the areas that would be shaded in marked!

•Killers body was drawn, re-sized, and colored in one piece of art, and then he was cut (heh heh) out and pasted into a whole other artwork so that I could fit him in the elevator background the size I needed him!

•I must have attempted close to 30 times to try to get the sparks right, and I’m still not completely enthused (but I’ll tell ya, it makes the time-lapse video of this artwork being made [posted on my YouTube - link to video below] kinda spectacular and look like it’s actually sparking, so whatevs)!

I could NOT decide for the life of me where to put the text, how much text to add, or if I even wanted to add text in the first place, soooooo THAT was a nightmare (no, not nightmare with a capital “N”). That’s why I’m posting a couple versions of it for your viewing pleasure!!!

And yeah, I know it’s kinda dark in the elevator, but in the story it said the lights were flickering, so I muted the colors so it would reflect that easier. IT’S ARTISTIC LIBERTY, GIMME A BREAK!

I ALSO heard, maybe, possibly, probably… that another person may have helped to work on ideas for the elevator scenario… sooooo shoutout to both @lady-of-disdain (the author) and to @calcium-supplement for instilling upon me this brain-rot that refused to go away until I could puke-out a decent image. Go support them!

It’s kinda funny which parts of a story stick out in every individuals mind… and this was just one of them for me.

I can’t WAIT to draw more for this story! I’ve still got ideas, and you just keep adding MORE ideas with every chapter you release!

Wanna see what it took to draw this?

Check out my YouTube!

Wanna read the story?

Check out Poor Little Meow Meow!

Wanna see what I’m drawing next?

TOO BAD.

I’M NOT TELLING.