suddencolds

[suddencolds]

~

musings (on being lost)

[suddencolds]

I've never been in any of the fandoms you write about on here but your snz kink writing is so good I still read them 🫶 By the way, if u saw a regular blog like your post I may have done it unintentionally 🙇‍♀️

This is so sweet?!! 🧎‍♀️ Thank you sincerely for giving my work a chance despite not being familiar with the fandoms/characters—I am so serious when I say it is an honor :') (I have lowkey been kicking myself for my propensity for getting into the most obscure fandoms ever 😭 Thank you for keeping me company across the array of characters I have decided to write h/c for 🙇‍♀️)

[suddencolds]

Hi my love ❤️

Totally not anonymous but what I love about your characters is how protective Yves is of Vincent yet how Yves is so uncomfy with that level of care directed back at him. Yves is really focused on other people’s needs and making sure other people are okay even at the expense of his own wellbeing. He is peak golden retriever energy and Vincent is like a black cat that slinks over and is secretly friendly. I love how Vincent calls Yves out on his bs, and is incredibly perceptive of Yves and how introspective Vincents character voice is. He feels private yet somehow introspective and open at the same time which I think is an incredibly nuanced trait that can be really difficult to capture but you do it so well. Your characters feel lived in, melancholic, and cozy like I’m watching an anime play out. You let the characters breathe and your a master at making small domestic moments feel like something special. The magical in the everyday - that’s how I’d describe them.

Anyway! I’ll stfu!

Feel better, big hugs 🤗

MEL 😭😭😭😭😭 I was calling someone when I received this and I had to take a break to scream about this message out loud????? THIS IS SO SWEET 😭 thank you so much!?!??!?

the golden retriever black cat comparison is so cute 😭 with hair color to match... I love that you describe Vincent as secretly friendly (and I agree) 🥹❤️ I am also so glad you find Vincent to be introspective!! I think it's somewhat hard to convey nuance given that he is both relatively reserved/closed off, and bc the story is not in his perspective, so it's hard to get direct access to his internal world🧎‍♀️ It makes me really happy that you still see him as nuanced despite this 😭

your description of Yves is so cute!!! I really love that you called him out for being uncomfortable at getting the same level of care directed back at him... like he really does not know how to be on the receiving end of the exact level of care that he shows others on the regular... he is so hypocritical (I say this with utmost fondness) 😭💖

(also magical in the everyday is a lovely turn of phrase 😭 I feel like that is a quality I aspire to capture, so it makes me really happy to hear that you feel that those moments are significant 🙇‍♀️ I am definitely guilty of romanticizing very not-textbook-significant moments irl haha)

thank you so much for this??? I have reread this ask so many times omg. I am really honored that you think this, and I'm grateful that you took the time to write out such a sharp analysis 🥹❤️ From author to fellow author, I hope you are doing well 💖

[suddencolds]

💌 if you’re still doing these and have the time!

from 💌 ask meme

omg aster. how could you send me this /j. word count exceeded + tumblr crashed + website down for hours from the length of this post 📄📄 (adding a much needed cut)

you are the first friend i ever made on snzblr! looking back, i am a little amazed that we are still in contact :') i am amazed too that speaking to you now feels just as natural as it did back then, even though i think we have both changed so much individually.

(i have this distinct memory, wayyy back when we started talking, of sitting in the backseat of a car and typing out my paragraph responses to you on my laptop, even though i had no reception. i couldn't just wait until i got home to respond 🥲 whatever we were talking about felt so immediate and pertinent that i wanted to write out my responses to you, even when i knew i had no means of sending them.)

i'm not sure why that moment stuck with me, but i do think it feels strangely emblematic for our friendship as a whole. i think i have always felt understood by you—as a fellow liker of sharp/carefully constructed prose, as a fellow asian & eldest daughter who grew up in the states, as someone who shipped [redacted] and thought about it all the time... i think at the time i was still learning to be a person (though i suppose this will always be an ongoing effort in some sense).

when i stumbled upon the first fic i read by you (i'm sure you know the one) on ao3, i remember being so awestruck. when i found out that you had written it, i was like. hello??? how can i be friends with her immediately????? 😭 haha so much of this time is a blur now, but i think to have someone who i looked up to and felt so deeply understood by write sneezefic for the same characters i was crazy about was really special to me 😭😭

((jumping ahead in time... pls forgive this non-linear narrative of a post 🫡)): in having the privilege to meet you irl, i really got the sense that you are surrounded by people who feel very seen by you and who care deeply about you, and i just thought: this makes so much sense. i don't know if i've told you this, but it made me very happy to see how loved you are 🥹 i think you are really good at connecting with people, and i have learned a lot from you in seeing how you conduct yourself socially

(i also think you are so smart??? and you remain an excellent writer; i always love seeing those paragraphs in your work where i can tell a lot of thought was put into the prose and the specific phrasing. there's a sentence in your cher//ry mag//ic fic where adachi can see the half moons of his nails reflected back from the desk; i still think about that sentence often 😭)

i think i will always hold a certain sort of reverence for our friendship, even though we don't talk as frequently as we used to. when we first met, that was one of the first times i'd ever felt so seen 🥲. at times i miss the frenzied late night conversations and the fic drafts spiraling out of nowhere; thinking back on them, i am filled with a little longing for the specific and rare kind of closeness which we had then :') but at the same time, i think it is really special that i got to know you. i still fall to my knees when you leave tags on my fics, only now i get to also jump for joy at the front door when you mail me letters :D

it seems embarrassing and sentimental to write all of this in a response to a silly ask meme, but thank you for everything. getting to talk about good prose and writing and life with you still means the world to me 💖

[suddencolds]

What the heck, I'll bite too 💌

from 💌 ask meme

—

poni!! hello :) i don't think we've spoken before, but i feel like i've been following you for longer than i can remember?? thank you for gracing my dash all these years 🫡

i feel like you are an incredibly chill person <3 and i feel like you are really friendly to anyone who sends you a message! like i feel like you have this sort of openness where when someone comes to talk to you, you are able to immediately strike up a conversation with them? you come across as someone very approachable :D (as a side note, i was very surprised when i first posted picrews of yves and vincent and you commented that they looked exactly like how you imagined them to look... i was like omg, i did not know poni knew who my ocs were 🧎‍♀️ ‼️ though you had taken up a poni-shaped space in my life for years, i was surprised and honored to know that i had also occupied a tiny space in yours)

i also love seeing your art when it comes up!! (as a side note, you are such a prolific artist?? i love looking through your sketch pages; the placements are very satisfying 🫡) i feel like you have a really distinct and lovely art style, and i feel like it pushes the boundaries of emotional/physical expressiveness (in a similar vein to what you sometimes see in stylized animation)—i really like that the expressiveness is always at the forefront :)

anyways, i know life has been difficult as of late, but i hope you have been doing okay 🫂

[suddencolds]

BIPOC Snz Discord!

hello! i made a bipoc snz discord :DD i hope this place can be a safe space for those who are bipoc, so please, do not join if you are not an adult person of color. thank you!

[suddencolds]

i wanna cup yves' cheeks and tell him he deserves all the love and everything (from vincent hehe)

i dont have anything super meaningful to say just that i love both ur OCs <3

ANON!!! this is so funny... i am cupping yves's cheeks on your behalf... squeezing them even 🙂‍↕️ he shall receive no explanation for these actions 😌‼️

thank you for dropping in and for sending something so sweet 🥹 i hope your day is going well!!

[suddencolds]

excavation of habit

hello! i honestly didn't think i still had it in me to thirst-write a fic, but on friday i watched the only 3 aired episodes of To Be He//ro X and had to whump the main character immediately 🫡

if you haven't watched the show yet, i highly recommend it! with that said, this fic can be read w/o any context if you do not mind ep1/ep2 spoilers.

(3.5k words, ft. a secret identity, a cold, a popularity-driven hero society, and a two-way character study)

—

It’s only a sore throat, at first. Barely registers, between the carefully choreographed morning appearances Miss J shepherds him through. 

Something Lin Ling is learning is that she always has something new ready for him. We live in a digital age, she said to him the other day. There is no such thing as privacy. If you want to stay relevant, you need to make yourself seen. He had been puzzled about that, at first. He’d asked her: “Haven’t I already been to enough interviews this week?”

“I’m not talking about interviews,” Miss J had said, and then refused to elaborate.

That’s another thing Lin Ling is learning about her. Despite her curt attitude, she is only non-communicative when she thinks an answer is self-evident. He found out what she meant soon enough. People’s trust, as it turns out, relies just as heavily on Nice’s actions out in the open. He can nail every interview and every game show and every celebrity appearance, and it won’t be enough. This is part of staying relevant, too—that he masquerades himself as just an ordinary citizen from time to time, that he shows himself to be remarkable even in ordinary circumstances.

Last week, he waited in line at a coffee shop downtown for thirty minutes, even though Treeman has more than enough money and resources to get an assistant to get coffee on his behalf, just so he could—with Nice’s strength and superhuman reflexes—1) rescue a cup of scalding hot coffee from being nearly-dropped onto someone’s open laptop, and 2) offer to help the workers haul in a heavy shipment of new machinery.

Compared to normal hero work, these sorts of appearances aren’t really that hard. There was even minor press coverage of it—some girl caught it all on video and posted it to Weibo—and everyone in the coffee shop left charmed.

Well done, Miss J had said, clapping him on the back. The people need to know what Nice is like on a day-to-day basis, you see? If you wait in line for coffee like everyone else, it makes you just that much more relatable. And that had been that.

It does not occur to Lin Ling to ask the question until lunch time, when he swallows again and feels it again: that flash of pain. He reaches for the energy drink on the table—Double VVoltcharge, a brand Nice has recently been sponsored by, which they have excess stock of lying around—and finds that his throat is still hurting when he gulps it down. 

“Miss J,” he says, setting the bottle back on the desk, in the exact corner he got it from. Makes sure his tone comes out sufficiently unassuming. “What was Nice like when he was sick?”

She regards him, scrutinizing. “Why are you asking?”

It’s a trap. She’s trying to gauge if anything is off, so he pretends not to notice. “Oh, you know, just—all this conversation about what he’s like as a normal person, like, what his coffee order is and everything, and I was like, huh, it’s strange that Nice drinks coffee. Like, since he’s so perfect and everything, I wouldn’t have been that surprised if I found out he never got tired.”

“Everyone gets tired,” Miss J says, rolling her eyes. “Even heroes.”

“Yeah, I guess so, or maybe he just liked the taste?” Lin-Ling-as-Nice shrugs. “Just wondering if he ever got sick, too, or if the public’s trust in him willed that away.”

“Of course he got sick,” Miss J says. “He’s not some kind of robot.”

“So what was he like? If I’m supposed to be him, shouldn’t I know these kinds of things?”

“Hmm.” Miss J seems to consider this for a moment, worrying at her lower lip. Lin Ling wonders if he’s happened upon a touchy subject.

He’s about to provide more justification—shouldn’t she be happy that he’s taking interest in Nice’s habits?—when she responds.

“...Excessively polite,” she says. “You know, always wearing a mask, coughing into his elbow, apologizing about it, that kind of thing. Sometimes he would even wear gloves or bring disinfectant spray around with him, if he really had to be somewhere. Though mostly he would stay in.”

“Ah,” Lin Ling says. “Okay. I guessed as much.” That doesn’t sound too difficult to emulate, on the off-chance that he is getting sick. The disinfectant makes sense, considering Nice’s borderline-obsession with neatness and cleanliness—the same tendencies Lin Ling feels as a static buzz at the edge of his consciousness more often than not, these days, whenever there’s clutter on the table or a cup is in the wrong place.

“You aren’t asking for any particular reason, are you?” Miss J says.

“Of course not!” Lin Ling says. “Just making conversation, is all.” He downs the rest of the energy drink, makes sure he doesn’t let the wince show on his face as it goes down.

—

The sore throat doesn’t get any better.

If anything, it gets worse. By the time dinner rolls around, Lin Ling finds that his nose is running, too, and even though he’s cleared his throat about a hundred times, it’s starting to take on a slight rasp. It’s strange and disconcerting to hear Nice’s smooth, low baritone marred by anything at all.

At the very least, he has confirmation now that Nice did get sick, even as a hero. The fact that Lin Ling is coming down with something now is not going to be the thing that exposes him as a fraud. That alone is a small comfort.

But the comfort ends there. Despite Miss J’s earlier descriptions, Lin Ling has no idea what kind of person Nice was when he was sick, aside from the usual obsession with cleanliness, and he has no idea how much the public knows about it either.

He isn’t sure how he’s going to break the news to Miss J. He’s never been—well, blatantly unfit for work before, ever since he took up Nice’s identity. Up until now, he’d like to think he’s been pretty good at taking up whatever she’s thrown at him. He still isn’t quite sure what her response to this might be. 

There was one time, a couple years back in December, when he’d come down with something when he was still working the advertising job. The heat had gone out in his apartment, and he had picked up this bug he couldn’t quite shake, had just about lost his voice with all the coughing. He’d finally worked up the courage to ask, meekly, for time off work.

His old boss had said, Do you think that just because you’re sick, Nice doesn’t need any more advertisements? And then, The proposal for next weeks’ advert needs to be emailed to me by 7am tomorrow morning. If it’s even a minute late, consider yourself fired.

In the end, Lin Ling—well, Lin Ling had apologized, put his head down, and gotten back to work. The week passed, and the week after that. That was just the life he led, then.

Things are different, now that he’s Nice. Now that he’s someone the public cares about, someone the public might miss. Nice’s public persona is damn near spotless, which makes sense at the surface, seeing how Miss J keeps virtually everything about Nice’s life squared away under lock and key. She probably has a collection of all of Nice’s favorite things, listed alphabetically, for God’s sake; she probably picks out his damn cologne for him based on market trends. But Lin Ling knows, deep down, that part of it has nothing to do with Miss J at all.

Part of it is this: Nice was Nice before he was a hero, too. Before he earned the trust of the people, before he was taken under Treeman’s wing, he was probably good at all of this: at appearing effortlessly charming and likable, which are things that Lin Ling has never been in his entire life. These days, he thinks he’s just one misstep away from having the entire foundation to his fake identity crumble under his feet.

“Not to your liking?” one of the agents says, casting a pointed glance towards the braised pork and steamed eggplant in front of him. Like all of the other agents, he’s dressed in all black and wearing sunglasses.

“Ah… sorry,” Lin Ling says, tightening his grip around his chopsticks. “I was just lost in thought. It’s delicious.” 

The agent nods, gruffly but not unkindly. “Then eat up.”

This, too, is foreign—having the agency be responsible for all of his meals, or even beyond that, having someone who cares whether something is to his taste. Lin Ling isn’t sure if it’s something he’ll ever get used to. He doesn’t have much of an appetite, but he makes himself eat, nonetheless.

The steam makes something shift in his sinuses, prickling, like the static edge of noise on the radio. He sniffles, leans forward to take a bite. Then the static edge sharpens into something he can no longer ignore.

“hh-hEh—!”

Remembering suddenly Miss j’s description of Nice, he ducks into an elbow. “—’IKkTSH’iIEw!—iihhh!”

The sneeze, when it finally comes, is surprisingly vocal. It’s the kind of sneeze you can hear the ending in, all high-pitched at the end, and it scrapes at his throat in a way that makes him want to cough afterwards. It sounds… well, markedly different from how Lin Ling is used to sounding when he sneezes. Then again, his voice has sounded different—less like his, and more like Nice’s, low and honeyed—ever since he made his first public appearance under the new identity. If he thinks about it, it isn’t all that strange that his sneeze sounds different, too.

He looks up, a little anxiously, to see if anyone’s noticed. Thankfully, the agent who stopped by earlier is on the other side of the room now, and none of them have so much as looked up at him. 

He resumes eating. The rice is steaming hot, and he’s been cold all day, though he’s only known the agency to set the thermostat at reasonable temperatures. He wonders distantly if Nice was ever susceptible to the cold.

Aside from Miss J, there’s only one person who might know.

—

Lin Ling texts Xiao Yueqing after dinner, from the privacy of his room on the tenth floor. After the incident at the wedding, he’d resigned himself to never speaking to Xiao Yueqing again—he didn’t know where she was anymore, and she’d changed her number—Miss J was very clear about not leaving behind any digital evidence. There was no reason for him to contact him again.

But it turns out that she had Nice’s phone number memorized. She texted him from a new number a week later, with a photograph of a tropical white sand beach, the line of water blue and sparkling from a distance, and followed it up a cheery: weather’s rly nice here ✌️u should come visit sometime, when you’re not so busy :p

He knew it was her immediately. The relief he’d felt, receiving that text, was nearly crushing.

They’ve been talking on-and-off ever since: Xiao Yueqing sending him pictures she’s snapped of the different cities she’s been to, accompanied by offhanded comments on what she’s seen, what she’s found surprising, and what she’d like to see; Lin Ling texting her whenever anything particularly amusing happens on the job.

Now, he sends off the text with no small amount of self-consciousness.

LL: Quick question, if you aren’t busy

These days, he never quite knows which country she’s in, so he doesn’t know what time it is for her, though she’s usually pretty good at responding if she’s awake and if he’s asked her a question. This time, Xiao Yueqing responds almost immediately.

MOON 🌺: ?

Lin Ling pulls the tissue box a little closer to him and extricates one carefully—he’d nabbed one from the agency storage room right before Miss J had driven him back to the Hero Tower. That is proving to be a wise decision now, considering that he’s gone through nearly a quarter of the box already.

LL: What was Nice like when he was sick?

MOON 🌺: wdym?

LL: Like 

LL: When he had a cold? assuming he did at least once when you were living together

LL: Idk did he act any differently or 

MOON 🌺: ohh

MOON 🌺: haha. yea i think he did get sick a couple times

A beat. Xiao Yueqing’s typing indicator vanishes on the screen—probably she’s been pulled away to talk to someone in real life. Then, after a moment, it pops up again.

MOON 🌺: he was toooootally

Lin Ling waits with bated breath.

MOON 🌺: insufferable :/

He very nearly falls out of his chair.

Nice, insufferable? The very Nice who Miss J described as excessively polite, the very Nice who couldn’t seem to make anyone hate him, even if he tried? That Nice? Insufferable?

LL: Come again???

LL: You’re going to have to elaborate, I’m not following

MOON 🌺: well u alrdy know nice was like a bit of a neat freak

MOON 🌺: when he got sick it was like cranked up to 200%. he was soo fussy abt everything

MOON 🌺: brought him tea once out of pity and he nearly bit my head off bc i made the water 15 degrees too hot for the type of tea or smth??? like there’s no way u can even taste the difference when ur congested???

LL: Oh

Lin Ling doesn’t quite know what to make of this information. He’d never thought that Nice might be anything other than pleasant, especially to Xiao Yueqing. Even learning that his entire relationship with her had been scripted hadn’t changed that.

LL: Maybe it was too bitter for him?

MOON 🌺: extremely rude

MOON 🌺: dont start taking his side now

LL: Sorry, sorry, it was nice of you to make him tea

MOON 🌺: ur on thin ice 🫵

LL: I’m sure it was delicious

LL: Please go on

MOON 🌺: this other time i caught him rearranging all the medicine in the agency cabinet 

MOON 🌺: like some crazy organization system based on strength and symptoms targeted and duration and wtvr

MOON 🌺: he was at it for like an hour. and when i asked him why he was there it turned out he was looking for

MOON 🌺: cough syrup and he just got distracted. but he got annoyed at me and insisted they had to be sorted for some reason and so i left him alone 

LL: That’s heroic

LL:Do you think he was delirious?

MOON 🌺: honestly that would be giving him too much credit

MOON 🌺: hey

MOON 🌺: why r u asking abt this anyways =.=;;

He freezes. He isn’t quite sure how to justify himself, other than the fact that it’s natural that he’s curious about the very person he’s supposed to be replacing. But she’s right—usually, he would go to Miss J with questions like this. Not Xiao Yueqing, who he’s learning seems to be happiest when she’s avoiding thinking about the old Nice altogether. 

LL: No particular reason 

MOON 🌺: hmmm~

MOON 🌺: you just happened to be curious abt nice for no particular reason?

LL: He seemed so put together all the time

LL: I just wondered

LL: Wasn’t sure if he could even get sick in the first place 

For a long moment, she doesn’t respond again. He lets himself think that maybe she’s gone for real, now, offline to haggle with some vendor or book some kind of ticket, or maybe she’s found someone to have lunch-or-dinner-or-whatever-meal-lines-up-with-her-timezone with. His head feels heavy. He’s more tired than he usually is at this time of night. Maybe he should call it a night early.

Then his phone vibrates in his hands. Onscreen, in bright white characters: INCOMING CALL.

He scrambles to pick up the call, nearly drops his phone in the process.

“You are not a very good liar,” is the first thing Xiao Yueqing says.

It’s his first time hearing her voice in weeks. It sounds a little tinny through the speakers, the higher frequencies a little harsher than the crystal-clear recording quality he’s used to from her advertising livestreams. He holds onto it like it’s a lifeline.

“Sorry?”

“I said what I said. Are you going to tell me how long you’ve been sick?”

For a second, Lin Ling feels a flash of anxiousness in his chest—could she tell, just from that one word of his? Did she know, even before he picked up this call? “...I don’t recall ever saying that I was.”

“Uh huh. So you’re just studying what Nice was like when he was sick for fun,” Xiao Yueqing says. “Just as a trivia question, nothing more.”

Lin Ling bristles. “I’m supposed to be him,” he says. Winces when he can hear the congestion in his—Nice’s—voice. “Learning about him is part of the job.”

“Yeah, so that’s why you texted me to ask about it. That’s the only reason.”

“I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t— s-seriously missing the mark…” Lin Ling really doesn’t want to be interrupted. His nose has other plans. This time, the action of turning to shield the sneeze with his elbow comes reflexively, even though there’s no one else here. “hH… Hhii-HH-GZSCHh-Hiiew! -hhIh… Snf-! IIh—!!!’KKTSHh-EwW!—-iiih…”

His face feels like it’s aflame. The phone speaker is right there, he berates himself. He really should have moved it away, who knows how loud those were on her end, who knows how close she was holding her phone to her ear, who knows what she might be thinking now—

“Bless you!” Xiao Yueqing says breezily, sounding utterly unfazed. Her voice has taken on a different turn, now—something closer to concern. “Man, you sound pretty rough. How are you holding up?”

“I’m not—” Lin Ling starts, and then breaks off into an undignified cough. “It’s just—”

His voice cracks on the syllable. As if there could be anything more embarrassing.

“You can say, you know,” Xiao Yueqing says, a little softer now. “However you’re feeling, you can say. It’s like I said. I’ve seen Nice sick a handful of times already. It’s not anything new to me.”

Lin Ling considers this for a long moment.

“...In that case,” he says, with another sniffle. “I’m–I’m probably getting a cold. I didn’t mean to bother you at—ahh, I don’t know what time it is there. I don’t even feel that siIIhh… iIhh’ii’DSHhH-EEew!—hh… snf… hhEh…!”

“Bless you again! Times two?”

“—-G’KTTSSHh—IiEEw! ugh… thanks.” He takes a tissue out from the tissue box, folds it in half, buries his face into it. “I’m sorry I’ve been doing that so much. It’s probably right next to your ear.”

“You sneeze differently from him,” Xiao Yueqing says, with a breathless little laugh that makes something tighten in Lin Ling’s chest. He can’t help but feel like he’s making a fool out of himself in front of his longtime—well, crush is probably the right word for it, just going off of definitions, but it seems laughably inadequate in the face of everything.

“Oh,” Lin Ling says, rubbing a hand over his eyes. “I can fix that. How did he sneeze?”

“Don’t fix it,” Xiao Yueqing says, sounding gleeful. “I think it sounds cute.”

He definitely heard her wrong there. “Cute?”

“The more ways in which you differ from Nice, the better.”

He shakes his head, despairing. “I can’t accept that. If I happen to sneeze in public—”

“No one will notice any difference,” she says. “It’s just a sneeze. You’re so concerned about acting in character, but have you stopped at all to think about how you’re feeling? Like even once? Did your own health ever once factor into your concerns?”

The defensiveness he feels—the defensiveness he’s felt, this entire conversation—gives way for something else, something like resignation.

“...I don’t know why it would,” Lin Ling says, honestly. It’s more than he means to admit.

Xiao Yueqing makes a noise that’s somewhere between exasperation and understanding. There’s another moment of silence. Lin Ling wonders how it’s possible to feel so strangely exposed over a phone call, even though she can’t see him, even though this is their first time talking in weeks.

“I called to tell you there’s this herbal tea in the kitchen of your flat, in the third drawer from the right side,” she says. “It’ll work wonders on your throat, if it’s hurting. You’re still early into this cold, so it probably is, right?” Lin Ling doesn’t have the time to process how she knows this. “Oh, and there are extra blankets in the storage closet, to the opposite side of the elevators. Three, I think, but the yellow one with white stripes is the warmest. Text me if you can’t find them.”

He blinks, a little overwhelmed. “How do you know all this?”

“I did live there for years, whether I liked it or not. Oh, and Lin Ling?”

“Yes?”

“I hope you feel better soon,” Xiao Yueqing says, sounding sincere. The call goes dead. 

Lin Ling sits there for awhile, his phone dark in his hands, contemplating the feeling in his chest, the strange weight to it.

Then he gets up to head to the kitchen in search of tea.

[suddencolds]

excavation of habit

hello! i honestly didn't think i still had it in me to thirst-write a fic, but on friday i watched the only 3 aired episodes of To Be He//ro X and had to whump the main character immediately 🫡

if you haven't watched the show yet, i highly recommend it! with that said, this fic can be read w/o any context if you do not mind ep1/ep2 spoilers.

(3.5k words, ft. a secret identity, a cold, a popularity-driven hero society, and a two-way character study)

—

It’s only a sore throat, at first. Barely registers, between the carefully choreographed morning appearances Miss J shepherds him through. 

Something Lin Ling is learning is that she always has something new ready for him. We live in a digital age, she said to him the other day. There is no such thing as privacy. If you want to stay relevant, you need to make yourself seen. He had been puzzled about that, at first. He’d asked her: “Haven’t I already been to enough interviews this week?”

“I’m not talking about interviews,” Miss J had said, and then refused to elaborate.

That’s another thing Lin Ling is learning about her. Despite her curt attitude, she is only non-communicative when she thinks an answer is self-evident. He found out what she meant soon enough. People’s trust, as it turns out, relies just as heavily on Nice’s actions out in the open. He can nail every interview and every game show and every celebrity appearance, and it won’t be enough. This is part of staying relevant, too—that he masquerades himself as just an ordinary citizen from time to time, that he shows himself to be remarkable even in ordinary circumstances.

Last week, he waited in line at a coffee shop downtown for thirty minutes, even though Treeman has more than enough money and resources to get an assistant to get coffee on his behalf, just so he could—with Nice’s strength and superhuman reflexes—1) rescue a cup of scalding hot coffee from being nearly-dropped onto someone’s open laptop, and 2) offer to help the workers haul in a heavy shipment of new machinery.

Compared to normal hero work, these sorts of appearances aren’t really that hard. There was even minor press coverage of it—some girl caught it all on video and posted it to Weibo—and everyone in the coffee shop left charmed.

Well done, Miss J had said, clapping him on the back. The people need to know what Nice is like on a day-to-day basis, you see? If you wait in line for coffee like everyone else, it makes you just that much more relatable. And that had been that.

It does not occur to Lin Ling to ask the question until lunch time, when he swallows again and feels it again: that flash of pain. He reaches for the energy drink on the table—Double VVoltcharge, a brand Nice has recently been sponsored by, which they have excess stock of lying around—and finds that his throat is still hurting when he gulps it down. 

“Miss J,” he says, setting the bottle back on the desk, in the exact corner he got it from. Makes sure his tone comes out sufficiently unassuming. “What was Nice like when he was sick?”

She regards him, scrutinizing. “Why are you asking?”

It’s a trap. She’s trying to gauge if anything is off, so he pretends not to notice. “Oh, you know, just—all this conversation about what he’s like as a normal person, like, what his coffee order is and everything, and I was like, huh, it’s strange that Nice drinks coffee. Like, since he’s so perfect and everything, I wouldn’t have been that surprised if I found out he never got tired.”

“Everyone gets tired,” Miss J says, rolling her eyes. “Even heroes.”

“Yeah, I guess so, or maybe he just liked the taste?” Lin-Ling-as-Nice shrugs. “Just wondering if he ever got sick, too, or if the public’s trust in him willed that away.”

“Of course he got sick,” Miss J says. “He’s not some kind of robot.”

“So what was he like? If I’m supposed to be him, shouldn’t I know these kinds of things?”

“Hmm.” Miss J seems to consider this for a moment, worrying at her lower lip. Lin Ling wonders if he’s happened upon a touchy subject.

He’s about to provide more justification—shouldn’t she be happy that he’s taking interest in Nice’s habits?—when she responds.

“...Excessively polite,” she says. “You know, always wearing a mask, coughing into his elbow, apologizing about it, that kind of thing. Sometimes he would even wear gloves or bring disinfectant spray around with him, if he really had to be somewhere. Though mostly he would stay in.”

“Ah,” Lin Ling says. “Okay. I guessed as much.” That doesn’t sound too difficult to emulate, on the off-chance that he is getting sick. The disinfectant makes sense, considering Nice’s borderline-obsession with neatness and cleanliness—the same tendencies Lin Ling feels as a static buzz at the edge of his consciousness more often than not, these days, whenever there’s clutter on the table or a cup is in the wrong place.

“You aren’t asking for any particular reason, are you?” Miss J says.

“Of course not!” Lin Ling says. “Just making conversation, is all.” He downs the rest of the energy drink, makes sure he doesn’t let the wince show on his face as it goes down.

—

The sore throat doesn’t get any better.

If anything, it gets worse. By the time dinner rolls around, Lin Ling finds that his nose is running, too, and even though he’s cleared his throat about a hundred times, it’s starting to take on a slight rasp. It’s strange and disconcerting to hear Nice’s smooth, low baritone marred by anything at all.

At the very least, he has confirmation now that Nice did get sick, even as a hero. The fact that Lin Ling is coming down with something now is not going to be the thing that exposes him as a fraud. That alone is a small comfort.

But the comfort ends there. Despite Miss J’s earlier descriptions, Lin Ling has no idea what kind of person Nice was when he was sick, aside from the usual obsession with cleanliness, and he has no idea how much the public knows about it either.

He isn’t sure how he’s going to break the news to Miss J. He’s never been—well, blatantly unfit for work before, ever since he took up Nice’s identity. Up until now, he’d like to think he’s been pretty good at taking up whatever she’s thrown at him. He still isn’t quite sure what her response to this might be. 

There was one time, a couple years back in December, when he’d come down with something when he was still working the advertising job. The heat had gone out in his apartment, and he had picked up this bug he couldn’t quite shake, had just about lost his voice with all the coughing. He’d finally worked up the courage to ask, meekly, for time off work.

His old boss had said, Do you think that just because you’re sick, Nice doesn’t need any more advertisements? And then, The proposal for next weeks’ advert needs to be emailed to me by 7am tomorrow morning. If it’s even a minute late, consider yourself fired.

In the end, Lin Ling—well, Lin Ling had apologized, put his head down, and gotten back to work. The week passed, and the week after that. That was just the life he led, then.

Things are different, now that he’s Nice. Now that he’s someone the public cares about, someone the public might miss. Nice’s public persona is damn near spotless, which makes sense at the surface, seeing how Miss J keeps virtually everything about Nice’s life squared away under lock and key. She probably has a collection of all of Nice’s favorite things, listed alphabetically, for God’s sake; she probably picks out his damn cologne for him based on market trends. But Lin Ling knows, deep down, that part of it has nothing to do with Miss J at all.

Part of it is this: Nice was Nice before he was a hero, too. Before he earned the trust of the people, before he was taken under Treeman’s wing, he was probably good at all of this: at appearing effortlessly charming and likable, which are things that Lin Ling has never been in his entire life. These days, he thinks he’s just one misstep away from having the entire foundation to his fake identity crumble under his feet.

“Not to your liking?” one of the agents says, casting a pointed glance towards the braised pork and steamed eggplant in front of him. Like all of the other agents, he’s dressed in all black and wearing sunglasses.

“Ah… sorry,” Lin Ling says, tightening his grip around his chopsticks. “I was just lost in thought. It’s delicious.” 

The agent nods, gruffly but not unkindly. “Then eat up.”

This, too, is foreign—having the agency be responsible for all of his meals, or even beyond that, having someone who cares whether something is to his taste. Lin Ling isn’t sure if it’s something he’ll ever get used to. He doesn’t have much of an appetite, but he makes himself eat, nonetheless.

The steam makes something shift in his sinuses, prickling, like the static edge of noise on the radio. He sniffles, leans forward to take a bite. Then the static edge sharpens into something he can no longer ignore.

“hh-hEh—!”

Remembering suddenly Miss j’s description of Nice, he ducks into an elbow. “—’IKkTSH’iIEw!—iihhh!”

The sneeze, when it finally comes, is surprisingly vocal. It’s the kind of sneeze you can hear the ending in, all high-pitched at the end, and it scrapes at his throat in a way that makes him want to cough afterwards. It sounds… well, markedly different from how Lin Ling is used to sounding when he sneezes. Then again, his voice has sounded different—less like his, and more like Nice’s, low and honeyed—ever since he made his first public appearance under the new identity. If he thinks about it, it isn’t all that strange that his sneeze sounds different, too.

He looks up, a little anxiously, to see if anyone’s noticed. Thankfully, the agent who stopped by earlier is on the other side of the room now, and none of them have so much as looked up at him. 

He resumes eating. The rice is steaming hot, and he’s been cold all day, though he’s only known the agency to set the thermostat at reasonable temperatures. He wonders distantly if Nice was ever susceptible to the cold.

Aside from Miss J, there’s only one person who might know.

—

Lin Ling texts Xiao Yueqing after dinner, from the privacy of his room on the tenth floor. After the incident at the wedding, he’d resigned himself to never speaking to Xiao Yueqing again—he didn’t know where she was anymore, and she’d changed her number—Miss J was very clear about not leaving behind any digital evidence. There was no reason for him to contact him again.

But it turns out that she had Nice’s phone number memorized. She texted him from a new number a week later, with a photograph of a tropical white sand beach, the line of water blue and sparkling from a distance, and followed it up a cheery: weather’s rly nice here ✌️u should come visit sometime, when you’re not so busy :p

He knew it was her immediately. The relief he’d felt, receiving that text, was nearly crushing.

They’ve been talking on-and-off ever since: Xiao Yueqing sending him pictures she’s snapped of the different cities she’s been to, accompanied by offhanded comments on what she’s seen, what she’s found surprising, and what she’d like to see; Lin Ling texting her whenever anything particularly amusing happens on the job.

Now, he sends off the text with no small amount of self-consciousness.

LL: Quick question, if you aren’t busy

These days, he never quite knows which country she’s in, so he doesn’t know what time it is for her, though she’s usually pretty good at responding if she’s awake and if he’s asked her a question. This time, Xiao Yueqing responds almost immediately.

MOON 🌺: ?

Lin Ling pulls the tissue box a little closer to him and extricates one carefully—he’d nabbed one from the agency storage room right before Miss J had driven him back to the Hero Tower. That is proving to be a wise decision now, considering that he’s gone through nearly a quarter of the box already.

LL: What was Nice like when he was sick?

MOON 🌺: wdym?

LL: Like 

LL: When he had a cold? assuming he did at least once when you were living together

LL: Idk did he act any differently or 

MOON 🌺: ohh

MOON 🌺: haha. yea i think he did get sick a couple times

A beat. Xiao Yueqing’s typing indicator vanishes on the screen—probably she’s been pulled away to talk to someone in real life. Then, after a moment, it pops up again.

MOON 🌺: he was toooootally

Lin Ling waits with bated breath.

MOON 🌺: insufferable :/

He very nearly falls out of his chair.

Nice, insufferable? The very Nice who Miss J described as excessively polite, the very Nice who couldn’t seem to make anyone hate him, even if he tried? That Nice? Insufferable?

LL: Come again???

LL: You’re going to have to elaborate, I’m not following

MOON 🌺: well u alrdy know nice was like a bit of a neat freak

MOON 🌺: when he got sick it was like cranked up to 200%. he was soo fussy abt everything

MOON 🌺: brought him tea once out of pity and he nearly bit my head off bc i made the water 15 degrees too hot for the type of tea or smth??? like there’s no way u can even taste the difference when ur congested???

LL: Oh

Lin Ling doesn’t quite know what to make of this information. He’d never thought that Nice might be anything other than pleasant, especially to Xiao Yueqing. Even learning that his entire relationship with her had been scripted hadn’t changed that.

LL: Maybe it was too bitter for him?

MOON 🌺: extremely rude

MOON 🌺: dont start taking his side now

LL: Sorry, sorry, it was nice of you to make him tea

MOON 🌺: ur on thin ice 🫵

LL: I’m sure it was delicious

LL: Please go on

MOON 🌺: this other time i caught him rearranging all the medicine in the agency cabinet 

MOON 🌺: like some crazy organization system based on strength and symptoms targeted and duration and wtvr

MOON 🌺: he was at it for like an hour. and when i asked him why he was there it turned out he was looking for

MOON 🌺: cough syrup and he just got distracted. but he got annoyed at me and insisted they had to be sorted for some reason and so i left him alone 

LL: That’s heroic

LL:Do you think he was delirious?

MOON 🌺: honestly that would be giving him too much credit

MOON 🌺: hey

MOON 🌺: why r u asking abt this anyways =.=;;

He freezes. He isn’t quite sure how to justify himself, other than the fact that it’s natural that he’s curious about the very person he’s supposed to be replacing. But she’s right—usually, he would go to Miss J with questions like this. Not Xiao Yueqing, who he’s learning seems to be happiest when she’s avoiding thinking about the old Nice altogether. 

LL: No particular reason 

MOON 🌺: hmmm~

MOON 🌺: you just happened to be curious abt nice for no particular reason?

LL: He seemed so put together all the time

LL: I just wondered

LL: Wasn’t sure if he could even get sick in the first place 

For a long moment, she doesn’t respond again. He lets himself think that maybe she’s gone for real, now, offline to haggle with some vendor or book some kind of ticket, or maybe she’s found someone to have lunch-or-dinner-or-whatever-meal-lines-up-with-her-timezone with. His head feels heavy. He’s more tired than he usually is at this time of night. Maybe he should call it a night early.

Then his phone vibrates in his hands. Onscreen, in bright white characters: INCOMING CALL.

He scrambles to pick up the call, nearly drops his phone in the process.

“You are not a very good liar,” is the first thing Xiao Yueqing says.

It’s his first time hearing her voice in weeks. It sounds a little tinny through the speakers, the higher frequencies a little harsher than the crystal-clear recording quality he’s used to from her advertising livestreams. He holds onto it like it’s a lifeline.

“Sorry?”

“I said what I said. Are you going to tell me how long you’ve been sick?”

For a second, Lin Ling feels a flash of anxiousness in his chest—could she tell, just from that one word of his? Did she know, even before he picked up this call? “...I don’t recall ever saying that I was.”

“Uh huh. So you’re just studying what Nice was like when he was sick for fun,” Xiao Yueqing says. “Just as a trivia question, nothing more.”

Lin Ling bristles. “I’m supposed to be him,” he says. Winces when he can hear the congestion in his—Nice’s—voice. “Learning about him is part of the job.”

“Yeah, so that’s why you texted me to ask about it. That’s the only reason.”

“I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t— s-seriously missing the mark…” Lin Ling really doesn’t want to be interrupted. His nose has other plans. This time, the action of turning to shield the sneeze with his elbow comes reflexively, even though there’s no one else here. “hH… Hhii-HH-GZSCHh-Hiiew! -hhIh… Snf-! IIh—!!!’KKTSHh-EwW!—-iiih…”

His face feels like it’s aflame. The phone speaker is right there, he berates himself. He really should have moved it away, who knows how loud those were on her end, who knows how close she was holding her phone to her ear, who knows what she might be thinking now—

“Bless you!” Xiao Yueqing says breezily, sounding utterly unfazed. Her voice has taken on a different turn, now—something closer to concern. “Man, you sound pretty rough. How are you holding up?”

“I’m not—” Lin Ling starts, and then breaks off into an undignified cough. “It’s just—”

His voice cracks on the syllable. As if there could be anything more embarrassing.

“You can say, you know,” Xiao Yueqing says, a little softer now. “However you’re feeling, you can say. It’s like I said. I’ve seen Nice sick a handful of times already. It’s not anything new to me.”

Lin Ling considers this for a long moment.

“...In that case,” he says, with another sniffle. “I’m–I’m probably getting a cold. I didn’t mean to bother you at—ahh, I don’t know what time it is there. I don’t even feel that siIIhh… iIhh’ii’DSHhH-EEew!—hh… snf… hhEh…!”

“Bless you again! Times two?”

“—-G’KTTSSHh—IiEEw! ugh… thanks.” He takes a tissue out from the tissue box, folds it in half, buries his face into it. “I’m sorry I’ve been doing that so much. It’s probably right next to your ear.”

“You sneeze differently from him,” Xiao Yueqing says, with a breathless little laugh that makes something tighten in Lin Ling’s chest. He can’t help but feel like he’s making a fool out of himself in front of his longtime—well, crush is probably the right word for it, just going off of definitions, but it seems laughably inadequate in the face of everything.

“Oh,” Lin Ling says, rubbing a hand over his eyes. “I can fix that. How did he sneeze?”

“Don’t fix it,” Xiao Yueqing says, sounding gleeful. “I think it sounds cute.”

He definitely heard her wrong there. “Cute?”

“The more ways in which you differ from Nice, the better.”

He shakes his head, despairing. “I can’t accept that. If I happen to sneeze in public—”

“No one will notice any difference,” she says. “It’s just a sneeze. You’re so concerned about acting in character, but have you stopped at all to think about how you’re feeling? Like even once? Did your own health ever once factor into your concerns?”

The defensiveness he feels—the defensiveness he’s felt, this entire conversation—gives way for something else, something like resignation.

“...I don’t know why it would,” Lin Ling says, honestly. It’s more than he means to admit.

Xiao Yueqing makes a noise that’s somewhere between exasperation and understanding. There’s another moment of silence. Lin Ling wonders how it’s possible to feel so strangely exposed over a phone call, even though she can’t see him, even though this is their first time talking in weeks.

“I called to tell you there’s this herbal tea in the kitchen of your flat, in the third drawer from the right side,” she says. “It’ll work wonders on your throat, if it’s hurting. You’re still early into this cold, so it probably is, right?” Lin Ling doesn’t have the time to process how she knows this. “Oh, and there are extra blankets in the storage closet, to the opposite side of the elevators. Three, I think, but the yellow one with white stripes is the warmest. Text me if you can’t find them.”

He blinks, a little overwhelmed. “How do you know all this?”

“I did live there for years, whether I liked it or not. Oh, and Lin Ling?”

“Yes?”

“Take care,” Xiao Yueqing says, sounding sincere. The call goes dead. 

Lin Ling sits there for awhile, his phone dark in his hands, contemplating the feeling in his chest, the strange weight to it.

Then he gets up to head to the kitchen in search of tea.

[suddencolds]

I love the way Yves can be so shy when it comes to asking Vincent for favors and not wanting to force anything upon him. But when it comes to things like Vincent’s wellbeing, he is wholly unafraid to force him into bed and reprimand him for neglecting his health 🤭

I GIGGLED READING THIS????? this is such a good reading of them dude you have no idea... yves to vincent is like ugh truly pains me to ask you this but could you go on a date with me to keep our fake relationship intact. i have already come up with 15 excuses this past month as to why we missed all these other events. trust that i seriously owe you 😭.

yves to sick vincent is like here :) let me put your files on your desk! actually you have no groceries, so i'm going to get you groceries. you haven't eaten?? i have to make you chicken noodle soup, there's absolutely no other option :) i will also clean your apartment haha it's no big deal. and no you don't get to have a say in this ‼️

i imagine he is actually quite careful about not overstepping (socially or personally or otherwise), but when he sees that vincent isn't okay, he's like... first let's make sure absolutely everything is accounted for... THEN you're allowed to complain 🫵🏼

[suddencolds]

I’m sorry you’re so sick and I hope you feel better soon! 💕 in the meantime, things I like about your OCs:

I love how much thought and care you put into them. They feel like real people every time I read them, and I love how cozy their story is. They’re so attentive to each other in their own ways, and I like how they fit together so naturally. There are so many small moments between them that I find so sweet, like when Vincent took care of Yves in the hotel in France, and when Yves brought Vincent soup 🥰 They’re just such GOOD characters and the way you write them brings out the best in them, and I never get tired of reading their story ❤️

GHOST!!!! THIS IS SO KIND OF YOU??? i know i am replying a couple days late, but please know when i got this message in my inbox it really cheered me up 🥹

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THE DETAILED ANSWER?? 🧎‍♀️ i will never tire of reading your thoughts about yves and vincent 😭💖 i am really glad you find their story to be cozy!! i also really love that you brought up those two scenes of them in particular??? it is always interesting to me to know what sticks with people, but more broadly i find caretaking hard to write (as compared to hurt haha), so i am very happy you found them to be sweet 🧎‍♀️

thank you so much for the well-wishes and for your thoughts!! i feel so lucky to have you as a friend 😭 i hope you are doing well!! ❤️

[suddencolds]

I love your dedication to them. I love that even when you aren't sharing them, they are on your mind, lovingly simmering in the background until you're ready to do something again. You put such love and care and attention into them, in sharing them as authentic people even in the context of being snz OCs. They feel like actual people, and are so unique from one another in a way that makes it so interesting to see them play off and with one another. Seeing the edges that line up, and where they foil, and where they simply aren't any overlap or reflection but two imperfect people that are entwined with one another

MYLES I AM HUGGING YOU SO TIGHTLY????? thank you so much for this????? 🧎‍♀️ i am really glad they read authentically to you :') ❤️

also simmering in the background is such a fun description 😭🫕 i have always felt a little self-conscious about wanting to talk about y+v when i don't have anything more formal (i.e. a writing installment) to contribute. for you to call this quality out as a good thing is actually very nice to hear 🧎‍♀️

i hope you are doing well!! 💖 (i also apologize for being super terrible at responding. please know that i am always very happy to open up my discord to a message from you 🥹)

[suddencolds]

Hey~ I'm just a quiet fan of your work, I hope this ask doesn't come off intrusive? I'm really sorry you're sick, a 103 degree fever sounds terrible 😭 I hope you got some time off work because that sounds concerning. Get well soon!! 🤍

thank you sincerely, anon!! this is not intrusive at all, it brightened my day to receive this 😭❤️ i am very much of a quiet person irl, so i am really happy that you took the initiative to reach out!!

usually i would not have hesitated to take off from work (i have been WFH the past few days anyways), but this week was a little special bc i took on a time-limited project on my own, and i really wanted to show that i could finish what i scoped out 🥲 anyways it is over now

yesterday evening was restful! i'm looking forward to the weekend :) thank you for stopping by (please be assured that i would never find your asks to be intrusive 🧎‍♀️). i hope you're having a nice day/night 💖

[suddencolds]

Anonymously tell me something you like about my OCs

[suddencolds]

new blog

Hey friends! Blue here (formerly softsleepysnz). I made a new account for a number of reasons...if you see a follow from sl**pys*ft-b*tch, that's me. I'm going to be gradually reuploading my fics on here, but in the meantime, you can find them all on my ao3. If you feel like reblogging so people can find me/I can find you, please do!

[suddencolds]

💌 <3

from 💌 ask meme

--

mochi!!!!!! hello :D

you are one of the first friends i made on this blog, way back when i was first writing for genshin. i feel so lucky that i got to cross paths with you then :') though the fandom has grown a lot since, i think there was something so special about being in such a small fandom at the time and liking the same characters. i think it was one of the only times in my life i felt that connected to a fandom, and every time you posted art, it came as a such lovely surprise 😭 (i still think very fondly of the comics you drew of the mondstadt & early liyue characters!! in particular, your albedo + kaebedo art and your xiao/xiaoven comics live in my head rent free 💖🥹)

anyways, i think it is really cool to have met someone in my same (work/career) field on here! particularly so because i feel like i relate to you in a lot of ways (like being a creative and choosing a more "practical"/technical field for work, or just being new to our field in general and working hard to get up to speed 🥲🙏).

i have always really admired that you have put so much diligence into learning new languages (between mandarin and japanese and korean and german)! also, it's been incredibly cool to hear about the hard work you put into cosplaying and making your own props 🧎‍♀️ i think i've always had the sense that you are a person with a lot of different talents, and that when you want to try something new, you do it without hesitating, which is something i want to learn from you :D

even beyond that, you are so sweet and thoughtful??? i feel like whenever i talk to you the vibes are so good; i really enjoyed the few art/writing calls that we had last year :') i also think to this day you are one of the few people i have felt comfortable enough to share my art with (way back in 2021, back when i still made art haha 🏃‍♀️). i love hearing about your ocs as well + seeing the projects you start with them (still very excited for the snz otome game if you ever get back to it!! also unrelated, you know i am a nolan and oliver stan🧎‍♀️). i'm really grateful for the times you have hyped me up on yvverse as well—it always makes me smile to see your comments 🥹

i'm really glad we're still friends!!! thank you for sharing your art with me over the years, and for always being so easy to talk to 💖

[suddencolds]

💌 if you’re still taking these! -w1ngxd💕

from 💌 ask meme

--

@w1ngxd!! omg where do i start?? you are such an incredibly cool person :D i am still so happy i had the privilege in meeting you irl (the hike we went on is like something out of a dream, and it is insane to me that you reached down and caught a snake right off the ground!!! it's still such an unlikely story i keep in my arsenal.) i feel like there were so many factors which were aligned on that day—the weather, our serendipitous encounters, lunch afterwards being super delicious :). thank you so much for driving me around! 🧎‍♀️

i have loved hearing about your current work + your past experiences with field work!! (you do the coolest work ever.) also, it is so fun when the things we read align. getting to livetweet my thoughts on TSH to you last year (and getting to send you all my many varying feelings about henry) was so much fun. (i feel like you have really good memory when it comes to book details?) also it was such a treat to be reading gideon the ninth and to find out that you had also read it??

(i've been meaning to tell you i finally got around to reading and finishing the likeness on your recommendation, after 940850 years. i can definitely see why people compare it to TSH! and i am sure you can guess who i have many varying feelings about this time haha, though i have to say i like henry much better 😶)

it is so lovely to read your oc fics when they come up. i love to see the world you've built around arthur and jude 🥹 you write with a level of sensory detail and rich immersion which i feel like accompanies many classic novels? i also love the setting and occupation you chose for them, and i love how you play with the tensions of performance and recognition, and that so much of the story takes place in these intimate offstage moments, backstage/in the dressing room or during the sound check or otherwise.

it's also nice to get a little window into your life whenever we talk!! i am always intrigued to hear what you're up to, and i feel like you always have something interesting to say :') i feel like you are a very understanding person, and i remain really grateful that when you met me, you were so incredibly accommodating and easy to talk to. thank you for letting me nerd out over books, and for bestowing upon me your knowledge of wildlife!!