#variable over PRIME

[gravityrooom]

[khuzena]

The Perfect Notation

𐙚 PAIRING: Phainon/gn!Reader

𐙚 SUMMARY: In a modern AU, a reserved, math-obsessed student (you) prepares for the prestigious Nationals math competition, slowly forming a quiet, unexpected bond with the ever-cheerful yet enigmatic Phainon. And while your world revolves around formulas and precision, Phainon watches you from the sidelines—curious, drawn in, and gradually learning to understand you through the language of numbers. As the competition nears, tension builds. You begin to ease your strict routines, letting Phainon into your life, unaware of how much he’s learning—not just math, but you.

𐙚 C.W: Depression, Academic pressure, Kinda happy ending, Angst

𐙚 A/N: Hi!! I'm so fucked. I crammed this so bad................. I onl wrote this as an offering for Phainon. Idk man. Goodluck to me. WE WILL ALL GET PHAINON AD HIS LC!!!!!!!!!! MANIFEST MANIFEST!!!

𐙚 W.C: 8.5k

Anaxa didn’t even glance up from the monitor when he announced it.

“Top rank. Regional champion. You,” he said, sharp and almost lazy. “Congratulations. Nationals is in two weeks. Don’t embarrass us.”

There was a scattered beat of applause from the others—half-hearted, short-lived. Not because they didn’t respect you. They did. But you’d won too many times already. You didn’t smile. You never did. Just gave a small nod and turned your eyes back to the problem set you’d brought with you, already thinking ahead. Everyone else looked relieved that it wasn’t them expected to carry the weight of Nationals.

Phainon clapped a little longer than everyone else, even if he did it mostly out of instinct. Maybe also to see if you’d look up. You didn’t. You just adjusted the mechanical pencil between your fingers and started writing. No celebration. No smugness. Just a clean transition from victory to preparation, like your mind had already sprinted two weeks ahead without you.

He waited until the others filtered out of the room before sliding into the seat next to yours. Your notes were out, as usual—lined graph paper, faint sketches of triangle spirals in the corners, a few barely readable side equations that looked like your personal shorthand. You were midway through a set of recursive relations, flipping your pencil over and shading tiny regions of an imaginary shape you hadn’t finished sketching.

"You’re incredible, you know that?" he said, keeping his voice soft. Friendly. That usual tone that never quite gave away how hard his heart hit the inside of his ribs when you were this close.

You didn’t glance over. Just mumbled, “There’s still nationals.”

“That’s not a denial.”

You pressed the side of your pencil against your temple. “I didn’t study to impress people.”

“Good,” he said. “Because then I’d be very, very out of my league.”

That got him a brief exhale—almost a laugh, maybe. He smiled quietly to himself. It was always like this with you. No dramatic sparks, no confessions in the hallway, no big rom com moments. Just subtle shifts. Only barely there smiles. There's this slight change in your voice when you explained something and thought he was actually paying attention

He was. He really was.

"You’re still doing number theory this week?" he asked, nodding to your notes.

“Number theory, and complex optimization. The nationals committee has a history of using constraint based problems in the first round. And… including linear programming with edge cases. I’m trying to account for unusual variables.”

“You make that sound fun.”

“It is.”

There was something gentle in the way you said it, even if your tone didn’t change much. He liked hearing you talk about math more than he liked math itself—maybe that was the problem. You were fluent in this language. You thought in it, breathed it. And he didn’t. He was still stuck in the shallow end, watching you swim through vectors and primes like it was nothing. In his eyes, you were something else entirely.

But he was trying. You didn’t know that. Maybe it was better that way.

Later that night, in his room, he stared at the scanned copy of one of your old solution sets. You’d let it slip into his notes by accident. Maybe on purpose. He didn’t know. The paper had your name scribbled in the corner in small block letters, and the answer space had margins filled with diagrams no professor would ever require: loops within loops, a staircase of ratios descending inwards. Not just working out the solution—mapping it emotionally, too.

There was something about the way you thought that felt like art. You once solved an entire probability challenge backward just to demonstrate a flaw in its framing. He didn’t even understand the flaw. But he remembered how calm your voice was as you explained it to the class, as if you weren’t constantly carrying the pressure of being everyone’s expectation.

He wasn’t sure when it happened. When the fascination turned into something heavier. When your quiet concentration became something he’d seek out in every room. When your silence started feeling warmer than most people’s words.

Phainon didn’t tell Mydei about it. Not really. But Mydei knew something, of course—he always did. Once, when they were walking back from the library together, Phainon had grumbled something about being “math fucked” and “losing brain cells over logic gates.” Mydei had just looked at him, unreadable, then muttered, “You don’t like math. You like them.”

Phainon hadn’t denied it. Just kicked a pebble on the sidewalk and said, “What’s the difference if I’m learning for the right reason?”

Right now, the right reason was sprawled in the library’s farthest corner, buried under mock test printouts and three different pens. You were tracing something across the page—he couldn’t tell what from this angle. He hesitated by the doorway before walking over.

“Hey,” he said, keeping his voice light.

You didn’t startle. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Says who?”

“You’re not even in the nationals roster.”

“I’m studying vicariously,” he offered, flashing a grin.

You gave a small sigh, but didn’t ask him to leave.

He sat across from you, watching as you marked a value in red. Constraint minimization, he realized—probably some kind of modified simplex method. You liked visual cues, always highlighted in different shades. Red was for discardable outcomes. Blue for fixed values. Green for hypotheses. He’d memorized the palette without trying.

“You know you don’t have to do this,” you murmured, still focused on your work.

“Do what?”

“Follow me around. Pretend this is your thing.”

He hesitated. The grin faded a little.

“I’m not pretending,” he said finally.

You stopped writing. Not looked at him yet, but still.

“I don’t care about the numbers the way you do,” he admitted. “But I care about why they matter to you. And... that’s worth trying to understand.”

That got your attention. You looked up slowly, not angry, not even surprised. Just quiet. Tired, maybe. Tired of people trying to get something from you. Tired of always being the brain, the standard, the benchmark to beat.

He wished he could explain it better. That he wasn’t trying to win anything. He wasn’t chasing your answers. He just wanted to be near the questions that made you come alive.

“...I used to think people only noticed me when I solved things fast,” you said, almost too low to hear. “Like I didn’t matter outside of that.”

“You do.”

You blinked at him.

“I notice you even when you’re not solving anything,” he added, a little softer.

For a moment, neither of you said anything. You just stared at him, pen still between your fingers, like you weren’t sure how to factor this variable in. Like you hadn’t expected honesty to be part of the equation.

You didn’t say thank you. You didn’t have to. You just turned back to your notes and pushed a blank page toward him. Handed him a pen.

“Try this one,” you said. “I’ll walk you through it.”

And you did. Quietly. Carefully. Like you actually wanted him to stay.

He didn’t solve it perfectly. Not even close. But you didn’t correct him harshly. You just crossed out one step, rewrote it, and said, “Closer.”

Closer. He could live with that

Twelve days before the competition, you stopped staying for lunch.

Phainon noticed it gradually—first the empty seat, then the unfinished water bottle left behind, then the absence of your voice during roll call. You were always quiet, but you were never gone. Now, you disappeared between periods, emerging only for tests and drills, vanishing again like a scheduled ghost.

He caught sight of you once in the third-floor study room. You were sitting with your hoodie drawn halfway over your head, glasses fogged slightly, hair pushed back in a way that looked unintentional. There were seven books stacked beside you, two calculators, three different notebooks open to wildly different problems. Your eyes didn’t even blink between lines. You were writing in loops, as if time itself bent into circles around your wrist.

He stood by the door for maybe thirty seconds before turning away. He hadn’t meant to interrupt. Hadn’t meant to hover. But you were so deep into it—into your world of vectors and bounds and proofs with ugly constants—that he didn’t dare step inside.

That evening, Mydei said, “They’re going to burn out.”

Phainon looked up from the practice sheet he’d half-filled with mistakes. He hadn’t realized Mydei was paying attention. Then again, Mydei always paid attention to things no one else bothered to watch.

“I know,” Phainon muttered. “I just don’t know if I’m supposed to say anything.”

“You’re not,” Mydei said, and went back to his own book.

Still, he couldn’t shake the image of you hunched over the desk, barely moving except to flip pages or change pens. It was the kind of focus that was a little frightening. Not because it was obsessive, but because it was clearly the only thing keeping you anchored. You didn’t trust the world, not entirely. But you trusted a good equation.

The next day, he brought a small coffee to the study room and left it by the door. Nothing fancy. Just the kind you always ordered—plain, warm, no sugar. He didn’t write his name on it. You probably knew it was from him, but if you didn’t, that was okay too. He left it anyway.

You didn’t acknowledge it when you passed him in the hallway two hours later, but you also didn’t throw it away.

That counted.

By the tenth day, you looked like you were made out of pencil lead and fraying patience. Your eyes were slightly red from staying up too long. You had a cough. Your posture had changed—slouched inward, like your spine had curled into itself to conserve energy. When you walked past the windows, you didn’t even glance up at the light. Your hands were always busy, twitching slightly when you solved problems mid-step, mouthing integers like incantations.

Phainon watched you from across the room during study hall. He wasn’t subtle, but you weren’t paying attention. He always saw when you were working through something—something with matrices, maybe, or Lagrangian optimization. You crossed out two full lines, rewrote them, circled a variable twice, then pressed the heel of your palm into your eyes like the numbers were starting to hum behind them.

It was as if he wanted to say something. Not something dramatic. Not some big motivational monologue. Just—you can breathe, you know. You don’t have to prove it all the time. But even that felt like too much.

Instead, he passed by your table on his way out and dropped a small eraser beside your book. You always borrowed one. Always forgot it. This one had a tiny sun drawn on it with a blue pen. You didn’t say anything, but you moved it closer to your notes and kept using it.

The next few days, he kept studying on his own. He didn’t bother pretending he liked it anymore—he’d moved past that phase. He liked understanding parts of it. Not the math itself, maybe, but the logic. The way you treated problems like puzzles, always finding the most efficient path from question to solution. He kept a folder now, filled with problems you’d solved in front of him. Sometimes he redid them with your steps beside his, trying to see where his mind wandered and yours didn’t.

He also started noticing your habits. You tapped your pencil three times before starting a proof. You wrote every square root without simplifying, unless explicitly told. You skipped the final boxed answer until you double-checked the sign of every constant. When you got stuck, you tilted your head to the left—not right, never right—and frowned as if disappointment were just part of the process.

He wondered if you even knew how many systems you carried in your head at once. How many variables you managed, even outside math. You rarely spoke unless asked. You never sought help. You moved through school like someone who knew how fragile time was and didn’t want to waste a second pretending to be someone else.

Eight days left. Phainon joined your review session by accident—or maybe it wasn’t an accident, but he pretended it was. Anaxa raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything, which was either mercy or mild curiosity. You were already there, surrounded by open binders and highlighted theorems.

He asked one question. You corrected him quietly, barely glancing up. But then you passed him a page with an easier version of the same problem. No comment. Just... passed it to him like it wasn’t a big deal.

He kept that page.

Six days before the nationals, it rained. He found you sitting near the vending machine, hair damp, hoodie too thin for the wind. You had a small bag of crackers beside you and your notebook flipped open to a new page. This time, no spirals. Just equations. Dense ones. Partial differentials and strange notation. The kind that hurt his head if he looked too long.

“You’re going to get sick,” he said, handing you a dry napkin.

You took it. “Didn’t bring an umbrella.”

“You okay?”

“I have to finish the integration methods tonight. That’s the only thing I keep slipping on.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

You didn’t answer, but your jaw tightened slightly. The crackers stayed untouched. Your hand shook a little when you wrote something—he couldn’t tell if it was from the cold or from exhaustion.

“Can I sit?”

You shrugged.

He didn’t say anything after that. Just sat with you while the rain hit the windows and the world outside got blurred into noise. You solved two problems. He solved one and a half, badly. But you didn’t mock him. You just corrected a sign with your red pen, circled a line, and nodded.

“Closer,” you said.

He felt warmer after that.

Not because of the math. Not because of the rain.

You sneezed. Quiet, quivk, like you were trying not to draw attention to it. Your pencil paused mid equation, fingers curling tighter around it. Then another sneeze followed, this time a little sharper, less contained. You didn’t say anything, but your shoulders tensed slightly, and your hand brushed under your nose before you kept writing like nothing happened.

Phainon watched you from the corner of his eye. You didn’t look sick, not exactly, but you were definitely running warm. Your hoodie was bunched at the sleeves, collar loose, and there was a slight pink flush at the tips of your ears that hadn’t been there yesterday. It wasn’t dramatic—just off. And that was enough.

“You okay?” he asked quietly, voice light.

“I’m fine,” you said, and that would’ve been the end of it, if you hadn’t swayed a little when you leaned back to check your notes. Just a blink’s worth of hesitation. Your hand moved to steady your balance, fingers briefly flattening against the desk before you continued writing like nothing had happened.

“You’ve sneezed three times,” he added. “Statistically, that’s a pattern.”

You rolled your eyes, but didn’t argue. Another sniffle. You finally lowered your pencil and pinched the bridge of your nose like it was starting to hurt.

“I don’t have time to get sick,” you mumbled.

Phainon leaned his chin into his hand. “Pretty sure your immune system doesn’t care about your schedule.”

He saw it—the falter. The hesitation in your lips before you pressed them together. You were tired. Bone-deep tired. The kind of tired that caffeine doesn’t touch and focus can’t compensate for. Your notebook was filled with clean solutions, but the eraser marks had gotten more chaotic lately. Your last proof had a correction line that ran through four variables like a frustrated scrawl.

You looked like you were trying to hold the world together by sheer force of will. Phainon had no idea how you hadn’t collapsed already.

“Let’s go out,” he said suddenly.

You blinked at him. “What?”

“Come on. Just for a bit. Stretch your legs, walk, grab a snack. There’s a convenience store two blocks down.”

“I have to review,” you said automatically, already glancing back at your notes.

“You’ve been reviewing for seven straight hours.”

“Exactly.”

Phainon tilted his head. “You’re burning out. Your handwriting looks drunk. You just sneezed into your own shoulder. I am—scientifically—concerned.”

You stared at him. Not offended, not irritated—just confused, like you didn’t understand what he was trying to get out of this. And maybe you didn’t. Most people left you alone. Phainon hadn’t.

You rubbed your eye with the heel of your palm. “I’m not in the mood to hang out.”

“It’s not hanging out. It’s tactical energy recovery.”

You raised a brow.

“I’ll buy you a snack,” he offered. “Any one.”

That made you pause. Not because of the snack, probably. Maybe because it sounded easy. Normal. Like something someone who wasn’t constantly calculating would say.

“I’m not changing out of this,” you said, gesturing to your hoodie.

“Didn’t ask you to.”

You stared at him another few seconds. Then, finally, with a long, quiet sigh, you capped your pen and closed the notebook. You stood without a word. Phainon followed.

The wind had gotten colder since earlier. You pulled your sleeves down and kept your hands in your pocket, head ducked slightly. Your steps weren’t fast, but they were steady. Still, your shoulders moved a bit more than usual, like you were trying not to shiver.

“Your nose is pink,” he said gently.

“So is yours,” you shot back.

That made him laugh, surprised. “Wow. You do have a bite.”

You sniffled again. Didn’t reply. But you didn’t walk away either.

The convenience store’s lights buzzed softly when you stepped in. It smelled like microwaved curry and floor wax, comfortingly familiar. You wandered first, gravitating toward the drinks aisle with a slow shuffle, while Phainon trailed behind, hands in his coat pockets.

“You like those jelly cups, right?” he asked, nodding toward the bottom shelf.

You didn’t answer right away, just crouched slightly and picked one up. Held it in your hand like you were deciding whether it was worth it.

“Get two,” he said. “You can pretend I earned it.”

You looked at him then. Really looked at him. Your eyes were dull from the fatigue, but there was something flickering just under the surface—confusion, maybe, or something softer. He wasn’t sure.

“I feel kind of hot,” you muttered, half to yourself.

“You’ve probably got a mild fever,” he said. “Here.”

He stepped closer. Not too close, just enough to reach out, hand slow and open. You flinched, barely, but didn’t move away. His palm touched your forehead, fingers brushing against your temple. He expected to feel awkward. He didn’t. Just warm. Human.

You were, indeed, running warm.

He let the contact linger for a second longer, then lowered his hand.

You looked off to the side. “I should be reviewing.”

“You can review tomorrow.”

You shook your head, but it was weak. Your fingers squeezed the jelly cup just slightly.

He walked toward the checkout. You didn’t stop him.

He paid for both snacks, plus a bottle of ion water, and handed them to you outside. You took them, slowly. The sky had gone from pale blue to soft orange—late afternoon bleeding into early dusk. Your breath fogged a little when you exhaled.

“Just one night,” he said. “Don’t solve anything tonight. Don’t even open a notebook. Just... recharge.”

You looked down at the bottle in your hand. Read the label. Then, with no ceremony, you opened it and took a long drink.

“You act like you’re not smart,” you said.

He blinked. “Sorry?”

“You figure me out fast,” you added, quieter. “That’s not easy.”

He smiled. Not widely. Just enough. “I study you more than math.”

You exhaled through your nose, a laugh that wasn’t really a laugh. But the tension in your shoulders loosened slightly. You walked beside him all the way back without pulling away, even when your sleeve brushed against his.

He didn’t say anything else. Didn’t ruin it.

You didn’t either.

That night, when you got back to the study room, you didn’t open your notebook. You just sat there, hood over your head, sipping your drink slowly. Phainon leaned back in his chair and let the quiet settle.

One night off.

The table’s surface was warm from the overhead light. Your arm pressed against it as you leaned forward, eyes locked on the scratchpad. The problem had three variables and an error margin no greater than ±0.05. So this was the kind of equation meant to eat hours: a balance model with variable-bound inequalities.

(your messy notes)

 x₁ + 0.6x₂ + 1.4x₃ = 42,  where 8 ≤ x₁ ≤ 14,  x₂ ≤ 2x₁,  x₃ ≥ x₂ – 3.

You’d written that down ten minutes ago and hadn’t spoken since.

Phainon shifted beside you, eyeing the margin of your notebook. There were no doodles this time. No arrows or metaphors or messy little tangents. Just the problem. Just you.

You’d stopped talking much three days ago. You still showed up, still reviewed, still scribbled on his printouts without asking. But your answers came slower. Less confident. Less sharp.

He didn't say anything about it. Not yet.

You pressed your palm to your forehead and muttered something under your breath. The pencil in your right hand twitched.

“You want to test boundary values?” he asked.

You didn’t look up. “What’s the point? It’s unstable no matter where x₁ lands.”

“It stabilizes at x₁ = 10,” he said. “If x₂ = 18 and x₃ = 15, the equation balances at—”

You were already writing it.

 10 + 0.6(18) + 1.4(15)  = 10 + 10.8 + 21.0  = 41.8

He saw your jaw twitch.

“Too low,” you muttered. “It needs 42 exactly.”

“Try rounding x₂ up to 20.”

You scribbled again.

 x₁ = 10, x₂ = 20, x₃ = 17  → 10 + 12 + 23.8 = 45.8

“Too high.”

You exhaled sharply and sat back. The chair creaked beneath you.

Phainon didn’t speak for a moment. He watched you crack your knuckles, flex your neck to the side. You were tired again—he could tell. Not the kind of tired that could be fixed with a snack or a nap. The kind that settled under the skin. The kind that had you burning out in silence.

He looked back at the numbers. “Hm… Try interpolating? Let’s find x₂ that fits given x₁ fixed at 11, I think.”

You hesitated.

He nudged the pencil toward you. You didn’t take it.

“What’s the point if I’m just guessing?” you muttered.

He sat straighter.

“Hey,” he said, more level now. “You don’t guess. That’s not what you do.”

“I used to not guess,” you said. “Now I’m just throwing numbers until it fits. That’s not solving, that’s flailing.”

You didn’t raise your voice, but it was the most emotion you’d shown all week. And it settled between you like heat.

Phainon tilted his head, frowning faintly. “You’re still solving. You just don’t trust yourself when it’s slower.”

“I don’t have time to be slow.”

That silence again. The kind that dared someone to argue.

He didn’t. Not directly.

Instead, he pulled the notebook toward himself and began testing values. Small, controlled substitutions. Not to prove you wrong—but to try what you wouldn’t let yourself do. Try without crumbling.

 x₁ = 11  x₂ = 17  x₃ = 14  11 + 0.6(17) + 1.4(14) =  11 + 10.2 + 19.6 = 40.8

Closer.

“Try x₂ = 18,” you muttered suddenly.

He adjusted.

 x₂ = 18 → 0.6(18) = 10.8  x₃ = 15 → 1.4(15) = 21.0  Sum = 11 + 10.8 + 21.0 = 42.8

“Over,” you said. “Lower x₃ to 14.5.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You’re allowing floats now?”

“It never said integers only.”

Phainon adjusted again, writing as you dictated.

 x₃ = 14.5 → 1.4(14.5) = 20.3  11 + 10.8 + 20.3 = 42.1

“Almost.”

You took the pencil from him. This time, your hand didn’t shake.

 x₃ = 14.2 → 1.4(14.2) = 19.88  Sum = 11 + 10.8 + 19.88 = 41.68

“No,” you whispered. “Too low again.”

He watched the way your brows furrowed. Not in frustration—but focus. Like the real you was re-emerging, inch by inch, from a long, silent retreat.

You scribbled one more:

 x₃ = 14.4 → 1.4(14.4) = 20.16  Total = 11 + 10.8 + 20.16 = 41.96

Phainon leaned closer. “That’s within the error margin.”

“±0.05,” you echoed, eyes narrowing. “That’s close enough.”

The tension in your jaw didn’t release. Not right away. You just kept staring at the page, calculating again. Double-checking. Reducing. Making sure you weren’t wrong.

“Hey,” he said quietly. “That was a good solve.”

You exhaled, still not smiling. But your grip on the pencil eased.

Phainon didn’t push the moment further. He didn’t say anything reassuring. He just leaned back in his chair and looked at you—not expectantly, not with pity. Just... looked.

He’d watched you shift like this for days. From sharp precision to burning out. From holding yourself too tightly to finally slipping. Not in a way that made you fragile—just quieter. And he hadn’t realized, until now, how carefully he’d started tracking it. The rise and fall of your moods. The way your sleeves drooped past your wrists when you hadn’t slept. The way your eyes moved faster when your confidence returned.

He hadn’t meant to notice so much.

But he had.

And now, with the answer in front of you and your hands stilled, he didn’t know how to look away.

You finally broke the silence. “I haven’t studied properly in days.”

He nodded once. “I know.”

You stared at the solution again.

“You going to tell me I’m screwing up?” you asked.

He thought about it. Then: “No. You already know when you are.”

You looked at him. And for once, didn’t look away.

The silence wasn’t awkward. It wasn’t kind, either. It just was.

Eventually, you stood. Packed your things slowly. Left the notebook open on the table. Phainon didn’t move, didn’t speak. He waited.

As you reached the door, you paused.

Then you left.

And he watched the half-solved page for a long time after, hand twitching once over the final line of the equation you’d both earned.

The day before nationals, you were staring at problem seventeen.

The question wasn't hard. Just dense. It was a nested inequality, no diagrams, three lines of conditions, and you’d already seen the structure before—maybe two sets ago, maybe last year’s regional finals. But your hands weren’t moving.

Your eyes dragged across the page. Back. Then again.

Nothing stuck.

Not the phrasing, not the shape of the functions, not even the constants. Every time you tried to scan it, it broke apart into noise—like reading with cotton in your ears. Like thinking through static.

The solution was probably two steps. Three, at most.

You couldn’t even start.

Someone knocked.

You didn’t look.

The knock came again—softer this time, a kind of hesitation behind it. Then the door clicked, and you heard it open anyway.

You didn’t have to turn around.

“Don’t,” you said, not even loud.

There was a pause.

“I’m just—”

“I said don’t.”

A beat.

Then footsteps.

Not retreating.

He stepped into the room anyway. Phainon, silent. Probably still in that same hoodie he wore when he didn’t want to draw attention. You didn’t turn your head. You just stared harder at the paper, as if concentration could be forced by spite.

“What do you want?” you asked flatly.

He didn’t answer.

The silence stretched too long. You hated it.

“You think showing up is helpful right now?”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t have to.”

Your pencil scratched a line across the page, but it was aimless. More like a heartbeat line than math. You flipped to the next page.

Blank. Just grid lines.

You tapped the pencil three times, then pressed it to the paper again. No questions. No prompt. You just drew a symbol. Something meaningless. A circle with a line through it.

Your jaw locked.

“Go home, Phainon.”

Still nothing.

“You think being here does something? That it makes me feel less like I'm falling apart?” You laughed, hollow. “If you’re waiting for some last-minute wisdom to come out of this, don’t bother.”

“I’m not.”

“Then what?”

Nothing.

He just stood there, behind your shoulder.

You grabbed your binder and closed it, too fast. The snap echoed.

“Look, I don’t want to talk. I don’t want eye contact. I don’t want you sitting there acting like your presence is comforting. It isn’t.”

“I know.”

Your throat tightened.

“You think I didn’t notice?” you said, still not looking. “How everything slowed down the past two weeks? How I stopped keeping up with my logs, stopped doing three sets a day, stopped treating this like it mattered?”

“That wasn’t—”

“I let myself breathe, and now I can’t focus. I’m sitting here and I can’t even move past a two-line problem. Nationals is in the morning, and all I want is silence.”

Your voice was low. Sharper than you intended. But honest.

And you meant it.

Phainon shifted. A quiet inhale. Then nothing.

For a second, you thought he might say something. Some vague, clipped version of comfort dressed up as logic. Something he could pass off as neutral.

But he didn’t.

Because you’d made it clear you wouldn’t hear it.

You stood, moved to the far side of the room, pulled open your bag with fingers that wouldn’t stop twitching. You took out another mock set. Unopened. Pages pristine.

You didn’t sit. Just held it like it would matter.

Phainon hadn’t left yet.

You said, with your back turned, “I’ll delete your messages if you send any tonight.”

Silence.

And finally—finally—you heard him step back.

Then the door clicked shut behind him.

No goodbyes. No dramatics.

Just quiet.

Too quiet.

You didn’t cry. Didn’t scream. There wasn’t time for that. You sat down and opened the mock test like nothing happened. Like you weren’t seconds from snapping. Like tomorrow wasn’t the only thing waiting for you, bare-fanged and watching.

The first question blurred. You blinked. Read it again.

Then started solving.

Because that’s all you had left.

The bus ride was too quiet.

You’d brought your binder. Everyone did. Open sets, annotated diagrams, clipped formula guides taped to the back of laminated ID cards. You used to do the same. You used to flip pages just to feel sharp, to stay in rhythm. But today you just held it in your lap. Your thumb brushed the edge of the cover, but you didn’t open it.

Someone laughed two rows down. Probably a teammate. The coach said something about breathing and pacing yourself and trusting what you already know.

You didn’t hear most of it. Your ears buzzed. Your head was full, but not of numbers.

You blinked and the venue arrived. High ceiling, clean rows of chairs, dry ass ac that immediately made your eyes sting red. In the room, they had labeled placards on the desks and printed IDs with barcodes. Everything looked exactly like it had last year.

You were in the front row this time.

Not that it mattered much.

You sat, hands on your lap, knees stiff. Your legs wouldn’t stop bouncing. Your pen was already uncapped. You kept uncapping it, then recapping it again. Five times. Six. You didn’t notice until someone tapped your desk to hand you the test envelope.

You said “thank you” without making eye contact.

Then it started.

Booklet flipped. Timer started. You read question one.

And felt nothing.

It was combinatorics—one of your favorite categories. The kind of problem you used to eat for warm-up. The first half was trivial: inclusion-exclusion, pigeonhole principle, standard case count. But your brain tripped on the wording.

You read the same paragraph twice.

Then a third time.

The logic was familiar. The numbers weren’t. You tried sketching something, but your pencil felt heavy. The lead snapped halfway through your first diagram. You paused to sharpen it, fingers tight, breathing shallow.

You looked at the clock.

You’d spent nine minutes on the first item.

You flipped to number two. Then three.

Then back again.

The room was silent—pages turning, pens scribbling, the occasional cough.

Your pen hovered above the paper. You wrote half a line of working for problem one. Then scratched it out.

It wasn’t even wrong.

You just couldn’t focus.

Your stomach churned.

By the time you finished the first page, it had been twenty minutes. Your hand hurt. You weren’t writing fluidly anymore. You weren’t even calculating. Just stumbling between guesses and second-guessing every instinct you used to trust.

Problem four was geometry.

It was clean. Symmetrical. The kind of shape you’d usually smirk at.

Now it made your head throb.

Midway through the proof construction, you forgot why you were solving it. You blinked and realized you'd written a congruence that didn’t apply. Your triangle labeling was inconsistent. You had to rewrite half the setup.

Thirty-five minutes gone.

Only two questions answered—poorly.

You wiped your palms against your pants. They were damp. You hadn’t noticed.

You looked around.

Everyone else was working. Focused. Calm.

You stared back down at your paper and told yourself to just breathe.

One step.

You just had to think.

Just had to trust your training.

Just had to—

Your vision blurred for half a second. Not from tears. From sheer cognitive fatigue.

You closed your eyes.

This isn’t me.

That voice sounded distant. Like it belonged to a version of you that hadn’t already spiraled.

You used to feel alive during competitions. You used to get high off the logic. Used to finish before the timer. You’d lean back and double-check the whole thing just for fun. You used to walk out of the room with a grin.

Now you couldn’t even lift your head.

You wanted to quit.

Not the competition—just the moment. Just stop existing here. Just vanish from the desk and leave the half-scratched paper behind. You wanted to crawl out of your own body and sleep for a week.

You looked back at the clock.

Fifty-eight minutes left.

You hadn't solved more than two problems.

Your hands shook.

You flipped to the next page anyway. You didn’t want to—your body just moved on instinct. A functional equation. Weird domain restriction. You could see what it wanted you to do. Transform. Isolate. But the working wouldn’t come.

You wrote a line. Crossed it out.

Wrote a second. Scratched over it.

You felt your chest tighten.

This is a joke.

You stared at the ceiling, not blinking, not breathing. Then you looked down and forced yourself to pick up the pen again.

It didn’t matter how slow.

You weren’t going to leave it blank.

Even if everything felt like it was slipping sideways, even if you knew—knew—you’d fumble this set, you couldn’t walk out knowing you hadn’t tried.

So you solved.

Not well.

Not fast.

And then, the announcement came four hours later.

They posted the results on the auditorium wall, in clean rows under the school banners. It took less than a minute for the cluster of students to gather. Someone whooped when they saw their name. Another dropped to the floor in disbelief, grinning at their teammates

You didn’t move.

You stood farther off, half in the shadow of the hallway, arms crossed too tightly across your chest.

You already knew.

The one with the modular constraint and inverse evaluation. The one that was practically made for you. You'd caught the structure immediately—cyclic groups, reduced residues, classic residue pairing. It was clean. Direct. Elegant.

You’d known before they even collected your paper.

You knew the second you circled back to problem nine.

But you hadn’t notated your base step.

You skipped it.

You proved the process but didn’t state the root value.

No mark.

You lost five points for that.

Five points.

You walked up to the sheet anyway. Just to see it.

The margin between first and second place?

Five.

Your name was there. Clear as day.

National rank: 2nd Place Total: 91 / 100

People were already murmuring. A few were surprised. A few weren’t. Some were still talking about how you "looked out of it" during the morning set, how you’d "sat still for too long" during the first page.

First place had 96.

Third had 89.

You didn’t respond.

You’d never placed second before.

You read the number again.

Ninety-one.

Not once.

Not since the beginning.

You weren’t angry. You weren’t even crying.

You just stood there, tired. Your legs ached. Your hands felt like they weren’t fully yours.

You heard someone approach behind you. The footsteps were familiar. Lighter than Mydei’s. Too careful to be Anaxa. You didn’t turn.

Phainon stopped beside you.

He didn’t say anything.

You didn’t either.

For a moment, the results just... existed between you.

It should’ve been perfect.

That one line.

That one symbol.

That one stupid omission.

The logic was right. The reasoning was solid. It was the kind of solution they’d print in post-competition reviews. But it was incomplete. Technically correct, formally flawed. The judges hadn’t been harsh. Just consistent.

You exhaled, slow.

“You already knew?” Phainon asked, voice low.

You nodded.

“I left it blank.”

“You didn’t leave it blank.”

“I left it unanchored.”

Silence.

You didn’t want consolation. Not even from him.

Because this wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t a failure.

It was worse.

It was that knife’s edge between greatness and flaw. The kind of mistake you can’t even be mad at. Just live with. Just swallow. Just remember when you look at your own name in second place next year and wonder how much tighter your grip has to be.

Someone asked to take a photo with the medalists.

You didn’t move.

Your hand twitched slightly when your name was called, but you stayed behind until the crowd thinned.

Phainon stayed with you.

Still silent.

It wasn’t a terrible ending.

You still placed.

You still qualified.

But when you finally walked outside—medal in your pocket, sweat dried cold on your back—the world felt too loud. The cars too sharp. The sunlight too white.

You’d done almost everything right.

Except the part that counted.

You didn’t wait for the team photo.

You stepped down from the auditorium steps, medal still boxed in your pocket, shoes hitting the concrete too hard. The sun was brutal. The wind made the sweat on your neck feel sticky. You crossed the street with no destination—just motion. Just away.

Someone called your name. You didn’t turn.

You heard the footsteps speeding up behind you. Rubber soles scraping pavement.

“Wait—” Phainon’s voice, breath catching.

You didn’t.

You kept walking until your throat started burning from how tight it was clenched. Until your fists were hot from how hard you were holding onto nothing.

He caught up anyway.

Of course he did.

“Can you—can you just stop for a second?”

You did.

But not for him.

You stopped because your legs were shaking.

You spun around.

“What.”

His mouth opened. Then closed.

You didn’t wait.

“No, really. What do you want, Phainon?” you snapped. “To say it’s okay? That I still did great? That I should be proud of second place?”

His expression shifted. “I wasn’t going to—”

“Because I don’t want to hear it.”

You stepped closer.

“I don’t want your version of understanding. I don’t want your... your weird quiet ‘I’m here’ look like that does anything for me. You know what I want?”

He didn’t move. Just stared.

“I want to go back two hours and slap myself for being so goddamn stupid.”

Your hands were shaking. “I missed one notation. One. You know how easy that base statement is? It’s mechanical. It’s an instinct. And I missed it because I was so fucking fogged I forgot how to write.”

Phainon said nothing.

You hated that.

You hated that he still wouldn’t argue.

“You knew,” you accused, voice low. “You saw me falling apart this week and you said nothing.”

“I tried—”

“You watched me. You followed me. You sat in that room and you knew I wasn’t in the right state, and you still didn’t stop me from spiraling.”

“I wasn’t going to control you.”

“Maybe you should have!”

It echoed off the buildings.

You took a shaky breath, but your lungs wouldn’t fill right. You swore your heart was in your throat.

“I don’t lose,” you whispered. “I don’t.”

Phainon’s brows knit. “It’s one mistake.”

“To you.”

“Not just to me.”

“Well, I’m not you!” you snapped, voice cracking.

Pedestrians crossed the street behind you. None of them looked your way.

“Do you know what they’ll say?” you asked bitterly. “That I choked. That I got distracted. That I got lazy. That the math kid finally cracked because they stopped grinding and started... I don’t know. Socializing.”

Phainon flinched. Barely.

Your breath caught.

And then, softer: “This wasn’t supposed to happen.”

You stepped back, blinking hard, jaw locked.

“I was supposed to win. Cleanly. Not because I’m gifted, not because I’m smart—because I fucking worked for it.”

Phainon’s voice came quiet.

“You still did.”

“Don’t,” you warned.

You weren’t ready to hear anything from him. Not validation. Not warmth. Not that irritating, careful silence he kept bringing like it was supposed to help.

You didn’t want him to understand.

You wanted him gone.

So you said the one thing you knew would stick:

“I can’t stand being around you right now.”

He froze.

You didn’t take it back.

You turned.

You walked.

And this time, he didn’t follow.

It had been a week. Maybe longer.

You didn’t care. You didn’t count anymore. The calendar with Nationals circled in red was still on the wall, but you hadn’t looked at it since the results. You kept the lights dim. Didn’t open the window. Didn’t answer your messages. You couldn’t. Every ping made your skin crawl. The medal was still in its case, unopened. Your fingers had touched it once, briefly, by accident when reaching for a pen, and your body recoiled like it was hot iron.

You didn’t deserve to hold it.

You sat hunched over your desk again, notebook open to the same damned problem—the same sequence from that day. That warm-up with Phainon. The one you couldn’t solve cleanly. The one you laughed about, once.

You hated that memory now.

You ran through it again.

You hated how close you’d been.

You hated that it showed up again. You hated that you froze. You hated that you had been the one to say “it needs 42 exactly” out loud—and still blanked.

 x₁ = 11, x₂ = 18, x₃ = 14.4  11 + 10.8 + 20.16 = 41.96

Almost.

You wanted to punch something.

But you didn’t. You just kept tapping the lead of your pencil to the desk. Over and over. Like that would make the numbers change. Like if you rewrote them enough, your score would shift backwards in time and undo the second place.

Your door creaked.

You didn’t look.

You already knew who it was. He kept doing this now—once a day, maybe twice. Quiet steps, paper bag rustling, some drink left on the corner of your desk. He didn’t say anything. You liked that. No words meant you didn’t have to scream.

But this time was different.

Phainon didn’t leave.

He sat beside you.

Not at a distance. Not lingering behind you. He sat—right there—on the edge of the desk like he belonged, like you weren’t halfway to a breakdown, like he wasn’t the last person you wanted to see right now.

You didn’t tell him to go.

You just snapped.

“I fucking had it.”

Your voice cracked on the first word. You didn’t care.

“I solved this. Two weeks ago. I said the answer out loud. I knew the spread. I knew the constraint.”

He didn’t speak.

“I said 42. I said it needs 42 exactly. I even adjusted the values with you. We got 41.96 and laughed because we were close, remember?”

You stared at the paper.

“You know what I got in Nationals?” You didn’t wait. “A time warning. I blanked. I hyperfocused. I optimized the wrong case, and then—then I panicked, Phainon. I panicked.”

Your throat clenched.

“I missed five points. Five points I could’ve solved in my sleep.”

The pencil snapped in your hand.

You stared at the broken lead, then the paper, then your own shaky fingers.

“I don’t get second place. I don’t choke. I don’t choke. I was the kind of person who didn’t choke. Who wrote the neatest notation. Who finished with five minutes to spare. Who got asked to coach others, because I was always sharp, always clean.”

You bit your lip.

“And I blew it. Over one question I’d already seen.”

The silence pressed against your ears.

“I ruined it.”

Still no reply. Just breathing. Just presence.

Your fingers curled, trying to keep steady.

“I hate this. I hate being this person. The person who peaked early. The person who was promising and then lost.”

Your voice dropped.

“I hate that it’s me.”

You felt your chest cave in a little—like air was too much to take in.

“And I can’t stop going over it. I can’t stop. My brain won’t shut up. I wake up thinking of equations. I stare at the ceiling and count backwards. I solve this problem again and again and it never changes.”

You let the pencil fall.

“I lost. I lost. And I can’t even scream because I don’t want anyone to hear how broken I sound.”

The tears came hot. You didn’t wipe them.

You closed your eyes. “I don’t know who I am if I’m not winning anymore.”

Then—

Warmth.

Not words. Not footsteps. Just arms around your shoulders, sudden and too human, too solid.

Phainon pulled you in.

No announcement. No breathy confession. No stupid I’m here for you monologue.

Just a silent, firm hug like the air had decided you’d had enough and finally let you collapse.

Your fists clenched weakly against his sleeves.

You wanted to scream again.

You didn’t.

You just stayed there, held in a silence you didn’t know how to break, shoulders trembling, breath stuttering, eyes blurry, voice too small when it came again:

“…I’m still solving it.”

And he said nothing.

Just held you tighter.

You stared at it for so long you forgot to breathe.

You’d seen the variables before. The shape of the function, the weighted coefficients, the margins for error. You’d memorized every possible spread that week before Nationals. Burned it into your skull, dreamed of the numbers like they were prophecy. You knew the bounds. You knew the behavior. You knew what was optimal.

And yet you’d missed it.

Your finger hovered over the line again:

 x₁ = 10.3, x₂ = 18.6, x₃ = 14.7  10.3 + 11.16 + 20.58 = 42.04

Exactly what you needed. Balanced. Minimal error. Clean notation.

You swallowed.

This was what it looked like when someone else solved your problem.

Not the kind of problem written in a book.

The kind of problem that defined your life.

You didn’t say anything at first. What was there to say?

That he used your notation?

That he probably went through your old scratch paper?

That he even wrote like you now—left margin wide, decimals aligned, iterations clearly marked?

That the one thing you hadn’t gotten right, the one thing that shattered your momentum and your pride and everything you thought made you worth something—he solved it in your language?

You pressed your palm to your face.

The tears didn’t come this time. Just heat. The kind that made your eyes sting and your ears burn.

You weren’t angry at him.

You were angry that it still mattered this much.

He said nothing.

You finally spoke.

“…You used my margin system.”

A pause.

Then, low and hoarse: “It made the most sense.”

Your hand trembled as it dropped to the desk.

“I gave up on this.” You stared at the page like it was some kind of curse. “And you didn’t.”

“I didn’t have to perform in front of a panel,” he said.

You bit your lip.

“I still blanked. Even though I knew the spread. Even though I had this. I still choked.”

Silence.

“I don’t choke,” you muttered again, voice smaller.

Phainon didn’t argue. He just sat beside you, fingers loosely laced in his lap, expression unreadable.

You hated how quiet he was being.

You hated that he wasn't trying to fix you.

You hated how real it made everything feel.

“I thought I could… I don’t know. Rebuild it,” you muttered, eyes flicking across the page again. “Like if I solved this, just this one… if I got it cleanly, then maybe I could forgive myself.”

He glanced down.

“I didn’t solve it for that,” he said quietly. “I just… kept seeing you staring at it.”

You laughed under your breath. Not amused. Not even bitter. Just tired.

“It’s so stupid.”

“It’s not.”

Your voice cracked. “It is. It’s one number. A decimal shift. And it’s been clawing at me like—like the loss means I’m less. Like if I didn’t get it, I don’t deserve anything I had before.”

The words slipped out before you could stop them.

“Everyone says I’m gifted. That I was made for this. That I was ‘born for precision.’ But what kind of genius blanks on a number they said out loud two weeks before the exam?”

He turned his head, just slightly.

“You.”

You froze.

Phainon’s voice didn’t waver. “You did. You blanked. You panicked. You lost.”

You didn’t move.

He continued, gently:

“And you’re still you.”

That pierced deeper than any sympathy would’ve.

Because it wasn’t comfort.

It was truth.

You looked at him for the first time.

He didn’t look triumphant.

He looked exhausted.

Like he’d carried the weight of that number for days—not because it was hard, but because you were.

Because watching you disappear into yourself was worse than not knowing the answer.

You didn’t realize how tight your grip had gotten until the edge of the paper started to crumple in your hand.

You set it down.

“I still lost,” you whispered.

“I know.”

“I hate it.”

“I know.”

The tears stung again.

“I hate that I care so much.”

He didn’t respond this time. Just leaned back slightly, letting the air between you return. Not out of cruelty. Just space. Like he knew you needed it.

You glanced down at the scratch again.

There it was. Your ghost of a victory. Written in handwriting that wasn’t yours. Solved by someone who wasn’t onstage. Who wasn’t panicking. Who hadn’t been trained for this the way you had.

“I was supposed to be better,” you muttered. “Than them. Than this.”

Phainon tilted his head. “Than me?”

You looked away.

“No,” you admitted. “Than myself.”

The words fell flat, bare, real.

You stared at the final boxed answer. The clean, round 42.04.

“That’s the score I needed.”

“It is,” he said softly.

You ran a hand through your hair, trying to gather something like breath.

Your chest still felt tight.

But not crushed.

You weren’t okay. Not even close. But your hands had stopped shaking.

And for the first time in over a week, you weren’t reciting the question in your head. You weren’t counting factors on your fingers. You weren’t spiraling through iterations.

You were just sitting. Still. Quiet.

Beside someone who had gotten there, when you couldn’t.

Beside someone who didn’t offer forgiveness, because they knew you weren’t asking for it.

Phainon shifted, about to speak—

—but didn’t.

You reached forward.

Picked up the paper.

Folded it once.

Then tucked it into the corner of your notebook like a scar.

A reminder.

A truth.

The perfect notation you forgot, and someone else remembered.

a/N: BEFORE YALL COME AT ME YES THIS IS LINEAR WEIGHTED OPTIMIZATION. THE IDEA AROSE WHEN I REMEMBEERED THE GUY I LIKED AND I WANTED TO LEARN MATH BS HE MADE IT SOUND FUN:((. This ENTIRE formula was something I did wayyy back. Idek remember the process but when I dug my old notes, I saw my tiny comments step by step. If the math is wrong.......... feel free to tell me. pls bro I based this off an old scratch paper GIVE ME A BREAK. WE ARE ALL GETTTING PHAINON. I'm so sorry if this was rushed dawgggggggggggggg

Written by @khuzena. Likes, reblogs and comments are always appreciated. ♡ 

[sportsentranced]

becoming sebastian

Taking over someone elses body isn’t always an easy task. Too many variables to take into consideration. Their age, fitness, mental capacity, and innate resilience. Are they exhausted, or well-rested? Even more, when considering taking over athletes. Even the ones not in their prime.

But, using something as a conduit, a tool, may erase most of them. Clothes work perfectly. Especially tight clothes. The immediate contact to skin can make it so much easier to take control.

Luckily, transfering your consciousness into objects was always an easy task me. For years now I trained to pour more and more of myself into clothes—track pants, hoodies, gloves—I got quite good at it.

Yet, I wasn’t fast enough to get the one body I always dreamt of possessing.

Sebastian Vettel.

He retired from Formula 1, and dropped from the face of the earth. Like a cryptid, there were hints and sightings, scetchy at best, and I felt like I have to give up on him.

When the news broke, that he will attend the next race, that he will be putting on a old red bull racing suit and hop into a car, my heart skipped a beat.

That's all I asked for.

A chance.

Even if it didn’t work out, I needed to try it.

i had to use all of my contacts, so much money—wearing other people's skin has many benefits—but I made it work.

I got access to the racing suit. And what a beautiful piece that is.

Running my fingers along the seam, brsuhing across the logos, his name written on the waistline—that alone made me hard—felt so good.

It was like the heat of his body was still clinging to it, his scent—just barely there, after years—wooven into the fabric. Amazing.

I would have prefered to get my hands on the tight undergarments, but they were completely out of reach. Still, getting the opportunity to be worn by Sebastian, even if I can’t take over his body, was worth it all.

I had to ask even more favors for someone to pick up the suit and get it back to the paddock for my scheme to work.

It was odd to be carried around in a suitcase. Dark, barely breathable air, unable to move on my own. Yet I felt good. Being inside the fabric meant I could just relax. Knowing I will eventually meet Sebastian.

My time would come.

And it did.

Media day comes around, and with that Sebastian's upcoming laps on track.

I wait.

Not in the shadows—but within them. Within the fibers of a sleek, high-tech racing suit that clings to the hook inside the changing room. Woven into every thread, every layer, my presence humming quiet and low, like a pulse behind fabric.

The door opens.

He’s here.

Sebastian Vettel. His energy enters before he does—familiar, composed, steady. I sense him before I see him.

Then, there he is: still sharp-eyed, hair tousled, a focused intensity in his every step, even if this is just a ceremonial return.

He looks good, wearing a simple shirt and jeans—his usual attire. Nothing too fancy, just Sebastian.

Without the need for words he strips out of his street clothes, layer by layer. His shirt peels away, revealing lean muscle, toned more by endurance and precision than raw strength.

Then he kicks off his sneakers, and unbuckles his jeans. The noise of the denim sliding down his thighs filling the quiet room around us.

The fabric pools around his ankles before he steps out of it, approaching the white undergarments lying on the table next to me.

Just in his boxers, I can't help but notice the outline of him, his length, idly pressing against the fabric of his Calvin Klein briefs, he licks his lips.

He seems to be excited, nervous, maybe. But he looks so good.

Sebastian lets out a low groan, barely audible, mumbling something more to himself than anyone else. Of course, he thinks he's alone.

I feel the warmth of his body rise as he slides on the tight, flame-retardant underlayer—thin enough to hug every line of him, close enough that his body heat begins to fill the room like a slow fog.

He pulls the underpants up his legs, one at a time, until the waistband settles perfectly—a gentle tug here, a firm pull there—until Sebastian is done adjusting himself.

His length is tenting more insistently now. The rush of adrenaline is getting to him. He rubs his palm against it, along his shaft, letting out a low, needy sound, vibrating deep inside his throat, before closing his eyes for a brief moment, slowly regaining his composure.

He picks up the tight shirt and pulls it over his head. Like the million times he had done this before, he slides his arms into the sleeves, pulls the stretchy fabric down his torso, and straightens it with firm strokes.

"Fühlt sich gut an."

His voice filled the air around us, soft, tinged with excitement and a hint of need.

Hearing him up close makes my entire being vibrate, humming quietly through the seams of his suit.

He takes a few steps around, stretching his limbs, arms over his head, his legs, until he's sure everything fits just right.

And then, it's my turn.

He approaches me—socked feet barely making any sound on the floor.

I feel him.

His fingertips ghost over me, barely touching me, but it is enough to make me whimper internally.

Sebastian lets his fingers dance along the red bull logo, along the sleeves, and back down to his name embossed at the waistline.

My breath catches, anticipation rising through every fiber of my being.

His smile widens, licking his lips as he takes me off the hook and in that instant I truly feel him.

The warmth of his fingertips. The slight tremble of energy before the calm. The trace scent of clean skin and aftershave, faint motor oil still clinging to his palms. He doesn’t know I'm there yet, but my presence coils tight, waiting. Anticipating.

He steps in—one leg at a time.

As the suit—I—glides up his body, I begin to press inward, tightening over his calves, thighs, hips, feeling the way his body moves—fluid, efficient.

The heat of his body radiates through the thin fabric of the underpants. Mingled with his scent, clean, a hint of citrus, and yet, his skin tastes salty, deliciously real.

I am barely able to contain myself, when I settle around his waist, feeling his length imprinting through his pants, rubbing against me, insistently making its presence known. The way it twitches once, firm against my being.

I swallow hard.

Not yet.

I cannot rush this.

Yet, something inside Sebastian is already shifting.

Another low growl echoes through his chest, and then, he reached for the obvious tent forming through me.

He grabs himself, pumping once, twice, letting out a low moan.

"Fuck—"

That does it.

I feel myself slowly dripping through the underpants separating us into his skin.

Not enough to make any move on him. All he feels is a tingling sensation spreading through his calves, into his thighs and further up.

That's what is causing the rush of adrenaline and pleasure surging through him.

Sebastian shakes his head, regaining his composure slightly. But I keep dripping. Tasting his skin, engulfed in his scent, my head swims—it feels so good.

Casually, he puts on the upper half of me. Sliding his arms into the sleeves.

And I can't stop myself.

As the fabric slides up his torso, his arms, I move, just barely, feeling his muscles, pecs and biceps, squeezing here and there, causing him to let out a breathless giggle.

"Das habe ich vermisst."

He growls, letting his hands run across his chest, firmly stroking himself through me.

More and more of me drips through the tight underlayer into him. And that is when he notices something is off.

His expression shifts, his muscles tense as I keep encompassing his form.

I cannot waste any time.

I—deliberately, intimately—press forward. Through his back, his thighs, his chest—everywhere.

My essence phasing into him like silk sliding over skin. There’s a jolt. His body stiffens. His head jerks up.

I feel my will seep in deeper now, threading through the fabric and muscle until Sebastian’s limbs begin to obey my command.

First, the arms. His right arm rises—quietly, almost imperceptibly—elbow lifting, forearm extending, as if guided by an invisible puppeteer. I savor the sensation of his sinewy muscle slipping beneath my control, each fiber warming to my invasion. His biceps flex beneath the skin, strength bending to my will even as the back of his mind struggles to reclaim it.

Then the left arm follows, rising in perfect mirror of the first. His hands hang suspended at chest height, fingers curling and uncurling in slow, deliberate gestures. I test the strength, pressing out each finger, feeling the sturdy bones and tendons align to my subtle commands. I flex his wrists, feeling the snap of resistance give way to obedience.

A shudder ripples through him—his awareness flickering, he is fighting—yet his body remains unwavering under my grip. With both arms now fully mine, I start to stroke our chest.

Fuck—it feels good.

I drag the fingers across the suit, feeling both—the sensation of the fabric, and the firm touch.

"Was...ist das..." He let out a low, strangled moan.

His body stiffens, he feels something—feels me coursing through his body. Into his belly, filling his chest, up his neck and into his head.

Sebastian’s footsteps falter as he spins in a slow, unsteady circle, eyes unfocused. He reaches out with trembling fingers, brushing the cold metal of a locker to steady himself. His breath comes in shallow gasps, each inhale catching on that strange, electric warmth coursing through him.

I glide closer, guiding his hand so that it can grip the edge of the zipper down at his navel. His other hand still presses against the locker’s cool surface as he fights to make sense of the spinning world around him. The zipper hangs there, a silent invitation.

I need more to fully take over.

I need to enclose him inside me.

With a deliberate tug, I pull the zipper upward. It slides smoothly through the fabric channels, closing around him with a soft whisper. As the suit seals him in from neck to ankle, the final threads of his resistance unravel.

He hiccups as the zipper reaches the collar of his suit, fully enclosed in me, I let myself drip.

I lean in, allowing my consciousness to flow through every fold of the suit’s lining and every sinew of his body.

I sink deeper, further, into all of him.

I embrace all of him.

His scent, still fresh yet tinged with sweat from the ongoing take over. The salty taste of his skin, rubbing against the fabric. The soft moans he is unable to hold back. The insistent straining of every muscle—biceps flex beneath the suit, chest filling the tight suit fully.

His strength is his weakness now, as I use it against him.

I keep stroking his chest, as heat rises in his entire body, the suit's fabric is tighter now. I enjoy the heat radiating through the suit, the little sounds he makes with every stroke, but he's not gone yet.

Sebastian is still resisting. Clawing at the fabric, at me, trying to remove me. A desperate groan escapes his lips, he struggles, so much.

I just smirk.

I'm not going anywhere now.

I run his hand lower, across his chest, his tummy and beyond his waistline until I find my target.

His tenting cock.

I find that hot, hard length and begin to tease—slow, deliberate strokes along the silky material. Thumb and fingers trace the outline through the cling of the suit, drawing little shivers up Sebastian’s spine.

He shakes his head in denial, his throat works but a low mumble is all that's leaving his lips.

"Nein...bitte." Sebastian moans as I wrap our fingers around his shaft and start pumping. Once, twice, through the suit, feeling his mind spinning.

His breath hitches in a futile attempt of protest. He tries to tense his legs closed but the navy suit squeaks with every tremor. My teasing becomes more precise—feather-light flicks at the tip, circles at the swollen ridge, each motion designed to demand his full, undivided attention.

Sebastian swallows, eyes unfocus even more. He can’t help but shift his hips into each stroke, as I teases every last nerve.

i don’t know who is the one causing it, but more and more pre-cum swells at the tip of his cock, staining his precious suit slightly.

"Mmhmph." Leaves his parted lips, such a cute sound.

I drag his thumb down the ridge at the tip—deliberate, teasing circles that send fresh jolts through him. His strangled moans grow louder, each one more desperate than before.

As my pace quickens, the damp fabric strains and creaks with every movement. Sebastian’s legs part instinctively, suit slick and dark between them.

Right at the edge of release, I push even further into him.

Going all in.

His body stiffens, lips part in a breathless moan, and a trail of saliva glistens at the corner of his lips.

His eyes roll as he tilts his head back. The entire body is stiff, rigid, near collapse, when I feel him coming into the suit.

His release erupts in thick, warm pulses against the pristine navy of his suit. The fabric balloons briefly with each spurt before soaking in, darkening in a glossy bloom.

The first time I came as Sebastian Vettel.

His knees give a faint, involuntary tremor, but I—he—stand firm at the locker. The hum of the paddock beyond fades into a distant pulse as my awareness deepens within Sebastian’s form. Every muscle, every thought, now settles under my guidance. He’s still there—a dim echo—but the body is mine.

I take a deep breath, feeling cold air fill my lungs. Then another, and another, slowly settling in my new body. Sweat drips down my forehead, I watch them drop to the floor.

That’s when his scent fully hit me. It was intoxicating before, but now, I can't stop. With every inhale through his nose, I take him in. His aftershave, mingled with the scent of cum.

I take a step back, legs still wobbly, before I find my footing. My vision sharpens, and I look down at myself, red bull racing suit tight against my skin, a wet patch outlining my cock, and my toes wiggling inside white socks.

"Fuck—it worked." I grunt.

Hearing his voice echo through me sends another wave of need through me, my cock twitches and a bead of cum slides down my thighs.

I chuckle, trying to regain my composure.

"That felt good."

I take in my surroundings, and spot a small mirror mounted to the wall.

I walk over and cannot believe my eyes.

Sebastian Vettel is staring back at me.

Face flushed, suit a little rumpled, damp in places, and so, so handsome.

I let my fingers caress my new, pretty face. Pink cheeks, so soft, a slight stubble, and his pretty eyes.

There is a sudden knock on the door, and I flinch.

"Seb?" Some voice rings through the wall. "Make sure you're ready in 20."

"Yeah, don’t worry." I try to sound casual, but my voice is huskier than it should have been.

"Come find us in the lobby when you're done."

I hear footsteps as they step away feom the door.

Turning back to the mirror, I smirk back at my reflection.

"I will have so much fun with you."

[aventurineswife]

helos fre :3 random but any thoughts on self aware hsr 🙏🙏 ngl it's absolute peak to me cuz the fics I've read about it is so good I wanna digest it into my blood cells 😍🥰🥰/hj /lh

AHHHH I HAVE FEW BUT ITS PROBABLY NOT GOOD 😭🙏 (I might need to write a series about it in the future lmaoo)

The Express itself, and the crew aboard it, start referencing an "observer" that influences their journey. They might leave cryptic remarks like, "We wouldn’t have made it here without a guiding force…" or, "Are you out there, watching us?"

Himeko and Welt have deep discussions about the metaphysical implications of being part of a "game." Welt's past in other dimensions makes him particularly reflective.

Occasionally, your Trailblazer might break the fourth wall and stare directly "out" of the screen. They’d ask questions like, "Why are you helping us? What’s in it for you?" Or even, "Do you think you’re doing the right thing?"

Their dialogue changes subtly depending on your in-game decisions, showing that they’re paying attention.

Kafka is one of the few who seems fully aware that you’re pulling the strings. She might tease, "How long will you keep playing this game? Or is it playing you?" It’s unclear if she means it literally or as a metaphor.

Pela starts digging into the concept of "higher dimensions" where powerful entities (like the players) influence their world. You might find hidden journal entries speculating about the possibility of unseen forces guiding their lives.

Characters start commenting on how often you farm the same materials or run the same domains (?). For instance, Dan Heng might say, "You’ve had me fight this exact enemy over fifty times… What are you preparing for?"

When summoning characters, some of them might react to being "chosen." For example: Silver Wolf might say, "Took you long enough. Were you saving for someone else?" While Seele could mutter, "You really wanted me, didn’t you?"

As beings tied to the metaphysical order of the universe, the Aeons might perceive your existence. Xianzhou scholars hypothesize that you are an entity akin to an Aeon of "Control" or "Fate."

The Stellaron within the Trailblazer seems to have an awareness of you, treating you like an ally—or a potential threat. It might whisper cryptic messages about your choices or consequences.

Herta becomes suspicious of the odd behaviors in the universe and starts referring to you as a "prime variable." She might even try to communicate directly through simulated events, asking for your cooperation.

Some characters, like March 7th or Natasha, might express gratitude for your care and attention. "You always bring me along… Do you think I’m special?" they might ask, breaking the fourth wall.

Certain antagonists, like Cocolia or Jade, might break from their usual dialogue to challenge your decisions. "You think you’re the hero? You’re just another player, aren’t you?"

A secret cutscene or dialogue could play if you act in unexpected ways, revealing that the characters have fully realized their reality. It could be bittersweet, with them either embracing or lamenting their lack of agency.

Aventurine might acknowledge your influence subtly. After completing a mission for the IPC, he sends a message: "Noticed your knack for efficiency. You deserve a little bonus for all the extra effort you 'inspire.' Don’t let it go to your head." He attaches an unusually large amount of credits, as though recognizing you directly for optimizing his profits.

Argenti might kneel before the screen during a heartfelt moment (or after a battle): "O noble guide, it is your divine hand that shapes my path! I dedicate my blade not just to the people, but to you. May your will continue to shine upon us!" He also gifts you rare items or sends messages of gratitude, as though you're a divine figure he serves.

AHHH I wanna write fics for certain characters or something (this could also lead to yandere themes depending if the person/anon reqs for it).

[h-sleepingirl]

Essay: Hypnosis is Irrational

For PSYCHOSPIRITUAL: A Spirituality/Hypnokink Essay Jam

This is an essay about bonfires, Quaker meetings, Judaism, and the entirely transcendent nature of hypnosis. I'm sorry in advance to philosophers and scientists. Don't come for me until you've seen God in the ceiling through your fluttering lashes!

--

Rationality is a core value of modern western society. Materialism and objective, evidence-based science are seen as the gold standard for how to view the world around us. It’s easy to see why -- this approach has catapulted humanity forward over a relatively short period of time, technologically and philosophically. Finding the truths of the universe through hard evidence and math is extremely compelling and much more logical than basing our views off of conjecture or old religious texts.

Hypnosis entered public western consciousness in tumult. Franz Mesmer’s animal magnetism clearly worked, and he had theories of why, but they didn’t hold up to scientific rigor. Really from its inception, hypnosis has been fighting to be seen as legitimate as a medical practice, and as compatible with evidence-based science.

It’s not that it doesn’t make sense that hypnotherapy fights so hard to be accepted as a “real” discipline, or that it needs to go through studies to be practiced on patients. We value medicine that is objectively safe and effective -- for good reason.

That being said…

I am not anti-science. But I do think if we don’t acknowledge the methodology’s limitations, we are being dishonest and misleading -- with ourselves and with those we teach.

Here’s the thing: We are not doing therapy with our partners. We don’t need to be beholden to these limitations. Not in our theory, and especially not in our practice.

We are free -- more free than any other practitioners of hypnosis -- to accept and celebrate its irrationality.

And when we stop trying to shoehorn our experiences into being understandable, we are free to explore and experience unbelievable things.

--

In terms of spiritual beliefs, I would describe myself as a skeptic-leaning agnostic. I think that how you are raised is a major religious influence on you, and I happened to be raised in an atheist household. Despite branching off from my family and taking spiritual exploration seriously, I would never confidently say “I believe in God” or “I believe in magic,” nor that I am even particularly convinced by my handful of difficult-to-explain experiences.

While my spirituality intersects with hypnosis, I am not here to tell you that hypnosis is the result of God or magical forces -- and I’m not here to define how hypnosis fits into “magic” or vice versa. I think that too is a kind of rationalization -- it’s trying to explain something nebulous in a concrete way, trying to fit it into a box.

I don’t think that calling hypnosis irrational should cause us to seek alternative, definitive answers outside of science. I think that we as humans need to be comfortable not knowing, not labeling -- a space that can be very uncomfortable for us, but one that ultimately allows us to have less-filtered subjective experiences.

Subjective experiences are the core of hypnosis. No matter what method is purported to be “objectively” best, the one that you should actually use is the one that makes your partner feel trance most intensely. Science simply cannot anticipate, direct, or account for the subtlety of the subjective experience of hypnosis.

Scientific tests cannot accurately measure anything about hypnosis, because hypnosis relies almost entirely on the softest variables: the interpersonal relationship and biases we have, the way a person is feeling or primed on a given day, the slightest changes in tone or delivery or nonverbal language. We might say that standardized hypnosis is a completely different activity from the hypnosis that we practice with real partners.

A brainwave-measuring machine cannot communicate the intricacies and depth of a trance. I would not be surprised, if I was hooked up to an EEG, that many of my “trance states” would not produce expected effects on the device. Even physically observable signs of trance do not tell the whole story -- I can be having an intensely hypnotic internal experience while appearing completely awake. There is simply not an objective way to tell when I am hypnotized -- it is completely based on my own feelings.

And yet, with shocking accuracy, my partner can tell the exact moment that I slip into trance, even if I give no discernable outward response. When pressed, he often can’t identify what the signal is -- it is very, very subtle, if anything.

It is a moment where his focus on me melds into my experience, into my mind.

Really, there have been countless times in hypnosis that I feel with total certainty that my mind is being read or that I am reading my partner’s mind. It’s shocking, and sort of maddening, and I have heard from many others that they’ve experienced the same thing. Our urge is to say, “Well, that’s a result of unconsciously reading microexpressions, of knowing a person’s nonverbal language intimately, of having a robust internal map of a person, being good at anticipating hypnotic responses, linguistic cold reading tricks.” That’s rationalizing, and it’s all very logical and certainly has some element of truth to it -- but it causes us to say “OK, case closed,” and sigh in relief that we can dismiss the question and no longer be faced with it.

The reality is this: Those are guesses. They are probably pretty good guesses, but I believe we fall into this trap of assuming the logical-sounding guesses we make are objectively correct, even in the absence of evidence.

Ostensibly, the vast majority of “answers” we have about why hypnosis works are just that -- theories, models, best guesses. Science doesn’t even have a singular accepted answer on whether hypnosis is an altered state. Often, working within a given theory (or two) gives us structure and allows us to perform more effectively. But when we really think about the nature of hypnosis, the truth is that we really don’t have much of a solid idea why and how it works.

That’s uncomfortable. I’m not pushing that because it’s the cold, hard truth, or because accepting it is some form of mental asceticism (nor spiritual gateway). I’m saying it because living in that liminal space of irrationality will actually change the way you do and experience hypnosis -- because it frees you from the limitations of feeling like everything we do has to make sense.

--

I have my own theory about why we want to make those logical guesses: Because it feels embarrassing to say we are hypnotists and yet there are things we don’t understand. Because we are afraid of judgment if we say we are actually mind-reading or doing magic, even as a shorthand for a complex invisible process. I think these are unconscious biases -- a result of seeing ourselves as rational people in a rational world. Spirituality is seen as lesser and fake -- entertaining the idea of magic gets you labeled as immature or crazy.

But when you try to remove your biases and think about it, it is crazy that we use just our words to make people forget things, hallucinate things, have orgasms, experience dissolution of the ego. And we don’t really know why.

True curiosity and wonder are hypnosis’s best friends. New subjects who struggle to experience trance or suggestions often are stuck because of their expectations -- they feel like they know what is supposed to happen, so when their experience doesn’t line up, they perceive it as failure. It’s why one of the best ways you can set a person up for “success” in hypnosis is to really cultivate a sense of curiosity, of not being judgmental of their experience, of not assuming they know what is happening.

Even still, this model of trance often has the subject experiencing wide-eyed wonder while the hypnotist actually holds the esoteric knowledge of what’s going on behind the curtain. But in my opinion, the real magic happens when both parties are prepared to question everything they know, to be surprised, to not take for granted, and to observe without rationality.

My most treasured memory is one that I keep close to my chest. Briefly: it was at a hypnosis-friendly bonfire on the autumnal equinox. My partner and I embraced and for an hour had a completely shared experience, wordless and hypnotic and bizarrely spiritual. Neither of us were “driving�� -- we were both passengers, almost like being possessed. No drugs were involved, just the two of us in the right place at the right time, able to let go of the feeling that we were “crazy” or being illogical, or that we knew what was going to happen. We were both really shaken by it.

That ultimately led us to being able to have trances, occasionally, where we mutually let our guard down and play without the usual “rules.” We can’t do it intentionally, but sometimes we hit on little pockets of magic, and then the trance becomes like spellcasting, and spellcasting isn’t bound by the laws that supposedly govern hypnosis.

We know that hypnosis is influenced largely by how we expect it to work. We give pretalks to set expectations that often function as suggestions, boundaries, and definitions: “All you need to do to be hypnotized is pay attention -- it’s OK if your thoughts drift.” “Hypnosis might feel different from what you expect, like floating or sinking.” Even: “You can always come out of trance if you need to.”

I believe my partner and I are on similar pages about whether magic is “real.” The word “maybe” does a lot of heavy lifting in my worldview. It’s really more about being open to different perspectives, and playing in different models. So if we can dip into a perspective where hypnosis behaves a bit more like magic -- or otherwise irrationally -- then that actually, literally changes the way hypnosis works.

This is the true nature of hypnosis -- it is a shapeshifter. If you define hypnosis as a science or as a spiritual practice, it works either way. So if you can change the beliefs you inhabit, you will experience wildly different trances. And it may be irrational to assign spirituality and magic to it, but it is not absurd.

--

In this way, belief and perspective is actually where a lot of the nature of hypnosis sits.

After the “bonfire incident,” I was motivated to do some spiritual seeking, and I started going to Quaker meetings. Quaker meetings are simple but intense: People get together in a room and sit silently, opening themselves up to “messages” from within their own hearts or outside themselves, and if they feel moved to share a message, they stand up and speak it. There is no discussion, just completely passive listening and speaking.

I found this to be an extremely potent spiritual environment. We weren’t meditating, per se, just going quiet. Sitting silently for an hour with no other stimulation was luxurious, and felt quite a bit to me like a kind of trance.

I went regularly for a few months. I never spoke, but I did listen. There was one meeting I remember vividly where I was sitting and thinking about something, and at that moment, a woman stood up, and shared a message that was very close to what I was pondering over.

Then another woman stood:

“I know sometimes in this room,” she said, “we feel like we are all thinking the same thing when someone shares a message. This is one of those times for me.”

There was no fear of judgment, nor proclamation of metaphysical experience. It was just a statement of fact.

Quaker meetings taught me to be curious. If the bonfire opened the door, Quaker meetings honed my ability to be irrational. There was a period while I was going regularly where I was seeing wonder in the world at every turn -- a leaf falling on my back felt like a tap on the shoulder, the wind felt like a whisper.

And when my partner and I were doing hypnosis, my rigid belief system became so flexible that I was utterly open to suggestions about my experiences. He would tell me things and I believed them completely, almost like being on a drug, or completely enchanted. We were doing serious magic back then, tempting reality to peel back and reveal the “truth” underneath. It was intoxicating, and it certainly had an element of danger.

As intense as it was, I found this magic to be frustrating too, because I wanted to understand the nature of it -- I wanted to understand hypnosis so badly, and I wanted so badly for magic to be real. I thought that maybe there was a facet of hypnosis that I’d been missing -- some spiritual facet -- that would take me one step closer to an objective, unified, overarching hypnosis model.

I was right that I had been neglecting to think about spirituality with regard to hypnosis. But of course the idea that was leading to some overarching truth was a red herring. The real truth is that there is no overarching truth -- hypnosis can be seen from many models and perspectives, but there isn’t a singular “correct” one.

-- 

I have written extensively about how I feel this is core to hypnosis -- both in educational articles, an upcoming book, and in a personal essay about Judaism. My Jewishness is critically important to me, and has taught me a lot about the value of diverse perspectives, including on the spectrum of rationalism versus spirituality or mysticism.

By some, religion is often seen as incompatible with science (or rationality) -- unprovable mystical forces, an unseeable omnipotent creator. But there have been a number of important rationalist thinkers throughout history, across world religions.

Judaism’s most famous is probably Maimonides -- Moses ben Maimon. He lived in Spain in the 1100s, a time and place where Jewish mysticism was thriving. Maimonides was both a scientist and a deeply religious, learned Jew. One of his greatest contributions to the culture was in codifying Jewish law and practice in the common tongue to make it accessible to the average Jew at the time. In doing so, his rationalism made a great impact in Judaism as a whole.

Maimonides brought Aristotalian philosophy into Judaism, which came with a full rejection of the supernatural -- with the exception of God as transcendent creator. (The creation exists, so it must have been created.) One of his major theological tenets was that there was no conflict between the scientific and the teachings of Torah -- that the revelations of God were completely compatible with science. To Maimonides, for example, angels were not supernatural beings, but a metaphorical personification of the natural forces of the world. There are “angels” for why the wind blows, and “angels” for why we are held stuck to the earth.

If something appeared to be at odds with the natural order of the world -- whether it was from Torah or a perceived miracle -- Maimonides said that was our own lack of understanding, both of science and of the “secrets” of Torah. Essentially: everything that seems irrational has a rational explanation.

There are pros and cons to this, in my opinion. First, it’s neat, elegant, and sensible -- and I think it’s compatible with a measured view of hypnosis. Hypnosis is real -- no one is disputing that -- and while it has unknowable parts to us at our current point in history, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it behaves counter to the natural order of the world.

But I think Maimonides contradicts himself. If you claim to be humbled by the secrets of the world and revelation, why would you so vehemently reject that the world might behave differently than you understand or expect?

How can we claim to “know” the natural order of the world in any capacity beyond what we can observe? How can we claim that our observations are universal or objective?

If we can’t know, we can only experience, explore, experiment. It is brutally human -- reaching out to the world with our limited five senses and our remarkable consciousness. By the nature of us being humans, our explorations will all produce different perspectives and models, all of which have an element of truth to them because all of our experiences are “real,” true experiences.

Hypnosis operates necessarily with/on the human brain -- two unique human brains -- so we each see a unique, limited facet of it. By talking, playing, and connecting with each other, we learn about other facets and perspectives which influence our internal models of it. On a larger scale, as a community, we create, bend, and break rules about it as our community experience evolves. We actually change what hypnosis is, how it works, and how to do it.

Even in just 15 years, I have seen firsthand how hypnosis changes as the community changes. If you look back at historical sources about hypnosis, you can see that we do something radically different nowadays -- which we think of as more sophisticated, but then again, historical hypnotists were doing amazing things too.

Hypnosis as a thing evolves as we explore it more -- as we explore each other more -- and push its boundaries.

We can’t pin down what it is. We can’t model it. But we can participate in it.

It is transcendent -- as Maimonides and Aristotle say God is transcendent; utterly beyond us.

--

Part of my experience of being hypnotized really intensely is a deeper acceptance of what I am feeling or thinking, moment to moment. It is a kind of radical acceptance that what my brain is doing is important and real. It’s not that I don’t understand that I’m hypnotized, or that I don’t make any critical judgments about what is happening. It’s just partially that if I feel something “weird,” I don’t dismiss it out of hand.

When I am in deep trances, weird stuff often happens. I get spontaneous sensory hallucinations, I get stray thoughts that can blindside me.

Occasionally, I have this unmistakable feeling that I am “seeing God.” That felt like a crazy thought to me the first time I had it -- like a person of capital-F “Faith” would have. It didn’t suddenly make me believe in a higher power, but I was left with that feeling that I had touched something divine while my partner murmured into my ear and took control of me.

Hypnosis is not just transcendent by nature or in a vacuum -- it feels transcendent. It feels like nothing else in this world; it completely transcends language and the realm of usual experience.

It makes sense that when faced with this kind of experience, it makes a skeptical person like me feel for a moment that there might be something more, something ineffable. It makes sense that when I have spiritual experiences with hypnosis, it feels innately spiritual to me.

But also it is true that hypnosis is simply very weird.

Why do I feel like I am connecting with divinity in deep trance? Why do I feel certain that my partner and I are reading each other’s minds? Why have I felt a quality of presence or possession?

I can believe it or disbelieve it all I want. I can rationalize it in any way I want. You can relate to me, or think less of me and judge me. But none of that takes away from what my experiential truth is.

What hypnosis feels like is not just more important than what it “is,” that is what it is. The subjective experience that we inhabit is hypnosis. 

Humans are moved by weird, irrational, transcendent experiences. Those are the times our worldview is affirmed or shaken. For those of us who are spiritually open to the idea that the materialistic world might be more than it seems, these moments are bright sparks of light, motivating, inspirational.

Hypnosis does this to me all the time. I am constantly amazed by it. I truly believe the only reason we look at it as a mundane phenomenon is because we assume our world is mundane -- we take it for granted.

But it is not mundane. It is two people communicating in such an intimate way that it behaves like a psychoactive drug. It is striving to know another person so deeply that you innately understand what they are thinking and feeling and you don’t know why. It makes the impossible seem possible; it makes magic feel 100% real.

That’s not some perspective that is out of touch with reality. That is the grounded view of hypnosis.

We are allowed to have crazy experiences with this art. Our main job is not trying to sell people on the idea that it is real. We work so hard to portray ourselves as sane and grounded -- we imitate therapists who need to have an answer to skeptics walking into their office. I think that at a certain point when we are doing intimate hypnosis we are allowed to say, “OK, I know this is real, and you know this is real, so let’s drop the bullshit and acknowledge that what we are doing is actually completely crazy.”

Hypnosis is amazing. It is just amazing. I am not saying that it is completely impossible to understand -- I think it is fair to say at this point that my life’s work is trying to understand it and communicate that understanding. I am saying that we need to not cut ourselves off from amazement, from confusion, from wonder, from not-knowing -- those are crucial to understanding, even crucial to science.

It is a form of respect to the art and to our partners to inhabit a space where we don’t know, to relax our egos and say that hypnosis is more than we can comprehend. To listen -- to ourselves or our partners -- when weird stuff happens.

Hypnosis will grow with us as humans if we let it. We have the opportunity to open ourselves to it, to greet it curiously, and to truly surrender to our exploration.

--

Sleepingirl (they/she) is a hypnokink educator with over a decade of experience on both sides of the pocket watch. They’re the author of several books, many articles (patreon.com/sleepingirl), and LearnHypnokink.com (a guide through the foundations of improvised hypnosis).

Their body of work in hypnokink is extremely extensive and spans many mediums -- see everything at https://sleepingirl.info/.

[radicaldreemurrs]

Oh yeah one more thing--has Kris been trying to change themselves since before the game started, and [Player] just got dropped in the middle of it? Or did the events of the game cause them to start to change?

i think kris has been trying to change for a long time, even before whatever may have happened back then. they've been taking out their SOUL since before the game, it is not a new thing for them. the reason DELTARUNE starts where it does is because that is where the first major story event occurs — the heroes of light meeting the prince of dark — and anything that happened beforehand is both irrelevant to and set-in-stone foundation for the interactive narrative, and thus reasonably can't/shouldn't be changed. you can't change the past.

what defines their ability to change during the events of DELTARUNE is the SOUL's “connection” to the interface of the game as a playable entity. i realize that i haven't actually put to words the way i see it yet, so i think what the survey sequence represents is this:

in the same way that booting up UNDERTALE and entering a name initiates the “connection” of your SOUL to the game's world and chara's subsequent revival, booting up SURVEY_PROGRAM does the same automatically, taking you running the program at all as implicit input that is acceptable in order for the “connection” to take place (“YOU ACCEPT EVERYTHING THAT WILL HAPPEN FROM NOW ON”).

in UNDERTALE, the only relevant input the game accepts that affects the game's world directly is the name. this variable is what ties you to the underground, as it retroactively alters the history of the world in the same way changing the name of a player character typically would (i.e. “Cloud” in FFVII is the character's canon name, but it can still be changed and will have always been the changed name retroactively). it's diegetically quantifying the way games normally work in a way that the game's main character can then tie back to you directly — you spoke their name and, by selecting Yes, you initiated the “connection”, giving them your SOUL and asking that they follow your guidance in exchange (“I, your humble servant, will follow you to the utmost...”), which can lead to them then changing, regressing, or stagnating, based on your will.

with DELTARUNE's presentation of the “connection” being inherently different, it can be assumed that the nature of the “connection” is different as well. the presented premise is that of developing a form and shaping its mind as your own for the seeming purpose of letting you interface with the world waiting beyond the sequence in a way you have full control over — a bold thing to promise, too good to be true, which is why it isn't.

the end of the sequence pulls away the curtain to show it was never your choice how you would present in and interface with this world, because it is never anyone's choice in this world. no one can choose who they are in this world. this leading directly into the introduction of kris is extremely relevant, because it sets the stage for the main thematic throughline of the game, which is a throughline that is most relevant to kris.

the true “connection” that DELTARUNE initiates is an emotional connection, with the entire point of the survey being to prime you for the narrative to follow by placing you in the same mindset as kris — a teenager who has struggled their whole life to express who they truly are, a person who struggles to change in a world that will not afford them any room to grow, and a hero whose story was just beginning. as you play as kris's SOUL — the culmination of their being, the font of their compassion — you have the opportunity to teach them how to become the person they want to be. they might hate it, and they still have promises they need to keep that their SOUL is not attuned to because they remove it when they need to stop being themself, but your task in this game, just as in UNDERTALE, is showing kris LOVE through your guidance.

[babyjakes]

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event | kinkmas 2023

prompt | monster fucking

pairing | steve rogers x fairy!reader

warnings | me knowing nothing about fairies. reader is in "fairy heat"? bruce captured reader (potentially inhumane conditions for fairy-keeping?) soft sweet steve. size kink LOL. th-thumb riding? fingering. p-pinky fucking? stretching. multiple orgasms. squirting. praise and encouragement that makes me feral. pity kink? is that a thing? if it is, i think i have it.

word count | 1,225

an | i've never written monster fucking (or really anything super fantasy-oriented) so please be kind!! wasn't expecting to get sooo into this, but like there's just something about reader being literally so tiny that steve's pinky stuffs her to the brim that's making me all 🥲🫠😩

what if bruce was off working in some top-secret remote location and brought you back with him: a sweet little fairy he'd captured while working out in the field, just as you were entering your fairy heat 🫠

maybe you're just about 7 inches tall, with the body/proportions of a grown young woman. he's been conducting research on your species for quite some time, so he's able to determine basics like your age, your likely place of origin, etc. he's thrilled to have caught you at the start of your heat

what's your fairy heat? i made that part up simple, it's the span of several days that occur around the same time every month when your body's at its prime and looking to breed. you become insatiably horny, almost to the point of it being debilitating, and all you can focus on during your excruciating waking moments is fucking yourself on anything of appropriate size in sight

you're kept in some sort of incubator in his lab, a glass box that's a few feet by a few feet wide and deep. the bottom of the enclosure is made of a soft cushiony material, making any spot a good spot to lay down and rest. miniature food and water bowls are set out for you, and a bright lamp hanging from the ceiling of the box shines 12 hours a day. it's a pretty miserable existence, your makeshift habitat nothing close to the wide open flower fields and prairies you're used to, but it allows the scientist to observe you closely without any distractions or interfering variables. and since you're in heat, you aren't too worried about where you are or who's taken you. all you can do is writhe around on the soft floor of the incubator in desperate, horny agony

maybe one day bruce is out of the lab, but he told steve he could come check out his new findings and maybe keep you company if you'd let him. when he enters the room and sees you lying there, squirming and struggling weakly, of course the supersoldier's heart is instantly hurting for you 🥺

he approaches the incubator slowly, not wanting to startle you. but pretty quickly he realizes that you're paying him no mind; you're too preoccupied with your discomfort. he takes his time observing you, standing right in front of the glass box as his huge frame towers over you. bruce told him a little about your condition and the science behind it. it made him blush, but he accepted it like he would learning about any other species and their unique reproductive habits

"poor thing," he hums to himself as he watches your tiny body wriggle in distress. he's stunned by how pretty you are. you have the most delicate little face, and your translucent wings with their iridescent shimmer look like something straight out of a fairytale movie. you're completely naked- bruce removed your scraps of moss carpeting and leaf clothing when he found you. but it's not strange or offputting in the slightest to steve. he just thinks you're beautiful, such a stunning little creature that seems too precious for this world 💕

he notices the plugged openings in the glass wall that allow bruce to reach in and work inside the enclosure. carefully removing the rubber inserts, he reaches a large hand in, wanting to offer you some comfort if you'll take it. you're so tiny that you could nearly crawl right into the palm of his hand and curl up if you wanted to

but snuggles are the last thing you're looking for in this moment. when you see his huge hand lying there, palm up just a short distance away from you, you weakly crawl over, wings drooping in exhaustion. you couldn't fly at the moment if you tried

steve is a little surprised as you hoist yourself up onto his thumb, your tiny legs dangling on either side of it. it only takes him a moment to realize what you're doing- his cheeks turn bright red as you begin rolling your hips desperately, a faint feeling of wetness forming on the pad of his finger as you leak your glistening juices all over him

"oh doll-" his voice is dripping with pity and concern. he doesn't try to stop you, just watches as you so needily try to relieve yourself. as strange as the situation is, he can't help but find your primal actions endearing, in a way

he continues watching sympathetically as you grind your tiny little pussy down against his large digit. his heart swells at the way you place your hands down in front of you, trying to keep yourself upright as you rock at a steady pace. just a few moments later, he sees your little body spasming and realizes you've reached orgasm by merely riding along on his finger. "oh my," he hums thoughtfully, watching as your precious little toes curl in delight

your face is much happier after your climax. steve watches curiously to see what you'll do next, staying silent as you climb off of his thumb and move to the other end of his splayed-out fingers. as you lie yourself down on your back and spread your legs out on either side of his pinky, he's again blushing deeply. "o-oh, hey little one-"

he watches as you begin pushing down to press the tip of his smallest finger up against your leaking hole. seeing how much you struggle to maneuver against him, steve takes even more pity on you. "here, doll. let me help," he decides, bringing his other arm through the unused hole in the glass. he moves it over to lift your back up gently, supporting you in a sitting position as he carefully begins easing his smallest digit up into you, smiling affectionately as you let out a soft sigh of relief

"there you go. that's it," he's murmuring encouragingly as he carefully fucks you with his pinky. your little pussy is so tight around him, he's surprised he's able to fit. but you're taking him so well, and there's something so sweet about the way you look as you sit here in his hands, letting him stretch you out over the smallest finger he has 💕

"good, just like that" "such a pretty little thing you are" "that feel good, doll?" "just keep taking it, sweetheart" "so good for me, keep going" he's not sure if you can understand his words, but there's something he finds satisfying about talking to you this way

he can somehow feel your second orgasm approaching, your walls growing a bit tighter around him as he works up his pace a little more to carry you over the edge. "there," he's humming proudly, smiling as you manage to squirt out forcefully against him. your come ✨literally sparkles✨ as it coats his finger

as you're floating down from your high, he strokes your hair with his thumb as you lean up against the rest of his hand that's behind you. your eyes are droopy, your body no longer writhing in discomfort. as questionable as his actions might've been, it's clear he's taken care of much of your discomfort- at least for now

whyyy was this hot 🫠🫠 maybe i need to write fantasy shit more often lol

[anghraine]

Today was a weird, uncomfortable day, so I'm consoling myself in the best way: with a Tumblr poll about my favorite Tolkien family—

*Tolkien wrote of the foundation of the Stewardship:

The Kings of Gondor had no doubt had “stewards” from an early time, but these were only minor officials ... He [Húrin of Emyn Arnen] was evidently the chief officer under the crown, prime counsellor of the King, and at appointment endowed with the right to assume vice-regal status [note: that is, the status of a viceroy or regent granted the powers and responsibilities of the king in his absence], and assist in determining the choice of heir to the throne, if this became vacant in his time. These functions all of his descendants inherited.

**Except the very elderly, obviously—but otherwise, every described Dúnadan of Gondor has dark or black hair (Boromir's is dark and longish by his death, while Faramir's is black and likely longer). Nearly all described Southern Dúnedain have grey eyes as well, including Boromir, Faramir, their uncle Imrahil, random soldiers, Rangers, messengers, etc, while Denethor has dark, glowing eyes (the color unknown). The members of the House of the Stewards, specifically including Boromir, also have enough of Elros's blood to inherit his beardlessness.

(None of the women of the Southern Dúnedain are described as anything except vaguely beautiful, but there's no reason to suppose the appearances of Elros's female descendants are more variable than the male ones, and Tolkien did say in NOME that Númenórean men and women were more physically similar to each other than usual.)

[yayasvalveplay]

For the I'm An Autobot AU, everyone sitting around in states of variable anxiety as Optimus goes under to have his memories restored, once Ratchet figures out how. Team Prime are terrified he won't be the same person once he wakes up, that having Orion Pax's memories will make him a stranger to them. Shockwave knows the pain of having to reconcile new memories and a whole new conception of yourself and is dreading his old friend having to face the same, Starscream is terrified that Orion will ask why he never came for him, and Megatron is pretty sure that he's going to lose Orion all over again when Orion knows the whole story of what Megatron has been doing since he was reported dead.

Oh ya getting his memories back is a very stressful time for them all. But really nothing changes. New relationships gets added to Orions life. He's still Optimus in some aspect, But he now understands that somethings he did were Orion ticks, something he picked up while being a Decepticon.

And really he picks them back up this time without the guilt that it happens.

[wachinyeya]

04.10.2025-Story by Marina Wang

In 1992, Hurricane Andrew, one of the most devastating tropical cyclones in U.S. history, ravaged Elliott Key, Florida. “Most of the island was covered in seawater, and about a quarter of the trees were either toppled or completely broken,” says Sarah Steele Cabrera, a biologist at the University of Florida. “There was not a leaf to be seen.”

At the time, conservationists fretted that the enormous hurricane was going to wipe out the last of the island’s Schaus’ swallowtails (Papilio aristodemus), a species of endangered black-and-yellow butterfly native to southern Florida and now found only on Elliott Key and nearby Key Largo. And the butterfly’s numbers on the island did take an initial hit from the storm. But only four years later, much to scientists’ surprise, the population jumped dramatically. Now, a 36-year-long dataset shows that Schaus’ swallowtails saw similar post-hurricane population bumps after two subsequent hurricanes: Wilma in 2005 and Irma in 2017.

In 1976, the Schaus’ swallowtail butterfly became one of the first insects to be listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, Cabrera says. This critically endangered butterfly prefers higher-elevation hammock forests with a mix of standing trees and grassland—a habitat that also happens to be prime real estate in the Florida Keys. The butterfly’s numbers on Elliott Key hit an all-time low in 2007, just two years after Hurricane Wilma, with an estimated 56 individuals remaining. But the most recent estimate from 2021 shows the island’s population sitting at a slightly more comfortable 4,400 or so.

While it seems counterintuitive, the dataset suggests that hurricanes are partly responsible for the butterfly’s current spike in population. To make sense of the recurring post-hurricane peaks, Cabrera and colleagues analyzed how butterfly numbers varied with precipitation, wind speed, temperature, and other meteorological variables.

When a hurricane first makes landfall, Cabrera says, the storm’s high winds kill many adult butterflies, while its surges of salty ocean water drown many caterpillars. In the immediate storm’s aftermath, both butterflies and caterpillars have fewer flowers or leaves to feed on. But as the damage fades and the years march on, toppled trees and downed branches create gaps in the canopy that let light penetrate to the forest floor. With more space and light, understory plants flourish, bringing fresh greenery for caterpillars and blooming flowers for butterflies.

“Hurricanes are natural disturbance events that shape population dynamics in ways that we are only just beginning to understand,” Cabrera says. 

Jess Zimmerman, an ecologist at the University of Puerto Rico who was not involved in the study, says the nearly four decades of observations that went into this research offer the perspective of a wide-angle lens, yielding much more insight into the butterfly’s long-term crests and troughs than a narrower dataset could provide. As a result, he says, scientists are now more confident that the Schaus’ swallowtail population has remained fairly stable over the long term, despite high year-to-year volatility.

In general, Zimmerman says, animals that evolved in areas prone to disturbance are adapted to handle those variables. Schaus’ swallowtails, like many of the insects that Zimmerman studies, have many offspring and their populations can balloon under the right conditions. “They have ways of making it through these disturbances without getting lost,” he says.

[brucewaynehater101]

Okay so, saw you wonder “How does Space Emperor Tim handle war with his morals?” And I think that Tim doesn’t

More specifically I think he is able to accept that this is where he fails. He’s a master diplomat and great organization leader, and although he is great at tactics as a Robin, he’s not willing to lead a war. He’s not willing to sacrifice his moral compass in this way

And I think the empire respects this because, in spite of his personal objections to leading a war effort, he does not leave the planets stranded and defenseless…

He assigns Cassie as the many armies prime military commander

Each of the planets likely has their own military structure and command, as a mostly decentralized empire. But I think we also have a centralized mixed cultures/peoples/planets military to promote cross cultural exchange as well as the exchange of tactical knowledge

Cassie serves as the head of the military council responsible for overseeing both the centralized and decentralized military forces

Cassie has already been shown to be a capable leader with YJ and I think her Amazonian training has specifically well prepared her for commanding military forces (Idk her lore perfectly so correct me if wrong)

There’s obviously a lot of training and research needed to adjust Earth based tactics to space wars, but the JL and Batman likely already had some resources prepped for that. And as one of the Great Baby Emperors Glorious Consorts, the many leaders under her command are happy to assist in her training

Kon and Bart likely also help her, providing emotional support and serving as sound boards for her ideas, but she’s the military commander right now. And she’s gonna kick whatever alien equivalent of asses these attackers got

Tim probably also continues to help in his own way, managing logistics and supplies (really important for armies). He’s also probably assisting with developing new technologies to help in the battle given his skills in R&D (maybe it’s only medical advancements or maybe he feels okay developing ships or weapons, or maybe that’s where Bart gets to go to town making his fantastical sci-fi space lasers) Tim is not going to abandon his empire, they have stood by him through thick and thin, and he’ll give whatever he knows he is able to give them

So yeah, Tim might not be an Emperor who leads armies, but he doesn’t leave his worlds defenseless and gives Cassie the perfect opportunity to show the Timpire, and really the whole galaxy, just how badass she is !!!

Oh my gods, you are brilliant. Cassie would 100000% be the military commander (I don't know enough about her lore either, but that checks out).

Hmm... The only issue I can see is whether or not Cassie needs Tim's approval to go to war. She won't just do it for the hell of it, but Tim won't really approve of it either. Then again, maybe they should spend hours upon hours upon hours arguing about the necessity of going to war, considering how likely it will lead to casualties.

While Tim won't lead into war, I can see him going over "hypothetical" plans with Cassie. Maybe not in the middle of a war, but I could see Tim stealing GL/JL space war files and going over it with Cassie.

For angst reasons, YJ at first doesn't take going to war seriously. They're kids when this starts. Yeah, they've been through shit, but leading an empire to kill other people for whatever reason they deem is necessary? Probably not.

Instead, they train on space war strategy by making games out of it. Tim and Bart create a hallographic board game that incorporates various space war variables. It's a fun pass time of theirs with the excuse of "training" (not that they ever believe they'll need that kind of training).

After their first war, they never pick that game up again. They do provide it the generals of each planet, though, and have the planets compete against each other for friendly bonding.

Tim does help with the logistics and defense of the planets. None of it is lethal, but he does have extreme measures (I'm thinking about that one panel where he threatens to permanently deafen people).

Bart collaborates with the planets for space travel, war machines, and weapons for the military.

Kon may not lead, but he helps develop creative strategies and plans to assist Cassie.

Tim may be the emperor, but Cassie becomes the name feared among all enemy planets.

[walkerbiter]

tfp au maybe. had this bouncing around in my brain for years.

so imagine it’s just the show normally. first few episodes introduce the characters, setting and all of that. it’s lighthearted, silly, cute. all of that. then at the end of the 4th episode optimus dies. i’m not sure by who’s hand. maybe a vehicon, something underwhelming. the great prime, taken down by an unnamed decepticon.

after this ratchet looses his shit. he unofficially takes over, even though there are bots maybe more well equipped for the task. but he’s seen so much war, and he’s the oldest, so he starts giving orders. he wastes no time in making very drastic decisions, one optimus would never make. he’s out for blood, and he wants this war to end. it’s taken so much from them all, and it needs to stop by any means necessary. so he’s pulling no punches. an added variable is that with optimus gone, that’s one less mouth to feed. and he was a big bot, so that adds quite a bit of energon to their rations. still not enough, but more. specifically for ratchet, who was previously starving himself for the ‘teams benefit’. so he’s got a clearer head and generally more strength, although he is still being fueled primarily by anger.

eventually, though, probably mid season, ultra magnus comes in. he, being a higher rank than ratchet takes over as the commander. he gives orders very similarly to optimus, and ratchet sees him basically undoing all of the progress they made while he was in charge. so he attempts to rally the rest of the team behind magnus’ back. some agree, some don’t. (arcee agrees and so does bulkhead, although tentatively. he just wants the war to be over, and while being beneath ratchet is reminding him a little too much of the wreckers he believes that this must be done. arcee has just lost too many to the decepticons, and she wants them all dead.)

on the decepticons side, megatron is destroyed by optimus’ death. they’d been fighting for so long, and he’d always talked about his death. he always said he wanted to kill him, but.. prime was invincible. he never really thought he’d die— he never actually considered it a possibility. he had never thought this far, and now his operation is in shambles. he doesn’t know what to do. that is, other than execute the vehicon that killed him. this plants seeds of uncertainty within the lower decepticon ranks because all of them were sure that optimus’ killer would get high praise, or even a promotion. instead they were publicly executed. to them it was a sign of weakness, of uncertainty. almost sympathy towards the autobots, which makes them doubt their ‘great leader’ more than they already were with their dwindling ranks and his. purple energon nonsense.

i’m not sure how i’d like it to end. not yet. im thinking of writing a full fic of this.. idk though

[crocomum]

Lost Not Light: Chapter 2

Optimus Prime heeds Prowl's warnings about Megatron in the worst possible way; making him the tyrant's official chaperone aboard the Lost Light.

///////////////////////

Basically Prowl gets sent to the Lost Light for an attitude adjustment disguised as a mission and the Constructicons tag along, using the opportunity to more aggressively court their sixth now that he's essentially alone. ao3

Five Constructicons walk into a bar.

Chatter hushed to raised whispers; the bartender asked, “Any weapons?”

“Got your weapon right here,” Bonecrusher flexed. “A weapon of mass-construction.”

Awkward laughter, somebody coughed; the loud chatter and overcharged revelry recommenced. The little red and white bartender laughed the loudest, his expression of befuddled amusement. Bonecrusher grinned, real proud of himself for that one. Their entire night’s plan would fail if they couldn’t get their peds through Swerve’s door, and Bonecrusher was pretty sure he’d just earned them their ticket in with a good if hokey joke.

“Alright, alright,” the little bot nodded. “Tables are free, drinks aren’t—got any preference?”

Mixmaster took that as his cue to saddle up to the bar while the rest of them looked for the whole reason they’d decided to join in on the first night's fun.

Long Haul took point on locating their objective, using his height to scan over the crowd. Scavenger, their most curious member, turned his helm in every direction it could, not out of any enthusiasm for their objective, but to scope out all the bots who didn’t know him. Some who didn’t even know of him—the gestalt’s personal loose screw was already imagining how he could twine himself onto already established clicks; endearing himself to them in ways that had never worked among their old faction.

Bots liked chattery little try-hards. Decepticons? Scavenger never would have made it without the rest of the team, a fact they regularly reminded him of.    

Hook’s arms were crossed in front of his chassis, field held tightly around himself. The surgeon had never liked crowds—crowds meant mingling with the masses, potentially bumping armor, or even, primus forbid, talking to them. And their hoity-toity Hook was too good for that; mech thought himself too good for just about everything and everyone. Except for the gestalt. For Prowl. 

Bonecrusher only had optics for the low-quality engex, blues and bright yellows, floating in polished glasses on the bar counter, the high-grade cubes that glittered in mecha’s servos, reflecting its glowing energy off round, dirty tables, and sat unbound on shelves lined with Cybertronian liquor. All wonderful opportunities for the Bonecrusher to exhibit his virtuosity—all brilliant little bombs ready to go off with the right detonator.

Good stuff, that high-grade. Lower quality, but not cheap. Problem was, he could tell the additives it had been blended with from visuals alone; proving the blend hadn’t been mixed by a master.

The flints of minerals and metals glinted in the bar’s dim lighting, giving the cubes a glimmer that reflected off bright Autobot armor. The resulting destruction were he determined to set it off would have been pretty, bordering on beautiful, a fine example of Bonecrusher’s particular vision of art. Only there were too many variables out of his control, the timing of the sequential explosions, the specifics of minerals, and even the amount of high-grade in the bots’ tanks were unknowns that could spatter his work with imperfections. And if he couldn’t control every aspect of the demolition, it wouldn’t be perfect; if it wasn’t perfect, it wasn’t worth it.

Prowl was worth it.

There were a lot of faces surrounding the bar, hopped up on stools, even more crowded together at the tables pushed up against the wall; toward the back, there was a circle of mecha who had cleared space for their own makeshift dance floor. If their unsynchronized bouncy shuffles could even be considered dancing. Huh, looks like the old Decepticon adage that an Autobot’s back-strut was too stiff to dance was right.

Simply put, the place was stuffed fuller than a pleasure-bot on payday.

Bonecrusher grinned behind his mask at the pack of wannabe dancers, wondering if he could convince Long Haul to toss Hook into the mass, and give this party some real entertainment. A ripple of amusement passed through the bond as Long Haul picked up on his thoughts. Beside them, Hook’s armor drew in impossibly tighter even as his field lashed out in warning at his conspiratorial teammates.

Don’t you dare.

They shared a chuckle at their surgeon’s expense but left the idea as nothing more than an amusing thought. Heavy-duty frames like theirs had to tread lightly on razor-thin ice; they couldn’t afford to crack through the Autobots' scarcely gained tolerance. There was too much ground for the Constructicons to lose so early into the voyage.

Was a big night, the first night. The Lost Light had breached Cybertron’s atmosphere and in less than a breem, the sounds of partying could be heard all throughout the ship. It bounced through the halls, coming from closed doors and shared recreational spaces, but the loudest had come from the bar. Music and mechs—now femmes too—all excitedly jabbering about what the voyage held, what their part would be in the grand epic of a quest: the adventure, the mystery, the romance.

Bonecrusher snorted at his own thoughts; romance, right.

Before the first merge, back when the Autobot was just a tool slotting in with tabs b, c, d, e, and g—before they knew Prowl was Prowl—the Constructicons would have sworn there wasn’t a romantic wire in their frames and would have fought anyone who suggested otherwise. But now?

Here they were on a ship full of Autobots, their own plating smooth where a purple sigil was once engraved, and looking for the one bot that had recently skyrocketed up their ever-lengthening frag that guy list; the only other to have made the list so fast was that puny fleshling, Spike Witwickey. The human held the record. Probably always would.

And if joining this slagged up, hug-fest, hippy-dippy ship’s crew wasn’t romance; the Constructicons would beat anyone who said as much.

The demolitionist rolled his neck, huffing and cracking stiff joints—what love did to a mech…Bonecrusher shook his helm, a rueful smile hiding underneath his mask, the demolitionist unused to his own foppish musings.

Within its casing, his spark swirled and warmed with affirmation from the gestalt bond; they all felt the same deep love for their sixth and they were all unfamiliar with the amorous turn their thoughts had turned in the light of that love. Warm fuzzies all around; Scavenger even turned from scouring his future victims (potential friends) to gently touch Bonecrusher’s elbow in assurance.

He frowned and shook off his teammate’s touch, not caring how the shorter mech wilted at the rejection; little Scav had thought they were having a moment. Over Bonecrusher’s greyed out husk. Just because he loved the little weirdo the same as he loved every other Constructicon didn’t mean he would tolerate the excavator’s wimpishness. They might be one big fragged up family who loved each other, had no hang-ups admitting as much, and would offline anyone who was dumb enough to call them weak for it—but they were in love with Prowl. It was different. New. Exciting. Terrifying. Excruciating.

Agreeing rumbles all around and Bonecrusher forced himself to focus on their self-assigned mission.

With Long Haul taking his sweet aft time finding the cog sucker they’d come to cosey up to, Bonecrusher decided to turn his gaze from the glowing cubes of temptation to the bots holding them, trying to spot who his taller teammate had missed. All he saw were blue optics and red badges.

Bonecrusher sneered behind his mask; it was no wonder the Decepticons hadn’t put their faith in the Lost Light’s frivolous voyage. The Constructicons hadn’t either. That wannabe Prime, Roddy-something, could make all the grand speeches he wanted about finding Cyberutopia and the Knights of Cybertron—but who would that utopia really be for? There wasn’t a single con onboard that hadn’t given up the faction and there wasn’t a coolant drop of doubt between them that the Constructicons would have been granted permission to join the crew’s roster had they not scrubbed their armor clean of branding before registering; idly Bonecrusher brushed a servo over the center of his bare-green chassis, the phantom ache of the nanites’ removal a reminder of just what they had been willing to give up for their ultimate goal.

The Constructicons didn’t believe in some distant fable of a Cyberutopia or need the recognition that would come with being part of the crew that found it; they believed in Prowl. They needed Prowl.

The real, tangible (touchable) Prowl who had holed himself up in the storage closet of an office he’d commandeered almost immediately after the Constructicons had placed their praxian’s soft, breakable berth into his personal quarters. They’d all made up excuses their bot didn’t believe, but had been too exasperated to call them out on, as to why all five of them were needed to heft the berth into his quarters, slowly, slow enough for an experienced construction mech to scan a full schematic of the rectangular space and learn the room’s exact measurements; course that was just hypothetical. Heh.

Out of their gestaltmates' unnecessary personal quarters, Prowl had marched around the ship like he owned it—and the Constructicons would make a valiant effort if that’s what he really wanted—looking for an empty room to take as an office. Because of course, he’d have an office. Their boss bot wasn’t on some pleasure cruise, he had a very important mission to accomplish, or so he had claimed while rejecting the Constructicons’ offer to parse out a section of their larger-than-most habitation suite for the tactician to use.

Once he’d picked a room, Bonecrusher and Long Haul had helped him set it up, tossing heavy boxes of whatever out into the hall until it was sufficiently empty enough to fit their praxian’s fancy desk and chair, barely. His gestalt mates had radiated their jealousy through the bond over Long Haul and Bonecrusher being the only ones allowed in such a tight space with their sixth, but the closet the praxian had picked out was too small to fit all the construction mechs at once; two comfortably, three if they squeezed.

They’d find him a new, bigger office later once they’d gotten ahold of or built their own blueprints of the ship.

Bonecrusher and Long Haul had used the opportunity to get in close with their smallest gestaltmate at every opportunity—Long Haul going so far as to use his longer limbs to accidentally brush against a stiff doorwing, just one digit casually running along the tip as he reached over top their praxian to look at a questionable (perfectly fine) light fixture above where he stood—it had been cute the way Prowl had chased them out immediately after; practically hissing like a turbo-fox, doorwings raised like hackles.

The desk he tossed in their direction was less so.

Long Haul had apologized for the accidental touch, not meaning a word of it. Prowl knew and went back to his usual silent treatment, watching the construction mechs through narrowed optics as they reset the desk and bowed out of the makeshift office before their praxian could start contemplating a chair toss.

The touch had been worth it though and Bonecrusher had been the first to slap Long Haul on the back out of respect for a job well done once the office door was closed. They’d be reliving the sensation of the intentional brush up in the privacy of their hab-suite for the orns—or until a more prolonged contact took its place. And there would be more: longer, willing, intimate contact with their sixth.

The Constructicons never left a job half done and wooing Prowl was easily the most demandingly complex one they had ever taken on. It would also be the most rewarding once complete. Once they were complete.  

The barbed walls their sixth had built around his spark would crumble under the might of Devastator, and each time the tactician painstakingly built them back up, blocking them from his side of the bond; the Constructicons would be observing, learning the tools and materials he used for their construction. The Constructicons’ courtship of Prowl would be a controlled demolition, identifying the structural weaknesses in his barriers and strategically (heh) targeting them, breaching closer and closer until it was too late for another rebuild because they were already on the other side.

Sweet anticipation rippled through the bond.

Turning from thoughts of their sixth to what they were attempting to accomplish for him, Bonecrusher’s visor narrowed as he sought out a homely white helm and a hideously gangly frame. Even in a crowd, the tall fragger should have been easy to spot. Was hard to hide that much ugly.

If they didn’t find their first choice of Autobum to cozy up to soon then they would need to pick another while enough of the partying crew was still sober enough to remember how well-behaved and welcoming the Constructicons had been during the Lost Light’s first underway party. They only required their chosen bot to be of a popular sort, a real name onboard and not one of the rejects who had joined as some misplaced grab at notoriety. They also couldn’t know any of the Constructicons personally, at least not too well. The one exception was Clown-dome, but he didn’t really know them, only their close association with Prowl. That fight at the cliffs didn’t count; any con would have done the same.

There he is.

Bonecrusher’s helm whipped around to where Long Haul was not so subtly shoulder gesturing to, his visor brightening as he spotted their quarry. His face mask hid the predatory smile that split his faceplate and a rumble of delight at how vulnerable their prey had left himself.

Seated all alone in a booth pushed against the side of the bulkhead, hunched over the table, and surrounded by what appeared to be multiple empty high-grade cubes sat Chromedome. There was no sign of approaching partiers, the bargoers appearing to be giving the lonesome bot a wide berth—just enough for five Constructicons to squeeze through.

Without waiting for the others, Bonecrusher set out on a path directly to the booth. Scavenger and Hook were close to follow, with Long Haul making up the rear as he usually does. A few scathing glances were sent their way as they passed partying bots and even more scrutinizing looks followed the ex-cons as they made their way through the crowd and into the empty space around their chosen company’s empty booth.

As he came closer, Bonecrusher noted that just above the table there was a single, small round window giving a limited view of the space outside. An odd design choice and one the Constructicons wouldn’t have gone with had they any part in the ship’s design. It was an obvious hull vulnerability, a waste of triple reinforced plexin-glass, and even aesthetically it was pointless—there was nothing out in space worth looking at, everything worth interest was already inside the ship.

Affirmative nods reached across the bond from everyone except Scavenger (and their silent sixth), but then the excavator had always held a strange penchant for the kitschier designs.

The closer the Constructicons came to Chromedome, the more they understood why none of his fellow Autobots had been brave enough to approach.

An open, heavy wave of misery poured from the bot at the table and the Constructicons allowed it to wash over their own tightly held fields, basking in Crum-dome’s unrestrained suffering. The four empty cubes surrounding the slumped-over mech were likely the reason for the uncontrolled emotions, but the Constructicons knew its source and it tickled their sparks seeing Chromedome exactly as he always should be. Alone.

The merriment Bonecrusher allowed to peak through his own field didn’t even need to be faked.

“Hey mech, been looking for you,” Bonecrusher’s mask lowered in an audible click, revealing a sharp-if-friendly smile. “Slide on over, we got something for ya.”

The other Constructicons' mask also lowered just as the slouching bot startled, sitting up with his visor stretched wide. “What, no you’re—”

But Bonecrusher was already lowering himself to sit, his bulk easily shoving Chromedome’s lighter frame to the booth’s corner as he slid into the long, cushy seat. Across from them, Hook and Scavenger piled in, their frames only narrowly missing each other in the cramped booth, only a vent’s worth of space between them. Long Haul hadn’t even bothered, having searched around and grabbed a chair from a table, without asking, and pulled it over to the end of the booth to sit, his legs spread around its back as he faced them.

Raising his helm toward the bar, Bonecrusher spotted Mixmaster performing an impressive balancing act with multiple cubes of high-grade balance on his bent, raised arms, a cube held in each servo for good measure. Scavenger spotted him too and they waved their teammate over, calling him through the bond.

Here, this way, we got him. 

Mixmaster’s optics lit up at the urging and carefully started making his way over to their booth, dodging various passersby and narrowly avoiding the gyrating mecha who had fumbled their way from the dancefloor. 

Chromedome didn’t wait for the mixologist to arrive before questioning the ex-cons surrounding him. “Did Prowl send you? This some kind of elavrate revenge?” The pointed accusation was dulled by slurred vocals and Bonecrusher was left wondering what the mech had actually meant to say.

Elaborate, Hook supplied and the rest of the Constructicons internally shrugged it off as unimportant. Kind of like the waste of parts himself, Chromedome.

What Prowl had seen in that walking set of rusted-rebar the Constructicons would never understand; except they did understand. They’d been in Prowl’s memories and seen everything to do with this particular toxic waste dumping ground of a relationship. Had seen their lonesome little bot’s exuberance at believing he had finally found someone who understood him, and would accept him—except Tumblr hadn’t understood him, Chromedome would never accept him; the Constructicons had done both and more. They were everything Prowl had ever wanted; he just refused to acknowledge the spark-proven truth.

Their praxian would though, there was only so long a logical processor like Prowl’s could deny the obvious. Especially with the Constructicons’ using the voyage as a means to prove their usefulness to the tactician in more ways than just their unparalleled construction abilities.

They’d have him, it wasn’t a matter of if but when.

“What, Prowl? Noooo,” Bonecrusher started, the others joining in, scoffing and snorting their denial. “Boss bot doesn’t even know we’re here—he’s been locked up in that little office of his for joors now.”

“His office? Here, on the ship; Prowl has an office?” Chromedome questioned; as if it was even a question.

“It’s Prowl, of course he has an office,” Long Haul shrugged, not feeling a need to elaborate.

The bot seemed to feel the same way, accepting the answer with a nod, but his unrestrained field was a buzz with uncertainty, hostility, and buried beneath all that, fear. That have been great, warmed Bonecrusher’s spark to know that even in a congenial setting they were able to pull that kind of reaction from a bot. Unfortunately, the Constructicons had settled on a play-nice strategy for the voyage and as satisfying as the fear was, they were attempting to engineer a more…amicable response from the mnemosurgeon.

Chromedome’s attention was taken from the Constructicons seated with him to the one who had finally reached their table as Mixmaster finally joined them. Not a drop of high-grade was spilled and he started placing the drinks on the table, putting one in front of each of the seated Constructicons before finally pushing away the empty cubes that had been surrounding Chromedome and replacing them with a bright pink, larger-than-everyone-else’s-cube containing something that smelled sweet, but potent.

Mix then took a seat on the sliver of bench remaining next to Bonecrusher, precariously balancing himself by placing a servo on one of Long Haul’s spread legs. The mixer gave said leg a squeeze, servo sliding up the larger mech’s leg higher than strictly necessary in a subtle tease.

Long Haul’s engine growled low, the larger mech sending an amused threat across the bond, implying he’d get Mix back for that later—something Bonecrusher looked forward to watching, preferably while they were all bonding and reexamining that brush of doorwings from earlier. Scavenger echoed his thoughts.

Hook sighed, loudly, continuing as though he hadn’t noticed the scrawny mech’s fear or his team’s less-than-pure turn of thought. “We helped him with the furniture arrangement and when we dared to linger–he flung the desk at us.”

Alright, back to business; being visibly chummy with Chump-dome.

“Was worried we’d have to build him a new one,” Long Haul chimed in.

“Three times!” Scavenger lifted his digits to the number, and the Constructicons all shared a laugh at the exaggerated memory.

“…heh,” Chromedome finally laughed with them, it was small, more of a chuckle than a full guffaw, but it was something. It was an in.

“He does that,” the Autobot tacked on, bringing life to his visor, the mech obviously taking the Constructions’ affectionate riffing at face value; as a derisive dig at their praxian. As if they would ever, as if Crud-dome had the right.

An astro-click of outrage flashed through the Constructicons, and in an exercise of previously untapped restraint, they reigned it in; kept their furious fields, full of violent desire, held close and their smiles wide, encouraging. Long Haul even managed a laugh, expression bright as he tilted a cube in the bot’s direction. Their faces may have been exposed, but their masks were up; even Hook had one firmly in place.

Their whole half-formed plan would fall apart if Chromedome felt threatened and seriously shooed them away, potentially calling his who-could-like-this-loser friends to do it. They needed to be big friendly hydro-pups who were happy to pall around with their new crewmates, sharing drinks and good stories all around. As the Constructicons, as Devastator, they had reputations amongst the Autobots—but that was all they had. There weren’t many bots who had actually encountered them personally on the battlefield and survived to bleat their terrified sparks out to the rest of the faction about it. And any who had ever made it to Hook’s operating table either died under the surgeon’s scalpel or offlined themselves soon after to escape the memory of piercing agony he had engraved directly into their most primordial systems.  

The Autobots knew of them, feared them and rightfully so, but they didn’t know them. Dispelling those very true rumors and winning a short-tether of trust with the crew was the second phase of their grand plan to win Prowl’s spark—the first phase was always conception, and even that was vague, Scrapper had been the master architect and without him their plans had become shaky, erased and rewritten lines on blue vellum paper. The second phase was also the most well thought out part of the plan; they weren’t even completely sure what the other phases were, only that all good plans had multiple phases. All of Prowl’s had, anyway.

But their plan was one their cute-but-competent helmsmen would have never been able to put together himself, let alone pull off. It revolved around being the one thing their sixth couldn’t be—Personable.

And it was working so far: they had gotten into the bar with no major incident, sat with a popular bot who was laughing at their jokes, enjoying their company (kind of), instead of telling them to frag off. That Chromedome hadn’t yet, considering their proximity to Prowl and the mech’s protoform deep hate of him, was their luck and they knew better than to push it.

Bonecrusher still wanted to kill him.

Stick needles into the back of their helm, root around in their processor, removing memories, leaving them spread wide open for the enemy to plug in and control—commit the deepest act of violation known to Cybertronian kind—and Cybertronians had been around for longer than most recorded species; they knew a lot.

Happen to any of them and the Constructicons would be sitting with a dead mech. Soon as they’d learned of the betrayal, they’d have welded the traitor to Hook’s med-berth, or a solid refueling table, or even built him his own personal slab of insulated metal; any flat surface would have worked, really. Then they’d have taken turns breaking him apart, putting him back together, just to take him apart all over again. It’d have been different each time, too. Each Constructicon getting to put their own preference on the method.

—Bonecrusher would widen the mech’s transformation seams, just enough to slide detonation cords throughout his frame, little tetryl boosters placed over the sensor heavy sectors, where the wires clustered. He’d set off a controlled detonation and watch as the mech’s armor rattled and broke apart in sequence, from helm to ped. After the armor fell away, the same would be done to the underlying protoform, twisting the cords into wires and fuel lines, connectors that held internals together. Layer by layer, until every piece of the mech had been broken apart under his deftly crafted demolitions. Bonecrusher would have started with the visor first, though. Just plucked that right off his face and gouged out any optics beneath. Was always fun to see himself reflected in dull optical glass, fear making them pull wide so he could see more of himself, but he enjoyed the way their electro fields went crazy wherever he touched when they didn’t know where he would touch more. The perfectly measured destruction would be beautiful, even more so if Prowl was with them watching, supervising, approving.—

They’d have killed the skinny glitch over and over again, and made him grateful for when it was the last. They still would if Prowl asked. And slag, did they wish he would ask.

But he wouldn’t. Their sixth had only gone so far as to say something mean to the scrawny slagger after finding out—Prowl was soft like that. Soft like that berth the five of them had their optics set on during that first fun move to the Lost Light. (They already had plans to modify their own after it, making it more welcoming for when their sixth eventually joined them on it.)

The Constructicons were willing to play nice with Chromedome in public, they’d suffer his continued function if only because pointing servos would immediately turn toward their sixth were he to disappear. They wanted those who would point and accuse their praxian to reassess any distaste of him because the Constructicons liked him, and they liked the Constructicons. But they had a line that couldn’t be crossed and they needed the crew to want to respect that line—Prowl.

“Yeah, he does,” Bonecrusher finally managed, vocals a rough grunt—he hoped the Autobot thought it was a laugh from shared humor. “Never seen a mech hate a piece of furniture that bad before.”

“I have,” Scavenger’s visor brightened as he wiggled in his seat, radiating an inordinate amount of enthusiasm through the bond, the excavator excited to be part of a conversation, to be tolerated by anyone but his fellow gestaltmates. “They…they hated the wash racks and never went in them, ever.”

The top of Bonecrusher’s visor raised at the mention of the seekers. The story was well known among the Decepticon rank and file but had never quite made it to the Autobots as anything more than speculation. Nothing of any significance to the war, but a juicy bit of gossip that could potentially capture a bot’s attention just enough for him to forget who was telling it.

Good call.

Scavenger beamed through the bond.

“What, ya mean the seekers? They didn’t hate wash racks, they were just scared of ‘em,” Bonecrusher said as leaned back, casually laying a strong arm across the bot’s shoulders. He felt the plating beneath his own tense, but the mech didn’t pull away. Good, good.

A tug too hard, a flex too strong, and those shoulders would buckle and bend beneath his hold; the joint sockets sparking as they tore beneath the Constructicon’s pure laborious power. The mech’s dismantling would be quick, satisfyingly so. The mnemosurgeon was worth less than a klick of the Constructicons’ time outside of a torturous setting—he wasn’t worth even a nano-second of Prowl’s.

“…The seekers were scared of wash racks?” Chromedome questioned, his tone disbelieving, the overcharged mech entirely unaware of Bonecrusher’s vicious imaginings.

Scavenger fidgeted in his seat, “they um, thought everyone wanted them? Their wings I mean. They’re not so hot though, there are uh…better wings.” The last bit was mumbled and Bonecrusher’s optics rolled behind his visor; he agreed but now wasn’t the time to subtly imply how smelter hot they all found Prowl.

“He means they thought us dirty grounders would all jump ‘em if they ever used solvent,” Bonecrusher salvaged, even though that was supposed to be Scavenger’s job. “Completely flew over their helms how not everyone’s preferences ran aerial.”

“Arrogant,” Long Haul huffed.

“Delusional,” Hook supplied.

Bonecrusher and Mixmaster hummed their agreement as they let it all sink in for the Autobot.

Chromedome’s visor was pinched, his helm tilted ever so slightly in such a way that implied concentrated thought–what little the glitched mech was capable of, overcharged or sober.

“…Did they just not wash?” The bot finally asked, likely cross-referencing everything he knew about the narcissistic frame type with the new information the Constructicons had just given him; his high-grade heavy logic drives struggling to fuse the two.

“They did,” Bonecrusher answered. “Though no one ever saw them doing it.”

“Even…even if you did, no one believed you,” Scavenger commented with a pout, having been subjected to that particular disbelief and mockery more than once.

Hook patted the excavator’s leg under the table in solidarity. The other Constructicons had shared Scavenger’s memory and believed him; hadn’t stopped them from joining in on the ridicule. Or calling him (rightfully) a creepy little voyeur.

“Most believe they made deals with Starscream for the use of his personal washracks,” Hook said. “Some even claiming it was the real reason the air armada was so loyal to him—It’s not true, but who are we to get in the way of a good rumor?”

“…So they just didn’t wash?” Chomedome asked incredulously, his optics wide in disbelief.

“Oh they did, and they were cutting deals, just not with Starscream,” Bonecrusher clarified as he glanced at the high-grade Mix had gotten them. It looked weak, but then what could he expect from an Autobot ship?

“Then who?” The bot questioned, snapped really, white plates shifting impatiently beneath Bonecrusher’s servo. A miserable and snippy drunk? Chromedome really was the worst kind of everything.

“Soundwave,” Hook answered.

“Soundwave?” Chromedome repeated.

“Soundwave,” Bonecrusher confirmed with a nod.

“But why?” The bot asked, his field finally losing that last hint of fear and hostility, replaced with open curiosity. There it was. They got him. Wouldn’t matter if the scrub bucket didn’t remember their conversation come the morning, and he probably wouldn’t. What mattered was the rest of the bar watching them have it.

“For information on Starscream, of course,” Hook smiled, delighted by the duplicitous nature of the seekers toward their own commander whenever he was reminded of it. The surgeon had always loved a good betrayal—Chromedome’s own toward Prowl the sole exception.

Were the bot not wearing a mask, Bonecrusher was pretty sure Chromedome’s jaw would have dropped. “That makes too much sense, or no sense at all, I’m not really sure I—” Cutting himself off Chromedome reached up to press long fingers onto the back of his helm. “Primus my helm hurts.”

Hook, sensing an opportunity to show off, began explaining, “It’s the high-grade, it causes the fuel in your tank to burn faster, which disrupts communication between the circuitry in your processor and your filtration system. Your processor is over-firing due to the increased demand and overcompensates for the delayed response, causing a helm-ache. Nothing a little coolant and med-grade won’t fix.”

Finishing his explanation, Hook’s derma curled into a conspiring grin. “Or if you’re looking for an immediate relief, more high-grade helps.” The medic gestured to the untouched cube of high-grade they’d bought for the Autobot.

If anything, Chromedome looked more pained by the explanation and had brought both servos up to grip his helm, squeezing and messaging it in a way the Constructicons knew wouldn’t work.

Bonecrusher used the lull in conversation to peek around the room, grinning at all the bots that had turned to openly stare at the construction mechs. He tilted his helm toward Chromedome and if not for his visor, he’d have winked. The stares were a good turn, they wanted as many optics on them as possible.

Misery had begun to seep back into Chromedome’s field, causing Bonecrusher’s grin to widen. They’d been seen, possibly accepted, which meant they were done with the scrawny bot. Best if they moved on, and found a few others to mingle with before retiring to their shared quarters. Maybe even make a few passes at Prowl if they spotted him on the way.

“Why are you here?” Chromedome questioned, breaking the table’s silence and sounding depressingly sober. Though finding no hostility directed to ward them, the Constructicons decided they had been technically successful with their mission.

The mournful mech’s misery turning toward the Constructicons was their final sign to bow out and move on, but their tolerance for Chromedome was at its lowest and the five of them sensed an opportunity. They’d continue to play nice a little longer, just enough to grab the knife of grief digging into Chromedome’s spark and twist it. All while maintaining the friendly façade of comradery.

“Course we’re here—we’re crew!” Bonecrusher crowed with a smile, acting oblivious as to the real reason the bot would be asking them that.

“No, I mean why are you here with me?” Chromedome emphasized, then through a narrowed visor. “I know Prowl hates me.”

“Hate you?” Hook frowned as if the thought had never occurred to him.

“Prowl doesn’t hate you,” Mixmaster assured.

Unfortunately.

“We are not the most…approachable mecha onboard. An inevitable consequence due to our previous loyalties,” Hook tactfully remarked. “We are attempting to change that image through repeated positive contact with the crew.” The surgeon supplied, fully confident Chromedome wouldn’t remember complete details of their conversation come morning.

“Prowl had good memories of ya, figured you’d be as good a start as any,” Bonecrusher added, hating how true the former part of his statement was.

“…He did? That’s not…,” Chromedome shook his helm only to wince, clearly not sober, but wary enough to realize maybe he should be. “Why are you really here—what do you want?”

“Why, to share a drink with a fellow crewmate—and to thank you, of course,” was Hook’s honeyed response.

“Thank me?” Chromedome puzzled.

“Course, bot like Prowl never woulda bonded with us willingly; big bad cons like us? He’d sooner offline,” Bonecrusher responded, keeping the amusement he felt at watching the bot’s frame begin to slump in response to the bulldozer’s words locked in tight around himself.

Chromedome did no such thing, the now anguish bleeding from his frame. Bonecrusher greedily soaked it in, relishing the Autobot’s torment over their cheerfully delivered thanks.

“But you gave him to us,” Scavenger whispered, red visor shining with reverence.

“Wrapped him up all pretty like an energon goodie and dropped him off at our door like an early creation day gift,” Bonecrusher complimented with a soft, appreciative rumble.

Slump. Slump. Slump.

“Best present we ever got,” Mixmaster affirmed.

They all nodded and Bonecrusher even gave the bot a good little jovial shake of appreciation.

“And Constructicons have been called a lot of things over the years, but ungrateful ain’t one of them,” Bonecrusher went on; more nodding and murmurs of agreement.

“We always pay back our dues,” he promised, visor burning a dark red.

Bonecrusher’s smile, more a nasty grin, stretched wide as he pushed a high-grade cube into one of the Autobot’s now limp servos, taking it underneath his own and squeezing to make sure the grip stuck. He felt the delicate white plating crunch, satisfyingly, underneath his hold; he didn’t let go. Instead raising the servo-held cube of high-grade up. His fellow Constructicons raised theirs in answer, smiles all around.

Bonecrusher leaned in close to the lump of limp guilt—was it guilt? His derma dangerously close to touching one of the smaller mech’s audials as he growled low, hot air venting across thin armor.

“This one’s for you, Tumblr.”

Cheers.

[homosexualgirlandbags]

drag queen nik w body dysphoria maybe idk

who’s far past his prime as a man, too much hair too many wrinkles too much fat. but the tight corsets and glitter are something of an escape for him. hip pads that seem to grow larger every few months, makeup that piles up in cost and seems to deplete quicker and quicker every purchase.

it comes to a head when price is helping him get ready, and nik is begging him to thread it tighter and price just refuses. says he doesn’t want to hurt the other man, and nik lashes out. ‘how could you betray me, this is all i want, im not a child.’

‘i know what im doing’.

but he doesn’t, not really, and price knows this. he’s seen the way nik’s been struggling, struggling massively. he can’t facilitate that any longer.

Ong Anon did you just rip out my heart?

But Nik is only human after all. He still gets affected by the passing comment of a lady over his weight, still sometimes stands in front of the mirror and feel shame over the soft pudgy belly that has grown over layers of muscles.

He's only a person.

He likes dressing up and dolling himself up with make up. He likes how the contour hides the wrinkles on his face, how the hip and chest pads hide his belly, how the corset restrains his stomach, even though he can't breathe on some nights.

He likes the attention he gets on stage when he looks 10 years younger, instead of the unassuming man smoking behind the bars alley. And it's not like money is a problem for him, he could retire at any moment now and still ride off into the sunset on a unicorn. They do say money could sometimes buy happiness, so could you blame him if he doesn't look at the numbers on the card reader before beeping his card?

But in all the variables he had accounted for, he had never accounted for Price to be here. He hadn't expected to actually grow old with the man of his dreams, much less hold him close on nights where the stars dimmed out.

So when Price refuses to pull his corset ever tighter, tight enough that he doesn't look into the mirror and feel pretty, you couldn't really blame him for the surge of anger and slight accusation that rises up in him.

He doesn't understand, why wouldn't Price want him to feel pretty? He deliberately hadn't eaten in a day just so he could pull the corset tighter? It feels like betrayal when the man steps back and leaves him hanging.

It feels worse when he sees the reflection of Price disapproving stare in the reflection of his mirror.

The fight dies down in him, just ever so slightly. And he wordlessly allows Price to end it there.

That night, he couldn't help but feel like a thousand pairs of eyes were judging him on stage, pointing out the leftover sponginess that Price had refused for him to hide.

Nevermind that the crowd seemed wilder than usual, and the tip jar was practically overflowing, and that he could actually normally breathe for once, but the thought that he was undesirable ate at him in the back of his mind.

He avoids Price when he walks backstage, his mind blaming him for not letting him fulfill his wishes.

The next morning, Nik couldn't help but felt stared at whenever he was eating, baby blues staring at him, grunting occasionally in disapproval when the man began to starve himself.

Hands seem to grip at him a little more than usual now too. Price's hands lovingly rubbing over the soft fat covering his stomach the next time they had sex, kisses trailing down over the hidden muscles.

A reminder that the man still finds him pretty, even after all these years

It wasn't like Price had any of what to do. It pains him to see Nik starve himself just to fit into that one corset 2 times too small. It's not like he could help the man when he sees Nik standing in front of the mirror, hands pinching the soft fat surrounding his abs with a frown. He hands trailing up and down those scars they had gained together, Nik mumbling in russian as he contemplates how long it would take for them to fully heal.

It pains Price in ways when Nik lashes out at him for not enabling his toxic behaviour. How the man seemed disgusted with the idea of his body when he was on stage. How Nik had rejected him after he ran off to his room.

He couldn't do much to help, except to trace over the soft pudginess of Nik's stomach, and to kiss those soft thighs before teasing the man. Maybe trace those scars in nights where he holds him against his chest.

Price would rather run his fingers over Nik's wrinkled face when they grow old together than allow the man to hurt himself with food.

[alarwynnwhispers]

⏳ᴛᴏ ʟᴏᴠᴇ ʜɪᴍ ᴀɢᴀɪɴ, ʙᴇꜰᴏʀᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴇɴᴅ - ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ 2: ᴀ ᴡᴇᴇᴋ ᴛᴏ ᴜɴᴍᴀᴋᴇ ꜰᴀᴛᴇ⏳

ꜰ1 x ʀᴇᴀᴅᴇʀ | ʟᴀɴᴅᴏ ɴᴏʀʀɪꜱ ᴀᴜ | ᴀɴɢꜱᴛ + ɢʀɪᴇꜰ + ᴡʜᴀᴛ ᴄᴏᴜʟᴅ’ᴠᴇ ʙᴇᴇɴ

⚠️ ᴄᴏɴᴛᴇɴᴛ ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢꜱ:

ᴛɪᴍᴇ ᴛʀᴀᴠᴇʟ ᴅɪꜱᴛʀᴇꜱꜱ

ɪᴅᴇɴᴛɪᴛʏ ᴇʀᴀꜱᴜʀᴇ

ᴘᴀʀᴀɴᴏɪᴀ

ᴅᴇᴀᴛʜ ᴘʀᴇᴠᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴ ᴛʜᴇᴍᴇꜱ

ꜱᴜʀᴠᴇɪʟʟᴀɴᴄᴇ & ᴅᴇᴄᴇᴘᴛɪᴏɴ

ɢʀɪᴇꜰ & ᴏʙꜱᴇꜱꜱɪᴏɴ

ɪᴅᴇɴᴛɪᴛʏ ᴄᴏɴꜰʀᴏɴᴛᴀᴛɪᴏɴ

ᴍᴏʀᴀʟ ᴀᴍʙɪɢᴜɪᴛʏ

Time travel, contrary to every romanticized film she’d ever seen, was not gentle. It tore through her bones like wind through a broken window, dragged her lungs inside out, and when she emerged from the calibrated field of the temporal gate, (Y/n) collapsed to her knees on the rocky edge of a rural road, her body trembling from the seismic rift between now and then.

She had arrived.

Italy. Late August. A full seven days before the Monza Grand Prix.

The machine behind her, hidden in the natural curve of an abandoned vineyard shed, hummed with residual energy. It would remain dormant now, counting down the days until its recall trigger auto-activated and dragged her back to her rightful place in time.

She had exactly one week.

Seven days to prevent a death that had unraveled her world.

DAY ONE: CALIBRATION AND CHAOS

Monday arrived with a blistering sun and the earthy scent of olives and dust. The roads leading to Monza were still relatively quiet, with only a few trucks beginning to weave into the circuit’s outer infrastructure. Construction teams moved like ants, assembling grandstands, banners, sponsor tents.

(Y/n) was not here for leisure. She hadn’t come to see her favorite driver in his prime, or to chase some fantastical dream of meeting a hero.

She was here to rewrite death.

So she planned.

For fourteen hours straight, she remained in the confines of her rented room, a sparse, no-nonsense Airbnb with peeling cream wallpaper and a loose doorknob. Her laptop, retrofitted with an offline archive of historical data, buzzed with life as she reviewed every known variable of the upcoming race weekend.

Circuit blueprints. Car setup expectations. Pit stop strategy leaks. Forecast models. The times Lando typically arrived at the paddock. Where he sat during press briefings. Even the grocery store he frequented three towns over.

She didn’t eat. She barely drank. She only calculated, drew, rewrote, highlighted, and memorized.

Every second mattered.

A single slip could shatter her fragile presence here, ripple a timeline she was barely allowed to touch, and doom Lando all over again.

And so she drew the line between herself and emotion. This was no longer about hope or idolization. This was war. A silent war between history and her will to bend it.

DAY TWO: STRATEGIC THREADS

On Tuesday, she moved.

Still cloaked beneath a plain black cap and unremarkable denim jacket, she made her way into Monza proper. The town had begun to stir, vendors unboxing shelves of merch, locals hanging up race-week banners on iron balconies. Conversations buzzed with predictions. But beneath the celebration, (Y/n) walked with surgical intent.

Her first task was securing access, not into the paddock directly, but into the spiderweb of people who could lead her there.

At a café frequented by junior reporters, she struck up a conversation with a British freelance writer who worked for a minor motorsports blog. She listened to him ramble about journalism politics, inserted a few well-placed motorsport facts, and by the end of their cappuccinos, she had an invitation to a media mixer the next evening.

She slipped through garages and back entrances, blending in with the local logistics team. A few forged passes and altered digital tags later, she had brief access to the behind-the-scenes movement of F1 personnel.

All the while, she stayed invisible, just another cog in the machine.

She had no intention of getting close yet.

Not until she was ready.

DAY THREE: THE MASK OF PROFESSIONALISM

Wednesday came with a murmur of anticipation. It was media day eve, when journalists flooded the paddock like migrating birds, cameras flashing, microphones poised, all seeking headlines, tension, and clicks.

It was also the day (Y/n) became someone else.

She studied the behavioral patterns of paddock staff: the way reporters carried themselves, the subtleties of posture and dress, how they asked questions, when they lingered and when they vanished into the background. In a rented flat, she transformed herself. Her hair was pulled back in a low, severe ponytail. Glasses replaced the shadow of her cap. She wore a tailored black blazer over neutral slacks and a forged ID tag clipped to her collar.

She chose her identity carefully, just another obscure stringer from a Scandinavian outlet unlikely to be questioned.

Her purpose was not to stir curiosity.

It was to observe.

To place herself just near enough to watch how Lando moved, how the team interacted, to map his proximity patterns and pinpoint the moment she could intervene without setting off alarms.

The fake credentials worked.

She passed through the outer checkpoint, nodded at security, and stepped into the paddock for the first time.

The hum of proximity nearly undid her.

This was sacred ground, where gods of speed lived and legends were born, and she was walking among them not as a fan, but as a spy rewriting destiny.

Everywhere she turned: mechanics working on brake ducts, engineers cross-checking tire sets, journalists whispering rumors. Lando’s face appeared on banners above her, youthful and bright, untouched by the cruel end that waited just beyond the calendar’s reach.

She swallowed her breath.

Tomorrow would be the real test.

DAY FOUR: COLLISION

She hadn’t expected to see him so soon.

Thursday morning, the paddock bloomed with chaotic grace. It was media day, and (Y/n), now fully immersed in her false identity, had blended effortlessly into the rotating scrum of journalists. Her voice recorder was fake, her questions pre-written and useless. She hovered near the McLaren hospitality tent, pretending to check her notes.

Then he stepped out.

Lando Norris.

Alive.

Closer than she had ever allowed herself to imagine.

He wore his team polo, sleeves pushed up to his elbows, curly hair half-tamed beneath a cap. He was speaking to a Sky Sports interviewer, his laughter effortless, his gestures animated.

(Y/n) froze.

In that moment, the reality of his existence hit her like a freight train. This was not a video. Not a digital echo. This was him, his presence, his vitality, the spark of him that had vanished a decade ago in her time.

She took a step closer, too close.

His gaze flicked to hers.

A second. Maybe less.

She dropped her eyes instantly and turned away, disappearing into the crowd. Her heart pounded wildly. She cursed herself for the lapse, for letting awe override strategy.

But it was done.

She had seen him.

And he had seen her.

DAY FIVE: EXPOSED

She arrived earlier the next day, certain the previous moment had gone unnoticed. But paranoia grew like weeds in her mind.

She kept her distance, careful to linger in shadows, moving with intention, not repetition. Still, there were glances. From crew members. A pause in a security guard’s eyes.

Something had shifted.

At lunch, it unraveled.

She was on her way out of the media tent when a firm hand gripped her shoulder.

“Hey.”

She turned, instantly blank-faced.

Lando stood before her—not smiling. His eyes were narrowed, jaw tense.

“I’ve seen you,” he said evenly. “Every day this week. Lurking.”

Her throat tightened.

“I’m with—”

“I know every journalist here by name. You’re not one of them.”

Around them, voices continued, unaware. But his gaze pierced through her like a blade.

“Why are you following me?” he asked, voice low. “Are you some kind of stalker?”

“No,” she replied too quickly.

His jaw clenched.

“Security.”

The word summoned two paddock officials like shadows.

“She’s banned,” he said without hesitation. “I don’t want her near the paddock again.”

The words cut deeper than she expected.

The guards escorted her out—not violently, but with enough finality that she knew re-entry under the same identity was impossible.

He thought she was obsessive.

Dangerous.

Delusional.

He would never understand the truth.

But (Y/n) was nothing if not persistent.

The mission had not changed. Only the method.

She burned her old disguise, ID badge, blazer, everything. By morning, she was reborn as another ghost in the machine: a logistics temp. Dirty uniform. Safety vest. No eye contact.

She no longer needed proximity.

She just needed sight.

From a distance, she tracked Lando’s movements. Watched the car. Studied the engineers. She marked the moment they wheeled out the setup sheets. Noted which tires were prepped for qualifying. Everything still pointed to that inevitable setup—the one that would fail him.

She was running out of time.

But her hands were steady.

The guards escorted her out—not violently, but with enough finality that she knew re-entry under the same identity was impossible.

He thought she was obsessive.

Dangerous.

Delusional.

He would never understand the truth.

----

Far above the chaos of the paddock, beyond the reach of cameras and civilian eyes, a conversation was unfolding.

In a sterile glass chamber lined with servers and screens, a council of shadowed figures reviewed the anomaly.

“She appeared on August 27,” said one, voice filtered and toneless. “Time signature from the future. Independent traveler.”

“No authorized clearance?”

“None. Built it herself.”

“A civilian breached the temporal field?”

Another leaned forward. “And intervened. Small changes. Observation. Surveillance.”

A pause.

“Don’t engage yet,” the leader said. “We observe. The timeline is already cracked. Further damage could cause collapse.”

“What about Norris?”

A silence hung like a guillotine.

“Let her make her move. Then we decide who must disappear.”

To be continued...🧡

⏳ᴛᴏ ʟᴏᴠᴇ ʜɪᴍ ᴀɢᴀɪɴ, ʙᴇꜰᴏʀᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴇɴᴅ - ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ 3: ᴄᴏʟʟɪꜱɪᴏɴ ᴄᴏᴜʀꜱᴇ⏳

📝 Note from the Author: Hello, my dear Alarwynnites! It’s the 24th day of this little time-travel chaos corner on Tumblr, and yes, this is the first post for tonight (yep, night!!). I was absolutely useless all morning and afternoon, just pure ✨lazy potato energy✨, so here we are now... posting at night like the nocturnal writing goblin I am HAHAHAHA.

But anyway, on to the important part!

Quick Recap: Our girl (Y/n) has time-traveled to Italy, one week before the Monza Grand Prix, with one desperate mission: to save Lando Norris from a death that shattered her world. So far, she’s survived the brutal effects of temporal displacement, crafted false identities, infiltrated the paddock, and even locked eyes with the very man she’s come to save. The problem? He thinks she’s a stalker. And now she’s been banned from the paddock, forced to pivot her plan while a shadowy organization watches her from above, waiting to see if she’ll break the timeline, or save it.

Stay tuned, because things are spiraling fast and she’s running out of time. Literally. Thanks for reading, as always.

With love, me 🧡

[dottowos]

Reader having a vibrator inside them underneath their clothes, its intensity being controlled by dottore through a remote from the other room 🤤 imagine reader talking to the segments then stopping when they suddenly felt it vibrating hard and nearly falling over, eventually just cums right in front of them without the segments knowing (or do they). just some kinky things between reader and dottore

You don't know why you keep agreeing to partake in Dottore's bets or experiments, because it really never goes well for you. Okay well - maybe you do like the slight thrill of it, having to keep yourself composed while Dottore has his way with you - but still, you swear Dottore has more joy imagining your stammering and leg squeezing than you do coming senseless in front of his segments. Sure, he could observe the effects of his latest invention (which he will later) but there should be more too it, more variables, more excitement! And what better than to put you in a sticky situation to test which is stronger - his toy or your will!

It's something that truly tests your patience, swallowing and grinning a little too hard to mask your stuttering breathes. You can feel the segments squinting at you, desperately biting your lip so that moans don't slip through. Omega hasn't said a word, but you can feel him literally burning a hole into you. It takes all of your will to resist all the lewd noises your mouth is desperate to release, to the point where Alpha (the last one to catch on) asks you if you're in pain. You nearly tumble over the desk before furiously reassuring him and stumbling out the room uncomfortably wet. Of course Dottore is waiting for you to tell him all the details of your little adventure while he bounces you on his cock.

Without a doubt, the other segments knew what was happening. They're not dumb, more importantly they're very observant, and the way you were trying to discreetly cover your mouth wasn't doing you any favors. They just decided to let you save face since they couldn't interrupt Prime's experiment. That's why they all made excuses and left the room to take care of their cock, imagining how much harder they could make you come than some toy.